Monday, February 20, 2012
Nothing just happens
By Edward Copeland
People tend to be described as dog people or cat people. New York people or L.A. people — you get the idea. When it comes to filmmakers, countless directors fall into that sort of categorizing where either you love their work or their movies just rub you the wrong way. I know many people who flat-out dislike the films of Alexander Payne whereas he hasn't disappointed me yet. The Descendants, Payne's first work on the big screen as a director/co-writer since the "14e arrondissement" segment in 2006's Paris, je t'aime and first feature since the sublime Sideways in 2004, doesn't break his streak. In fact, I think it could be Payne's finest film so far and it definitely delivers a role to George Clooney that allows the actor to give the best performance of his career.
Perhaps the secret to Payne's success can be put in two simple words: He reads. With the exception of Citizen Ruth, his first feature as a writer/director, all Payne's subsequent films have been adaptations of novels — not giant, well-known best sellers, mind you, but fiction that somehow crossed his path and seemed as if they'd transfer well into films. In a recent profile in The New York Times, Payne said that the reason he started to co-write his own screenplays was because when he began his career all the scripts that came his way didn't appeal to him. The Descendants began life as a well-reviewed 2007 novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings and marks the first Payne feature that the director didn't co-write with Jim Taylor (though Taylor does serve as a producer). Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, the other writers credited with Payne on the screenplay, both received their first feature writing credits, having worked primarily as actors.
Matt King (Clooney) makes a great living practicing law in paradise — or at least that's what many think when they hear the word Hawaii. Not everyone agrees, especially Matt King with everything he has on his plate. As he says in a voiceover early in the film, "Paradise can go fuck itself." Though King and his extended family of cousins bear little outward signs of being native Hawaiians, their ancestry stretches back to original Hawaiian royalty, giving them the rights to a huge tract of beautiful, untouched Hawaiian land that's their family has held in trust for eons. The trust expires in seven years and Matt somehow has become the trustee who makes the final call after a vote by the various cousins whether to hold on to the land or accept one of two competing offers that will make all the relatives rich.
The pre-scheduled family meeting has come at a most inopportune time for Matt as his wife, Elizabeth, suffers severe injuries in a boating accident that places her in a coma. Soon after, the doctor informs Matt that Elizabeth is in a persistent vegetative state and won't be coming back. According to the terms of her living will, Elizabeth didn't want any unusual measures taken to keep her alive and wants all life support turned off so her friends can have a chance to say goodbye before her funeral. Matt, who pretty much lives in a world of obliviousness, finds himself suddenly the main caretaker for his precocious and odd 10-year-old daughter Scottie (Amara Miller).
As he finds himself dealing with several incidents Scottie has caused at school and with her friends, he retrieves his 17-year-old daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) from the boarding school he and Elizabeth sent her to following drug problems. Alexandra still harbors a grudge against her mother about a fight they had over Christmas break that her father urges her to let go and Alex realizes that Matt has no idea what mother and daughter fought about and she fills him in — Elizabeth had been cheating on him with another man.
The screenplay, which deservedly won the Writers Guild Award for adapted screenplay last night, perfectly blends the comedy and pathos of all the characters' situations and the entire cast from the biggest roles to the smallest perform them with pitch-perfect aplomb. Among some of the performers who show up in small but quite effective roles are Beau Bridges as one of Matt's cousins, Robert Forster as Elizabeth's perpetually pissed father, Matthew Lillard as Elizabeth's lover and Judy Greer as his wife. You probably guess early on that the land trust decision and Matt's stepping into his role as a father and dealing with his dying wife's secrets will tie together, but they tie together quite naturally and without any gimmicks.
The Descendants also marks Payne's best use of visuals as a director. He especially finds some really unusual and unique framing built around Clooney's head — and I don't mean Clooney's usual handsome profile. No scene or shot seems extraneous and while the film provides plenty of laughs, the feeling it leaves you with is one of warmth and the credit for that really belongs to its four main characters.
The actor who hasn't been discussed much in all the praise showered upon The Descendants is Nick Krause who plays Sid, who Matt describes as being about "100 miles from smartsville." He appears to be a stoned-out teen whose presence never really gets explained but Alex insists that she needs him there for if her dad wants her to stay and help with Scottie. Sid's knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time balances out with an ability to define a situation accurately without fear of repercussions. One of the best tiny scenes come when Matt wanders in on Sid in the middle of the night and random talk reveals why Alex relates to Sid.
Amara Miller gives one of the better turns I've seen from someone playing a precocious 10-year-old. She manages to sound as if she's saying and doing things beyond her years without losing that essence of childhood that so often gets lost in the work of professional child actors. There isn't any of that sing-songy fakery that they often give off. You always believe she's a kid first.
Shailene Woodley emerges as the movie's real find as Alexandra, giving a fully rounded performance as Alex begins as cynical, caustic and shielded, angry at her mom, her dad and the world until she slowly develops into her father's co-conspirator in his desire to track down the man who cuckolded him. Her evolution from Matt's nemesis to his ally serves as the story's bridge.
Clooney stands out, but not because he's the biggest star but because Matt King gives him a different type of character to play than he ever has had the chance to portray before. Clooney never has turned in a bad performance, but far too often his parts have been ones that he simply slided by on his charm. We've never seen Clooney play someone as completely at sea as Matt King is. When Alex tells him that he hasn't got a clue, referring specifically to her mom's affair, she could be talking about anything. Matt even describes himself to another child's parent as "the understudy parent." He appears to do his job competently, but a parade of elephants could walk past his house and he might not notice. The arc of Matt regaining control of himself and connecting with his daughters drives The Descendants and taps acting power not seen from Clooney before.
