"If you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets." – Pauline Kael
Quick: How many great female physical comedians have there been? (Aside from Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, I mean.) Mabel Normand was both funny and charming, and could hold her own even with Chaplin. Louise Fazenda, who looked a bit like Joe E. Brown in drag, was often hilarious but both she and Normand are pretty much forgotten. For that matter, neither Lucy nor Burnett performed much physical humor in their movies. Carole Lombard had her moments, especially the way she uses her feet against John Barrymore in 20th Century, her slugging match with Frederic March in Nothing Sacred and the way William Powell manhandles her in My Man Godfrey, but she never had a wholly knockabout movie role. And Doris Day, who was occasionally involved in physical humor, wasn’t particularly funny at it, largely because the tone of her comedies were usually loud and shrill when slapstick was involved and such things in her movies tend to be done to her; she’s not responsible for the mayhem the way the great silent stars generally were. Even in the pictures written and directed by Blake Edwards, arguably the last great American proponent of elegantly conceived and executed slapstick, the great physical gags were performed mostly by men (Peter Sellers, Jack Lemmon, Dudley Moore, Richard Mulligan, Burt Reynolds, John Ritter.) Not here: In Switch, Edwards assigns Ellen Barkin all of the picture’s physical comedy, and she’s exhilaratingly adept; her comic aplomb carries through her entire performance. Only toward the end, when the narrative takes on a more serious tone, is she less than achingly hilarious. Added to which, like Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria, Barkin is playing two roles at once.
Although most contemporary reviewers of the picture (most of whom hated it) claimed Edwards had remade the flop 1964 George Axelrod farce comedy Goodbye, Charlie, he hadn’t. The basic premise of Switch is similar to the Axelrod: A womanizing cad is murdered during an assignation and comes back as a woman, with whom the man’s incredulous best friend slowly falls in love. But Edwards rings a crucial change on the set-up. In Switch the unprincipled Lothario Steve Brooks (Perry King) is sent back with a mission — find a woman who loves him, or go to Hell — a quest further complicated when Satan (Bruce Martyn Payne) demands Steve be brought back to life as a woman. Throughout the picture, then, Barkin is playing not, as Andrews does as Victoria, “a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman,” but a man in a woman’s body, pretending to be that woman and, despite his track record with the opposite sex, understanding nothing about how women behave or even how they move. She’s a bit like Steve Martin in All of Me, the male spirit battling against the female, except that Martin’s character kept his own body and “Steve Brooks” has this pesky woman’s exterior to contend with. Barkin never loses sight of that essential comedic device, and when as a woman with a man’s soul she tries to walk in heels she’s uproariously funny. Furthermore, “Steve” is a crude, unsubtle seducer, so generally obnoxious we wonder how his essentially gentle best friend Walter (Jimmy Smits) can abide him, and when “Amanda Brooks” (as Steve wittily dubs his feminine self) behaves normally, as Steve, Walter immediately thinks she’s a Lesbian. (“Pal, if I’m gay,” Amanda snaps back, “Clint Eastwood is a transvestite.”) But Barkin isn’t playing Amanda as a stereotypical Bull Dyke; she’s playing the role as a boorish, vulgar, argumentative sexist creep — she’s playing Steve. Barkin is so good, and so goddamned funny, she seems to be successfully re-addressing the decades-old screen imbalance of female slapstick all by herself.
Tony Roberts exudes his usual warmth and charm as a sneering advertising executive, but Jimmy Smits and Ellen Barkin more than compensate.
Edwards directs with his usual aplomb and lightness of touch, and he gets a great comic performance from JoBeth Williams as Steve’s killer, a sexy and surprising one from Lorraine Bracco as a potential client for whose advertising account Amanda is almost willing to sleep with to acquire and, briefly, a wittily hilarious turn by Jim J. Bullock as a phony psychic. Dick Bush, who also shot Victor/Victoria, provides rich, clean cinematography and although Edwards eventually removed Henry Mancini’s ineffective musical score (I have the Varèse Sarabande CD and it’s a stultifying bore) he included, in the main and end titles, a soft, beautiful rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” by Paul Young & Clannad. Mitchell’s has been my favorite pop lyric of the 1960s since I first heard it as a teenager, and I would give significant portions of my anatomy to have written it. Edwards’ use of it manages, by the picture’s end, to be both thematically appropriate and gently moving.
Your reaction to Switch may be less enthusiastic than mine — no performance form is more divisive than comedy, and I admit I had a couple drinks while watching it — but at least Steve Brooks doesn’t end up, as Charlie does in the last scene of Goodbye, Charlie, being reincarnated as a Great Dane.
I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience, but for myself there was no period in my movie-going (and watching, if we include television airings of older pictures) history more vivid and influential in forming my tastes than that which fell between the ages of 12 and 18. I’ve always been strongly affected by movies, from my earliest memories of them, which stretch back to my 3rd or 4th year of life, but when you’re younger — at least when I was growing up — the fare you’re exposed to is softer and much less prone to send shockwaves through your system, certain Disney animated features excepted. While I was in the process of becoming movie-mad, the pictures I watched on TV ranged all over the genre map, but seeing more adult fare, such as The Apartment, The Americanization of Emily, Klute, Irma La Douce, Sweet Charity (you can see I was a sucker for Shirley MacLaine), The French Connection and The Manchurian Candidate, altered my view, not just of movies but of life. Going to see Cabaret on my 13th birthday was revelatory, and convincing my mother to let me go to the movie of Marathon Man when I was 15 and still relatively sheltered in what I knew of cinematic blood and violence expanded my visual and emotional senses; the movie exploded in my brain like a dumdum bullet, and nothing I saw between autumn of 1976 and summer 1977 made a comparable impact until Sorcerer opened. I haven’t seen the picture since I was 16, but I was forcibly struck, watching it again recently, by how many images I recalled from that single viewing at the end of the ’70s.
