Sunday, January 12, 2014
Love Hurts
Why do we always hurt the ones we love?
Anyone who’s been a part of any kind of significant relationship, whether of the familial or romantic variety, has been given to ponder the paradoxical nature of those thorny, forged-in-fire entanglements. As evidenced by the brutal, bruising verbal brickbats the family members of August: Osage County lob at each other’s heads like hand grenades, no one can inflict quite as much damage as one’s nearest and dearest. This axiom may be most commonly applied in reference to human interaction, but it holds equally true when considering a writer and his work.
Anyone who’s ever put pen to paper — or, in this modern age, spent hours staring at a blinking monitor — knows that the peculiar bond between a scribe and his prose can be as complex and as intimate as that of any of the human variety. Many playwrights and novelists have likened their labors to the birthing process, and discuss their work in the same way that parents talk about their children. By that definition, writers who do harm to their own creations can be charged — at least, on some metaphysical plane — with child abuse.
This is not to cast aspersions on the character of Tracy Letts, who has adapted his Pulitzer Prize-winning play for the screen, and whom I suspect is only minimally to blame for what has happened to it (nothing good) en route. Still and all, it begs the eternal question: Why do we hurt the ones we love? As far as selling a book or a play to the movies is concerned, nine times out of ten, the road to perdition is paved with good intentions.
Rather than veering too far off course into the realm of psychoanalytic introspection, it may be best to consider the history of the property in question. August: Osage County premiered in the summer of 2007 at The Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. The production subsequently moved to Broadway in the fall of 2008, with most of its original cast intact. It remained ensconced on The Beltway for a year and a half — a rare feat for a non-musical production not featuring a movie or TV star — picking up virtually every major award along the way. I saw the production three times over the course of its run — anyone familiar with Broadway pricing will recognize that this represents a sacrifice — and reviewed it for this site in 2009. It is not an overstatement to say that, then as now, I regard it as one of the highlights of my life’s theatergoing experience. Admittedly, I am not the ideal person to review the film adaptation, since I cannot approach the material with any kind of objectivity. Nor would I want to. Even if it’s a fundamental part of our nature to hurt the ones we love, it doesn’t follow that we enjoy doing it.
Nevertheless, when the owner and proprietor of this blog calls me up for active duty, I do my best to answer the call. In interest of full disclosure, I must state that while I tried to approach the assignment with an open mind, personal prejudice (did I mention how much I loved the show on Broadway?) has gotten the better of me to some degree. Oddly enough, without that pre-existing prejudice, my response toward the film might have been even less felicitous than it is now.
It’s bad form when reviewers reference other critics’ opinions to reinforce and/or validate their own position. The mere act of doing so suggests lack of confidence in one’s opinion. That said, one of the things I’ve been struck (and depressed) by is the manner in which many non-theatergoing critics have suggested, based solely on their reaction to the film version, that August: Osage County is not, and in fact never could have been, much of a play. The critic for The New York Times, while allowing that that the material may have been “mishandled…(in its) transition from stage to screen,” pondered whether that transition may have “exposed weak spots in (Letts’) dramatic architecture and bald spots in his writing.” On the opposite coast, the scribe for The Los Angeles Times took it a step further in declaring that while he had not seem the stage incarnation, “nothing about this film version makes me regret that choice.”
I suspect many people on the receiving end of years’ worth of glowing testimonials will react in much the same fashion. Anyone experiencing director John Wells’ hamfisted, ultimately rather conventional Hollywood treatment of family dysfunction without a suitable frame of reference may well be given to wonder, “Is this what all the fuss was about?” Advance reports suggested that the filmmakers made a deliberate effort to brighten things up, even going so far as to tack on a happy ending. That’s not the case. While truncated, the play has not been radically revised. In a certain sense, that’s good news. The bad news is that fundamental fidelity to the text doesn’t bring this baby snugly into port. You could rewrite every line and still arrive at something that felt closer in spirit and purpose to what Letts created for the stage than what Wells and company have come up with. As played for cozy camp by a cast of Hollywood heavyweights, the material has not been softened as much as it has been neutered.
For a sharp-fanged predator used to trolling the wild with confidence, this has an effect of bland domestication, despite the fact that its path through the jungle remains essentially the same. What sets the plot in motion is the mysterious disappearance of Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), the craggy, alcoholic patriarch of an extended clan that includes three daughters, one grandchild and an assortment of in-laws. A noted poet whose output didn’t extend beyond one fledgling success, Beverly has a habit of going missing without so much a heads up to his nearest and dearest. This time, however, his absence has an unmistakable air of finality. No one can be quite certain whether he’s alive or dead, but the likelihood of his coming back seems slim to none. One by one, the far-flung Weston children, two of whom have wisely chosen to get themselves as far away from Mom and Dad as humanly possible, descend upon the family homestead en masse to try to piece together exactly what happened to Dad, and what in hell to do about mother Violet (Meryl Streep), a chain-smoking, pill-popping, cancer-riddled gorgon who shows no signs of becoming more manageable now that her chief antagonist has vanished without a trace. Leading the charge is pragmatic, sardonic Barbara (Julia Roberts, keeping that million-dollar smile firmly under wraps), who isn’t about to let Mom off the hook without answering a few questions. Of course, when you start digging for the truth, there’s no telling what sort horrors you may uncover. As it turns out, there are good and plenty festering away in the crypt of family secrets, and Violet is perfectly willing to invite them out to dance.
Even as I lavished praise upon the play and the production in my original review, I did so with the caveat that August: Osage County was not a revolutionary work of theater, nor even a particularly original one. Borrowing liberally from Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman and Sam Shepard, among others, the play harks back to the classic traditions of American drama while reinvigorating the tried-and-true machinery of melodrama with brazen, jolting theatricality. The chief mistake Wells has made for the purposes of the film version – besides some critically misjudged casting choices — is in his confusion of theatricality with camp. He encourages his cast members to go for the easy laughs whenever they can, and irons out the characters’ idiosyncrasies to the point that their behavior seems almost quaint. When Violet and Barbara literally come to blows in the climatic dinner table scene, it’s like watching Joan Collins and Linda Evans wrestling on the marble foyer at Carrington Manor. It’s outrageous, to be sure, but not particularly shocking. Without the emotional resonance that original stage players Deanna Dunagan and Amy Morton brought to the proceedings, under the skillful direction of Anna D. Shapiro, what you’re left with feels more along the lines of a live action cartoon.
While the sins of the director shouldn't be heaped at feet of the playwright, Letts' screenplay adaptation doesn’t help matters much. The clunky efforts at opening up the piece for the screen, taking the action out of doors at select intervals, never feel like an organic extension of the action. The element of claustrophobia that contributed so much to the proceedings onstage, in the rambling Pawhuska, Okla., farmhouse with its shades drawn tight to keep out light and air, has been jettisoned in favor of woebegone glimpses of parched prairies. Certain nuances inevitably fall by the wayside when condensing a 3 hour play into a 2 hour film, and while the cuts do not fundamentally alter the dramatic structure, the action occasionally feels rushed, as if the filmmakers were working on a limited budget and needed to hit all the major plot points before running out of film stock. Some characters have been whittled down to near non-existence (the Native American housekeeper, here played by Misty Upham, has been reduced to a virtual extra), while the participation of others has been severely curtailed so as not to distract from the main event of the Streep-Roberts smackdown.
About that smackdown. Judging by the posters for the film, which flaunt a scrunch-faced, teeth-baring Ms. Roberts wrestling a very harassed-looking Ms. Streep to the ground, the battle royal between two living legends already has been designated as the chief selling point for this film. I won’t argue the point. The tattered Baby Jane template still has some blood coursing through its skeletal remains, and I suspect it isn’t just camp-starved audiences who will pony up the cash to see the two biggest female stars of their respective generations going at each other like a pair of fabulously plumed Japanese fighting fish. Both actresses seem to have taken their cues from that WWE poster aesthetic, and while the ham they serve up may be to many people’s taste, the meal as a whole is less than nourishing.
At this point, we’re really not supposed to say anything bad about Meryl Streep, since certain things are to be accepted without questioning. Remember that thing they taught us in school about Democracy being the best form of government? Well, even if a few dozen Tea Party crackpots can force a complete shutdown of the entire federal shebang, you can’t fault the model, God dammit. Likewise, I’ve discovered that in certain quarters, if you broach any contradiction to the edict that Meryl Streep is The Greatest Actress Who Ever Was, people will react as if you said something bad about America. I’ve spoken this blasphemy before, and I’ve been unfriended on Facebook for doing it. I’m not exactly sure why certain folks seem to have so little sense of proportion when it comes to Our Lady of the Accents, but this is not to imply that their insistence upon her genius is entirely lacking in merit. Ms. Streep is unquestionably great. She has given some of the best and most memorable performances of the last 30-odd years. That her talent level is through the roof, residing somewhere in the stratosphere, is beyond reproof. I suspect she’s abundantly aware of this.
