Saturday, September 10, 2011

 

The river runs, the round world spins…
The day ends. The end begins.

"This and The Red Shoes are the two most beautiful color films ever made." — Martin Scorsese


By Edward Copeland
Scorsese wasn't alone when he expressed that opinion in a short interview he recorded in 2004 for The Criterion Collection edition of Jean Renoir's The River, the first film the French master made in color, which was released 60 years ago today. A short essay called "The Making of The River" by the late Alexander Sesonske accompanies the Criterion DVD. Sesonske, author of Jean Renoir: The French Films 1924-1939 and, at the time of the DVD's release, professor emeritus of film studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, wrote that director Eric Rohmer called The River "the most beautiful color we have ever seen on screen." During the actual filming in India, Renoir and his d.p., nephew Claude Renoir, had to trust their eyes since they lacked Technicolor labs and could only see black-and-white rushes, sending footage to England for processing. According to Sesonske's piece, the answer arrived one day in a cable from London which read, "Technicolor chiefs consider photography of The River the best they have ever had." It's unusual for me to start a tribute to a film discussing what others thought about the cinematography, but while The River has a story to tell as well, its greatness lies first and foremost as a visual feast and the screenshots I have don't do its brilliant look justice. It also has an offscreen tale about how the film came to be that's nearly as interesting as the story on the screen.

Renoir's masterpiece The Rules of the Game opened in 1939 at the peak of his 15 years of superb filmmaking. Surprisingly, upon release in France Rules proved to be hated by both critics and audiences. (I also was surprised to hear Scorsese say on The River DVD that while he likes Rules OK, he can't relate to its characters and always would rather watch The River.) I think Francois Truffaut summed up how The Rules of the Game fits into film history in his book The Films in My Life.
"The Rules of the Game is the credo of film lovers, the film of films, the most despised on its release and the most valued afterward…Along with Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game is certainly the film that sparked the careers of the greatest number of directors. We look at this movie with a strong sense of complicity; I mean that instead of seeing a finished product handed to us to satisfy our curiosity, we feel we are there as the film is made, we almost think that we can see Renoir organize the whole as we watch the film projected."

Given the reaction to Rules and the looming war clouds, Renoir headed to Hollywood. He did not his enjoy brief time there. Why is it that movie industries — usually Hollywood, but it can happen elsewhere such as when Japan turned Akira Kurosawa into a pariah in the late '60s — have this tendency to take film's greatest artists and squander them? It's not an across-the-board policy and sometimes the filmmaker in question gives the industry the finger and finances his movies any way he can such as Robert Altman did, but time and time again they shit on the artists and treasure the hacks. How some of the greats manage to navigate the system and do superb work without compromising themselves too much is a mystery. Anyway, Renoir was not a happy camper in Hollywood even though he managed to make six films between 1941 and 1947 one of which, The Southerner, earned him an Oscar nomination for director. According to Ian Christie, professor of film and media history at Birkbeck College, University of London, who also wrote an article in the Criterion booklet, Renoir surrendered in his fight against RKO over his final American film, 1947's The Woman on the Beach. Around this time, as Renoir himself tells in an introduction on the DVD taken from the Jean Renoir Presents series he made for television for showings of his films in the 1960s, he was reading book reviews in The New Yorker when he read one for the novel The River by Rumer Godden, which the critic described as "one of the best novels written in the English language" so far in the 20th century. Its portrait of an English family living in India fascinated Renoir and he started jotting down notes for a movie version.

Excited by the prospect of making a film again, he took the project to the various Hollywood studios who all told Renoir the same thing: No one wants to see a movie about India unless it has elephants, tigers or Bengal lancers and The River has none of those things. Meanwhile, a very successful florist in Los Angeles named Kenneth McEldowney (he provided the flowers for the first Oscar ceremony as well as the funeral for Jean Harlow, among others) went to a movie preview with his wife, an MGM publicist. She asked what he thought and he told her the movie was "junk." She dared him to do better so he sold his floral business and set out to make a movie of his own. According to Renoir's intro, McEldowney also had talked to financiers who agreed to back him if he ever chose to make a film. McEldowney also was fascinated by India, having been stationed there in the Air Force and fallen in love with the country. In a case of synchronicity, McEldowney was seated on a plane next to the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's prime minister. McEldowney told her of his dream of making a movie in India, but she said Westerners can't seem to depict India accurately. The person who came closest, she said, was Rumer Godden in her novel The River and he should try to acquire the rights. McEldowney flew to London to try to meet Godden, only to learn that Renoir already had optioned the novel. McEldowney offered to produce the film with Renoir directing. Renoir had one demand before he would agree to work with McEldowney: He had to pay for Renoir to fly to India to see if it was feasible to film there because he wouldn't make the movie on studio sets. McEldowney agreed and Renoir fell in love with India and found it perfect for location shooting. The River would be made into a film, Renoir's first in color as well as the first color film shot in India. Getting all the equipment to India sometimes caused delays so during downtimes, Renoir shot silent, documentary-style footage of work along the Bengal River, a tributary of the Ganges. Renoir also insisted on using mostly nonprofessionals in the pivotal roles to give the film an air of authenticity, especially since the film revolves around blossoming adolescent girls (He also had no luck finding name stars to take on the adult roles who were willing to spend several months in India). "For without the stabilizing, conservative presence of a star, The River became an experimental film," Sesonske wrote.














The film begins by showing much of the labor that goes on in the Bengal River as a narrator (June Hillman), who we will later learn is the adult Harriet looking back on her and her family's life there when she was an adolescent, paints the picture of the scene with her words. Her voiceover describes the Bengal River as "one of the holy rivers flowing out of the eternal snows of the Himalayas and into the Bay of Bengali." She says that the river has a life of its own, where people spend the entirety of their lives — being born, living, working and dying. We witness the many Indian workers bringing rolls of a yellow substance to shore and unloading and moving it, almost like an assembly line, toward a plant. The adult Harriet informs us the substance is jute and it's the reason her family lives in India as her father (Esmond Knight) manages the plant that processes the jute. At this point, we see her father moving among the workers (the family's surname is never given) as he stops by a vendor at the bazaar to purchase a kite on his way to his family's home. He ends up taking two. "Father always preferred to take the longer way," she tells us in her look back. As we watch Father pass workers and villagers, he spots a small Indian girl and stops and gives her one of the kites. "Traditions have not changed in thousands of years," the adult Harriet comments, almost with envy.