The movie is said to be a re-make of the 1953 Henri-Georges Clouzot The Wages of Fear, but it isn’t really. William Friedkin, the picture’s progenitor and director, perhaps to avoid being slammed for attempting a new edition of an almost universally-esteemed classic of post-war French cinema, claimed his was an adaptation of the slender Georges Arnaud novel on which Clouzot had based his version, but I take issue with that as well. Sorcerer, tersely written by Walon Green, is more a variation on both Clouzot and Arnaud; there’s nothing in Friedkin’s movie as agonizing on a human level as the sequence in the crater rapidly filling up with oil in which Yves Montand accidentally drives the truck packed with nitroglycerine over Charles Vanel’s leg, and the climax, although darkly ironic, is not at all like Clouzot’s genuinely shocking final scene. Nor does the picture have the rich existential or philosophical qualities of The Wages of Fear, novel or movie. Yet (and I say this as one who often admires Friedkin’s work even as I deplore his obnoxious egotism and self-promotional braying about both the paucity of his collaborators’ gifts and the abundancy of his own — anything good in a Friedkin picture, you understand, is his) Sorcerer is almost profligate in its forceful presentation of intensely memorable moments:
The French embezzler’s public suicide; the crash of the robbers’ getaway car into the semi on the city street and Roy Scheider’s bloody, wounded stumble away from the wreckage; the charred bodies of the peasant oil rig workers after the explosion; the trucks on the rickety rope-bridge in the torrential rain bearing down on the men trying to guide them, their ancient grills like the mouths of weird, hungry automatons*; the huge fallen tree across the only road and Scheider’s wild, frustrated reaction to it; the tense, silent preparations for destroying the obstacle; Scheider’s drive through the weird, hallucinatory lunar landscape as his compatriot lies dying on the floor of the cab. (Although most of the movie was shot in the Dominican Republic, the latter sequence was filmed in New Mexico’s Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness.) Dick Bush, who later lit Victor/Victoria, was Friedkin’s initial cinematographer but the director, unhappy with Bush’s jungle photography, replaced him with John M. Stephens, whose work on Sorcerer is among the most astonishing of 1970s American filmmaking. Although by no means a great movie (I’m not sure it’s necessarily even a good one) the picture is certainly among the most photographically striking ever made in color.
Some have averred that Scheider’s character is a nod to Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs. The hat does support that contention.
Sorcerer marked my first experience since seeing Doctor Dolittle in 1968 when I was a small boy of an overture before the feature. Because both I and the others with whom I went to see the movie were teenagers in the ’70s and had pretty much missed the whole road-show experience, we had no idea it was an overture… if you can call music by Tangerine Dream an overture to anything. Yet watching the Friedkin-approved Blu-ray, which does without it, I actually missed that overture a little. I can’t think why.
*This image, which also graced the movie’s poster, made me think before I saw it that the movie was somehow related to The Exorcist. There is as well a fast shot of a bas-relief demon that also suggests a kinship with Friedkin’s previous mega-hit. Indeed, Friedkin himself felt the movies were related, although there is nothing in the narrative of Sorcerer to suggest a supernatural connection.
And Jacob was left alone, and wrestled with an angel until the breaking of the day and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him; and the angel said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And Jacob said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. — From Genesis 32:22, pointedly recited as grace by James Keller in The Miracle Worker
I have no idea whether William Gibson’s remarkable drama about Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan is still taught by junior and high school English teachers — I encountered it twice in my classes during the mid-to-late 1970s — just as I don’t know whether 12 Angry Men (excuse me: Persons!) is still being read. Perhaps in the 21st century a more or less feral girl-child folding her napkin is considered a hopeless example of classic white privilege, or that the mere notion of reaching a profoundly afflicted girl, and teaching her how to communicate with others, may currently be deemed an embodiment of anti-deaf oppression. And since the wonderful movie made from Gibson’s play is in black and white, good luck getting almost anyone born after 1970 to give it a look. Well, it’s their loss, for aside from Victor Jory’s tendency to overplay Captain Keller’s bluster this is an almost perfect transliteration of a noted stage production that neither loses what made it effective in the theatre nor imposes theatrical stylization on the movie transcription, although very little was altered either by Gibson as the screenwriter or by Arthur Penn as the director.
Due, I strongly suspect, to one of the many antidepressants prescribed for me a decade or so ago (and which seems to have damaged me permanently) I have a tendency when moved to tear up faster and more intensely than I did before, or wish to now. Even so there are still only a handful of movies guaranteed to reduce me to a veritable puddle, and The Miracle Worker is at the top of the list, where it has been since I first saw it on television over 40 years ago. The precise moment I become uncontrollably lachrymose while watching it is during the shattering emotional climax, when young Helen Keller (Patty Duke) finally understands what the word “water,” spelled so often into her palm by Anne Bancroft’s Annie Sullivan, means. Keller is now so famous (or was anyway when I was young) that the ultimate outcome of her long battle with Sullivan in the picture is a foregone conclusion. In spite of this, the moment of recognition, in the play and especially in the movie, is overwhelming. The dawning of a thought, or in any case the initial grasping of a concept, is one of the most difficult tasks set before any actor — and, when it’s pulled off with the requisite veracity, among the most satisfying to watch. To see it on the face of a performer as young as Duke was then, and in a character as wayward and seemingly unreachable as little Helen, is akin to the slap in the face she gives Annie in their first extended encounter; it shocks with its suddenness, and with its complete verisimilitude. In that moment we sense an entire universe, an entire life, extending before this wild, barely domesticated child she previously had no reason, and certainly no hope, of imagining possible. Few things in human reality can be more celebratory than opening the door to a world of possibilities for another human being, especially a child, and seeing them walk through it.
