By Scott Ross
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I Want to Live! (1958) As an Orson Welles partisan it’s almost impossible for me to enjoy a movie directed by Robert Wise. Welles believed that the one-time editor of Citizen Kane, in exchange for the opportunity to direct, eagerly butchered The Magnificent Ambersons for the management of RKO while its maker was in South America, and whether this is true or the justifiable paranoia of a man whose masterpiece was destroyed while he was unable to defend it is almost beside the point. In addition to his editorial malfeasance, Wise directed some of the terrible scenes in Ambersons re-shot by studio diktat, and he did become a director, eventually winning two Academy Awards (for the emotionally manipulative The Sound of Music and the appalling West Side Story). I admit to liking parts of some of his pictures: The Set-Up (largely for Robert Ryan’s superb performance), Executive Suite (sweaty capitalist melodrama somewhat redeemed by its cast, especially Nina Foch), Somebody Up There Likes Me (for Paul Newman), Run Silent Run Deep (for Gable and Lancaster), Odds Against Tomorrow (nowhere near as good as its source novel but watchable for Ryan and Harry Belafonte, and the picture’s ironic ending), The Haunting (not a patch on Shirley Jackson’s book but it is hard to forget that breathing door) and Star! (cynical and wildly overblown but fascinating, for all the wrong reasons). His two Val Lewton pictures (The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher) are memorable as much for what Lewton, their producer, brought to them as for anything Wise did. But there is absolutely no excuse for how badly Wise and Robert Anderson distorted and cheapened Richard McKenna’s wonderful novel The Sand Pebbles.
My distaste is not entirely centered around the matter of Wise v. Welles, however. Generally I find Wise the worst sort of obvious filmmaker, prone to symbols and to Expressionist camera angles, not for reasons of organic composition but merely to be smart, drawing attention to his cinematic “invention.” With I Want to Live! — note the gratuitous exclamation point — Wise was abetted in his emotional manipulation by the imprimatur of The Truth. Based by the screenwriters Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz on newspaper pieces by Edward Montgomery concerning the guilt or innocence of the condemned Barbara Graham, and on Graham’s letters, the movie paints its subject as a smart-ass good-time girl railroaded by The System. (The reality may have been less sanguine, although Graham maintained that her confession was coerced.) Susan Hayward gives one of those performances, half-banal, half-inspired, that kept getting her Academy Award nominations and, finally, this time, won her the prize. What’s best about the picture are Lionel Lindon’s superb black and white photography, William Hornbeck’s intelligent editing, and the trend-setting score by Johnny Mandel. Other soundtracks of the period, including several splendid ones by Elmer Bernstein and Alex North, were jazz-oriented. But like Bernstein’s Sweet Smell of Success the year before (and Duke Ellington’s Anatomy of a Murder the year after) Mandel’s was jazz, performed by a remarkable aggregation that included Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, Bud Shank, Shelley Manne, Milt Bernhardt, Pete Jolly, Jack Sheldon and Red Mitchell.
One thing Wise did get absolutely right: The depiction of Graham’s gas-chamber execution, whose starkness emphasizes the calculated nature of capital punishment as it is carried out in this country; the gawking spectators, eager to catch the condemned’s last breath, are more cold-blooded than Barbara Graham ever was.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) The generations born and raised after 1990 will find it hard to credit how, from 1959 to 1991, this already well-loved musical fantasy became an institution, its annual network television airing (usually at Easter) an event looked forward to and savored by children, even those (like me) whose families did not own a color teevee and who didn’t discover until they were in their 20s that the Horse of a Different Color was just that. Once Ted Turner got his mitts on the picture you had to have a cable subscription to see it; now, of course, it’s shown only on TCM, which, considered a thing only the old are interested in, I suspect few young people ever watch without coercion.
I may not be exactly happy to have reached my sixth decade but I wouldn’t trade the yearly excitement of tuning in to this imperishable product of the studio age for a few years chipped off my biography. Who, knowing their glories, would want to miss Harold Arlen’s felicitous melodies, “Yip” Harburg’s delicious lyrics, flying monkeys, dozens of midgets, a cranky apple tree who speaks in the voice of Candy Candido, Herbert Stothart’s background score with its instantly memorable theme for Miss Gulch on her bicycle and its menacing Winkie chorus, Judy Garland’s endearing performance as Dorothy (and her marvelous singing voice), Margaret Hamilton’s as The Wicked Witch of the West, Frank Morgan’s as The Wizard, Jack Haley’s as the Tin Man or Ray Bolger’s as the Scarecrow? Or, supremely, the great Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, especially when, singing “If I Were King of the Forest” like a mad Met tenor with enlarged adenoids, he belts the immortal phrase, “Monarch of all I survey/Mah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haah-nuck!” It always slays me.
The Dybbuk [דער דיבוק] 1937 A beautiful Polish adaptation (direction by Michał Waszyński, screenplay by S. A. Kacyzna) of S. Ansky’s Yiddish folk play, exquisitely filmed by Albert Wywerka and with an effective musical score by Henryk Kon. The splendid cast includes, in the leading roles, Abraham Morewski, Ajzyk Samberg, Mojżesz Lipman, Lili Liliana and the superb Leon Liebgold as the thwarted lover whose imprecations have such disastrous results. One of the few major European Yiddish productions, The Dybbuk was made near the end of a decade that would see Poland subsumed by Nazi Germany and, presumably, most of its cast and creators destroyed in the Shoah.
