"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
“Being around you pleases me.” — Rooster Cogburn to Eula Goodnight
A wholly unnecessary sequel to True Grit done for what I assume were entirely mercenary reasons — the producer, Hal Wallis, had made too much money on Grit to leave it alone — and with maximal borrowings from elsewhere but which has many compensations, not least of which is the once-surprising teaming of John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn. It wasn’t the wide divergence of their respective politics that made such a partnership unlikely so much as the public perception of each: The flinty Yankee-patrician feminism of Hepburn vs. the relaxed Western working-class machismo of Wayne, neither of whose core audience would presumably cross over to the other. Yet Rooster Cogburn was a hit, and that implausible pairing provided a great deal of pleasure to a large number of moviegoers. Although the plot involving Hepburn’s character, Eula Goodnight, is a direct steal from The African Queen, even unto a perilous encounter with river rapids and the antagonistic yoking of Goodnight with Cogburn essentially reprises both the Hepburn-Bogart pairing in Queen and the Rooster-Mattie Ross dynamic that fuels True Grit. Indeed, the pursuit of a ruthless killer (played, in this case, by Richard Jordan) is nearly identical in each. Where the fugitive in True Grit has killed Mattie’s rancher father, Jordan here is responsible for the death of Eula’s minister father (as opposed to Hepburn’s minister-brother, essentially killed by the Germans in The African Queen.) The screenplay was largely the work of Wallis’ wife, the actress Martha Hyer, with input first from Wallis, later from Hepburn* and Wayne, and including a polish by Charles Portis, the gifted novelist who had written True Grit, the final script attributed to “Martin Julien,” a nom de plume. The movie often feels cobbled together, and that many screenwriters is seldom a good thing; still, if Rooster Cogburn is a mess, it’s a highly entertaining mess.
First, there is the mouth-watering Technicolor photography by Harry Stradling, Jr. The picture was shot in Oregon in the autumn (and with two 67-year old over-the-title stars acting in those chilly conditions, no less) and while it looks no more like Arkansas than Colorado did in True Grit, the verdant quality of the location scenery, and Stradling’s luminous framing of it, are so beautiful they occasionally overwhelm the senses. Second, there is the intelligence of the crazy-quilt screenplay, and its abundance of humor, particularly between Cogburn and Eula, which fuel one’s enjoyment. Third (or, perhaps, considering their importance, first) there are the performances by Wayne and Hepburn, two old pros lending to this project everything they did well, reveling in each other’s company, and pretty obviously having a wonderful time. Eula isn’t quite as flinty and judgmental as Rose Sayer in The African Queen — just as religious as Rose, she’s less of a genteel termagant, and her sense of humor is more developed. Although this may be a necessity of the speed with which the story unfolds, Eula warms toward and largely accepts Cogburn and his vulgar frailties much more quickly than Rose does with Bogart’s Charlie Allnut, just as Rooster bends faster to Eula’s fearless qualities than he did to Mattie’s. (He doesn’t witness it, but there’s a remarkable sequence in which the villain’s gang tries to terrify Eula by shooting at her feet while she prays and she doesn’t even flinch at the shots that sums up the woman’s personal courage.) While Cogburn is as resistant to Eula’s companionship on his mission to bring in the outlaw Hawk (Jordan) as he was to Mattie’s joining his quest in True Grit, he softens sooner towards her, although he never becomes a softie. (Well, he wouldn’t, would he, even if he wasn’t being played by John Wayne?)
You can’t tell it from this still, but Wayne and Hepburn have a great time together in the movie.
A portion of the strong fellow-feeling these two exhibit toward each other may be chalked up to a shared maturity. Mattie Ross didn’t just irritate Rooster Cogburn; she annoyed every adult she came in contact with. She was the wise child with a backbone of tungsten, which while in many ways admirable can be a trial to an older person. Eula, especially as Hepburn plays her (and despite her religious bent) is womanly in a way Mattie never is, or becomes. Once she’s taken the full measure of her foil, she begins to admire his good qualities and to enjoy his rough company. She’s not flirtatious, but friendly, in a way that could invite some romantic complications if either could see their way to it; when the two part at the end, you feel a pang of genuine regret. Wayne of course had already honed Cogburn, in 1969, and knew what he was doing. He seems pleased to bring the one-eyed old reprobate back for a last hurrah, and his rich humor is in full bloom. At his age, and with his experience in movies, Wayne seldom did too much, pushed too hard or spoke too loudly. He leaves room, not only for Hepburn, but for Eula’s young Native charge Wolf (Richard Romancito), toward whom he behaves in a fatherly way… and both of them wisely give Eula a wide berth.
Stuart Millar, who was better known as a producer, directed crisply, and knew, as the scriptwriters did, when to pause the action to emphasize a human-scale scene between interesting actors. These include, in addition to Wayne and Hepburn, Anthony Zerbe as Breed, a tracker with no loyalties; John McIntire as a frontier judge as exasperated with Cogburn’s methods as he is good-naturedly accepting of his uncouth company; and Strother Martin, who had two of the best (and funniest) scenes in True Grit, as a ferryboatman with the impossible name of Shanghai McCoy. Only the redoubtable Richard Jordan runs aground with his remarkably unsubtle, scenery-ingesting characterization of Hawk; he was on record later as saying he had contempt for the movie, which he thought would be a flop no one but Wayne and Hepburn’s fans would see, but that’s a hell of a reason for an actor that good to give a performance this bad. Laurence Rosenthal’s score, although it both imitates Elmer Bernstein’s True Grit music and invokes Aaron Copland (always a test for composers confronting a Western) is nevertheless pleasing. He wrote a good, if Bernsteinesque, main theme, and his scoring of the massacre at the missionary outpost is hair-raising. At just under 40 minutes, Rosenthal’s score also has the virtue of knowing when to shut up, a part of the craft that has seemingly been lost in the last 30 years of film scoring.
