By Scott Ross
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Aliens (1986) The Alien franchise is so well-established now and its horrific contours so much a part of the popular culture after nearly 45 years, it may be difficult to explain to younger people how striking Alien was to moviegoers in 1979. (When that thing burst out of John Hurt’s chest I had an attack of hyperventilation in the theater.) As much as one hates, and hated even then, to praise that appalling egotist and self-confessed plagiarist James Cameron,* his 1986 sequel had nearly as great an impact as Alien, at least on me. Cameron hasn’t anything like Ridley Scott’s contemplative qualities, nor his deliberate sense of pace; he grabs you by the throat early on and shakes you repeatedly, at strategically-placed intervals, making Alien look almost like an art-film by contrast. Of course, Cameron had the advantage over Scott in that he didn’t have to take time setting up the alien xenomorph or its violent, parasitic reproductive biology, and it cannot be denied that his action-movie approach is remarkably effective; I’ve seen Aliens on, first, video-tape and later, DVD and Blu-ray, more times than I can count since 1986 — I’m one of those suckers who can usually be counted on to purchase the new editions of certain favorite movies as they are released, even as I grumble about paying more than once for essentially the same item — and the picture gets to me every time, and in such a visceral manner my temperature rises before the encounter at the power station and remains elevated until after the end credits.
The new 4K UHD edition looks spectacular and is not, as I had feared (and as is sometimes the case with 4K transfers) murkier than the original.
Little Miss Marker (1980) The fourth screen adaptation of the Damon Runyon story; it was filmed in 1934 with Adolphe Menjou and Shirley Temple, in 1949 as Sorrowful Jones starring Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, and in 1962 as 40 Pounds of Trouble with Tony Curtis, none of which I have seen. (My tolerance for both Temple and Menjou is nearly as low as Joe Biden’s for the First Amendment.) Engagingly written and cleverly directed by the formerly Blacklisted Walter Bernstein, the 1980 edition has a sunny quality that goes down like a glass of Cocomalt, with approximately as much nutritional value. Jennings Lang, who produced the picture with his star Walter Matthau, was a longtime producer at Universal and may have thought he had a Sting-like entertainment on his hands, with a cast of lovable 1930s rogues and the ante upped to include an adorable child. Matthau, I assume, as a degenerate gambler could not resist a comedy in which he plays a bookie and the backdrop is an illicit casino.
Runyon’s original is a curious little tale, bordered on the one side by comedy and on the other by a bathos that quickly drops into rank, manipulative sentimentality. Centered on the bookie Sorrowful Jones and the three or four-year-old girl left at his joint as a marker it’s essentially comic but takes a catastrophic turn at the end — the little girl dies — and none of the previous versions, as nearly as I can determine, has gone anywhere near Runyan’s deadly climax. (Two of them apparently end with either miraculous cures for the child or anyway the strong suggestion she will survive.) Bernstein, happily, avoids this complication, which in the story is unbearably maudlin, entirely. Where Runyan merely tells his readers that the girl’s presence in his single life alters the gruff, unlovable Sorrowful Jones to a more kindly, loving figure the writer-director shows us Jones thawing, slowly and not at all unbelievably, as he assumes responsibility for the child’s welfare and slowly stops seeing her as an impediment to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. What makes this work is not merely Matthau’s peerless hangdog persona and his gift for subtle change but the girl herself; Sarah Stimson, whose only acting job this picture was, brings a calming presence to the situation. She isn’t precocious, or cutesy and there’s nothing calculating about either her performance or Bernstein’s conception of the character. She has a grave, polite mien, accepting what’s happening to her, never questioning her faith that her father (Andrew Rubin) will come back for her and unintimidated by Jones’ perennial irascibility.
Bernstein adds plot wrinkles in the persona (not in the story) of the dumber-than-he-thinks-he-is gangster played by Tony Curtis and the woman (Julie Andrews) whose ancestral home he is turning into his casino and who, it will hardly surprise you to learn, attaches herself to “The Kid” and to Jones. Bernstein also turns Regret, a minor character in the Runyon story, into Sorrowful Jones’ bookie-joint manager who, in the single bit of miscasting in the movie, is played by Bob Newhart. Newhart’s essential character, the stammering low-key voice of, if not reason, at least stability, is all wrong for Runyon. Curtis and Matthau are much better suited to his style, as are Brian Dennehy as Curtis’ chief goon and, in smaller roles, Tom Pedi, Joshua Shelley and Kenneth McMillan as that perpetual oxymoron, a decent cop, albeit one who, if he succeeds in his aim of protecting the little girl, will ensure her misery by having her placed in an orphan asylum. Where Bernstein goes slightly awry, as far as stylistic integrity is concerned, is in the women’s roles, which seem to have drifted in from the work of another author. Andrews is appealing as she nearly always is, and Lee Grant gives a good reading of the gently exasperated judge at the climax but neither feels to me like an organic Runyon character.