The excellent restoration is part of the Kino Blu-ray collection Jewish Soul: Classics of Yiddish Cinema.
The Love God? (1969) This frequently hilarious Nat Hiken-written and directed take on 1960s sexual mores was the first adult Don Knotts comedy, and died a miserable death on its release in 1969. It was also traduced by the critics, who either didn’t seem to comprehend that it was a satire or if they did, like Judith Crist, considered it “smutty.” If you’re open to it, there’s something just inherently funny about Don Knotts as a mousy bird magazine publisher being turned into a Hugh Hefner prototype by an unscrupulous flesh-peddler (Edmond O’Brien), an ambitious editor (Anne Francis) and a pretentious gangster (B.S. Pully) with a penchant for punching everyone, women included, who disagrees with him. Along the way there are hilarious bits by James Gregory as a crusading lawyer, Maureen Arthur as a nudie magazine model, Jesslyn Fax as a retired schoolteacher, Marjorie Bennett as an ancient small-town secretary who can’t wait to cut loose in New York, Herb Voland as the Attorney General and Ruth McDevitt as an outraged old bat. If Maggie Peterson, who plays Knotts’ virginal beloved, looks a little like a pretty horse surprised by a grass bouquet, Knotts himself is in fine fettle, especially when sporting his new “mod” wardrobe or, riotously, twice performing his medley of bird calls, the second time with a mouth gone dry from terror. The score is, as usual for a Knotts comedy, by Vic Mizzy. Sadly, Hiken died between the filming and release of this, his only feature film.
The Green Man (1956) Memory betrays us in peculiar ways. There was a scene in some movie comedy or other — I no longer recall which one — that for years I misremembered almost completely. When I finally saw the picture in question again, I was more than a bit taken aback because my false memory of that scene (whatever it was) was so much funnier than the reality. I was a victim of memory distortion; somehow in the intervening years between first exposure and second my brain had filled in the details in a way that was almost infinitely more satisfying than what my eyes had actually seen. This psuedomemory recurred to me while watching the British comedy The Green Man because I saw it on the strength of a recommendation by Stephen Fry, whose appreciation of it I now realize was as misguided as my own for that nameless, long-ago seen comedy. In “A Critical Condition,” one of the essays in his book Paperweight, Fry writes, “As a child I saw a film on television starring Alastair Sim called The Green Man. Like almost any picture featuring that incomparable genius it contains moments of as absolute a joy as one is ever permitted on this sublunary plain. There is one scene, in which he attempts to bustle a female palm court trio out of a room that he needs to be vacated, which remains as funny as anything committed to celluloid.” Well! It sounded like something Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond had unaccountably left out of Some Like it Hot. Who wouldn’t want to see that?
I waited with great anticipation for the palm court sequence and when it arrived was utterly flummoxed to find the action consisted of little more than a somewhat anxious Sim asking the ladies of the trio to join him for drinks in the adjacent bar, and the women, after delightedly agreeing, following him out. That was it. Not that The Green Man was as puny a thing as the critic who offended Fry by deeming it “a thin, ultimately unsatisfactory vehicle for Sim” would have his readers believe. Sim, as a very successful middle-class assassin, is marvelous, as he nearly always was, the picture is cleverly constructed by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (based on their play), directed with assurance if not flair by Robert Day (and an uncredited Basil Dearden) and the supporting cast, which includes George Cole, Jill Adams, Avril Angers, John Chandos, Terry-Thomas, Raymond Huntley and Dora Bryan, performs with brio. But Stephen Fry, alas, appears to have been the victim of the same, unreliable memory distortion that also afflicted me.
Love and Death (1975) At the time of its release, this was considered Woody Allen’s most pretentious movie, by critics who hadn’t yet lived. Considering that this satire on Russian literature includes take-offs on, and homages to, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky (an entire dialogue scene composed of his titles), Chekhov and, although he was not Russian, Ingmar Bergman, pretentious Love and Death certainly is. It is also extremely funny.
If Sleeper gave Diane Keaton her first exposure as a comedian of no small inspiration, her performance here delivers something very close to genius. As Sonja, the lifelong love of Boris Grushenko (Allen) Keaton skewers every pseudointellectual Barnard graduate who ever pontificated mindlessly and reactively, and, in the scene in which Allen and the man (Lloyd Batista) he’s about to impersonate take turns bopping her on the head with a wine bottle, she’s blissfully funny. Sleeper represented an enormous leap in Allen’s filmmaking, and Love and Death is even more impressive, enriched by Ghislain Cloquet’s fine-grained, deeply saturated cinematography. The movie also contains Allen’s first great ensemble cast, including James Tolkan (as Napoleon); Olga Georges-Picot in a role intended for Groucho Marx’s secretary and manager Erin Fleming who had appeared in everything… about sex but re-cast when that mentally unbalanced woman stormed off the set in outrage; Zvee Scooler as Boris’ idiot father; Despo Diamantidou as his disapproving mother; Jessica Harper as Sonja’s Chekhovianly depressed friend; Alfred Lutter as the young Boris; Frank Adu in a hilarious bit as a black drill sergeant during the French invasion of Russia; and the wonderful Harold Gould, who shares a hilarious dueling sequence with Allen.