The full triumph of that, in The Miracle Worker, is not only Duke’s, or Penn’s for his sensitive direction of a young actress, nor even Gibson’s incisive writing or the irreproachable performances by Jory and Inga Swenson as the elder Kellers, at the end of it. Bancroft, throughout her entire performance, prepares us for the moment, and her reaction to Helen’s awakening drives our emotional response as much as the event itself. Before it begins, Annie has reached the nadir of her experience in the Keller household, and more or less hung up her hopes of ever being able to guide Helen to an understanding of what she’s tried to teach her, so that when the girl suddenly realizes that the word “water” applies to the wet fluid sloshing over her hands from the outside pump and first speaks it (after her remembered six-month-old’s fashion) then spells it, her teacher is at first too stunned to move. Slowly, as the seemingly impossible is made flesh, astonishment gives way to understanding, and excitement (“She knows!“) and to intense concentration as, taking Helen’s suddenly insatiable need as her lodestar, she rapidly spells into the girl’s hand everything she touches. Seldom, I think, have tensions in an American drama which have been built up over the course of the action to such an excruciating level been exploded so eloquently and with such economy of style, bringing everything to bear on the result, from the high level of the acting by all concerned, the perfect conception and writing of the scene by Gibson and the unerring direction by Penn* of action, camera and performance to the expressive cinematography of Ernesto Caparrós and the beautifully judged editing by Aram Avakian. It’s so intensely felt, and photographed, a sequence that the emotions it expresses come across with an almost violent shock.
There have been roughly two million movies made from American stage plays, or maybe it’s just felt that way. Yet very few of them are more than perfunctory. You might, if pressed, come up with a short list that got made into genuinely great movies, but after you’ve named the 1931 The Front Page, the 1938 Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Lion in Winter,The Boys in the Band, The Iceman Cometh, Six Degrees of Separation, the 1996 The Crucible, Angels in America and The Normal Heart, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with many more. Most such movies, even when very good indeed, were fatally compromised, usually (before the demise of the Production Code) by censorship, such as two Tennessee Williams adaptations: A Streetcar Named Desire (with Brando but without Blanche’s young husband’s homosexuality) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (no reference to Brick’s possible bisexuality). The 1956 Baby Doll, from Williams’ one-act 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, was notorious in its time, and it’s a lot of fun, but it’s hardly a great picture, any more than The Little Foxes is, despite much in it that is fine. Often we have to be content that a movie captures a great stage performance (Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple, for example, or Judy Holiday in Born Yesterday or Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy) or a wonderful acting turn (Barrymore and Lombard in Twentieth Century, e.g.). The Miracle Worker belongs on the short list; there’s little in it I can imagine being bettered, and it’s among the most emotionally plangent, and satisfying, movies of the 20th century, a well-acted picture that’s also exceptionally well-made.
Penn was theatre and live television-trained, but you’d never know it looking at his best movies, such as Bonnie and Clyde, Night Moves and this superbly realized adaptation of the play he’d staged for Broadway in 1959. (He’d also directed an earlier television version for Playhouse 90, starring the redoubtable Teresa Wright as Annie Sullivan.) United Artists, which financed the picture, didn’t want either Duke or Bancroft; they offered a $5 million budget if Penn would agree to Elizabeth Taylor, and it’s a measure of Penn’s integrity that he refused, taking a mere half-million and eking out the necessary budget by infusing it with part of his own salary, which Bancroft and Gibson did as well.† Everything works here; Gibson’s emotionally taut screenplay about the combustible interaction between the wild young Helen and her determined teacher has a sense of urgency that is nearly overpowering. And if Sullivan’s eventual triumph is a miracle (the phrase “Miracle Worker” was bestowed on her by Mark Twain, who financed Helen’s college education) the movie brings forth small miracles too, especially in the acting.
Although Bancroft and Duke had under their belts long New York runs with this material, nothing in the picture feels studied, or overly worked out. The shape of the scenes may feel inevitable, betraying to a degree their television and Broadway origins, but the action never seems less than true, even brutal, as in the harrowing 9-minute dining room battle between Helen and Annie that reportedly took five days to film and carries more dramatic fireworks than most cinematic military engagements. The original playscript was trimmed from three acts in the theatre to a more manageable 106 film minutes, and if my memory of the play does not betray me, the only things missing are some extended flashbacks to the asylum Annie and her crippled younger brother Jimmy were forced to endure, and a more protracted attempt by the cynical James Keller (Andrew Prine, and splendid) to breach his father’s love. This is synopsized in the movie, and although as an insufficiently loved son my sympathies are with Jamie, at greater length his quest would have gotten in the way of what is most compelling about the material. While the play was both naturalistic (stylized sets and haunting voices from Annie’s past, including that of her doomed brother, on tape) and realistic (the action, especially the violence Helen inflicts) the movie is based entirely in realism, except for the dreaming flashbacks to Annie’s childhood, blown up repeatedly to images so coarse-grained they are impenetrable, phantoms of the past, their sound likewise distorted.
The lovely Inga Swenson as Mrs. Keller seems to be playing most of her material on her nerve endings; it must have been exhausting for her. (It would be interesting to have seen Patricia Neal in the role on Broadway, for I can’t imagine two actresses less alike in voice, technique, tone or temperament.) Victor Jory as the mercurial pater familias I have spoken about above. Kathleen Comegys gives good account of the kind but exasperating Aunt Ev, and young Michael Darden as the black child Percy, pressed into midnight service as a sleepy cat’s-paw, is extraordinarily right. But the honors belong, quite properly, to Duke and Bancroft, both of whom were voted Oscars for their incendiary performances. Although there is, ultimately, extraordinary tenderness between the two, their major scenes are constructed by Gibson as battles royal, and the two give these scenes everything. Patty Duke was too old for the role in 1959 (Helen is supposed to be nearly seven) and much too old for it in 1962. But her small stature compensates, and if she isn’t six, her performance is so persuasive in every other respect it sweeps away these reservations.‡ Duke seems to have had no fear as an actress; her performance as Helen is guileless, so spontaneous and unguarded it can still strike the viewer with the force of the early Brando. And at least Brando never had to play identical cousins.
Penn and Bancroft on location.
