Sunday, March 04, 2012
Pearl Tributes: Rex Hamilton
By Edward Copeland
No, Rex Hamilton isn't really 30 years old, but today marks the pearl anniversary of his most famous performance. Sure, many fine actors have taken a shot at playing our 16th president — Ralph Ince, Benjamin Chapin and Francis Ford practically made entire careers out of playing Honest Abe in film after film after film during the silent era. Among the better-known names to don the stovepipe hat on the big screen and TV include Walter Huston, John Carradine, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, Hal Holbrook, Gregory Peck, Jason Robards and Sam Waterston. Many of those names would return to the role again and again — and we still haven't even seen Daniel Day-Lewis' take in Steven Spielberg's upcoming film. What none of these greats had that made Hamilton's portrait of Lincoln so much richer than any Lincoln before or since was his supporting cast: Ed Williams as Ted Olson; the great, recently passed William Duell as Johnny; Mission: Impossible veteran Peter Lupus as Officer Norberg; Alan North as Capt. Ed Hocken and, most importantly, Leslie Nielsen as Sgt. Frank Drebin, Detective Lieutenant, Police Squad! — a special division of the police force.
The writing-directing team of brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams couldn't have been hotter following the surprise hit of their no-holds-barred comedy Airplane! Made for a mere $3.5 million, it tallied a domestic gross of $83,453,539 and became the fourth-biggest moneymaker of 1980. Paramount Pictures, headed then by Michael Eisner, was eager to work with the boys again. ZAZ (shorthand for the trio) had an idea to make a parody of old TV police dramas, but Paramount had offered them such a small window they couldn't figure out a way to turn the idea into a 90-minute script. Someone suggested that if they were spoofing a type of television show, why not make a television show? The idea appealed to them immediately since it meant having to produce a shorter script. According to commentaries on the DVD on two of the episodes by ZAZ and producer Robert Weiss (whose voices all sound terribly alike and hard to distinguish from each other), they sold the Police Squad! idea to ABC based on the opening credits sequence alone. As Airplane! took its premise from the 1957 film Zero Hour! (so much so that the rights to that film had to be acquired), Police Squad! was loosely based on the police drama M Squad that ran from 1957-1960 and starred Lee Marvin. Below are two YouTube clips. First, watch the memorable opening to Police Squad!, and then below it, the credits to M Squad, and see how closely ZAZ aped it, right down to the music.
The opening credits alone leave much to discuss. First, anyone old enough to remember series from the 1960s and 1970s such as Barnaby Jones, Cannon, The Fugitive and The Streets of San Francisco recalls the announcer who would proclaim the series "A Quinn Martin Production" as well as informing the viewer the title of the night's episode. In yet another instance of inaccuracy and inconsistency found on the Incompetent Movie Database, the entry for Police Squad! claims the narrator was Marvin Miller. However, the Quinn Martin announcer was Hank Simms, who IMDb also identifies as the narrator on Police Squad!, a fact verified by multiple sources across the Internet. You don't find Miller's name associated with Police Squad! anywhere else. The other distinctions that need to be pointed out about the credits is that when Simms announces the title, as in the premiere when he says, "Tonight's episode: The Broken Promise," on screen it would read, "tonight's episode: A SUBSTANTIAL GIFT." All six episodes had dual titles like that. Then there were the special guest
stars. In the clip, from the first episode, you saw it was Lorne Greene who rolled out of a car, a knife in his chest. It's never mentioned again. That happened each week with the special guest stars who always would be killed off and have nothing to do with the rest of that episode's story. In the second episode, they dropped a safe on Georg Stanford Brown, who made his name as an actor on The Rookies and went on to direct, including the third episode of Police Squad! In the third episode, Robert Goulet, the eventual villain in The Naked Gun 2½, bought it in front of a firing squad. The fourth special guest star honors went to William Shatner who dines with a beautiful blonde when a barrage of gunfire opens up on him. Shatner ducks, gets back up and fires back. He then smiles at his date and sips his wine and starts grabbing his throat. He points at her before keeling over. The fifth guest star death had Florence Henderson spoofing her Wesson Oil "Wessonality" commercials of the time. She's on a kitchen set holding a plate of fried chicken singing "Put on a Happy Face" when a hail of gunfire mows her down and she lets out a high note. We see her foot kicking up above the kitchen counter before it ends. The final celebrity death went to none other than an actual Quinn Martin production — William Conrad, Frank Cannon himself, doing a virtual shot-by-shot recreation of the Lorne Greene scene. The public has never seen the most infamous celebrity death scene and no one
knows if it has been lost or purposely destroyed. ZAZ met with John Belushi, who jokingly suggested they film him lying dead with a needle in his arm. What they did film was him having rocks attached to his feet and then sinking below the water, bubbles coming out of his mouth and a fish swimming by. The eerie part is that during the filming, something went wrong with the air, and when they pulled him out of the water, he started choking. Once he was OK, everyone was joking about mock obits saying, "Belushi was best known for his work on Saturday Night Live…" Two weeks later, Belushi did die of an overdose, so they didn't air his cameo. They thought about putting it on the DVD, but the footage couldn't be found. Of course, Greene, Goulet and Conrad all have passed on now. On the DVD, it includes a two-page memo of proposed celebrity death ideas they had (if the show had gone on) that included a shark attack, getting on the Hindenburg and signing a contract with ABC. The final credit detail worth noting is that, according to the commentary, ABC was uncomfortable with a show that aired at 7 p.m. in some time zones having a man run through the squad room on fire. ZAZ ignored them, but ABC kept complaining, and after three episodes had aired with that footage, ABC made them remove it, which was dumb considering the show was pulled after the fourth episode. Apparently for the DVD, they just used the same credits with the burning man for all six episodes.Yes, as beloved as many hold Police Squad! and Frank Drebin now, and even though less than two years earlier the comedy style employed by Abrahams and the Zucker brothers — namely having every kind of comedy running simultaneously as a nonstop bombardment of visual gags, puns, wordplay, very literal language, slapstick and more — reaped huge rewards in Airplane!, when ZAZ took that technique to TV, Police Squad! flopped badly. ABC didn't help the matter with where they placed Police Squad! on their schedule: the first show on Thursday nights opposite Magnum, P.I. on CBS and Fame on NBC (Yes Virginia, there once were only three commercial networks), filling in for Mork & Mindy. I'm uncertain what aired there for a couple weeks following its four-episode run, but then another short-lived (and truly bizarre) show, No Soap Radio, occupied the slot until Mork returned in May. While their madness appeared to be a new style of humor, on the commentaries the creators freely credit the influences of the Marx Brothers, Ernie Kovacs and MAD magazine. The trio had the right man for their star in Leslie Nielsen. In an interview on the DVD, he talked about how when he was making Airplane!, he noticed the writing-directing team watching him very closely, especially during the scene where he's trying to lift the spirits of Ted Stryker (Robert Hays) by telling him about George Zipp ("I don't know where I'll be then — but it won't smell too good, that's for sure"). "I thought, 'You know, if they watch too much, they're gonna find out I'm a fraud.' But it never turned out that way because they were watching me because they had detected in me the same wavelength in humor that they had." Indeed, aside from a few exceptions such as an early, hilarious episode of M*A*S*H, Airplane! unleashed the comic actor in Nielsen that always existed and
Police Squad! sealed it. Rewatching the six episodes, while each episode had its share of funny bits, the premiere episode, the only episode actually written and directed by ZAZ, is a gem from beginning to end. It opens at ACME Finance Credit Union where Sally Decker (Kathryn Leigh Scott) argues with the teller Jim Johnson (Terry Wills) about skimming more money for her because she owes money to her dentist, but Jim won't steal anymore. Then poor Ralph Twice (Russell Shannon) comes in to cash his last paycheck after being laid off from his job at the tire factory, giving Sally an idea as she takes two guns from her desk. Viewers who didn't already realize this wasn't your average TV comedy started to realize it as they watched Sally prepare but still heard Jim ask Ralph the usual check-cashing questions: form of ID, two major credit cards, thumbprint. Then it gets odd as Jim asks Ralph to look into a camera, to turn his head and cough and, finally, to spread his toes. Sally finishes loading her guns and she shoots Ralph with one of them and he dies in horribly fake slow-motion before she shoots Jim with the other, though he's conscientious enough to finish his paperwork before falling dead. Sally makes it look like Ralph shot Jim in an attempted robbery, and then she shot him. This leads to Nielsen's introduction as Drebin as he's driving his car.