The adult Harriet tells us about the large size of her family: There's her mother (Nora Swinburne), the teenage Harriet (Patricia Walters), who is a bit older than the rest of her siblings, Elizabeth (Penelope Wilkinson), the sole son Bogey (Richard Foster), Victoria (Cecilia Wood) and the young twins Muffy* (Jane Harris) and Mouse (Jennifer Harris). More growth is on the way as mother is pregnant with another child. When Father returns, he gives the other kite to Bogey, though the boy prefers lizards and turtles to toys. Helping keep Mother from being overwhelmed are servants and especially their Indian nurse Nan (Suprova Mukerjee), who tries to keep order in the house. The adult Harriet describes Nan as their "bridge to life, dragging us from dreams to reality, from reality to dreams." Harriet also attributes to Nan the quality of "filling our heads with romance, preparing our path for love" and we see the beginnings of the writer as young Harriet sits in the grass with a notebook while her older self tells viewers that she was "an ugly duckling waiting to turn into a swan." Outside, keeping a close watch on the children, especially Bogey, is Ram Singh (Sajjan Singh), who the narrator calls "our friend and protector," though his official role is that of gateman. He is a Sikh from the Punjab, she tells us, and once was "a valiant warrior." With a home so crowded with children, our storyteller from the future recalls an estate that always was filled with chatter and laughter, music and songs. Two others who often hang around the family's house are Bogey's best friend, an Indian boy named Kanu (Nimai Barik), and Valerie (Adrienne Corri), who is slightly older than Harriet but comes nearly every day to play anyway because she's an only child and there's no one else close to her age in the area. She's also rich since her father owns the jute press that Harriet's father manages.

This circle of family and friends becomes excited by the arrival of a stranger to the Bengal area. Mr. John (Arthur Shields), an Irish friend of Father's who lives down the road, is welcoming a visit from his American cousin who shares his first name, but is a war veteran (the war is never named) who lost his leg so he's referred to as Captain John (Thomas E. Breen) to avoid confusion. The excessively curious females in the family plus Nan and Valerie peer through the stone pillars of the estate's wall to try to catch a glimpse of the newcomer. Unfortunately, no one gets a good look. Fortune smiles upon them and Harriet's mind works quickest when she sees that Mr. John's daughter Melanie (Radha) has returned from the convent school she was attending. Since she hasn't seen her friend Melanie in a long time, Harriet hops the wall and runs over to greet her — and hopefully meet Captain John while she is there. Mr. John thwarts those plans because he's missed his daughter too much and steals her away too fast for Harriet to get anywhere else. Renoir co-wrote the screenplay with Godden herself, who was quite open to changes he wanted to make to her autobiographical novel. For example, the character of Melanie was invented. As Christie writes, her character was added "to give an Indian other than a servant an authentic voice and presence in the film's central drama," since that was a criticism from many Indians they met including one adviser, a young journalist by the name of Satyajit Ray, who a few years after his work on The River made his directing debut in 1955 with Pather Panchali. It also had a daring aspect because of the suggestion of possible romance between Melanie and the American Captain John which came at a time of heightened anger against race mixing on both sides (Indian and Westerners).

As The River develops, Melanie proves to be the most complex character in the film. When she first returns, she once again sees Anil (Trilak Jetley), the Indian boy she's known since she was a child and always assumed she would marry. However, Melanie suffers from a real identity crisis given her Irish father and her late Indian mother as to where she belongs. It doesn't help that Mr. John sent her to be educated at a Western school and that like Valerie and Harriet, she carries an attraction for the American Captain John. When she first returned home from school, she stayed in her convent clothes, but eventually she reverted to saris. Her father also carries much guilt about his daughter as well, even wondering at one point if she should have been born in the first place. When, at another time, her father comes to tell Melanie that Anil has come to see her Melanie suddenly doesn't want to see him. "I'm trying to be a practical man," Mr. John tells his daughter. "But you aren't practical," she replies. Still appealing for her to go see Anil, her father says, "He can give you so much. I've put you nowhere," referring to the fact that her mixed race pushes her outside the caste system. "Suppose I like to be nowhere," Melanie responds.

All of the pieces have been put in place for the story's main thrust. The more mature Valerie takes an interest in Captain John, who is of course at least a decade older than the oldest of the girls. She tries to be purposely aloof and cruel at times, getting her best friend Harriet to admit that she's starting to "hate her." Harriet still looks like a child, no matter how much she has started to feel the stirrings of womanhood, and tries to entice the American with her poems and storytelling. These all present the opportunity for Renoir, his nephew Claude and the Indian they trained at Technicolor to be their camera operator, Ramananda Sen Gupta, to film sequences remarkable not only for their color, but for their imagery as well. Many great examples come during the section covering Diwali, which also is known as the festival of lights. You see the lit-up faces of Nan and Harriet as they spy on Valerie and Captain John and see the girl smoke her first cigarette. There's also the subtler touch of the captain and Valerie sitting on the foot of some stairs and talk as Captain John keeps brushing away the moths that hover around the girl's face an hair. Before that, there are lots of shots of the various celebrations of the holiday itself, including the lighting of sparklers by all the children including Harriet and Valerie, who at first choose to ignore Captain John's presence in the house. Melanie, still dressed in her convent outfit, stands on the balcony with the adults watching the festivities. The adult Harriet explains that Hindus believe God is everywhere, so God is a river or a tree or even Captain John. Also, though they only believe in one God, they have temples devoted to different parts and in the Diwali section, we watch them honor Kali, the goddess of eternal destruction and creation because, as the adult Harriet tells us, "you can't have creation without destruction." That idea in many ways will prove not only to be the central motif of The River but essential to how Renoir formed and shaped the pieces of what he shot into this marvelous film, which is what he basically had to do. Sesonske wrote in his article on the making of the film, "Back in Hollywood in June 1950, Renoir discovered that the awkwardness of his actors made some footage unusable. Without the possibility of retakes, he began to construct his film in the editing room, first creating a version concentrating on the story of adolescent girls coming of age through their encounter with a romantic stranger." Unfortunately for Renoir, his youngest performers were his least experienced ones, most having none at all and while that story was the key, they alone couldn't carry the film. Again, retakes weren't an option. In his article, Sesonske continued, "Through subsequent versions, Renoir reduced the elements of story and added more and more of his documentary footage, compensating for the loss of dramatic material by adding a commentary to help explain the action and make Captain John acceptable." I guess those equipment delays turned out to be a lucky break after all.