Some of the set-pieces are uproarious, some merely wan, and a few of the jokes don’t work at all; hearing that Boris is seen leading a cheering squad during a battle, for example, is funnier than actually seeing him do it. Allen’s Bob Hope impersonation, honed in his earlier movies (Bananas, Sleeper and as the Jester in sex) gets a full workout here, and in some ways the picture is little but a remake of the 1946 Hope comedy Monsieur Beaucaire, right up to the hero’s surprise execution at the end. But it’s handsome looking, occasionally brilliant, and the lulls don’t last long. The score, comprised solely of music by Sergei Prokofiev, includes well-chosen excerpts from “The Lieutenant Kijé Suite,” “Alexander Nevsky,” “The Love for Three Oranges,” the String Quintet in E and “Scythian Suite” for Orchestra.
The Night of the Iguana (1964) After A Streetcar Named Desire, the finest of all Tennessee Williams screen adaptations. John Huston, the director and with Anthony Veiller co-scenarist, working in Gabriel Figueroa’s luminous black-and-white cinematography, enhanced what was effective in Williams’ 1961 drama (the characters, the situation, the dialogue and the jungle-like Mexican atmosphere) and removed what was superfluous (the 1940 time-frame and the German Nazi tourists), crafting a genuinely cinematic experience that is also a faithful interpretation of a great American dramatist’s last important play. Richard Burton has one of his best movie roles as the Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon, a disgraced minister driven by circumstance to shepherding a bus full of middle-aged church ladies around Mexico, drinking too much, fending off the advances of a hormonally unbalanced teenage girl, and being put into a blind panic by all of it. Shot largely in Puerto Vallarta, then little but “a remote fishing village” but which the unrelenting paparazzi fixation on The Liz and Dick Show eventually helped turned into an exclusive resort which I assume the fishermen and their families could no longer afford to live in, The Night of the Iguana exhibits throughout the sort of supple artistic control Huston lavished on material that really engaged him. Williams of course was continually drawn to his twin themes of the sacred versus the profane and the struggle of the sensitive to survive brutality; here he embodies the former in Shannon’s battle with his own nature (and the nature of the girl, and of the earthy widow who’s got her eye on him) and the latter through the character of the gentle spinster Hannah Jelkes, companion to her grandfather, an aged poet embarked on his last tour and hopeful of completing his latest poem before the little strokes that beset him carry his fragile spirit away.
I hope I don’t make The Night of the Iguana sound deadly, because it’s the furthest thing from that, and not least because of Huston’s superb cast. As Maxine Faulk, the lusty widow of Shannon’s oldest friend, Ava Gardner gives what is probably her finest performance — dallying with two strange maraca-playing Mexican youths (Fidelmar Durán and Roberto Leyva) out of her anger at, and jealousy over, Shannon, laying out her disappointments in invective yet capable of great kindness. As Hannah, Deborah Kerr is an utterly transcendent figure, not fluttery and self-deluding as Blanche Du Bois or Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke are or driven to ruthlessness like Maggie the Cat but practical-minded and, despite her genteel poverty, filled with compassion for the sufferings of others, even those like Shannon whom she correctly suggests enjoy their own mental anguish. She, and Cyril Delevanti as the poet Nonno, are deeply moving; when Nonno recites his final poem while his granddaughter takes it down, it would take a stonier constitution than mine not to melt before the beauty both of the language and Delevanti’s becalmed, ancient face. Before that transcendent event, during her long discussion with the immobilized Shannon, Miss Jelks observes, “Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it is unkind or violent.” This seems to me Williams’ response to the Roman playwright Terence’s “Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.” (“I am human: I consider nothing human is alien to me.”) Interestingly, as Williams wrote it Hannah’s line concludes “unless it is unkind, violent.” Someone (Huston and Veiller, or perhaps Kerr herself) altered it slightly, and for the better. Poetic expression like that can work onstage but is not as easily digested in the more realistic medium of film.
Sue Lyon, the physically overripe Lolita of the Kubrick picture two years earlier, fully captures what Orson Welles once called the insanity of adolescence, careening from her lubricious crush on Shannon to suddenly hating him to switching her allegiance to the tour’s young bus driver (James “Skip” Ward). Mary Boylan does wonders with the brow-beaten tourist Miss Peebles, but Grayson Hall steals every scene she’s in as Lyons’ chaperone Miss Fellowes, a woman clearly in the thrall of her own Lesbian obsession but, as a convention-minded church choral director, unwilling or unable to see it for what it is. Although the movie could be seen as cruel toward the character, even her chief nemesis Shannon is at pains to protect her from the self-knowledge he correctly believes would destroy her. Benjamin Frankel composed a beautiful score for the picture, Huston’s best work between The African Queen and The Kremlin Letter. Yet in his infinite wisdom and renowned critical perspicacity, Leonard Maltin in his movie guide deems this poetic masterpiece a “plodding tale.” He would.
