By Scott Ross
Brother Bear (2003) was my punishment for believing there could be no modern hand-drawn animated Disney feature worse than Hunchback! The Musical. Somewhere in this movie lies a nice fable for children utterly destroyed by the latter-day Disney penchant for smothering everything in smart-ass anachronism: In the dialogue, relentlessly “street” circa 2003 even though the people who made it are at pains, through depicting things like woolly mammoths, to tell us this is an ancient story; in the characters, such as the obnoxious moose voiced by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis and clearly intended to evoke the equally annoying McKenzie Brothers, the least funny recurring sketch on the old “SC-TV” program; and, relentlessly, via Phil Collins’ staggeringly inept, utterly banal and aggressively persistent songs, in the music. (Because nothing says “Authentic Ancient Eskimo Story” quite like Tina Turner screeching at you and the Blind Boys of Alabama twanging away.) Brother Bear marks the first time since my parents took us to Mary Poppins when I was four that I have ever turned the volume off, or otherwise sought to escape, songs in a Disney movie. This, from the studio that was once capable of giving us “When You Wish Upon a Star,” “Baby Mine,” “Pink Elephants on Parade,” “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” “Feed the Birds” and “Under the Sea”!
The picture itself is often breathtakingly beautiful. But God, do you owe me, Collins.
The Court Jester (1955) It was with blessed relief, then, that I turned to Danny Kaye’s best and funniest comedy, one with actual songs instead of ear-splitting percussion and created by people who knew how to write them. In this case, that was Kaye’s wife — and best special material provider — Sylvia Fine, with words for most of the numbers by Sammy Cahn. (The exception is “The Maladjusted Jester,” which Kaye performs for the tyrannical king and for which Fine provided both the music and the lyrics.) A great deal of care was taken with The Court Jester, including with the songs, the witty screenplay (Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, who also jointly directed), the Korngold-evoking musical score (Vic Schoen), the rich VistaVision cinematography (Ray June), fulsome art direction (Hal Pereira), perfectly appointed costumes (Edith Head) and charming choreography (by the wonderfully-named James Starbuck). Perhaps too much care was lavished on it: The movie, budgeted for an over-lush $4 million — actual money in 1955 — returned a little over half that amount in revenues. It was television that, over time, turned it into a classic.
I’ve always found it interesting that while Kaye was under contract to Sam Goldwyn for five years, the two never made a single good picture; he had to go first to Warners (for The Inspector General) and then Paramount to do his best work. He’s a bit more restrained than usual under Frank and Panama, and all the funnier, although surely the clever script helped a great deal, requiring as it does that his persona change constantly, literally at the snap of someone’s fingers. Kaye is surrounded by better actors here than usual as well: Basil Rathbone, whose face Mrs. Patrick Campbell once perfectly described as “two profiles pasted together,” essentially spoofing his own Sir Guy of Gisbourne in the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood; Angela Lansbury, both amorous and cold-blooded as the usurper king’s marriageable daughter; the deliciously honey-voiced Glynis Johns as Kaye’s feminine counterpart; and the great Mildred Natwick as the sorceress who memorably advises him not to drink from the vessel with the pestle. Frank and Panama wrote two of Bob Hope’s better pictures (My Favorite Blonde and Monsieur Beaucaire, the latter also a comic swashbuckler) and there are times when Kaye almost seems to be imitating Hope… which in turn makes him also sound a little like Woody Allen. I wouldn’t dwell on that for too long.
Whichever idiot or idiots wrote the Wikipedia entry on the picture deemed The Court Jester part of a genre blessedly undiscovered heretofore, namely a “musical-comedy, medieval romance, costume drama film.” Get it? Got it. Good.
