Monday, May 21, 2012
Centennial Tributes: Richard Brooks Part III
By Edward Copeland
It isn't often that a masterpiece of literature begets a masterpiece of cinema yet both retain distinct identities all their own, but that's the case with In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's "nonfiction novel" and Richard Brooks' stunning film adaptation of his book. Capote often gets credit for inventing the genre of adapting the techniques of a novelist to that of straight reporting, but earlier attempts existed — Capote's stood out because In Cold Blood 's excellence made everyone forget any other examples (at least until more than a decade later when Norman Mailer added his own brilliant take on the genre with The Executioner's Song). Brooks, with his job as a crime reporter in his past, on the surface appears to follow Capote's approach, but the director, forever the activist, skips the objectivity that Capote tried to evoke in his book. Brooks didn't want to minimize the horror of the crime that occurred at the Clutter farm in Holcomb, Kans., but he also wanted to humanize the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. In a way, Brooks' film inspired the path for the two films made decades later telling the story of Capote's writing of the book and his getting to know the killers first-hand as they waited on Death Row. Even today, Brooks' 1967 film remains more powerful and better made than the two more recent tales. Undoubtedly, In Cold Blood remains Brooks' greatest film. If you got here before reading either Part I or Part II of this tribute, click on the respective links.
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Capote begins his book with that paragraph in the first chapter titled The Last to See Them Alive. Brooks begins the film of In Cold Blood introducing us to The Last to See Them Alive in the forms of Robert Blake as newly paroled inmate Perry Smith and Scott Wilson as an acquaintance he met in prison who had been freed earlier, Dick Hickok. Brooks gives Blake — and the movie — a memorable entrance, especially thanks to his decision to go against the grain of the time and film in black-and-white Panavision. We see a bus driving down a two-lane highway, passing signs showing the distance to different Kansas towns, including the horrific Olathe. On the bus, a young female stumbles down the aisle to get a closer look at the pair of pointed-toe cowboy boots with buckles on its heels before creeping back. The shadowy man who wears the boots also has a guitar strung around his neck. A flame suddenly illuminates Robert Blake's face as he lights a cigarette and Quincy Jones' ominous yet jazzy score kicks in to start the credits. The sequence not only sets the tone for the film that follows, it also introduces us to the movie's most important participant — cinematographer Conrad L. Hall (though he didn't need to use the L. yet since his son, Conrad W. Hall, wasn't old enough to follow his dad into the business).
The movie spends its opening minutes introducing us to the soft-spoken Perry and getting him hooked up with Dick. Whereas Blake's Perry comes off as a puppy repeatedly kicked by his owner, Scott Wilson portrays Hickok as a cocky, livewire and a chatterbox — and Brooks gives him great lines, especially in the scenes where he and Blake drive around. "Ever seen a millionaire fry in the electric chair? Hell, no. There's two kinds of laws, one for the rich and one for the poor," Dick imparts as wisdom to Perry. When the two buy supplies for the planned robbery of the Clutter farm, Dick shoplifts some razorblades for no good reason, leading Perry to chastise him for taking such a risk for something so small. "That was stupid — stealin' a lousy pack of razor blades! To prove what?" Perry asks. Smiling, Dick replies, "It's the national pastime, baby, stealin' and cheatin'. If they ever count every cheatin' wife and tax chiseler, the whole country would be behind prison walls." Though in the two recent biographical films about Truman Capote's research into the case, it's strongly implied that Capote at least developed a crush on Smith and that Perry may have been gay. In Cold Blood never explicltly claims that Perry Smith was gay, but throughout the film Dick taunts him by
calling him "honey," "baby" or something along those lines. Hickock on the other hand chases every skirt he gets near and during the robbery/murder, Perry intervenes to stop Dick from raping the Clutters' 16-year-old daughter Nancy (Brenda Currin). Wilson made his first two feature films in 1967 and he landed roles in two of the biggest — this one and the eventual Oscar winner for best picture, Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night. The jaws of younger readers should hit the floor when they see Wilson's great work here and it slowly dawns on them that playing Dick Hickok is a younger incarnation of Herschel on AMC's The Walking Dead. When Perry and Dick do get together, they meet at Dick's father's house where Dick tries to aid his old man, who's slowly losing his battle with terminal cancer. (Veteran character actor Jeff Corey, who co-starred in the Brooks-scripted 1947 classic Brute Force, plays the elder Hickock.) Contrasting Capote's take with Brooks' version fascinates in the ways the works reflect each other yet, like a mirror, many things appear on the opposite side. The book introduces its readers to the Clutter family first before Perry and Dick enter the story (by name anyway). Brooks' screenplay reverses the order, beginning with the killers then letting us meet the Kansas family. However, both aim to draw parallels between the victims and their eventual murderers. "That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because
he touched neither coffee or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had — a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City's First Methodist Church, a congregation totaling seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire," Capote described the Clutter patriarch. A few pages later in the first chapter, Perry Smith makes his entrance into Capote's book. "Like Mr. Clutter, the young man breakfasting in a cafe called the Little Jewel never drank coffee. He preferred root beer. Three aspirin, cold root beer, and a chain of Pall Mall cigarettes — that was his notion of a proper "chow-down." Sipping and smoking, he studied a map spread on the counter before him — a Phillips 66 map of Mexico — but it was difficult to concentrate, for he was expecting a friend, and the friend was late. He looked out a window at the silent small-town street, a street he had never seen until yesterday. Still no sign of Dick," Capote wrote. Brooks uses a visual link to draw victim and killer together, showing Herbert Clutter (John McLiam) performing his morning shave. As Clutter leans into the sink to rinse the remaining shaving cream from his face, the face that rises up and looks in the mirror sees Perry Smith, excising his excess whiskers as well.
The biggest difference between the book and the movie came with Brooks' introduction of a Truman Capote surrogate, a magazine reporter named Jensen, who travels to Holcomb to cover the case. Jensen isn't played in a way similar to the extremely distinctive Capote — such as the way that won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar for Capote, that Toby Jones played even better in Infamous or that Tru himself played best of all as Lionel Twain in Neil Simon's 1976 mystery spoof Murder By Death. Brooks wrote the Jensen character straight (no pun intended) and conventionally, even giving him a narrator's function at times. He doesn't precisely follow how Capote researched the story though because Capote didn't arrive in Kansas until after Smith and Hickok had been apprehended. In the movie, Jensen arrives almost from the beginning of the investigation. For the role of Jensen, Brooks cast another veteran character actor — Paul Stewart, whose first credited screen role was the butler Raymond in Citizen Kane. His 42-year film and television career ended in 1983 with an episode of Remington Steele and he died three years later, a month shy of his 88th birthday. After starting with Kane, a few of Stewart's eclectic highlights included Champion, Brooks' Deadline-U.S.A., The Bad and the Beautiful, Kiss Me Deadly, Hell on Frisco Bay, King Creole, Opening Night, Revenge of the Pink Panther,
S.O.B. and appearances on nearly every episodic police or detective show between the 1950s and the 1970s, including The Mod Squad. The Jensen character arrives around the same time that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation joins the case led by John Forsythe as Alvin Dewey, what may be Forsythe's best performance. Brooks gives him a lot of speeches — and some come off as less pristine than others, but Forsythe succeeds at selling most of them. Forsythe gets so identified with Dynasty or as a voice on Charlie's Angels that I think people forget that he really act when the material was there for him as it was here or in the short-lived and underrated Norman Lear sitcom The Powers That Be and having fun with Hitchcock in The Trouble With Harry (though no one could help Topaz much). He also was a replacement performer of one of the major roles in Arthur Miller's All My Sons on Broadway. Granted, didn't see him, but he had to show some chops to land that one. Of his filmed work though, I think In Cold Blood stands as the best. Sure, this speech reads as overwrought, but he pulled it off as he delivered it to Jensen. "Someday, someone will have to explain the motive of a newspaper to me. First, you scream, 'Find the bastards.' Till we do find 'em, you want to get us fired. When we find 'em, you accuse us of brutality. Before we go
into court, you give them a trial in the newspaper, When we finally get a conviction, you want to save 'em by proving they were really crazy in the first place. All of which adds up to one thing — you've got the killers," Dewey tells Jensen as he's taking down to the basement of the Clutter house. Dewey also serves as Mr. Exposition, explaining why these two numbskulls just out of prison would decide to go to this one particular farmhouse and rob this family, making sure to "leave no witnesses," even though Dick and Perry only gain $40 from the crime. A fellow investigator asks Dewey if Clutter might have been rich and Alvin sort of laughs knowingly. "Ahh — the old Kansas myth. Every farmer with a big spread is supposed to have a secret black box with lots of money in it." It isn't until the ending that you realize the Brooks gave Dewey some of that dialogue because he's supposed to symbolize the parts of the system that disgust him. Brooks ardently opposed capital punishment and he made no secret that he wanted the ending to make clear that it was murder. At Smith's hanging, another reporter asks Dewey about how much the executioner makes. "Three hundred dollars a man," Dewey answers. "Who does he work for? Does he have a name?" the reporter follows up and then poor John Forsythe has to deliver the clunkiest line of dialogue in the entire film. "Yes. We the people." Earlier, it had been the topic of discussion between Jensen and an imprisoned Hickock.DICK: Perry's the only one talking against capital punishment.