It isn’t that Streep has become complacent as a performer; she doesn’t just coast on her abilities, though at times, she seems to be responding more to her characters as Great Acting Opportunities than as flesh-and-blood human beings. By default, she is undoubtedly the best thing in August: Osage County. Her performance is the most finely honed and easily the most convincing of the bunch, even if the favored mannerisms and inflections are starting to look so precise and polished that they might as well be kept under glass at Tiffany’s. Where the performance loses credibility (and probably, this is the director’s fault as much as hers) is in her rendering of Violet as a lip-smacking Diva turn. Part of the fun of watching Deanna Dunagan onstage was the slow reveal of Violet’s true nature; behind the drug-induced haze and tortured insecurities lie an ineffably shrewd, twisted, Machiavellian mind, sharp as a tack and ready to do battle. By contrast, Streep takes to the screen like she’s warming up to play Eleanor of Aquitaine. When it’s crystal clear from the outset exactly who’s pulling the strings, a vital element of suspense is lost. Frankly, given who’s she up against, it isn’t as though she has much in the way of competition, anyway.
Lest anyone misunderstand my intentions, I must duly assert that I am not a snob when it comes to acting pedigree. Range and/or skill set, whether acquired by classical or method training, does not necessarily place one person on a higher pedestal than anyone else. Talent is talent, and I’ve always had a soft spot for performers who can make assembly-line crap compulsively watchable by sheer force of personality. Julia Roberts has her limitations as an actor, and her fair share of detractors (and boy, are they emphatic), but she’s also given some of the great movie star performances of her era. It’s not a knock on Audrey Hepburn to say that she probably didn’t have the chops for Albee, or that Barbra Streisand might have been absolutely disastrous in Pinter. Nor should it be perceived as a negative reflection on Ms. Roberts to say that what is required of her in this context is simply beyond her abilities. Unfortunately, that negative balance takes a lot of the charge out of the material, and gives the mother-daughter skirmish the appearance of a lopsided battle.
On stage, Amy Morton’s cornhusk-dry delivery, powerful physicality and searing emotional transparency went a long way towards revealing the deep reserves of anger and pain which informed Barbara’s metamorphosis from defeated, resentful onlooker to fully engaged combatant. While Barbara is nominally the protagonist, she’s not really the hero. That she is very much her mother’s daughter, as damaged and damaging as Violet and with the same capacity for unleashing icy torrents of cold, hard fury, is made abundantly clear as soon as Mama starts turning up the heat. You have to believe, as one character asserts, that in spite of surface appearances, there’s “no difference” between the two. Roberts endeavors diligently to embody the complexities and contradictions of the role, but going to the dark places is not the most comfortable place to be when one has made a career out of flooding the screen with sunshine. She overcompensates by punching up her sassy, feisty Erin Brockovich shtick, but what worked like gangbusters in a miniskirt and push-up-bra does not here dimension make. It’s an uncharacteristically flat, colorless performance. There’s never any risk of Barbara turning into her mother, not does it ever seems as though she is willing or able to take Violet to the mats.
No one else meandering through the din makes much of an impression, although a few of the performers — notably Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale and Juliette Lewis, who brings some nice flashes of hysteria to her marginalized role as the most clueless and least functional of the three sisters — are at least better suited to the material. While Benedict Cumberbatch has carved out a nice niche for himself in recent years as the thinking girl’s sex symbol, and Ewan McGregor likely will remain boyishly handsome well into his 60s, their presence here as, respectively, a sad-sack, slow-witted underachiever and an unprepossessing middle-age college professor, defies all measure of reason. Julianne Nicholson, Dermot Mulroney and Abigail Breslin are among those also caught in the cross-hairs, although everyone not named Meryl or Julia is essentially treated as window-dressing. While it’s something we’ve come to expect of the movies, casting so many extremely photogenic performers was probably a mistake. Quiet desperation, romantic neglect and midlife crisis have never looked more red-carpet-ready.
That red carpet will doubtless unfurl in the months to come for at least one member, and possibly more, of August: Osage County’s creative team. Tracy Letts may reap some of the rewards for his contribution here. Of course, nominations are nice, and so is the money…but reading between the lines of the playwright’s recent comments to The New York Times, he’s not entirely satisfied with the finished product. A writer’s life is one of compromise when the camera comes into the picture, and based on Letts’ statements, he probably realized that trying to maintain too much control over the film version would have been fighting a losing battle. At least, by doing the adaptation himself, he could still score a few points and protect some of what needed to be preserved. Why do we hurt the ones we love? If August: Osage County is any indication, the answer may be to prevent others from hurting them instead.
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Labels: 10s, A. Hepburn, Albee, Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Harold Pinter, Julia Roberts, O'Neill, Shepard, Streep, Streisand, Theater
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Thursday, December 15, 2011
“Sitzen machen!”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
The very first Billy Wilder film I watched as part of my burgeoning film education wasn’t one of his acknowledged classics such as Double Indemnity (1944) or Sunset Blvd. (1950) — or even Some Like it Hot (1959) or The Apartment (1960) but a movie I consider “second-tier” Wilder, the 1961 Cold War comedy One, Two, Three. Keep in mind that I don’t refer to the film as second-tier because I dislike it or am trying to denigrate the work; it’s just that with the passage of time, the topicality of One, Two, Three hasn’t particularly worn well, something that I’ve also noticed in Ninotchka (1939), a Wilder-scripted comedy (but directed by Ernst Lubitsch) whose plot and themes are revisited in the later feature. (One, Two, Three also contains echoes of the filmmaker’s earlier Sabrina, the 1954 romantic comedy starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden.)
The dated political content of One, Two, Three doesn’t do it any favors, but this is nevertheless going to be an enthusiastic review of a film that debuted in motion picture theaters 50 years ago on this date. “Second-tier” Wilder is miles and away better than the best movie helmed by any director today, and with his longtime partner I.A.L. “Izzy” Diamond, Billy crafted a fast, frenetic and funny farce (based on a 1929 play, Egy, kettö, három, by Ferenc Molnár) that still can leave an audience breathless with laughter. The icing on this cinematic cake is that, before he returned briefly to movies for Ragtime in 1981, One, Two, Three served as the penultimate cinematic swan song for the legendary James Cagney.
C.R. “Mac” MacNamara (Cagney) is head of operations for Coca-Cola in West Berlin, a month or two before the closing of the Brandenburg Gate (and subsequent construction of the Berlin Wall). Company man Mac is extremely loyal to the Pause That Refreshes, and has been working diligently to advance himself, with an eye on assuming the post of European operations in London by shrewdly brokering a deal to introduce the soft drink to the Soviet Union. (Mac was formerly in charge of Coca-Cola’s interests in the Middle East but a mishap involving Benny Goodman resulted in Mac’s demotion after the bottling plant was destroyed in a riot.) He’s scheduled to meet Soviet representatives Peripetchikoff (Leon Askin), Borodenko (Ralf Wolter) and Mishkin (Peter Capell) to discuss introducing the soft drink behind the Iron Curtain, and is juggling that conference with plans to further his “language lessons” with luscious secretary Fräulein Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver).
The roguish MacNamara is planning to take advantage of his wife Phyllis’ (Arlene Francis) scheduled trip to Venice with their two children to dally with Ingeborg, but those plans are put on hold when Mac receives a call from his boss, Wendell P. Hazeltine (Howard St. John), in Atlanta. Hazeltine’s daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin) is en route to Berlin, and he’s entrusted Mac to keep close tabs on her since Scarlett is a bit of a shameless flirt (despite being only 17). As an example of her hot-blooded tempestuousness, Mac and Phyllis meet her at the airport just in time to find her awarding herself as a lottery prize to the flight crew (the winner is a man called Pierre, prompting Phyllis to dub him “Lucky Pierre”). What starts out as a two-week assignment stretches into two months, but Mac is pleased that he’s keeping Scarlett on a tight leash.
On the day before the Hazeltines travel to Berlin to collect their daughter, Scarlett turns up missing. Mac learns from his chauffeur (Karl Lieffen) that the girl has been bribing him to let her off at the Brandenburg Gate every night to allow her to cross the border into East Berlin. Devastated by this news, MacNamara expresses relief when Scarlett turns up at his office, but then is hit by a streetcar when she announces that she’s been spending all her time with an East German Communist named Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), whose political philosophy fills Mac with utter revulsion. The problem for Mac is that the fling between Otto and Scarlett has gone beyond mere puppy love — they tied the knot in East Berlin — something that will no doubt go over with her parents like flatulence at a funeral. The devious MacNamara arranges for the young Commie to be picked up by the East German authorities after they find a “Russkie Go Home” balloon affixed to his motorcycle’s exhaust pipe and a cuckoo clock (that plays “Yankee Doodle” on the hour) wrapped in a copy of The Wall Street Journal in his sidecar.
Mac’s machinations even go as far as to arranging for the couple’s marriage license to disappear from the official record, and he gloats about his triumph to a furious Phyllis, who has finally had enough of her husband’s neglect of their marriage in his pursuit of Coke advancement. The popping of champagne corks is put on hold when Scarlett faints after hearing of Otto’s arrest. An examination by a physician reveals that the girl has a Communist “bun in the oven!” Racing against an ever-ticking clock before the Hazeltines touch down in Berlin, Mac manages to spring Otto and then embarks on an extreme makeover of the hostile Bolshevik to transform him into someone whom Scarlett’s parents will approve. Against all odds, McNamars’s scheme comes off without a hitch, but his dreams of taking over as head of Coke’s European office are dashed when Hazeltine announces the job will go to his new son-in-law! Kicked upstairs to a position in the home office in Atlanta, Mac will reconcile with Phyllis and will hopefully live happy ever after.