It's a helluva coincidence that in the same year both Clooney here and his buddy Brad Pitt in Moneyball landed roles that stretched their abilities as actors and provided each with his best screen performance yet. In terms of lead actors, 2011 truly has been an embarrassment of riches. If I were an Oscar voter, I'd be horribly torn between Clooney, Pitt and Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. For a change, none of the nominees in that acting category is a joke and yet there still are countless others who would have been deserving of a slot.
As for The Descendants, I feel confident it should win adapted screenplay Sunday, but though I've been unable to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or War Horse, I think it deserves the top prize as well.
Tweet
Labels: 10s, Beau Bridges, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Oldman, Payne
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Monday, July 18, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Hume Cronyn Part II
Hume Cronyn
By Edward Copeland
We continue our tribute to Hume Cronyn as the decade turns to the 1950s. If you started here by mistake and missed Part I, click here. Cronyn continued to appear steadily on the various live theatrical programs on TV but only two feature films the entire decade. He definitely turned his focus to the stage, especially behind-the-scenes work. In March 1950, he directed his first Broadway play, the original comedy Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep whose cast included Fredric March. In November, he and his wife did their first New York stage collaboration when he directed her as the title character in the original drama Hilda Crane. In April 1951, he helped produce The Little Blue Light which reunited him with Burgess Meredith and had Melvyn Douglas in the cast. In August, his sole feature film of the year was released: the underrated Joseph L. Mankiewicz gem People Will Talk starring Cary Grant. Grant and Cronyn play professors at a medical school with diametrically opposed views on just about everything and Cronyn's character leads a crusade to get Grant removed from the faculty because of his unorthodox views.
Beginning Oct. 24, 1951, Cronyn and Tandy appeared on Broadway together for the first time in a play that became such a hit, that it managed to be spun off into radio, TV and movie versions with Cronyn and Tandy starring in all but the movie version because they were still enjoying the successful Broadway run at the time. The original comedy The Fourposter by Jan De Hartog is a two-character play where spouses Michael and Agnes re-enact their marriage around their four-poster bed and took place between 1890 and 1925. José
Ferrer directed the production and both he and De Hartog won Tonys (meaning it won best play). Since Cronyn and Tandy stayed with the play until May 1953, their roles in the 1952 film version directed by Irving Reis went to Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer. Its only Oscar nomination was for black-and-white cinematography. When Cronyn and Tandy finished their run in the play, Cronyn produced an NBC radio sitcom version of the play, changing the title to The Marriage, the characters' names to Ben and Liz and losing the period element. While they worked on this during the play's run, the radio show didn't begin airing until October 1953. A total of 26 episodes aired and then The Marriage made history, albeit short-lived. It moved to NBC TV where it became the first sitcom broadcast in color, though it only lasted eight episodes when, tragically, Tandy suffered a miscarriage and live broadcasts ceased never to start again. The Fourposter would come back throughout Cronyn and Tandy's careers though in the form of revivals and tours (including a 15-performance Broadway revival in 1955). In fact, in the summer of 1955, Cronyn and Tandy performed The Fourposter on an episode of Producers' Showcase and Tandy received her first Emmy nomination for actress in a single performance.Throughout the 1950s, movies didn't see much of Cronyn as he kept busy with productions on TV and the stage. Other than People Will Talk, the only other feature film IMDb lists for that decade is something called Crowded Paradise in 1956 of which IMDb contains the bare minimum of information. Part of the reason for this may have been that Hume Cronyn may have been one of the few people in this country's sordid history of the blacklist to keep himself busy so constantly that he didn't know he'd been blacklisted. Another reason was that it seemed inconceivable to him since he was never very active politically, never called before HUAC or ever attended any "suspect" meetings. It turned out eventually that his particularly puzzling blacklisting was because he had hired people who were blacklisted, not that he knew or even if he did he would have cared. Cronyn didn't suffer too much because by the time he became aware of his status, others had started breaking the blacklist anyway by doing what got him on the list in the first place.
In December 1953, he and Norman Lloyd inaugurated The Phoenix Theatre by co-directing and co-starring in Madam, Will You Walk? which also featured Tandy. Interestingly, the play with the same opening and closing dates is listed in both the Internet Broadway Database and the Internet Off-Broadway Database and I can find nothing in a quick look to settle where it belongs — not even number of seats or an address. Cronyn didn't spend all his stage time in New York though, he started doing a lot of tours, including a series of concert readings with Tandy in 1954 called Face to Face which were later turned into a recording. In 1955, Cronyn hit The Great White Way with Tandy twice: the aforementioned short revival of The Fourposter and an original farce by Roald Dahl called The Honeys. Sometime that year he had time to act in A Day By The Sea at the American National Theatre and Academy Theatre — and that's not counting 13 TV acting jobs between 1953 and 1955.
The remainder of the decade was even more dominated by work on television, to the exclusion of actual stage work in 1956 though he did make the first of two appearances (the second coming in 1958) on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He returned to Broadway in 1957 to direct longtime friend Karl Malden in The Egghead. Cronyn and Tandy also toured several cities across the U.S. in 1957 with the new comedy The Man in the Dog Suit ahead of its Broadway premiere in 1958. Cronyn followed the same pattern in 1958, touring with Tandy and other actors in a production he both starred in and directed called Triple Play that consisted of three one-act plays and a monologue, which was considered an original one act play when it opened on Broadway in 1959, though it was written by the long dead Anton Chekhov. The one acts were Tennessee Williams' Portrait of a Madonna, two by Sean O'Casey: A Pound on Demand and Bedtime Story, and the Chekhov monologue which Cronyn performed Some Comments on the Harmful Effects of Tobacco. Cronyn and Tandy closed out the 1950s with a television movie adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence with a cast led by Laurence Olivier and featuring Judith Anderson, Denholm Elliott, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Jean Marsh. IMDb actually had a link to the original Time magazine review of it.
