Friday, September 16, 2011

 

Committed to Controversy


By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
An August 2008 episode of AMC’s popular TV series Mad Men shares more than just a title — “The Benefactor” — with a 1962 episode of the seminal legal drama The Defenders. In the Mad Men episode, the Sterling Cooper ad agency attempts to interest one of its clients (a lipstick company) in to purchasing time on that very same CBS series when the show’s regular sponsors desert the program over the subject matter of the titular episode: an accused abortionist on trial for performing the procedure on a young woman who’s been raped. “Benefactor” marked a turning point in the direction of The Defenders in its first season which, despite its later reputation for tackling tough social issues, spent its freshman year mired in, according to TV historian Stephen Bowie, “silly melodrama or Perry Mason-style courtroom theatrics.” For the rest of The Defenders' four-year run (the show ended in 1965), the program fearlessly dealt with such hot-button and taboo-to-TV issues as capital punishment, the blacklist, child abuse, euthanasia, birth control and atheism, to name but a few.

Mad Men's producers may have whetted modern-day audiences’ appetites to get a gander at the inspiration for their homage to the program praised by The Museum of Broadcast Communications as “the most socially conscious series the medium has ever seen “…but if you’re looking to purchase or rent the show on home video you’re going to be sorely disappointed — and an online DVD search will more than likely result in the recently canceled Jim Belushi-Jerry O’Connell series that’s similar to the landmark 1960s program in name only. The last time The Defenders was seen on TV was in 1980 on a lesser-known (and now defunct) cable channel and according to Bowie: “It’s hard to think of another series made after 1960, even one in black and white, that ran for as long as The Defenders (four seasons, 132 episodes) and yet hasn’t been syndicated in nearly 30 years. And that’s not even taking into account the show’s acclaim and enormous historical relevance.” So on the occasion of its 50th anniversary of its television premiere, I’d like to pay tribute to a program that deserves to be better-known…and whose absence on home video is a crime that even the show’s stars (E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed) would have difficulty defending.

The origins of The Defenders begin with stage, screen and television writer Reginald Rose — we recognize him, of course, as the author of such screenplays as Crime in the Streets and 12 Angry Men as well as co-writing the screen adaptation of Whose Life Is It Anyway? with the play's author Brian Clark, but during television’s Golden Age he was one of the medium’s most respected scribes, with critically lauded teleplays such as Thunder on Sycamore Street and The Incredible World of Horace Ford to his credit. For the dramatic anthology series Studio One (which also presented 12 Angry Men before its silver screen adaptation), Rose penned a two-part episode entitled The Defender, in which the father-and-son legal team of Walter (Ralph Bellamy) and Kenneth Preston (William Shatner) defend Joseph Gordon (Steve McQueen), a young man accused of a crime he swears he didn’t commit. The Defender is the only incarnation of the series to be released to home video (on DVD in 2006); it also bears the distinction of inspiring an episode of Boston Legal (“Son of the Defender”) — in which clips from the live telecast are used to paint the portrait of Shatner’s Denny Crane as a young man.

Producer Herbert Brodkin had worked with Rose on both The Defender and previous Studio One presentations, and it was Brodkin who convinced the writer that a viable weekly series could be made from the two-parter, which premiered on CBS in fall 1961. The role of the elder Preston (rechristened “Lawrence”) was recast with actor E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed played his son Kenneth, a recent law school graduate. The senior Preston was a veteran attorney (more than 20 years before the bar) who acted as mentor to his greener and more idealistic son, though over the course of the show’s four-year run, Kenneth did become a more seasoned practitioner of the law. By that time on The Defenders, however, Ken’s progress as a litigator had taken a back seat to the complicated and controversial legal issues spotlighted in each episode and because this character development eventually was diminished, minor first season players such as the Prestons’ secretary Helen Donaldson (Polly Rowles) and Ken’s girlfriend Joan Miller (Joan Hackett) soon became inconsequential as well.