Because the emphasis in Ninotchka is primarily on the romance between stars Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas, that film hasn’t dated nearly as badly as One, Two, Three, whose jibes at Cold War politics make it more of a period piece, and is likely to appeal mostly to the history majors in the audience. (Wilder’s cynicism also comes to the fore in this film in that you never really believe the romance between Scarlett and Otto. They have to stay married because there’s a “bouncing baby Bolshevik” on the way.) But if you’re able to put its topicality on a back burner, there is much to enjoy in the film; it is a spirited farce, buoyed by the participation of Cagney as the main character of C.R. MacNamara. Mac is a typical Wilder hero: not the most admirable man (he’s cheating on his wife and comes across as a bit of a jerk) but an individual who rises to the occasion when faced with a crisis. Cagney, whose screen performances were usually marked by his established persona as a fast-talking wise guy, is a marvel to watch in this film, barking out orders and, in the words of a reviewer for Time magazine, “swatting flies with a pile driver.”
Cagney did not have an easy time making the film. He was no spring chicken at the time of its production, and having to spout Wilder’s rat-a-tat dialogue at a furious pace was often difficult, particularly in one scene where the director insisted on Jimmy’s completing it in one take. Cagney was tripped up continually by the line, “Where is the morning coat and striped trousers?” It was never explained to his satisfaction why Billy refused to let him paraphrase the dialogue, and so it took 57 takes to get it done (which might explain why the finished product comes off as a little mechanical). Cagney also was not enamored of co-star Buchholz and his scene-stealing antics; Jimmy had experienced a similar incident when making Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and had trouble with character actor S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall upstaging him in a scene, but he overlooked it because Sakall “was an incorrigible old ham who was quietly and respectfully put in his place by [director] Michael Curtiz.” But if Wilder hadn’t exercised his director’s prerogative and discouraged Horst to stop with the same, Cagney “would have been forced to knock him on his ass, which I would have very much enjoyed doing.”
All in all, the experience of making One, Two, Three drained Cagney and made him realize that he’d rather be enjoying retirement, and upon the movie’s completion, the actor settled in for a second career as a gentleman farmer (though he did narrate a TV special and a 1968 Western, Arizona Bushwhackers, in the interim). He was coaxed out of retirement for a small role in Ragtime in 1981 (as the police commissioner, his last big-screen appearance and a final reunion with his longtime chum/movie co-star Pat O’Brien), and an additional role in a 1984 TV movie Terrible Joe Moran where he played a retired boxer forced to used a wheelchair, but still a fighter to the core. Having suffered a stroke affected Cagney's performance somewhat and it was the final project before his passing in 1986.
In watching One, Two, Three, it almost seems like Wilder and Diamond presciently knew it would be James Cagney’s last significant silver screen work, what with all the in-jokes and references pertaining to the actor sprinkled throughout. There’s the aforementioned cuckoo clock (Cagney’s best actor Oscar was awarded for his role as George M. Cohan in Dandy), but there’s also a scene in which Jimmy picks up a grapefruit half and moves menacingly toward Buchholz’s Otto (shades of The Public Enemy!) and a funny cameo by Red Buttons as an Army MP who imitates Cagney while having a conversation with Jimmy’s MacNamara. Of course, the self-referential jokes are a staple of Wilder’s film comedies; at one point in the movie Cagney cries out “Mother of mercy, is this the end of little [sic] Rico?” as a nod toward Edward G. Robinson’s memorable last line in Little Caesar (something Billy also did in Some Like It Hot, in which George Raft asks a coin-flipping Edward G. Robinson, Jr., “Where’d you pick up that cheap trick?”).
Wilder also recycled a line used by Bogart in Sabrina, “I wish I were in hell with my back broken” (a variation of this also turns up in Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo) and in fact, borrowed Sabrina’s “switcheroo” ending (right down to the hat and umbrella) and use of the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” (only it’s sung in German in One, Two, Three). Music is at the center of many of the gags in the film; in addition to “Bananas,” comic set pieces use Aram Khachaturian's “Sabre Dance” (the main theme that accompanies MacNamara’s breakneck activities, described by Wilder and Diamond to be played “110 miles an hour on the curves…140 miles an hour on the straightways”), Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”
Though watching Cagney go through his paces is the main draw of One, Two, Three, his co-stars also rise to the occasion. Arlene Francis is probably best known as a panelist on the longtime TV show What’s My Line?, but she provides solid support as the acid-tongued, long-suffering Phyllis (“Yes, Mein Führer!”). The real-life antagonism Cagney had for Buchholz works to the film’s advantage, of course, but Horst has a certain goofy charm that makes his Otto likable despite his political leanings, and Pamela Tiffin is delightful as the ditzy Scarlett — many a classic movie buff has wondered why, despite high-profile showcases in films such as Summer and Smoke (1961) and Harper (1966), Tiffin’s film career never reached its full potential. Fans of Hogan’s Heroes will recognize Leon Askin as Comrade Peripetchikoff, but you can also hear Askin’s fellow Hogan player John “Sgt. Schultz” Banner as the voice of two of the characters in the film — in fact, when I watched One, Two, Three the other day, it was the first time I noticed that the voice for Count von Droste Schattenburg (the aristocrat who “adopts” Otto, played by Hubert von Meyerinck) is dubbed by character great Sig Ruman!
Jules White, the head of Columbia Studios’ comedy shorts department, once described his directorial style as “mak(ing) those pictures move so fast that even if the gags didn’t work, the audiences wouldn’t get bored.” Wilder and Diamond upped that ante with One, Two, Three; the film not only moves at lightning speed, the gags remain funny today. (My particular favorite has MacNamara calling one of the Russians “Karl Marx,” and when the comrade gives Fräulein Ingeborg a generous swat on her fanny, he quips, “I said Karl Marx not Groucho.”) In Cameron Crowe’s book Conversations with Wilder, the legendary writer-director observed: “The general idea was, let's make the fastest picture in the world…And yeah, we did not wait, for once, for the big laughs. We went through the big laughs. A lot of lines that needed a springboard, and we just went right through the springboard…” The film may not have been a box-office smash (both in the U.S. or Germany) but the final gag left an impression on me when I first saw it as a kid (“Schlemmer!”), and 50 years later watching the great Jimmy Cagney rush pell mell through farcical circumstances beyond his control remains a Wilder devotee’s delight.
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Labels: 60s, A. Hepburn, Bogart, Books, Cagney, Curtiz, Edward G., Garbo, Holden, Lubitsch, Movie Tributes, Nonfiction, Oscars, Raft, Television, Wilder
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Wednesday, October 05, 2011
A Real Phony
By Damian Arlyn
What was it about Audrey Hepburn? She was beautiful. There's no doubt about that. She made being natural and vulnerable in front of the camera seem so effortless. She had grace, charm, poise, charisma, and could seem both earnestly innocent and incredibly sexy at the same time. Yet these qualities have all belonged to countless other actresses both before and after her, so what made her different? Having re-watched two of her movies recently, I was reminded of what a truly unique screen presence she was. The impression she managed to leave on audiences was far more than merely the sum of these parts. Regardless of the genre she was working in there was something strangely elusive and sparklingly radiant about her. As the cliché goes, one can't take one's eyes off her. She commanded attention not by doing a lot (as other actors tend to do) but by doing very little. It's easy to see how a whole industry has sprung up around her, and yet somehow (almost 20 years after her death) she even manages to rise above that. I mention all this because one of her most iconic films, Breakfast at Tiffany's, celebrates its 50th anniversary today and although it is one of my all-time favorite films, I can admit that whatever greatness it does possess comes mostly because of her immeasurable contribution, which is far more than purely an aesthetic one. Her presence alters the whole approach the filmmakers took to the material and her absence no doubt would've affected the film's now classic status. Without Audrey, Tiffany's still would've been a good movie, but with her, it's a terrific one.
The role Audrey played (famously known as Holly Golightly but, as the film elucidates, that's not her real name) first began as a character in a Truman Capote novella. While I have not personally read the book, my understanding is that it's much darker and more provocative than the Paramount's movie adaptation (the character of "Fred" is homosexual, there is no happy ending, etc). As it is, the film still deals with very adult subject matter but it handles it in a very restrained and accessible manner. Because of that approach, the casting of Audrey Hepburn as the naive but worldly "call girl" (called by Capote as an "American geisha") works. Capote apparently wanted the sluttier Marilyn Monroe for the part and although it might've made it closer in spirit to its gritty source material, that choice would've severely altered the alchemy of the finished film.
From the film's opening sequence where a gorgeous Audrey stands on a deserted street eating breakfast while gazing longingly at a Tiffany's store window to the emotionally wrenching climactic kiss in the rain, it is clear that Breakfast at Tiffany's is pure Hollywood fantasy. Only in a fantasy could such a scared, lonely and tragic character seem so elegant, so glamorous and so engaging. It surprises me (and my wife) how many women fantasize about being Audrey's Golightly character (wearing her outfits and so forth) presumably not realizing that within the context of the film, it's a facade. She is not stylish, she's pathetic. She's not strong, she's sad. As Martin Balsam states in the film: "She's a phony," but because she actually believes in the illusion "she's a real phony."