I missed Rooster Cogburn when it was released at Christmastime in 1975 (I was 14, obviously unable to drive yet, and the recipient of a very small weekly allowance) but was given the Signet paperback of the screenplay in my stocking that year, and one of its aspects that amused me was Cogburn discovering the definition of the word “lustrum,” which was also new to me, and the way he repeats this addition to his vocabulary late in the movie. The picture is by no means a classic, of the Western genre or any other, but being around Wayne and Hepburn pleases us; with both of them gone the movie they co-starred in has attained a sort of golden aura, and serves as a reminder of what’s been lost in the headlong rush to replicate last year’s remake of the previous summer’s big hit from an idiot comic book. Nearly ten lustrums on, even Rooster Cogburn‘s many borrowings seem less irksome than mildly regrettable… and with this much on the screen to enjoy, almost negligible.
*Hepburn, who had been slated to star in her old friend and frequent director George Cukor’s movie of the Graham Greene Travels with My Aunt, took such a strong hand in the revision of Jay Presson Allen’s script that both Cukor and Allen afterward said she should have gotten screenwriting credit. Doubtless she deserved a similar nod for Rooster Cogburn, and I wonder how much of the general wit and intelligence of the dialogue is due to her, and to Portis.
Speaking of Cukor, I have to get this off my chest: When the picture was in general release Hepburn wrote an appreciation of Wayne for TV Guide that, considering her long friendships and collaborations with Cukor, and with Garson Kanin, contains one of the most graceless acts of backhanded viciousness I’ve ever read. Describing Wayne’s physique she noted: “No backside — a rarity in these gay times.” Why did she, very likely a closeted Lesbian herself, feel the need to be that catty toward homosexual men in print? And what the hell did she mean by “no backside” anyway? Look at Wayne’s big butt in nearly every picture he was ever in and then tell me he lacked definition in that area. Was Hepburn blind as well as nasty?
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) I began the new year on a hopeful note, watching the excellent 4K UHD edition of what in 1977 was the single most entrancing movie I’d ever seen and which still exerts a beautiful spell over me.
I would like to think my other hopes for 2024 will not be betrayed, but short of worldwide revolution I suspect they will. As Tom Woods once noted (Woods’ Law #3): “No matter who you vote for, you always wind up getting John McCain.”
From Here to Eternity (1953) James Jones’ enormous (860 pages) 1951 novel, beautifully adapted by Daniel Taradash and directed with sensitivity and grace by the splendid Fred Zinnemann. Set in and around Pearl Harbor in the months leading up to the Japanese attack and, essentially, ending on it, the picture is (presumably like its source) remarkably and unusually adult in erotic/romantic content* and, to use a word I normally avoid due to its extreme overuse, powerful in its imagery. Example: The famous love scene on the shore between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, kissing passionately as the waves break over them. That Kerr’s character is a married woman and her affair with Lancaster’s career soldier illicit (her husband, his commanding officer, is a serially unfaithful pig) added to the heat the sequence generated, yet few seem to remember how bitterly the scene ends, with Lancaster humiliating Kerr and impugning her virtue.
From Here to Eternity, even more than A Place in the Sun, showcases Montgomery Clift’s gifts as an actor although his character is, at least to me, inexplicable: A young man planning on a career as a soldier who claims to love the Army yet who makes a habit of rebelling against his superior officers. Still, Prewitt is perhaps the Clift character who displays the greatest range of emotions, from the riant to the deeply sorrowful, and I defy you to remain unmoved when, with tears streaming down his cheeks, he plays “Taps” in honor of his murdered friend. As that friend, Private Maggio, Frank Sinatra is superb. Forget the Mario Puzo version of his casting†; Sinatra knew the role reflected his image of himself, and he gave himself over to it entirely, perhaps reminding those who know such things that a great ballad singer is also, perforce, a great actor. Lancaster too gives a fine account of the First Sergeant with no desire for promotion and the central women — Kerr and Donna Reed — are equally fine, Kerr even producing a more than creditable American accent and Reed giving a performance no one expected her capable of, including Zinnemann, who had accepted her casting with reservations.
Although the movie pushed at the edges of the Production Code in regard to sexual relations there was some inevitable bowdlerization: Thus, the brothel Reed’s character works in was changed to a dance-hall, yet I doubt many people who saw the picture in 1953 had any difficulty figuring out that the girl was a whore. In exchange for being permitted to shoot at Schofield Barracks, however, the filmmakers had to compromise on some of Jones’ harsher material, especially in the matter of Maggio’s “treatment” at the hands of the sadistic stockade commander “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine). In the event, Zinnemann’s being made to eschew depicting the violence against Maggio may be in the movie’s favor, since we’re forced to imagine what’s been done to him, making his death scene after he escapes all the more poignant; Fatso’s own violent death is depicted aslant, making us wonder at the outcome of his fight with Prewitt until the latter emerges from the shadows. Taradash’s screenplay is marked by its intelligence, and the black-and-white cinematography, the work of Burnett Guffey, is exemplary. The head of Columbia, the monstrous Harry Cohn, initially insisted on color but Zinnemann prevailed, and the movie benefits from this, the monochrome images shimmering on the screen. (Among other pictures, Guffey, who had been in movies since 1928, later shot Bonnie and Clyde. That should give you an idea of how good he was.) The fine supporting cast includes Philip Ober as Kerr’s philandering martinet of a husband, Mickey Shaughnessy, Jack Warden, Merle Travis as a blues-singing Private, Claude Akins as one of the bullies who tries to break Clift and, in an uncredited role, the future screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who endures a shocking death by Japanese tracer-fire.
There was, by the way, a hilarious spoof of From Here to Eternity on “Your Show of Shows,” in which the Lancaster and Clift characters were more or less combined, as were Kerr’s and Young’s. The beach scene was brilliantly parodied, with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca getting periodically doused with what are pretty obviously buckets of water thrown at them from unseen stagehands. It gets funnier and funnier. It even got to Coca, who seldom cracked on camera but who pretty much loses it here, turning her head and burying her face on Caesar’s shoulder to hide her hysteria from the audience.