JENSEN: Don't tell me you're for it.
DICK: Hell, hangin' only getting revenge. What's wrong with revenge? I've been revenging myself all my life.
Part of the film's brilliance stems from the way Brooks structures the scenes detailing the crime itself. Toward the beginning of the movie, he presents what probably remains the greatest sequence of his directing career without actually showing the murder. Then, as the film winds down, he shows us what we didn't see and it's horrifying. Through a window of the farmhouse, we can see Nancy kneeling beside her bed saying her prayers. At that moment, it isn't made clear who could be seeing that — are Dick and Perry outside her window or are we simply the voyeurs right then? A split second later we spot Dick and Perry still sitting in the car beneath the cover of night. I guess it was us. The discordant sound of a doorbell suddenly fills the soundtrack and the viewer realizes he or she has moved inside the Clutter house — and sunlight shines through the windows. The camera tracks slowly around the furniture of the living room as it makes its way toward the front door. A woman and some other people open the door calling out for the Clutters. We faintly hear church bells tolling and the visitors wear their Sunday best. The woman continues to call out the Clutters by their first names as she ascends the stairs to the second floor. The film cuts quickly to the house's
exterior just as we hear the woman let out a horrified scream. Coming on the heels of The Professionals, it's as if somehow Brooks transformed himself from a competent director and damn good writer into a master of both. I don't know if the fact he had Conrad Hall working as his d.p. on both films made any sort of difference or if that proved to be just fortuitous, but that one-two punch sealed Brooks' artistic reputation forever beyond what respect he'd earned before. I've never been fortunate enough to see In Cold Blood on the big screen and allow Hall's haunting and beautiful mix of light and shadow to bathe me in its glow, but I did get the next best thing when in 1993 at the Inwood Theater in Dallas I saw Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels' documentary Visions of Light, a film devoted to the art of cinematography and highlighting some of its greatest practitioners and their best moments. One of the highlighted scenes comes from In Cold Blood when Robert Blake as Perry gives an emotional monologue about his father in his prison cell while he looks out the window at the rain coming down. The reflection of the raindrops cast shadows on Blake's face that make it appear as if he's crying. The moment stuns in its beauty — even when you learn that as so many say, accidents ends up producing some of the best parts of film. Hall admitted it hadn't been planned but the humidity in the prison set had pumped up the window's perspiration so much (as well as everyone else's) that's how the magic happened. Thankfully, YouTube had that clip.It must be said how good a performance Blake gives while at the same time acknowledging that it can't be viewed the way many of us assessed it originally. When a Naked Gun movie pops up and you see O.J. Simpson play an idiot and constantly take a beating, somehow that's OK. When you watch In Cold Blood again and see Blake give such a convincing and chilling performance as a mass murderer (especially when Forsythe's Alvin Dewey engages him in conversation during the ride to jail and Perry tells him, "I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought it right till the moment I cut his throat."), you can't help but recall that a few decades later, the actor stood trial and received an acquittal for killing his wife. It doesn't stand out as groundbreaking now, when last night's Mad Men said shit twice, but in 1967, In Cold Blood became the first major release to utter the word bullshit. For the second year in a row, Brooks received Oscar nominations for directing and adapted screenplay and Hall got one for cinematography. Quincy Jones also picked up a nomination for original score, though Jones didn't receive one for his music for In the Heat of the Night. I don't understand how the nimrods at the Academy left it out of the top five for best picture. They nominated two films that deserved to be there: Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. The film that won, a fine film but certainly expendable: In the Heat of the Night. A perceived prestige project of social significance that's overrated as hell: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The fifth nominee that would make no sense in any year: Doctor Dofuckinglittle. Basically, three out of the five films could have been tossed to make room for In Cold Blood. A few other more deserving 1967 titles: Cool Hand Luke, The Dirty Dozen, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Accident, Wait Until Dark, Point Blank, The Jungle Book. The National Board of Review did honor Brooks' direction. Brooks also received his sixth Directors Guild nomination and his sixth Writers Guild nomination. With the exception of the WGA, Brooks would never be named for any of the top awards again. In Cold Blood marked his best, but from there things went downhill fast.
One of the most difficult films to find (I've never seen it) for that recent a film with a best actress nomination. Brooks wrote his first original screenplay since Deadline-U.S.A. as a vehicle for wife Jean Simmons. From descriptions I've read, Simmons plays Mary Wilson, who was raised on romantic notions of marriage from the movies, finds herself in a funk on her anniversary and flies to the Bahamas on a whim, running into a free spirit (Shirley Jones) while there.
I missed this one as well. From TCM's web site; "In Hamburg, Germany, American Joe Collins (Warren Beatty) is considered by bank manager Kessel (Gert Fröbe) to be the most honest, hard-working bank security expert in the world. Unknown to Kessel, Joe has been devising a plan with his girlfriend, American expatriate prostitute Dawn Divine (Goldie Hawn), to take the contents from bank safe-deposit boxes owned by several criminals and place them into one owned by Dawn. Roger Ebert gave it three stars in his original review.
I wanted to see this one, but just ran out of time. Here's what qualifies as TCM's full synopsis: A former roughrider (Gene Hackman) matches wits with a lovely but shady lady-in-distress (Candice Bergen), as a drifting ex-cowboy (James Coburn) and a young, reckless cowboy (Jan-Michael Vincent) join in on a 700 mile journey. Ebert gave it three and a half stars in his original review.
I've actually seen this one. In fact, as we near the end of Brooks' career, I've watched two of the last three movies. As an unrelated sidenote, this year also marked the end of Brooks' 17-year marriage to Jean Simmons. If by chance you aren't familiar with this movie, think of it as sort of the Shame of the 1970s — and I don't mean the Ingmar Bergman movie. Diane Keaton stars as a teacher of deaf students whose affair with her college professor ends badly. She reacts as anyone would to a breakup — she starts cruising New York bars and picking up strangers for one-night stands while also developing a taste for drugs. The film definitely didn't belong in the genre of liberated women films of the 1970s as Keaton's character will pay. I saw this when I was a young man and I found it distasteful then, though it did have more sensible plotting than last year's Shame. Brooks directed his last performer to an Oscar nomination with Tuesday Weld getting a supporting actress nod. Keaton won the best actress Oscar for 1977 — but for Annie Hall. Brooks adapted a novel by Judith Rossen that was loosely based on a real incident, but most reviews by people who had read the novel seemed to indicate that Brooks changed key elements. Then, that matches the speech Brooks gave the movie's cast and crew on the first day of shooting, according to Douglass K. Daniel's Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks. "I'm sure that all of you have your own ideas about what kind of contributions you can make to this film, what you can do to improve it or make it better. Keep it to yourself. It's my fucking movie and I'm going to make it my way!" Daniel wrote. Goodbar also featured Richard Gere in one of his earliest roles. This clip plays off the tension of whether fun and games are at hands or something more dangerous.