As the 1960s began, movies began to enter Cronyn's life again and television receded a bit, mainly because the popularity of programs that televised plays were on the wane. Theater maintained its prominence in his life, and he started to see some award recognition for it. In the fall of 1960, he played Louis Howe to Ralph Bellamy's FDR and Greer Garson's Eleanor when Sunrise at Campobello was released. In early 1961, Cronyn opened on Broadway as Jimmie Luton, the main character of the new farce Big Fish, Little Fish by Hugh Wheeler, his first work on Broadway though he'd go on to write the books for A Little Night Music, Candide and Sweeney Todd, winning a Tony for all three. Cronyn was directed in Big Fish, Little Fish by John Gielgud, who won the Tony for best direction in a play. Cronyn received his first Tony nomination as actor in a play and the cast included Jason Robards, George Grizzard (Tony nominee for featured actor in a play) and Martin Gabel (Tony winner for featured actor in a play). The show proved to be such a success that
the following year Cronyn made his London stage debut when he played Jimmie Luton again when Big Fish, Little Fish opened at the Duke of York's Theatre. While overseas he helped his friend Joe Mankiewicz by taking the part of Sosigenes in the out-of-control Cleopatra, which finally opened in 1963. When he was back in the U.S. in 1963, he helped inaugurate the premiere season of the Tyrone Guthrie's Minnesota Theatre Company at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis by appearing in three productions: Harpagon in Moliere's The Miser, Tchebutkin in Chekhov's The Three Sisters and Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In 1964, Cronyn scored a coup — playing Polonious in a Broadway production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton and nearly stealing the show from the melancholy Dane. Directed by Gielgud as if the company were in rehearsal clothes, it also was filmed and aired on TV the same year. Cronyn's performance won him a Tony for featured actor in a play. Here is a YouTube clip of Cronyn and Burton at work.A few months after his triumph in Hamlet, Cronyn returned to the Broadway stage with Tandy in tow in The Physicists opposite Robert Shaw. Two days after that show closed, Cronyn was one of the producers of the play Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, which earned Cronyn his third Tony nomination, his first as producer of a best play nominee. In late 1966, Cronyn and Tandy created the roles of Tobias and Agnes in a bona fide classic: Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance and Cronyn received another Tony nomination as actor in a play as Tobias. In 1967, Cronyn took A Delicate Balance on tour. He stayed on the road performing in productions in L.A. and Ontario in 1968 and 1969. He squeezed out two films in 1969: Elia Kazan's adaptation of his own novel The Arrangement and Norman Jewison's comedy Gaily, Gaily starring Beau Bridges. Somehow, in this busiest of schedules, Cronyn also had to recover from a bout of cancer that cost him one of his eyes in 1969 and left him with a glass eye for the rest of his life.
Now, we do draw near the end of the theatrical careers of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, but Cronyn wraps it up very actively and the couple will follow it up with prolific television and film work. First in 1977, Cronyn co-produced with Mike Nichols the two-person play The Gin Game for he and Tandy to star in and Nichols to direct. After an initial tryout in Long Wharf, Conn., they moved to Broadway to much success, running 517 performances. Cronyn received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for both best actor and best play while Tandy won both those awards for best actress. The play's author, D.L. Coburn, won the Pulitzer. Nichols received play and directing nominations from both groups. Cronyn and Tandy then took The Gin Game on tour, not just in the United States but throughout Canada, the United
Kingdom and some cities in the Soviet Union as well through 1979. Then, they made a television version of the play that aired in a version made for Showtime in 1981. During this time period, dating back to 1977, Cronyn also was collaborating with writer Susan Cooper on what would become Cronyn and Tandy's penultimate stage project. Before they got to that, Cronyn managed to return to feature films three times and took Tandy along on two of them. They had small parts in the odd ensemble assembled for John Schlesinger's wacky satire Honky Tonk Freeway, Cronyn re-teamed alone with his Parallax View director Alan J. Pakula for an economic thriller called Rollover starring Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson and then he and Tandy had brief roles as the parents of the one-of-a-kind Jenny Fields (Glenn Close) in the movie adaptation of The World According to Garp.Susan Cooper also hailed from England, but came to the U.S. when she married an American, though the marriage didn't work out. She primarily wrote novels and children's books until she developed an interest in
playwriting and somehow began collaboration with Cronyn a long-gestating work called Foxfire about the end of an Appalachian family's way of life. It added to Cronyn's resume because not only was he co-author of the play, he, Cooper and Jonathan Holtzman wrote lyrics for songs for which Holtzman wrote the music, though it wasn't strictly a musical. After debuting first at The Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario and The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, it opened on Broadway in November 1982. Playing Cronyn and Tandy's characters' son in the play was Keith Carradine. Tandy won both the Tony and the Drama Desk awards for best actress in a play. Five years later, it aired on CBS where Tandy again won outstanding actress, this time in a miniseries or special. Cronyn was nominated as outstanding actor and he and Cooper received a solo writing nomination. The movie itself was nominated as outstanding drama or comedy special and John Denver took Carradine's role. Below is a YouTube clip of the TV movie.After having seen Foxfire, Cronyn's co-star in Rollover, Jane Fonda, asked if he and Susan Cooper would adapt the novel The Dollmaker into a script for a TV movie for her. They did and received Emmy nominations for writing the 1984 telefilm and Fonda won outstanding actress in a miniseries or special for it. It was (and remains) only the second time Fonda appeared in a TV production, the previous one being when she was just starting out in 1961. Cronyn started heading back to the cinema in the 1984 thriller Impulse and Richard Pryor's surprise relative who gives him the challenge of spending $30 million in 30 days if he wants to inherit his vast fortune of $300 million in the umpteenth remake of Brewster's Millions in 1985. However, Cronyn, with Tandy beside him, had another 1985 release that really made the veteran actors stars to an entirely new generation.