Though the show’s inaugural episode, “Quality of Mercy,” offered up a then-daring-for-its-time plot centering on a physician needing legal representation for mercy killing an infant with Down syndrome, many of the plots on The Defenders rarely deviated from the similar subject matter featured on its first season lead-in, Perry Mason, the only difference being that the celebrated Mason seldom lost any of his cases while the firm of Preston & Preston was more fallibly human, subject to the realities of the legal system in facing such factors as better-equipped or more skillful legal opponents and arbitrary judges and/or juries. “The Benefactor” was chiefly responsible for changing the direction of the series. Asked by an accused abortionist to defend him in court, Lawrence and Kenneth mount a defense that essentially argued in favored of legalized abortion nearly a decade before the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. (Not surprisingly, the Prestons do not prevail at the show’s conclusion.) The Defenders' sponsors — a rotation that featured Lever Brothers, Kimberly-Clark and Brown & Williamson Tobacco — strongly objected to the episode’s content and decreed that they would have nothing to do with “Benefactor,” despite CBS’ defense that the installment was “a very fine, realistic and honest dramatization.” The network finally landed a backup sponsor in the Speidel Watch people (who probably obtained the ad time at bargain basement prices) and even though CBS exercised preliminary damage control by screening the episode via closed circuit television to its affiliates, 10 of the network’s 180 stations (including outlets in Boston, Buffalo and New Orleans) flatly stated “uh-uh.”

The sponsor defection during “Benefactor” did little to make CBS skittish about continuing with The Defenders. Despite the objections of network President James “The Smiling Cobra” Aubrey, who was against the series from the get-go, Defenders had a loyal ally in CBS Chairman William S. Paley — known for going to the mat for prestigious programs, a status he had acquired since his early days in radio. Paley and CBS executive Michael Dann also knew of both Brodkin and Rose’s reputations for program quality and the backlash after the telecast was relatively minimal — of the mail they received (close to a thousand letters) nearly 11 to one was in favor of the episode. The fact that The Defenders was CBS’ highest-rated new show of the season — not to mention its four Emmy Awards (including achievements in writing and directing, and acting honors for star Marshall) — surely didn’t hurt either. “Benefactor” galvanized the creative team behind Defenders, giving the program “the courage of its convictions” to address sensitive social issues of the day in a frank and unabashedly opinionated manner. As series creator Rose affirmed in an issue of The Viewer: “We’re committed to controversy.”

Regular TV viewers in the era of the 1960s knew instinctively that clients in need of the services of legal eagle Perry Mason rarely were guilty and just required Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous barrister to prove their innocence via his show-off courtroom histrionics. But the patrons hiring Preston & Preston were certainly no angels…and often misfits and societal outcasts; the father-and-son lawyers defended conscientious objectors ("The Objector"), illegal immigrants ("Stowaway"), civil rights demonstrators ("The Non-Violent"), pornographers ("A Book for Burning") and neo-Nazis ("The Indelible Silence"). One of the show’s most celebrated episodes — and one that garnered Emmys for author Ernest Kinoy and guest star Jack Klugman — was “Blacklist,” in which an actor (Klugman) who was blacklisted for alleged Communist affiliations is targeted by a group opposed to his hiring for a part after 10 years in “exile.” (Bowie points out that despite accepting the industry accolades for this entry, CBS continued to enforce a blacklist at least until The Defenders' final season, oblivious to any irony.) In short, The Defenders was never about justice but the pursuit of justice. As author Mark Alvey points out in a Museum of Broadcast Communications essay on the show, “The Defenders focused on the machinery of the law, the vagaries of the legal process, and system's capacity for justice.”