Brooks referred to this film as "the biggest disaster" of his career. Later, he amended it slightly, blaming TV for purposely not coverage the film because the movie criticized "checkbook journalism." Having watched Wrong Is Right for the first time recently, this compels me to ask, "It did?" Sean Connery stars as a globetrotting reporting for what appears to be a CNN-like news station. The opening sequence contains some amusing moments, (including a young Jennifer Jason Leigh, nearly 30 years after her dad Vic Morrow played the worst punk in Brooks; Blackboard Jungle) but what could be cutting-edge satire of a media form just being born transforms into a scattershot satire involving fictional oil-rich African countries, the CIA, a presidential race and arms dealers trading suitcase nukes, Based on a novel, I hope that it had a plot, but Wrong Is Right just ends up being one of those strange satires like The Men Who Stared at Goats where once it ends you still don't know what the hell happened. This clip shows the opening sequence. Nothing after it deserves your attention.
I've got good news and bad news when it comes to Richard Brooks' final film. The good news: it brought him awards consideration again. The bad news: It was at the Razzies where it earned nominations for worst picture, worst director, worst screenplay and worst musical score. I'm not sure whether or not it relieved him that the film lost in all four categories, with Rambo: First Blood Part II taking worst picture, director and screenplay and Rocky IV winning worst score dishonors. I have not seen Fever Pitch which TCM hasn't even given a synopsis, but I know enough to tell you that Ryan O'Neal plays an investigator reporter doing a story on compulsive gambling who discovers he suffers from the problem. The subject of the movie came up on my Facebook page and Richard Brody, critic at The New Yorker, commented, "I saw Fever Pitch when it came out and loved every overheated second. Haven't seen it since then. Seeing The Connection has brought it back: no detached observer but a participant almost instantly in over his head." At the time of its release, it became one of the rare films that Ebert gave zero stars.
Following Fever Pitch, Brooks toyed with the idea of writing a screenplay about the blacklist, basing it around an incident in 1950 when fights broke out at the Directors Guild over the loyalty oath, but he didn't get around to it. The man who could be quite a bully on the set, had quite a bit of bitterness toward the industry by now as he showed in the second half of that 1985 interview.
Richard Brooks died of congestive heart failure on March 11, 1992, at 79. He did have close friends, but most of them had died themselves by then. The stepdaughter he basically raised as his own when he married Jean Simmons, Tracy Granger, made certain, his tombstone bore the only appropriate epitaph for the man.
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Labels: Arthur Miller, blacklist, Books, Capote, Connery, Diane Keaton, Ebert, Hackman, Hitchcock, J.J. Leigh, James Coburn, Jean Simmons, Jewison, Mailer, N. Lear, Neil Simon, P.S. Hoffman, W. Beatty
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Monday, January 16, 2012
It's about which master you've been serving
By Edward Copeland
I've never read a single novel by John le Carré and I remember when the TV miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy aired starring Alec Guinness, who was Obi-Wan to me at the time (as well as the blind butler from Murder By Death — I was starting sixth grade — sue me!), but I didn't see it. In college, I did see the movie adaptation of le Carré's novel The Russia House starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, which I thought might be an aberration. I liked it quite a bit, but movies reared me to think spies meant James Bond. Now, that I've seen the outstanding new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (no commas please), I'm getting the impression that, like Rick and the waters in Casablanca, I was misinformed as to the nature of le Carré's novels. Looking at the film adaptations of his books, I wish I had time to read them now. I can't compare the new film to the TV miniseries or Gary Oldman's performance as George Smiley to Guinness', but I can say that Oldman and the new movie both are damn good.
Tomas Alfredson directed this version of le Carré's tale, marking the Swedish filmmaker's first English-language movie and his first feature since 2008's creepy and moving vampire film Let the Right One In, remade in the U.S. two years later as Let Me In.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy takes place in the early 1970s in the upper echelons of British intelligence (referred to as "The Circus.") The top man, known as Control (John Hurt, in an excellent performance), receives word that a Soviet operative in Budapest wants to switch sides so Control sends agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to Hungary, but the operation goes awry and in the fallout, Control is forced to retire and so is Smiley. Control, already ailing, dies soon afterward. Word gets to Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), the civil servant in charge of British intelligence via Ricki Tarr, a discredited agent in hiding (Tom Hardy, unrecognizable when compared to his role in Warrior) that the Hungarian mission's objective truly had been to ferret out the truth about Control's suspicions that one of the top men in The Circus actually works for the Soviets as a mole.
Lacon approaches the retired Smiley and asks him to lead a secret probe to determine if the mole exists and, if so, who he is. Smiley enlists the help of a young, still-working agent, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), and another retired intelligence official Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack). Their search of Control's flat uncovers the code names he had given to his suspects, based on the old rhyme, attached to photos taped to chess pieces. Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), who took Control's job as chief, was called Tinker. Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), now Alleline's deputy, was christened Tailor. His close allies Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik) were Soldier and Poorman, respectively. Smiley, whom Control also suspected, had been named Beggarman.
Bridget O'Connor wrote most of the screenplay until her death from cancer and it was completed by Peter Straughn. Through the taut direction by Alfredson and the carefully constructed screenplay that doesn't always play out in strictly chronological order and lacks major action sequences, Tinker Tailor drips with suspense, helped in no small part by the great ensemble assembled. If the film contains a weakness, it's that the four potential moles aren't developed well enough, particularly Hinds' character. Toby Jones acts his part very well, especially considering that they almost try too hard to make him look guilty. It's interesting to see Jones in a fictional role for a change after playing Karl Rove in W., Swifty Lazar in Frost/Nixon and being the best screen Truman Capote in Infamous. In addition to those already mentioned, there is a brief but memorable appearance by Kathy Burke as another operative who was purged. Burke just doesn't appear in enough movies, but her most memorable performance might be Queen Mary Tudor in Elizabeth opposite Cate Blanchett. If you look closely, you'll spot le Carré himself playing a drunk in a Christmas party scenes. The most amazing thing for viewers of Boardwalk Empire is the chance to hear Stephen Graham use his actual British accent in his role as Jerry Westerby, an intelligence officer monitoring the teletype the night of the Hungarian mission. His look also doesn't remind you remotely of Al Capone. Interestingly enough, one of the film's more important characters, Smiley's wife, never actually appears. The two performances that deserve the most praise are Hurt's brief work as Control, which frankly I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned much in awards talk. The MVP prize undoubtedly goes to Oldman's quiet, reserved work as Smiley.
Since Oldman took the film world by storm in 1986 in Sid & Nancy, he's made some bad movies and been over-the-top at times but he's also done a lot of great work yet his performances seem resistant to recognition from his peers. Granted, I haven't seen all of the top 2011 best actor contenders as of yet, but of what I have, Oldman belongs in that list. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy deserves more notice than it's been receiving as well.
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Labels: 10s, Blanchett, Boardwalk Empire, Books, Capote, Colin Firth, Connery, Fiction, Guinness, John Hurt, Oldman, Pfeiffer
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Sunday, January 15, 2012
Adapt or die
By Edward Copeland
Brad Pitt, as far as I'm concerned, always has received a bit of a bum rap as an actor. Granted, he doesn't have the breadth of abilities of others in his generation such as Edward Norton or Philip Seymour Hoffman (who actually co-stars with him here in Moneyball), but when Pitt gets a role that falls into his narrower range such as in Fight Club or The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, he truly excels. In fact, the older Pitt gets, the more his talent grows and there hasn't been a better example yet than his performance as Billy Beane in Moneyball where he delivers his best work yet. It also doesn't hurt that he's working from an incredibly strong script by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin.
Zaillian and Sorkin's screenplay, with a story by Stan Chervin, was adapted from Michael Lewis' book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. While there have been many films about baseball and several I've liked a lot, Moneyball may revolve around the game, but it doesn't resemble other baseball movies though it manages to be just as compelling — if not more so — than other sports movies where the climax involves a Big Game. Bennett Miller helms Moneyball, his first film since his feature debut, Capote, six years ago. While I liked Capote well enough, Moneyball represents a quantum leap forward in quality for Miller.
Billy Beane works as the general manager of the Oakland A's and the movie begins when the team faced off against the New York Yankees in the October 2011 American League Championship Series. At the time, the A's boasted some talented up-and-coming players such as Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi and Oakland almost pulls off the win, but the Yankees prevail. Figures on the screen put the disparity between the teams in very stark terms: It isn't really the Yankees vs. the A's, it's $114,457,768 vs. $39,722,689. Teams with smaller payrolls just can't compete (especially once the season ends and the Yankees poach Damon and Giambi from the A's). As one sports radio talk show host comments, "It's like we're a farm system for the New York Yankees." I don't follow baseball, but that is a ridiculous disparity. It's much like the political system has become following the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.
