By Scott Ross
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Ordinary People (1980) The emotionally wrenching adaptation by Alvin Sargent of Judith Guest’s very fine literary novel, well directed by Robert Redford. One of the last important American movies of the ’70s era.
30 Years of Fun (1963) My introduction, as a wide-eyed nine-year old, to the world of silent movie comedy, Robert Youngson’s ’60s compilation is one that continues to delight me more than a half-century later.
The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973) An extremely silly Disney comedy dating from my early adolescence whose compensations included a wonderful cast of comedians, and the opportunity to gaze for nearly 90 minutes at the unalloyed beauty of the then-young Jan-Michael Vincent.
The plot, such as it is, is barely adequate for such nonsense and the direction (by one Robert Scheerer) is equally perfunctory. Yet I laughed a great deal throughout and was pleasantly surprised to be reminded of just how funny Tim Conway is in the picture. What he is asked to do is no more subtle or believable than what he was already doing as a recurring guest on “The Carol Burnett Show,” but as always with these things, believability is scarcely the point. Laughter is, and Conway provides a lot of it, as do John Amos as Vincent’s coach, Dick Wilson (the erstwhile Mr. Whipple of the Charmin commercials) as a drunk in bar and Vito Scotti as a sports spectator frightened nearly out of wits by Vincent’s pet tiger. The formidable Nancy Walker, alas, can do little with her role as a comically myopic landlady, and Danny Goldman’s as a nasty, jealous dweeb is too unpleasant to be genuinely amusing. But Joe Kapp gets to do to Howard Cosell what I suspect millions of ABC viewers wanted to in the ’70s and Roscoe Lee Browne lends splendid support as Vincent’s African witchdoctor guardian. One can all too easily imagine the howls of protest at that notion today, but one of the jokes of the movie is that the orphaned white boy speaks like Tarzan while his native mentor sounds like an Oxford don.
Billy De Wolfe’s appearance as a college dean is far too brief, but among the familiar faces showing up in other supporting roles are Liam Dunn, Philip Ahn, Al Checco, Virginia Capers and Clarence Muse, who is allowed some pleasing dignity as Browne’s ancient aide-de-camp. Dee Caruso and Gerald Gardner wrote the dumb yet amiable screenplay, Marvin Hamlisch provided some enjoyable music and the cinematography by Frank V. Phillips is rather good, although hampered by notably poor back projection in some of the special effects shots.
The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) Walt Disney’s serious version of the same Civil War espionage adventure Buster Keaton told in a seriocomic fashion in The General thirty years earlier. The picture was a flop in ’56, and its ultimately downbeat climax is probably the reason why. (James J. Andrews, the Union spy who led the theft of the General, was hanged by the Confederates along with several of his compatriots; the others managed to escape.) It’s a rather good straight escapade, well written by Lawrence Edward Watkin, three years later the screenwriter of the charming Darby O’Gill and the Little People, and intelligently directed by Francis D. Lyon, with fine CinemaScope photography by Charles Boyle that occasionally suffers from poor back-projection. Fess Parker (whom Disney, strangely, seemed incapable of exploiting properly after his breakthrough role as Davy Crockett) is gently commanding as Anderson and Jeffrey Hunter is dogged as William A. Fuller, the General‘s conductor, whom Keaton portrayed in comic variation as “Johnny Gray.” The good supporting cast includes Jeff York, Eddie Firestone, John Lupton, Slim Pickens and Morgan Woodward. Curiously, Harry Carey, Jr. has very few lines and Claude Jarman, Jr. none. And while there is nothing here as spectacular as the death of the General in the Keaton picture, the trains look splendid, and the excellent matte work is by Peter Ellenshaw assisted by Albert Whitlock. The Disney DVD is in widescreen it is not, unfortunately, formatted to fit a plasma screen, so it’s lucky the movie is only 88 minutes and over before complete eyestrain sets in.