Broadway Danny Rose (1984) I’ve never quite been able to reconcile the snideness and cynicism of Woody Allen with some of the pictures he’s made that suggest a sweeter soul than he generally displays. Are they the result of calculation merely? Broadway Danny Rose is one of those seemingly incongruous movies, an openhearted paean to the losers of show-biz that is both unexpectedly moving and sidesplittingly funny. Told as a long, shaggy-dog anecdote by Sandy Baron to a table of his fellow comedians at the Carnegie Deli, the picture doesn’t make fun of Danny’s acts, such as the stuttering ventriloquist or the balloon-folding couple, as much as it laughs at Danny’s unflappability — his unshakable belief that any one of his stable of barely employable clients could become wealthy and famous. It’s easy to laugh at a man who keeps reminding these pathetic acts to say to themselves, “Smile, star, strong,” yet Danny genuinely loves and care for these bottom-feeders, and the casual way he’s betrayed by his favorite, a washed-up singer called Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte) and Lou’s Mafia-connected mistress Tina (Mia Farrow) shatters him. For once in an Allen performance the pain isn’t just a story point indifferently acted; when near the end Tina unexpectedly shows up at the tatty Thanksgiving dinner Danny holds for his clients the look of deep hurt on Allen’s face is remarkable.
Gordon Willis shot the movie in thick-grained black-and-white, and the picture’s look renders the action as a modern fable, remembered not from a distant past but recounted at best a few months later. Among the comics at the Carnegie, in addition to Baron, are Jackie Gayle, Will Jordan (when people imitate Ed Sullivan, if indeed they still do, they’re really imitating Jordan’s impersonation of Sullivan) and Allen’s then-manager Jack Rollins, and Milton Berle, Howard Cosell and Joe Franklin also appear as themselves. Gina DeAngelis is marvelous as a vindictive Mob mother and Farrow, hiding behind smoked eyeglasses, gives a terrific comic performance as the sort of woman no one would ever mistake her for (or, up to the time of the movie, ever thought her capable of enacting.) Among the comic pleasures of Broadway Danny Rose is a hysterically funny sequence in the warehouse in which Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons are stored involving Danny, Tina, a gun-wielding hood and the unexpected release of helium.
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) There has probably never been a more manipulative, counterfeit “populist” in American movies than Frank Capra, and this perennial holiday favorite (a dud in its time which only became popular through loss of its copyright) is the perfect illustration of that. What Capra did well, such as depicting the dark corners of American platitudes, he did exceptionally well here, as when James Stewart’s George Bailey rejects a weeping Donna Reed and marriage even as he’s embracing her in desperation, or when with his life in tatters he hugs his young son, or as with tears in his eyes he’s praying in a bar for a deliverance he doesn’t believe possible. (Capra realized too late that he needed to move the camera in and when Stewart said he couldn’t perform the scene again, resorted to a slow optical printer zoom.) Casting is half the battle here, and in James Stewart Capra got a man capable of both enormous charm and pitch-black despair; it was George Bailey that led the critic David Denby several years ago to claim that Stewart was the greatest actor in American movies, a sentiment with which I wholly concur.
Alas, what Capra did badly is in even greater abundance in It’s a Wonderful Life: That cloying, mealy-mouthed (and patently phony) embrace of treacly platitudes that mars if it does not ruin every picture of his except It Happened One Night. It’s particularly galling when one knows that Capra, although he publicly proclaimed himself a populist, loathed and distrusted people, in groups or singly, and privately worshiped fascism, adopting the political traits and impulses of the natural-born reactionary. His “convictions” tended to be those of his principal screenwriter, Robert Riskin, from which he ran in terror during the Blacklist years. It’s telling that Capra is one of four scenarists credited on It’s a Wonderful Life, because George Bailey’s dilemma is his director’s as well, that of a man who hates what he believes he’s supposed to love. I don’t mind that Capra, along with the husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (and Jo Swerling, who also worked on the script) lards on the ironies with a trowel or even that he paints George’s antagonist Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) as an irredeemable villain whose fangs fairly drip with poison like the spider George compares him to so much as I do his concomitant wallowing in sentimentality; that bit about bells and angels’ wings makes my teeth ache.
Although Capra was too profligate with money for the picture to ever show a profit, it must also be admitted that having built an entire town on the backlot, he used it effectively. The cinematography by his gifted director of photography Joseph Walker (with Joseph Biroc) is exceptional as well, and Dimitri Tiomkin’s music is less oppressively heavy than was his norm. The director also got, in addition to Stewart and Reed, lovely and/or thoroughly engaging performances from a large cast including Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Beulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, H. B. Warner, Frank Albertson, Todd Karns, Sheldon Leonard, Charles Lane, Carl Switzer, Ellen Corby, Dick Elliott and Bobbie Anderson, who is extraordinary as the young George.
Eliot M. Camarena believes the movie depicts the final thoughts of a suicide, and although Capra certainly would have disagreed, it’s an avenue of interpretation worth pursuing.