Ragtime / Ragtime Director’s Workprint (1981) Miloš Forman and Michael Weller’s disastrous adaptation of Doctorow’s literary masterpiece.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) Alfred Hitchcock’s first picture for Gaumont-British, and his first big talkie success both expresses his admiration of German Expressionism and lays out his thriller template, aspects of which will recur throughout the remainder of his filmography. It isn’t as sharp or as accomplished as his pictures would become, quite soon, and he foils his hero (Leslie Banks) by making him a prisoner of the international spies and killers who have kidnapped his daughter (Nova Pilbeam) to keep him and his sharp-shooter wife (Edna Best) quiet. But it’s an entertaining thriller, droll and occasionally witty, and the young Peter Lorre makes an engaging villain. This is the earliest depiction of which I am aware in movies of the widespread public fear of dentistry, as a vaguely sinister “painless” dentist (Henry Oscar) menaces Banks with ether. The big, noisy shootout during the last third was based by Hitchcock and his scenarists (Charles Bennett , D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson) on the Sidney Street Siege of 1911. Emlyn Williams is credited with additional dialogue and Arthur Benjamin composed the crucially-situated Albert Hall cantata. Hitchcock remade this one, in a bland 1956 color VisatVision release under the same title but which lumbers on for 120 minutes, 45 longer than the brisk original.
Cinderella Liberty (1973) One of a pair of movies made from Darryl Ponicsan novels in 1973, and the lesser of the two. Ponicsan’s engaging narrative depends too much on whimsy to survive a literalist interpretation, which is what he (as scenarist), Mark Rydell (direction) and Vilmos Zsigmond (photography) imposed on it. Rydell, an excellent actor — he’s coolly terrifying as a gangster in the botched Altman version of The Long Goodbye — was also a good director of other actors but a plodder behind the camera who, unless he was manipulating an audience, was entirely lost. The shocker here is how poor the great Zsigmond’s cinematography is; the night sequences (and there are many) are so dark, and so indistinct, it’s difficult to see the actors at all, let alone what they’re doing at a given moment. That isn’t a style, it’s a technical error somehow carried through an entire movie.
The best thing about the picture is its people, even if you can’t really believe in any of them; the movie is wonderfully cast, with James Caan giving a relaxed, amused performance as a sailor caught in limbo when the Navy loses his paperwork and who becomes involved with a slatternly B-girl and her mixed-race teenage son. As the boy, Kirk Calloway is astonishing, even when the script meanders into the cliché of uplift, and Eli Wallach counters the stickiness with vinegar as, essentially, the story’s deus ex machina. In smaller roles, Burt Young, Dabney Coleman and Allyn Ann McLerie give rich support and the young Bruno Kirby is wildly funny as the bizarre, officious little chatterbox who gets temporarily yoked to Caan on Shore Patrol duty.
The role of the B-girl Maggie is crucial to giving the picture a semblance of reality, and Marsha Mason really delivers. At the time, and thanks largely to a brief but impressive performance in Blume in Love, Mason was emerging as one of our more interesting actresses, and there’s no artifice to her Maggie. It’s a performance that goes with her appealing but somehow lumpy facial features. Like Ellen Barkin later, Mason’s face skirted conventional prettiness, which made it easier to concentrate on what she did as an actress; we weren’t distracted as is commonly the case with those, to use Anthony Burgess’s phrase about the young Jeremy Brett, “adventitiously endowed with irrelevant photogeneity.” She has an exceptional moment when, screaming at the departing Caan, she yells, “I hate you!” and then weeps, “I hate sailors…” You can tell from her devastated face that, dependent on them for her meagre livelihood, she really does despise these men and may not have realized the depth of her loathing until that moment.
Although Rydell, Zsigmond and Ponicsan muck things up generally, the picture goes down fairly easily and you may not hate it even when it’s trying your patience with its contempt for verisimilitude. What is unforgiveable are Paul Williams’ simulated orgasms to a funky John Williams melody on the soundtrack. But then, the only way to make a Paul Williams lyric listenable is to have someone other than Paul Williams sing it.
Candleshoe (1977) A “cute” Disney comedy-cum-thriller-without-thrills from the late ’70s all too freely adapted by David Swift and Rosemary Anne Sisson from a charming mystery novel by Michael Innes that increases the nastiness quotient (embodied by the seriocomic Leo McKern) and all but eliminates the charm. It’s up to David Niven and Helen Hayes to compensate, and they do their damnedest against overwhelming odds, which include a basic lack of believability in nearly every element aside from Jodie Foster’s solid performance as a tough orphaned street kid forced by circumstance to pretend she might be the heir to Hayes’ stately home, in which is hidden a cache of fabled doubloons. Thus is Anastasia grafted onto Innes, right down to a steal of Hayes’ own revelation scene from the movie version. There’s a typical would-be amusing Disney battle between the thieves and the children and old folks of the manor near the end, but the cast is pleasant and Foster, who the year before had astonished the viewers of Taxi Driver with her astounding performance as the child prostitute Iris, manages to inject a measure of reality to counter the preciousness.