Joining Cronyn and Tandy as the leads of Ron Howard's Cocoon were Wilford Brimley, Maureen Stapleton, Gwen Verdon, Jack Gilford, Herta Ware and Don Ameche, who took home an Oscar for supporting actor for
the film even though he wasn't even the best supporting actor in the film. A sci-fi comedy and meditation on aging and dying, it was made when Big Blue was a swimming pool loaded with extra-terrestrial magic making the seniors horny instead of a pill for erectile dysfunction. Cronyn and Tandy had particularly good moments as the pool awakened his character's libido and his wandering eye, reminding his wife of his younger days when he was far from faithful. Of course, they had to make an awful sequel, but to have that a big a hit with that many older actors as leads was quite something. It's not like Steve Guttenberg was the draw. The following year, 1986, Cronyn and Tandy were honored together as that year's batch of Kennedy Center honorees alongside Lucille Ball, Ray Charles, Yehudi Menuhin and Antony Tudor. Cronyn and Tandy would appear in two more feature films togethers (three counting the Cocoon sequel): 1987's *batteries not included and 1994's Camilla, Tandy's final film released after her death. Among the many televison and feature films we won't still talk about that Cronyn would go on to make the most notable were The Pelican Brief and Marvin's Room.
In 1986, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy appeared in their last Broadway show, fittingly together. The Petition was a two-person play and earned each of them Tony nominations. In 1994, they received the very first Tony Awards ever given for lifetime achievement. It was just a few months before Tandy's death. Though their stage work considerably lessened and Broadway work ceased, movie and TV worked soared. Cronyn became a regular presence at the Emmys, being nominated five times between 1990 and 1998 and winning three times. He won lead actor for HBO's Age-Old Friends, which allowed him to act opposite daughter Tandy Cronyn. He won that, his first Emmy, the same year that Tandy won the best actress Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy. During this time, the pair went on 60 Minutes and had fun putting Mike Wallace on.
Cronyn earned two 1992 Emmy nominations, one for lead actor in a miniseries or special in Christmas on Division Street and one for supporting actor in a miniseries or special for Neil Simon's Broadway Bound, which he won. His third win was bittersweet. Written by Susan Cooper, To Dance With the White Dog co-starred Tandy who also was nominated, and dealt with a widower working through the grief over the loss of his wife. The awards ceremony took place shortly after Tandy's death. Cronyn's final Emmy nomination came for supporting actor in a miniseries or special for Showtime's version of 12 Angry Men in 1998. Two years after Tandy's death, Cronyn married Susan Cooper who remained his wife until his death in 2003. The only other writing project they worked on together was a screenplay adaptation of Anne Tyler's novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which they didn't complete. Cronyn completed one other bit of writing: his memoir A Terrible Liar which was published in 1991. Hume Cronyn only missed his own centennial by eight years, but with as much as he accomplished, he might as well have lived 200 years. It helps when you have a partner as simpatico to you as Jessica Tandy was to him.
SOURCES: Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy: A Register of Their Papers in the Library of Congress,, The Digital Deli Too, thelostland.com, film reference.com, Internet Accuracy Project, Superiorpics.com, Wikipedia, Lortel Archives: Internet Off-Broadway Database, The Internet Broadway Database and the Internet Movie Database.
Tweet
Labels: Albee, Beau Bridges, Bellamy, blacklist, Burgess Meredith, Cary, Ferrer, Fredric March, Garson, Gielgud, Glenn Close, J. Fonda, Jewison, K. Carradine, Kazan, Malden, Mankiewicz, Nichols, Olivier, Robards
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Warned against the siren call of adventure
By Edward Copeland
Many years ago, I saw Scarlet Street, the great noir collaboration of Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett with director Fritz Lang. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to see the same team's earlier entry in the genre,
The Woman in the Window, but for some reason I never got around to it. With film noir being the theme for this year's For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon being hosted by Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren, I thought now would be the ideal time to finally catch up with it. Before I discuss my thoughts on The Woman in the Window, I would like to give you some background about this year's blogathon. The blogathon this year benefits The Film Noir Foundation. This year, the fundraiser will be working to save a specific film. As Marilyn Ferdinand wrote when announcing this year's blogathon: "In 1950, United Artists released a searing drama called The Sound of Fury, aka Try and Get Me. The film recounts the same story Fritz Lang told in Fury (1936) and was directed by Cy Endfield, who would run afoul of the Hollywood blacklist. Its star, Lloyd Bridges, never had a better role, and Eddie told me that when Jeff and Beau Bridges finally saw the film, they were blown away by his performance. A nitrate print of the film will be restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, using a reference print from Martin Scorsese’s personal collection to guide them and fill in any blanks. Paramount Pictures, which now owns the film, has agreed to help fund the restoration, but FNF is going to have to come up with significant funds to get the job done. That’s where we come in." To donate, click here. Now, let's talk The Woman in the Window. Be warned: There will be SPOILERS. Usually, you can tell when your reaction to a film will end up being negative early on. It's not something that hits you suddenly. That's why it's a surprise when a film such as The Woman in the Window, which pleased me for most of its length, manages to ruin itself and leave a sour taste in my
mouth with a bad ending. If it had ended just a few moments earlier, the way it looked as if it were going to, I'd have loved it. Then they had to do that ending...more on that later. Director Fritz Lang opens the 1944 film outside the walls of Gotham College, before taking us outside a classroom where the course being taught is Some Psychological Aspects of Homicide and the professor lecturing the class is Richard Wanley, Ph.D. (Edward G. Robinson), who spends the summer teaching at the Manhattan college. When we first meet Professor Wanley, he's explaining to the class that while the Ten Commandments may say "Thou shall not kill," it's not as cut and dried as that according to the law. Killing in self-defense is viewed quite differently than a murder for gain, he tells the students. Are we hearing some foreshadowing of events that could be coming down the road for Professor Wanley? Wanley lives as a solid family man and shares a tender goodbye with his wife and two children at the train station before going to meet his friends District Attorney Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey) and Dr. Michael Barkstane (Edmund Breon) for some drinks.