Philip H. Lathrop’s photography is colorful and clear, Henry Mancini score consists largely of lively pastiches of 1930s music and Wayne Fitzgerald and David Oliver Pfeil designed the charming main title sequence featuring period wheeled children’s toys including, in a winking cameo, Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley.
Pardon Us (1931) Laurel and Hardy’s first feature, a spoof of the early talkie The Big House, was intended as a short subject and it feels padded out, with long, dry and mostly unfunny stretches and one appalling sequence in which the boys, after escaping from prison, hide out in a black sharecroppers’ enclave. The black performers surrounding Stan and Ollie are neither more nor less stereotyped than in other movies of the time (although as usual they are happy laborers, singing spirituals during work and more secular fare after); what’s really insulting is that we’re asked to believe they’re so simple they can’t spot in their midst two white men in obvious minstrel-show blackface complete with exaggerated lips. The casual racism is even more of a shame because it detracts from our enjoying Hardy’s beautiful tenor in the communal sequence. (Speaking of music: When a prison quintet played by The Avalon Boys sings in the exercise yard, their a cappella number is an uncredited “I Want To Go Back To Michigan,” the 1914 ballad by Irving Berlin later memorably performed by Judy Garland in Easter Parade.)
The occasional funny bits involve Stan’s speech impediment, caused by a dental problem, which makes it sound as if he’s blowing raspberries at tough cons like Walter Long and Wilfred Lucas’ psychotic Warden, the schoolroom sequence featuring James Finlayson as a lunatic pedagogue and a scene in the prison dental clinic where (naturally) it’s Ollie’s healthy tooth that gets pulled. The dialogue is credited to L & H’s usual scenarist of the period H.M. Walker, the team’s frequent shorts director James Parrott staged it (often poorly and in so enervated a manner than its 55-minute running-time feels like two hours) and the uncredited gag-men include Parrot, Charley Rogers and, as usual, Stan. Those who grew up on Our Gang comedies (called The Little Rascals on television) will recognize the music in the score, comprised of stock-music composed by Leroy Shield used by Hal Roach in both L & H and Our Gang short subjects.
Those Calloways (1964) If Paul Annixter’s 1950 coming-of-age novel Swiftwater did not exist, this Disney conservationist epic might suffice, but the adaptation by Louis Pelletier softens, complicates or reverses nearly everything that made Annisxter’s beautifully written book enthralling, and refreshingly candid.
Blind Date (1987) The screenwriter Dale Launer’s 1980s specialty was a certain witty nastiness with a marshmallow center: Ruthless People, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and this exercise in comedic mayhem, directed by Blake Edwards and featuring the first starring movie performance by Bruce Willis. The way to enjoy the picture is to accept that nothing about it is related in any way to reality; once you realize that it takes place in an invented comic universe where a young woman can get insanely drunk and destructive on a single half-glass of champagne, a maniac lawyer can smash up several businesses without charge and, later, represent a client in front of a judge who it turns out is his father you may relax and perhaps, as I did, get a lot of laughs from it. Although Edwards was not, at least officially, the writer, Blind Date feels like a Blake Edwards picture, especially in the elaborate last third, and there are wonderful surprises for those paying attention, as when during a wedding ceremony the judge played with dyspeptic irritation by William Daniels snarls at his butler to shoot his incessantly barking Doberman and, a couple of minutes later, we hear a distant gunshot, which goes unnoticed by the guests, and uncommented on. The surprise of the delayed effect is as large as our hilarity at the filmmakers’ audacity.
King of Hearts (Le Roi de cœur) (1966) The captivating Philippe de Broca war-fable starring Alan Bates, given a glorious restoration in 2018 by Cohen Media Group.