A final speech made by Larry Preston to his son at the end of “Blacklist” neatly provides a summation of the raison d’être for The Defenders: “The law is man-made, and therefore imperfect. We don't always have the answer. There are injustices in the world. And they're not always solved at the last minute by some brilliant point of law at a dramatic moment.” And that’s how the series built its reputation — addressing timely legal issues such as capital punishment, the insanity defense and illegal evidence searches while refusing to do so in a clear-cut, black-and-white manner — and taking judicious time to explore all the perspectives and gray areas present in the process. If you’re shrugging your shoulders in indifference because you’re witnessed this sort of thing on recent shows such as Law and Order and The Practice — where characters employed in the legal profession aren’t there to “win” but simply because it’s their job — this probably all seems tame. However, it’s important to remember that The Defenders not only broke the ground in establishing these now commonplace concepts, but it also ushered in a trend of series that focused on nonviolent “heroes” who usually possessed some sort of professional taint (doctors, teachers, etc.) and confronted important social concerns of the day. Its pedigree of writing and directing talent (Kinoy, David Shaw, Adrian Spies, Alvin Boretz) praised for their triumphs in live television ensured that the 1950s dramatic anthology tradition continued throughout the '60s (as marked by other shows such as Route 66 and Naked City) and though outside location shooting in the Big Apple was minimal, it provided a necessary shot in the arm to the once popular industry practice of producing TV shows in New York. The social relevance of The Defenders also inspired similar series attempting to trod the same ground (East Side/West Side, Slattery’s People) but in terms of critical attention and audience loyalty, The Defenders remained the champ.

During its four-year run, The Defenders received 20 Emmy Award nominations and collected 13 of those trophies, including outstanding drama series three years in a row. Among the episodes singled out for Emmy praise (either winning or being nominated): “Madman” (a two-part episode that probes the legal definition of insanity); “Moment of Truth” (son Kenneth is accused of bribing a juror); and “The 700 Year Old Gang” (also a two-parter, and a lighter-than-normal outing about an elderly vintner who’s being prosecuted for bootlegging). But author Stephen Bowie, who has described the series in past writings as “one of my pet TV history causes” draws attention to such integral Defenders outings as “Blood County,” which finds Preston pere and fils defending an accused murderer (a hunter) in an atmosphere of corruption set against a backwoods Pennsylvania burg; “A Man Against Himself,” a script about a black man (Ivan Dixon) who insists on defending himself on manslaughter charges (written by Raphael Hayes, the co-scenarist of the provocative independent film One Potato, Two Potato); and “Kill or Be Killed,” which focuses on the plight of a convicted murderer who killed a guard during his escape from prison, oblivious to the fact that he’s been cleared of the original murder charge. It was Stephen who brought to my attention that despite my previous belief that The Defenders had never been syndicated, the series did turn up in repeats on New York’s WPIX-TV (channel 11) in the late '60s; but its failure to establish itself in more markets could have something to do with the serious tone of the series (it’s probably not the sort of the show you’d program after, say, Gilligan’s Island on a five-days-a-week basis). The Defenders surfaced briefly during the home video era (circa 1980) on the Armed Forces Network and many of the “bootlegs” in circulation were culled from that AFN stint.

The Defenders now is in the control of CBS-Paramount, and though the rights to the series haven’t necessarily brought upon a legal entanglement that would require the services of Lawrence and Kenneth Preston, its DVD absence no doubt stems from the cardinal rule of home video: it’s not commercial enough to justify season-by-season releases. If shows such as The Streets of San Francisco or The Phil Silvers Show can be sidelined on DVD due to indifference and sluggish sales, the chances of The Defenders — which, despite its inclusion on TV Guide’s 50 Best Shows of All Time list (it ranked No. 31) in 2009, has been mostly unseen since its original network run (plus it’s a black-and-white series to boot) — being bought or rented becomes more remote with each passing year. (This may be pure speculation on my part, but if the show had the good fortune to have its rights controlled by NBC-Universal, it might be a different story — after all, that’s why the good Lord created Timeless Media Video.)

Stephen Bowie observes (courtesy of an e-mail exchange): “[I]f anything The Defenders not only meets but exceeds its original reputation as one of the greatest American television dramas. It is daring both dramatically (the Prestons lose a LOT of cases) and in its politics…in ways that no one in commercial television would be able to get away with today.” On a personal note, I can’t help but equate that the missed opportunity to see this extraordinary program (outside of bootleg copies) in its proper presentation virtually has played out like the conclusion to an episode of the series — and the earlier words of Lawrence Preston to son Ken keep ringing in my ears: “There are injustices in the world.”