"My name is Sergeant Frank Drebin, Detective Lieutenant, Police Squad, a special detail of the police department. There'd been a recent wave of gorgeous fashion models found naked and unconscious in laundromats on the west side. Unfortunately, I was assigned to investigate holdups at neighborhood credit unions," he says in voiceover. When Drebin pulls up to the crime scene, his car crashes into a garbage can. They didn't end up getting to do it through all six episodes, but in each subsequent episode they would add a trash can for Drebin's car to strike, but for whatever reason the gag only got up to four cans in the fourth episode. The visual gags begin nonstop when he arrives and his boss, Capt. Ed Hocken (Alan North), awaits. One of the corpses is being brought out of the credit union on an insanely long gurney. As they go inside, they walk past the chalk outline of Ralph's body where there also is an Egyptian hieroglyphic on the floor. Someone takes a photo of a man posing on a bench with Ralph's corpse as Drebin and Hocken go to interview Sally, where Frank introduces himself with his third rank, this time captain. What follows is another great ZAZ variation on the classic Abbott & Costello "Who's on First?" routine, which they used in Airplane! among the pilot, co-pilot and navigator. It gives a great example of the absolute straight-faced style of Nielsen and North.Nielsen and this episode's writing earned Police Squad!'s only Emmy nominations. Nielsen was brilliant, playing Drebin more deadpan than he eventually would in the movies. In an interesting comparison to their inspiration, click here to watch a clip of Lee Marvin in an episode of M Squad alongside a young Leonard Nimoy. In his interview, Nielsen says he broached the idea of a movie when the show died so quickly, but ZAZ still couldn't imagine stretching it out for 90 minutes. At one point, there was talk of trying to edit the six episodes together into a feature. In fact, according to the ZAZ and Weiss commentary, that's what prompted the freeze frames at the end of each episode. It wasn't just to spoof the old TV shows that would do that, but to use them as planned transitions for a feature. Surely, they
can't be serious. That would mean the Zuckers, Abrahams and Weiss would have had to know before the episodes aired that the series would flame out in the ratings so spectacularly. Nielsen summed up fairly well why the series failed. "(Tony) Thomopolous, who was the head of ABC at that time, said the series didn't work because you had to watch it. Well, it sounds funny and it sounds dumb, but it was true. You had to pay attention. You couldn't look away," Nielsen said. "You had to watch to make sure you caught the humor or where it was coming from. People don't really watch TV…That's why you can have a laugh track. You can read a book, then look up and ask, 'Oh, what are they laughing at? Oh yeah, that's funny.' Then you go back to reading or do anything you want, but you don't really watch TV." ZAZ and Weiss said that ABC tried to get them to use a laugh track, but, by contract, the final decision on that matter rested with them. An episode actually was tested with a laugh track and without one, but the results were negligible so they got to go without one. As one of the Zuckers or Weiss or Abrahams asked, "How do you put a laugh track on a sight gag?" Remember, Drebin and Hocken had told Sally Decker that she needed to go down to the station and make a "formal statement." Several minutes passed between that direction and the payoff. Nielsen also put some of the blame on the size of TV screens at the time, which made some of the sight gags too small to catch whereas in Airplane! they were huge and hard to miss. Man cannot live on sight gags alone and that first episode contained what I think was Nielsen's greatest Frank Drebin moment as he and Hocken go interview Ralph Twice's widow (Barbara Tarbuck) in the Twices' apartment in Little Italy. Something Mrs. Twice says gets Frank a little distracted and nostalgic.In "A Substantial Gift"/"The Broken Promise," we meet two of the series' priceless recurring characters. First, we meet Mr. Ted Olson (Ed
Williams), sort of a forerunner of all those forensic specialists on the various CSI shows, only crossed with Mr. Wizard and perhaps someone who belongs on a neighborhood watch list. As Peter Graves' Capt. Clarence Oveur liked to ask young Joey uncomfortable questions such as, "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" in Airplane!, each week when Frank goes to Olson's lab, he's always visiting with a child (of either sex) trying to explain different scientific things that inevitably draw comparisons to their mothers getting out of showers or something along those lines. Each week, he leaves them with a hysterically odd line. For those six brief weeks, we hear Olson make these promises or requests to various kids:
What might be the biggest gag concerning Williams' great performance as Ted Olson is that it was his first acting role. Prior to auditioning for Police Squad! and winning the part, Williams had retired from a career actually teaching science. He's acted steadily in small roles ever since. Every visit to his lab, even in the lesser of the six episodes, usually proved worth it. In the perfection of the premiere, Olson discovers problems with Sally's story because of the depth and trajectory the bullets would have had to take to make her story true. He demonstrates this for Frank with a state-of-the-art ballistics test where he fires each weapon into videotapes of Barbara Walters interviews. His first firing goes all the way to her interview with Paul Newman where Walters "asks him if he's afraid to love." The bullet from the second gun goes through the entire row of tapes clear through "where she asks Katharine Hepburn what kind of tree she would be." For a first-time actor, one thing that sets Ed Williams apart is that when Police Squad! had its resurrection in the form of The Naked Gun movies, he was the only actor other than Nielsen to reprise his role. The Zuckers, Abraham and Weiss regret on the commentary not being able to bring Alan North back as Hocken, calling him "very good." The studio insisted on a better-known actor so George Kennedy got the role in the films and as (I think it was David Zucker) said, "We folded like a cheap suit."