Paint Your Wagon (1969) There was probably no way, at the time of its release, for this Lerner and Loewe musical about the 1849 California gold rush to get a fair evaluation because everyone knew how much was spent on it; budgeted at $10 million it eventually cost the struggling Paramount Pictures twice that, at a time when a million dollars was actual money. The critics were aware of the cost overruns, and of the protracted Oregon shooting schedule — of the general spectacle of American movie studios hurling good money after bad, in obscene amounts, for ever more bloated musicals, few of which made a profit and even fewer of which (Oliver!, Funny Girl, Darling Lili, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Sweet Charity) were any good. In the case of Paint Your Wagon, the manic-depressive Joshua Logan was stuck for months in the literal wilderness, with a cast of hundreds and a makeshift Western town he first had to build, then destroy in a spectacular fashion. He was also saddled with a producer who was not only the show’s lyricist and author of the Broadway book but the man with whom he had made another disastrous adaptation (Camelot) two years earlier and who, after entrusting Paddy Chayefsky to put together a new, hipper, screenplay, one involving a (heterosexual) ménage à trois, which he then (out of jealousy? insecurity? sheer perversity?) rewrote himself, to its diminution. Both Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood signed up on the basis of the Chayefsky screenplay and both were astounded to find much of what they had loved removed by Lerner’s fine Italian hand. (Chayefsky retained an “adaptation” credit but the screenplay itself is credited solely to Lerner.) Marvin gave up The Wild Bunch for this, so one can only imagine his reaction to the new lines that were filmed, although I hasten to add that you can detect Chayefsky’s unique way with a monologue, especially a rhetorical one, in several of the speeches that remain in the movie: Jean Seberg’s wedding-night monologue is one, and Marvin’s “let’s all be married” speech at the end of the first act is another.
Those names are worth pondering: Lee Marvin. Clint Eastwood. Jean Seberg. Stars who didn’t sing, in a big-budget musical. That was the madness abroad in the land in those days, when the likes of Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave were routinely called upon to carry a musical. Eastwood, at least, could more or less carry a tune, and had an appealing, unemphatic, slightly jazz-flavored way with a lyric. Marvin got, of all things, a Top 10 European hit out his melancholy, whiskey-laced rendition of “Wand’rin’ Star.” Eastwood had to strain too much in the higher registers for his “I Talk to the Trees” to land as sweetly as it should have, but he did rather well by “I Still See Elisa” and, especially, “Gold Fever,” one of several new songs on which Lerner collaborated with André Previn, whom he did his best to drive insane. (Speaking of not knowing when to quit: Previn then allowed himself to be driven even madder writing songs with Lerner for the Broadway musical Coco starring yet another non-singer, Katharine Hepburn. What an era. No wonder Hair seemed so fresh to people then.) Seberg was dubbed, by Anita Gordon, on her single number, the evocative, Previn-composed “A Million Miles Away Behind the Door” which contains one of my two favorite song lyrics: There’s so much space between the waiting heart and whispered word/It’s never heard.† Harve Presnell is, thankfully, on hand to sing a hair-raising version of “They Call the Wind Maria” (Pauline Kael: “Where did he come from?”) and I have always like Nelson Riddle’s orchestrations of the songs, except for the one we hear when Marvin sings “The First Thing You Know” and which feels like a last-minute demand from someone to “make it sound more like a musical-comedy song!” The banjo-and-harmonica arrangement on the soundtrack album is much simpler, and more relaxed. I assume Riddle preferred it.
Lerner can, I suppose, be excused to a degree on the grounds that he was being given daily injections of “vitamins” by the notorious Max Jacobson, put up in Oregon at Paramount expense, and was probably not in complete possession of his mind. Logan later revealed the extent of his own manic-depression, and, again, one supposes he couldn’t help making a mess of things. But where was everyone else? The wonder is that anything entertaining came out of it, yet the movie is much more enjoyable than it had a right to be, Ray Walton’s appalling performance notwithstanding. William A. Fraker’s cinematography was roundly condemned at the time of the picture’s release for being as muddy as the streets of “No-Name City,” but on the recent Kino Blu-ray, looks awfully good. (The 4K disc emphasizes the mud. Why is it so hard to get these color balances correct?) Superfluous side-note: I’ve always been amused that someone — Chayefsky, possibly — plunked Horace Tabor down in No-Name City, in the person of William O’Connell, complete with prince-nez and fastidious Boston Brahman accent. Tabor, the noted Leadville, Colorado silver miner and magnate, became one of the three principals in another musical piece, the Douglas Moore/John LaTouche opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, but wasn’t in the West in 1849, and if he had been, would have been all of 18 or 19.
I used to refer to Paint Your Wagon as a guilty-pleasure. I no longer do. The phrase is not in my personal vocabulary now. If a picture provides enough basic entertainment, relatively brightly, with some talent expressed behind the camera and in front of it, and doesn’t embarrass you or insult your intelligence while you’re watching, it isn’t “guilty” anything; God knows there are enough truly shitty movies out there that don’t even give you the modicum amount of those criteria, and they routinely make millions.