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# posted by Ivan G Shreve Jr @ 8:00 AM 3 comments

Monday, July 18, 2011

 

Centennial Tributes: Hume Cronyn Part I


By Edward Copeland
When I planned to do a tribute to Hume Cronyn on what would be his 100th birthday, I never imagined that I'd have to break it into two parts, but the more I delved into his history, the more I realized the piece would be a long one because Cronyn's career was not only a long one, it was multifaceted. Believe it or not, I'm omitting a lot of what he did, just to make this salute as short as it is. In fairness, this tribute to the actor-screenwriter-playwright-author-director-producer-lyricist should ideally have led with a solo photo of the man, but his life and career was so inexorably linked with that of his second wife Jessica Tandy, it would be just as wrong not to include her since she figures so prominently in his story. Cronyn and Tandy met in 1940, wed in 1942 and stayed together until her death in 1994. In that time, the two of them collaborated in their first film together in 1944 and would go on to make a total of nine feature films, one feature documentary, appear in 10 plays shown on TV in the 1950s (one of which he directed), co-star in a short-lived 1954 sitcom (which he produced and began life as a radio show they did together), make five TV movies together, appear on countless talk shows and TV specials as a couple and, of course, teamed on the same Broadway productions 14 times, earning them the title of The First Couple of the American Theater. Cronyn did do plenty on his own though, not just as an actor, but as I mentioned earlier as a writer, not only of plays but of TV movies as well as two screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock, who directed Cronyn in his film debut in 1943, as well as his autobiography.

While Hume Cronyn, born on this date in 1911 in London, Ontario, Canada, certainly left his imprint on all entertainment mediums and in most of the possible roles associated with that industry, that almost wasn't going to be the course of his life's career. His father, also named Hume, was a banker and prominent member of the Canadian Parliament in Ontario and insisted his son go to law school so Cronyn studied law at McGill University in Montreal even though young Hume already had his sights set on a career in the theater. While at McGill, he also took an interest in boxing and developed skills good enough that he nearly landed a spot on Canada's 1932 Olympic boxing team as a featherweight, except he dropped out of McGill after the 1930-31 term and headed over the border to the United States. He made his professional stage debut in 1931 in the play Up Pops the Devil at The National Theatre in Washington. He played a paperboy for a salary of $15 a week. Cronyn began attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts under Max Reinhardt where he graduated in 1934. He took acting jobs wherever he could find them, including working with The Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va., outside Richmond. The city of Richmond reprints an article about the theater which still exists, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch about their production of a play called Mountain Ivy in summer 1934 as well as their unusual experiment where patrons could swap pigs, chickens, jellies and other assorted foods in exchange for a seat during the hard economic times. The article lists Cronyn as both a member of the cast and its production designer. He made his Broadway debut later that same year in the play Hippers' Holiday in the role of a janitor where he also served as understudy in the comedy whose cast also included Burgess Meredith. The next year, he replaced Garson Kanin (who would gain more fame later in his career as a writer) in the role of Green in George Abbott's production of the comedy Boy Meets Girl whose cast also included Everett Sloane, probably best known as Bernstein in Citizen Kane. Sometime in this time period, Cronyn wed for the first time, but no two sites agree on either the beginning or end dates of his marriage to Emily Woodruff or provides much information about her. They were either married in 1934 or 1935 and divorced in 1936 or 1941, the year after he met Jessica Tandy, but I was having no luck finding a definitive answer until I discovered that Cronyn and Tandy donated a treasure trove of their personal papers to The Library of Congress along with copies of divorce decrees, marriage licenses, etc. So I'll take their words as the final authority and Cronyn wed Emily Woodruff wed in 1934 and were divorced in 1936. Tandy, who actually was two years older than Cronyn and English born, ended her first marriage to the actor Jack Hawkins in 1942 after 10 years of marriage.

