Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Harry Morgan (1915-2011)
Harry Bratsburg made his Broadway debut in the original cast of The Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets' boxing drama Golden Boy on Nov. 4, 1937. His co-stars included Lee J. Cobb, Howard da Silva, Frances Farmer, Jules Garfield (who would later act under the first name of John) and two men who would become better known later as directors: Elia Kazan and Martin Ritt. Of course, Bratsburg would change his name as well. After appearing in a total of eight original Broadway plays through 1941 (all but two Group Theatre productions) with up-and-comers such as Burl Ives, Sidney Lumet (when he started out as an actor), Karl Malden, Sylvia Sidney, Franchot Tone, Shelley Winters and Jane Wyatt, Bratsburg headed West for the start of a lengthy film and television career where he'd become much better known as Harry Morgan. Morgan died Wednesday at 96. Actually, when he made his film debut in 1942's To the Shores of Tripoli, he was credited as Henry Morgan as he was well into the 1950s when he started frequently being cited as Henry (Harry) Morgan because of the comedian Henry Morgan who was popular on radio prior to Harry's career, so his screen credit eventually became just Harry Morgan.
It didn't take long for him to land in a classic film once he left the stage for Hollywood. His sixth film was William A. Wellman's masterful 1943 warning against lynch mobs, The Ox-Bow Incident, where he played Henry Fonda's trail companion. His career kept him busy, not always in classics, but always working. Some of his other notable films:
Morgan's greatest fame came from his roles as a regular on several television series throughout his career, beginning with his role as Pete Porter on the comedy December Bride from 1954-1959, which earned him an Emmy nomination. The role was spun off into its own series Pete & Gladys, which lasted from 1960-1962. The first series that probably garnered Morgan the most recognition was when he took the role of Officer Bill
Gannon in Dragnet 1967, Jack Webb's resurrection of his early '50s police drama, that in my mind may well be the funniest show ever to appear on network television. Watching Sgt. Joe Friday square off (pun intended) with spaced-out hippies is hysterical. Morgan reprised his Gannon role in Dan Aykroyd's 1987 spoof movie and merely vocally on an episode of The Simpsons. Morgan also did many guest appearances on other series, TV movies and miniseries, most notably playing another Harry, President Truman in the miniseries Backstairs at the White House. However, the role that will hold his place in TV viewers' hearts is as Col. Sherman T. Potter, the second commanding officer of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the last eight seasons of M*A*S*H. (We'll not talk about AfterMASH.) The role earned him eight consecutive Emmy nominations as outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series and he won once. He also received a nomination for directing an episode. For me though, I'll always love the performance he gave the year before on M*A*S*H in an Emmy-nominated guest appearance as Maj. Gen. Bartford Hamilton Steele in "The General Flipped at Dawn." Steele appears to be a by-the-book, high-ranking officer but everyone soon realizes, especially Alan Alda's Hawkeye who he tries to court-martial, that he's a raving loon. Morgan's hysterical performance was a thing of beauty. He could be just as funny as Potter but in a completely different way. Potter also frequently touched your heart as he drank a toast when the last of his old comrades died.We drink a toast to you, Harry Morgan. RIP.
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Labels: Alda, Awards, Aykroyd, H. Fonda, Jack Webb, Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Lumet, Malden, Obituary, Shelley Winters, Sylvia Sidney, Television, The Simpsons, Theater, Wellman
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Saturday, September 10, 2011
Cliff Robertson 1923-2011
Ordinarily, when someone with as long and as illustrious a career as Cliff Robertson passes away, I would try to be as comprehensive as possible in my appreciation. Unfortunately, because I've been so underwater in projects, I didn't receive the news until much later than I should have and the due dates of the projects require that I can't take myself away from them for too long a stretch. Before I write my short look at the career of Mr. Robertson, who died Saturday one day after his 88th birthday, I'd like to express regret for not finding a better photo of him as the slimy and manipulative presidential candidate Ben Cantwell in the 1964 film adaptation of Gore Vidal's play The Best Man. His at-any-costs maneuvers to wrestle the nomination away from Henry Fonda's William Russell, for me at least, was the best work Robertson ever did on screen.
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Labels: Aldrich, Crawford, De Palma, DeVito, Fosse, H. Fonda, John Carpenter, Mailer, Mankiewicz, Obituary, Oscars, Raimi, Redford, Television, Tennessee Williams, Theater, Vidal, Walken, Walsh
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Sunday, July 17, 2011
He did more than just think funny things
By Edward Copeland
Thirty years ago, we were visiting my aunt and uncle when one night my older cousin came home raving about a hysterical movie that he and his date had seen called Arthur and how good this Dudley Moore was in the title role. Why he didn't know who Moore was before that, I can't rationally explain. I certainly knew who he was. Not only from two years earlier in Blake Edwards' sex farce 10 but for his amusing supporting turn in 1978's Foul Play with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. Admittedly, I was unaware of his decades of British work with the satirical troupe Beyond the Fringe or his frequent comic pairings with Peter Cook. However, when Arthur opened on this date 30 years ago, it launched Moore into the stratosphere in the U.S. thanks to his brilliant comic turn, a great supporting cast led first and foremost by the incomparable Sir John Gielgud and a Grade A script by writer and first-time director Steve Gordon. Despite the best efforts to suppress the original gem for this year's remake which thankfully bombed, the real Arthur survives and perhaps finally will get the proper DVD release the movie always has been denied.