Marathon Man (1976) The dark, visceral adaptation by the screenwriter William Goldman and the director John Schlesinger of Goldman’s “What-If?” novel about a Mengele-like Nazi in South American unavoidably drawn to New York City, one of the finest thrillers of the ’70s (or since).
Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986) The first of Neil Simon’s “Eugene Trilogy” of alliterative semi-autobiographical plays, directed with no distinction whatever by Gene Saks (who also staged the play on Broadway) and acted by a variable cast in what feels like a hermetically sealed Depression-era set. Except in the uncharacteristically abrasive — and uncharacteristically ethnic — performance by Blythe Danner as the mother, the movie never breathes. It doesn’t help that the central character, who is supposed to be 14 going on 15, is portrayed by an actor who was 20 at the time of filming, and looked it. The original Eugene, Matthew Broderick, was even older (22) when he played the role on stage but pulled it off because he was diminutive and looked considerably younger than his years. Jonathan Silverman is not merely mature looking, he towers over everyone else in the cast. (His clothing also hangs weirdly on him, so that he appears to have curiously wide hips.) As if to compensate for his superannuation, Silverman employs an annoying pipsqueak voice for Eugene, like an older, more joke-happy version of Barry Gordon in A Thousand Clowns, or a would-be Jerry Lewis avant le lettre.
The movie isn’t boring, but it isn’t satisfying either.
Biloxi Blues (1988) The second installment in Simon’s theatrical trilogy is an enormous improvement on the first, not least because the director this time out was the playwright’s old collaborator, Mike Nichols. The good Arkansas locations also help, especially when compared to the phoniness of the sets in Brighton Beach Memoirs. Additional assets: Bill Butler’s sharp cinematography, the period pop recordings (excluding the anachronism of a 1958 recording of “How High the Moon” by Pat Suzuki, a weird inclusion for a movie set during World War II when she was in a Federal government prison camp courtesy of Franklin Roosevelt) and the general excellence of the large cast.
Matthew Broderick repeats his stage performance as Eugene, and he’s charming and exasperating in equal measure. (I wonder if Neil Simon meant Gene to be as annoying as he seems in these plays. Unless one is an O’Neill, self-hagiography is the usual norm in autobiographical writing. Or did Simon think the character entirely charming?) Gene is also, at times, both more mature than his years would indicate and more socially progressive than his times and his background would have suggested. Thus when his diary is read aloud, to embarrass him, we get this: “It just happens to be my instinctive feeling that Arnold is homosexual, and it bothers me that it bothers me.” That is not the voice of a 23-year old Brooklyn boy in 1945; it’s the voice of his author in 1984.* As the aforementioned, intermittently obnoxious Jewish/intellectual misfit Arnold Epstein, Corey Parker does not telegraph the character’s essential decency, and gives the movie’s most effective performance. Of the other members of Eugene’s outfit, Matt Mulhern is frighteningly believable as the animalistic Wykowski, Casey Siemaszko is pleasing as the musically-inclined Private Carney and Michael Dolan gives a strong account of the gentle Pvt. Hennesey. The major stumbling block, as is so often the case with this overrated actor, is Christopher Walken as the troupe’s drill instructor. Whatever one’s feelings about his technique or attitude, our discovering that Sgt. Toomey is dangerously unbalanced should come as at least something of a surprise. With the perennially strange Walken in the role, the revelation is about as shocking as the announcement that Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer’s.
On the distaff side, Park Overall as the prostitute with whom Gene loses his virginity is a marvel. With her wholly creditable Southern accent (Overall hails from Tennessee), her adorably heart-shaped face and her sweet practicality, she nearly steals the entire picture. Penelope Ann Miller, for whom I usually have scant use, gives a lovely performance as the local girl with whom Gene enjoys his first romance, and Nichols stages their meeting, at a sponsored dance, beautifully, in a long, unbroken take that lets the dialogue and the two characters breathe without seeming in the least stagey. That’s what you may get when you hire a gifted director instead of a serviceable hack.