In January 1937, Cronyn landed the role of Elkus in the original production of Maxwell Anderson's fantasy High Tor, which won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for show and whose cast included Meredith again as well as Peggy Ashcroft. He continued making Broadway appearances but 1939 became notable for two reasons. One: Cronyn made his first appearance on the fledgling medium of television on a program called Her Master's Voice. In October 1939, he made his biggest impression on The Great White Way to date in the role of Andrei Prozorov in a production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. He continued working regularly on Broadway though 1940 proved more significant as the year he met Jessica Tandy. They wed two years later, though they didn't collaborate on the stage until six years later. In fact, Cronyn and Tandy shared the screen together first. When Cronyn and Tandy did make their first trip to Hollywood, it wasn't long before film roles came their way, especially for Cronyn who lucked out with his film debut. Though only 32 at the time, Cronyn was cast as the much older Herbie Hawkins, neighbor friend of Henry Travers in Alfred Hitchcock's great 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt starring Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright. Travers played Wright's father and he and Cronyn's characters were obsessed with mysteries and scenarios for the perfect murder while completely unaware that Cotten's Uncle Charlie who is staying with Travers actually is a notorious serial killer. Cronyn and Travers' scenes are a hoot. The same year, Cronyn landed a small role in Claude Rains' rendering of The Phantom of the Opera and the war drama The Cross of Lorraine starring Jean-Pierre Aumont and Gene Kelly. Cronyn and Tandy also welcomed the birth of their first child, a son, Christopher. Cronyn also kept busy during those war years by staging and performing in many USO productions to entertain the troops.

His first working relationship with Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt would begin a professional relationship between the two that would persist and in many areas. The director cast Cronyn again as part of the ensemble in his next full-length feature, 1944's Lifeboat, for which YouTube provides a clip.


The same year also placed him in his first film with his wife, The Seventh Cross directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Spencer Tracy. This war-time drama, which I've never managed to see, tells of seven men who escape a Nazi concentration camp. The camp's commandant orders that as each escapee is recaptured by the Gestapo, he be returned to the camp and put to death on one of the seven crosses he's erected. Tracy's character is the last of the seven still on the run, trying to flee to Holland. Cronyn and Tandy play a married couple who take Tracy in, unaware of who he is at first, though their own son is in the SS and Cronyn's character is tempted by a large reward. It earned Cronyn his first and only Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. It was the first film Tandy made in Hollywood. In 1945, Cronyn's major films took a lighter and, in one instance, a more domestic turn, as did he and Tandy's life with the birth of their second child, daughter Tandy. Filmwise, he co-starred with Robert Walker and June Allyson in The Sailor Takes a Wife and appeared in the all-star cast that included Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly and many, many more in the mix of music and comedy skits in Ziegfeld Follies. Cronyn acted in the sketch "Sweepstakes Ticket" with William Frawley and Fanny Brice. Again, YouTube actually has the clip and how often do you get to see the real Fanny Brice?


The year 1946 proved especially busy for Cronyn on several fronts. In Los Angeles, he directed his wife for the first time on stage in a production of Tennessee Williams' Portrait of a Madonna at the Actors' Laboratory Theatre. Cronyn also was named a director of the Screen Actors Guild. He worked with director Jules Dassin for the first time in A Letter for Evie, teamed with his wife on screen for the second time in The Green Years, did uncredited voice work in The Secret Heart and co-starred as the smarmy defense attorney representing Lana Turner (or is he?) in the murder of Turner's husband in the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice. Finally, on a personal note, Cronyn adopted Tandy's daughter, Susan, (from Tandy's marriage to Jack Hawkins) on the girl's 12th birthday and Susan changed her last name to Cronyn. In 1947, Cronyn became the first person to portray scientist Robert Oppenheimer in a film about the making of the atomic bomb The Beginning or the End. Tandy was making a mark on the East Coast creating one of the landmark characters in theatrical history — Blanche Du Bois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. In movies, Cronyn gave what may be the best performance I've ever seen him give — the tyrannical leader of the prison guards, Captain Munsey, locked in a battle of wills with Burt Lancaster in Dassin's Brute Force. This clip doesn't show Munsey at his cruelest or most terrifying and it has foreign subtitles, but you'll get the idea.