As the trio walk to the hotel where Wanley will reside for the summer, Wanley finds himself captivated by a portrait of a woman in the window of a building. His companions comment that they also have been struck by this vision of beauty before. Once seated in the hotel's lounge, noting that the professor still seems preoccupied by the woman in the painting, the two men jokingly congratulate Wanley on his "summer of bachelorhood," but Wanley laughs them off, saying that they are just three old crocks and lamenting "this stodginess" he feels. His days of adventure have passed, he tells them. "Life ends at 40," the professor declares. The three friends continue to discuss their youthful exuberance and to speculate about the woman and carousing in general and where that can lead. Lalor reminds the doctor and the professor that sometimes trouble can start from the littlest things. Wanley tells them they needn't worry about him. "The flesh is still strong, but the spirit grows weaker by the hour," he tells them. His friends decide that it's safe to leave Wanley alone in the big bad city and bid him goodnight.
After his buddies have left, Wanley isn't quite ready to turn in yet, so he grabs a book of the shelf of the lounge, has the steward Collins (Frank Dawson) bring him a cup of tea and tells him to make sure to tell him when it's 10:30. Apparently, either the reading isn't enough to hold Richard's attention or he still can't get that portrait off his mind, because Professor Wanley grabs his coat and steps out into the brisk night air to stroll back to that building with that painting in the window. Wanley's a little tipsy, but he goes inside and gapes at the framed beauty, but then he gets a start — in the top left hand corner of the painting he sees a reflection of the woman's face. Wanley regains his bearings and realizes it isn't his imagination — she's standing there by him. She apologizes for startling him and introduces herself as Alice Reed (Joan Bennett). Richard asks if that's really her in the painting and she admits that it is and that sometimes she comes by, just to see what people's reactions will be. She tells him it is usually one of two: a kind of solemn stare for the painting or a long, low whistle. Richard asks which look he had. "I'm not sure," Alice replies, "but I suspect that in another moment or two you might have given a long, low, solemn whistle." She then invites him out for a drink and, despite all that Wanley said before about life ending at 40 and his weakening spirit, the professor takes Alice up on her offer despite his class the next morning and being well on his way to inebriation.
Really, up until this point (and even after what comes next), The Woman in the Window doesn't really follow the broad definition of what you think of when you think of the typical film noir, especially in comparison to what this team would produce the following year with Scarlet Street. Bennett's Alice Reed doesn't remotely
resemble the femme fatale archetype of noir you'd expect her to be or come close to matching the cruelty her Kitty March is capable of in Scarlet Street the following year. Similarly, Robinson's Professor Wanley in no way resembles a dupe or a mark as his bank cashier Chris Cross will be in the 1945 film. Interestingly enough, Robinson did co-star in a true 1944 noir — as the good guy, the insurance investigator unraveling the scheme of his co-worker, the ambitious Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Barbara Stanwyck's wicked Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder's masterpiece Double Indemnity. Back where I left off in The Woman in the Window, Richard and Alice share some late-night drinks and discuss her posing for that painting that so entranced Wanley. Alice asks if he'd like to come back to her apartment to see some other sketches that have been made of her and though the faithful husband in the professor pleads reluctance, Richard decides to make the jaunt anyway.
Despite Richard's insistence that it's late and he's drank too much already, he gives in to Alice's offer and consumes more alcohol as they sit on her couch and look over her sketches. Once Alice has removed her covering, you can see her sheer black dress and it's almost see-through. Even though both Richard and Alice have gone far past the point of being tipsy by now, the two still maintain a chaste relationship. Alice might not have seduction on her mind, but with the outfit she has on, she wouldn't have to do much to make it happen. As Richard tries to open another bottle of booze, he cuts his hand. He asks for a pair of scissors to help get the cork out, which Alice brings him. Perhaps Alice flirts a little, but the married professor continues to be on his best behavior. Of course, the possibility of Richard breaking his marital vows could have been on the horizon: Alice seems to genuinely like him and it's obvious
that Richard finds Alice terribly attractive. However, neither will ever know if a romantic dalliance loomed in their future because on the street below, a cab stops in front of Alice's building in the pouring rain and a man (Arthur Loft) gets out and vaults up the steps and into her apartment. When he finds Richard there, the man explodes, yelling at Alice something to the effect that she promised he was the only one. Alice screams, "Frank!" before the man then viciously smacks her, sending Alice to the floor. Frank then throws the bottle against the wall before turning his rage on Richard. He climbs on top of the professor on the couch and begins to choke the life out of him. Alice manages to get back on her feet and Richard reaches his hand out to her and she hands the scissors to him and he stabs Frank several times in the back until he's dead. The professor's first instinct is to call the police, since it obviously was an act of self-defense. He questions Alice about Frank, and she says his last name is Morgan, he lives out of town and she sees him occasionally when he comes to New York. Richard starts to call the police, but then he puts down the phone and pauses.