Surrounding Audrey is a very capable cast. A young, handsome George Peppard plays Paul Varjak, the down-on-his-luck writer currently being supported by his "decorator," with ease and confidence. The always reliable Patricia Neal was the classy (and deliciously frosty) Emily Failenson, Paul's married companion/benefactor. Buddy Ebsen turns in a brief, but heartbreaking, performance as Holly's former husband, Marty Balsam plays Holly's long-suffering agent and, in one of my all-time favorite "bit" parts of any movie, a memorable John McGiver shows up as a very understanding Tiffany's salesman who, in spite of his cold professionalism, pontificates wistfully about how the knowledge that Cracker Jack boxes still contain prizes "gives one a feeling of solidarity with the past."
The film's solitary sour note performance-wise comes from Mickey Rooney's buck-toothed, yellow-faced Japanese landlord, Mr. Yunioshi. Originally intended to provide hilarious "comic relief", the clumsy, bad-tempered character is the textbook example of a racist stereotype. Made all the more embarrassing by its sheer gratuitousness, many of the filmmakers have since apologized for the insensitive portrayal, though his scenes did make for a compelling sequence in the 1993 biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story starring Jason Scott Lee. There are, however, other moments of comedy in the film that do work very well. When Holly throws a party in her apartment, for example, we are treated to some very funny vignettes (my favorite of which is the woman who's laughing at her own reflection in the mirror at one point and then when glimpsed later she's crying at it, mascara smearing down her face). Some have commented that these scenes are actually the best in the movie. I don't know that I'd go that far but they do demonstrate Blake Edwards' knack for staging comic set pieces, a talent that would be on full display two years later in his most famous film, The Pink Panther.
Despite Edwards' natural affinity for comedy, he was a competent director of drama as well. Breakfast at Tiffany's and Days of Wine and Roses prove this I think. Furthermore, there is a lightness of touch that Edwards brings to the whole proceedings. Not a subtlety necessarily because Edwards is admittedly not the most subtle of directors (he often paints in very broad strokes whatever genre he chooses to work in), but a nimbleness. Edwards may deal with heavy material, but he doesn't handle it heavily and that characteristic, combined with Audrey's effervescent influence, is what makes Breakfast at Tiffany's so airy and delightful (in contrast, consider that the film originally was going to be directed by John Frankenheimer and imagine what kind of finished product it would've ended up becoming). This is helped in no small way by Henry Mancini's lovely score (another plus of having Edwards as the director since he and Mancini always worked together). In addition to some bouncy jazz pieces and some appropriately emotional cues for the film's more dramatic moments, Mancini created one of the most unforgettable theme songs in the history of cinema in "Moon River." A simple little melody with somewhat corny lyrics and yet, like Audrey herself, somehow the tune manages to transcend its ingredients. The scene where Audrey sits in her window playing the guitar and singing helps to establish its immortality. By now it is almost common knowledge that the studio did not want to keep the song but Audrey forbade them from cutting it ("Over my dead body" were ostensibly her exact words).
When it was released in 1961, Breakfast at Tiffany's was very successful at the box office and relatively well received by critics. Whatever criticisms were aimed at the film, Audrey herself was highly praised for her performance. Nobody could've anticipated, however, the lasting effect the film and its protagonist could have on pop culture. Holly Golightly would become Audrey's most iconic character and the quintessential example of her onscreen appeal. I must confess that the film was my first introduction to Ms. Hepburn and, just as George Peppard did, I fell in love with her almost immediately. She was a true original and I doubt there will ever be another one like her. Her character might've been a "real phony," but she herself was the genuine article.
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Labels: 60s, A. Hepburn, Blake Edwards, Capote, Fiction, Marilyn, Movie Tributes, Patricia Neal
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Friday, August 12, 2011
Living out the unlived lives of their mothers
Gloria Steinem
By Edward Copeland
For the final film in HBO Documentary Films' summer series, the nonfiction movie premiering is short and simple. Gloria: In Her Own Words resembles a collage more than a documentary as feminist icon Gloria Steinem's life gets briefly recounted through both new interview and archival footage.
If anything gets repeated throughout director Peter Kunhardt's film, it's the mantra of young Steinem that her commitment to the women's rights movement beginning around 1970 is about "revolution not reform" leading up to another significant historical event that's been lost to the indifference of time and piss-poor history education in the U.S.: the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality on Aug. 26, 1970, which was the 50th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.
Sprinkled through the hour, many details caught my attention such as when Steinem first arrived in New York in the early 1960s, landlords routinely refused to rent apartments to single women, assuming they lacked the ability to support themselves. One thing that seems odd though is that Steinem said she started out wanting to be a political reporter, but that was nearly unheard of in those days when there's a long list of women political reporters that stretch at least as far back as the 1920s to Lorene Hickok at the Minneapolis Tribune and later with The Associated Press and would have included at the time Steinem sought that career Helen Thomas, who'd been covering Washington since the Eisenhower years and became UPI's White House correspondent under JFK in January 1961. Granted, inequity in pay between male and female reporters would (and still is) an issue and the women reporters had to work their way up to the jobs, but I think Steinem's comment reflects impatience that a new college graduate and novice reporter didn't immediately begin on the beat she aspired to be on, something that rarely happened to journalists of either sex.
One surprising admission from Steinem is that she based her look at the time (mainly the streaks in her hair) and her outlook on not needing a man on Audrey Hepburn's interpretation of Holly Golightly in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, based on Truman Capote's novel.
The documentary hits most of the highlights in Steinem's career and life such as going undercover as a Playboy Bunny in one of the Playboy Clubs and how her 1963 article on the experience basically made her career. It also explains her transformation into an activist when she talks about the abortion she had at 22 but never told anyone about. When she covered a hearing in 1969 where women were demanding the right to have one and Steinem realized that 1 in 3 women either had received an abortion or needed one and she questioned why safe, legal procedures were denied. Soon after, Gloria Steinem the activist was born.
In the archival footage, what took me by surprise was how blatantly many of the big-name newscasters of the day such as Harry Reasoner and Chet Huntley mocked the women's movement or Ms. magazine. When Huntley previews the upcoming Women's Strike, he actually says that the women who are involved "want to be men." Reasoner does a commentary on Steinem's Ms. magazine after it publishes its first issue, predicting it won't last because they've exhausted all the possible topics in the first issue. To Reasoner's credit, when Ms. does end up persevering, he does return to the air with another commentary admitting he was wrong in predicting its demise.
Gloria: In Her Own Words hardly qualifies as a probing, groundbreaking documentary, but it is an informative hour about a woman who made her mark in late 20th century history. It premieres Monday on HBO at 9 p.m. Eastern/Pacific and 8 p.m. Central.
Though a busy schedule and some health issues forced me to miss three installments (Sex Crimes Unit, Hot Coffee and Citizen U.S.A.: A 50 State Road Trip) of the summer documentary series, with a few exceptions, most of the films turned out to be good and, in some cases, magnificent. To close the series, I thought I'd rank the films I saw.
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Labels: 10s, A. Hepburn, Capote, Documentary, HBO, Television
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Thursday, December 16, 2010
Blake Edwards (1922-2010)
Blake Edwards' reputation as a film director seems locked by some in the realm of lowbrow slapstick comedy and, in many cases, not particularly good ones, but Edwards' work as a director and a writer was more multifaceted than that. Born in Tulsa, Okla., in 1922, Edwards died this morning at 88.
True, at his heart he was a clown. A few years ago when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences finally saw fit to bestow an honorary Oscar upon Edwards, he used his acceptance speech as an occasion for a gag, abetted by presenter Jim Carrey, showing up in a wheelchair with a broken leg and making it appear as if it went out of control and crashed through the wall of part of the awards show set. Like many recent honorary Oscar presentations, it was a highlight until the youth hungry, ratings-obsessed execs in charge segregated honorary awards to a nontelevised dinner where movie buffs couldn't celebrate significant players in film history such as Edwards anymore.
His work in the film industry began as a screenwriter in the late '40s with his most notable work probably being the screenplay for 1955's My Sister Eileen starring Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon. In this same period he also did a lot of television work, including creating several shows in the late 1950s, the most famous being Peter Gunn starring Craig Stevens and Richard Diamond, Private Detective starring David Janssen and the legs of one Mary Tyler Moore.
His feature directing debut came in 1955 on the musical Bring Your Smile Along. He directed a few more films but the one that was his first standout was 1959's Operation Petticoat starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis.
In 1961, he helmed the adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn. The following year, he made two films that no one could accuse of being slapstick: Experiment in Terror with Glenn Ford and Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick battling alcoholism.
Though it opened in 1963 elsewhere, the film that would launch his most famous film series didn't open in the U.S. until 1964: Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther. The first followup, A Shot in the Dark, came out the very same year. Edwards became so attached to the series that he kept it going for decades, even after Sellers had died.
Other notable films of the 1960s included The Great Race, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? and The Party.
In 1970, he directed the woman he wed in 1969, Julie Andrews, for the first time in Darling Lili. He tried a Western in 1971 with William Holden in Wild Rovers. He directed the adaptation of the Michael Crichton thriller The Carey Treatment in 1972. In 1974, he directed Omar Sharif and his wife in a romantic drama called The Tamarind Seed.