Come on, shake your depression/And let’s have a yam session…
Carefree (1938) The seventh teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is the slightest of their RKO musicals, the first to lose money, and the one with the least dancing. Another of those pictures whose complicated screenwriting credits betray a certain amount of panic (the script was by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano from an “original idea” by Marian Ainslee and Guy Endore, its “story and adaptation” by the redoubtable Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, credited that same year with Bringing Up Baby) the picture casts Astaire as a dancing psychoanalyst trying to break through Rogers’ resistance to marrying Ralph Bellamy (it takes a shrink to figure that out?) and in the process falling for her himself. There are some good lines and funny situations, as when Ginger, a radio singer, wrecks her own live show under hypnosis, but there are also items that make you squirm, such as the way, again having been hypnotized, she hunts Astaire down with a shotgun, repeatedly proclaiming that “men like him should be shot down like dogs.” Fun-nee!
Adding to the troubles are an ill-conceived dream sequence set to one of Irving Berlin’s less interesting tunes, which by its conception demanded to be filmed in color but which RKO refused to do, making a hash of a song Berlin pointedly called “I Used to Be Color Blind.” (It also contains a slow-motion dance, a device I resist on principle, and a prolonged kiss between Fred and Ginger, which is just plain objectionable.) There’s an extended New Dance Sensation called “The Yam,” whose melody Berlin later adapted for his war-time anthem “Any Bonds Today?” and which illustrates that a certain degree of democratization in the Astaire and Rogers universe is unwelcome; instead of those gleaming, absurd but oddly endearing white Art Deco sets complete with extras in evening dress that were the series’ mainstay from Flying Down to Rio through Swing Time we’re in a woodsy country club with patrons joining in the dance, and who wants that? Fortunately, Fred and Ginger get a good Berlin ballad (“Change Partners”) and subsequent dance routine in which he uses his big, expressive hands in an attempt to re-hypnotize her. Even better, Astaire has a jaw-dropping bit, set to a wordless tune (“Since They Turned ‘Loch Lomond’ into Swing”) in which he rhythmically hits one golf ball after another, sending every one of them soaring in perfect arcs, the entire routine performed in long, sustained camera shots. Was there nothing the man couldn’t do?
Laughter among the ruins: Olivier, Hepburn and Cukor share a moment of levity during the filming.
Love Among the Ruins (1975) This charming, witty period comedy by James Costigan, although admired, was, somewhat surprisingly, not a ratings success. (I was watching the filmed version of George Furth’s play Twigs starring Carol Burnett that night, and I remember that deciding which to see between these two nearly engendered the 14-year-old’s equivalent of a nervous breakdown.) Despite its low viewer rating, the picture won multiple Emmys, losing only in the “Outstanding Special” category, to a TV-movie starring Judd Hirsch called “The Law,” which seems to have vanished into obscurity. I don’t know whether its author originally intended it as a play — Costigan proposed it as a 1960s television project for Lunt and Fontanne, who apparently objected to being likened to ruins and withdrew — but it feels like a stage comedy, with few scenes occurring on the London streets and most set in drawing rooms, the Old Bailey or the Inns of Court and the action rising as it might in a boulevard comedy. In any case, the dialogue sparkles with graceful aperçus, in a fashion that recalls the stage plays of Wilde and Coward and S.N. Behrman, and the stars, Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn, parry and thrust with their lines like the expert verbal and dramatic fencers they were.
Olivier was so often touted, in those years, as The World’s Greatest Actor, and accepted in that designation by people who had never seen him, that it was perhaps easy to forget what a superb comedian he was (although his performance opposite Michael Caine in the 1972 two-hander Sleuth should have reminded audiences of that). He’s especially funny in outrage, to which Hepburn’s maddening character repeatedly drives him; when he opens his eyes wide or screws up his face in disbelief as his voice rises to a sort of half-strangled masculine screech and his word pile up in a heated rush, he’s one of the premiere screen comedians of his age and weight. Hepburn’s role is perhaps less showy, but because we know what she refuses to reveal, until the climax anyway, her characterization becomes fascinating, an onion that resolutely refuses to be peeled. There are two wonderful supporting turns, by Colin Blakely as Olivier’s courtroom rival and Richard Pearson as Hepburn’s solicitor, and the director, Hepburn’s old friend and crony George Cukor, keeps the pace and the performances clicking along brightly. Douglas Slocombe’s photography, like John Barry’s delightful score, is exactly what is required, although you will undoubtedly notice how assiduously he protected the aging Hepburn, who seems shot not just through gauze but gauze, Vaseline and perhaps lace curtains as well.
Missing (1982) The exceptional adaptation by Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart of Thomas Hauser’s book on the political arrest, torture and murder of a young American in Chile for the crime of told told too much, superbly acted by Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. The talented cast also includes Melanie Mayron, John Shea (as Charles “Charlie” Horman, the murdered man), Charles Cioffi as a creepy Naval Captain, David Clennon, Richard Venture (as the thinly-disguised Ambassador Nathanial Davis), Joe Regalbuto (as another murdered American), Keith Szarabajka and Janice Rule, as a reporter helpful to both the victim and his survivors… imagine.
The Cameraman (1928) A very funny Buster Keaton feature, his last under a new contract with MGM in which he had any level of autonomy. Although the picture was popular, the studio was determined to clamp down on Keaton’s independence; he later called his signing with Metro “the worst mistake of my life.” Buster, who also produced, stars as a New York City tintype portrait photographer who realizes (in 1928!) that the motion-picture camera is making his profession obsolete. Some of the movie’s brightest moments have little or nothing to do with the plot, such as Keaton’s impromptu pantomime of a baseball game, his riding on the outside of an omnibus and his experience at a communal swimming pool, although I don’t find the sequence in which he has to share a tiny dressing space with an overbearing Edward Brophy funny because I am constitutionally incapable of laughing at bullies, or at the trouble they cause their victims. (Maybe that’s why I’ve always been uneasy about Donald Duck?) Edward Sedgwick was the director, and the story is credited to Clyde Bruckman and Lew Lipton, but on a Keaton picture that doesn’t mean much. (The story was his and, I assume, most of the gags.) Marceline Day is charming as Buster’s inamorata, and the simian “Josephine” is wonderful as the monkey he inadvertently picks up while filming a violent tong war in an otherwise remarkably non-stereotyped Chinatown.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) A nearly perfect Disney feature, at the time the most modern full-length cartoon the studio had ever released and among the six or seven best hand-drawn movies Walt’s animators produced in his lifetime.