Beane, once a promising player himself, pleads to the Athletics' owner for more money to try to level the playing field with the richer teams, but the owner balks. During a meeting with Cleveland Indians General Manager Mark Shapiro (Reed Diamond) to obtain replacements for his lost stars, Beane gets shot down at every turn by what he can afford. While he's there, he notices a young man (Jonah Hill) whispering advice that appears to be taken. Beane zeroes in on the guy and learns his name is Peter Brand. Brand advocates a different approach to team building. Instead of chasing star players who cost a fortune and may or may not deliver championships, Brand proposes following a statistical formula based on which players get on base most often, usually at lower salaries.
Oakland's veteran baseball scouts and his manager Art Howe (Hoffman) resist this new system and it falls flat at first as Howe continues to use the players the way he always has, ignoring Beane's suggestions. Finally, Beane makes moves that force his Howe to give his new player acquisitions to get game time. Eventually, the new method reaps rewards and the A's go on an incredible and historic winning streak. Even if you aren't a baseball fan, it's difficult not to feel the excitement when a home run comes at a crucial time.
The only criticism I had with Moneyball is that it dips a bit too often into flashbacks to Beane's life as a promising baseball player coming out of high school (It doesn't help that the actor playing the younger Beane doesn't look that much like Pitt). They could have made all the same points they make in those scenes in less time and without so much repetition and shortened the film's 133-minute running time. However, that's a minor complaint against an otherwise solid film.
Pretty much from top to bottom, the cast excels, including brief appearances by Robin Wright as Beane's ex-wife and Arliss Howard as the head of the Boston Red Sox. Hoffman turns in a fine performance as always, but he lays back since this isn't his movie and makes no scene-stealing attempts. Hill gets to show he's capable of playing a role unlike anything he's played before. He's been fine in most of the comedies in which he's appeared, most from the Judd Apatow Factory such as Funny People, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Superbad and Knocked Up, even if the movies' quality varied, but it's nice to see him given the opportunity to portray a completely different type of character and do it well.
Combining the screenplay and Pitt's best-ever performance proves ultimately to be the winning formula that makes Moneyball so compelling. Pitt (who also was a producer) never strikes a false note and the film rarely does either. Even though Moneyball tells a true story, I didn't know what happened in 2002 so the ending came as a genuine surprise, yet one that felt wholly appropriate — and not the way a fictional script would choose to finish its tale. That's another reason Moneyball belongs on the list of 2011's best films.
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Labels: 10s, Apatow, Books, Brad Pitt, Capote, Edward Norton, Jonah Hill, Nonfiction, P.S. Hoffman, Robin Wright, Sorkin
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Wednesday, October 05, 2011
A Real Phony
By Damian Arlyn
What was it about Audrey Hepburn? She was beautiful. There's no doubt about that. She made being natural and vulnerable in front of the camera seem so effortless. She had grace, charm, poise, charisma, and could seem both earnestly innocent and incredibly sexy at the same time. Yet these qualities have all belonged to countless other actresses both before and after her, so what made her different? Having re-watched two of her movies recently, I was reminded of what a truly unique screen presence she was. The impression she managed to leave on audiences was far more than merely the sum of these parts. Regardless of the genre she was working in there was something strangely elusive and sparklingly radiant about her. As the cliché goes, one can't take one's eyes off her. She commanded attention not by doing a lot (as other actors tend to do) but by doing very little. It's easy to see how a whole industry has sprung up around her, and yet somehow (almost 20 years after her death) she even manages to rise above that. I mention all this because one of her most iconic films, Breakfast at Tiffany's, celebrates its 50th anniversary today and although it is one of my all-time favorite films, I can admit that whatever greatness it does possess comes mostly because of her immeasurable contribution, which is far more than purely an aesthetic one. Her presence alters the whole approach the filmmakers took to the material and her absence no doubt would've affected the film's now classic status. Without Audrey, Tiffany's still would've been a good movie, but with her, it's a terrific one.
The role Audrey played (famously known as Holly Golightly but, as the film elucidates, that's not her real name) first began as a character in a Truman Capote novella. While I have not personally read the book, my understanding is that it's much darker and more provocative than the Paramount's movie adaptation (the character of "Fred" is homosexual, there is no happy ending, etc). As it is, the film still deals with very adult subject matter but it handles it in a very restrained and accessible manner. Because of that approach, the casting of Audrey Hepburn as the naive but worldly "call girl" (called by Capote as an "American geisha") works. Capote apparently wanted the sluttier Marilyn Monroe for the part and although it might've made it closer in spirit to its gritty source material, that choice would've severely altered the alchemy of the finished film.
From the film's opening sequence where a gorgeous Audrey stands on a deserted street eating breakfast while gazing longingly at a Tiffany's store window to the emotionally wrenching climactic kiss in the rain, it is clear that Breakfast at Tiffany's is pure Hollywood fantasy. Only in a fantasy could such a scared, lonely and tragic character seem so elegant, so glamorous and so engaging. It surprises me (and my wife) how many women fantasize about being Audrey's Golightly character (wearing her outfits and so forth) presumably not realizing that within the context of the film, it's a facade. She is not stylish, she's pathetic. She's not strong, she's sad. As Martin Balsam states in the film: "She's a phony," but because she actually believes in the illusion "she's a real phony."
Surrounding Audrey is a very capable cast. A young, handsome George Peppard plays Paul Varjak, the down-on-his-luck writer currently being supported by his "decorator," with ease and confidence. The always reliable Patricia Neal was the classy (and deliciously frosty) Emily Failenson, Paul's married companion/benefactor. Buddy Ebsen turns in a brief, but heartbreaking, performance as Holly's former husband, Marty Balsam plays Holly's long-suffering agent and, in one of my all-time favorite "bit" parts of any movie, a memorable John McGiver shows up as a very understanding Tiffany's salesman who, in spite of his cold professionalism, pontificates wistfully about how the knowledge that Cracker Jack boxes still contain prizes "gives one a feeling of solidarity with the past."
The film's solitary sour note performance-wise comes from Mickey Rooney's buck-toothed, yellow-faced Japanese landlord, Mr. Yunioshi. Originally intended to provide hilarious "comic relief", the clumsy, bad-tempered character is the textbook example of a racist stereotype. Made all the more embarrassing by its sheer gratuitousness, many of the filmmakers have since apologized for the insensitive portrayal, though his scenes did make for a compelling sequence in the 1993 biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story starring Jason Scott Lee. There are, however, other moments of comedy in the film that do work very well. When Holly throws a party in her apartment, for example, we are treated to some very funny vignettes (my favorite of which is the woman who's laughing at her own reflection in the mirror at one point and then when glimpsed later she's crying at it, mascara smearing down her face). Some have commented that these scenes are actually the best in the movie. I don't know that I'd go that far but they do demonstrate Blake Edwards' knack for staging comic set pieces, a talent that would be on full display two years later in his most famous film, The Pink Panther.
Despite Edwards' natural affinity for comedy, he was a competent director of drama as well. Breakfast at Tiffany's and Days of Wine and Roses prove this I think. Furthermore, there is a lightness of touch that Edwards brings to the whole proceedings. Not a subtlety necessarily because Edwards is admittedly not the most subtle of directors (he often paints in very broad strokes whatever genre he chooses to work in), but a nimbleness. Edwards may deal with heavy material, but he doesn't handle it heavily and that characteristic, combined with Audrey's effervescent influence, is what makes Breakfast at Tiffany's so airy and delightful (in contrast, consider that the film originally was going to be directed by John Frankenheimer and imagine what kind of finished product it would've ended up becoming). This is helped in no small way by Henry Mancini's lovely score (another plus of having Edwards as the director since he and Mancini always worked together). In addition to some bouncy jazz pieces and some appropriately emotional cues for the film's more dramatic moments, Mancini created one of the most unforgettable theme songs in the history of cinema in "Moon River." A simple little melody with somewhat corny lyrics and yet, like Audrey herself, somehow the tune manages to transcend its ingredients. The scene where Audrey sits in her window playing the guitar and singing helps to establish its immortality. By now it is almost common knowledge that the studio did not want to keep the song but Audrey forbade them from cutting it ("Over my dead body" were ostensibly her exact words).