Another recurring joke that Police Squad! spoofed from the Quinn Martin shows were mid-episode title cards that marked the start of an episode's second act. With that in mind, I will end the first half of the tribute here with my favorite second act joke. You can click here to go to Part II to read about the other recurring characters, the remainder of "A Substantial Gift/The Broken Promise," some of the best bits of the other episodes, other background tidbits and the lasting influence of Police Squad!
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Labels: 80s, Abbott and Costello, D. Zucker, G. Kennedy, J. Zucker, Jim Abrahams, K. Hepburn, Marvin, Marx Brothers, Newman, Nielsen, Nimoy, Shatner, TV Tribute
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Saturday, February 11, 2012
If anyone believes these two families should not join together…
By Edward Copeland
Has a movie wedding ever gone off without a hitch? Now, some can turn out to be enjoyable messes from the old (It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story) to the more recent (My Best Friend's Wedding, I Love You, Man). In the past few years, even when arguably taking the form of "dark" comedy, dysfunction or worse has tended to be the main dish served at the reception ranging from the blahs of Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, the blech of Noah "Just go see your shrink" Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding and the boneheaded bombast of Lars von Trier's Melancholia. NOTE: I've purposely omitted the turd that goes by the title of Bridesmaids from either category because it belongs in a separate one called Overlong, Poorly Written Movies That Claim to Be Comedies but Wouldn't Have Any Laughs If They Didn't Cast Melissa McCarthy. All of this preamble brings us to the film I'm actually writing about in this post, Another Happy Day. Ellen Barkin produced the film and leads a strong ensemble in another tale of tensions that erupt when severed and estranged members of a large melded family must intermingle for the wedding of a shared son. What differentiates Another Happy Day from others of its ilk is that, while it's not a great film, most of the cast and the screenplay succeed at being engaging enough that the movie manages to earn laughs and rip scabs off old wounds at the same time.
It's easy to see why Barkin would help see this film get made so she could play Lynn — it's easily the best part she's had since probably This Boy's Life in 1993 (other than the just-for-kicks Ocean's 13). Barkin plays the perpetually frazzled Lynn, mother of the groom Dylan (Michael Nardelli), the oldest of her four children and one of two from her first marriage by her ex-husband Paul (Thomas Haden Church) and raised by his second wife, a real piece of work named Patty (Demi Moore).
Paul and Lynn's daughter Alice (Kate Bosworth) has been away at college, doing what she can to avoid both parents, though rumors have circulated throughout the extended family that Alice has been cutting herself. As her goofy aunts (Diana Scarwid, Siobhan Fallon) discuss it, they suspect it's some kind of new generational thing and wonder what happened to anorexia — they understood anorexia: Who doesn't want to look good?
Then again, Lynn's second brood presents a handful of its own. Her second husband Lee (a delightful, but underused Jeffrey DeMunn, who also is the best part of The Walking Dead as Dale) seems quite pleasant and at ease with the fact that their 17-year-old son Elliot (Ezra Miller, as wry and funny here as he was frightening in We Need to Talk About Kevin) just finished his second stint in rehab and can be quite rude and nasty to anyone, and their youngest son Ben (Daniel Yelsky), just beginning adolescence, who has a mild form of Asperger's syndrome and constantly videotapes most moments of their lives.
Even before Lynn and the boys arrive in Annapolis for the wedding events, Lynn is second-guessing most of her decisions in life and battling depression. She blames many of her problems on her parents, the bottled-up Doris (Ellen Burstyn), who doesn't recall depression running in her family though Lynn's grandfather did shoot himself to death, and her now-ailing father Joe (George Kennedy). Lynn feels they didn't support her during her divorce, siding with the idea that Paul should get custody of Dylan and Alice.
Another Happy Day marks the directing debut of Sam Levinson (son of Barry), who also wrote the screenplay and won the Sundance Film Festival's 2011 Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his script. What separates it from other recent films that tapped into this area is that Levinson manages to earn both his laughter and his pathos whereas everything, especially in Baumbach's film, just plays flat and maudlin. Levinson must be eternally grateful that he was able to assemble the cast he did, because they're key.
Barkin obviously relishes having this juicy a part for the first time in a long time, so much so that her histrionics do go overboard at times. She's at her best when she's grounded in scenes of truth with other talents such as the always brilliant Burstyn or selected scenes with Church and DeMunn. When she has to go one-on-one with Moore, things gets out of hand since Demi Moore only knows one note to play and it looks as if Barkin instinctively tries to play down to her level. Demi Moore can play "one dimensional bitch in heels" and that's it. That's pretty much how it always has been.
The two who really hold the film up are Ezra Miller and Daniel Yelsky as Lynn's younger sons, particularly Miller as Elliot. Between his work here as the constantly sarcastic addict (so much so that he keeps lifting grandpa's Fentanyl patches and licking the pain medicine off them to get high) and as the demon spawn in We Have to Talk About Kevin, this 19-year-old actor (surprise from all the other sources I checked, IMDb's birth month and year are wrong) definitely is someone to keep your eye on.
Levinson's career also will be of interest to monitor. While Another Happy Day isn't perfect, it's worlds away from something his father Barry would make, though it's interesting that the son gives Ellen Barkin her best part in more than a decade while his father gave her her first credited feature film role in his feature directing debut 30 years ago in the great Diner.
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Labels: 10s, B. Levinson, Barkin, Burstyn, Demi, Demme, G. Kennedy, von Trier
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Sunday, March 13, 2011
This is more serious than you think
ROBERT: I haven’t been feeling good lately. I think it’s probably us. This is more serious than you think. I don't think we should go out anymore. I mean I just think it's over.
MARY: OK. So we're over again.
ROBERT: No, not again. This is the last time.
MARY: And you don't love me.
ROBERT: I do love you. Love has nothing to do with this. Yes, I do love you. That what makes this very confusing, but I just don't think...You've heard of a no-win situation, haven't you?"
(Mary indicates that she hasn't. Robert expresses disbelief that she's unfamiliar with the term.)
ROBERT: Vietnam? This? They’re around. I think we’re in one of them.
So begins the bulk of the opening of Albert Brooks' second feature as a director, Modern Romance, which premiered 30 years ago today.
By Edward Copeland
Before that conversation takes place, film editor Robert Cole (Brooks) sits alone in the all-purpose restaurant awaiting the arrival of his girlfriend Mary Harvard (Kathryn Harrold). When Mary arrives, he tells her he wants to order and eat quickly, because they have to talk seriously before he rushes back to work. They order, but his impatience gets to him and Robert starts to tell her their relationship hasn't been good for awhile but Mary, who has
been through this innumerable times with Robert, isn't ready, and wants to wait until after they eat, quickly changing the subject to how his work on a sci-fi movie is going. Robert indulges her briefly, telling her that the film's director told him he's the best editor that he's ever worked with, but then Robert stops, insisting that the relationship talk take precedence. After the conversation listed above, Robert suggests that it's a good time for them to be free and clear, but when Mary agrees, he suddenly changes his tune and assumes he's psychic and that she's already seeing someone else, demanding to know who it is. Mary just gives up, spitting back that he thought it was a good time but Robert denies he meant what he said. Mary walks out, telling him to drop dead as an instrumental version of "You Are So Beautiful" plays over the opening credits.