While the young actresses hardly can be called the best film debuts in the world, it's clear even as great as The River remains that the weak link that Renoir needed to overcome in editing was Breen as Captain John. His performance lacks so much in the way of expression and charisma that Renoir really had no choice but to make the film be about falling in love with India because at times it's hard to fathom that one of the girls would develop feelings for Captain John, let alone three. It's really a credit to Renoir's direction of the girls and his staging of the action that it comes off as believable as it does. The only part that came off as genuinely charming or romantic to me is the scene I described earlier where he's gently swatting the moths away from Valerie. The River was the last film Breen ever made out of seven total with the only other notable title being 1949's Battleground directed by William Wellman and starring Van Johnson and earning James Whitmore an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Breen played Doc but it has been a long time since I've seen Battleground, so I don't recall him in it, but I think a seven film career may speak for itself since he lived until the year 2000 and has no other IMDb credits. For playing someone who is supposed to have lost his leg in a war, he reminds me somewhat of Kevin Costner at the opening of Dances With Wolves where we're supposed to believe he's a suicidal Cavalry officer. Perhaps real actors could make that believable. At one point, the adult Harriet says about Captain John, "I didn't realize…that he had no room in his thoughts for the romantic dreams of a silly little girl." With Breen playing Captain John, you can't be sure he has thoughts of any kind.

While that would seem to be a major demerit on The River, its beauty so overcomes one bad performance no matter how central that performance might be. Shields alone almost compensates as Mr. John, not only for his scenes with Melanie but with Captain John as well whether it's when he's explaining to him that "I’m too lazy for the big philosophies so I invent little ones of my own.” Even more interesting are Mr. John's thoughts after everyone has to deal with a surprise tragedy. (SPOILER ALERT) Little Bogey, always fascinated with scaly creatures, found himself particularly enthralled when he watched the performance of a snake charmer with a cobra. One day in the garden, he and his friend Kanu discover a cobra and Bogey tries to charm it with a makeshift flute. Harriet catches them and orders them to go report it immediately as they are supposed to do — she's preoccupied with an injury Captain John suffered and is on her way to take him flowers so she's too busy. Later, in a great montage, Renoir shows all the members of the family and the servants napping — Mother, Elizabeth, Victoria, the twins, Nan, ending with Harriet outside, who sits up with a start. She sees Kanu and he starts running. She chases him, but stops at the pipal tree where lying there, looking as if he's napping like everyone else, is Bogey, killed by the cobra. After the funeral, Mr. John tells Captain John, “We should celebrate that a child died a child. That one escaped. We lock them in our schools, we teach them our stupid taboos, we catch them in our wars, we massacre the innocents. The world is for children. The real world." (END SPOILER)

Perhaps the most memorable sequence in The River actually occurs on land. While Captain John recuperates from a spill he took, he gets the idea that the attraction he feels toward Melanie might be reciprocated. He tells her that he always had the impression that she disliked him, but she tells him the she only dislikes herself and runs out of the home. The American chases after her through the greenery at the same time, from different directions, after having been moping on Harriet's porch Harriet and Valerie both took Nan's suggestion and came to visit Captain John with flowers. They see him making his way through the lusciously green scenery and start their own pursuits, at one point with the three girls literally forming a triangle on the screen as the adult Harriet says they were "suddenly running away from childhood and rushing toward love." The pursuit of would-be lovers reminds one of The Rules of the Game, only this isn't played as farce. Valerie finally catches up with Captain John and snags a kiss, prompting our narrator to note, "It was my first kiss, received by another." The film advances a few months later as Father hands out letters to Valerie, Harriet and Melanie from Captain John, who it seems left a few months ago. As Christie points out quite rightly, "Renoir's films tend to show that not all problems are soluble." Father and Nan get called in from the porch to learn that Mother has had the baby, yet another girl. "Ten minutes ago, she wasn't born," Harriet says. "Tomorrow, we'll be used to her."

Ian Christie also writes that "we know that Rumer Godden liked Renoir's adaptation of The River as much as she disliked Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's version of her earlier novel, Black Narcissus." The greatest contribution made by The River though is how it rejuvenated Jean Renoir after the double whammy of having his native country reject his greatest work and then to get mistreated by Hollywood after that. It inspired him to return to Europe where he had another burst of creativity and produced some more wonderful films. Renoir also got to see The Rules of the Game restored to what he originally intended and recognized as the masterpiece it is. As for Kenneth McEldowney, he never made another film. He'd taken his wife's dare and succeeded, so he felt he had nothing left to prove and went into real estate.

*In English subtitles (and it is an English language film) and various references to cast lists and the characters' names, some spell the one twin as Muffy, others as Muffie.

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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

 

My Missing Picture Nominees: Sons and Lovers (1960)


By Edward Copeland
Before I begin discussing the 1960 best picture nominee Sons and Lovers, based on the famed D.H. Lawrence novel and which earned acclaimed Oscar-winning cinematographer Jack Cardiff his only nomination as a director, I'd like to use this occasion to point out yet another reason any true film lover should dump their streaming only Netflix option in favor of DVDs only. Sons and Lovers is one of the few Oscar nominees for best picture that I've never been able to see, but Netflix only carries it on streaming so I've been trying to watch any titles they have only on streaming before I switch to DVDs only. Cardiff filmed Sons and Lovers in luscious black-and-white CinemaScope (actually his d.p., the equally famous and lauded Freddie Francis was the cinematographer on the film). While you will see the opening and closing credits in the intended aspect ratio, the film in between will be cropped and squeezed for no good reason. Other streaming titles are shown in CinmaScope from beginning to end. Another strike against Netflix streaming. You won't get that on the DVD unless it's a DVD that only offers fullscreen.

As you might expect, a film being directed by Jack Cardiff, the brilliant d.p. behind the look of the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classics A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus (for which he won the Oscar for cinematography) and The Red Shoes. He also shot Under Capricorn for Hitchcock, The African Queen for Huston, War and Peace for King Vidor (earning another Oscar nomination) and garnered his final cinematography nomination for Joshua Logan's Fanny in 1961. Believe it or not, he even served as d.p. on Rambo: First Blood Part II. The Academy saw fit to give him an honorary Oscar for his long career of exceptional work at the ceremony held in 2001.