When it was released in 1961, Breakfast at Tiffany's was very successful at the box office and relatively well received by critics. Whatever criticisms were aimed at the film, Audrey herself was highly praised for her performance. Nobody could've anticipated, however, the lasting effect the film and its protagonist could have on pop culture. Holly Golightly would become Audrey's most iconic character and the quintessential example of her onscreen appeal. I must confess that the film was my first introduction to Ms. Hepburn and, just as George Peppard did, I fell in love with her almost immediately. She was a true original and I doubt there will ever be another one like her. Her character might've been a "real phony," but she herself was the genuine article.
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Labels: 60s, A. Hepburn, Blake Edwards, Capote, Fiction, Marilyn, Movie Tributes, Patricia Neal
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Friday, August 12, 2011
Living out the unlived lives of their mothers
Gloria Steinem
By Edward Copeland
For the final film in HBO Documentary Films' summer series, the nonfiction movie premiering is short and simple. Gloria: In Her Own Words resembles a collage more than a documentary as feminist icon Gloria Steinem's life gets briefly recounted through both new interview and archival footage.
If anything gets repeated throughout director Peter Kunhardt's film, it's the mantra of young Steinem that her commitment to the women's rights movement beginning around 1970 is about "revolution not reform" leading up to another significant historical event that's been lost to the indifference of time and piss-poor history education in the U.S.: the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality on Aug. 26, 1970, which was the 50th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.
Sprinkled through the hour, many details caught my attention such as when Steinem first arrived in New York in the early 1960s, landlords routinely refused to rent apartments to single women, assuming they lacked the ability to support themselves. One thing that seems odd though is that Steinem said she started out wanting to be a political reporter, but that was nearly unheard of in those days when there's a long list of women political reporters that stretch at least as far back as the 1920s to Lorene Hickok at the Minneapolis Tribune and later with The Associated Press and would have included at the time Steinem sought that career Helen Thomas, who'd been covering Washington since the Eisenhower years and became UPI's White House correspondent under JFK in January 1961. Granted, inequity in pay between male and female reporters would (and still is) an issue and the women reporters had to work their way up to the jobs, but I think Steinem's comment reflects impatience that a new college graduate and novice reporter didn't immediately begin on the beat she aspired to be on, something that rarely happened to journalists of either sex.
One surprising admission from Steinem is that she based her look at the time (mainly the streaks in her hair) and her outlook on not needing a man on Audrey Hepburn's interpretation of Holly Golightly in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, based on Truman Capote's novel.
The documentary hits most of the highlights in Steinem's career and life such as going undercover as a Playboy Bunny in one of the Playboy Clubs and how her 1963 article on the experience basically made her career. It also explains her transformation into an activist when she talks about the abortion she had at 22 but never told anyone about. When she covered a hearing in 1969 where women were demanding the right to have one and Steinem realized that 1 in 3 women either had received an abortion or needed one and she questioned why safe, legal procedures were denied. Soon after, Gloria Steinem the activist was born.
In the archival footage, what took me by surprise was how blatantly many of the big-name newscasters of the day such as Harry Reasoner and Chet Huntley mocked the women's movement or Ms. magazine. When Huntley previews the upcoming Women's Strike, he actually says that the women who are involved "want to be men." Reasoner does a commentary on Steinem's Ms. magazine after it publishes its first issue, predicting it won't last because they've exhausted all the possible topics in the first issue. To Reasoner's credit, when Ms. does end up persevering, he does return to the air with another commentary admitting he was wrong in predicting its demise.
Gloria: In Her Own Words hardly qualifies as a probing, groundbreaking documentary, but it is an informative hour about a woman who made her mark in late 20th century history. It premieres Monday on HBO at 9 p.m. Eastern/Pacific and 8 p.m. Central.
Though a busy schedule and some health issues forced me to miss three installments (Sex Crimes Unit, Hot Coffee and Citizen U.S.A.: A 50 State Road Trip) of the summer documentary series, with a few exceptions, most of the films turned out to be good and, in some cases, magnificent. To close the series, I thought I'd rank the films I saw.
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Labels: 10s, A. Hepburn, Capote, Documentary, HBO, Television
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Friday, June 24, 2011
Peter Falk (1927-2011)
One more thing…before I get started talking about the great Peter Falk, who died Thursday at 83 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease, as memorable as his creation of Lt. Columbo was in the pantheon of iconic television characters, he needs to be remembered for far more than just that role, even if it may have been his most famous — maybe even his best — and earned him four Emmys and 10 Emmy nominations. He also did considerable screen work and some Broadway. He was capable of the most searing drama of John Cassavetes and the broadest of comedy. He was a talent.
As with many actors of his generation, he began his career on live television in the 1950s, appearing in many of the shows that featured theatrical productions staged for viewers at home as well as the occasional guest appearance in an episode of a recurring series. According to IMDb, his first television appearance came in 1957 on Robert Montgomery Presents in a presentation of Return Visit. This came shortly after his Broadway debut in 1956 in a revival of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan where Falk played an English guard. Also in the cast as a member of the ensemble was none other than Robert Ludlum, before he abandoned acting to become a novelist. Also in 1956 on Broadway, Falk appeared as a servant in the comedy Diary of a Scoundrel whose cast included Roddy McDowall, Howard da Silva, Margaret Hamilton, Jerry Stiller and future killer on multiple episodes of Columbo, Robert Culp. Falk didn't return to Broadway for about seven years, concentrating on television and movies.
In 1960, he made his film debut in Pretty Boy Floyd. The same year, he also appeared in Murder, Inc. as a violent hit man for the notorious crime syndicate of Jewish gangsters run by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter in the 1930s. It earned Falk his first Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. He still stuck mainly to TV after that, though an appearance on a 1961 episode of The Law and Mr. Jones won him an Emmy. He hit most of the big series of the time at some point: The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables, Have Gun — Will Travel.
In 1961, he made another big feature, this time with some big names. He co-starred with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford in Frank Capra's remake of his own Lady for a Day, retitled A Pocketful of Miracles. Falk played gangster Ford's none-too-swift sidekick and it earned him his second consecutive Oscar nomination for supporting actor. Movie roles started to come easier after that, though he still did a lot of television, including an appearance on a 1962 episode of The Dick Powell Theatre called "The Price of Tomatoes" that garnered Falk another Emmy nomination.
As the film roles started coming more frequently, he took advantage. In 1963, he was one of the two cab drivers caught up in the chase for the money buried under that big W in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The next year, he appeared in The Rat Pack vehicle Robin and the 7 Hoods when it was released. He did take time off to return to Broadway in 1964 to star as Stalin in The Passion of Josef D. by Paddy Chayefsky. In 1965, he joined Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis for The Great Race. That same year, he tried his hand as the lead of his first television series, The Trials of O'Brien, but it only lasted one season.
Heading back to the big screen, he made the comedy Penelope with Natalie Wood in 1966; Clive Donner's adaptation of the play Luv in 1967, again with Lemmon and with Elaine May; and Anzio in 1968 featuring a cast that included Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. Falk also made a TV movie in 1968 called Prescription for Murder that introduced the world to a homicide detective named Lt. Columbo, even though he would not reappear again until 1971.
In 1970, Falk made his first collaboration with John Cassavetes in Husbands. Cassavetes' films remain an acquired taste for just about everyone, film lovers included, but he brought out sides and shadings in Falk that you never saw anywhere else. He directed Falk again opposite his wife Gena Rowlands in 1975's A Woman Under the Influence and his portrait of a blue collar Italian husband trying to deal with a mentally unbalanced wife really is a thing of wonder. Falk and Cassavetes worked again on screen together in 1976's Mikey and Nicky, a very unusual portrait of a friendship, only it was Elaine May in the director's chair in that case. Cassavetes even appeared as one of the killers on an installment of Columbo. He made a cameo as himself in Cassavetes' underrated Opening Night. He worked for Cassavetes on his final film, Big Trouble in 1986, which reunited Falk with Alan Arkin and Andrew Bergman, Falk's co-star and writer of The In-Laws, but I haven't seen that one since word was not good.