Anne Bancroft was in Hollywood from 1952 and left after five years of increasingly thankless jobs (Gorilla at Large, anyone?); she must have been thrilled to have the opportunity, not merely to show what she was capable of, or even to re-create one of the two Gibson roles in which she had starred, and triumphed, on the stage (the other was Gittel Mosca in Two for the Seesaw, played on film by Shirley MacLaine) but for once to get a great part on film. Her Annie Sullivan is, as might be expected when an actor has played a part in the theatre for dozens of rehearsals and hundreds of performances, assured, yet without obvious calculation. Some actors’ performances ossify over time, fixed in amber, and the “definitive records” on film of their career-defining roles become overly precise and worked out, but Bancroft’s never feels less than entirely spontaneous. The only, very slight objection I have to her Annie Sullivan is the Irish accent, and not from any aesthetic standpoint — it sounds creditable enough — but because Sullivan herself didn’t have one; it was a device Penn came up with during Broadway rehearsals to help Bancroft differentiate her characterization of Annie from Gittel, with the result of course that now everyone who plays Sullivan gives her a dashing brogue. Although Sullivan was a mere 20 at the time of the events Gibson describes in his play and Bancroft was nearly 10 years older than that, she somehow conveys Annie’s youth, her immature impetuousness and her headlong determination, crucial factors in breaking down not only Helen’s defenses but those of her well-meaning but indulgent parents. And while Sullivan could easily seem to be a human steamroller, Bancroft locates her regret, and her vulnerability, banked down deep within that indomitable will of hers, with unerring precision, never seeming to ask for pity. It’s that very, seemingly innate, strength of Bancroft’s that creates the needed contrast and which when Annie sees she’s finally reached the girl makes her response so haunting; as Helen spells “ground” into her fingers, Bancroft’s “Yes!” (really “Ye-e-ss!“) is filled with a staggering combination of emotions — it’s an almost agonized expression of relief, and hope, and is among the most stirring, and memorable, single word interjections in the history of American movies.
Credit for at least some of the power of the movie’s climax must be apportioned to Laurence Rosenthal for his intensely moving score, which at the end nearly equals Elmer Bernstein’s for To Kill a Mockingbird in sheer, aching beauty and emotional release.
The heresy I am about to state, therefore, may come as a surprise even to casual readers of these pieces, particularly since I’ve previously made it plain in these pages that film music is an abiding passion for me, and movie scoring a facet of filmmaking to which I give a great deal of my attention when watching, and writing about, movies.
However… it seems to me that most movies, especially contemporary ones, could do without any score at all other than, as with those Peter Bogdanovich directs, a diegetic one. Moviegoers’ reactions got trained in what is essentially a 19th century tradition pretty early on, when the silent pictures they went to were accompanied by pianists and organists in the smaller venues and entire symphonic orchestras in the larger. (Except in their earliest days, silent movies were seldom really silent.) This practice became exponentially more intrusive when talkies became the norm, and the worst excesses of score composition blossomed in the 1940s when it seemed that no on-screen act or emotion, however vestigial, could be said to exist unless it accompanied by 101 strings and a choir invisible. Thanks in part to the Star Wars template I’ve seen movies, such as the 2003 Peter Pan, in which not a single frame of film was permitted to breathe on its own without the score crashing in on it. It’s the sonic equivalent of wall-to-wall carpeting. And I’m not blaming John Williams for this; he correctly perceived that the original Star Wars required that sonic boost, in part because he understood its origins in the pop art of 1930s movie serials. But what works for one movie, or even one series of movies, is not appropriate to everything else, and music has once again, as it did in the ’40s, become yet another way for nervous producers and know-nothing studio executives to hedge their bets: Del Bigtree of The HighWire invariably drowns his video segments in wall-to-wall scores, as if he does not trust his audience to have an honest emotion unless he drags it out of them with music.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule on scoring, obviously, and whether the majority of pictures need musical underlining or not, it’s nearly impossible to imagine certain movies without it. Would Lawrence of Arabia be as effective without Maurice Jarre’s desert theme? Chinatown, minus Jerry Goldsmith’s plangent scoring for trumpet? The shower murder in Psychosans Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking strings? Rosenthal is one of those inspired craftsmen who has quietly written a brace of brilliant works (A Raisin in the Sun, The Comedians, The Return of a Man Called Horse, Who’ll Stop the Rain, the 1981 Clash of the Titans and, for television, the magnificent score for The Power and the Glory) but has seldom received the praise he deserves. Tellingly, he limited his contribution here to a little over 30 minutes’ scoring. At least partially as a result of its brevity, then, his music for The Miracle Worker is that much more effective, and affecting. “What I was really trying to do was, in some way, capture the feeling of living in a world of darkness and silence,” he is quoted as saying in Nat Segaloff’s Arthur Penn biography. He further represented Annie and Helen by “the hollowness of those two clarinets and the weaving, falling series of progressions which is part of the theme.” When those progressions reach a crescendo in the pump scene, they are not pulling tears from us — they’re providing a cloud onto which we can climb and safely pile our responses. Rosenthal knows when to pull back as well, to let the scene breathe. He never abuses the trust placed in him.
You’re free of course to agree or disagree with me about any or all of this. But if that devastating climax, in which an almost desperate young teacher finally reaches her nearly impossible student’s subterranean Id and draws her out into the world doesn’t move you, I would respectfully suggest you seek immediate help.
*Unerring as it stands, although not without mistakes in getting there. Penn initially shot the pump sequence from the vantage point he understood best from having seen the play so many times in the theatre — at a distance. Seeing the rushes he knew immediately the approach was all wrong, and re-shot it, presumably on his own dime.
†UA was every bit as parsimonious with the advertising as with the budget, so while the picture made a small profit, the fact it didn’t do considerably better, based on the reviews, must be laid at the feet of Arthur Krim & Co.
‡ I have seen Duke’s age during production of the movie listed as anywhere from 13 to 16 depending on the source. It was shot in the spring and summer of 1961. Duke was born in December of 1946; she was 14.