Freddie Francis, his d.p. for Sons and Lovers, took home the Oscar for his work on the film. Despite a long list of impressive work, Francis was only nominated for the Oscar one other time — for Glory — and he won. Some of Francis' other films included Scorsese's version of Cape Fear and, his final film, David Lynch's The Straight Story. Also on Cardiff's crew as an assistant director was Peter Yates, who would go on to direct films as diverse as Bullitt and Breaking Away.

I wish I could say that I've read the D.H. Lawrence novel upon which the film is based, but the title itself makes it obvious that the adaptation by Gavin Lambert (who co-wrote Nicholas Ray's films Bigger Than Life and Bitter Victory) and T.E.B. Clarke (Oscar-winning writer of The Lavender Hill Mob) has taken some big liberties from the book. I mean the title indicates multiple sons, but aside from one brief scene that kills off Arthur (Sean Barrett), son of Walter and Gertrude Morel (the great Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller, by far the film's greatest asset beyond its look and design), a couple of scenes with their son William (William Lucas), who lives in London, the film revolves around their son Paul (Dean Stockwell).

According to summaries of the novel online, Lawrence's book begins with a focus on the turbulent marriage of Walter, a working class miner in Nottingham, England, with a penchant for liquor and Gertrude, who develops unhealthy attachments to her sons. William still moves to London in the book, but is the eldest son and Gertrude's favorite, though he takes ill and dies. Arthur is an afterthought in the book and they also have a sister named Annie who doesn't exist in the film at all. None of the children follow dad into the mines. A near-death experience for Paul (in the novel, not the film) makes Gertrude transfer her obsession to him. Aspiring to be an artist, he gets a chance to move to London when a patron (Ernest Thesiger, who played Dr. Pretorious in 1935's Bride of Frankenstein) sees promise in Paul's work, but Paul abandons his chance to leave when he witness an incident of his drunken father mistreating his mother and stays, fearful of what his lout of a dad could do to his mom.

His mother also subtly and not so subtly interferes with Paul's romances, first with the overly pious Miriam (Heather Sears), who teases the poor lad unmercifully. and later with the married but separated suffragette Clara (Mary Ure) he meets when he takes a job at a sewing factory. (His boss is played by Donald Pleasence). While Miriam runs frigid, Clara burns hot and Paul eats her up, much to the disdain of Clara's cheating husband and his possessive mother.

Howard was nominated as best actor, though he's really supporting and deserved a nomination there. Ure was nominated as supporting actress. Hiller didn't get remembered at all, which is a shame. Given the five films up for best picture in 1960, they all were going to finish a distant second to Billy Wilder's The Apartment. John Wayne's starring in and directing The Alamo automatically lands in fifth. The middle three are tightly bunched, but I believe I'd rank Elmer Gantry second, then The Sundowners, and place Sons and Lovers fourth.

What finally brings Sons and Lovers down that low, despite its gorgeous look and design and mostly superb acting, is Dean Stockwell, who sticks out like a dandelion in a bouquet of roses. Amidst all this British authenticity, including filming on many locations that D.H. Lawrence actually traversed, Stockwell just doesn't belong. His accent isn't horrible, but he's so recognizable as an American (he was born in Hollywood and began acting as a child in the 1940s after all), you know that he wasn't spawned by Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller. Supposedly, one of the producers, American Jerry Wald, insisted on casting an American in hopes of better U.S. box office. Stockwell can be a great actor but when you think of all the marvelous actors in the right age range circulating in the U.K at that time, what a boneheaded move. Imagine if this film had starred an O'Toole or a Finney or a Caine or a Richard Harris or an Oliver Reed or an Alan Bates or a Laurence Harvey. It could have saved the movie.



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Monday, March 01, 2010

 

Centennial Tributes: David Niven


By Liz Hunt
It’s easy to celebrate the late actor David Niven’s life.

Today, Niven would have been 100. Had he lived, the Oscar-, British Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning actor probably would have been a dapper, urbane gent with wavy white hair, a pencil-thin moustache and, as always, be 100 percent British.
He died July 29, 1983, at his home in Chateau-d’Oex, Switzerland, after a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). He is buried there.

His 112 movies include best picture winner Around the World in 80 Days, the film that won him the Oscar, Separate Tables, The Guns of Navarone, the 007 farce Casino Royale and the original Pink Panther.

He was known for his gentle, self-deprecating manner, his light-hand with comedy, his depth as a dramatic actor, his friendships with screen stars Cary Grant, Clark Gable and Roger Moore, and his charming wit — whether aimed at Errol Flynn or a streaker dashing behind him during the 1974 Oscar ceremony.

James David Graham Niven was born in London in 1910. For years, his biography said he was born in Kirriemuir, Scotland, because he thought it sounded more romantic than London.

His father was Scottish, a British military officer who died at Gallipoli on Aug. 21, 1915. He was a landowner who left his wife Henrietta with four children, David, Max, Joyce and Grizel.

Niven’s wit emerged early. He said as a child he felt superior to others because when reciting the Lord’s Prayer in church, he thought it was written “Our Father, who art a Niven…”

When his mother remarried, Niven attended several boarding schools. He hated them, and his grades showed it, but his soldier father’s reputation helped him get into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He left there as a second lieutenant. He was asked where he wanted to serve and he wrote he’d be fine anywhere but the Highland Light Infantry, which was where he was posted. He later transferred to the Rifle Brigade. During his service, he was posted to Malta and charmed a number of highly placed people with his devil-may-care attitude and his dashing looks, a precursor of many of his future film roles.

After his military service, Niven took a number of odd jobs, including by his account, a gunnery instructor for Cuban revolutionaries. He arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s had bit parts in films such as There Goes the Bride, Eyes of Fate and Cleopatra.

Samuel Goldwyn took an interest in the engaging young man in 1935, adding him to a group of attractive young contract players. He had several small roles for Goldwyn and was loaned to 20th Century Fox for the 1936 Thank You, Jeeves!

It was then he started making friends with fellow actors Flynn and several other British actors in Hollywood, and also made quite a splash with the ladies of the film world.