Radio Days (1987) Woody Allen’s sweetest movie, a loving tribute to the mass medium of his childhood refracted through a fictionalized depiction of his family. It’s also among the writer-director’s most beautiful pictures, shot with a burnished glow by the great Italian cinematographer Carlo Di Palma on Santo Loquasto’s richly designed and executed sets. One could, I suppose, accuse Radio Days of nostalgic excess but the tone is generally so light and amusing it’s a bit like Fellini’s Amarcord translated into American pop iconography. Allen narrates, and his youthful doppelgänger Joe is charmingly played by the young Seth Green, with Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker as his bickering parents. The large ensemble cast includes Joy Newman as Joe’s teenage sister, Josh Mostel as his quarrelsome uncle (“Take the gas pipe!”), Renée Lippin as his equally bovine wife, Mia Farrow as a talentless aspiring actress, Danny Aiello as her would-be mob assassin, Gina DeAngelis as his practical mother, Kenneth Mars as the family’s rabbi, Wallace Shawn as the hilariously incongruous radio voice of The Masked Avenger and Diane Keaton in a lovely New Year’s sequence as a nightclub singer crooning Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” (and incidentally wiping Farrow’s anemic rendition of “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” off the screen and out of your memory.) Although Radio Days is a love-letter to Allen’s reminiscences of radio it’s also a Valentine to Dianne Wiest. As young Joe’s chic, marriage-minded Aunt Bea, Wiest is the movie’s vibrant human fulcrum, ever hopeful of romance yet nearly always thwarted; one of her suitors leaves her stranded on the road when he becomes convinced the Martians have landed, another is married and a third (Robert Joy), seemingly the most appropriate match for her, turns out to be grieving the death of his boyfriend.
The wonderful soundtrack of period recordings includes Benny Goodman’s “Body and Soul,” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” Tommy Dorsey’s “Opus One” and “I’m Gettin’ Sentimental Over You,” Artie Shaw’s “Frenesi,” The Mills Brothers’ “Paper Doll,” Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters’ “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” Carmen Miranda’s “South American Way” (to which Newman joyously lip-synchs, accompanied by Tucker and Mostel), The Ink Spots’ “If I Didn’t Care,” Xavier Cugat’s “Babalu” and “One, Two, Three, Kick,” Guy Lombardo’s “That Old Feeling,” Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and, in a nice sequence, a then-living link to the past Allen was evoking: The aged Kitty Carlisle performing “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old” on the radio.
The Band Wagon (1953) Produced by MGM’s Freed Unit the year after Singin’ in the Rain, written (like Rain) by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and based (also like its predecessor) around an existing musical catalog — in this case the elegant songs of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz — The Band Wagon is usually treated like the proverbial red-headed stepchild. But how fair is to compare any movie against what many people (myself included) regard as the best of all film musicals and find it wanting? For one thing, under the direction of the design-oriented Vincente Minnelli, it looks even better than Singin’ in the Rain. For another, it’s got Fred Astaire.
I hope if you’re reading these pages you don’t need to be told that Astaire was the greatest performer in musicals, or why. Just watching him stroll beside a stationary train with his distinctive walk while softly singing in that inimitable voice the Dietz and Schwartz standard “By Myself” is joyous, and when he gets an opportunity to do what he did best, there is almost no one in movies who could, or can, touch him. Comden and Green used Astaire’s insecurities to flesh out his character, a faded movie star taking a chance on a Broadway show: His concern that Cyd Charisse, his dancing partner in the picture, was too tall for him, for example, or too much of a ballet dancer, or that he had no natural sympathy with or ability to perform Michael Kidd’s stylistic choreography. Despite his fears and as a result of his willingness to be persuaded by people with talent, Astaire gets to do more in The Band Wagon that he had in years, and in more different but related styles. He has a great number with an authentic shoe-shine man (Leroy Daniels) in “Shine on Your Shoes”; a breathtaking pas de deux with Charisse in “Dancing in the Dark“; a charming duet with the wonderful Nanette Fabray in “I Love Louisa” (which he originally performed with his sister Adele in the stage revue, also called The Bandwagon); a hilarious version of “Triplets” with Fabray and Jack Buchanan; a long, funny Mickey Spillane spoof (“The Girl Hunt Ballet,” written by Alan Jay Lerner) that also includes a sexy dance with Charisse which virtually defines the appeal of both partners; and, with Buchanan, an exquisite song-and-dance to one of the most sophisticated ballads ever written, “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan,” gloriously designed by Oliver Smith. Watch the way Astaire slides out of his highchair in “Triplets” and seems to be moving to the floor in graceful slow motion, and marvel that such golden beings once walked the earth.
Streamers (1983) During what I think of as his wilderness years, between the debacle of Popeye (1980) and the triumph of Vincent and Theo (1990), what Robert Altman mostly did was stage plays, and in a few instances, film them. The movie of David Rabe’s excoriating Vietnam-era drama Streamers came just before Altman’s superb condensation of Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone’s Nixon fantasia Secret Honor (1984) and while neither was seen by nearly enough people (Streamers cost a mere $2 million to make but earned only $378,452) both represent a different way of looking at plays cinematically. Streamers doesn’t feel entirely real, the way McCabe and Mrs. Miller did, or California Split, but it also doesn’t look exactly like a stage play either. Some critics of the movie were bothered by that, and there are times (as with the lack of outside activity around the Army barracks in which it’s set) when the picture does feel hermetically sealed. Yet it’s so well directed, so beautifully lit (the cinematograper was Pierre Mignot) and so magnificently acted by its exceptional cast this slight air of neither-fish-nor-fowlness in no way detracts from the power of the drama.