It wasn't until 1979 that he got out of a Pink Panther rut and introduced the world to Bo Derek in the Dudley Moore comedy 10, which also managed to make composer Ravel's piece "Bolero" popular again.
He followed that up with the wicked Hollywood satire S.O.B. with an all-star cast led by William Holden and including Julie Andrews' first topless scene.
In 1982, he made his last really big hit with Victor/Victoria, earning Andrews an Oscar nomination as best actress. More than a decade later, he tried his hand at turning it into a Broadway musical with terrible results.
Most of his films after that were not worth mentioning, though Micki & Maude with Dudley Moore as a bigamist had its moments and you have to mention Skin Deep since it is the only film with a glow-in-the-dark condom chase scene.
Still, Edwards' resume was far more eclectic than you'd think and he did produce some classics. His only competitive Oscar nomination came for writing the adapted screenplay for Victor/Victoria. He received two Emmy nominations for Peter Gunn, for writing and directing the same episode. He also earned a Directors Guild nomination for Breakfast at Tiffany's.
RIP Mr. Edwards.
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Labels: A. Hepburn, Blake Edwards, Capote, Cary, Glenn Ford, Holden, Julie Andrews, Lemmon, Musicals, Obituary, Oscars, Sellers, Television, Theater, Tony Curtis
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Monday, August 09, 2010
Patricia Neal (1926-2010)
The great Patricia Neal, sidelined momentarily by what could have been a career-ending stroke but who resumed her career eventually, has died at 84. With an Oscar to her credit as well as a Tony handed out in the theater award's very first year, her lengthy career included many memorable performances that should keep her well known for a long time to come.
Neal only appeared on Broadway four times and it was her debut that won her that Tony for featured actress in a play for Another Part of the Forest which was written by Lillian Hellman and was a prequel to The Little Foxes. Neal played Regina before she married into the Giddens family. Neal later appeared in a revival of The Children's Hour and in the original production of The Miracle Worker as Helen Keller's mother Kate.
She first appeared on film in 1949 in three films: John Loves Mary, King Vidor's adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead starring Gary Cooper and The Hasty Heart, which like John Loves Mary starred Ronald Reagan.
In 1951, she appeared in the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Then, in 1957, came one of her best roles and greatest films in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd as Marcia Jeffries, who unwittingly creates a media monster out of Andy Griffith's Lonesome Rhodes.
In 1961, she played the scheming socialite giving Audrey Hepburn grief in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Two years later, she gave her Oscar-winning performance as best actress playing Alma, the sultry housekeeper sparring with that no-good Paul Newman in Hud. She was part of the large ensemble in Otto Preminger's 1965 war epic In Harm's Way. In 1968, she earned another Oscar nomination as the mother trying to keep peace in the adaptation of the play The Subject Was Roses.
Despite steady feature work, she performed frequently on episodic television from the 1950s and beyond, earning three Emmy nominations in the process, including one for the TV movie The Homecoming, which was essentially the pilot that begat The Waltons.
She suffered a series of strokes in 1965 that nearly ended her career. The one major role it cost her was Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, but she came back to acting rather quickly. Her best role late in her career came courtesy of Robert Altman as the title character in Cookie's Fortune in 1999.
She was married from 1953 to 1983 and had five children with the author Roald Dahl, the writer behind works such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Witches.
R.I.P. Ms. Neal.
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Labels: A. Hepburn, Altman, Awards, Cooper, Kazan, Newman, Obituary, Oscars, Patricia Neal, Preminger, Television, Theater
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Thursday, August 05, 2010
Send a Thief...
By Ali Arikan
Earlier this summer, as I was churning out retrospectives and reviews five at a time, I received an e-mail from a friend, an accomplished author and translator, who complimented me on a few of the pieces, and asked if I would be interested in looking back at Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, which he’d recently seen for the first time. Since most of the correspondence I receive concerns the various degrees in which I suck, I was flattered, and leaped at the opportunity: being commissioned to write a piece, by a fan, a friend, or an editor, is an infinitely more satisfying task — to consider, carry out, or accomplish — than a voluntary whim, which is how I usually end up with subject matter.
I pitched it to Edward, and we decided to run the piece on Aug. 5, the 55th anniversary of the film’s release. However, I failed to take into account three possible impedimenta, one foreseeable, the other two less so: I’d booked the first week of August off work, and, since I’m a firm adherent of Parkinson’s Law, I tend to file my work around 12 hours before it’s set to published, much to Edward’s chagrin. Last week, as my deadline approached and I tried to formulate from a nebulous hodgepodge of ideas a somewhat congruous set of notes, I got more and more stressed about the impending possibility of having to work on holiday, but eventually made uneasy peace with it.
Still, I thought this but a small set-back to the planned acedia of my holidays. Having to write the piece on vacation would not, by itself, be disastrous: since my only access to the interwebz at my parents’ summer house is my Blackberry (which, as far as this Luddite understands, is unable to show YouTube videos), my efficiency would be much improved. But, as the saying, and the name of the most famous painting in my alma mater’s Picture Gallery, goes, man proposes, god disposes. In this case, I’d failed to take into account the precarious nature of Western capitalism, how the office drone is prone to major changes, caused by forces far beyond their control, even the thought of which wreaks havoc with not just my holidays, but also my concentration. However, these two problems were nothing compared to the final one: I’d never realized how terribly dull To Catch a Thief actually is.
One dreary Saturday 14 years ago during my second year at university, when most of my friends had gone back home for the weekend and the campus was as empty as my wallet, I took out a whole bunch of second-tier Hitchcock films from the library, and spent the weekend watching them in the screening room, a most enjoyable pity party of one. At the time, To Catch a Thief had turned out to be a breath of fresh air among such dreary work as Suspicion, Topaz and Rope. Seeing it in the condition I was last week certainly did not help matters, but, even objectively, To Catch a Thief, written by John Michael Hayes based on David Dodge’s novel, is slow and aimless, like a long walk along the waterfront in Cannes: fine weather, beautiful people, gorgeous scenery, but vacant, redundant and totally devoid of meaning.
Cary Grant plays John Robie, a retired cat burglar, forced to return to his noctivigant lifestyle, this time as a detective, when a copycat thief starts stealing from the wealthy denizens of the Riviera. Over-enunciating like
Audrey Hepburn in a stutter-fit, Grant chews the lush scenery, but still acts circles around Grace Kelly as the virginal ingénue, who is at once the subject of his affections and the audience’s suspicions (though a later single shot during the climactic rooftop chase untimely gives away the identity of the thief, mainly thanks to the law of economy of characters). The standouts, really, are John Williams as Hughson the insurance man (and Watson to Robie’s Holmes), and Jessie Royce Landis, as a nouveau riche widow, and Kelly’s mother. Unburdened with the unenviable task to lead such a frivolous film, the two actors let loose, and play broad caricatures, thus making them more sympathetic, and, dare I say it, realistic. As in many of Hitchcock’s lesser works, the supporting cast are much more fun than the leads (compare, for example, Landis with Florence Bates in Rebecca, and the two unconventional ways both ladies dispose of their cigarettes).Of course, Hitchcock meant for the film to be lightweight. Sandwiched between the paranoid and metatextual Rear Window and the deceptively disturbing The Trouble with Harry, To Catch a Thief sees the director at
his frivolous best — this is his only film where he cameos as himself. It features a beautifully shot high-speed car chase on the Riviera that shamelessly doubles as a tourist video (the film’s single Oscar went to Robert Burks’ stylish cinematography). The infamous seduction scene, set under a verdant light, as the fireworks outside mirror the sexual desires of the two thieves, he of diamonds, she of his heart, is really rather magnificent, though I prefer the underrated Quiche Lorraine lunch between Grant and Williams. Hitchcock deftly weaves feline symbolism through the narrative, and the thief motif is accentuated during the many tits-a-tat between the two leads, but none of this coheres. To Catch a Thief works wonderfully as a kaleidoscopic view into a foregone era. It just doesn’t work as a film.Tweet
Labels: 50s, A. Hepburn, Cary, Hitchcock, Movie Tributes
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Monday, April 05, 2010
Live and learn
By Edward Copeland
You can never really claim that a year in movies has an overriding theme, but if you could, 2009's would be that so many of the better films were dependent on a single performance that almost single-handedly raised his or her film to a higher plane. You saw it with Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart to Sam Rockwell in Moon and Tilda Swinton in Julia. This is most decidedly the case with An Education, which would probably be a fine film anyway but becomes an even better one with Carey Mulligan as its lead.
Mulligan stars as Jenny, a bright 16-year-old attending an all-girls school in the London suburbs in 1961 in presumed preparation for her eventual enrollment at Oxford. She's smart, funny and talented and can't help but show it, even if it means often offending those around her, including teachers such as Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams, unrecognizable from those who only know her from Rushmore) and her stuck-in-the-mud father (Alfred Molina). As many smart teens can be, Jenny thinks she knows a lot more than she really does and, unfortunately, she suffers for it in the end.
One day, while walking home from concert rehearsal with her cello in a driving rainstorm, a handsome thirtysomething stranger named David (Peter Saarsgard) charms Jenny into his car and before long, despite the age difference, the two are dating, despite Jenny's insistence that she's hanging on to her virginity until she turns 17.