Arthur Bach (Moore) may look like an adult, but he's really a child trapped in a man's body and having one helluva time with it. He's a wealthy playboy devoted to fun and leisure and leaving many an empty bottle in his wake across Manhattan. In the film's very first scene, his chauffeur Bitterman stops the Rolls by two streetwalkers for his drunken boss who asks if "the more
attractive" of the two would please step forward. Realizing that's not the best approach, even when you are paying, Arthur amends his query to ask the one who finds him more attractive to step forward. Dressed in red spandex pants, the hooker Gloria (very recognizable character actress Anne De Salvo) steps up to the car and asks Arthur what he wants. "VD. I'm really into penicillin," he laughs. She gets in any way as the inebriated heir continues to crack jokes and laugh. When she asks him what he does for a living, Arthur tells her, "I race cars, play tennis and fondle women, but I have weekends off and I AM my own boss." At one point, he just starts laughing for no apparent reason. Gloria asks what's so funny. "Sometimes I just think funny things," he responds. Arthur will say a lot of funny things as will the other members of the cast and we'll learn we're not just laughing at someone doing a drunk act — if it's been a while since you've seen the 1981 film, you might be surprised to see how relatively little time Arthur spends soused in the movie and when he's on a bender, something has usually set him off or he's inoculating himself ahead of time for an event he's dreading. There's a serious reason behind it that actually makes Arthur slightly deeper than your average comedy. I'll get to all that later, first I have to take a break to vent about unnecessary remakes and how they actually can be dangerous in this era.I must get this rant off my chest about the Arthur remake that came out earlier this year with Russell Brand taking Moore's role and John Gielgud's Oscar-winning valet Hobson getting a sex change and becoming Arthur's nanny Hobson in the form of Oscar winner Helen Mirren. I did not see the remake. I live by the principle that if the original movie was really good or great, I will not see a remake of it. There's no point other than filmmakers
bereft of original ideas looking to steal what worked in the past and, inevitably, doing a piss-poor job of it. When I first heard that they were remaking Arthur, I thought it sounded like a bad idea. Once commercials started appearing, it looked much worse than even I imagined. It didn't help that they had Brand going around semi-criticizing the original in a way that only proved he couldn't have seen it (or wasn't sober at that time if he did). Since the character of Arthur does drink to excess and Brand is a recovering addict in real life, he made a big point about changes in the remake as if the original were pro-alcoholism. “It was very important that we established a context where the alcohol was humbling,” Brand said in an interview. “In 2011, you also need to see a resolution to his vice. I was happy to see how it was rendered.” The only times Dudley Moore's Arthur Bach gets drunk is when he's miserable or frightened. Once he meets Linda (Liza Minnelli) and falls in love or when he worries about Hobson's health and becomes his caretaker for a change, his drinking ceases. His drinking wasn't a vice: It was an anesthetic to ease his pain about being forced into marriage with a woman he not only didn't love but didn't like much either with the cost of refusing to wed her being the loss of his fortune.What's most despicable in this case is that it sort of proves my fears of why remakes are dangerous. With the constant development of new technologies, Hollywood won't keep transferring every film ever made to the latest format. They will stick to the most recent versions with the most recognizable stars. When I started plotting out tributes to do this year at the end of 2010, I knew that the 30th anniversary of Arthur would be one of them. Upon investigation, I was shocked to find that it was NEVER released on DVD in its proper aspect ratio. All versions were cropped instead of the 1.85:1 in which it was shot. (At the time of the remake's release, the original along with its horrid 1988 sequel Arthur 2: On the Rocks were released together on a single Blu-ray disc in widescreen without any special features which even the cropped DVDs had.) I also try to collect screenshots from the web ahead of time, so I know if there is anything I'll have to grab from the DVD. Surprisingly, very few shots from the actual 1981 movie are out there. Mostly, there are poster or publicity stills. Even more frightening, if you try to do an advanced search where you specifically omit the name "Russell Brand," you still end up getting more art related to the remake than the original anyway. Now someone tell me I have nothing to fear from Johnny Depp's ego thinking it needs to play Nick Charles in a remake of The Thin Man. If they start trying to pretend that a 1981 film doesn't exist, what do you think they'll do with one made in 1934? Think they released that no-frills Blu-ray where they handcuffed it to its terrible sequel by accident or so they can say, "Nobody bought it" and then let it die? It's more ridiculous when you realize what a gigantic hit the original Arthur was and what a colossal flop the remake turned out to be.
Back to the real Arthur. We'll pick up where we left off with Arthur on his "date" with Gloria. Part of the genius of Steve Gordon's screenplay was how deftly it intertwined plentiful laughs and exposition at the same time. Arthur takes Gloria to dinner at The Plaza. Needless to say, when she walks in first, the maitre'd (Dillon Evans) is ready to throw the hooker out — until he sees she's with "Mr. Bach" and then he's all manners. The other haughty patrons express shock, but few of them stand to inherit $750 million someday so the maitre'd isn't
too concerned. On their way to Arthur's regular table, Arthur spots his Uncle Peter (Maurice Copeland, no relation) and Aunt Pearl (Justine Johnston). He goes on to introduce the hooker as "Princess Gloria," telling them she hails from a tiny country. "It's terribly small, tiny little country," he breathes on Aunt Pearl to her disgust. "Rhode Island could beat the crap out of it in a war. That's how small it is." Uncle Peter finally steps in saying what he does know is that Arthur is terribly drunk and perhaps they should see him when he's sober. "Grow up Arthur, you'll make a fine adult," his uncle tells him. "That's easy for you to say. You don't have 50 pair of short pants hanging in your closet," Arthur responds as Gloria leadx him to their table. Without being aware of what he just asked, Arthur prods Gloria to tell him about herself. "You mean why I'm a hooker?" she replies. She goes on to reveal that her mother died when she was 6 and her father raped her when she was 12. "So you had six relatively good years," Arthur slurs. "Sorry. My father screwed me too." That's how he introduces the film's main plot point and why Arthur drinks. His father and grandmother keep pressuring him to marry a young heiress named Susan Johnson, but Arthur wants no part of it. He holds on to the silly notion that he'll get married for love.The next morning, when Gloria wakes up with Arthur in his bedroom that looks more suited for a child, complete with an elaborate train set behind his bed, we meet the most important person in Arthur's life: his butler/manservant/valet Hobson (Gielgud, who most deservedly took home the Oscar for best supporting actor). We first see him as elevators door open to reveal him bearing a tray of breakfast sustenance. Having just awakened, Arthur's embracing Gloria and we hear Hobson intone, "Please stop that." He steps further into the room and informs Arthur, "I've taken the liberty of anticipating your condition. I have brought you orange juice, coffee, and aspirins. Or do you need to throw up?" Gloria registers surprise at the sudden appearance of this British gentleman who hands her a robe and asks her to put it on, adding that she has breakfast waiting for her on the patio. "Say goodbye to Gloria, Arthur," Hobson instructs him and Arthur does as he says. Later, Arthur sits in a chair reading part of the newspaper while Hobson stands next to him reading another. It's a scene that contains several classic moments and, thankfully, YouTube had the clip.