He had a few supporting roles and carried a few movies before 1939, when he returned to Britain to reenlist in the army’s Rifle Brigade. He left World War II to make two movies to rally British morale, Spitfire and The Way Ahead. Fellow actor Peter Ustinov served as his valet in the army.

Niven married Primula Rollo in 1940 and they had two children. Despite his fighting for six years, he came in second in the 1945 Popularity Poll of British film stars. When he returned to Hollywood, he was made a Legionnaire of the Order of Merit, the highest American order a non-American can earn. It was presented to Niven by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

His first major post-war film was working with Powell and Pressburger in Stairway to Heaven (known as A Matter of Life and Death in the U.K.) about a British aviator who after surviving a certain death must argue for his life before a celestial court.

His life changed when his wife died in an accident during a dinner party at Tyrone Power’s home in 1946. During a game of hide and seek, she opened a door and walked in, thinking it was a closet. It was the basement, and she fell downstairs, landed on concrete and died.

It was a low point in his life. In a 2009 biography of the actor, David Niven: The Man Behind the Balloon by Michael Munn, the author recalls an interview with Niven when he remembered one moment he toyed with suicide. The story was reported in U.S. tabloid the Globe and says that after his first wife died, he decided to shoot himself.

In that report, Niven said, “I took a gun and put the barrel in my mouth and with barely a thought for my children, which was unforgiveable, I pulled the trigger. And the bloody thing didn’t fire.” The act shocked Niven, and while he never knew why the gun didn’t fire, he knew he would live to take care of his children. Gable, who had dealt with the accidental death of his wife Carole Lombard, was able to help Niven with his loss as well.

In 1947, he made The Bishop’s Wife with Loretta Young and Cary Grant, now a holiday classic. He played the title role (the bishop, not the wife). Niven said Grant was a great actor because he pursued perfection in himself.

His comments about friend Flynn were more pointed. “You can count on Errol Flynn, he’ll always let you down.

“Flynn was a magnificent specimen of the rampant male. Outrageously good looking, he was a great natural athlete who played tennis with Donald Budge and boxed with ‘Mushy’ Calahan. The extras, among who I had many friends, disliked him intensely.”

Niven married Hjodis Genberg in early 1948. They adopted two children, (one was his by a Swedish model) and they were married until his death.

After his contract with Goldwyn ended in 1949, Niven could only get small roles, and he joined Dick Powell, Charles Boyer and Ida Lupino to form the television production company “Four Star.” In Four Star Playhouse’s 33 episodes between 1952 and 1956, Niven was able to play the strong dramatic roles he had wanted. While working with “Four Star,” Niven met Blake Edwards, who would hire him years later for another famous role.

For the rest of his career, he switched between big and small screens with ease. He enjoyed the meatier dramatic roles, but the public liked his lighter-hearted roles better.

Twice in the 1950s he teamed with director Otto Preminger, once in the then-controversial 1953 The Moon Is Blue where he and William Holden competed for the affections of "virgin" Maggie McNamara and again in 1958's Bonjour Tristesse where he played a widower whose scheming daughter (Jean Seberg) tried to thwart any potential romantic interests, especially Deborah Kerr.


His luck in film changed forever in 1956, when he played globetrotter Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days, his most successful film and 1956's Oscar winner for best picture. His biggest break came when Laurence Olivier dropped out of Separate Tables. Scheduled for a 1958 release, Niven was tapped to play an elderly and disgraced British military man. He played down his part, saying, “They gave me very good lines and then cut to Deborah Kerr while I was saying them.” His modesty wasn’t necessary. He took home an Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe award for best actor for his reading of Major Angus Pollock.
Hollywood’s recognition of Niven as a serious actor made him a highly paid professional in films and television throughout the 1960s. It was then that Niven began his long flirtation with British super spy James Bond. Ian Fleming recommended that Niven play Bond in Dr. No in 1962. Sadly, producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli thought Niven too old for the part. Niven was not totally ignored. In the Bond novel You Only Live Twice, Fleming refers to Niven and a pet bird in the story is named after the actor. Three years after the book was released, Niven played Bond in the spy send-up, 1967’s Casino Royale, a Fleming Bond novel to which Broccoli didn't own the rights.

Niven wasn’t only an actor. During breaks, he wrote two autobiographies, The Moon’s a Balloon in 1972, and Bring on the Empty Horses in 1975. His novels include Round the Ragged Rocks and Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly, both published posthumously.

In 1976, he joined a great ensemble of actors including Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith and Peter Falk among others in Neil Simon's spoof of both film and literary detectives in Murder By Death, giving Niven a chance to play a variation on William Powell's Nick Charles from The Thin Man films. Two years later, he got to reunite with his war-time valet when he and Ustinov co-starred in the Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile.

Niven created one of his more lasting characters, the suave jewel thief Sir Charles Lytton for Edwards’ skewed heist picture that brought Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, 1964's The Pink Panther. The movie spawned multiple sequels and Niven reprised Lytton in two, 1982’s Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther in 1983.

The public was not aware that Niven had been diagnosed with ALS early in the 1980s. By the time filming began on the final two films, Niven could physically appear, but his speech was slurred. Impressionist Rich Little was brought in to do Niven’s lines.

Niven underplayed his strengths with gentle humor, which made him popular on television shows and for witty quotes for newspapers.

“I’ve been lucky enough to win an Oscar and write a best seller — my other dream would be to have a painting in the Louvre,” he said. “The only way that’s going to happen is if I paint a dirty one on the wall of the gentleman’s lavatory.”

As a naked man ran behind him at the 1974 Oscars, very calmly he said, “Isn’t it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”

Finally, some thoughts on acting current performers might keep in mind.

“This isn’t work. It’s fun. The whole thing is fun. I hear actors say, ‘I have to go to work tomorrow.’ Nonsense. Work is eight hours in a coal mine or a government office,” he explained. “Getting up in the morning and putting on a funny moustache and dressing up and showing off in front of the grown-ups, that’s play, and for which we’re beautifully overpaid. I’ve always felt that way. After all, how many people in the world are doing things they like to do?”

One final thought for the man who would have been 100 years old. It’s something he never had to worry happening to him.

“Actors don’t retire. They just get offered fewer roles.”