In March 1971, Lt. Columbo appeared again in a television movie called Ransom for a Dead Man, but that fall, Columbo became a regular series — or as regular a series can be when it's on irregularly. It was part of NBC's rotating lineup of Mystery of the Week and would share its time slot with McMillan & Wife and McCloud. Columbo stayed on the air until 1978. Then, in 1989, ABC brought the rumpled detective with the broken-down car back. They tried an alternating format, but their other series sucked so they just continued doing occasional Columbo movies until 2003, only Falk also was the executive producer now. He also wrote an episode. He directed two outings back in 1972.
In early 1971, Falk made his last appearance on Broadway in the original production of Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue. He and Simon must have been good partners, because Falk later appeared in two original spoofs that Simon wrote for the big screen. The first was 1976's delightful Murder By Death with
a truly all-star cast: Eileen Brennan, James Coco, Alec Guinness, Elsa Lanchester, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith, Nancy Walker, Estelle Winwood and, of course, Truman Capote. Also playing a small role, and up until then probably most recognizable as Stretch Cunningham on All in the Family, a younger James Cromwell. The premise had the stars playing spoofs of famous literary detectives and Falk plays Sam Diamond, which means Sam Spade which to most people means Bogart and Falk does a hilarious Bogart satire. So funny in fact that Simon resurrected it in the 1978 film The Cheap Detective where Falk did Lou Peckinpaugh with another all-star cast in a spoof of all Bogart films. It wasn't as good as Murder By Death, but Falk was just as great.
Falk had another release in 1978, now largely forgotten, that I haven't seen in years but that I do remember enjoying when I was a lot younger and that was The Brink's Job. Directed by William Friedkin, it told the true story of a hard-luck would-be criminal who manages to rip off an armored car for a sizable amount of cash. He's surprised to find that the robbery doesn't even make the news and after some snooping, he discovers it's because Brink's has such poor security they didn't want it reported. Of course, it goes to his head so he and his gang plot an even bigger score. In 1979, Falk made what's probably one of the purest comic pleasures put on film, a movie so funny that even having Arthur Hiller as director didn't screw it up. Of course, I'm referring to The In-Laws where, frankly, I think Falk's off-the-wall portrayal of Vincent Ricardo and Alan Arkin's work as dentist Sheldon Kornpett, his flabbergasted, unwilling partner in hijinks, both deserved Oscar consideration in this crazy farce written by Andrew Bergman. If you've never seen it, you owe it to yourself to do so, but don't get the recent remake by mistake. Serpentine!
The remainder of Falk's film credits contained two certified gems and a lot of misses such as 1981's All the Marbles, where he managed female wrestlers; a cameo in the underwhelming The Great Muppet Caper the same year; 1987's Happy New Year, where the makeup was the star; Cyndi Lauper's try at screen fame in 1988's Vibes; a mobster in the dumb 1989 comedy Cookie; and 2001's Corky Romano. However, he did appear in some films that earned some good notices that I didn't see such as Joe Mantegna's directing debut of a David Mamet script called Lakeboat in 2000. He also made a very funny appearance in the first season of The Larry Sanders Show. The two film classics he made post-1979 were Wim Wenders' exquisite Wings of Desire, where he played himself but he had the ability to talk to the angels (click here to see the scene), and The Princess Bride, where he played the kindly grandfather reading the story to his sick grandson (Fred Savage) and us.
He wasn't done with the stage yet either. In 1998, he earned raves appearing off-Broadway in Arthur Miller's Mr. Peters' Connections.
What a range and I can't even add up the hours of enjoyment this man has given me through his work all my life. Thankfully, the work still remains to enjoy.
Rest in peace, Mr. Falk.
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Labels: Arthur Miller, Awards, Bette, Capote, Capra, Cassavetes, Chayefsky, Glenn Ford, Guinness, Hitchcock, Larry Sanders, Lemmon, Maggie Smith, Mitchum, Neil Simon, Niven, Obituary, Robert Ryan, Sellers, Tony Curtis
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Thursday, December 16, 2010
Blake Edwards (1922-2010)
Blake Edwards' reputation as a film director seems locked by some in the realm of lowbrow slapstick comedy and, in many cases, not particularly good ones, but Edwards' work as a director and a writer was more multifaceted than that. Born in Tulsa, Okla., in 1922, Edwards died this morning at 88.
True, at his heart he was a clown. A few years ago when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences finally saw fit to bestow an honorary Oscar upon Edwards, he used his acceptance speech as an occasion for a gag, abetted by presenter Jim Carrey, showing up in a wheelchair with a broken leg and making it appear as if it went out of control and crashed through the wall of part of the awards show set. Like many recent honorary Oscar presentations, it was a highlight until the youth hungry, ratings-obsessed execs in charge segregated honorary awards to a nontelevised dinner where movie buffs couldn't celebrate significant players in film history such as Edwards anymore.
His work in the film industry began as a screenwriter in the late '40s with his most notable work probably being the screenplay for 1955's My Sister Eileen starring Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon. In this same period he also did a lot of television work, including creating several shows in the late 1950s, the most famous being Peter Gunn starring Craig Stevens and Richard Diamond, Private Detective starring David Janssen and the legs of one Mary Tyler Moore.
His feature directing debut came in 1955 on the musical Bring Your Smile Along. He directed a few more films but the one that was his first standout was 1959's Operation Petticoat starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis.
In 1961, he helmed the adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn. The following year, he made two films that no one could accuse of being slapstick: Experiment in Terror with Glenn Ford and Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick battling alcoholism.
Though it opened in 1963 elsewhere, the film that would launch his most famous film series didn't open in the U.S. until 1964: Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther. The first followup, A Shot in the Dark, came out the very same year. Edwards became so attached to the series that he kept it going for decades, even after Sellers had died.
Other notable films of the 1960s included The Great Race, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? and The Party.
In 1970, he directed the woman he wed in 1969, Julie Andrews, for the first time in Darling Lili. He tried a Western in 1971 with William Holden in Wild Rovers. He directed the adaptation of the Michael Crichton thriller The Carey Treatment in 1972. In 1974, he directed Omar Sharif and his wife in a romantic drama called The Tamarind Seed.
It wasn't until 1979 that he got out of a Pink Panther rut and introduced the world to Bo Derek in the Dudley Moore comedy 10, which also managed to make composer Ravel's piece "Bolero" popular again.
He followed that up with the wicked Hollywood satire S.O.B. with an all-star cast led by William Holden and including Julie Andrews' first topless scene.
In 1982, he made his last really big hit with Victor/Victoria, earning Andrews an Oscar nomination as best actress. More than a decade later, he tried his hand at turning it into a Broadway musical with terrible results.
Most of his films after that were not worth mentioning, though Micki & Maude with Dudley Moore as a bigamist had its moments and you have to mention Skin Deep since it is the only film with a glow-in-the-dark condom chase scene.
Still, Edwards' resume was far more eclectic than you'd think and he did produce some classics. His only competitive Oscar nomination came for writing the adapted screenplay for Victor/Victoria. He received two Emmy nominations for Peter Gunn, for writing and directing the same episode. He also earned a Directors Guild nomination for Breakfast at Tiffany's.
RIP Mr. Edwards.
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Labels: A. Hepburn, Blake Edwards, Capote, Cary, Glenn Ford, Holden, Julie Andrews, Lemmon, Musicals, Obituary, Oscars, Sellers, Television, Theater, Tony Curtis
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Friday, April 02, 2010
John Forsythe (1918-2010)
John Forsythe, who has died at the age of 92, had a long career as a leading man in movies and television, even a bit on stage, but for all the work that played off his distinguished looks, one of his most famous roles may always be the one the depended solely on the timber of his voice.
Forsythe's first film of note was 1943's Destination Tokyo, but the majority of his early career was spent on various episodic television and the stage, including a role in the Broadway debut of Teahouse of the August Moon in 1953.
In 1955, he landed the lead in Alfred Hitchcock's dark comic classic The Trouble With Harry. Two years later, he starred in his first television series, Bachelor Father, which ran through 1962.
In 1964, he starred opposite Ann-Margret in the cult classic Kitten With a Whip. In 1965, he had a short-lived, self-titled TV comedy that ran a mere 29 episodes about a retired Air Force major who inherits a school for girls.
In 1967, he landed a role in Richard Brooks' classic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. In 1969, he and Hitchcock worked together again, this time in one of the master's lesser works, Topaz. The same year he played opposite Jean Simmons in her Oscar-nominated role in The Happy Ending.