Now Arthur's bathtub is much like his bedroom: Elaborate with an intercom system and a stereo (From the photo of the remake the bigger budget seems to have bought a smaller tub with fewer frills). Hobson reminds him that he must meet with his father in his office, so he gets prepped. Once they arrive and wait in the outer lobby, Arthur's jitters are on full display. He tells Hobson how he hates it there. "Of course you hate it. People work here," Hobson replies, before ordering Arthur to lean back in his chair and sit up straight. The receptionist announces that Arthur's father will see him now. He wants to take Hobson, but the receptionist says that his father said for Arthur to come in alone. After Arthur has left, an
exec in the lobby (Paul Gleason) picks up the courtesy phone and says to Hobson, "He gets all that money. Pays his family back by being a stinkin' drunk. It's enough to make ya sick." Hobson smiles. "I really wouldn't know, sir. I'm just a servant. On the other hand, go screw yourself." In his father's office, Arthur makes a beeline for the bar. His father, Stanford Bach (Thomas Barbour), flips through newspaper clips, noting how his drunken playboy status has made great fodder for the tabloids. He calls his son weak. "I despise your weakness," his father tells him. Arthur reiterates what he says he's told his father "a thousand times." He's not going to marry Susan Johnson. His father tries to sell him on it, insisting that he wants it, his grandmother wants it and Burt Johnson wants it. "Burt Johnson — he's a criminal!" Arthur exclaims in reference to Susan's father. Stanford Bach says they all are criminals in their own way and he admires Arthur, in a way, for sticking to his principles, but from this moment on — he's cut off. "From you? From grandmother? The rest of the family?" Arthur gulps. His father shakes his head. "You mean from —" Arthur can't even say the word. "The money Arthur," his father says. Suddenly, Arthur has a change of heart about Susan, finding positive qualities about her. Stanford shakes his son's hand. "Congratulations Arthur. You're gonna be a very wealthy man for the rest of your life," he tells him. "It's all I've ever wanted to be."Most of the pieces for Gordon's simple yet great screenplay are in place but the final part comes into play after Arthur's meeting with his father when he and Hobson go shopping at Bergdorf Goodman. Arthur goes on a spiteful spending spree, ordering three dozen of a particular shirt then telling Hobson, "I hate my father." "Buy four dozen," Hobson advises and Arthur increases the order. Then Arthur spots her (Liza
Minnelli). She's wearing a red hat and bright yellow slicker with a bag draped over her shoulder — and she steals a necktie and stuffs it in the bag. Arthur asks Hobson if he saw that. "It's the perfect crime — women don't wear ties. Some women do so it's not the perfect crime, but it's a good crime," Arthur comments. He then sees that the store's security guard has begun to follow her. Despite Hobson questioning why they should care, Arthur follows her out to the street where the guard confronts her, accusing her of stealing a tie. She gets confrontational, wanting to know the guard's name and asking the people in the crowd to get her a cop. Arthur steps in and says he thinks he can straighten this out. The guard of course knows who he is. He tells the guard he told her to pick out a tie and he'd put on his bill at the cashier. Arthur even asks to see it which the woman shows to him. Arthur says it's lovely and plants a big kiss on her lips. He tells the guard to have the cashier add the tie to his bill and he just keeps following the woman, whose name he learns is Linda. She can't figure out who the tall British gentleman stalking them is. When Arthur tells her he's not married, she gives him her phone number. "Thank you for a memorable afternoon," Hobson tells her. "Usually one must go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of your stature." Arthur lets Bitterman drive her home while he and Hobson continue shopping. Now the romance, albeit thwarted, at the center of Arthur may be between Arthur and Linda, but when you get right down to it, the film's most important relationship exists between Arthur and Hobson. The reason Arthur drinks has little to do with him being an overgrown kid out to have a good time but much to do with
the lousy childhood he had. The movie never even alludes to what happened to Arthur's mother, but in one of the film's quieter and sweeter scenes, when he's showing Linda his favorite horse, she comments how great it must have been to be around the horses and the rest of the estate when he was growing up. Arthur admits he wasn't home a lot because he always was at a boarding school — and he got kicked out of 10 prep schools because he was a bad kid. "You weren't bad. You just wanted to come home," Linda tells him. She's right — and the main reason for that was Hobson, who treated Arthur more like a son than Stanford Bach did. Sure, Hobson and Arthur have a teasing relationship, but Hobson always has been Arthur's protector. While the rapport between Moore and Gielgud provides many of the movie's biggest laughs, it also supplies the film with much of its emotional underpinnings and heart. You can tell from looks that Gielgud gives early in the film (or the TV ads showing Mirren's Hobson in the remake) that Hobson isn't well and he's trying to prepare Arthur for life when he's no longer there.At first, Hobson isn't the wise oracle you might take him for, at least when it comes to Arthur's feelings toward Linda. When Arthur asks Bitterman where Hobson is and the driver says he's tired, Arthur notes that he's been tired a lot lately. Arthur goes to Hobson's room out of concern for his surrogate father and also to vent because he's feeling crappy, having just told Linda about his engagement to Susan. First, Hobson tries to
allay Arthur's fears about his health by doing his usual hammy fake dying scene, but Arthur isn't in the mood. He tells Hobson about his admission to Linda and the old valet, assuming they still are playing their usual verbal games responds, "I don't know why. A little tart like that could save you a fortune in prostitutes." Arthur gets livid, yelling at Hobson never to speak about Linda in that way again and asking why he has to be such a snob before storming out. It actually causes Hobson to sit up in bed when Arthur returns to the room, saying that's the first time he's yelled at him in his life. "Perhaps you're growing up," Hobson suggests. Despite Arthur standing up for Linda as he did, it still isn't enough to convince Hobson yet that Arthur's feelings really represent love for Linda and not just resistance to marrying Susan. Arthur's mood does not change though. Hobson accompanies him to one of his favorite getaways — some high-speed spins around the racetrack — but Bach remains as morose as ever when he climbs out of his car, complaining to Hobson that, "I could love somebody. I never got to love anybody. I'm a failure in everything I do." Hobson asks Arthur to remove his racing helmet, then his goggles, and holds them both under one arm as he repeatedly slaps him on both cheeks with one hand.