A Stranger Among Us (1992) A surprisingly square crime drama to have been directed by Sidney Lumet, due largely to the interesting but almost wholly schematic script by its elevated-hack screenwriter, one Robert J. Avrech. One grants that placing a hard-nosed, profane, secular female NYPD cop inside an Hasidic household to solve the murder of one of the sect’s young yeshiva scholars provides an opening for examining cultural differences, and with a religious demographic about which most Americans know little or nothing and which is seldom examined in popular culture… although the appearance of the picture in the summer of 1992 may have seemed more than a bit tone-deaf to some, a mere year after the Crown Heights riots placed in national spotlight the Orthodox in Brooklyn, where the movie is also set, although it was shot largely in Queens.
After listening to the self-serving commentary by Avrech on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray, one imagines him in studio pitch meetings exclaiming, “It’s Witness meets The Chosen!” (Although not Fiddler on the Roof, which Avrech despises but which he seems not to know was made into a movie.) Certainly his constant panting references to Hawks and Hitchcock reveal a mind wholly worshipful of Hollywood movie conventions and absolutely compelled to uphold them. Everything trite and by-the-numbers about the picture is due to Avrech, who can’t even stay true to his own central device in defining the young rebbe-to-be played by Eric Thal, his perpetual quoting from the Kabbalah, admitting in his commentary that the construction of the quotations is entirely his own. What’s best in the picture are Lumet’s typically concentrated direction with its focus on human relationships; Andrzej Bartkowiak’s exquisite cinematography which in its interior scenes evokes Rembrandt and in all other respects is wonderfully lit and shot — the opening credits sequence, a long, unbroken helicopter view of the bridges leading into the borough, is breathtaking, in a way I don’t think they’ve ever been filmed before — and the actors’ performances, especially Thal’s and the extraordinary (and extraordinarily beautiful) Mira Sara’s as his devout younger sister. There’s a moment at the end when, saying goodbye to a woman he loves, Thal’s tear-stained face, despite his facial hair, looks like that of a lost little boy, and is terribly moving.
I’ve seldom cared much for Melanie Griffith, whose little-girl voice militates against her occasionally incisive acting, but she’s relatively effective here, as are Lee Richardson as the aged rebbe, Tracy Pollan as the yeshiva student’s betrothed and John Pankow as Griffith’s temporary partner. Burtt Harris, Lumet’s longtime associate and assistant director, delivers an exceptional turn as Griffith’s oblivious ex-cop father and the cast includes Jamey Sheridan, David Margulies and, as an enterprising Mafia shakedown artist, James Gandolfini. Jerry Bock contributed an often lovely if sometimes intrusive musical score; this is a much more score-heavy Lumet picture than normal, and I wonder if the amount of music was imposed on him by the suits at Hollywood Pictures.* The production design (Philip Rosenberg ), art direction (W. Steven Graham) and set decoration (Gary J. Brink) are superb, particularly in the rebbe‘s home, and the costumes by Gary Jones and Ann Roth are small marvels of character design, especially the mouth-watering, deep red, blue and purple dresses for Mira Sara.
I don’t really wish to keep dwelling on the dopiness of Avrech, whose second bible, after the Torah, must surely be Syd Field’s ludicrous book on screenwriting, but one of his more risible pronouncements on the Blu-ray commentary demands a response: “Every great movie is a love story.”
Balls.
*Did Avrech know the composer of the score for the movie he wrote was responsible for the music of that show he hates?
Switch (1991) Blake Edwards’ very funny sex-role fantasy, with a brilliant comedic performance by Ellen Barkin that is one of the few great slapstick turns by a woman in American movies.
Manhattan (1979) Woody Allen’s beautiful if uneven comedy, suffused by Gordon Willis’ incomparable photography and the peerless music of George Gershwin.
The Big Fix (1978) A genial modern private detective picture featuring a very likable lead performance by Richard Dreyfus and an underlying sadness at the loss of national ideals.
The original poster art, before #MeToo rendered the movie’s foolish distributors neuter.
The Death of Stalin (2017) In an interview a couple of decades ago concerning the inevitable movie of her astonishing 1987 novel Beloved Toni Morrison, mentally rolling her eyes at Oprah Winfrey’s philosophy of life and literature, made the heretical statement that a book did not need a movie to complete it; that it was complete on its own! This seems to me perhaps even more true of the so-called graphic novel, in which the visual is as important as the verbal. The artist and the writer have laid out their story in exactly the manner they feel best represents their text, often in striking or witty fashion that enhances the words and the story. Why then, Mr./Ms. Filmmaker, do you think you must “improve” on what Alan Moore and his gifted collaborators have already accomplished in their book? What makes you think you can? (“Oh, but we want to honor the book through our artistically compromised reinterpretation of it…”)
That said, the 2017 cinematic transliteration of Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin’s La Mort de Staline improves upon its source. It’s sharper, wittier and almost infinitely funnier, and the visuals are an enormous improvement on Robin’s rudimentary (and frankly unappealing) artwork. The movie benefits as well from a wonderful cast of actors and comedians, and comedy is very much central to the director and co-writer Armando Iannucci’s approach to the material. All politics is inherently comic, however tragic the eventual outcome, and The Death of Stalin is hilarious. The naked jockeying for position by members of the Central Committee begins while Stalin is still (barely) alive, as Khrushchev (the marvelous Steve Buscemi), Malenkov (the riotously funny Jeffrey Tambor) and Beria (Simon Russell Beale, and terrifying) plot and counter-plot, alternately aided, abetted and confounded by Molotov (Michael Palin), General Zhukov (Jason Isaacs), Mikoyan (Paul Whitehouse), Bulganin (Paul Chahidi) and Stalin’s problematic adult children (Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend). It’s like a musical-comedy roundelay, with the cant of dialectical materialism and the lugubrious conference rules of the International taking the place of the dropped needle. The frantic scramble for a seat, however, is the same, and ends with one last, witty, visual joke.