In 1975 when Mike Nichols directed the premiere of the play at the Long Wharf, theatre in America was seldom as strong, as confrontational, as violent or as bloody as Streamers, and there were a lot of walk-outs and, in New Haven, Off-Broadway, on Broadway and in Los Angeles, reports of men and women fainting in their theater seats. I’ve always found it interesting that people can sit through all sorts of violence, gore and human viscera being spewed in a movie, the most realistic of all performing artforms, without demur yet are overcome by seeing it done by live actors on a stage. Perhaps the very artificiality of theatre, however heightened its reality, lulls them into such a state of comfortable alienation that the explosion of violence un-moors them. I also confess that I’ve never quite understood the essential situation of Rabe’s play, which primarily concerns sexual tensions in a stateside barracks. While the interior struggle of a draftee to come to grips with his homosexuality is one countless young soldiers have dealt with, in every nation, presumably for centuries, the way Ritchie (Mitchell Lichtenstein) flirts with the others, flaunting what he’s uncertain of himself, doesn’t ring true for 1965, when Streamers is set. Nor do the attitudes of his barracks-mates (Matthew Modine and David Alan Grier) who in a comparable situation would probably have beaten Richie up on a regular basis or otherwise have made him so miserable he would have asked for a transfer. Here they reject his being what they call a “faggot,” but don’t despise him. That, however dismissive, still seems a bit enlightened, if I may use the word, for that time.
However, Rabe’s dialogue is so good, the acting here of so high a quality and Altman’s staging of it so effective as to sweep such cavils aside. All of the young men are splendid, but Lichtenstein and the terrifyingly mercurial Michael Wright as the outsider who deliberately stirs the tensions, are better than that, as are Guy Boyd and, especially, George Dzundza, as the veteran officers who float in and out of the action and whose generally drunken presence is a fearful reminder of what is about to happen to the boys when they are finally shipped to Vietnam. Dzundza has a long monologue at the end that, as written and acted, are pocket illustrations both of why American stage drama was once revered, and how much has been lost in the decades since Streamers premiered.
the birdcage (1996) The latest (and, so far, last) iteration of the popular French stage play by Jean Poiret that became an internationally record-breaking movie in 1978 and a Broadway musical which despite premiering in the age of Reagan, AIDS and rampant public and private bigotry against gay men and Lesbians,* became a long-running, Tony Award-winning hit. The musical La Cage Aux Folles kept its action in Europe (the original creators, who included Tommy Tune, Jay Presson Allen and Maury Yeston, had planned to set theirs in New Orleans); for the movie, wittily written by Elaine May and flavorsomely directed by Mike Nichols, the action was, wisely, moved to South Miami Beach and the central characters made American. (The sole exception is the Guatemalan houseboy Agador, hilariously portrayed by Hank Azaria.) The basic plot remains the same: Middle-aged couple consisting of club owner (Robin Williams) and drag star (Nathan Lane) find their son (Dan Futterman) is getting married to the daughter (Calista Flockheart) of a Moral Majority-type Senator (Gene Hackman), himself fleeing the press over a sex-scandal involving his late political partner. Add in the politician’s convention-minded spouse (Dianne Wiest), a conniving National Enquirer reporter (Tom McGowan) and attempts to, variously, temporarily get rid of the drag queen or train him to pass, to remodel the couple’s apartment in Early Conservative and to inveigle the boy’s biological mother (Christine Baranski) to put in an appearance at the dinner party, and pandemonium naturally ensues.
I like this edition of the material better than the original, and infinitely more than the stage musical. May has a way with a comic line that is as distinctive as Larry Gelbart’s or Woody Allen’s. In addition, that master of behavioral direction Mike Nichols was the perfect person to guide an enterprise that, although wildly funny, could if not kept on a believably human line become protracted and silly. Emmanuel Lubezki lit the movie to bring out the pastel surroundings, Jonathan Tunick contributed some characteristic melodies and orchestrations, Stephen Sondheim added a nifty number (“Little Dream”) for Williams to stage with Lane and a sullen dancer, Ann Roth contributed witty costumes, there is some splendid matte work by Robert Stromberg and Mike Wassel, and the cast performs the material with comedic gusto and fresh invention, especially Hackman and Lane. The latter’s beard is noticeable during his scenes as “Mother,” however, proving Billy Wilder right for shooting Some Like it Hot in black-and-white.