Jenny's classmates find it quite chic that she's seeing an older man while her teacher and especially the school's stern headmistress (the always reliable Emma Thompson) give her strong warnings, some threatening her future at the school. Her parents (Molina and Cara Seymour) would probably be similarly suspicious, but David manages to seduce them at a faster rate than he does Jenny. The sometimes veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) anti-Semitism doesn't even seem to factor in even though David is Jewish.
Before long, her parents are allowing Jenny to go on overnight trips with David and even a journey to Paris, all under the assumption that David's "aunt" will be along as a chaperon. David and Jenny's clubbing and traveling companions are usually Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike) and some of their actions, as well as David's, should clue Jenny in to the idea that her boyfriend might not be all that he claims to be, but the heart of a first love has a terrible defect that allows for the masking of a significant other's defects.
Everything hits the fan soon after David takes the big leap and proposes marriage to Jenny, who is torn since her whole life had been geared toward continuing her education at Oxford. Her father, who'd supported the idea her entire life, is quick to abandon it for a good marriage because, really, what career can she expect to have? Even Thompson's headmistress tells her there are more opportunities than just teaching for young women now: There's also the civil service.
The sparse, deliberate and well-written screenplay by Nick Hornby was adapted from the memoir by Lynn Barber and smoothly directed by Lone Scherfig. The performers all do well, especially Molina and Williams. Sarsgaard's British accent isn't even half bad. If the film has a weakness, its final scenes seem rushed to try to tack on somewhat of an unnecessary happy ending that seems out of place with what went before.
However, as far as Mulligan goes, a star is born. She is so beguiling that the overwhelming number of comparisons of her to Audrey Hepburn certainly seem earned. While you are watching Mulligan in An Education (and I don't recall any scene she's not in), you can't take your eyes off her. It's not often that you see a performance from a relative newcomer that immediately makes you anxious to see what she does next. Carey Mulligan is an actress to watch.
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Labels: 00s, A. Hepburn, Carey Mulligan, Emma Thompson, Jeff Bridges, Sam Rockwell, Tilda Swinton
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007
A Parisian in America
By Josh R
For the past several years at The Primetime Emmy Awards, it has been an annual custom for the winners in the guest acting categories — which are announced during
a prior ceremony primarily devoted to the technical arts — to present the writing and directing awards. In discussing the highs and lows of last month’s ceremony, some smartass AOL television blogger was given to wonder why The Academy would allow Leslie Caron, a winner for her guest turn on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, to present an award during the network telecast when, in his words, “nobody had the faintest idea of who she was or what she was doing there.” In the warped mind of this sad and twisted soul, who shall remain nameless mainly to save undue embarrassment (because it isn’t nice to pick on the mentally deranged), Ms. Caron’s presence on the telecast qualified as a “low” point of the evening. It wasn’t that the actress had difficulty reading off the prompter, went off book with some shambling impromptu remarks (paging Elaine Stritch), or wore some outlandishly garish frock so blinding as to cause television sets to go on the fritz. Blogger X, whom I only assume is one of those nutjobs who believes that all black and white movies categorically “suck” and that elderly people who can no longer contribute to society should be kept in detention centers fenced in by chicken wire, simply felt that presentation duties should be reserved for the likes of “real” stars, like Eva Longoria, Adrian Grenier or Hayden Patinierre. Forgetting for a moment that people will still be watching films like An American in Paris long after most of today’s top-rated shows have become obscure footnotes in pop cultural history, with names of the actors who starred in them long forgotten, indulge me while I review the credentials of the lady in question — and, hopefully, give Blogger X a lesson in respect. These kids today — you gotta learn `em.
To be fair, it would be difficult to make a case for Leslie Caron as a major star — at least when juxtaposing her career accomplishments with those of her contemporaries. Her rise to prominence in the 1950s, and her years of greatest productivity, coincided with those of Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren. While a marquee attraction in the prime of her career, Caron never quite achieved — nor ever really earned — the same degree of importance or acclaim as the aforementioned women, either as a performer or as a figure of public fascination. Nevertheless, Blogger X dismisses her too lightly, for her resume is impressive by any standard. Consider these facts:
She is a two-time Academy Award nominee for best actress, and one of only two women to have played leading roles in multiple Best Picture winners. She is perhaps the only French-born actress whose stardom owes itself to work in English-language films, and really the only one who can be said to qualify as a mainstream American movie star; one could rightly argue that Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve have had more significant careers in the world of global cinema, but neither ever found success in Hollywood to the extent that Caron did (for a bit of perspective, Deneuve’s most prominent American film credits would be Hustle and The Hunger — a far cry from Gigi and An American in Paris). She is one of the few MGM contract players hired as a novelty performer for Arthur Freed’s musical unit to have successfully navigated the transition to dramatic roles, and one of only three “star” dancers, after Cyd Charisse and Vera-Ellen, whose field of specialty was ballet — she is more closely associated with the genre than either of the other two. She is among an elite group of women to have danced opposite both Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and quite a few of her films have endured as major and minor classics beyond the period of their initial success. From the group of actresses mentioned in the previous paragraph, she is the only one who is still active as a performer — while the legendary status of Taylor and Loren may eclipse that of the little French ballerina, Caron is the one who’s still working.
The delicate-featured, purse-lipped gamine, often employed as the centerpiece of MGM’s frequent attempts at Gallic pastiche, was born in Boulogne-Bilaincort, France in 1931, the daughter of a chemist. Her mother had been a dancer; Caron was introduced to ballet at an early age. As a teenager, she was performing with a company in Paris when spotted by a vacationing Gene Kelly, who was in town doing preliminary research for An American in Paris. Cyd Charisse, the original choice for the female lead, had become unavailable due to pregnancy, and Kelly and director Vincente Minnelli were in the process of searching for a replacement — no small feat, considering Kelly’s concept required a classically trained ballerina who could meet the rigorous demands of the film’s ambitious choreography. Caron was quickly signed to a contract by MGM, transplanted from Paris to Culver City, given a crash course in English, and cast as Lisa, the Parisian love interest of Kelly’s struggling artist. If the novice made little impression beyond affecting a modest, self-effacing charm in her acting scenes, she more than compensated for it with her exquisite performance in the climatic 20-minute dance sequence. Her look was unusual — as Pauline Kael observed in her discussion of the film, it didn’t appear that MGM had quite yet gotten her makeup exactly right for the purposes of her debut. Her pleasantly quotidian appearance, distinguished by a broad, toothy grin, made her a bit of a challenge from a casting perspective; the 1950s was already shaping up as the decade of goddesses, glamour queens and sex symbols.
She bided her time in a few dull costume pictures — she cited the consummate professionalism of Barbara Stanwyck, with whom she appeared in 1951’s The Man
with the Cloak, as being of particular inspiration to her — before signing on for her next musical project, Lili, directed by Charles Walters. The sentimental story of an orphaned waif who finds a home with a traveling carnival, it was property that MGM had no particular enthusiasm for. The studio brass underestimated the film’s canny fusion of sweetness and pathos; made on a low budget and with limited expectations, it went on to become one of MGM’s top grossing films of 1953, netting a surprise best actress nomination for its leading lady in the process. Although that accolade seems generous in retrospect, the film did allow Caron to demonstrate an ability to project an appealing vulnerability without resorting to preciousness. She lost the Oscar to Roman Holiday's Audrey Hepburn, with whom she was often compared and occasionally confused; although bearing little facial resemblance, they were a similar physical type — together they popularized the gamine look, making slim-hipped, flat-chested girls with boyish haircuts seem like the height of European sophistication. Daddy Long Legs, which found her being romanced by Astaire, and The Glass Slipper, a musical retelling of the Cinderella story, were pleasant diversions; the latter’s ballet-heavy choreography provided her with best opportunity since An American in Paris to demonstrate her prodigious skill as a dancer. Gaby, an unhappy foray into straight drama, was a sodden remake of the 1940 Vivien Leigh weepie Waterloo Bridge concerning an out-of-work dancer who resorts to prostitution as a means of support; the actress was unhappy while making the film, and considered the finished product an embarrassment. While she had been an appealing presence in her musical roles, it was clear that she hadn’t yet experienced her breakthrough as an actress — her unaffected charm, while never less than ingratiating, didn’t communicate an abundance of personality; she didn’t always seem that sure of her bearings in front of the camera, and slightly embarrassed as a result. Her next project — and the film for which she was to become most identified — marked tremendous strides toward that end.