The usual literalist geniuses who can always be counted upon to express the obvious whinged that the brilliant, mad and entertainingly vicious screenplay (Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin) plays fast and loose with history, but so did the graphic novel — or “comic book,” as the credits weirdly have it — and both carry disclaimers warning readers and viewers of that fact. These types are especially upset that when the appalling Beria is cremated his ashes float away on the wind; I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that their high school literature teachers never introduced to them the gentle concepts of symbolism and irony. Everyone else whose cognitive abilities remain intact can take pleasure in the high black comedy, the uniformly splendid performances, Zac Nicholson’s mouth-watering cinematography and the rich and appropriately Shostakovichian musical score by Christopher Willis. Indeed, the only real cavils I entertain about The Death of Stalin have nothing to do with the picture itself: 1) The spineless, craven decision by the distributors to literally erase the indispensable Tambor’s face from the original poster over alleged (meaning: “said without proof”) incidents of sexual harassment and 2) some loose innuendo by Iannucci on a promotional featurette in which he invoked Donald Trump as a reason for making the picture, a statement I’m glad I didn’t hear at the time or I’d likely have hedged my bets and ignored his movie, the best new picture I’ve seen in years. Why is it that “woke” liberals behave as if a) Trump actually was a dictator, somehow comparable to Stalin merely because they hated him — and which his limp presidency proves conclusively he was not; and b) as though even a mentally befogged old career criminal like Joe Biden, merely because he is a Democrat, could never behave like one?
Finian’s Rainbow (1968) A great stage musical filmed too late, and with warring elements of fantasy unfulfilled and a director determined to bring reality out of studio backlots that ultimately sink the picture.
Sorcerer (1977) William Friedkin and Walon Green’s variation on The Wages of Fear was and remains one of the most striking movies of the 1970s.
Finian’s Rainbow, one of the most radical, progressive and frankly leftist Broadway musicals ever written when it opened in 1947 was, by the mid-1960s, hopelessly dated, not in its Socialist critiques (which if anything had proven more than prescient) but via its racial parameters; if it was ever to be made into a movie, the time for that was, at the very latest, before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Staid old MGM was interested in it, in 1948, as a vehicle for Mickey Rooney (as, one presumes, the leprechaun Og) and the UPA animators John and Faith Hubley later attempted to get a cartoon feature made before their blacklisting killed the project… although the song score was recorded, by Frank Sinatra, Ella Logan (the ingénue of the stage production), Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald(!) Considering the show’s fantasy elements — leprechauns, pots of gold and wishes granted which include turning a bigoted white Southern Senator black — animation, which has always embraced the impossible and often achieved a perfect simulacrum, was the ideal form for the material. What decidedly isn’t, is realism tinged with the fantastic, and that is what the eventual movie’s director wrongheadedly tried to impose on it. Naturally in our Director-as-God era, Finian has been “rediscovered” as a representative auteur musical and a “forgotten masterpiece.” Ráiméis, as the Irish say. Ah, but if I tell you the director in question was Francis Coppola, such madness becomes at least explicable.
Some of the Hubleys’ designs for their planned animated version of Finian.
Coppola, who adored the great Burton Lane/E.Y. Harburg score, took the job partially on the basis of his affection for the songs without, as he admits on the Warner Archive commentary, reading the book for the show, realizing only too late how dated the material had become. Harburg and his co-author Fred Saidy were credited with the movie’s script, but Coppola says he only met the famously irascible librettist/lyricist once, and his and Saidy’s “screenplay” does seem to have been a virtual transcription of the dialogue-heavy original book, minus only the Act Two appearance of the catalog-store magnates “Shears and Robust,” and the young hero’s union activism. (A clue to what was lost is the character’s very name: Woody, christened after Guthrie.) That the script, as Coppola maintains, would have benefited from being trimmed is a valid criticism of an overlong movie. But as an admirer of the original, I resent his repeated characterization of the play as “clunky and old-fashioned.” Its fashion as a post-Oklahoma!book musical was still very much in fashion on the Broadway stage of 1967 when the movie was shot, just after Cabaret, just before Hair and preceding by a few years how the Prince/Sondheim and Jerome Robbins stage innovations became the norm for Broadway writing and staging. As to “clunky,” I have no idea what the man means. As a stage show Finian’s Rainbow was complex, its satire taking on reactionary politics, sharecropping, Jim Crow, poverty (and its opposite, mindless consumerism), and refracting them all through the charming/fantastic prism of a magical Irish fable. But “clunky”? (If I seem to be belaboring the point, it’s because Coppola does.)
The young director understandably felt hamstrung by Jack Warner’s decision to shoot the picture entirely on the studio’s backlot rather than on location, and on standing sets for the recently-completed fiscal disaster Camelot, redressed for Finian. He was further hampered by the script’s admittedly dated depiction of the black and white sharecroppers, firmly under the Jim Crow thumb in pre-Civil Rights 1947, less so 20 years later, and more than beginning to fight back, although only a fool or an ignoramus would suggest the use of fear and violence by the white ruling class had disappeared by then, either in the South or elsewhere. But Coppola’s “solution,” grafting on a subplot involving the cross-breeding of tobacco and mint to produce a naturally mentholated cigarette (which it must be said at least gave the wonderful Al Freeman Jr. more to do) just added to the picture’s overlength. And if the backlot forest occasionally looks phony, Coppola’s attempts to impose a sense of reality on the fantasy militates against Harburg’s whimsy. As Og sings to Sharon in their charming minuet “Something Sort of Grandish”:
I might be manishish or mousish I might be a fowl or fish…*
Well, the movie of Finian is neither the fish of documentary realism nor the fowl of the wholly fantastic but a (to use this director’s favorite word) clunky hybrid of the two. And while some birds can swim, a brook trout never flies except on the end of a hook.