Wanley asks out loud, "Do we have the nerve?" The question, seemingly asked to the ether, puzzles the distraught woman at first. Wanley asks if Alice thinks anyone would have seen him coming to her apartment or had she mentioned Frank to anyone and Alice answers no. Richard says that even though it clearly was an act of self defense and that they haven't done anything wrong with each other, it could look back to his wife when she reads about it. Perhaps they should just make Frank disappear. Richard searches through Frank's pocket for identification and they both discover that he'd been lying to Alice: His real name was Claude Mazard. They also find a pocketwatch with his initials "CM." Richard decides that he'll go get his car and then sneak his body out and dump it somewhere on the side
of the road. Alice wants to go, but Richard says they shouldn't be seen together and they can't just leave the body there unattended. Since they've just met, she's afraid that he'll abandon her to take the fall. Richard decides to leave her his vest as proof that he's
coming back. Alice agrees. Richard doesn't notice, but in his clothing is a pen bearing his initials "RW" and Alice sets that aside separately, just to be safe. Richard washes the scissors and tells her to try to get the apartment back in order while he goes to retrieve his car from the parking garage, reassuring her that it will be OK. At the parking garage, the attendant notes that the professor is getting his car at an awfully late hour and Richard offers a half-assed excuse that seems to satisfy the man who tells him that he needs to get his brakes checked — they appear to be running loose. Wanley assures him that he will. Surprisingly, this bit, which would seem to be a setup for something that will pay off later, never gets referred to again in the film.Richard returns with his car and parks outside Alice's apartment building, the same spot where the cab stopped to let Frank/Claude Mazard off to the place where he'd meet his fate. Careful to make certain no one sees him, Richard makes the return trip to the steps where a nervous Alice awaits. Richard and
Alice prepare the dead man for the journey to his almost final resting place, but first Alice looks out the door and spots another resident coming home. She smiles at him and he smiles back. Once he's safely in his place, the two lug Claude down and toss him into the back of Richard's car as if he's a drunk. Alice says she guesses that this is the last they'll see of one another and Richard says for safety sake, he sees no other choice. She returns his vest (though she kept the pen) and says goodbye. As Wanley drives slowly and carefully on the wet streets he hasn't gone very far when he hears sirens and a cop pulls him over. The professor figures that it's all over, but the cop has just stopped him for driving without his lights on. Wanley shows him two pieces of ID and says he thought the attendant turned them on and apologizes and the officer lets him move on. Once he's cleared the city proper, he finds a wooded area on the side of the road and stops. Mazard's eyes are still open, giving the corpse a creepy look and as Richard drags him out to dump him, it reminded me of the similar scene in Blood Simple, only Claude doesn't come back.
The next night, Richard gets together again with Dr. Barkstane and D.A. Lalor for dinner and drinks. The previous night's actions, not to mention lack of sleep, weigh heavily on Wanley's mind and the total tonnage only increases when Lalor receives an urgent call and returns to the table with the news that a well-known industrialist who had been scheduled to arrive in New York more than 36 hours ago is missing — and his name was Claude Mazard. As is their usual game, the doctor begins speculating and Richard slips and asks Lalor how Mazard was murdered. "I didn't say he was murdered," Lalor replies. Wanley emits a nervous laugh and says he just assumed that is what Lalor meant. Lang directs The Woman in the Window with great efficiency, getting the story going quickly and effectively, leaving little fat on the cinematic bone. Now that the essential action has taken place, it shifts gears from the usual noir pattern. Bennett's Alice stays on the sidelines for a little while Wanley, who does teach on the psychological aspects of homicide, gets invited by his friend the district attorney to tag along on various aspects of the investigation, as when Lalor receives the news that a Boy Scout has stumbled upon Mazard's corpse. This is the part of the film where subtle humor also plays a larger role, as with the aforementioned Boy Scout, who seems to be appearing on a very early newscast and, since this is 1944, how many would have even seen it?
"If I get the reward, I'll send my young brother to a good college and I'll go to Harvard."
Richard, already a bundle of nerves in his room, also hears a commercial for an antacid that reminds listeners that, "Overindulgence in food and drink can affect a person's whole outlook on life." He doesn't know how well he will sleep: He'd already accepted Lalor's offer earlier in the evening to go inspect the scene where they found Mazard's body. When they arrive, another officer notices Richard scratching at his arm and says that it looks like he might have contracted poison ivy. Lalor introduces Wanley to Inspector Jackson (Thomas E. Jackson) of the homicide bureau. Without even thinking, Wanley starts leading the men to where the body was found. They stop him and ask where he was going and how he knew which direction to go. Richard really doesn't
have a good answer for that, but Lalor laughs, reassuring his friend that, "We rarely arrest people just for knowing where a body was." Jackson also warns him to be careful because the place is full of poison ivy. They also mention that they know the murder took place elsewhere because of the signs of footprints with less weight coming and going. They also note blood on the barbed-wire fence which doesn't match Mazard so it most likely belongs to the killer. Richard finds himself feeling sicker to his stomach and tells Lalor that he's going to wait in the car. "If you simply confess professor, we could wrap this up by noon," Jackson says jokingly. "Afraid you'll have to work for this one," Richard laughs nervously. "There ya go. Never any consideration for cops," the inspector sighs. Richard climbs in the back of the car and watches nervously, hoping they can't connect that blood to his cut or his poison ivy to that source.
Later that night, Lalor is late meeting Wanley and the doctor for their usual supper. Even though Wanley is itching (literally) for updates about the case, the doctor's natural curiosity runs just as hot and saves Richard from looking as if he's too inquisitive. Lalor repeats the story about the blood on the fence and Richard, choosing the path of hiding in plain sight, shows the cut on his hand. He tells them he got it opening a soda can. The doctor could care less about blood evidence, he wants to know about suspects. Lalor tells his friends that they are interested in finding a woman that Mazard would see when he came to New York. They don't really know much about her, but they know he'd see her every trip and have been speculating that perhaps they fought or there was a third party and that led to Mazard's death. Then Lalor changes his tune and tells them that was the leading theory earlier in the day, anyway. It seems that Mazard's company knew of his tendency to cat around, so they had someone trail him everywhere he went, but this man hasn't turned up, so they figure that either the spy also is lying dead somewhere or he's the one who killed Mazard for some reason. The news that Mazard had a constant tail does not please Richard.