And incidentally, I love you. (Hobson puts his arm around Arthur and they walk off together.) Marry Susan, Arthur. Poor drunks do not find love, Arthur. Poor drunks have very few teeth, they urinate outdoors,
they freeze to death in summer. I can't bear to think of you that way."
Hobson may have advised Arthur to marry Susan, but he has plans of his own. He soon shows up at Linda's apartment with a dress and the time and address for Arthur and Susan's engagement party. Linda can see that the old man is sick, but she realizes he's doing this because he cares for Arthur. He tells her he still recognizes when "a gentleman is in love." She does have to ask though if Arthur sent him. "Arthur would never be involved in something as devious as this," Hobson insists. Linda tells Hobson that Arthur has a really good friend in him. "You really look out for him, don't you?" she says. "It's a job I highly recommend," Hobson
responds. He has another bad coughing spell as he's leaving and she asks if he's seen a doctor. "Yes — and he has seen me." Soon, Hobson does end up hospitalized and his role and Arthur's are reversed as Arthur sees to his care, completely re-doing his hospital room, bringing him catered meals against doctor's orders ("I'm not going to let his last meal be jello.") and moving in himself. He also brings him a plethora of gifts from basketballs and toy trains to a cowboy hat, which Hobson insists he remove if he should die suddenly. After Arthur stays up most of the night when Hobson has a bad one, Hobson tells him in the morning that he looks awful. "That's because you've never seen me sober," Arthur tells him. At one point as he grows weaker, Hobson confides to Arthur that he can do anything he wants. Arthur asks what he means. "Figure it out." The pairing of Gielgud and Moore was brilliant casting on someone's part and, as I wrote before, Gielgud deserved that Oscar win. Moore also deserved his nomination for best actor, but he faced a tougher field that consisted of Warren Beatty in Reds, sentimental favorite and winner Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City and Paul Newman in Absence of Malice.Watching it again, you have to commend whoever took a chance on Steve Gordon and let him make his directing debut on Arthur when it was only the second screenplay he'd written. The first, The One and Only starring Henry Winkler and directed by Carl Reiner, wasn't bad, but couldn't prepare anyone for how good Arthur would be. The remainder of Gordon's resume consisted of limited sitcom writing on shows such as Barney Miller and Chico and the Man and as creator/head writer of a short-lived 1976 comedy called The Practice starring Danny Thomas. Sadly, after the success of Arthur, including an Oscar nomination and a Writers Guild award for original screenplay, Gordon died in 1982 of heart failure at the age of 44.
Arthur wouldn't feel that out of place if it had been made decades earlier than 1981 except for some language and sexual innuendo. Classic comic scene follows classic comic scene, great actors both of stature and solid character work fill most every role and it
follows the tried-and-true rule of the best comedies by running around 90 minutes. (The remake and the original's own awful sequel both end up 10 minutes shy of the two hour mark.) The infectious, bouncy score by Burt Bacharach blends perfectly with the laughs and tugs on the heart when needed, though the instrumental music was overshadowed by the film's popular and award-winning theme song. The cinematography by Fred Schuler (who also filmed The King of Comedy) makes Manhattan look beautiful and glistening, something you didn't see too often in films of the late '70s and early '80s. I've praised the exquisite work of Moore and Gielgud, but some of the others deserve their due. Admittedly, I've always felt that Liza Minnelli was the weak link as Linda, but seeing it again, I enjoyed her performance more than I have in the past and it's probably the most likable she's been on screen. Of course, this was before her body was made mostly of plastic, rivets and wax. Even better is the late Barney Martin (probably best known now as Morty Seinfeld on Seinfeld) as Linda's unemployed father who gets more upset than she does at times when it looks as if she's lost her chance at love with a multimillionaire. Martin's far from the only familiar face that shows up. 
Jill Eikenberry, long before L.A. Law, gets the somewhat thankless task of playing Susan, Arthur's unwanted fiancée, who always denies the evidence of what's in front of her — namely that Arthur isn't attracted to her in the least. She's blind to the clue of his drunken playboy antics that perhaps she shouldn't be anxious for this marriage. She does come from her own fortune after all. The restaurant scene where Arthur forces himself to propose turns out to be another hilarious keeper as he shows up blotto — he couldn't go through with it otherwise — and tosses out a seemingly endless line of nonsequiturs. (My personal favorite: "Do you have any objection to naming a child Vladimir? Even a girl?") Susan never runs out of patience, insisting to Arthur that "a real woman could stop you from drinking" to which he replies, "It'd have to be a real BIG woman." While Susan may be a forgiving sort, the same cannot be said for her father Bert Johnson, a tough self-made millionaire who likes to intimidate and, though he wants Arthur to marry his daughter, he doesn't trust him or like his drinking. Played
by another great character actor, Stephen Elliott, veteran of countless TV appearances as well as films such as The Hospital and Beverly Hills Cop as the police chief. Bert sets up a meeting with Arthur to make it clear that he won't put up with his nonsense. Arthur offers him a drink, though he's in Bert's house, but Bert informs him that no one in his family drinks. "I don't drink because drinking affects your decision-making," Bert tells Arthur. "You may be right. I can't decide," Arthur replies. On a feature on the DVD, which must have been made before anyone even dreamed of a laserdisc let alone a DVD, the late Gordon talks about how during the sequence, which takes place in Bert's study in front of the head of a moose he killed while hunting, Dudley Moore kept improvising so many funny things that he ended up with 12 takes where each one was just as funny as the last and he wished someday he could run all of them in a row. Bert makes a point of telling Arthur — with a smile no less — how he killed a man when he was 11 who was trying to steal food from his family. "Well, when you're 11 you probably don't even know there's a law against that," a drunken and nervous Arthur replies.