The Third Man (1949) In the interviews that make up their book This is Orson Welles, Welles defined Harry Lime as a great “star part,” comparing it to a 1913 stage play called Mr. Wu in which Wu (whom Welles claimed he once played in the theatre) is discussed by the other characters for an entire act. Just before intermission a figure enters and intones, “I am Mr. Wu…”, leading the audience, buzzing between the acts, to marvel at that wonderful actor who plays Mr. Wu! Harry is discussed by everyone in The Third Man for over 50 minutes before Welles’ famous entrance in the dark of the Vienna night, supposedly revealed by a single light from a window across the street — it must have been the Luxor Lamp of post-war lightbulbs — during which he smiles wryly at getting caught, seemingly abashed by his own irresistible theatricality. Graham Greene’s divided-city mystery/thriller, his most famous “entertainment,” was wonderfully (if somewhat floridly) directed by Carol Reed and contained more memorable moments in its 104 minutes than any comparable popular movie since Casablanca, another romantic melodrama set in a turbulent time and place.
How to Murder Your Wife (1965) George Axelrod’s black comedy of misogyny divided a lot of opinion in 1965 and it’s impossible to imagine anyone making it today, or even thinking about doing so, even if it does wind up by endorsing marriage and women equally. Jack Lemmon plays the confirmed bachelor unexpectedly wed, after a drunken debauch, to the former inhabitant of a bachelor-party cake (Virna Lisi) who cannot speak a word of English. Although Lemmon responds all too enthusiastically to the more sybaritic aspects of marital life, the whole business quickly palls and he begins to fantasize a way out, at least for his successful spy comic-strip star Brash Brannigan, whom he has also married off. The picture is broad and, when Lemmon is put on trial for murder at the climax, just plain silly (no one thinks to look for Lisi’s body?) It’s also, despite the odds, very funny. Richard Quine directed with good pace, Harry Stradling’s color cinematography is mouth-watering, and in his infectious musical score Neal Hefti develops at least six distinct, complete melodies. Eddie Mayehoff gives his standard hilarious characterization as Lemmon’s lawyer, Claire Trevor is surprisingly arch as his wife, and Terry-Thomas is a wonder as Lemmon’s butler. Among the rich supporting cast: Sidney Blackmer, Jack Albertson (“Brrrrtt! Right up the wall!”), Max Showalter, Alan Hewitt, Mary Wickes, Howard Wendell and Khigh Dhiegh. Actually, I don’t think the movie is misogynist as much as it is anti-marriage, or at any rate, anti-wife. Does that make it any less offensive to women? Probably not, but it still makes me laugh.
The Yakuza (1974) An interesting exercise in East-West tensions refracted through the traditional Japanese yakuza gangland thriller. The picture suffers from too much exposition, badly handled both by the writers (Paul Schrader and Robert Towne,‡ from a story by Leonard Schrader) and the director (Sydney Pollack), and Pollack’s refusal to use English subtitles renders long dialogue sequences featuring Ken Takakura utterly incomprehensible to a non-Japanese speaker. (To see what you’re missing, turn on the Blu-ray’s subtitle feature.) Yet it’s fascinating to watch, particularly with Robert Mitchum in the American lead. Mitchum plays a man in love with Japan, whose post-war experience during the American occupation — which of course has never ended — left him bereft of the love of his life when he crossed her brother (Takakura). It’s a stylish movie, beautifully shot in widescreen by Kozo Okazaki, which despite my reservations about Pollack as a filmmaker I must admit he was highly skilled in framing.§ Dave Grusin provided a fine, atmospheric musical score and the cast contains riches: Takakura, at once stoic and almost shockingly adept with a sword; Herb Edelman as Mitchum’s old pal, an American who put down roots in Tokyo; Keiko Kishi as Mitchum’s great love; and Brian Keith as his employer, who is not as trustworthy a crook as he wishes his compatriots to believe. As Mitchum’s bodyguard, Richard Jordan gives the sort of total performance that causes you to wonder how a young man that handsome, and that accomplished, never became an important actor in American movies. James Shigeta, who improved every picture he was in just by showing up, plays Takakura’s sage, and quietly dangerous, older brother. What stays with you about The Yakuza is its expression of psychic pain; nearly every character in it is in some kind of agony, and they keep visiting it on each other without meaning to, which in turn makes that pain equally unbearable to the one who causes it.
The Dark Horse (1932) A very amusing political satire, something American movies used to turn out on a regular basis but which the toxic partisanship of modern life has rendered entirely off-limits. (You can still write a satire, but if it doesn’t target Republicans, leftists or the non-aligned, good luck getting it produced.) Warren William plays what we would now call a political consultant, a fast-talking con artist who is let loose on a corrupt gubernatorial campaign and catapults a complete nonentity into the governor’s mansion. My revealing the ending will in no way mitigate your enjoyment of this sharp, cynical exercise which features the young Bette Davis as Williams’ inamorata, Vivienne Osborne as an ex-wife with the soul of an adding machine, Frank McHugh as an eager political operative and the genial Guy Kibbee as the unlikely candidate, of whom William memorably observes, “He’s the dumbest human being I ever saw. Every time he opens his mouth he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.”
That line sounds like the work of Wilson Mizner, who wrote the screenplay with Joseph Jackson. Wilson and his brother Addison were the subject of an aborted Irving Berlin musical in the 1950s and, many decades later, emerged on the stage in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s later project, which went under several titles over a number of years (Wise Guys, Gold!, Bounce and, finally, Road Show). The director of The Dark Horse, Alfred E. Green, began in pictures in 1916, eventually guiding Colleen Moore in eight of her vehicles including Sally (1925), Irene and Ella Cinders (both 1926). He also made three with George Arliss including Disraeli (1929) and The Green Goddess (1930); the somewhat notorious Baby Face (1933) starring Barbara Stanwyck; Dangerous (1935), which won Davis an apology Oscar; the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937); and The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939), a Philo Vance vehicle also starring Warren William. His work on The Dark Horse is fast and clean, and the sharp black-and-white cinematography was by Sam Polito. For those interested in trivia, the Blackfoot Chief who gives Kibbee a ceremonial headdress is played by Jim Thorpe.