As I said at the beginning, I had not seen The Woman in the Window prior until the time I watched it for this blogathon so when Alice suddenly calls Richard, with a decidedly different tone in Joan Bennett's voice, I thought that this would be when her character took a malevolent turn (She had kept that pen after all). Wanley isn't happy to hear from her, since he knows that the police are seeking her and he needs to keep himself as far from her as possible. He's also displeased that she knows who and where he is, which he never told her, because she got it out of the newspaper which carried a story about a new title he'd earned at the college. She tries to make small talk, but Richard wants to get her off the phone as soon as possible. The next time Richard sees Dr. Barkstane, he tells him that he's been having trouble sleeping and the doctor prescribes him something. When he goes to fill it at the drug store, the pharmacist says he only has it in stock in powder form, so be careful — too much and he'll go to sleep for good.
When Alice calls Richard again, the call isn't to congratulate him about his career, it's because she's in trouble. It seems she's started getting calls from that man who tailed Mazard for his company and he knows he went to Alice's apartment that night. He didn't mention anything about Richard, but he knows that he never saw
him come out of Alice's apartment and now he wants money. She doesn't know want to do — she's frantic. Richard tries to calm her down and agrees to try to scrape together the cash, though he tells her blackmailers never stop with just one payment. Wanley arranges a place where he and Alice can meet without being spotted to discuss their plans. For such a studious family man, crime has come rather easily to Professor Richard Wanley, but for him it's a matter of self-preservation. He tells Alice, "There are only three ways to deal with a blackmailer. You can pay him and pay him and pay him until you're penniless. Or you can call the police yourself and let your secret be known to the world. Or you can kill him." Even Alice is taken aback at how calmly Richard suggests murder as a solution. He gives her the money, but tells her to only give him part, saying she couldn't come up with the full amount. Then, if she feels she can do it, he gives her part of the prescription he just filled and tells her how to poison him and to call him if that doesn't work.
For the first time in the film, we get a sequence that doesn't begin with Richard Wanley. In Alice's apartment, she awaits the arrival of the blackmailer, who was the man (Dan Duryea) who tailed Mazard and goes by the name of Heidt. Heidt tells her that he doesn't want to make trouble for anyone, but he will. With the arrival of Duryea, who also plays a key character in Scarlet Street, I figured that things would really be getting as good and complicated as they did in the team's followup film. Alice turns on the charm, fixing them drinks (she wastes no time — she stirs the drug in his drink before she finds out whether or not the plan works) and telling him that she doesn't know what happened to Mazard and she could only raise part of the cash, which she gives him. (Aside: Am I the only one who thinks that, from the right angles, Duryea bears a striking
resemblance to Willem Dafoe?) Heidt tells Alice he needs the cash because the police will try to pin the murder on him and he plans to leave the country. Alice sidles up to the extortionist and suggests that she's in a similar position and perhaps they should run off together. Unfortunately, Alice's eagerness to get the night over with pushes her to go for the hard sell on the drink, offering to freshen his ice. Heidt turns and tells her to drink his, which she naturally refuses. He throws the glass down and asks her what kind of dope does she think he is and starts searching the apartment. He opens a drawer and finds Mazard's pocketwatch (which he takes with him) and asks if she's interested in changing her story now. He pushes her down on the bed and rifles through some books and finds the rest of the money. The phone rings and Heidt correctly deduces that it's her "partner" and tells Alice to tell him that he'll return tomorrow for another installment and then leaves, tipping his hat on the way out, a gesture, caught in reflection in the mirror over Alice's hearth. As you'd expect in this genre, Lang makes plentiful use of shadows, but he also seems particularly taken with mirrors and reflections. What his obsession with straw hats is, which many characters wear at different times, I have no idea. 
When Alice gets on the phone with Richard, she tells him she blew it, that Heidt plans to come back the next day for more money and he took Mazard's watch. Richard's look shows his devastation. The calm, rational man who plotted a blackmailer's murder has evaporated and he half-heartedly tells Alice to remain calm and he'll try to come up with something. After he hangs up, Richard goes to his bathroom, pours what remains of his prescription into a glass of water and drinks it. Lang films the fading away of Wanley in quite an interesting perspective. Unfortunately, if he'd waited a few minutes more, Alice would have called him back with some startling news. When Heidt left Alice's apartment, he stopped briefly for some reason and some cops recognized him and told him to stop. Heidt took off and the police opened fire and shot Heidt dead. When they searched his body, Inspector Jackson found Mazard's pocketwatch. Richard had killed himself and Heidt
would have taken the fall for Mazard's death. What a great ending. Unfortunately, that's not the ending and that's when The Woman in the Window ruins itself in its final moments. As Richard continues to slip away from life, we hear a voice say, "Professor." Wanley wakes up and he's in the chair in the lounge of his hotel with the book in his lap. The steward Collins reminds Richard that he wanted to be told when it was 10:30. Yes, my friends, it was ALL a dream. The copout ending of all copout endings that stopped working after The Wizard of Oz. Wait, there's more. Richard, so disoriented from the dream, decides he needs to get some fresh air. He goes to get his coat and hat and the coatcheck man turns out to be Claude Mazard! When he steps outside, the doorman greets him pleasantly and it's Heidt! He strolls down and look once again at the portrait when a hooker asks him if he'd like a date and a scared Richard replies, "Not for a million bucks!" before taking off running. That's the end: a jokey, comic note, complete with a musical score to match. Those few moments wipe out all the film's effective moments of a different type of noir and tries to shoehorn it into a comedy about a man's midlife crisis with a conclusion that wipes out everything you've seen before just as they did decades down the round to explain away an entire season of TV's Dallas.