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Saturday, January 23, 2010

 

Jean Simmons (1929-2010)


Jean Simmons' long career, which has sadly ended at the age of 80, had such a wide array of varied and great performances, it always has puzzled me why the British-born actress didn't have a larger reputation. Maybe there is a price to be paid for being so prolific for so long and for being so damn good.

Simmons started her film career young back in the 1940s. Her first film was 1944 and by 1946 she already had landed the role of the young Estrella in David Lean's Great Expectations and followed that up the following year with the role of Kanchi in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus. For her work as Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's 1948 Hamlet, she received the first of her two Oscar nominations.

She did get her shot at a lot of biblical-era costume dramas, including 1953's The Robe with Richard Burton. Simmons got a chance to do a musical turn as well in the role of Sgt. Sarah Brown opposite Marlon Brando in 1955's Guys and Dolls. 1960 brought her three great roles that couldn't be more different. There was Varinia, the woman loyal to Spartacus. The role that she truly got robbed of an Oscar nomination for was Sister Sharon Falconer, a tent circuit evangelist who begins to believe a bit much in herself beyond the con in Elmer Gantry opposite Burt Lancaster. Finally, there was the frothy fun as the gossipy, fourth wheel watching and spurring on the action in a love triangle between Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum in The Grass Is Greener.

In the mid-'60s, she began appearing on television more, though one film, which I haven't seen, 1969's The Happy Ending, did earn her another Oscar nomination. The remainder of her career was a mix of TV movies and miniseries, feature films and guest shots on TV series. She even appeared on The Odd Couple and received and Emmy nomination for an appearance on Murder, She Wrote. She won an Emmy for her role in the miniseries The Thorn Birds. The last notable feature film she appeared in was 1995's How to Make an American Quilt. R.I.P. Ms. Simmons.


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Thursday, April 23, 2009

 

Jack Cardiff (1914-2009)


By Edward Copeland
Granted, I've been under the weather of late, but I don't know how someone or something didn't alert me to the passing of the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff yesterday at 94. Perusing the headlines of Web versions of major newspapers and Google's conglomeration, there has been no mention. By God, we can find plenty of space to go on about that 47-year-old woman who shocked Simon Cowell because she knew how to sing. This is pathetic and sad. A true great artist has died, but the mainstream media has determined that a short segment on a British reality show is more important. Screw them. I'm here to salute a Brit with decades of evidence of real talent.

In the AP story on Cardiff's passing, they mentioned what Martin Scorsese once said about Cardiff being able "to paint with the camera." As it would happen, yesterday I was watching director Albert Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman for a long-term project I'm working on. I didn't pay much attention to the credits, but I was immediately struck by the look, which almost reminded me of some of the Powell-Pressburger masterpieces. There was a good reason for that. Jack Cardiff was the d.p. Of course, his true crowning achievements were his work with Powell and Pressburger, specifically the great 1947 Black Narcissus and the exquisite 1948 The Red Shoes. His first collaboration with the fabled team was A Matter of Life and Death also known as Stairway to Heaven. It isn't that much of an overstatement to say that Cardiff contributed to the Powell-Pressburger reputation as much as the filmmakers themselves. They made countless other great films that Cardiff didn't film, but his contribution to Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes were in many ways greater than the filmmakers themselves. The pure beauty of the images were so hypnotizing in their colors and light, shadow and shadings, that at times they could overwhelm the stories in a way I can't think of cinematography doing in any other great films. Sure, that's easy to do in lesser films when a viewer is trying to find distractions, but when the film doesn't suffer and keeps its high quality, that's a feat. He truly showed off what you could do with Technicolor.

Cardiff's great work wasn't limited to that directing team. He worked with Hitchcock on Under Capricorn and Huston on The African Queen. He worked with Mankiewicz on The Barefoot Contessa and Vidor on War and Peace.

His lengthy career included work on films that I would have never connected him to such as Death on the Nile, Conan the Destroyer and Rambo: First Blood Part II.

Cardiff also directed a good number of films, the most notable of which was probably 1960's Sons and Lovers, which was nominated for best picture and earned Cardiff a directing nomination. Cinematographer Freddie Francis even won for his work on it.

Cardiff's cinematography only earned Oscar nominations three times, though he did win for Black Narcissus. His other nominations were for War and Peace and 1961's Fanny. The Academy did bestow an honorary Oscar upon Cardiff as a "master of color of light" at its 73rd ceremony.

RIP Mr. Cardiff.


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Thursday, October 18, 2007

 

Deborah Kerr (1921-2007)


That iconic image above in From Here to Eternity is one of many associated with the great Deborah Kerr, who passed away Tuesday in England at the age of 86. With six Oscar nominations and zero wins, she unfortunately holds the record for the most nominations without a win among lead actresses, though at least the Academy saw fit to give her an honorary Oscar in 1994.

Though, as seems to be the case with many of our greatest performers, her six nominations didn't necessarily represent her very best work. Her first nomination came in 1949's Edward, My Son, where she was fine, though really it was a supporting turn. Following that was a nomination for 1953's Eternity, 1956's The King and I, 1957's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, 1958's Separate Tables (another supporting role, and a miscast one at that) and 1960's The Sundowners. For me though, her finest work came in films for which she wasn't nominated, such as her triple role in Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. She scored with them again in 1947's Black Narcissus. Then there were other, less well-known films such as in 1945's Vacation From Marriage and, most especially, her charming turn as an Irish lass who hates the English so much she unwittingly becomes a Nazi spy in I See a Dark Stranger. Often, she was the best thing in otherwise lackluster films such as Otto Preminger's Bonjour tristesse and John Huston's adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana. This doesn't even take into account the number of huge movies in which she appeared such as King Solomon's Mines, Quo Vadis?, Julius Caesar and An Affair to Remember.

RIP Ms. Kerr.


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Tuesday, May 22, 2007

 

Centennial Tributes: Laurence Olivier

"I take a simple view of living. It is keep your eyes open and get on with it."
Lord Laurence Olivier


By Edward Copeland
Lord Laurence Olivier was often referred to as one of the all-time greats on stage and I wish I could have seen him perform in that capacity. He co-founded with Sir Ralph Richardson a new Old Vic Theatre Company in 1944. Later, he was one of the founders of the Royal National Theatre in 1963. He retired from the stage in 1974. He also was the fifth actor to be given the honor of burial in Westminster Abbey. Despite his legendary status as a stage actor and appearing frequently on Broadway between 1929 and 1961 and directing two productions after that, he only received a single Tony nomination for acting (for The Entertainer in 1958) and he lost. As it is, myself and many others have had to make do with his admittedly massive body of screen and television work, work which the actor often expressed embarrassment about, understandable when you consider some of the roles he took, presumably just for the paycheck.