Thanks once again to my perspicacious friend Eliot M. Camarena for the recommendation!
*I understand that Jones’ editors or publisher demanded he remove some homosexual content from the original manuscript of his novel, which his heirs returned to a recent edition. Not having read the novel I have no idea what this may entail, although the author was allegedly (i.e., according to a Wikipedia entry) open about his own sexual experiences in that area.
†The truth of Sinatra’s casting was less dramatic, but nearly as grubby: he was pestering his wife Ava Gardner on the African location of John Ford’s Mogambo, and to get him out of her hair (and to allow her to philander in peace) she allegedly insisted that Cohn use him as Maggio.
‡If Towne is present, can Edward Taylor be far behind?
§On the Yakuza commentary Pollack says he gave up shooting in widescreen, which he loved, once he realized how badly his pictures were being cropped, and panned-and-scanned, for home video. He wasn’t alone.
“Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.” — Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians
A nearly perfect Disney feature, released in the year of my birth, One Hundred and One Dalmatians was at the time the most modern full-length cartoon the studio had ever released and remains among the six or seven best hand-drawn movies Walt’s animators produced in his lifetime.* It was based on the beguiling 1956 novel by Dodie Smith and while hipper and less cozily “English” in tone, the movie respects the book, hewing more closely to the author’s plot and characters than any other Disney adaptation; P.L. Travers, who loathed the movie Disney made of Mary Poppins, would have envied Bill Peet’s fealty to Smith’s book. Smith was so delighted with Peet’s work she felt his story was an improvement on hers and his sketches of her characters superior to Janet and Anne Grahame-Johnstone’s original illustrations. I think she was being over-generous on that score, as the Grahame-Johnstone pen-and-ink drawings are inextricably linked to my love for that book, a favorite since I first read it after the movie was reissued when I was eight.†
Reading Smith’s novel (called The Hundred and One Dalmatians) again recently, many decades on from my first exposure to it, I was struck by how wittily she limns her balanced canine/human world, each with its own (and to the inhabitants of the other, at least somewhat incomprehensible) language and practices, much of which Peet managed to slip into his screenplay without ostentation. Smith’s most ingenious device — the Twilight Barking — is wonderfully replicated in the movie, as are most of her splendid characters. Peet combined Pongo’s slightly dim but courageous spouse Missis and the fortuitous wet-nurse for their 15 puppies, Perdita, into a single figure; renamed the Dalmatians’ human pets Mr. and Mrs. Dearly as Roger and Anita Radcliffe and changed Saul Baddun to Horace; rechristened the litter’s runt Cadpig as “Lucky” (an existing pup in Smith’s literary litter); brought the amusingly masculine/feminine servant “couple” Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler together into a single Nanny; and altered the sex of the female tabby cat Tibs, who became the take-charge, male Sergeant Tibbs in the picture. Aside from compressing some of its events, Peet left the narrative largely alone, although Smith’s dread collector of furs Cruella DeVil is in the movie both more comic (she sometimes seems like a caricature of Tallulah Bankhead) and at times more terrifying. In the novel there is a strong hint that Cruella has actual devils in her family tree, and Peet eliminated the dinner party scene in which every victual on the DeVil menu somehow tastes of pepper including the ice-cream, how she habitually overheats her home and the way, while searching for the Dalmatians in the English countryside she stops to warm herself at a building fire. (He also eliminated the timid furrier Mr. DeVil, who is no great loss, and the couple’s perpetually abused Persian cat, who is… although I can understand why she was dropped, if only for the purposes of streamlining the story; a 79-minute movie is not a 200-page novel, after all.) There is as well more slapstick-type humor in the movie, of a kind we now associate with Disney features but which up to 1961 was prevalent mostly in the studio’s cartoon shorts. A couple of Smith’s wittiest lines made it into the picture, however, and I was surprised on reading it again to discover that the “What’s My Crime?” television quiz program, which feels amusingly exaggerated and thus original to the movie, was hers as well. (A wonderful line that didn’t make it into the movie: When a group of gypsies attempts to trap the dogs and their 96 pups on the trek back to London and one of its caravan horses thwarts the move as the gypsies’ dogs, penned up in the wagons, raise a ruckus, Pongo sagely observes, “The caravans bark but the dogs move on.” I suppose my old-fashioned delight at the way Smith turned that maxim on its head, accompanied as it is by her, and my, citing of the “racist” word gypsy, puts me beyond the pale.) My favorite chapter in the book, in which before a warming fireside Pongo and Missis appear to an elderly country gentleman as the ghosts of his beloved past pets, has a wistfulness and a gentle, sad sweetness whose tone would be all wrong for a comic animated feature of the early ’60s; like the moment in The Wind in the Willows when Mole, after his and Rat’s long travels, smells his home, it’s unforgettable for a sensitive child (or at least it was for this sensitive former child) but its mood is perhaps too contemplative for fast-paced, fantastic moviemaking, and ultimately too literary.
That’s the director Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman pushing a mock-up of Cruella’s car through prop-snow.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians was made possible by Ub Iwerks’ experiments with Xerox photography (all those spots to draw, ink and paint…) He was able to transfer the animators’ drawings directly to cels, which not only eliminated the inking process but retained the quality of the original penciled art. The animators were delighted; they’d long felt a lot of soul was lost between their drawings and the finished, painted cels. Others were less enchanted. Walt Disney for one disliked the look of the picture, although it’s notable that he didn’t put a stop to the process; anything that saved animation money was difficult to dismiss. As a child I was struck by the look of Cruella’s red roadster, particularly when the driver ran into a snowbank and backed out to extricate herself and the dirty snow seemed to move and drift in a way that didn’t look to me like hand-drawn animation. Only decades later did I discover that, to save costs, the DeVil car was constructed out of cardboard and filmed separately before being added to the drawings, another innovation the Xerox process made possible. (As I write these words I hear the shade of Richard Williams growling, “If you want to save work, what on earth are you doing in animation?” Ah, but, Richard: I said “costs,” not “work.”) While Peet sketched out the characters, it was Ken Anderson, taking inspiration from the cartoonist Ronald Searle, who designed the look of the picture, in particular its strikingly modern, UPA-esque backgrounds, so at odds with traditional Disney layouts that Walt despaired of them, fearing the “fantasy element” of his movies was being lost. He had a point, although Anderson’s work perfectly matches the “unfinished” Xerox quality of the drawings.