The Last Detail (1973) The other, better Darryl Ponicsan adaptation of its year is not (pace Alexander Payne on the Indicator Blu-ray extras) quite a classic but has much to admire, not the least of which are the three central performances. Since his star-making turn in Easy Rider in 1969 — and he was not only the best thing about that masturbatory, self-indulgent mess of a movie but the sole reason to sit through it — Jack Nicholson had been on the verge but the movies in which he’d starred (Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The King of Marvin Gardens) had either under-performed at the box office or otherwise hadn’t been sufficient to make the difference. And while The Last Detail, owing in part to an indifferent release by Columbia, also didn’t make the money it ought to have, its Oscar nomination for Nicholson seemed to certify him as a bona fide movie star. (His next picture, which was likewise only a moderate hit, also resulted in an Academy Award nomination for its star, and has long been recognized as a genuine classic, both of its era and its genre: Chinatown.)
Nicholson plays Billy “Badass” Buddusky, a career sailor tasked with escorting the young kleptomaniac Meadows (Randy Quaid) to the naval prison at Portsmith for an unconscionable eight-year sentence. The novel, and the picture, concern how Buddusky and his coeval, Mulhall (the splendid Otis Young) react to this unwanted Shore Patrol duty, and what it takes out of them. Billy is determined to show their prisoner a last good time (which, because the virginal boy has so little in the way of good memories, becomes his only good time) with the more serious, circumspect Mulhall a somewhat reluctant participant. It’s the basic road-movie updated with sex and profanity; the screenwriters, Robert Towne and the (as usual) un-credited Edward Taylor, laced Billy’s speech with so many variations on the word “fuck” that Columbia got nervous about it and someone at TV Guide opined that when it aired on television it might be the first silent talkie.* The use of obscenities was entirely correct; they brought a necessary level of reality to the dialogue. The characters’ behavior benefits from the screenwriting and the acting too, as when a drunken Billy tries to goad the sweet-natured Meadows into hitting him and, rebuffed, punches out a hotel lamp. Nicholson’s Buddusky seems easygoing but underneath he’s tense and coiled and as the picture goes on the detail he’s been assigned eats away at his sense of composure so that when Meadows makes a futile attempt at escape Billy’s rage at the situation explodes and he beats him savagely with his fists.
Ashby’s cool, cinéma vérité style perfectly suits the material, as does Michael Chapman’s splendid lighting and Robert C. Jones’ intelligent editing. Although I find the series of dissolves during Young’s dressing-down of Nicholson, of which Jones is so proud, obvious and obtrusive, it may have been the only solution to a problem Ashby left him with. I also, in common with Payne, believe Johnny Mandel’s martial score intrusive, except for the placement of the old English hymn near the end, which is exactly right. The wonderful supporting cast includes Clifton James, Michael Moriarty, Nancy Allen, Carol Kane as the whore with whom Meadows couples, Luana Anders as a cult aficionado and, in a brief turn, Gilda Radner. (The picture was largely shot in Toronto, doubling for the U.S.)
One of Towne’s/Taylor’s most inspired alterations from the novel was to have Meadows’ mother, when the three sailors pay an impromptu visit, be away from home. The quick glance we get of the alcoholic mess inside Mrs. Meadows’ living room renders her banal, cliché-spouting appearance in the book entirely moot: We know everything we need to from that look inside, including why Meadows is so quietly broken. It was also a smart move on everyone’s part to end the picture before Ponicsan’s denouement. Although the final portion of the novel, in which Buddusky and Mulhall go AWOL out of self-disgust at the completion of their detail, is perfectly legitimate and, from a literary point of view, entirely explicable, it’s not exactly a satisfying finish: Billy is killed resisting arrest, and I can’t imagine anyone who loves or admires the movie of The Last Detail wanting to see that.
*Robert C. Jones, The Last Detail‘s editor, was asked to handle the television and commercial airline edit, and he refused to have the actors overdub the usual idiotic “acceptable” substitutions for the movie’s blue language. Somehow, by cutting the picture’s running time and trimming the then-record number of “fucks” in the script (65) Jones was able to please the ABC censors.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 