Really, Olivier is the one who inspired me to use my running gag "All British actors are whores." That's not to say he wasn't great, but it did often exemplify itself in his seeming willingness to appear in just about anything that passed his way. At the same time, he did manage for a long time to hold the record for acting Oscar nominations among men with 10 nominations until Jack Nicholson tied him with his nomination for A Few Good Men and passed him with his nomination for As Good As It Gets. Instead of just going chronologically through his works that I've seen, I've decided to divide this tribute into four acts.

Act I: The Oscar Nominations

"My stage successes have provided me with the greatest moments outside myself; my film successes the best moments, professionally, within myself."


Olivier's first Oscar nomination came in 1939 for the film which really put him on the map as far as movies were concerned, Wuthering Heights. Really it is one of the few times he played an almost purely romantic role on film, seeming to slip into more character-type parts almost immediately afterward. Still, his Heathcliff can make hearts flutter to this very day. in 1940, he scored his second consecutive nomination as best actor and worked with the legendary Alfred Hitchcock on Rebecca, the only Hitchcock film to win best picture, even though Hitch failed to pick up director. Olivier's Max de Winter perfectly blended mystery as to what his character may or may not have done to his previous wife with enough appeal to understand why Joan Fontaine's unnamed second wife would fall for the rich and eccentric man living in the wondrous estate of Manderley with the housekeeper from hell, even if his marriage proposal was vague enough that he had to add, "I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool." As World War II preoccupied most of England, Olivier originally joined the actual war effort until given a pass to lend more support through the arts and so his next Oscar nomination came in 1946 with Henry V, which also marked Olivier's first outing as a film director. Shakespeare's tale of the English king and his battles was transformed into a rousing morale boost for British moviegoers when it debuted there in 1944, though it didn't land in the states until two years later. He didn't win as actor, but the Academy bestowed an honorary Oscar to him for his work as actor, director and producer in bringing Henry V to the screen. Two years later, Olivier returned to the best actor ranks in another Shakespeare adaptation, Hamlet, and this time he earned a directing nomination as well. Perhaps Shakespeare's most famous play and certainly the most famous role for any actor interested in the Bard, Hamlet earned Olivier the prize for best actor and won best picture as well, though Olivier lost director to John Huston for Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His Hamlet, as was his Henry V, is very good, but for me he approaches the roles as if the words might break, a tendency I see too often in Shakespearean turns. I wonder if his Shakespearean performances would play differently for me if I saw them on the stage. It was five years until Olivier's next best actor nomination and once again it came from Shakespeare and in a film he directed. This time, Olivier sank his teeth into the great villain that is Richard III and to me, it plays as his first truly great Shakespearean role on film, though I still prefer Ian McKellen's Richard III both in terms of performance and as a film. In 1960, Olivier made it into the best actor finals again, this time for repeating his stage triumph as Archie Rice in Tony Richardson's film of The Entertainer, also notable for his first film teaming with his third and final wife, Joan Plowright. For me, of all the Olivier film performances I've seen, Archie Rice remains the best. His next nomination returned him to Shakespeare again, this time for a film he didn't direct. His Othello is jarring at first, when he enters the film in blackface using a gait that's reminiscent of Antonio Fargas as Huggy Bear on Starsky & Hutch. Once you get past that though (and the makeup is good), it turns out to be his best Shakespearean performance on film yet. It's fascinating, because you see that the older Olivier got and the longer he worked with the Bard's words, the better he got at it. His movie Hamlet was better than his Henry V and his Richard III bested Hamlet, but Othello beats them all (and wait until we get to his King Lear on TV). The supporting cast is a mixed bag. I didn't care much for Frank Finlay's Iago and after decades of enjoying the steel and wit of many a Maggie Smith performance, it seems weird to see her as frail Desdemona, but then again it beats Julia Stiles any day. His next nomination in 1972 came for his acting duel with Michael Caine in Sleuth, but imagine for a moment how the movie world would have been different if Olivier's health had been better in the 1970s. In his DVD commentary on The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola admits that he had two choices for Don Vito: Brando and Olivier, but Olivier's health forced him to decline, though the studio would have preferred him. Four years later, his next nomination came for the first time in the supporting category for his superb turn as the Nazi-in-hiding Christian Szell in Marathon Man, a chilling portrayal that heightened fear of the dentist as much as Jaws did for swimming in the ocean. Two years later, he went from the hunted to the hunter with his final Oscar-nominated performance as the Nazi hunter seeking to stop Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) and his plot to clone little Hitlers in The Boys From Brazil. Though, as if they wanted to make sure he got a little something, the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar the same night.

Act II: The Emmys

"I believe in the theater. I believe in it as the first glamorizer of thoughts. It restores dramatic dynamics and their relations to life size."



Olivier won five Emmys for his acting work on television and two of those wins were for performances that probably come closest to approximating what it would have been like to see him on the stage. I was unable to see his first win for a 1960 special of The Moon and Sixpence or his 1975 win for Love Among the Ruins, which paired him with Katharine Hepburn. I did see his 1973 win for a production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, and I must say he was great as the elder Tyrone, the tired actor not nearly as great as he wanted to be nor that he thought he was. The production itself is as flawed as the 1962 film version starring Katharine Hepburn and none of the other cast members really soar the way Olivier did. I also saw his winning performance in the 1982 British miniseries Brideshead Revisited, whose reputation far exceeds the production's actual worth. Olivier only appeared in two of the 11 laborious chapters and I was sort of surprised as it unfolded that he beat the far-more interesting work by John Gielgud — until I saw the episode Olivier won for, which happened to be the final installment. His performance overpowers the entire episode (thank goodness something did) as a family's dying patriarch. The finest television work I saw him give (and the best Shakespeare I've seen him perform) was his final win for a 1984 production of King Lear. Watching Olivier as the troubled monarch who can't tell his good children from his bad was a joy to behold, despite Gordon Crosse's overbearing musical score, and he truly does the mad scene justice. I once saw a stage production of King Lear and during an intermission, an audience member commented that what Lear really needed was a good estate planner, but what the play really needs is a great Lear and Olivier provided that.