With 1948, Cronyn definitely indulged in the multi-faceted nature of his work in the arts. He only acted in one film that year: the comedy The Bride Goes Wild co-starring Van Johnson and June Allyson. Before he headed back east, he took his first crack at screenwriting. With Hitchcock's uncredited help, the two wrote the adaptation of Arthur Laurents' screenplay for Hitchcock's gem Rope, which was based on the play Rope's End by Patrick Hamilton. Rope not only was notable for the way Hitchcock filmed it in long takes that ran until the camera ran out of film, it also was the director's first film made in color. Cronyn then went back to New York where Jessica Tandy continued to play Blanche on Broadway. Cronyn returned to the stage for the first time in seven years in The Survivors whose cast included Louis Calhern, E.G. Marshall, Kevin McCarthy and Ray Walston. He also became a producer on the New York-based theater TV show that started on the fledgling ABC network called Actor's Studio, renamed The Play's the Thing in its final season when, by then, it aired on CBS. He directed an installment that broadcast Portrait of a Madonna and Tandy was even able on a night off to re-create the role she played in the L.A. production in which Cronyn directed her. The series attracted lots of big names and introduced viewers to many great works but sadly no copies of the program exist, including Marlon Brando's first appearance in a role on television in 1949, something he wouldn't do again until 1979.

As the 1940s ended, Cronyn was all over the map — literally. He only acted in one feature film — and it was a musical. Cronyn put on a brogue to play the assistant to an Irish town's police sergeant (Barry Fitzgerald) who calls on a singing insurance investigator from America (Bing Crosby) to help solve the mystery of the whereabouts of their missing Blarney Stone. That was the least of Cronyn's accomplishments that year. He still served as a producer on the series Actor's Studio, though he didn't have time to appear or direct on that program because he was so busy on other TV series. He worked again with Burgess Meredith as well as Pat Harrington Jr. in the "One Sunday Afternoon" installment of The Ford Theatre Hour in May; acted opposite Fay Bainter in "The Uncertain Hour" on The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre a week later; and played the title character in "Dr. Violet" on Suspense, a series that presented live plays with characters in dangerous situations. Cronyn would repeat the role in two more installments the following year.

He also found time to play the title role in a national tour of Shakespeare's Hamlet put on by The American National Theatre and Academy. Cronyn also repeated the job he had on Hitchcock's Rope on Hitch's next project Under Capricorn, the only movie by the director I couldn't even finish. It wasn't his usual suspenser, but a big costume drama set in 1831 Australia and starring Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten. I'm far from alone in my criticism of it — Hitchcock himself regretted making it in the book-length interview he did with Francois Truffaut. Cronyn had a helluva task. First, it was a novel, then a play, then a screenplay and then he got his hands on it to try to turn it into something worth watching. Hitchcock admitted he only took the movie for the chance to work with Bergman and to return to England — and the big paycheck didn't hurt either. He also admitted that Cronyn was out of his element. "I wanted (Cronyn) because he's a very articulate man who knows how to voice his ideas, but as a scriptwriter he hadn't really sufficient experience," Hitchcock told Truffaut while taking the ultimate blame.

FOR PART II, CLICK HERE

SOURCES: Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy: A Register of Their Papers in the Library of Congress, Fandango, biography.com, film reference.com, Encyclopedia of World Biography, Internet Accuracy Project, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut, Wikipedia, The Internet Broadway Database and the Internet Movie Database.

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Saturday, April 09, 2011

 

Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)


I want you to get up right now. I want you to stand up, out of your chairs. I want you to get up, go to your window, open it and shout, "I'm as sad as hell. Sidney Lumet has died." One of the all-time great film directors, whose debut in 1957, 12 Angry Men, earned him his first Oscar nomination, and who 50 years later still was capable of producing as great a film as Before the Devil Knows You're Dead died today in New York at 86.