Sir John Gielgud wasn't the only actor with "prestige" in Arthur. Also a delight is Geraldine Fitzgerald, the Irish-born actress whose film career dated back to the 1930s (She earned a supporting actress Oscar nomination for 1939's Wuthering Heights), though she moved to the U.S. early and became an American citizen during World War II to be in solidarity with her adopted country, and earned the title of a British Lady when she wed Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg 4th Bt., which means he held an inherited title of baronetcy from one of the U.K.'s isles. Fitzgerald turns in a doozy of a performance as Arthur's grandmother, who he calls Martha, and who is keeper of the Bach family fortune. She can be naughty, as when she tells Arthur, "Every time you get an erection it makes the papers" or asks him, "Is it wonderful to be promiscuous?" However, she might seem old and dotty, but that doesn't mean she isn't ruthless as she insists that Arthur marry Susan, reminding him that he's too old to be poor. "You're a scary old broad, Martha," he tells his grandmother. She's also one of the few with the guts to stand up to Bert Johnson in the film's climax, slapping him and threatening him with the words, "Don't screw with me."
I wanted to make sure to include a good shot of Ted Ross as the chauffeur Bitterman. He didn't get a lot to do, giving a performance that was mostly reacting to what was going on around him. He wasn't close to Arthur the way Hobson was, but he had a similar dynamic where he could be exasperated by his boss, but he wouldn't want to work for anyone else. Ross deserves some recognition not just for his performance because
he also belongs to the sadly long list of people associated with Arthur who have died in the 30 years since it was released. I already discussed the early and untimely death of writer-director Steve Gordon, but of the performers in major roles in the film we have lost Dudley Moore, John Gielgud, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Stephen Elliott, Ted Ross, Barney Martin and Thomas Barbour. Even though they only had single brief scenes, even Paul Gleason, Lou Jacobi who plays a florist, Richard Hamilton who plays a drunk in a bar who listens to Arthur's story and Lawrence Tierney who plays a diner customer sitting next to Arthur when he proposes to Linda. Of the major characters and notable appearances, only Liza Minnelli, Jill Eikenberry and Anne De Salvo remain. Even Executive Producer Charles H. Joffe and Peter Allen, one of the four people who took home an Oscar for contributing to the song "Arthur's Theme (The Best That You Can Do") have passed on. (Allen only got any credit because on a completely separate occasion, he'd coined the phrase "caught between the moon and New York City" when his airplane was circling awaiting approval to land.)Three decades after it first seemed to spring out of nowhere, Arthur remains a well-crafted, well-acted piece of film entertainment. After the disastrous remake's huge flop and the original's years of neglect (probably partially due to its origination as an Orion release, making it another unfortunate orphan of that defunct studio), the movie deserves proper preservation and presentation for those who wish to see it again at home, either as a rental or as part of their home library. If they need another reason, do it as a record of what may be Dudley Moore's finest work. Sadly, he never made another film that came close to equaling Arthur in terms of quality or using his talent to great effect.
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Labels: 80s, Blake Edwards, C. Reiner, Depp, Gielgud, H. Fonda, Lancaster, Liza, Mirren, Movie Tributes, Newman, Oscars, Remakes, Seinfeld, Sequels, Television, W. Beatty
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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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Labels: Brando, Caine, Chayefsky, E.G. Marshall, H. Fonda, Hawke, Jack Warden, K. Hepburn, Kubrick, Lee J. Cobb, Magnani, Mankiewicz, N. Beatty, Newman, O'Neill, Obituary, P.S. Hoffman, Pacino, River Phoenix, Tennessee Williams
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Sunday, April 03, 2011
“You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean back then…”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Thirty years ago on this date, Atlantic City was released to U.S. theaters, a combination crime drama-love story set against the backdrop of the famed New Jersey burg that at the time of the movie’s production had seen the luster of its resort town status give way to a far seedier milieu dominated by casinos and legalized gambling. The oddest aspect of City is that it was directed by a Frenchman, Louis Malle, and with the exception of stars Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, had its cast populated with French and Canadian actors…and still, the movie’s setting and characters possess such a strong American vibe that it’s likely to escape the notice of a first-time viewer.
I had been fortunate enough to see Atlantic City in its original theatrical release and as such I vociferously argued with some film buff friends of mine that it would win the 1981 best picture Oscar — with my fellow cinephiles countering that that popcorn paean to Saturday morning serials, Raiders of the Lost Ark, would take home the grand prize. As it turns out, none of us made the correct call because the sleeper Chariots of Fire nabbed the best-in-show trophy that evening…but 30 years later, I still remain stubbornly convinced that I was right.
Proving that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, nickel-and-dime numbers man Lou Pascal (Lancaster) laments how his beloved Atlantic City, N.J. (“It used to be beautiful…what with the rackets, whoring, guns…”) has fallen into a state of decay brought on by the decision by the local government to legalize gambling in a last-ditch attempt to revitalize the city’s sagging fortunes. Pascal himself is looking for redemption; he spends his days as a “kept man” tending to the needs of Grace Pinza (Kate Reid), the verbally abusive widow of his old boss…and an individual whose glory days also have come and gone (she came to Atlantic City as an entrant in a Betty Grable look-a-like contest). Lou’s only avenue of pleasure is spying on his neighbor Sally Matthews (Sarandon) through her window as he intently enjoys her nightly ritual of rubbing her upper body with lemon juice.