Speaking of those drawings: Marc Davis was solely responsible for Cruella, taking great inspiration from her voice, that of the marvelous Betty Lou Gerson. (He also used Gerson’s cheekbones.) Davis later said Gerson’s voice “was the greatest thing I’ve ever had a chance to work with. A voice like Betty Lou’s gives you something to do. You get a performance going there, and if you don’t take advantage of it, you’re off your rocker.” No one could say Davis didn’t take that advantage; with her voice like a diamond cutting glass and her outré movements and mannerisms (Mary Wickes was her live-action model) Cruella was arguably the most memorable Disney villain since Lady Tremaine in Cinderella. Children could laugh at her even while enjoying the chill that ran down their backs at the ghastly close-up of her maddened skull during the climactic chase. Rod Taylor was an appropriately loveable and stalwart Pongo; Ben Wright (26 years later the voice of Grimsby in The Little Mermaid) was his pet Roger, a struggling songwriter here instead of Smith’s accounting wizard; J. Pat O’Malley gave voice to both Jaspar Badun and Colonel, the charmingly Blimp-y old sheepdog; George Worlock was the dim-witted Horace; and Martha Wentworth the cuddlesome Nanny (she was later, in a complete contrast, Mad Madam Mim in The Sword and the Stone). Other voices included Dave Frankham (Tibbs and the Skye terrier), Tom Conway (the Collie, who looks just like him), George Pelling (Danny, the Great Dane at Hampstead), and Thurl Ravenscroft (as Captain, the horse who gives the Badduns a memorable exit from his barn.) Bill Lee, who would later vocalize for Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music, gave Roger his singing voice.
Eight of the Nine Old Men worked on the picture, whose direction was credited to Wolfgang Reitherman, Hamilton Luske and Clyde Geronimi. (Only Ward Kimball was absent, presumably at work on his ill-advised live-action Babes in Toyland.) Eric Larson directed the animation on Tibbs, John Lounsbery did the Badduns, Ollie Johnson animated Perdita and Frank Thomas, perhaps the most gifted of the Nine, was responsible for Pongo, that most appealing of all Disney heroes. (At eight I already knew that real Dalmatians aren’t as handsome as he was.) This is one of those rare pictures in which everything works, from the charmingly designed, witty main titles to the smile-inducing finale. George Bruns provided the apposite, and surprisingly plangent, score largely based around Mel Levin’s spritely melody for the un-used “Playful Melody,” and Levin wrote the movie’s occasional songs, including of course that perennial favorite “Cruella DeVil.” Trivia note: The first time I heard Charles Strouse’s melody for the Annie song “A New Deal for Christmas” I was struck by how closely it resembled Levin’s “Dalmatian Plantation.” One of those curious mysteries of compositional coincidence, like the relationship of Henry Mancini’s “Charade” to “Silent Night,” or Sondheim’s “No One is Alone” in Into the Woods to, of all things, Leslie Bricusse’s “The Candy Man” in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Speaking of dogs, the alert viewer will note incongruous but enjoyable cameos in One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Jock, Peg, Bull and the silhouettes of Tramp and Lady from that other Disney picture centered around canines.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
*The others, in the order of my preference: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp and The Jungle Book. Although it has never been a favorite, in look, if not in total achievement, I should also add Bambi.
†I also loved, when I discovered it a few years later, Smith’s sequel. The wholly fantastic The Starlight Barking introduced me, at 12, to the concept of metaphysics.
If ever a movie was of its time, it was this one; not only was it one of the last important pictures of the extended 1970s era (essentially 1967—1982) but arguably the last with an unabashedly excoriating political viewpoint made within the American studio system. I remember vividly how angry it made me when I saw it in the theater and how its revelations concerning the murderousness of what I now think of as the permanent unelected American government (est., 22 November 1963) made me realize that the political cynicism I had operated under after Nixon’s resignation was merely fashionably decorative; although Reagan’s embrace of the psychotic, mass-murdering “Contras” in Nicaragua, spiritual heirs of the Chilean death-squads of 1973, had perhaps primed me for the rage I felt as I left the theater, seeing Missing was the moment the scales really fell from my eyes and I recognized that I had not been nearly cynical enough. This Damascan Road moment is perhaps understandable, given the one-sidedness of the “news” we were permitted even then to see and to read of the world and America’s actions within and against much of it and which I grant you was still less pernicious than what is on view today. In those days, after all, National Public Radio was not merely a reliable source of unbiased reporting but the model of it, at least in this country. How quaint that notion seems now.
Like the book (Thomas Hauser’s The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice) on which it was based, Missing details less young Horman’s arrest, torture and murder at the hands of Pinochet’s goons (we never see the violence) than the agonized, and agonizing, attempts by his wife and father to discover his whereabouts following the Kissinger-directed/CIA-sponsored coup that, as is America’s wont, deposed the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende and replaced him with a (to use the Permanent Government’s favorite ironic phrase) brutal dictator whose military then rounded up and slaughtered thousands of citizens without trial… and all because Henry Kissinger could not countenance a Socialist government anywhere in the Americas. Despite the attempts of the United States’ embassy in Chile to paint him as a radical agitator in order to justify his killing, Charles Horman’s only crime appears to have been that some American officials and military officers couldn’t keep their yaps shut — that they were too proud of their role in the coup to refrain from boasting about it in front of a young American journalist. That his wife (Joyce in reality, “Beth” in the movie) and friend Terry Simon were not also eliminated appears to have been either an oversight or the sheer luck of their not being in the Horman’s home when Charles was picked up by military forces.