Lumet actually began his career as a child actor, making his first appearance on the Broadway stage in 1935 in the original production of Dead End. He'd act on Broadway multiple times until 1948 when directing for television caught his eye. He only directed on Broadway three times. His direction for television began in 1951 and included both episodic television and the many live playhouse shows until the chance to direct 12 Angry Men as a feature came along in 1957. Its origins as a play clearly showed, but there was no point trying to open this tale up since the claustrophobia of that jury room heightened the drama and Lumet used to his advantage, as in the moment when they discuss the unusual knife the defendant had and that the victim was killed with and Henry Fonda suddenly whips out one of his own, tossing it so the blade sticks in the middle of the table. The film contained a great cast including, in addition to Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall and Jack Warden. In fact, of the 12 members of that jury, only Jack Klugman remains with us today.

Lumet continued his television work, not directing another feature until 1959's That Kind of Woman starring Sophia Loren. The following year, he got more notice when Tennessee Williams adapted his own play Orpheus Descending into The Fugitive Kind which Lumet filmed with Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani. In 1962, Lumet made a film of another stage classic, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, starring Katharine Hepburn as the opium-addicted Mary Tyrone.

In 1964, he filmed two of his most underrated movies: The Pawnbroker, featuring a great performance by Rod Steiger as the Jewish title character, a Holocaust survivor, who has given up on mankind; and Fail-Safe, a tense nuclear thriller starring Henry Fonda that got overshadowed by the satire of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove which came out first the same year.

He kept quite busy for the rest of the 1960s and early '70s, directing The Hill, The Group, Bye Bye Braverman, The Sea Gull, The Appointment, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, The Anderson Tapes, The Offence and Child's Play. In 1971, Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz co-directed the documentary King: A Filmed Record...Montgomery to Memphis about Martin Luther King Jr.

Beginning in 1973, Lumet started what was the most creatively fertile and rewarding period of his filmmaking career, one that earned him four consecutive nominations from the Directors Guild. Starting with Al Pacino in Serpico, it was one of many times in Lumet's career he'd turn his lens on the issue of corruption among police. In 1974, he went in another direction, casting Albert Finney as Agatha Christie's famed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot and assembled an amazing cast for Murder on the Orient Express.

Then came the first of an amazing one-two punch with 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, one of Lumet's greatest achievements and a film I never tire of watching. With Al Pacino and John Cazale attempting to rob a bank and having it turn into a hostage situation and a media sideshow, it's a wonder. It brought Lumet his first Oscar nomination for directing since that initial one for 12 Angry Men. It's not only proof of what a great director Lumet could be but when they released the special two-disc DVD edition of the film, Lumet also showed that he's one of the few people who actually recorded DVD commentaries that were worth listening to, sharing many interesting details about the production of this great work which deftly blends the humorous, the tragic and the absurd.

He followed Dog Day up in 1976 with the incomparable Network. While much of the credit for this satirical and prescient masterpiece deservedly goes to Paddy Chayefsky's Oscar-winning script, Lumet's direction shouldn't get short shrift. The way he filmed the chaos of the network control rooms and its overlapping dialogue and always found the right pacing for whatever craziness was going on. Also, as in Dog Day, Lumet didn't have a musical score. Except for the opening song in the 1975 film and the network news theme in Network, he eschewed any musical underscore. Neither film needed one. He also assembled some great visual compositions, such as the long view down the canyons of New York with windows open as far as the eyes could see with heads sticking out screaming "I'm mad as hell" to Ned Beatty and the lighting as he's at the end of that long conference table about to give Peter Finch his corporate cosmology speech. Brilliant. Lumet received his third directing nomination.

Things got a little bumpy filmwise after that. Next came the adaptation of the play Equus followed by what many count as his biggest mistake: casting a too old Diana Ross as Dorothy in the big screen version of the Broadway musical The Wiz, which also featured Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. Next came a rather lame Alan King-Ali McGraw romantic comedy (Yes, you read that correctly) called Just Tell Me What You Want.