Modern Romance marked the second time Brooks stepped behind the camera as a director, in front of it as the lead actor and provided the words as co-writer with his frequent collaborator, the late Monica Johnson. Coming two years after his mockumentary Real Life, Brooks' character of the insanely neurotic Robert Cole and his obsessively off-again/on-again relationship with Kathryn Harrold's Mary Harvard gave him the reputation at the time as the West Coast Woody Allen. It's funny that Harrold would play the part of his compulsive affection since more than a decade later, she'd assume a similar function as Francine, the ex-wife of another world-class neurotic during the second season of The Larry Sanders Show, only Francine at least had her feet planted more firmly on the ground than Mary Harvard does. Francine actually divorced Larry and resumed their relationship tentatively and decided rather quickly that going their separate ways was the better idea.
While comedies about romance among neurotics hardly qualifies as uncharted film territory, when placed in the hands of writers as talented as Brooks and Johnson, fresh angles and plentiful, if painfully realistic laughs, always can be found. One aspect of Modern Romance that does stake out territory you don't usually see in a film is the process of filmmaking itself, specifically the work of a film editor, which is what Robert does for a living. Following the split at the restaurant, Robert returns to the editing room with both meals to work with
his assistant editor Jay (Bruno Kirby). He gives both dinners to Jay, but you can tell he doesn't listen closely to Mary because when Jay asks what kind of dressing is on the salad he says it's the house dressing when we clearly heard her order herb. Jay tells Robert that David, the director of the film they're editing, had been watching at home and phoned in ideas for changes. Robert tells Jay they should never have started sending video tapes home with directors. Besides, the breakup, even though Robert instigated it, has left him in no mood to work. Jay volunteers to stay and make the changes but Robert decides that work might be the best thing to take his mind off Mary and he settles down to work. Jay asks him if he and Mary fought a lot. Robert says that all they would do was fight and then they'd make up and have really great sex. "Do you need to talk?" Jay asks. Robert changes his mind again and decides he's not in a film editing state-of-mind. Jay advises Robert to go home and try to relax, giving him two Quaaludes to help. "There are 10 million people in this city alone," Robert says, "it can't be that hard to find one perfect person." Jay reminds him that he's alone as well, but the self-absorbed Robert seems disinterested as he leaves for home.Once he's home, the weak Robert immediately checks his answering machine, but sees he forgot to turn it on. He then calls Mary, but no one answers. He interprets both of these things as signs that he's done the right thing. "Alone's kind of a nice place to be," he says to himself. Those Quaaludes have begun to kick in. The phone rings and he grabs it anxiously only to be disappointed to hear his mother on the other end and he hurriedly tries to get rid of her, lying that he's working at home and brushing past her inquiry about Mary. He
stumbles into the bedroom and switches his clothing to a robe and after a brief tumble to the floor, he calls Jay, telling him he wants to let him know that he's the best assistant editor he's ever worked with in his career. The less-than-lucid Robert continues, "Jay, listen — I didn't tell you this before, and I think I should tell you now. I love you. I mean, in the right way. I think you're an amazing guy, and I — I think I just love you." Jay — quite correctly — guesses on the other end of the conversation that the 'ludes have kicked in. Robert is up and wandering and Jay tells him he needs to get back to work because he thinks he's got it whipped. Robert asks if he could get him more Quaaludes and Jay asks how many. "I don't know. About 100?" Jay says goodnight and Brooks continue his hilarious solo scene as the loopy Robert. Out of his mind and sitting before a phone and a phone directory, Robert decides the best way to forget Mary is to leap back into the dating fray. He calls up a woman named Ellen and asks if she remembers him. He tells her that he's always sort of
loved her and wondered if she'd like to go out the next night, promising the best date of her life, full of surprises "like The Price Is Right." Ellen agrees to the date and Robert hangs up, telling himself that he'd be even more excited if he could remember what Ellen looked like and exactly who she was. The phone rings again, only this time it's from an assistant editor named Harry that Robert worked with once, asking for a job recommendation. Robert has no problem — until Harry says he always wanted to tell him how lucky he was to have Mary because he thinks she's a spectacular woman. Robert tells him that they are no longer together. Harry apologizes, saying he didn't know that and then makes the mistake of asking if it would be rude if he asked Mary out. The Quaaludes didn't relax Robert enough to keep him from going ballistic. He calls Harry a scumbag and Mr. Trashcan, even asks why he doesn't try to cozy up to his parents so he can take Robert's place in the will. A stunned Harry gets off the line and a furious Robert decides he better go out before something terrible happens so he climbs in his car and turns on the radio. The first song emanating from the radio is "Another One Bites the Dust." The next thing Robert knows, the sun is shining: He passed out in his car without ever going anywhere. However, Robert congratulates himself: He made it through the first night without Mary.After he freshens up, ready to start a new day, Robert decides that he better not push things by working, so he calls Jay and asks if he can get by without him. Jay has no objections, so Robert prepares for his new life. Unfortunately, he discovers that all his vitamin bottles are empty. He heads out to replenish his supplements and go on a new life shopping spree, telling the clerks at every store that he's coming off a breakup. This
leads the health food clerk (Dennis Kort) to recommend certain vitamins and supplements. He repeats the routine at a sporting goods store in one of the film's funniest scenes where the salesman is played by Bob Einstein, Brooks' real-life brother who is best known as Super Dave Osborne and these days as Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Robert gravitates toward a display that contains all you would need to begin a running regimen, but the salesman steers him away, insisting that those shoes "are made of old tires. Is that how you want to start your new life?" He brings out more expensive Nike shoes. Then he adds an expensive jogging suit, saying the cheaper one will leave a rash, and says he'll need two. Robert questions the need for two. "What if one is in the wash?" Robert smiles. "I won't run?" The salesman starts to hang the suits back up. "I'm sorry. I misjudged you." Robert caves and the equipment piles up to include salt tablets, headbands, wristbands and a wrist wallet, though Robert doesn't understand why he can't just keep his wallet in the pocket of his jogging suit, but the salesperson just glares. It's hysterically funny.