Like Hauser’s book, Missing does not prove (as Charles’ father Ed came to believe, with cause) that U.S. officials, in addition to covering up for the Chilean military, most likely ordered his murder, but comes as close as its makers dared without concrete evidence. It certainly came too close for comfort for several of the Americans involved, who brought suit against the director and co-scenarist (Constantin) Costa-Gavras and MCA, the parent company of Universal Pictures. (They’d ignored the book, which was small potatoes; a big Hollywood-produced motion picture that might be seen by millions around the world was another matter entirely.) A separate suit was filed against Hauser, and was dismissed, as was the action against Costa-Gavras and MCA. In a sane world, however, the suits should have opened the door to the arrest and prosecutions of the plaintiffs, who included the former ambassador Nathaniel Davis, none of whom ever had to face justice for their complicity in the murder of an American citizen. Kissinger, of course, never paid for any of his crimes of mass-murder, either in Chile, Vietnam, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cyprus, Laos or Cambodia and died at over 100, venerated by hawks and doves alike in the political duopoly Gore Vidal called the Property Party but which we now know best as the War Party. It may seem strange to some to be so moved by the murder, 50 years in the past, of a young man and by extension its cinematic depiction more than 40 years ago, but Hauser’s description of what were undoubtedly the last few days of Charles Horman’s life (and the execution as well of his friend and colleague Frank Teruggi, which the U.S. embassy continued to deny even in the face of evidence to the contrary) is heart-rending, as is recognizing the full measure of the Hormans’ uncomprehending grief and anger at what their government has done to them, which the movie also captures. Charles Horman’s death matters because, one or 1 million, every death matters to someone, if only to the one who dies, and few things in the life of a nation are quite as obscene as officially-sanctioned death.
Costa-Gavras wrote (with Donald E. Stewart) and directed with enormous restraint, considering the horrific nature of the material. As an adolescent during the Greek civil war, and the son of a Communist member of the Second World War Greek Resistance, the director was well aware of British and American manipulation of events in his nation, and the terrible cost of that ideologically-driven foreign interference. (And liberals and neocons claim Russia is the great world culprit?) Yet Costa-Gavras seldom depicts directly the violence either of the Pinochet coup or of its bloody aftermath, during which any Chilean considered at all left-wing was rounded up, roughly interrogated, tortured and, in thousands of cases, summarily executed. The writer-director does capture, vividly, the mix of confusion, outrage and terror that accompanies being arrested by heavily-armed and belligerent militia, particularly in two incidents. In the first, immediately following the coup, Charlie (John Shea) and Terry (Melanie Mayron) witness the harassment by soldiers of a young woman in a pantsuit whose trouser legs are cut from her legs as she is told that in Chile now, women wear dresses. The brutality of the act is more than coincidentally sexual; it’s a kind of rape, and it is certainly terrorism in the classic sense of the word. In the second event, Charlie’s friends David Holloway (Keith Szarabajka) and Frank Teruggi (Joe Regalbuto) are taken from their office to the National Stadium — soon to be notorious as the place from which so many, including Horman and Teruggi, never returned. There is little violence in these sequences, but the threat is never far from the surface.
Similarly, when Beth (Sissy Spacek) seeks sanctuary as the dread new curfew impends, during which anyone out on the streets was automatically shot, she sees a dead and bloody body lying half on the curb and half on the pavement and, in a panic, runs to a closed bridal shop where she is rebuffed by the owner, who chases her away angrily and, presumably, in terror of harboring someone he may believe the junta is seeking. After discovering a place of marginal safety she falls asleep and awakes to see a white horse galloping down the empty street pursued by a Jeep filled with soldiers shooting at it. The image may be seen as (as indeed some insist it is) a metaphor, liberty fleeing totalitarianism, yet it doesn’t feel imposed, or heavy-handed, although I don’t recall Joyce witnessing such a moment in Hauser’s book. I suspect it’s the documentary-like approach to Missing that Costa-Gavras and his cinematographer, Ricardo Aronovich, chose which takes the mickey out the moment. Had they filmed it through gauze, or in slow-motion, as if in a dream, the scene would reek of symbolism. As it is, Joyce immediately goes back to sleep, perhaps wondering if she was dreaming while awake. It’s of a piece with the day of the coup, when Charlie is awakened in his hotel room at Viña del Mar by a sudden loud and insistent mechanical noise and, running to his deck, is confronted by a hovering military helicopter. In the sudden fantasy world of violent social upheaval, surrealism becomes the norm.
Costa-Gavras with Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon. (Photo by Christian SIMONPIETRI/Sygma via Getty Images)
Some of the commentaries on Missing (and indeed a few of the comments made before the role was set) betray a curious amnesia about Costa-Gavras’ preferred casting of Charlie Horman’s father Ed. “Jack Lemmon? Doesn’t he just do comedies?” is the gist, yet a mere four years before the actor had received a “Best Actor” Oscar nomination for his riveting performance as the nuclear plant manager in The China Syndrome and, in 1973, was given that award for “Save the Tiger,” a drama with no laughs whatsoever. He had also been nominated, in 1962, for Days of Wine and Roses, had played Archie Rice in an Americanized version of John Osbourne’s The Entertainer for television, had (with Maureen Stapleton and Walter Matthau) starred in a acclaimed Juno and the Paycock at the Mark Taper Forum and been a strong contender for Butch Cassidy. Certainly most of Lemmon’s biggest hits had been comedies, but an insistence on that as proof that he was a comedian and not a dramatic actor also betrays a stunning inability to comprehend why excellence as the former hardly precludes achievement as the latter. Any good comedian can play drama; it’s acuity in the reverse that separates the men from the boys.
Although Lemmon admitted the director had to tamp down his propensity to act with his hands — part of his arsenal in comedic roles is the way he uses his hands, or even just a forefinger, to make a dramatic point — the actor seems to have understood how buttoned-down his character’s emotions needed to be. The unfashionable hat he wears as Ed Horman almost seems to be reigning Lemmon in, but it’s more a reflection of Ed’s conservatism and his refusal to give in to outraged expression the way he feels his daughter-in-law has. Although both Ed and Joyce approved the screenplay, the depiction of their relationship is far more tense and constrained than it was in life, and I feel this is one of Costa-Gavras’ few miscalculations in the picture. We didn’t, by 1982, need that sort of manufactured generation-gap conflict between family members on top of the angst the U.S. Embassy puts them through, nor the slow dawning of respect and affection in Ed toward Beth that feels like poor-man’s dramaturgy imposed on strong dramatic material that didn’t need it. (Father and son had their political differences but there was no sense in Hauser’s book that Ed was as antagonistic toward Charlie and Joyce’s moderate leftist idealism, as is depicted in Missing.) Unnecessary as I find these writing choices, it must be said that Lemmon and Spacek play the antagonism, and its eventual thawing, expertly. Once Ed has finally understood the truth about his son, and accepted that he is dead, his unyielding attitude toward his daughter-in-law dissolves exponentially. Nor do the filmmakers err in over-representing the love and protectiveness Ed feels for and toward Beth by the end. It’s little looks that convey this, and shy smiles, and in the way near the end Lemmon gently and undemonstrably places his hand over Spacek’s.