Tommy Steele, looking relatively subdued, with Petula Clark
Coppola had no say in the casting, nor even in the pre-recording of the songs, so he was stuck with the deplorable Tommy Steele as the leprechaun, whom one wishes he had at least managed to tone down a bit. Og is a timid creature, shy as a rule and in keeping with his enchanted nature. It’s only as he becomes more and more human that he also grows concomitantly more aggressive, especially sexually. (Or am I allowed to mention that now without being accused of condoning “rape-y” behavior?) Steele, who was nothing if not brash, plays the leprechaun with all the stops out, right from the beginning; the character has nowhere to go and quickly becomes obnoxious. He has a few good moments when he isn’t overdoing it, his best being the way, following the Saidy/Harburg original, after Og receives the first kiss of his life he lowers his tenor to deep baritone on the line, “Fairyland was never like this.” Taken in the aggregate, however, Steele’s is one of the worst ham performances in any musical. He’s even more annoying than Michael Crawford in Hello, Dolly!, and that’s saying something.
The dances are equally problematic, and that in a musical is a calamity. Because Fred Astaire was cast as Finian, the conniving old Irishman who sets the plot in motion by stealing Og’s crock o’ gold in his conviction that planting it in the ground near Ft. Knox will generate millions, his longtime friend and collaborator Hermes Pan was signed to create the choreography. But as Coppola rightly complains, Pan’s ideas are not merely old-hat, they’re a bore. With the exception of Astaire’s rhythm dance in the barn to “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich” and a charming soft-shoe bit by Steele and Barbara Hendricks as Susan the Silent during “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love,” there isn’t a memorable dance routine in the entire picture. And Pan didn’t stage that duet either; Coppola fired him midway through the production and relied on the choreographer Claude Thompson, and on his own ideas for staging the remaining numbers, largely through clever set-ups and editing. Warners compounded the dance problem by blowing up the 35mm footage into 70mm in order to make the movie a roadshow attraction, cutting off Astaire’s feet in almost every number. Fortunately for us, and for Fred, the Warner Archive Blu-ray corrects the problem. (Astaire, who felt that dance sequences should be shot so that the audience could always see the performer’s entire body, mistakenly thought Coppola had sabotaged him.) Coppola is also correct when he says that the dances for Susan the Silent should have been more interpretive, to suggest the terpsichorean language the mute girl has developed in place of speech, and which her brother Woody (Don Francks) and the little black boy Henry (Louil Silas), who translate for her, could more plainly read. I have no idea what Michael Kidd, who staged the dances for the 1947 original, did with Susan, but it had to have been more creative, and more interesting, than what’s done with her here.
Coppola at least keeps things moving, and his cinematic ideas for the musical numbers are often effective, with some glaring exceptions. The most obvious of these are near the beginning when he does a tricked-up rapid forward dolly shot of Don Francks on the train carrying him back to Rainbow Valley during “This Time of the Year,” a moment which might have been more at home in a horror movie. Less obvious is the logical fallacy at the beginning of the picture. Trying to inject some photographic beauty into this backlot musical, Coppola hired the young Caroll Ballard, an old USC film school crony, to take a pair of doubles for Astaire and Petula Clark on the road and shoot them at a distance in various locations across America for the picture’s main titles. It’s a nice idea, and for the most part it works… except that it begins on Staten Island and immediately shifts to the Golden Gate Bridge, heading the two figures eastward throughout the sequence, which makes absolutely no sense: If Finian and his daughter Sharon begin their journey across America in New York (which they would if they sailed from Ireland) and are aiming for Kentucky, why do they first head to the West coast and then come back east? Apparently those shots of Monument Valley and the back of the Statue of Liberty were more important than strict geographical sense. Yet this is the sort of thing that makes unthinking auteurists swoon.
Lane and Harburg
That score, which so enchanted Coppola, is one of the crowning glories of the American musical theatre. The songs are of a piece with what’s best in the book, Harburg’s whimsical/satirical lyrics sitting like sparkling gems atop Burton Lane’s lush, consistently charming melodies. Lane was one of those essential figures in musical comedy, like Harold Arlen, who were more musically gifted than almost anyone else around but who, perhaps because they didn’t write songs with a single partner as Loewe did with Lerner or Rodgers with, first, Hart and then Hammerstein, never became a household name. A protégé of Gershwin, Lane had a gift for melodic composition that approaches a casual form of genius, and a partial list of his standards more than supports this contention: “The Lady’s in Love with You” (lyric by Frank Loesser); “How About You?” (Ralph Freed); “Too Late Now,” “You’re all the World to Me,” “She Wasn’t You,” “On a Clear Day You Can see Forever,” “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?,” “Come Back to Me,” “Why Him?,” “It’s Time for a Love Song” and “One More Walk Around the Garden” (Alan Jay Lerner). One only wishes he’d worked more. With Finian’s Rainbow, half the songs in the score became standards (“How Are things in Glocca Morra?,” “Look to the Rainbow,” “Old Devil Moon,” “If This Isn’t Love,” “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love”) and those that didn’t could have enriched at least three other musicals: “Something Sort of Grandish,” “Necessity,” “The Great ‘Come-and-Get-It’ Day,” “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,” “The Begat.” There isn’t a dud or a weak entry in the lot.
“Old Devil Moon” has never sounded as erotic as it does when Don Francks and Petula Clark sing it.