Gigi, Vincente Minnelli’s lavish musical adaptation of Collette’s mildly risqué novella concerning the antics of a sprightly Parisian schoolgirl being groomed for the life of
a courtesan, has sometimes been unfavorably compared to My Fair Lady — certainly, they were cut from the same cloth. The composer-lyricist team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederic Loewe adhered very closely to the template set by their previous success; as in their smash musical treatment of Shaw’s Pygmalion, Gigi chronicled the transformation of a rambunctious, unprepossessing girl into an elegant, sophisticated woman — much to the consternation of the male protagonist, who finds himself surprisingly, if somewhat unwillingly, drawn to the altered incarnation. Moreover, in terms of both the structural function and thematic content of the musical numbers, Gigi mirrored its predecessor to an uncanny degree: “The Night They Invented Champagne,” in which the hero, the heroine and her grandmother dance around their apartment in jubilant celebration, is essentially a refurbishment of “The Rain in Spain”; “I Don’t Understand the Parisians” expresses female frustration in the tradition of “Just You Wait, Henry Higgins”; “It’s a Bore,” which outlines the male protagonist’s blithely anti-social outlook, echoes “Let a Woman in Your Life”; the Oscar-winning title song, in which Louis Jourdan’s disaffected playboy (a man who puts limited stock in the notion of romance) begins by disparaging the heroine, only to come to the realization that he has fallen in love, builds in much the same way as “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” — in both cases, the internal conflict, which progresses from angry denial to stunned epiphany, is made musically and verbally explicit. If an inevitable sense of déjà vu accompanied the proceedings, it didn’t prevent Gigi from qualifying as a resounding success on its own terms; in truth, it was a better film than An American in Paris, and Minnelli’s best since Meet Me in St. Louis. The melodic score, coupled with a witty script by Lerner which captured the essence of Collette’s prose while tempering its racier aspects, only accounted for part of the film’s considerable charm — with gorgeous location photography and French actors in the principal roles (including the redoubtable Maurice Chevalier as a septuagenarian bon vivant), the film felt like an authentic reflection of the culture it was attempting to recreate — something of a rarity for MGM, whose version of continental flavor usually wound up seeming more Euro-Disney than European. Moreover, Minnelli’s elegant visual composition brilliantly showcased the sumptuous production design; the director received an Academy Award for his efforts. All around, it was a sparkling entertainment, and the best film in which Caron appeared during her tenure at the studio.
For her part, the actress seemed notably more animated and engaged than she had been in her previous efforts. Too often, there had seemed to be a dark cloud hovering overhead when she took on ingénue roles — her lack of formal training as an actress may have left her feeling somewhat insecure, making the halting, abashed quality that had characterized her other star turns more pronounced than it would have been otherwise. It was nowhere in evidence with her work in Gigi, which revealed a lightness of touch worthy of a polished boulevard comedienne; working with Minnelli, perhaps her greatest champion, brought out her confidence, as well as a previously unsuspected streak of mischief. In the early scenes, she successfully conveyed the exuberance of youth and handled the comic aspects of the role with surprising dexterity; as the transformation took root, she became self-possessed, forthright, and for the first time, genuinely beautiful. As Lili, Gaby and Ella of the Cinders, she had had a tendency to seem pathetic and childlike when the material took a turn for the dramatic — finally, it was possible to see her as a mature actress of genuine spirit, capable of holding the screen without seeming apologetic or ill at ease.
Her last project at MGM was Fanny, another expensively mounted exercise in Gallic frivolity, only one in which the fun seemed forced. The film was successful, earning a best picture nomination and a Golden Globe nomination for its star, but couldn’t help seeming like a step backward — if Gigi had liberated her sense of humor, Fanny seemed determined to reign it back in. But The L-Shaped Room was a genuine triumph; as the ostracized émigré trying to rebuild her life in a seedy London boarding house, she offered an instinctive, insightful account of a stranger in a strange land, struggling to regain her sense of equilibrium. Clearly, the bleak predicament of a foreigner negotiating the uncertainties of survival in a hostile, unfamiliar environment struck a deeply personal chord; plucked out of the corps de ballet at a young age to embark on an acting career she had neither pursued nor conceived of, Caron had spent much of her early years in Hollywood feeling like a fish out of water.
The L-Shaped Room represented a risk for Caron, as it marked a dramatic departure from the kind of films on which she’d made her name. A product of the new vogue
in British filmmaking which favored the kitchen-sink style of realism, Bryan Forbes’ perceptive character study considers the position of social outcasts, trying to carve out a place for themselves in a world that regards them with suspicion and disapproval. The character of Jane Fosset, in addition to being an immigrant, also has the stigma of being pregnant and unwed — the first friend she makes is an immigrant and a man of color, who feels betrayed when she shows a romantic interest in someone else, and betrays her in turn. The characters are isolated by their outsider status, and ultimately, from each other — their attempts to connect often result in misunderstanding, disappointment and hurt. When an elderly eccentric reveals herself to be a lesbian, you can see in her face the fear of reprisal that such an admission might bring. Staring at the photograph of the woman’s dead companion, whom she had assumed to be a man, Caron’s wordless response is one of sad recognition and empathy — she can relate to what it means to be on the margins, yearning for acceptance but feeling shut out in the cold. It’s an unusual film, and probably ahead of its time in many respects, even though from a modern standpoint its content seems relatively tame. Her excellent, moving performance netted Caron a second, well-deserved best actress nomination; in contrast to her first nominated performance, audiences were seeing the insecurities of the character, as opposed to those of the actress. Her naturalistic style, which occasionally seemed out of place in the glossy Hollywood product which had been her stock in trade, meshed well with the new wave sensibility — it’s tempting to wonder what Truffaut, Malle and Godard might have made of her if she’d remained in her native France.
The fruits of success were somewhat less than she might have hoped for. In Father Goose, she played second fiddle to Cary Grant and a gaggle of schoolgirls — as if Gigi were getting her comeuppance. The lame-brained sex comedy Promise Her Anything cast her opposite Warren Beatty, with whom she embarked on an ill-fated affair; the young actor, who had already acquired the reputation of a lothario, was named as a correspondent in Caron’s divorce from British stage director Peter Hall. Later, the actress offered this infamous put-down: “Warren has an interesting pathology; he always goes after women who have either just won or been nominated for an Academy Award”…while not on the level of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” a withering assessment nonetheless.
She worked out the '60s in a succession of increasingly less interesting roles; in the seventies she devoted more of her energies to rearing her two children by Hall, breaking occasionally for the odd bit of film or television work (in some instances, quite odd indeed). If her work attracted less attention in the years to follow, she did — finally — get to work with Truffaut in The Man Who Loved Women, and with Malle in Damage. Chocolat was a high-profile film, even if she was criminally underutilized in what amounted to a cameo — she might have done wonders with the more prominent role of the village curmudgeon, which in Dame Judi Dench’s hands amounted to a fussy piece of caricature. Her fine, restrained work in Law & Order: SVU, in which she played a victim of sexual assault whose attacker is brought to justice 30 years after the fact, demonstrated that she is still willing and able to take on challenging acting assignments when the opportunity presents itself.
Contrary to what Blogger X and many others may have felt, this year’s Emmy telecast was a depressingly prurient affair — one in which the “high” points were often indistinguishable from the low. Poor taste has been the hallmark of many an awards show, and Emmy `07 didn’t stint in that regard: viewers were treated to Brad Garrett making crude remarks about Joely Fisher’s tits to the approbation of the crowd, the obligatory round of off-color jokes about Charlie Sheen, and an unusually high rate of bleeping (Fox’s censors might want to ease up on the trigger finger — a boob is a boob, but how much hand-wringing is merited by the term “screwing?”). Even Sally Field let a cuss word slip while voicing the tired old Lysistrata line, spoken verbatim at podiums around the world by women who want to make a political statement without saying anything remotely controversial, about how “if all the mothers of the world got together, there would be no goddamn wars” — a sentiment as quixotically naïve as it is stupidly sexist (at this point, I think women have demonstrated that they can be just as self-serving and obtuse when it comes to the politics of violence as men are — just ask Mr. Copeland for his views on Mrs. Clinton). It turns out, after all, that Blogger X has a point: Ms. Caron did seem out-of-place at this year’s Emmy Awards. Her presence provided the one glimpse of class in an evening otherwise distinguished by a lack of it. Perhaps her Emmy victory will bring more opportunities worthy of her talents — time can neither diminish the memory of her triumphs, nor, with luck, prevent her from achieving still more.
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Labels: A. Hepburn, Astaire, Awards, C. Sheen, Cary, Cyd Charisse, Dench, Gene Kelly, Kael, Lang, Law and Order, Malle, Marilyn, Musicals, Oscars, Stanwyck, Television, Truffaut, W. Beatty
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Sunday, April 29, 2007
Centennial Tributes: Fred Zinnemann
By Edward Copeland
If someone asks, "What is a Fred Zinnemann film like?" How would you respond? It's not that Zinnemann, who would turn 100 years old today, didn't make quite a few good and great films and at least one bona fide classic, but is there something you can point to as a Zinnemannesque film the way you might say Hitchcockian or Hawksian? Not really. This isn't to disparage Zinnemann at all. He simply was a solid, workman-like director who ended up making movies worth watching far more often than he made clunkers. He earned seven Oscar nominations as director between 1948 and 1977 and won twice. He also won an Oscar for producing A Man for All Seasons and for the documentary short Benjy in 1951. Some might call him colorless, but his body of work certainly deserves reflection today on the anniversary of his birth.
Zinnemann has directing credits stretching all the way back to 1929, but this is the earliest one I've been able to see and what a pleasant surprise it turned out to be. A simple B programmer about a blind detective (the great Edward Arnold), the mystery may be more complicated than necessary (and easy to guess what's going on in general, if not in specific), but it's a lot of fun. Arnold is great and Donna Reed gives a performance unlike any I've seen from her as a bitter, manipulative young woman at odds with her stepmother. There are some slightly racist scenes involving Arnold's butler that made me uncomfortable, but they are so few that I was able to look aside. Besides, that dog! Friday may well be the most talented dog in the history of film, being a true partner to his blind owner. In fact, in one scene where Friday ends up with the gun of a bad guy in his mouth, I was surprised the canine didn't actually know how to fire it.