Broadway Bound (1992) The most accomplished of the three “Eugene” plays, and the warmest emotionally. The movie, well and intelligently directed for television by Paul Bogart, also has the warmest palette, courtesy of its cinematography (Isidore Mankofsky), production design (Ben Edwards), art direction (Richard L. Johnson) and set decoration (Sharon Bonney). My only real complaint about the project is one that surprises me to have to make: That for the first time in my experience of his work, a musical score by David Shire is intrusive rather than organic.
This time out Corey Parker, the Epstein of Biloxi Blues, is Eugene, and he’s very fine, especially in the lovely second act sequence where he dances with his mother Kate. Jonathan Silverman is also back, as Gene’s older brother Stanley, based by Simon on his brother Danny, and he’s far more welcome and ingratiating than he was as Eugene in Brighton Beach. As Kate’s sister Blanche, Michelle Lee is only in a single scene, and she makes it count, but as Gene and Stanley’s inconstant father the usually splendid Jerry Orbach is flat and dispirited. The best performances are, not surprisingly, given by the actors playing the most sharply defined of Simon’s characters. As the boys’ grandfather Ben, Hume Cronyn provides a rich account of an old, unreconstructed Socialist buffeted by the indignities of increasing senescence, although Simon doesn’t play fair with the role: At the start of the play, Ben is confused and unfocused in the manner of the senile. As it progresses, however, his passionate erudition grows stronger rather than, as might be reasonably expected, the reverse. Kate herself, the immovable object of Brighton Beach, has likewise been reconsidered by the playwright (although not, as with Ben, within the same play.) Where before Kate was a figure of practicality and virtually no humor, here she has become, while still formidable, a warmer character altogether.
Simon’s inconsistency with Kate is relatively easy to digest, due primarily to the towering performance by Anne Bancroft. In her later years the Italian Bancroft seemed to specialize in Jewish mothers, but Kate Jerome is nothing whatever like Mrs. Beckoff in the 1988 Torch Song Trilogy, nor indeed like Mrs. Fanning in the 1994 PBS remake of Paddy Chayefsky’s early television play “The Mother,” and the three acting turns are equally as varied as their writers. Here, bruised and angered by her husband’s indifference (and quite rightly suspicious that he’s been philandering), keeping house with the same dedication if not indeed fervor as before, this Kate has mellowed somewhat inexplicably from the comic borderline termagant of the first play and Bancroft hits every note with unfailing accuracy. Her best moment is the superb monologue of Kate’s about dancing with George Raft as a young woman, and in which Bancroft really seems to be reliving a pivotal event from this woman’s life. Simon too comes in for praise here, of a type which perhaps only a fellow playwright might notice, or bestow: Unlike most theatrical monologues, this one is really a dialogue, between an ageing mother who long ago gave up on a dream and her artistically burgeoning son. It’s a colloquy rather than just a lengthy showpiece for an actress, and it plays so beautifully it nearly leaves you breathless. That is one of the chief virtues of enjoying a career as lengthy as Neil Simon’s — that with enough time, and practice, one can learn to write this well without appearing to be showing off.
*For proof of the younger Neil Simon’s all-too-typical comic fag-baiting I offer this line for Robert Redford’s character in Barefoot in the Park in 1963: “In Apartment C are the Boscos, Mr. And Mrs. J. Bosco [… ] A lovely young couple of the same sex. No one knows which one that is.” Need more? Try this juvenile jape, from a news report heard in The Prisoner of Second Avenue in 1971: “In sports today, the Nassau Coliseum opened its doors and its heart and will house a charity basketball game between the Harlem Globetrotters and a team made up of members of the gay liberation movement. The gay libbers said they did not expect to win since their team is young and have only been playing with each other since December.” Both of these knee-slappers were retained, with proper Talmudic reverence, for their respective movies.
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 