You Only Live Once (1937) A tough, nihilistic Fritz Lang picture starring Sylvia Sidney as an idealistic legal secretary and Henry Fonda as the ex-con she believes in. The screenplay by Gene Towne and Charles Graham Baker sets up Eddie Taylor (Fonda) as such a born loser that when he’s arrested for an armored car robbery and a batch of murders and sentenced to death you know that no matter what else happens, his story is not going to end well. Fonda pitches his soft tenor low, and gravelly, as if Eddie is in a constant state of fury and although the picture lost money his performance in it almost certainly led to better quality projects than he’d enjoyed during his first two years in Hollywood. 15 minutes of the movie were taken out of the original hour and forty minute cut, allegedly for then-extreme violence and it shows; some of the picture’s continuity is off as a result. (The deleted footage is lost and was likely destroyed.) The cinematography by Leon Shamroy, especially in the restored Classic Flix Blu-ray, is striking and Alfred Newman composed a strong score with a lovely main theme for the lovers. If you know and appreciate Newman, you can tell it’s him from the first notes of the main title.
The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) I don’t really know what to say about this British curio directed by the expatriate American blacklistee Joseph Losey except that it’s well acted (Glenda Jackson, Michael Caine and Helmut Berger are the leads), occasionally witty (the screenplay is by Tom Stoppard and Thomas Wiseman out of the latter’s novel), beautifully photographed (by Gerry Fisher, who at times almost makes Glenda Jackson look attractive) and engagingly scored (by Richard Hartley). But it’s such an elliptical chimera of a movie that with very few changes it could have been a Harold Pinter play, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. And while in real life Berger, who plays a sociopathic drug smuggler and pathological liar, identified as bisexual, his performance as a part-time heterosexual gigolo is, shall we say, less than convincing. What with his pronounced lisp and languid, piss-elegant walk we keep expecting him to come on to Caine rather than Jackson. Surely that’s not what was intended?
Man’s Favorite Sport? (1963) An intermittently hilarious variation by Howard Hawks on Bringing Up Baby, with Rock Hudson in the unenviable position of working up a sub-par imitation of Cary Grant and Paula Prentiss not evoking Katharine Hepburn and thereby coming off much better. In John Fenton Murray and Steve McNeil’s screenplay, Hudson is a fishing expert at Abercrombie & Fitch who has never fished in his life and who is bedeviled by the determinedly wacky Prentiss, who enters him into a prominent fishing competition and then must teach him everything he needs to know in three days. The picture is buoyed by Hawks’ expert way with comic set-ups and dialogue, by Russell Harlan’s scrumptious color photography, by a bouncy main title song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, some very funny sight gags (the look a bear gives the camera as it rides by on a runaway motorbike is priceless) and by the sparkling supporting cast which includes John McGiver, Roscoe Karns, James Westerfield, Regis Toomey, Forrest Lewis and, as a phlegmatic professional Indian, Norman Alden. Prentiss can’t match Hepburn’s originality in Baby, but she is an original nonetheless, especially when she laughs, which is often. Hawks later said of her that she was fine but couldn’t remember what she’d done from take to take, creating continuity problems. Yet she’s so engaging you don’t notice the technical flaws. Why her performance here didn’t lead to better opportunities than What’s New, Pussycat? is one of those eternal mysteries. Hudson is in his own way a good comedian, but it’s almost impossible to watch him in this role and not think of Grant, to Hudson’s detriment. Cary Grant’s touch with a comedic line was nonpareil and, like Fred Astaire, when he walked across a room there was no mistaking him. Hudson walks like a former truck driver.
Love Me Tonight (1932) This frothy, Lubitsch-like musical concoction is often regarded as one of the greatest of all movie musicals. It isn’t quite that, but it’s extremely entertaining, imaginatively directed, smartly written and beautifully scored. The director, Rouben Mamoulian, does some nice things, such as the way he hands off “Isn’t It Romantic?” from Maurice Chevalier — who sings it satirically — to various characters in Paris, on a train out of town and in the suburbs where in Jeanette MacDonald’s voice it becomes a soaring ballad. The songs are by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and Hart also wrote some of the dialogue, in rhyming couplets, which sounds rather fey but, as staged and acted, is charming. (The score includes “Lover,” “Mimi” and the title song.) The script, by Samuel Hoffenstein, George Marion Jr. and Waldemar Young, is light and witty, built on Graustarkian implausibilities cleverly worked out. Victor Milner’s cinematography is extraordinary, and the delightful supporting cast includes the peerless Charles Ruggles as an impoverished vicomte; Charles Butterworth as MacDonald’s thwarted would-be swain; Myrna Loy as a man-mad comtesse; Elizabeth Patterson, Ethel Griffies and Blanche Friderici as a trio of dizzy aunts; Robert Greig as a major domo; and C. Aubrey Smith as the imperious duke who rules all of their lives. If you like Chevalier, as I do, you’ll be entranced by his performance as the exuberant Parisian tailor, but as the princess above his station MacDonald is a little tough to take at times, especially when we’re exhorted by the director to gaze upon those vaguely homely shopgirl’s features of hers and pretend she’s a great beauty.
A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) The first Peanuts feature was wildly successful in its time, and broke Disney’s exclusive hold on big-screen animation. Charles M. Schulz’s screenplay, based on the notion of Charlie Brown being entered into a national spelling bee, is a charmer; it retains, and builds on, the characteristics of the strip that made it so unique and treasurable through the decades. Although I think that in his direction of the Peanuts features and TV specials Bill Melendez often flattened out the look of Schulz’s renderings, and occasionally made them downright ugly, his direction of the picture is assured, inventive (lots of split screens) and often very funny. While Snoopy’s skating/hockey fantasy at the Rockefeller Center rink is perfectly in keeping with his character the long Schroeder sequence set to his playing the Beethoven “Pathetique,” is a more puzzling inclusion, but most of what’s in the movie is entirely apt.