Stranger at My Door (1956) An interesting little B-Western with pretentions that, despite the way it pushes its conventional Christian piety, has the virtues of an intelligent script, vivid acting, accomplished direction and photography, and brevity; at 85 minutes, it is no shorter nor longer than it should be. A bank-robber on the run from the law (Skip Homeier) hides out with the family of a frontier minister (Macdonald Carey) who sees in him a project for redemption. The preacher has a young son (Stephen Wootton) and a newish wife (Patricia Medina) the outlaw tries to get around by claiming she isn’t cut out to be a minister’s spouse, and he reads her rather well at that: Medina seems more dance-hall floozie than pious churchwoman, and the camera is as fascinated with her bust as Homeier’s outlaw is.‡ Although Barry Shipman’s dialogue is occasionally a bit on the nose, it’s often remarkably honest even while pushing that Judeo-Christian through-line rather insistently. William Witney’s direction, like Bud Thackery’s black-and-white cinematography, is sharp and clean, and the cast seizes its opportunities without recourse to overdoing things. There are, however, some moments of bad back-projection that betray the picture’s budget limitations, and when the little boy’s dog is injured, the child pretty obviously rescues a stuffed animal, and a stiff one at that.
A secondary redemption narrative involves the seemingly mad horse sold to the minister by Slim Pickens (that’ll teach him) and it’s here that the picture soars off into realms of surrealist imagery as the horse fixes its ire first on one character (or animal; the dog also comes in for some menacing) and then another. How this horse was trained to perform as it does, and as convincingly, is one of the great mysteries of the Hollywood past, but you’ll seldom see a more terrifying specter in a Western than this violently-inclined equine maniac.
Gambit (1966) Beginning with the unexpected success of the blacklisted American writer-director Jules Dassin’s Rififi and 1955, and accelerating steadily after the Peter Stone/Stanley Donen Charade in 1963, there was an explosion of caper-thrillers and comedies, many but by no means all composed of a single intriguing word (the original French title for Rififi was Du rififi chez les hommes): Everything from, on the higher end, The Pink Panther, Arabesque, Mirage, How to Steal a Million, Who’s Minding the Mint? and Hot Millions to Topkapi and Ocean’s Eleven in the middle, to, in the dregs, Assault on a Queen, The Italian Job and Caprice. Gambit placed near the end of the original cycle and while it was modestly budgeted — except for a few fleeting glimpses of Hong Kong, most of it was shot at Universal Studios (or, in one hilarious case, Santa Barbara subbing for the Riviera) — didn’t make much money anyway. Too bad, because the picture, charmingly written by Jack Davies and (of all people) Alvin Sargent, expertly directed by Ronald Neame and winningly played out by Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine and Herbert Lom, is consistently appealing. The posters suggested to contemporary ticket-buyers that it was okay to give away the ending, but not the beginning, and it’s in that 26-minute stretch that I most detect the hand of the story’s originator, Sidney Carroll, author of, in the comic Western A Big Hand for the Little Lady, perhaps the most satisfying surprise ending I’ve ever seen.
The then-98 year old Neame in his commentary on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray says it was MacLaine who suggested her character remain silent throughout the extended phony-opening, which is in keeping with what one hears about her instincts and intelligence as an actress, although as she plays an Amerasian dance-hall girl, the entire enterprise would doubtless be considered intolerably racist today, as would the casting of Lom as a Middle Eastern millionaire, although for my part I don’t think I’ve never seen this wonderful character actor look more strikingly handsome than he does here. Speaking of commentaries: Avoid the second set on the Kino disc, by three nonentities who show off their collective ignorance by repeatedly confusing Sargent with Arthur Laurents, alleging first that he wrote the Gambit script for MacLaine, which Neame in no way corroborates and second that Sargent (not Laurents) did the same with The Turning Point… which was not only not written for MacLaine but was also not written by Sargent. Continuing on this weird tract the three movie stooges on the commentary further declare, with the confidence of the ignoramus whose thought process is entirely unclouded by fact, that Sargent also wrote Laurents’ The Way We Were! Needless to say after that, I did not follow these roaring fools any further.
Among the myriad pleasures Gambit offers are the comic interplay between the proletarian MacLaine and the phlegmatic Caine, the surprisingly winning score by the highly variable Maurice Jarre and the expert lighting and widescreen cinematography by Clifford Stine, of which I have appended a representative sample above, a small masterpiece of character contrast.
*For The Terminator, Cameron cynically plagiarized elements (particularly the opening) from Harlan Ellison’s short story “Soldier from Tomorrow” and from Ellison’s own adaptation of it, as “Soldier,” as a 1964 episode of “The Outer Limits.” He even said to a friend of Ellison’s who asked where the plot came from, “Oh, I ripped off a couple of Harlan Ellison stories.”
†My other favorite, from “Skylark,” lyric by Johnny Mercer: Faint as a will-o-the-wisp/Crazy as a loon/Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon... although I suppose we’re not allowed to sing that one any longer.
‡It says something about this performer, formerly a child actor, that when he achieved his majority he had his name legally changed from “Skippy” to “Skip.” That’s progress, I suppose, of a sort.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 