Act III: Other Notable Films

"I don't know what is better than the work that is given to the actor, to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself."



Olivier also appeared in many other notable films, some of which attracted award attention, even if not for him. The same year he made Rebecca, he also played Mr. Darcy in the great 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, even if Greer Garson was too old for her part. The next year, he appeared in the great Powell-Pressburger film 49th Parallel aka The Invaders, as well as perhaps his best collaboration with second wife Vivien Leigh in That Hamilton Woman. You know, it's always odd to hear Leigh act with her own British accent. Another film worth checking out is William Wyler's 1952 film Carrie, one of Jennifer Jones' best efforts as a girl looking for success in the big city of Chicago but running into a spate of bad luck and falling for a married restaurant manager (Olivier). Also, it goes without saying that anyone would be remiss if they missed Olivier's campy turn as Crassus in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. Kubrick basically disowned the film, but it's still worth seeing, if only for the ridiculous amount of innuendo in the scenes between Olivier and Tony Curtis.

Act IV: The Paychecks

"Without acting, I cannot breathe."


For most of the 1970s until the end of his life, Olivier battled many illnesses and I have to hope that they explain some of the motivation. Sometimes, the roles worked out in spite of themselves (I can't imagine that he expected that his fine turn in A Little Romance or the movie itself would turn out as well they did.) Other times, they turned out to be a campy treat in spite of themselves such as his role as Zeus in Clash of the Titans, which also contained a fun turn by fellow Brit Maggie Smith as the devious Thetis. However, other times things didn't turn out nearly so well and Olivier's work turned out campy and over-the-top in movies that ranged from the dull 1979 Dracula where he hammed it up as Van Helsing to the disaster that was Neil Diamond's version of The Jazz Singer where Lord Olivier took the role of the singer's cantor father intoning, "I haf no son." Then there is something that goes beyond the pale in putridness, his role as an American auto magnate (with an awful American accent in the soapy adaptation of Harold Robbins' potboiler The Betsy. The Betsy also proved that it's not just Brits that need paychecks, because I can see no other explanation for the presence of great American actors such as Robert Duvall, Jane Alexander, Tommy Lee Jones and Edward Herrmann in this 1978 lemon. Fortunately, I never saw Olivier take on the role of Douglas MacArthur in the fabled big-budget monstrosity Inchon, most notable for being financed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church (better known as "Moonies") and owner of The Washington Times newspaper. Hell, death hasn't even stopped Olivier who, through the creepy magic of CGI, turned up as the villain in 2004's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, released 15 years after his death.


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Friday, February 10, 2006

 

It's not the size of the role...

By Edward Copeland
With William Hurt's much-deserved (in my opinion) nomination for A History of Violence this year, my thoughts have turned to some of the great single-scene or particularly small roles that were able to grab the viewer's attention in unprecedented ways.

Hurt's brief bit is by no means the Oscar's only instance of short scene-stealers — Beatrice Straight won for basically one monologue in Network and Judi Dench won with very limited screen time in Shakespeare in Love.

Geraldine Page also snagged a nomination for essentially one scene in The Pope of Greenwich Village. Network also produced a great monologue for Ned Beatty that earned him an Oscar nomination. All those nominees were fine by me except for Dench, who was really just getting makeup Oscar love for losing for Mrs. Brown the year before to the wandering accent of Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets. Then there were also some brief nominations that were a complete puzzlement like Ethel Barrymore's nomination for The Paradine Case, one of Alfred Hitchcock's worst films.

So, as they come to me, some of my favorite brief roles.

Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights. When you get right down to it, the scene is completely extraneous to the movie — the climax of a film about the evolution of the porn industry well into the 1980s should have involved AIDS, not a standard drug deal. Still, Molina is masterful with his drug-addled dialogue set to the tune of Night Ranger's "Sister Christian."

One of my favorite single sequence tour-de-forces is Bill Murray in Little Shop of Horrors. His masochist wouldn't come off as great without Steve Martin's sadistic dentist to play off, but he's great.

Christopher Walken is a master of the monologue, but his one scene telling a child-size version of Bruce Willis about the journey of a gold watch in Pulp Fiction is priceless.

Another role that is essentially a single monologue, Jack Lemmon in Short Cuts. A brief but great role that few besides me remember is Swoosie Kurtz in Against All Odds where she is delightfully flaky as the secretary of a crooked lawyer who decides to help Jeff Bridges.

The year Frances McDormand won lead actress (for what in my opinion was a supporting role, but that's an argument for another time) for Fargo, she also gave a great single scene performance in Lone Star. Throughout the film, Chris Cooper's character's unstable ex-wife is referred to and when the situation requires Cooper to visit her late in the film, McDormand nails the character in a way that brings earlier references to vivid life.

Michael Mann's Collateral offered two great one scene performances: Barry Shabaka Henley as a jazz musician targeted for elimination and Javier Bardem as a crime lord. In another Tom Cruise vehicle, Lois Smith had a memorable one-scene turn in a greenhouse in Minority Report.

For a while last year, there was buzz that Lynn Redgrave might get nominated for her great single-scene at the climax of Kinsey as a woman whose life was profoundly affected by the sex researcher, but when that film folded, only Laura Linney was left standing.

It's more than one scene, but Tony Shalhoub's cab driver of indeterminate origin in Quick Change is a riot. Another short one that cracked me up was Maximilian Schell in The Freshman. "Carmine said one boy, here are two."

The original version of Love Affair and its remake by Warren Beatty produced two great short turns by Maria Ouspenskaya and Katharine Hepburn, respectively. Ouspenskaya even managed an Oscar nomination for her performance. Another one scene wonder that earned an Oscar nomination was Sylvia Miles in Midnight Cowboy, though it's been a long time since I've seen that one.

Most of the ones that are springing to my mind right now are more recent ones, but I'm sure brief turns in older films will come to my mind once the conversation gets going. The ones that immediately occur to me are Leslie Howard, Anton Walbrook and Raymond Massey's brief bits in the Powell/Pressburger masterpiece 49th Parallel aka The Invaders.

I'll leave you with this one: while certainly not a nomination-worthy performance, Garry Marshall's turn as the manager of the Desert Inn in Lost in America always cracks me up. "We're through talking now."

He may be through, but I hope you aren't.


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