1969 also brought him another television series, To Rome With Love, about a widower who takes his three daughters and accepts a teaching position at a school in Italy. It lasted two seasons.
Then, in 1976, he finally landed his most successful series to date and he never had to appear on camera. All he had to do was begin his dialogue with, "Hello, angels" and you'd recognize the voice as John Forsythe on Charlie's Angels. Throughout the years of the series until its end in 1981, the angels may have been replaced, but there was only one Charlie. In fact, when they decided to do a movie version in 2000, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz may have been the new angels, but Forsythe was still Charlie.
No sooner had Charlie's Angels gone away that Forsythe scored another television hit and this time, he actually appeared on screen as well. Aaron Spelling, looking to cash in on the success of Dallas, designed his own soap opera among the rich and famous and Dynasty was born with Forsythe playing Blake Carrington. He also appeared as Blake on the spinoff The Colbys and a Dynasty reunion movie.
In the middle of the run of Charlie's Angels, he had a juicy big screen turn as a corrupt judge battling Al Pacino's crusading lawyer in 1979's And Justice For All... He returned to the big screen again briefly during Dynasty in 1988 to play the ghost of Bill Murray's old boss to tell him what was about to happen in that take on "A Christmas Carol," Scrooged.
Forsythe's final TV series didn't last, but I enjoyed it. It was from Norman Lear and was about a political family titled The Powers That Be with Forsythe playing a Reaganesque senator with Holland Taylor as his Nancyesque wife. It also introduced TV audiences to the comic talents of David Hyde Pierce, who played his congressman son-in-law.
R.I.P. Mr. Forsythe.
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Labels: Capote, Hitchcock, Jean Simmons, Murray, N. Lear, Obituary, Pacino, R. Brooks, Television, Theater
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Tuesday, January 06, 2009
The reductive power of television
By Edward Copeland
I was not a normal child. In addition to being a movie buff from an early age, I also was a political junkie. It wasn't an inherited trait, but it was part of my existence. In fact, many of my fellow grade schoolers were up on current events (Makes you wonder what the hell happened when now people two or three times that age in the U.S. don't know or care what's going on.) Needless to say, since I was at this age in the 1970s, Watergate was like crack to me and it still is so even a film directed by Ron Howard such as Frost/Nixon is going to have a riveted viewer in me.
Lest you think I'm exaggerating my Nixon/Watergate obsession in elementary school (which included a Nixon impression), in 5th grade I tried to convince my teacher to let me do a book report on a collection of Art Buchwald Watergate humor columns called I Am Not a Crook. I digress.
The subject at hand is the movie Frost/Nixon. I didn't get to see Peter Morgan's stage play, so I can't attest to any major differences between the play and the movie but Howard's film more or less takes the form of a documentary, with the peripheral characters speaking directly to the camera about their thoughts and involvement in David Frost's landmark interviews with Nixon.
Whereas Howard's usual style tends to neither add nor subtract from a film, that actually serves the film well because when it's not a talking-head pseudodocumentary or a look behind the scenes, it is essentially a verbal duel.
Frank Langella doesn't really look or sound like Nixon but just like Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's Nixon, his embodiment of the man finds the ex-president's essence that's more truthful than mere imitation.
Michael Sheen, who got overshadowed for his spot-on Tony Blair in The Queen, is similarly being downplayed for how good he is as David Frost in his younger, playboy days.
One other small role reveals an acting chameleon: Toby Jones who might as well have been Truman Capote in Infamous is just as convincing as the late superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar" here.
I enjoyed Frost/Nixon a lot, but if you aren't a Watergate buff such as I am, you might not get the same charge. If you watched the original interviews and remember when Frost broke Nixon, you remember why the ex-president is a tragic figure. He did awful things. He broke the law. He betrayed the country and the Constitution, but he realized he did it and it haunted him. Nixon had demons and a soul, unlike our soon-to-be-ex-president who is so clueless he will never realize the damage he's left in his wake.
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Labels: 00s, Capote, Hopkins, Oliver Stone
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Monday, December 29, 2008
Cut to the Zwick
By Edward Copeland
Director Edward Zwick has an incredible, little-known true story of World War II to tell in Defiance and that's why it's so frustrating that he seemed determined in draining all of the life out of the episode and turning it into a monotonous debate.
Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell star as three Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Poland who led a resistance against the Germans from within the Belorussian woods while sheltering an ever-growing number of Jewish refugees.
Craig continues to show his considerable range. He's not going to be locked into a James Bond stereotype when he simultaneously starring in films like this or playing gay murderers in the other Truman Capote biopic, the underrated Infamous.
The problem with Defiance is that it so quickly becomes a bore. The Bielski Partisans as they came to be known started out as a group robbing the homes of Jews collaborating with the Germans to survive. It also turns into a case of seeking vengeance on those who would help the Nazis, killing them at times prompting a seemingly endless argument between Craig and Schreiber about whether or not that makes them just as bad as the Nazis, a debate that later shifts between other characters as the movie drags on and on and Schreiber's character leaves the hideout in the woods to help fight with the Russian Army.
As a result, aside from Craig, no one seems to develop much in the way of characterization as they become mostly props or pawns. Not helping Zwick's film is its washed-out look, which just makes it even dull to look at. When it gets to fighting scenes, especially the climactic battle, it looks like Zwick merely restaged his melees from Glory and The Last Samurai with actors in costumes from a different era.
It's a shame, because Defiance definitely has a fascinating story to tell. It just seems as if Zwick was determined to keep the fascinating out of his film.
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Labels: 00s, Capote, Daniel Craig, Zwick
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Monday, November 19, 2007
Oscar's rules for GLBT characters
By Edward Copeland
This post was for the Queer Blog-a-Thon hosted at Queering the Apprentice, which apparently no longer exists. Be warned: the words below will contain spoilers for a lot of films, too many to mention, so don't read it and whine later.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has been fairly generous in the past 20 or so years in nominating (and sometimes rewarding) actors and actresses who play gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters on screen. However, this does come with a price. Not to their careers, but in deciding whether or not the role gets nominated in the first place.
There seems to be only two types of gay roles that get deemed worthy of Oscar recognition: ones that are comicly broad or one where the gay character in question either ends up dead or alone. Look at just a couple of highly praised roles that got snubbed come Oscar time. Everyone thought Dennis Quaid was a lock for a nomination with his tortured married gay man in the 1950s in Far From Heaven, but he didn't make the cut. In the end of the film, his character has accepted his sexuality and found a boyfriend: no nomination for him.
Rupert Everett was a lot of fun as Julia Roberts' best gay friend in My Best Friend's Wedding, but his character was out, proud and presumably in a relationship. Strike him from your nominating ballot.
Now, here come the spoilers, as I look at all the performers who did get nominated or won an Oscar for playing a gay character. I'm only counting characters that are explicitly gay, not implied ones such as Clifton Webb in Laura For sake of simplicity, I'm going chronologically.
Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)
The first openly gay character that I can find with a nomination set one of the patterns: He's alone at the end.
Al Pacino and Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Sarandon's character of Leon is already institutionalized (and wants nothing to do with Sonny) when we meet him. Sonny (Pacino) ends up alone and in prison.
James Coco in Only When I Laugh (1981)
The first instance (post Dog Day Afternoon) of Oscar nominating an openly gay character was for Coco's broad comic turn in this lesser Neil Simon outing.
John Lithgow in The World According to Garp
Robert Preston in Victor, Victoria (both 1982)
Preston's great turn definitely belongs more in the broad comic category, though he might also be an exception since he is allowed to have a boyfriend by film's end. Lithgow, as the NFL player turned transsexual in Garp, might be an exception. He's alive at the end, but his role is mostly played for laughs and the film never provides him with a significant other.
Cher in Silkwood (1983)
Another possible exception, though the film makes it unclear if she's alone at the end, though she certainly looks guilt-stricken over possible involvement in her friend Karen's death.
William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. While the movie was certainly a drama, Hurt does a lot of histrionic flouncing AND he ends up dead in the end, even after his straight cellmate (Raul Julia) gives him a mercy fuck.
Bruce Davison in Longtime Companion (1990)
It was five years before another gay character earned a nomination and Davison's character got the double whammy. First, he has to watch his lover die of AIDS, leaving him alone, and then he dies as well (and not even on screen).