Fully equipped, Robert heads out immediately to begin his training, i.e. his new life without Mary. As we've observed, Robert Cole doesn't seem to stick by resolutions because his obsessive nature gets in the way and currently its laser-like focus stays on Mary, restraining him from new ventures. He goes to a field and keeps preparing for his sprint. He crouches in a starting position, but it's hard to remove things from his mind, as he counts off, "One, two, three. And I don't even miss her, two, three. One, two, three. And I don't even miss her, two, three." Finally, he starts jogging, then checks his new wrist wallet. The run continues until he veers off the track and to a nearby phone booth where he takes change from that wrist wallet and makes a call to Mary's bank and asks for her. The voice on the other end says she's not sure if she and Jim are back from lunch yet, but she'll check. The woman returns and says she's not back. Robert hangs up and, as you would expect, immediately starts obsessing about this Jim person, though he decides this is yet another sure sign that he did the right thing. He called last night and she didn't answer, now she's not at the bank and is out with another man. Yes, he was right to sever things for good. Albert Brooks over the years has proved he's always a master of phone call scenes, but in Modern Romance, phones pop up so often, they practically end up being a recurring theme. I can't help but wonder how this film would play today in the age of cell phones, if Robert weren't constantly stopping at phone booths.
By the time Robert has returned home, the feeling that everything that has happened is for the best has evaporated again. He decides that he can't go out with Ellen that night, especially since he's still not certain what she looks like it or how exactly he knows her. He dials her up to call off the date, but gets her answering
machine. Instead of putting the kibosh on the evening's activities, Robert says he's just calling to confirm that night's date and tells the device how much he is looking forward to it. When he's done with the call, he starts thinking about his place. He realizes that he doesn't have any dope or clean sheets. "I'm not prepared to get laid tonight." He ventures out anyway and pulls his car up to a house and gently knocks on the door. You think he's there to pick up Ellen, but he's actually stopped first at Mary's. She is not pleased to see him on her doorstep. She tells him that she doesn't want to go through this again, but he's obsessed with her clothing. He thinks she's particularly well-dressed so she must have be getting ready for a date. In no mood for this, Mary tells Robert to go home and closes the door. As Robert walks backward toward his car, he shouts, " I don't know where you get this strength. I'm sure it's in stores. I'll find it." Once he's in his car, Robert wonders how Mary could have scored a date so fast. He at least was under the influence of pills, but he doubts Mary was.
Robert leaves directly from Mary's to pick up Ellen (and learn who exactly she is). He pulls her car up in front of her apartment building and parks (Note the black cat that's in front of his car). He rings the buzzer and announces his presence. Her voice asks if he wants to come up, but he declines and tells her to just come on
down and then he meets Ellen (Jane Hallaren) and remembers that they had worked together on something involving Peter Bogdanovich. Then, because at this point it would seem that it's the only way Robert knows how to begin a conversation, he tells her that he's just had a breakup but not to worry, they are going to have a great time. He asks her if she has any suggestions for a restaurant, but she doesn't and he picks what he says is a great place and they start driving. Silence descends on the car as the radio begins playing Michael Jackson's "She's Out of My Life." Brooks' expression says it all as the song plays; you can just read what's spinning in his head and the entire scene has a simple sort of brilliance as it's just these two actors, silent in a car as the song plays. Then you realize, Robert has made a complete circle and is back in front of Ellen's apartment building and tells her that he can't go out yet. He thought he could, but he's just not ready. He promises that he will call her again in a few weeks or months, when he's more emotionally ready to move on and then reaches across to open the passenger door for her and lets her out leaving her standing in front of her apartment building, looking dumbfounded.
Instead of going home, Robert heads to a strip shopping mall which, apparently in L.A., sometimes come with parking gates with attendants which (you can probably repeat along with me by this point) he tells, "I just had a breakup..." adding that he just needs to buy some gifts. So he goes to what seems more like a drug store annoying the employees about their selection and picking up toys such as a stuffed giraffe and looking for items that talk, but failing to find any that actually say, "Mary." He gathers them all together and heads back to Mary's, but she's not home, so he leaves them on her porch, along with a note, and begins his insanely long night waiting for a response. First, he heads home to his answering machine, but there's nothing. The phone rings, but it's his mother again and he struggles to get rid of her, telling her he's waiting for an important phone
call. Paranoid that she could have called while his mom tied up the line, he heads out again and drives by her house, but the toys are still on the porch. He drives around a bit and decides to call from a phone booth and, in a scene that could be from the future, he has to wait for an old man to finish his call and the man could be Robert several decades down the road. The senior citizen is grilling the woman on the other end of the line about another man, even accusing her of having him there with her at the time before saying someone is waiting to use the phone. Robert's travels go on for quite some time: driving by Mary's, back home to check his machine, back to check her porch and then finally back home to the message he's been waiting for: "I love the giraffe." 
"I don't know what makes me do these things. It's my lizard brain," Robert tells Mary as he shows up at her house and immediately takes her to bed. Though I love Modern Romance, I view it as Brooks finding his film footing for the better films he would go on to make such as Lost in America (his best, I think), Defending Your Life and Mother. The central weakness for me is that as Mary willingly and quickly reconciles with Robert that night, her character gets no development to explain what's wrong with her that keeps her going back to this neurotic extraordinaire. When you get down to it, even once they get back together, his essential quirks don't change that much, yet Mary stays with him. He never physically harms her, but honestly, he's a stalker during periods of their separation and paranoid and jealous when they're together. If he hurt her physically, he could end up being Jake La Motta. The morning
after their reunion lovemaking, Robert immediately frets about the outfit Mary is wearing to work, saying the dress makes her nipples look like eyeballs, yet nothing in the film really gives any indication that Mary is as neurotic as Robert or even slightly crazy to explain why she puts up with his crap. As they continue dating for the rest of the film, he always tries to blame his craziness on love. When toward the end, it looks as if he's finally gone too far for her, he proposes — and she says yes. Nothing explains what's wrong with her to want to hitch her wagon to Robert when it's obvious she can do better. Really, Modern Romance is a dark comedy, but not the type you usually associate with the term. Its humor comes dipped so much in pain that you're not always certain that laughter is the proper response.This shouldn't imply that Modern Romance relies solely on angst-ridden humor alone. Albert Brooks knows how to make people laugh and the other films he co-wrote with Monica Johnson (Real Life, Lost in America, Mother and The Muse) weren't in the same dark vein and Johnson also wrote episodes of classic TV sitcoms such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and It's Garry Shandling's Show. In other words, these two could bring the funny. In fact, Brooks' big breaks were his hysterical shorts that aired on the original cast incarnation of Saturday Night Live.
In Modern Romance, the scenes played almost exclusively for laughs involve Robert's work as a film editor on the sci-fi film. Additionally, it provides extra depth in, as I mention, you seldom see this aspect of filmmaking shown in such detail in a movie, let alone a romantic comedy. It also helps in giving Robert extra layering. He's still the same neurotic man, but he does his work seriously and professionally and I believe it
helps the audience keep from being completely put off by his behavior. When he returns to the editing room to work with Jay, it's as if he'd not lost more than a day over his breakup. He immediately comes up with a suggestion on how to build suspense in a scene where the star of the movie, who happens to be George Kennedy, as Zeron is grilling his men over some nonsense about having to obtain a code. In the original cut, one of the men, Zeon (Rick Bleckner) steps forward and says he knows it, but Kennedy's character yells back at him that he doesn't know anything. Robert correctly points out that it will be another hour in the film before Kennedy will learn Zeon knows. Why not build suspense by cutting Zeon's line and just show him giving a little reaction and not have Kennedy respond at all? Jay agrees that it does play better and even though you can tell that the movie they are working on looks pretty silly, the actual process of cutting that way did improve it.