“Yip” Harburg’s lyrics are a paradox to have come from an angry mind: Supple and mischievous, hilarious as well as witty, his best songs express his unique gift for wordplay, arguably the strongest of any American lyricist. It’s no accident, I don’t think, that most of his masterworks came from fantasy: The Ed Wynn vehicle Hooray for What!, written with Harold Arlen, that turned a poison gas into a love potion and gave us “Moanin’ in the Mornin’” and “Down With Love”; the blacklist-era Flahooley, which involved, among other things, an Arabian genie, a laughing doll and a witch-hunt; The Happiest Girl in the World, from Lysistrata with Offenbach music and Cyril Ritchard as Pluto; and The Wizard of Oz, about which I hope I need say nothing. (Although in these times, who knows?) Harburg, a Socialist — he wrote the lyric for “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” — was nearly alone in combining stinging satireon capitalist excess with whimsy and musical-comedy nonsense, and his best lyrics show a man in love with the possibilities of verbal frolic. What Harburg called fairyland gave him the best excuse to indulge in his astonishing gift for spritely paronomasia; it’s easy to imagine Johnny Mercer writing the words to “Old Devil Moon” but only Harburg, I think, could have conceived the great pun near the end of “The Begat” in which “it didn’t matter which-a-ways” is rhymed with “sons of habitués.” If his refusal to re-think his musical’s book for the screen, and the changing times, is responsible for the picture’s occasional mauvais quarts d’heure, yet he is also the chief source of what, aside from Astaire, and Petula Clark’s singing, is most pleasurable about it. Clark is an exceptionally agreeable screen presence, and if, like me, you became aware of her pop recording “Downtown” at a young age you’re likely predisposed as I am to love her voice; I particularly cherish her and Francks’ deeply erotic “Old Devil Moon.” Together they turn one of the finest charm-song ballads in the American songbook into something hot.
As the beguiling old rogue Finian McLonergan, Astaire, who hadn’t made a musical since 1957, delivers his patented charisma in periodic increments alternating with a broader, more aggressive comedy than was usual for him. (Coppola says he rehearsed the script and numbers for six weeks before filming began, culminating in a live performance on the Warner lot and that as a result most of the cast did too much, too loudly, on film, which he did little to curb.) The Finian of the stage show was a straight comic with only one sung moment, a release during “If This Isn’t Love.” While the movie’s Finian vocalizes less than Woody, Sharon and Og, with Astaire in the role he still sings more than his stage counterpart, memorably taking all of the solo lines in the oratorio-like “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,” formerly a number for Sharon. 68 when the picture was filmed, Astaire seems ageless until while burying Og’s crock o’ gold he’s hit with a golden light from below, in extreme close-up, and as a consequence suddenly looks a good 20 years older. The effect is decent enough, but why would a director subject his ageing star to such unforgiving light? I suspect it was this shot that occasioned Renata Adler’s remark, made with her usual tact and judgment, that Astaire looked “ancient, far beyond his years, collapsed and red-eyed.” With his characteristic aplomb, Astaire uses Finian’s shillelagh as if it’s the cane from his “Top Hat” number; he’s dapper even in dowdy tweed, and his step is as light as ever — which, aside from his sparkling grin and that pleasant tenor, are what makes us smile the most when we see Fred Astaire.
If there is a single damning observation to make about Finian’s Rainbow as a movie, it’s that for a story about magic, the picture has none. I’m not talking about special effects, although they certainly might have helped. (About the only good one is the whirling pool, lit from below in changing colors, when Og works a charm spell on the newly black Senator.) The movie simply never soars the way other screen fantasies such as The Wizard of Oz does or Mary Poppins or even Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Astaire has to carry the burden of making magic with his feet and his elfin presence, and since Finian is essentially (and despite the star billing) a supporting character, there’s only so much he can do. When the Gospel trio (Avon Long, Jester Hairston and Roy Glenn) shows up toward the end and sings “The Begat” with Kennan Wynn, the number is so joyous, and so intelligently staged by the director, it almost compensates for the lack. Wynn too, as the bigoted Senator, gives the picture a fillip, especially since Harburg and Saidy were too smart to make the character suddenly turn all gooey at the end.
The best dialogue sequence, and the funniest, is between Wynn and Freeman, trying to make a few bucks as the Senator’s butler, and it’s perfectly framed by Coppola for maximum impact. When the college-educated Howard is told by the Senator’s toadying white retainer (Ronald Colby) what is expected of him, and given mind-boggling instructions on how to deliver the Senator’s daily mint julep with the appropriate amount of slow-motion minstrel buffoonery, the look of utter incredulity on Freeman’s face is funny enough; you can almost hear him thinking, “Surely this cracker is putting me on!” But that’s merely the set-up. The pay-off comes a few minutes later, when Wynn bellows for a Bromo (another little item that should have been updated; by ’68 everyone was using Alka-Seltzer) Freeman lets out with what has to be the most excruciatingly hilarious send-up of a backwards white man’s idea of the shuffling “coon” ever committed to film. Freeman’s timing is almost preternaturally right, as is Wynn’s; the latter’s roars of distress, alternating with the former’s over-exaggerated hyuck-hyuck exclamations, become almost a comedic form of call-and-response. The bit is so perfectly worked out that Freeman is lampooning every racial cliché ever conceived and destroying them all at once. And each time you think his routine has reached a crescendo, and that you can’t laugh any longer, or harder, Freeman assaults you with more. I watched that scene twice recently, and laughed just as hard the second time as the first. How often does that happen?
Al Freeman Jr. goes into his “darky” act. One of the funniest sequences in all of musical film.
I had no intention of going on at such length about a movie that, frankly, almost bores me to remember, much less write about. I’m not sure why it even matters, especially after 50-plus years, except that it was Fred Astaire’s swansong as, to paraphrase Ethan Mordden’s apt designation for him, the most wonderful man in musicals, and that I wouldn’t trade a single note of “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” for the entire oeuvre of Lin Manuel Miranda.
Well, that and hearing Francis Coppola call one of my favorite musical plays “clunky and old-fashioned” one too damn many times.
*Curiously, while Harburg updated the line in “If This Isn’t Love” that makes a reference to Carmen Miranda, rhyming “Glocca Morra” with “Zsa Zsa Gaborra,” he left the couplet that follows the lyrics mentioned above as they had been, topically, in 1947: But with thee, I’m Eisenhowsish Please accept my proposish Who, in 1968, still cited Eisenhower as a contemporary symbol of courage?
Text (except for Harburg’s lyrics) copyright 2021 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 