The reason for this ritual is that Sally works in an oyster bar and her dedication to removing the stink of fish lies in her ambition to become a blackjack dealer, even to the point of taking instruction from an autocratic martinet (Michel Piccoli) who acts as if he were teaching ballet and not dealing cards. Sally’s dreams of a better life are about to undergo a detour, however, when her drug-dealing ex-husband Dave (Robert Joy) shows up at her doorstep with his pregnant girlfriend Chrissie (Hollis McLaren) in tow. Chrissie, as it turns out, is also Sally’s sister…and Sally’s act of kindness in letting them stay for the night gets her bounced out of the casino because of her association with the two.
Deadbeat Dave managed to heist a brick of cocaine from a connection in Philadelphia and it is while attempting to sell the dope that he makes Lou’s acquaintance, who agrees to be the “mule” and deliver the dope to a local mobster (Al Waxman). But the Philly thugs catch up with Dave and dispatch him posthaste, leaving Lou with nearly a kilo of cocaine that presents him the opportunity to sell it off on a piecemeal basis. Lou uses his windfall to purchase a new suit and to wine and dine Sally, who is in danger when the men who killed her ex suspect their cocaine is in her possession.
Throughout Atlantic City the sounds of constant construction can be heard, which serves as a metaphor for both the refurbishment of the city and the movie’s characters, each of whom is searching for that one chance at betterment and deliverance. Sally hooks up with Lou briefly and while their romance (a mixing of both the old and new of Atlantic City) doesn’t turn out as one would hope she comes away from the experience a better person, richer and filled with self-respect. Lou also finds his mettle tested and passes with flying colors as his former timidity melts when he confronts the individuals who threatened him and Sally earlier in the picture. His salvation is illustrated by the film’s ending where he and Grace promenade proudly along the city boardwalk bruised but unbowed; the lady on his arm also finding a purpose in life when she agrees to overlook her own neuroses and care for the pregnant Chrissie.
Frenchman Malle demonstrated a real flair for Americana mixed with a continental style in several of his motion pictures beginning with 1978’s Pretty Baby, a film set in 1917 against the backdrop of New Orleans’ famed Storyville prostitution district, and continuing with Alamo Bay (1985), a tale of Vietnamese fishermen working off the coast of Texas. While the merits of Baby and Bay are best left to discussion between the films’ defenders and detractors, one aspect that cannot be disputed in all these movies is Malle’s incredible eye for authentic detail and his amazing use of locations. What elevates Atlantic City to a slightly higher plateau than some of Malle’s other films is the contribution by screenwriter John Guare, a playwright best known for works such as House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation; Guare’s screenplay for City is a textbook example on how to create characters for the screen that are inescapably living, breathing flesh-and-blood people and not just cardboard caricatures; there are no car chases or explosions in this movie but because we identify so strongly with the people to whom we’ve been introduced their mundane, everyday existence nevertheless satisfies our minimum daily requirement of drama and suspense.
Guare was a friend of actress Sarandon, who in turn was Malle’s girlfriend at the time of the pre-production of the film. Susan had worked with Louis on Pretty Baby, and when the success of that movie nudged several film companies in France and Canada into allocating the director money to make another feature, it was Sarandon who suggested Malle collaborate with Guare when a good script was proving difficult to find…and the deadline to make the movie was drawing near (Malle’s agreement with the production companies stipulated he had to complete the film before the end of 1979). Guare came up with the idea of setting the story in “the lungs of Philadelphia”; the city made famous in song (“On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City”) and the Monopoly board game had just OK'd legalized gambling in effort to stave off the urban deterioration plaguing many municipalities across the nation…and Malle, Guare and cinematographer Richard Ciupka were fortunate to be able to capture a moment in time when many of the old buildings and landmarks were still in place (albeit in disrepair) awaiting their fate by the wrecking ball. Malle and company beat the deadline and completed filming on Dec. 31; the finished project was released in France and Germany in 1980 and to the U.S. the year after that.
With his performance as a gangster-gone-to-seed who undergoes a redemptive rebirth, actor Lancaster also revitalized his acting career in the same stroke. A handsome silver screen idol better known for athleticism and a certain flamboyance in his choice of movie roles, Burt had received the attention of his peers (an Oscar and a Golden Globe) in 1960 for his showy turn as the titular rogue in Elmer Gantry, based on the 1927 novel by Sinclair Lewis. But I’ve always believed that this is the role for which Lancaster should have taken home the Oscar, and in fact his later performances in such films as Local Hero (1983), Rocket Gibraltar (1988) and Field of Dreams (1989) demonstrate that like fine wine, his craft improved with age. I’m pleased to be able to reveal that I’m not the only one who thought Burt was tremendous in City; he was recognized not only by the National Society of Film Critics for his turn but the film critics organizations in Boston, Kansas City, Los Angeles and New York as well.
Lancaster’s co-star Sarandon also received an Academy Award nomination for her work in Atlantic City…and like Burt, went home empty-handed (the two lost to another screen couple, Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond…and believe you me, you do not want to get me started down that road) — but no one nominated for the movie (it received nods in the five major categories) received any statuettes, either; Malle lost best director to Warren Beatty for Reds and Guare saw his deserved trophy handed off to Colin Welland for best picture winner Chariots of Fire. It did, however, receive recognition at the Venice Film Festival the year before its Oscar nominations (1980); it shared the Golden Lion award with John Cassavetes’ Gloria) and won further vindication in 2003 when it was admitted to the National Film Registry honor roll of the Library of Congress. Since its release, it continues to add to its coterie of fans who are mesmerized by its story, character and images of what John Cougar Mellencamp might describe as “ain’t that America” filtered through the continental European sensibility of a great filmmaker. Louis Malle’s amazing achievement of transforming an ugly, decaying city into a thing of beauty is just one of the many reasons why I remain passionate about film.