When the film's director David (James L. Brooks, the film director, but no relation to Albert Brooks) drops into the booth and Robert proudly shows him his work, he's not as impressed. It could be that David had dropped by with his own obsession and wasn't particularly interested in listening to anything else or that he really didn't appreciate the change. David had dropped by because he had become obsessed with a scene where George Kennedy is running through the hallways of the spaceship and it was filmed in carpeted halls and it doesn't really sound like
desperate running and he wants to dub it to make it sound like something metallic or thumping on the floor — he even goes into repeated detail to imitate the thumping — to accompany Kennedy's breathing. Robert and Jay agree they will do what they can. As David is leaving, he asks Robert to walk with him, peppering him with questions
about whether he thinks the movie is any good. Robert asks him what got him upset and he says he saw Alien and they referred the bowels of the ship and they used the same phrase and he's afraid audiences will think they are copying and wonders if they should change it to the basement of the ship. Robert says he shouldn't worry. "All ships have bowels." David then invites Robert to a party at his house that night and to bring a date. Robert's revised line now is that he just got back together with his girlfriend and he doesn't know but David blows that off and tells him to come anyway because George Kennedy will be there and he wants him to see his feet. In Los Angeles, everyone is neurotic in their own peculiar way. They do go, though Robert tries to keep his eye on Mary who runs into some old friends who she goes off into a room to do some coke while Kennedy regales him with a tale of showing up at the wrong studio on the first day of shooting. David suggests it will make a great talk show story. "Why? To tell the world I'm an idiot?" Kennedy replies. Once Robert finally finds Mary again, her friends offer him so coke, but he declines, saying, "I'm hyper naturally." When they get home, he regrets going, since they are in a "mending phase." "When aren't we in a mending phase?" Mary asks.
Welcome to the sound mixing room, another of the funniest and behind-the-scenes sequences of Modern Romance as Robert and Jay return to work the next day to find the right sounds to match George Kennedy running down an imaginary spaceship's hallway. Who really deserves credit for the hilarious success of this section of the movie is the actor Albert Henderson, the gray-haired man in the back row playing the role of the head mixer. His sardonic delivery of every line truly is a treasure. I had to look him up on IMDb afterward and the actor died in 2004 at 88, though his credits didn't begin until 1957. Most was episodic television but even in his film roles, he almost always played a cop. Anyway, back to Modern Romance.
Robert asks the sound guys what they think the surface Kennedy is running on looks like and, naturally, they all reply carpet, since that is what it is. Robert says that David is looking for a sound that's like thumping when he runs on some kind of surface such as a metallic or concrete sound. He asks if they might have some kind of effect like that. The head mixer says they have tapes of The Incredible Hulk running, but he run kinds of slow, but Robert's willing to give it a try. Once they set it up, if The Hulk's moving fast, you can't hear it over his grunting screams, so Robert immediately nixes that, asking why they call that The Hulk Running effect. "Mark that Hulk Screaming," he suggests.
Robert and the men decide they'll have to fake the effect themselves. They ask the sound men what they have available and, given the options, they go with a small metallic surface, which one of the mixers brings out and sets microphones around upon which Robert will be faking the sound of George Kennedy's running. Then Robert remembers that since Kennedy is carrying something in the scene, he needs to mimic that as well, so they begin speculating how much that
prop would weigh. "I don't know. Maybe it doesn't weigh anything — did you ever think of that?" the head mixer says. "Maybe it's on one of those planets that doesn't have any gravity." Robert dismisses the sarcasm and spots an empty bottle from a water cooler and starts practicing holding that. Jay agrees that that looks right so Robert starts running in circles to get his breathing heavy and has Jay chase him before he gets on the surface and runs in place in sync to the footage of George Kennedy in that goofy silvery costume jogging down the cheap-looking spaceship set carrying the plastic-looking plot and they record Robert. They then sit and wait for the playback. The result thrills Robert and Jay and Robert turns to ask the head mixer what he thinks and with that same great dry deliver, Henderson says, "I think you saved the picture." As all the men clear the room, there's a final voiceover punchline announcing, "We've got Heaven's Gate the short version here at 8." Of course, I laughed, but like the movie, that joke is 30 years old and I wonder if future viewers, even future film buffs, will be able to have knowledge complete enough to get the gag or will you have to have been alive in that era to truly appreciate that reference?Having not seen Modern Romance in a long time before watching it again for this piece, I have to admit that it does pale next to Brooks' later works, but it still provides plenty of laughs if you can find humor that comes from such a painful place. The mystery to me always has been why Brooks has had such a small output as a writer-director. For someone initially painted as a "West Coast Woody Allen," he's not remotely as prolific, but on the plus side, he doesn't repeat himself as a filmmaker the way Woody does. All of Brooks' films are easily distiguished from the others, even if his central persona might be similar. Brooks seems content to stick to acting more than writing and directing. He cast writer-director James L. Brooks in an acting part here and six years later James returned the favor by giving Albert his best acting role, his Oscar-nominated turn in James' best film, Broadcast News. Then again, Albert Brooks was acting in great films before he ever made one of his own, playing Cybill Shepherd's campaign co-worker in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and now young generations might not know his name, but they'll recognize his voice as the anxious father searching for his missing son in Pixar's Finding Nemo. Thirty years later, Modern Romance might not represent the best of Albert Brooks' work as a writer-director but it's definitely fascinating to view it as a stepping stone in his overall artistic development.
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Labels: 80s, Albert Brooks, Animation, Bogdanovich, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Cybill Shepherd, G. Kennedy, Larry Sanders, Movie Tributes, Pixar, Scorsese, Shandling, Television, Woody
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Friday, October 08, 2010
A '60s film search for a serial killer
By Edward Copeland
We've become so accustomed to movies about the hunts for serial killers, both real and imagined, that it's a bit unusual to see one that dates back to 1968. Granted, I would never have put The Boston Strangler into the Netflix queue if it hadn't been for the recent passing of Tony Curtis, but it was interesting to watch the film because it's more of a detached crime procedural than some of the serial killer romps that have come around in the past couple of decades. It also was surprising to find that as much as it's sold as a Curtis vehicle, we don't even meet him until the film is half over and the ostensible lead (if there really is a lead) is Henry Fonda.
Coming so soon after I caught up with Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, which in turn reminded me of David Fincher's great Zodiac and an aborted attempt at watching The Red Riding Trilogy, it proved especially interesting to watch a film that was one of the forerunners of the low-tech large-scale murder investigation movies. (If anyone thinks I should have given Red Riding more of a chance instead of bailing out after watching much of part one, read Craig's great review at The Man from Porlock who did sit through all three and came to the conclusion I already was starting to form.)