Lemmon’s performance is exemplary throughout, but the scene in which Ed pleads with the Ambassador and his Embassy staff he has slowly begun to realize is keeping from him every scrap of vital information it has and he and Beth do not, is not only the finest in this movie but one of the most effective of the actor’s career; the way while saying he will take Charles back in whatever shape he’s in and make no trouble for anyone Lemmon says, softly, “Oh, really, I don’t care” before concluding, “I just want my boy back,” is quietly devastating; all of Ed Horman’s pain and loss are in those five simple, almost parenthetical, words.
As Ed and Beth descend deeper into the Chilean nightmare, the images become more urgent and more disturbing: The guided tours of morgues where the bloodied bodies, mostly of young men, are placed on every available surface, including on a translucent floor overhead like a ghastly mural; the stadium, where thousands await their fate and where the Hormans hope their voices can reach Charlie; soldiers shooting at fleeing citizens, the sudden eruption of gunfire finally too much for Ed, who nearly gets his entire party shot when he objects. Yet again, nothing in the picture aside from the manufactured tensions between Beth and Ed feels extraneous, or overstated, which is why I was somewhat taken aback by a carping contemporary review by Roger Ebert cited on the movie’s Wikipedia page. I quote Ebert at length here because his words a) seem to be describing a different movie from the one I saw and b) serve to illustrate just how unreliable a writer Roger Ebert was.
“I wish the movie,” he wrote, “had been even brave enough to risk a clear, unequivocal, uncompromised statement of its beliefs, instead of losing itself in a cluttered mishmash of stylistic excesses. This movie might have really been powerful, if it could have gotten out of its own way […] If Missing had started with the disappearance of the young man, and had followed Spacek and Lemmon in a straightforward narrative as they searched for him, this movie might have generated overwhelming tension and anger. But the movie never develops the power it should have had, because the director, Constantin Costa-Gavras, either lacked confidence in the strength of his story, or had too much confidence in his own stylistic virtuosity. He has achieved the unhappy feat of upstaging his own movie, losing it in a thicket of visual and editing stunts […] Let’s begin with the most annoying example of his meddling. Missing contains scenes that take place before the young man disappears. We see his domestic happiness with his wife and friends, we see him reading from The Little Prince and making plans for the future. The fact that this material is in the movie suggests, at least, that the story is being told by an omniscient author, one who can also tell us, if he wishes to, what happened to the victim. But he does not. Costa-Gavras shows us all sorts of ominous warnings of approaching trouble (including a lot of loose talk by American military men who are not supposed to be in the country, but are, and all but claim credit for a coup). He shows us a tragic aftermath of martial law, guns in the streets, vigilante justice, and the chilling sight of row after row of dead young men, summarily executed by the new junta. But he does not show us what happened to make the film’s hero disappear. Or, rather, he shows us several versions, visual fantasies in which the young husband is arrested at home by a lot of soldiers, or a few, and is taken away in this way or that. These versions are pegged to the unreliable eyewitness accounts of the people who live across the street. They dramatize an uncertain human fate in a time of upheaval, but they also distract fatally from the flow of the film […] The performances of Spacek and Lemmon carry us along through the movie’s undisciplined stylistic displays.”
To take Ebert’s charges in order: 1) I have absolutely no idea, even after reading his review three times, what he means by “a mishmash of stylistic excesses.” As I have been at pains to point out throughout this essay, Costa-Gavras never interferes in the narrative, or exerts himself, as either a screenwriter or a director, at the expense of understanding or of the people or events in his movie. To appreciate his restraint, imagine what a “stylistic mishmash” Scorsese would have made of this.
2) By suggesting that Missing ought to have begun with Charles Horman’s disappearance (a highly conventional, clichéd and even boring, beginning for a picture) Ebert is crossing the line from critic to filmmaker — he is telling an accomplished practitioner of cinema how he ought to have made his movie. It’s a temptation seldom indulged in except by hacks, or would-be cineastes without the imagination or the means to make their own movies.
3) Costa-Gavras “show[ing] us all sorts of ominous warnings of approaching trouble (including a lot of loose talk by American military men who are not supposed to be in the country, but are, and all but claim credit for a coup)” is performing one of the central jobs of the engaged storyteller. He is showing us what the place was like before, during and after a cataclysmic social event. How is that a matter for critical slanging? Moreover, hearing the “loose talk by American[s]” is what very likely got Charlie killed. It’s hardly incidental to the story, or a miscalculation. It is the God-damned story!
4) Complaining that the way Costa-Gavras depicts the conflicting testimony of the witnesses to Charlie’s arrest “distract[s] fatally” is just bizarre. That I find it a perfectly valid means of visual interpretation, and a metaphor for the unreliability of first-hand accounts of events is not the issue, but Ebert’s extreme language. The movie dies because of this?
And, finally, 5) What “undisciplined stylistic displays”? How, in a picture as straightforward and often elegant as Missing are they “undisciplined”? Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie was undisciplined. Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers often feels undisciplined. What, to quote Slim Pickens in another (often gloriously) undisciplined movie, in the Wide World of Sports is Ebert talking about? To get this much wrong (and I mean wrong, as opposed to his statements on the movie diverging from my opinion of it) in a single review reminds one of just how blinkered, and often downright useless, Roger Ebert’s criticism really was.
It may seem odd to get exercised over a 41-year-old newspaper review of a movie, but the damage hacks like Ebert do lasts forever. (The fact you can still find it online proves my thesis.) I’m sorry he had a botched cancer operation, and that he died not long after, but that doesn’t alter my essential disdain for his mind.
So few critics, so many poets 