Lumet began to get his bearings again by going back to police corruption with 1981's Prince of the City, which earned him his first Oscar nomination in a writing category. The next year brought him his final nomination as a director for The Verdict, starring Paul Newman as an alcoholic lawyer seeking redemption. That same year, he made the fun adaptation of the play Deathtrap starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve.

The remainder of his career mixed some OK efforts with some really bad ones. He made Running on Empty, which earned River Phoenix an Oscar nominaton but did his best when going back to corruption in movies such as 1990's Q&A and 1996's Night Falls on Manhattan. In 2005, the Academy finally saw fit to award him an honorary Oscar, back when they still televised those events. At least he ended on a high note, with the really good 2007 film Before the Devil Knows You're Dead starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Albert Finney.

RIP Mr. Lumet.


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Monday, October 04, 2010

 

Arthur Penn: The Chase


By Edward Copeland
With the talent gathered for 1966's The Chase, for awhile the movie seems like a mistake. Arthur Penn directing a screenplay by Lillian Hellman adapted from a novel and play by Horton Foote with a cast that includes Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford and Robert Duvall. Angie Dickinson even turns up as Brando's wife. How did this talent get hooked up with what feels like, for the first hour or so, one of those Southern soap opera potboilers so prevalent in the '50s and '60s. The younger members of the cast were early in their career, so they have an excuse, but it's puzzling to see Penn and Brando attached to something that resembles one of those longish bores with too many story strands and boozy characters. Thankfully, a larger purpose develops eventually as The Chase goes along, but not enough to make it worthwhile. No wonder Penn expressed dissatisfaction with what they did to this film too.

The person holding The Chase together over its early rough patches turns out to be Brando who turns in one of his committed performances as Calder, the sheriff of the unnamed Texas town who gets little respect from its citizens who see him as little more than a puppet for the local oil tycoon Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall). If Brando ever had an excuse to sleepwalk through one of his films or go bizarre just to amuse himself, this could have been it. The truth that escapes the small-minded, cliquish community who swap spouses as if they were baseball cards and treat alcohol as one of the five basic food groups, is that Calder holds a true commitment to the law and doesn't share their knee-jerk judgments about people or races.

What sets the town in motion is the news that its infamous former resident Charlie "Bubber" Reeves (Redford) has escaped from jail with another inmate and many of the citizens expect him to return to settle scores such as Edwin Stewart (Duvall) who really stole the money that got Reeves sent to his first reformatory and started the domino effect of bad luck that ruined Reeves' life. The escape hasn't made things better as the inmate he fled with murders the man whose car they planned to steal and strands Bubber on the side of the road, leaving him to take the blame for the slaying.

Complicating matters at home, Bubber's wife Anna (Fonda) has fallen in love with Val Rogers' son Jake (James Fox) (wed to someone else, of course) and has been having an affair with him, even though she's still devoted to Bubber as well. The various affairs between the upper crust can be very confusing and frankly not that interesting. When The Chase finally gets going is when you realize that Calder stands alone against a town full of armed drunks and rowdy kids (look close for a young Paul Williams) and their desire for vigilantism, be it against Bubber or a black man who dares to be seen walking in a white neighborhood.

That trio of ne'er-do-goods, with more booze flowing through their veins than blood and always packing heat presumably to compensate for other shortcomings, are led by Richard Bradford with Clifton James and Steve Ihnat on backup, and they seem to be there to harass the sheriff at every turn, including giving him a Major League asskicking to keep him from stopping Val Rogers from interrogating a black prisoner downstairs they believe knows Bubber's whereabouts.

As the film builds toward its climax, the chaotic town has transformed into a horror show that's half apocalypse, half block party. It's just a shame we have to suffer through the dull and soapy muddle of the more than first hour to get to its real point about mob violence. The Ox Bow Incident, it ain't.

Still, once we get to the final act, Penn directs with real verve and Brando's solid and laid-back performance throughout deserves thanks for keeping audiences from fleeing until we get to that point.

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# posted by Edward Copeland @ 2:30 PM 1 comments

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