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Labels: 80s, Cassavetes, H. Fonda, K. Hepburn, Lancaster, Malle, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Susan Sarandon, W. Beatty
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Monday, March 21, 2011
It's the Same Dame
By Eddie Selover
She takes a bite from an apple, then wonders aloud what would happen if she “clunked him on the head with it,” just before dropping it on him a three-story height. She sticks out her foot to trip him, and when he gets back up, berates him for damaging her shoe. She cozies up to him so her crooked associates can cheat him at cards. She calls him by a babyish nickname he loathes. She blatantly cock teases him, and when he’s bashfully choking on his own desire, tells him “you should be kept on a leash!” Later, she has him tripping over himself without any help, as he takes a series of embarrassing stumbles in front of his entire family. Finally, she marries him, and then on the honeymoon coldly and ritually humiliates him sexually. Mustering up the tatters of his shredded self respect, he leaves…and takes his final inexorable fall into a huge oozing pit of mud.
It’s a love story.
It’s also a romantic comedy, maybe the greatest, and it premiered 70 years ago today.
The Lady Eve, written and directed by Preston Sturges at the peak of his powers in 1941, is not a boy-meets-girl story. It’s a Paradise Lost story, only in this case “paradise” is living in a comfortable, smug world of ignorance and illusion. A woman introduces sin into a backward young man’s life, he responds by being hurtful and unforgiving, and she makes him pay the price for his narrow-minded weakness by reappearing in a new incarnation and making him fall in love with her all over again. Despite the dazzling wit and slapstick comedy, it’s a fundamentally serious movie, starring two fundamentally serious actors — Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.
Stars of the classic era were expected to be able to do everything, but Stanwyck and Fonda made few comedies in their long careers, and most of the others are dismal. She usually played tough lower-class women fighting for respect, and he’s remembered as a prototypical mid-century liberal hero: quiet, slow to anger, judicious, and upright. Their skill at drama gives The Lady Eve an unusual undertone of seriousness — when they wound each other, you really feel it. In most classic movies about the battle of the sexes, especially movies of the 1940s, the woman has to be tamed, subjugated, put in her place. In this movie, the man has to be stripped of his immaturity, insensitivity, and self righteousness — his unconscious belief that the woman is an extension of his own vanity. What’s remarkable is how exhilarating it is to watch that happen.
Some of it is Fonda. With his open face, drawling Midwestern speech, and lanky physical coltishness, he’s basically asking for it. There’s something vaguely infuriating about Henry Fonda; maybe it’s all that goodness. In the late '60s, he finally played a villain, in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, and it’s revelatory to see cold menace finally glaring from those blue eyes — the meanness that seemed to be there all along, buried beneath his sanctimonious blandness. In The Lady Eve, the repeated humiliations he undergoes aren’t just funny, they feel almost liberating. The air of the film is charged by the excitement of watching her slap him around. “I need him,” she murmurs at one point, staring off in the distance, “like the axe needs the turkey.”
Sturges created the script for Stanwyck, after her remarkable performance in Remember the Night, a movie he wrote (but didn’t direct) the previous year. In Remember the Night, she plays a hardened shoplifter who gradually rediscovers her own humanity and goodness during a Christmas holiday in the heartland. It sounds terrible, but it’s beautifully written and Stanwyck makes the character’s evolution utterly convincing and deeply touching. She makes you feel how precarious vulnerability is, and how much strength it takes to maintain it. In The Lady Eve, the same dynamic is at work, but the balance is shifted. We feel the tenderness, shame, and hurt feelings underneath her tough exterior. She’s a grown up: she shows how idealism and cynicism can reside in the same heart in an uneasy truce. She has a wonderful little riff about her ideal man — a little short guy, a practical ideal you can find in any barber shop — that would be typical screwball-comedy dizzy-dame chatter if it weren’t for the genuine world-weariness Stanwyck and Sturges convey beneath their bright remarks.
Maybe the greatest joy of Preston Sturges is his unique, and very accurate, vision of America as a nation full of wiseasses. In his movies, the leads don’t get all the jokes; every character has something snarky to say. In
The Palm Beach Story, he gives the best line in the script to a Pullman porter (“Gentleman tipped me a dime all the way from Jacksonville to Palm Beach — she’s alone but she don’t know it.”). He loved his actors, but his sin as a director was his weakness for letting them amp up the comedy with too much shouting, running around and arm-flapping. That wild energy becomes a muted, urgent subtext in The Lady Eve. Because Stanwyck, her father and his gang are criminals moving among the rich in their world of steamships and country houses, their acerbic comments are subtle signals to each other (and us) that they’re the most trustworthy people on the screen, because they’re the most experienced, and the smartest. Watching Stanwyck take Fonda for a ride and give him the shellacking he deserves, we get to share in and enjoy that smartness.Even their tenderest love scenes contrast her hard-earned wisdom with his obtuseness: “I don’t deserve you,” he says at one point (most of his remarks are just about that fatuous), and she reveals a world of complicated self-awareness as she answers ardently “oh, but you do… if anybody ever deserved me, you do... so richly.” Most romantic comedies come down to this: will they/won’t they, and when? The Lady Eve asks more timeless questions. Will he finally see her as more than a mere appendage? Will she wise him up and make a man of him? Can love survive the loss of innocence?
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Labels: 40s, H. Fonda, Leone, Movie Tributes, P. Sturges, Stanwyck
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Tuesday, February 08, 2011
“This is Duke Mantee, the world-famous killer…and he’s hungry!”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
As the star of the hit Broadway play The Petrified Forest, Leslie Howard also had in his possession (as co-producer) the production rights to Robert E. Sherwood’s stage smash…and Warner Bros., was quite keen on bringing Howard’s triumph to the big screen. The studio wanted the actor to reprise his stage role as Alan Squier alongside contractee Bette Davis, with whom Howard had previously worked on Of Human Bondage (1934); a critically and financially successful vehicle that cemented Davis’ future success in the movie business.