The musical score is variable, what with Rod McKuen’s typically gauzy ballad — why, during what is obviously the school year, does he twice invoke August afternoons, and what exactly is this “kind of magic that only little boys can do”? — vying with John Scott Trotter’s arrangements of the familiar Vince Guaraldi themes, but the vocal casting is not only just right it’s nearly definitive: Peter Robbins’ distinctive husky rendering of Charlie Brown, Pamelyn Ferdin’s conclusive Lucy van Pelt, Glenn Gilger’s gently philosophical Linus and Erin Sullivan’s entirely adorable Sally Brown.
Below, a newspaper advertisement for the weirdest movie coupling I think I’ve ever seen. It’s like an entry in one of those competitions to find the least (or most) appropriate double-feature.
This could be a satirical mock-up. I sincerely hope it is. We’re Hanging You from Your Nipples, Charlie Brown!
The Jungle Book (1967) I ended 2022 revisiting one of my earliest movie loves. I was the perfect age when this one was released to embrace a new Disney animated feature. As a cartoon-mad child, Walt Disney was at the center of my imaginative world; when he died in December of 1966, I was as stunned and saddened as I had been when my beloved maternal great-grandmother passed away in her sleep the year before. Remember, “The Wonderful World of Color” was a television fixture in those years, and the presence of Walt himself, although he appeared less often then than he had in the early days of its previous iteration (“Walt Disney Presents”) was still occasionally a part of that weekly experience.
Although my sister and I saw Cinderella in 1965, the reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to which my mother took me on a memorable afternoon in 1967, made so marked an impression on me that I have for years mistakenly believed it was my first animated feature. I tended to obsession even then, and Snow White was the focus of my six-year-old’s ardor for several months… until The Jungle Book arrived and I went duly gaga over it: I had the special double-length Gold Key Giant Jungle Book comic (I wore the cover off that one through obsessive re-reading), Jungle Book Disneykins figurines from Royal Pudding, Jungle Book temporary tattoos, a Jungle Book oil-paint-by-numbers kit, the wonderful Joe Liptak-designed Jungle Book View Master pack, a Jungle Book Whitman frame-tray puzzle, a Jungle Book coloring book, Jungle Book books, and, of course, the Jungle Book soundtrack album, whose surface I eventually wore to the smooth consistency of a hockey-puck. (My poor parents.) Seeing the picture again in its 1990 re-release I was considerably less enthusiastic, and not merely due to being 20 years older. Yet it’s remarkable what an additional three decades can do for a picture, and to your perception of it. Seeing The Jungle Book again in 2022 I still think, as I did going to the 1978 and 1990 reissues, that it’s too self-consciously (and anachronistically) hip for its own good, especially in Phil Harris’ and Louis Prima’s likable but slangy vocal performances. The rich character designs (by Bill Peet and Ken Anderson) and backgrounds (Al Dempster), however, are superb and the animation wonderfully expressive, particularly that by Milt Kahl, John Lounsbery, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, who animated most of the picture by themselves.
Cavils aside, although I’ve seen The Jungle Book numerous times since it was first released I don’t think I’ve enjoyed it as much since the age of six as I did watching it again on New Year’s Eve.
*I have never, and will never, employ “LGBT” or any of its increasingly ludicrous (and increasingly wearisome) acronyms for the so-called gay community. You would think any politician who panders by routinely mouthing such barbarisms as “LGBTQIA2S+” would find the letters causing his or her tongue to cleave to the roof of his or her mouth. Further, I will not be a party to pushing transgenderism, either as a part of that “community” or otherwise, especially to the self-questioning young. My reasons are manifold. First, until relatively recently, transsexuals did not wish to be considered as having anything in common with Lesbians and gay men, and I am perfectly happy to honor their previous wishes indefinitely… especially when they push gay men entirely out of leadership positions at Pride events, as happened two summers ago in New York. Second, I resent the coopting for its own highly suspicious reasons by the unbalanced Woke of a movement that did so much, beginning in 1969, to make my life less anxious. Third, when I was a youth the term was simply “gay,” period, which always seemed entirely sufficient. Later the acronym was “GLB,” although few of us trusted bisexuals, for good reason; they may have affairs with us but they nearly always go back to safe, heterosexual pairings. Besides, no one asked me whether I minded taking the second seat to gay women, who make up a mere 16% of the self-identifying gay population. (I did, and I do. Is this a social movement, or imprecations for dealing with a shipwreck, where the women must be gotten to the lifeboats first?) Fourth, I do not see the advantage, aside perhaps from providing political comfort, of labeling oneself in any way. Fifth, and perhaps most important: These labels are not used to unite. They are intended to divide, and are being used to do just that. Did the veterans of the Stonewall riots really put their bodies on the line so that one day children could have their hormones blocked and their breasts and genitals removed and have know-nothing college students claim, without citing the slightest evidence, that evil white gay men removed blacks and Latinos from the movement?
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 