On a humorous level, I can see where The Woman in the Window's ending could have worked and, admittedly, the film contains some funny bits in it before the story wraps, but not enough to make the entire switch in tone work. The ending annoyed me so much, that it compelled me to re-watch Scarlet Street. I figured, "Why not do two pieces for the blogathon?" When I saw Scarlet Street again, I noticed that it was based on the same novel that Jean Renoir's 1931 film La Chienne was. Since I owned the Renoir film on DVD, I figured, why not re-visit it as well, so what started as watching one noir film for the first time has now turned into three pieces. Oh, well. It's for a good cause. If you can, donate.
Tweet
Labels: 40s, Beau Bridges, blacklist, Blog-a-thons, Dafoe, Edward G., Jeff Bridges, Joan Bennett, Lang, MacMurray, Renoir, Scorsese, Stanwyck, Wilder
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Another season, another reason
By Edward Copeland
It's a cliche to say, "They don't make 'em like they used to." It's downright depressing when that trite saying is being employed to refer to a film such as The Fabulous Baker Boys that is just marking its 20th anniversary. Has Hollywood really degenerated this much this fast? In 1989, this was a big studio release. Now, we'd be lucky if someone would pick it up as an independent feature. Maybe if the Baker Boys were built out of Legos or transformed into robots.
When I first saw Steve Kloves' film in 1989, while I liked it, I didn't know quite what to think of it because it really was unlike any major studio release I was used to at the time. Here it was though: a film more like a tone poem than a heavily plotted release with Warner Bros. behind it and marquee names such as Sydney Pollack and Paula Weinstein backing a first-time writer-director on a film whose commercial prospects must
have seemed limited. Before Kloves made The Fabulous Baker Boys, his main credit was as the screenwriter of the good but largely forgotten coming-of-age film Racing With the Moon starring Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth McGovern. Michelle Pfeiffer's star was just beginning to rise, but she couldn't be counted on to lure in audiences. Jeff Bridges was a much respected actor but hardly box office gold and that was even more the case with his co-star, brother Beau. They even dared to allow a film with an open-ended, ambiguous ending. Still, they took the chance and allowed this film to be made and it is one that grows better and better with each viewing, even though I know deep down that if all the planets hadn't been in alignment at the right moment in the late 1980s, this film gem would never have been made. That makes me sad. It also makes me sadder to think of Kloves' career direction. He made another film as writer-director, Flesh and Bone, a mixed bag of a movie most notable for first gaining notice for Gwyneth Paltrow. Since then, he's been purely a screenwriter, albeit a great one, doing a faithful and solid job at adapting Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and adapting every single Harry Potter book with the exception of The Order of the Phoenix. He got the job because The Fabulous Baker Boys is one of J.K. Rowlings' favorite films. Still, I wish Kloves had the chance to write and direct his own original work again.Still, even if Kloves never directs again, he's left us a great one in The Fabulous Baker Boys where seemingly
every aspect is top notch, from Dave Grusin's moody, jazz-like score which seems in perfect harmony with Michael Ballhaus' cinematography, full of smoke and shadows, almost creating a color noir look to this tale of two piano-playing brothers. You're never quite certain where this film is heading because plot is almost irrelevant, yet Kloves creates a fictional universe with such complete confidence that it's never a concern. Having real-life brothers Jeff and Beau Bridges play Jack and Frank Baker was a brilliant stroke. Not only do the true siblings have a short-hand that only a lifetime of knowing each other could have brought, Baker Boys also gives each of the actors what may well be their finest feature film roles. Most of Beau's best work came on TV after this, but his Frank is memorable as the passive-aggressive control freak, who fancies himself the business brains behind the act and who works to support his wife and kids, even though he knows that his brother is the one with the greater talent. Jack though is the center of the film and Jeff
Bridges is superb as the chain-smoking, borderline alcoholic who hates the redundancy of his life and would rather be playing what he wants instead of the same set for the umpteenth time. He can be cruel and as one character describes him, cold as razorblades, yet he still takes time to be a pseudo-surrogate dad for the young girl who lives upstairs from him and frequently is abandoned by her mother for her frequent boyfriends. Bridges has been great so often in so many films sometimes it's easy to forget about him, but I've never forgotten his Jack Baker. Of course, the third member of this acting team is Pfeiffer as Susie Diamond, the singer the brothers hire when Frank decides that perhaps they need a vocalist to jump-start the act. Pfeiffer's work is both sultry and superb and there's a wisp of sadness when you remember when Pfeiffer was on the rise before she began turning down great roles and appeared to commit career suicide in crap such as I Am Sam. Susie not only revitalizes the act, she creates friction about other changes. When one of Frank's kids get sick and he has to let Jack and Susie perform alone, the two relish the chance to change the playlist. When Frank learns later they skipped "Feelings," an argument ensues over whether the song is filet mignon or parsley. In terms of movies, The Fabulous Baker Boys is most definitely filet. In fact, 1989 may be the most recent year to serve up so many delectable entrees and desserts in the form of movies. From the masterpieces to the solid good times, it truly was an amazing year and The Fabulous Baker Boys is another example of what cinematic magic that movie year managed to bestow as gifts to us who worship films.Tweet
Labels: 80s, Beau Bridges, Chabon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Movie Tributes, Nicolas Cage, Pfeiffer, Sean Penn, Sydney Pollack
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