Based on Gerold Frank's book about the string of slayings that terrorized the Boston area in the early 1960s, The Boston Strangler was adapted by Edward Anhalt (Oscar winner for Becket — talk about range) and directed by Richard Fleischer, whose filmography stretched all over the map from the solid thriller The Narrow Margin (1952) to Doctor Dolittle, perhaps the worst best picture nominee in history. His directing career stretched from 1943 to 1989 and included the good (Fantastic Voyage), the bad (Conan the Destroyer) and the ugly (The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond). I'll let you decide where to place Soylent Green.
Thankfully, The Boston Strangler belongs on the list of Fleischer's better efforts and it takes some kind of director who can switch gears from the tomfoolery of Doctor Dolittle to the darkness of this story the very next year. He does go a little overboard with the use of split screen and multiple images projected at once. The technique can be very effective and works quite well at times here, but Fleischer uses it so much that it kind of wears out it welcome.
The Boston Strangler contains an amazing number of familiar names and faces in roles large and small in roles of cops, suspects and victims. Look at this list of performers in minor parts: Hurd Hatfield (the third time he's appeared in a movie I've written about this week), Jeff Corey, Sally Kellerman, William "Blacula" Marshall, George Furth, William Hickey, James Brolin, Dana Elcar, Carole Shelley, David Lewis and Alex Rocco.
As in Zodiac, part of the problem for investigators comes from the murders crossing jurisdictional lines, meaning different departments have different pieces of the puzzle so Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke (Marshall), who would later go on to become the state's first African-American U.S. senator, taps one of his lawyers John Bottomly (Fonda) to head up a task force to collect all the investigations under one umbrella. Bottomly has no interest in the job since he has no law enforcement experience — he'd rather keep working on eminent domain issues — but Brooke basically orders him, despite the fact that the state really doesn't have funds to provide him for his investigation.
Even before Fonda enters the picture, we get the grunt work of various detectives trying to get a handle on what kind of maniac has descended on their city, leading to possible suspects and many dead ends. Two of the detectives who stand out the most are played by George Kennedy, fresh off his Oscar win for supporting actor for Cool Hand Luke, and Murray Hamilton, the year after playing the cuckolded Mr. Robinson in The Graduate and one of the rare times I can recall Hamilton being a good guy (this was the Amity mayor in Jaws, after all). By now, it's a staple for homicide detectives to have a streak of dark humor running through their veins, and Hamilton actually gets some of those best lines, welcome because the tale needs levity to lessen the darkness.
At one point, Bottomly even consults a psychic who amazingly describes the scene of a murder and the contents of a letter they received from a seemingly troubled man named Eugene O' Rourke. They believe they have their man and go to question him and, while he's not the strangler, he does need psychological help. More importantly, he's played by William Hickey and having never discovered the man until his wonderful Oscar-nominated turn as Don Corrado Prizzi in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor, it's always great to find Hickey in another film, especially when he gets as meaty a scene as he does here.
When the film hits the hour mark, we suddenly meet Albert DeSalvo (Curtis) and see things from his point of view briefly through the last of his 13 murders. For fans of the TV series Dexter, his introduction will seem awfully similar to the fourth season scene when Dexter follows John Lithgow's character home and discovers that he's not the loner that he presumed but a family man. In fact, the scenes mirror each other so closely, I can't help but believe that the writers on Dexter had this movie in mind for that plot twist.
DeSalvo's capture and identification happens because of a series of mistakes by him and a happy accident on the part of Bottomly and Detective DiNatale (Kennedy). Because of DeSalvo's seeming inability to understand charges against him (which are unrelated to the murders), he's sent to a mental hospital. The remainder of the film mostly consists of Bottomly questioning DeSalvo, who they believe suffers from a split personality, to see if they can find the part of him that committed the crimes. When we first see DeSalvo in the room where he will be questioned, it is a blank room with just a table and a one-way window where people can watch him. He's dressed in all white and again it's hard not to believe that there's not some inspiration found in The Silence of the Lambs. Many of the obituaries for Curtis said that he was disappointed that he didn't get the Oscar for this and some even called it his best work and while he's very good in a part unlike any other he played, I still think his best is Sweet Smell of Success, followed by Some Like It Hot.
As it is, The Boston Strangler works best now as a time capsule item. It seems to have wanted to make larger points about helping people with mental problems earlier, but it almost seems tacked on as a justification.
As a footnote, I discovered an interesting thing as I searched IMDb for the name of the actor who portrayed the psychic. I'd forgotten the character's name and though I was fairly certain which actor it was, I didn't want to make a mistake. I thought perhaps if I perused the external reviews, I might stumble upon the answer but though I didn't, I did discover in reviews written at the time of release, one by Roger Ebert, the other by Renata Adler at The New York Times, that The Boston Strangler was viewed as quite exploitative at the time. Ebert thought it was a good film, but questioned if it should have been made and was disturbed by the reaction of two young girls and its promotional materials while Adler found the movie absolutely repugnant.
Is my generation (and those coming up behind) really so jaded that we view something such as The Boston Strangler as tame? Is there some truth to the idea that mass media has hardened our hearts and minds to the point that we're harder to shock? It's sort of a running gang between me and a friend whenever some talking head declares "the loss of our innocence," how many times does that make that we've lost it now?
A key scene of the movie takes place on the day of JFK's funeral. When I was growing up, we knew about all of the upheaval of the 1960s: the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King as well as Vietnam. When John Lennon was murdered and Reagan and Pope John Paul II were shot and Sadat assassinated in an 11-month time period, they didn't hold the same trauma because we all knew of the ones before we were born and while they were awful events, it almost seemed like business as usual in our dangerous world. It really took horrific events such as 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing to capture our attention and leave scars, because those catastrophes were beyond our imaginations.
On the other hand, should people be protected from the horrors of the world to the point that when they grow up and learn of them, the shock could prove too much to bear? The girls laughing that Ebert saw would disturb me too: Not feeling or having empathy is a bad thing, but not being able to deal with the fact that bad things happen isn't right either. Movies can be exploitative but, in the end, it's just a movie. It's the so-called news when it's exploitative that disturbs me more.
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Labels: 60s, Bong Joon-ho, Ebert, Fincher, G. Kennedy, H. Fonda, Huston, Kurosawa, Lithgow, Netflix, Television, Tony Curtis
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Thursday, October 07, 2010
Take the Highway That Is Best
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
With the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957 — an autobiographical account of the author’s experiences traveling across the U.S. and Mexico with Neal Cassady and other members of “The Beat Generation” — it wasn’t long before television found the inspiration to start creating series placing protagonists in identical situations of “trying to find themselves” roaming the nation’s highways and bi-ways in similar fashion. You had The Fugitive’s Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen), a man who pursued a one-armed man for four years in an effort to prove that he had been falsely convicted of killing his wife. There was Run for Your Life’s Paul Bryan (Ben Gazzara), a man who decided to live his life to the fullest via endless travel after being diagnosed with having only two years to live. And Jim Bronson (Michael Parks), the hero of Then Came Bronson, got in touch with his inner Wild One and quit his newspaper job in favor of a life riding his “sickle” around from town to town after the suicide death of a close friend.