Zinnemann scored his first Oscar nomination as director for this moving drama set in post-World War II Berlin where an Army private (Montgomery Clift) tries to help a lost Czech boy find his mother while she similarly searches refugee camps for him. It's a simple, stark tale, but quite compelling, painting a vivid portrait of the desolation of the German city after the war and the timeless tale of people separated by events trying to find their way back together again.
The Search brought Zinnemann his Oscar nomination for 1948, but this taut thriller may be the better film. The always-great Robert Ryan plays a wounded WWII veteran on a mission to kill his former CO (Van Heflin), whom he holds responsible for his misfortune. The film holds the details close to its vest for awhile, and to good effect. Eventually, the stench of vengeance and violence contaminates most of the characters in the film so you're really not certain who will be on the receiving end of the film's title. Unfortunately, the payoff wimps out slightly, but until then the film is riveting, led by Ryan, Heflin and able supporting work, including Mary Astor as a hooker with a heart of stone.
More than anything else, this melodramatic portrait of recovering war veterans remains best known for marking the feature film debut of Marlon Brando. Brando plays an embittered soldier paralyzed from his war injuries. Much of the dramatics do go over the top, but The Men also contains surprising frankness, given when it was made, in terms of sexuality and balancing an antiwar message with a supportive one for fighting men, something that really rings true today, both in terms of the Iraq mess our troops find themselves embroiled in as well as the recent revelations of the piss-poor medical treatment they've received when they've returned home.
In the 2003 documentary All the Presidents' Movies, it was amazing how many occupants of the Oval Office
picked Zinnemann's Western classic as one of the films they watched in the White House screening room multiple times. (In fact, since Eisenhower, it's been the film requested most often by all presidents.) Regardless of your political persuasion, it's easy to see why this tale of one man standing alone against a cadre of villains while all his supposed allies turn tail and run would appeal to commanders-in-chief. Of all Zinnemann's movies, this one remains my favorite. Really, it's the perfect role for the stoic Gary Cooper and having its action play out in real time works better than just about any other attempt to imitate that pattern. (Come on 24 fans, you can't get anywhere in Los Angeles in an hour let alone have all the things that happen on the show in 60 minutes occur.) High Noon works as well even if you don't know or notice its allegorical background of the blacklist. It's a classic that should never be forsaken.While The Member of the Wedding still entertains after all these years, its stage origins remain painfully apparent. Julie Harris is quite good in her Oscar-nominated turn as the tomboy Frankie Addams unhappy with her lot in life and dreaming of something more. (You almost believe that Harris, in her late 20s at the time, is a 12-year-old.) However, the performance that stands out for me is Ethel Waters, the sensible maid who becomes Frankie's confidant. She grounds the film in a realism that some of its more theatrical flairs threaten to unravel. Waters should have been the one up for an Oscar that year.
It's interesting to note that with all the people questioning whether it was too soon for films such as United 93 and World Trade Center to tackle the events of 9/11 that From Here to Eternity re-created the attack on Pearl Harbor a mere 12 years after it occurred, albeit as a glorified soap opera. (Actually, movies began referring to the attack on Pearl Harbor within months of December 1941, but I believe this is the first to actually depict the attack.) Thankfully though, Zinnemann was no Michael Bay and the film still has some teeth (and earned Zinnemann his first directing Oscar). Most importantly though, it has great performances from Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Ernest Borgnine and Frank Sinatra's Oscar-winning turn as the doomed Pvt. Maggio. How Donna Reed won her Oscar I'm not certain. (As Josh R is fond of pointing out, she plays what must be the most virginal prostitute ever put on film.) However, enough remains to make it stand the test of time.
Zinnemann ventured into musicals and he went BIG, i.e. in full-blooded Technicolor, Todd-AO glory transferring this landmark Rodgers and Hammerstein musical to the truly big screen. In a way, Oklahoma! really is
a stage show that should be opened up since a stage is too limiting for this tale of early settlers. Zinnemann takes true advantage of this with some nice shots, particularly the opening which moves the camera through the stalks of a corn field before coming upon Gordon MacRae singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin.'" While the film is good enough, the importance of its stage version doesn't exactly transfer since Hollywood already had produced its own much better musical originals for the screen (such as Singin' in the Rain three years earlier). Despite that, there is much to admire in the songs and some of the performances, specifically Gloria Grahame's fun turn as Ado Annie. This is the performance that should have earned her an Oscar nomination and/or win, not her blink-or-you'll-miss-it work in The Bad and the Beautiful. Rod Steiger is good as the dark Jud, but his performance (and really the character himself) always has seemed somewhat out of place in what is essentially a musical comedy. Eddie Albert does what he can as Persian peddler Ali Hakim, but he's about as much a Persian as Mickey Rooney was Chinese in Breakfast at Tiffany's. (Well, Albert isn't offensive at least).You can probably count on one hand the number of films about Catholic priests or nuns that still have them in their religious vocation by the time the film ends, and this bloated work isn't one of them. Audrey Hepburn does her best as the conflicted nun-in-training, but it's really Peter Finch who steals the show as a feisty doctor that Hepburn works with during some missionary work. It's not only an obscenely long film, it's also an eminently forgettable one.
Also too long, but immensely more fun was Zinnemann's next film, with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr struggling to make ends meet in the outback as sheep drovers, with Kerr trying to be the sensible one and Mitchum's gambling spirit always getting the best of him (and their nest egg). She's tired of their wandering ways and wants to settle down, but his rambunctioness always gets in the way. There also are fine supporting performances by Peter Ustinov and Glynis Johns. Still, the cinematography by Jack Hildyard is stunning and there are some great set pieces, particularly a sheep-shearing competition. To say that its Oscar nomination for best picture was more than generous is no understatement.
Zinnemann truly created an odd one with this film that has Gregory Peck (?) playing an exiled Spanish revolutionary and Anthony Quinn as the Spanish official hoping to lure him back to the country to kill him with the news that his mother (Mildred Dunnock) is dying 20 years after the end of the Spanish civil war. Things get complicated further by a young boy named Paco (Marietto Angeleletti) who wants Peck to go back to kill Quinn to avenge his own father's death, but Peck also is torn by a possible traitor within his ranks. Despite the fact that Peck is even a less-convincing Spaniard than Eddie Albert was a Persian, the movie's overriding problem is that it's a world-class bore. It drags on and on to a truly anticlimactic ending. The most interesting thing about it is that it was based on a novel by Emeric Pressburger.
It had been a long time since I'd seen this best picture winner that earned Zinnemann his final two Oscars, one for directing and one for producing, and it plays even better than I remembered. While Robert Bolt's
screenplay does show its stage origins, Zinnemann has turned this story of Sir Thomas More's stance on principle against the will of King Henry VIII into a sleek, compelling enterprise with the look and feel of an epic but a running time of a mere two hours. Central to the film's success of course is Paul Scofield's Oscar-winning turn as More, but Zinnemann does add a lot of nice touches as well, particularly in the great opening sequence showing the travel of a message from Cardinal Wolsey to More. There's also stunning cinematography by Ted Moore and a top-notch supporting cast that includes Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, a young John Hurt and Robert Shaw in his Oscar-nominated turn as Henry VIII, which is a much smaller role than I recall. My 1966 Oscar preferences still lean to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but this film's win is not an embarrassment.
As Fred Zinnemann began his sixth decade as a filmmaker, he turned to yet another genre with this taut thriller starring the cool Edward Fox as a hired gun whose services are employed by embittered former members of the French Foreign Legion to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle. The story moves on two tracks as Fox, code name The Jackal, pursues his plot and the French authorities, led by Col. Rolland (Michel Auclair) try to determine the killer's identity and to stop him before he is able to act. The film is a bit overlong, but Zinnemann does build quite a bit of suspense, even though we know De Gaulle won't be killed, and Fox is superb as the cold and calculating mercenary.
I saw Julia when it was originally released and I was in grade school, hardly the ideal audience. All I remembered really was that I was bored silly and the scene where a frustrated Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda)
tosses her typewriter out a window (I miss typewriters). So, in fairness, I decided I needed to take a new look, hoping that age would make me have a new view on the film the way I did a turnaround on Reds recently. Alas, 30 years later, I find Julia as boring as I did as an elementary school student. Its awards puzzle me more now than they did when I only had vague memories. Fonda at times is pretty bad. Jason Robards in his second consecutive Oscar-winning supporting turn is fine, but really doesn't have anything to do to deserve the prize. Maximilian Schell's presence is so fleeting that his nomination is a headscratcher. What shocked me the most was Vanessa Redgrave. While she is one of our finest actresses, there was more drama and suspense surrounding her nomination and her winning speech than she gets to create in the film itself. This was Zinnemann's final Oscar nomination as director (though he did direct one more film, which I haven't seen), but Julia is a bore. Pure and simple. Despite his less successful works, Zinnemann produced a lot of good and great movies in his time and I still salute him on his centennial.Tweet
Labels: A. Hepburn, blacklist, Borgnine, Brando, Clift, Cooper, Deborah Kerr, Gregory Peck, Hammerstein, Lancaster, Mary Astor, Mitchum, Robards, Robert Ryan, Rodgers, Sinatra, Van Hefiin, Vanessa Redgrave, W. Hiller
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