Tommy Lee Jones in JFK (1991)
Here's another example of a broad performance in a drama and while Jones' character lives in the end, it is complicated by the fact that he is portrayed as a villain (and with some over-the-top gay orgy scenes that only Oliver Stone could dream up). In contrast, Joe Pesci playing the less showy gay character who does get killed, didn't earn Academy notice.
Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game (1992)
First, Dil's lover gets killed during an IRA kidnapping and then when he/she falls for his captor, Fergus (Stephen Rea) gets sent to prison and Dil waits patiently, even though Fergus shows no intention of abandoning his heterosexuality.
Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1993)
Gay and dead takes home the prize again, though at least Hanks' portrayal wasn't a broad one, even if Denzel Washington gave the better lead role in the film.
Greg Kinnear in As Good As It Gets (1997)
I don't think Kinnear's character had a significant other by film's end, but I do remember he took a bad beating.
Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters (1998)
Here is an openly gay actor nominated for portraying a true-life openly gay director. Alas, James Whale dies in the end (as he did in real life) but the real travesty was that McKellen (and Nick Nolte and Edward Norton) lost to Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful).
Kathy Bates in Primary Colors (1998)
Bates was great as a take-no-prisoners political operative working on the campaign of a Bill Clinton-like candidate. Alas, her lesbian character had principles and ended up firing a gun into her head.
Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry (1999)
Swank won the first of her two Oscars for lead actress by playing the gender-confused Brandon Teena. It also was the first of two times that Swank made it to the winner's circle by getting beaten to death.
Javier Bardem in Before Night Falls (2000)
Based on a real person, Bardem's character has to fight problems in Cuba before getting to N.Y. for one of the longest death scenes (from AIDS) I've ever seen.
Ed Harris in The Hours (2002)
The same year that the Academy snubbed Dennis Quaid for his fine work in Far From Heaven, they nominated this awful performance by the usually fine Harris as an artist dying of AIDS.
Nicole Kidman in The Hours (2002)
If Virginia Woolf hadn't walked herself into the river, this nomination and win probably would have never happened.
Julianne Moore in The Hours (2002)
In a way, her character here is similar to the one Quaid plays in Moore's other 2002 film. She's married, but unable to accept her sexuality. By the film's end, she appears to be alone, so she gets a pass while Quaid got snubbed. It may also explain one of the rare occasions where Meryl Streep didn't get an Oscar nomination since her lesbian character in The Hours had a lover in the end and doesn't die.
Charlize Theron in Monster (2003)
Another win based on a true story. Theron took the executed lesbian serial killer right up to the winner's circle.
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote (2005)
This may be the true exception to the rule. Based on a real life character, the story didn't follow Truman Capote to his death and he did have a longtime companion. The closest this comes is denying him his crush on the executed killer.
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Two nominated performances of gay character, so the Academy got to take one of each: Gyllenhaal's character ends up dead, Ledger's ends up alone.
Felicity Huffman in Transamerica (2005)
I'm not sure where to place this performance of an in-process transsexual. She doesn't die in the end.
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This post was for the Queer Blog-a-Thon hosted at Queering the Apprentice, which apparently no longer exists. Be warned: the words below will contain spoilers for a lot of films, too many to mention, so don't read it and whine later.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has been fairly generous in the past 20 or so years in nominating (and sometimes rewarding) actors and actresses who play gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters on screen. However, this does come with a price. Not to their careers, but in deciding whether or not the role gets nominated in the first place.
There seems to be only two types of gay roles that get deemed worthy of Oscar recognition: ones that are comicly broad or one where the gay character in question either ends up dead or alone. Look at just a couple of highly praised roles that got snubbed come Oscar time. Everyone thought Dennis Quaid was a lock for a nomination with his tortured married gay man in the 1950s in Far From Heaven, but he didn't make the cut. In the end of the film, his character has accepted his sexuality and found a boyfriend: no nomination for him.
Rupert Everett was a lot of fun as Julia Roberts' best gay friend in My Best Friend's Wedding, but his character was out, proud and presumably in a relationship. Strike him from your nominating ballot.
Now, here come the spoilers, as I look at all the performers who did get nominated or won an Oscar for playing a gay character. I'm only counting characters that are explicitly gay, not implied ones such as Clifton Webb in Laura For sake of simplicity, I'm going chronologically.
The first openly gay character that I can find with a nomination set one of the patterns: He's alone at the end.
Sarandon's character of Leon is already institutionalized (and wants nothing to do with Sonny) when we meet him. Sonny (Pacino) ends up alone and in prison.
The first instance (post Dog Day Afternoon) of Oscar nominating an openly gay character was for Coco's broad comic turn in this lesser Neil Simon outing.
Robert Preston in Victor, Victoria (both 1982)
Preston's great turn definitely belongs more in the broad comic category, though he might also be an exception since he is allowed to have a boyfriend by film's end. Lithgow, as the NFL player turned transsexual in Garp, might be an exception. He's alive at the end, but his role is mostly played for laughs and the film never provides him with a significant other.
Another possible exception, though the film makes it unclear if she's alone at the end, though she certainly looks guilt-stricken over possible involvement in her friend Karen's death.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. While the movie was certainly a drama, Hurt does a lot of histrionic flouncing AND he ends up dead in the end, even after his straight cellmate (Raul Julia) gives him a mercy fuck.
It was five years before another gay character earned a nomination and Davison's character got the double whammy. First, he has to watch his lover die of AIDS, leaving him alone, and then he dies as well (and not even on screen).
Here's another example of a broad performance in a drama and while Jones' character lives in the end, it is complicated by the fact that he is portrayed as a villain (and with some over-the-top gay orgy scenes that only Oliver Stone could dream up). In contrast, Joe Pesci playing the less showy gay character who does get killed, didn't earn Academy notice.
First, Dil's lover gets killed during an IRA kidnapping and then when he/she falls for his captor, Fergus (Stephen Rea) gets sent to prison and Dil waits patiently, even though Fergus shows no intention of abandoning his heterosexuality.
Gay and dead takes home the prize again, though at least Hanks' portrayal wasn't a broad one, even if Denzel Washington gave the better lead role in the film.
I don't think Kinnear's character had a significant other by film's end, but I do remember he took a bad beating.
Here is an openly gay actor nominated for portraying a true-life openly gay director. Alas, James Whale dies in the end (as he did in real life) but the real travesty was that McKellen (and Nick Nolte and Edward Norton) lost to Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful).
Bates was great as a take-no-prisoners political operative working on the campaign of a Bill Clinton-like candidate. Alas, her lesbian character had principles and ended up firing a gun into her head.
Swank won the first of her two Oscars for lead actress by playing the gender-confused Brandon Teena. It also was the first of two times that Swank made it to the winner's circle by getting beaten to death.
Based on a real person, Bardem's character has to fight problems in Cuba before getting to N.Y. for one of the longest death scenes (from AIDS) I've ever seen.
The same year that the Academy snubbed Dennis Quaid for his fine work in Far From Heaven, they nominated this awful performance by the usually fine Harris as an artist dying of AIDS.
If Virginia Woolf hadn't walked herself into the river, this nomination and win probably would have never happened.
In a way, her character here is similar to the one Quaid plays in Moore's other 2002 film. She's married, but unable to accept her sexuality. By the film's end, she appears to be alone, so she gets a pass while Quaid got snubbed. It may also explain one of the rare occasions where Meryl Streep didn't get an Oscar nomination since her lesbian character in The Hours had a lover in the end and doesn't die.
Another win based on a true story. Theron took the executed lesbian serial killer right up to the winner's circle.
This may be the true exception to the rule. Based on a real life character, the story didn't follow Truman Capote to his death and he did have a longtime companion. The closest this comes is denying him his crush on the executed killer.
Two nominated performances of gay character, so the Academy got to take one of each: Gyllenhaal's character ends up dead, Ledger's ends up alone.
I'm not sure where to place this performance of an in-process transsexual. She doesn't die in the end.
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Labels: Bardem, Capote, D. Quaid, Denzel, Hanks, J. Gyllenhaal, Julia Roberts, Julianne Moore, K. Bates, Lithgow, Neil Simon, Nicole Kidman, Oliver Stone, P.S. Hoffman, Pacino, Pesci, R. Preston, Tommy Lee Jones, Whale, William Hurt
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