The urge to roam was certainly not a new theme in the medium of television; the heroes of numerous Western series had been doing it for years. But 50 years ago on this date, two young men named Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) and Buz Murdock (George Maharis) gassed up a powder-blue Corvette left to Tod by his late father and headed off for adventure or whatever came their way…without guns or horses. Today, Route 66 is recognized by critics and classic television fans alike as the one of the best and most unique of small screen dramas to be televised in the 1960s — a first-rate blend of episodic television and dramatic anthology of such quality that, sadly, isn’t likely to be seen on the boob tube ever again any time soon.
Television producer Herbert B. Leonard and Stirling Silliphant first explored the idea of a show in which the weekly episodes would concentrate more on the guest stars than the series’ principals in Naked City, a program loosely based on the 1948 film that premiered in the fall of 1958 as a half-hour and then sat out a season before returning in the fall of 1960 in the full hour format. Their second collaboration would be Route 66, and in the debut episode, “Black November,” we’re introduced to Murdock, an orphan from New York’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” and Stiles, a Yale-educated son of privilege whose only possession is the Corvette in which the two men would travel (Mr. Stiles died penniless). Though the premise had out heroes looking for “a place to plant roots and stick,” it was really more of a dropping-off to meet a myriad of unusual and offbeat characters that they would encounter in their “vision quest” and to hear their personal stories (we rarely learned much about Buz and Tod save for a few sketchy biographical details). The title of the series, Route 66, was even a bit of a misnomer — many of the stories featured on the show actually took place in areas where the famous highway made famous by Nat King Cole’s hit (written by Bobby Troup) didn’t reach (in fact, two episodes took place in Canada).
Having been sired from the same stable that produced Naked City, there were naturally a good many similarities between the two shows. Both programs often relied on offbeat episode titles — some of the wackier ones for Route 66 include “How Much a Pound is Albatross?”, “Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma?” and the ever-popular “Is it True There are Poxies at the Bottom of Landfair Lake?” These whimsical titles often provided camouflage for first-rate scripting (which often tackled controversial and adult issues like mercy killing, drug addiction and the threat of nuclear annihilation) supplied by the likes of creator Silliphant (who scripted the bulk of the show’s output, close to 75 episodes), Howard Rodman, Shimon Wincelberg and Arnold Manoff. Movie veterans and up-and-comers who received credit for directing on both series include Arthur Hiller, Elliot Silverstein, David Lowell Rich, James Sheldon, George Sherman, Robert Gist, Robert Ellis Miller and Ralph Serensky.
Like its Naked sister, Route 66 also relied on the cream of the crop of acting talent, some of who were just getting a foothold in the business. James Caan, Robert Duvall, George Kennedy, Walter Matthau, Robert Redford and Martin Sheen all guested on the show — with veterans such as Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, Rod Steiger and Lee Marvin (who appeared twice) also putting in appearances. One of Route 66’s classic outings, “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing,” spotlighted a horror film triumvirate of Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, Jr. — all three who played themselves in tongue-in-cheek fashion. In Route’s fourth season, an episode entitled “Where are the Sounds of Celia Brahms?” even featured former Naked City regulars Horace McMahon and Harry Bellaver; (McMahon’s character, in a sly wink to the audience, is told that he resembles a policeman in New York City.)
Naked City was a trendsetter in the use of on-location shooting, and not only did Route 66 do the same it surpassed it in so many ways (of course, City rarely ventured beyond the Big Apple) by filming exclusively “on the road.” It was estimated that by the time the series ended its four-year run the Route 66 “caravan” (often numbering 50 people) had traveled to 25 states, led by Silliphant and location manager Sam Manners. Not only did this help fuel the show’s passion for realism, but it provides a sort of historical travelogue for today’s viewer — a look at a time when these United States of America weren’t quite so homogeneous. The Web site TV Party wryly summed up the nomadic nature of the show by observing: “If Star Trek was meant to be ‘Wagon Train in space,’ then Route 66 was Wagon Train in a rag top.”
For two-and-a-half seasons, the clean-cut Tod (and moral compass of the duo) and his volatile buddy Buz cruised around meeting new people and romancing women until co-star George Maharis (Buz) came down with a case of hepatitis that sidelined him for several episodes in the third season, and left Martin Milner (Tod) with no one to ride shotgun. Upon his return, Maharis let it be known that he had no love for Milner (the two men had always had a prickly working relationship) or the show’s producers and crew…and while producer Leonard (along with everyone else) interpreted Maharis’ actions as a ploy to renegotiate his contract he refused to play ball, so Maharis up and left. His character was replaced in March of 1963 with Lincoln Case (Glenn Corbett), a disillusioned war hero just back from Vietnam…and though viewers weren’t probably supposed to notice, a dead ringer for the departed Buz. Fans of the show weren’t happy with the switch, and Route 66 came to the end of the road in March 1964, with a two-part episode (“Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way”) that closed the chapter on the lives of its protagonists (Tod eventually settles down and marries guest star Barbara Eden).
In its first season, Route 66 benefited from a cushy time slot: it followed the Top Ten favorite Rawhide on Friday nights at 8:30 p.m. The problem was that the show had to compete for the same youth audience against formidable competition on ABC, with The Flintstones and 77 Sunset Strip — which goes a long way toward explaining why Route ranked an anemic (if respectable) No. 30 in the Nielsens for that season. Moving the show to another night of the week might have helped it considerably; it made only one other appearance in the Top 30 ( No. 27 in the 1962-63 season) before the exit of Maharis sealed its fate for good.
Nick at Nite provided a home for Route 66 reruns during its early years in operation but since that time fans have only the DVD releases of the program’s first three seasons to satisfy their wanderlust — and sadly, the company that brought Route to disc has done so in a lackluster, substandard fashion. But the strength of the scripts, the first-rate acting talent and exhilarating cinematography make up for these presentational shortcomings, as a new generation of viewers tune into one of the era’s finest dramatic shows. Though there have been other series that featured “traveling” themes — Movin’ On, Highway to Heaven and Touched by an Angel, to name just a few of the many — the original Route 66 stands head and shoulders above the rest. And when the attempt to revive the concept in 1993 lasted only a scant four weeks, it demonstrated that not only can you not go home again…you can’t even do it in a bitchin’ Corvette.
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear and even hearing just a few bars of Nelson Riddle’s classic theme for the show makes him want to take to the road in search of adventure…or at least as far as the local Dairy Queen.
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Labels: 60s, Caan, Crawford, Duvall, G. Kennedy, Karloff, Keaton, Lon Chaney Jr., Lorre, M. Sheen, Marvin, Matthau, Redford, TV Tribute
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