For the role of mobster Duke Mantee, the antagonist of the play, Warners wanted their resident gangster thespian Edward G. Robinson — but Howard insisted that the studio cast the performer that originated the part on stage; an actor who had previously worked at the studio in films and answered to the name of Humphrey Bogart. The studio bosses were hesitant…but relented when Howard informed them that without Bogie he wouldn’t be doing the film either. Seventy-five years ago on this date, Howard proved to the studio his instincts about Bogart were on the money when Petrified Forest was released to movie screens and ignited the film career of one of moviedom’s best-known tough guys.
Bogart’s foray into movies began six years before the release of Forest with an appearance in a Vitaphone short entitled Broadway’s Like That (1930), and that same year he signed a contract with Fox that provided him his first feature film exposure alongside Spencer Tracy in the John Ford-directed comedy-drama Up the River. By and large, however, Bogie didn’t make too much of a stir in films, and often found himself shuttling back-and-forth between the picture business and the stage, on which he had been an active participant since 1922. Bogart had become frustrated with moviemaking by 1934, feeling that his ambition to become a leading man onscreen was destined to wither and die on the vine. He could, when not unemployed, fall back on stage work and after appearing in a production of Invitation to a Murder producer Arthur Hopkins hired Bogie for the part of on-the-lam gangster Duke Mantee in the production of Robert Sherwood’s new play, The Petrified Forest.
Hopkins had reservations about Bogart at first: Bogie’s stage rep was, in Hopkins’ words, “as an antiquated juvenile who spent most of his stage life in white pants swinging a tennis racquet.” Author Sherwood had based the character of Mantee on 1934’s “Public Enemy No. 1,” John Dillinger — and because of his physical similarity to Dillinger, Bogart was a natural for the part. Bogie upped the ante in portraying the role by studying film footage of the gangster and mimicking Dillinger’s mannerisms. Forest won Bogart the best reviews of his career at that time, and after the movie version came out the actor himself remarked that Forest “marked my deliverance from the ranks of the sleek, sybaritic, stiff-shirted, swallow-tailed ‘smoothies’ to which I seemed condemned to life.”
The Petrified Forest takes place inside the Black Mesa Diner in a remote area in northern Arizona, a garage/eatery run by Jason Maple (Porter Hall), his daughter Gabrielle (Davis) and “Gabby’s” curmudgeonly grandfather “Gramp” (Charley Grapewin), who proudly tells all and sundry of the time Billy the Kid shot at him…and missed. Gabrielle’s mother, whom Jason married during the First World War, lives in France but still corresponds with her daughter, sending her books of poetry on her birthday. Gabby’s mother grew weary of life on the desert and her husband (calling him “a dull defeated man”), which is why she retreated back to the land of her birth; Gabrielle herself has inherited her mother’s free spirit, painting in her spare time and fending off the advances of the unimaginative males who seem to populate the diner, notably former gridiron hero and now gas pump jockey Boze Hertzlinger (Dick Foran).
Into Gabrielle’s life walks Alan Squier (Howard), a failed author-turned-alcoholic drifter who stops by the Black Mesa for a meal and soon finds himself captivated by Gabby’s independent and artistic temperament. His attention paid to Gabrielle arouses Boze’s jealousy, but he assures Boze that he’ll be moving on and manages to cadge a ride to a destination in Phoenix with a wealthy couple, the Chisholms (Paul Harvey, Genevieve Tobin) and their chauffeur Joseph (John Alexander). The Chisholms’ automobile is stopped en route by Duke Mantee and his gang, who are fleeing the police after a shootout in Oklahoma City. Mantee and his boys commandeer the car in which Squier and the Chisholms were traveling, and while Chisholm and his chauffeur futilely attempt to start the automobile abandoned by the Mantee gang, Alan takes off on foot for help.
Squier arrives back at the diner to warn Gabrielle of his encounter with Mantee and Company but learns that the gang has already arrived and Mantee will be holding the diner’s denizens hostage until a second car with three other members of his gang and his girlfriend arrives to rendezvous. The group are eventually re-joined by Mr. and Mrs. Chisholm and Joseph, who have made their way back to the establishment through a snowstorm, and a tense situation grows more so when Boze’s attempt to overpower Mantee earns him a slug in his shoulder.
As Gabrielle attends to Boze’s wound, Alan makes a proposal to Mantee: he asks Duke to shoot and kill him before he leaves, since he’s planning to sign over his insurance policy to Gabrielle (with the Chisholms as witnesses) so that she will have the funds needed to leave Black Mesa and travel to France to be reunited with her mother and live out her dream as an artist. Mantee agrees to Alan’s request, and as the police begin to close in the gangster shoots Alan before being gunned down himself. Alan expires in Gabrielle’s arms, and she vows to bury him in an area where old redwoods have ossified into stone — the “petrified forest” of the film’s title.
The Petrified Forest, with its themes of crime and social realism, was an ideal property for Warner Bros. to adapt to film, as the studio had made its reputation as a producer of gritty actioners tinged with the social commentary of the day. It was a big success for the studio…and for Bogart as well — but despite such a prominent part in an “A” picture he would soon find himself typecast as snarling, sneering gangsters in a variety of programmers and B-pictures. Bogart’s now-iconic image as a cynical, wise-cracking hero would not take hold until the early 1940s with legendary productions such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942).
Though he was never shy about complaining on being typecast in bad-guy roles, Bogart had an exceptional deference for Forest and his performance as Duke Mantee — a shining example of this was demonstrated when the actor agreed to reprise the role in a May 30, 1955 television adaptation of the play on the series Producers’ Showcase. (Playing the Leslie Howard role was Henry Fonda, and the part of Bette Davis’ character was essayed by Mrs. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall.) This performance and a guest appearance on The Jack Benny Show (from Oct. 25, 1953) would be the only two TV projects in which the actor participated before his passing in 1957. 1955 was also the year that Bogart appeared in what would be his penultimate film, The Desperate Hours — his character in that movie, Glenn Griffin, also holds people hostage (this time a suburban family) while on the lam from the long arm of the law. (Bogart was quoted as saying that Griffin was “Duke Mantee grown up.”)
Because of its dark subject matter and characters whose destinies seemingly cannot escape the heavy hand of fate (Mantee’s last words to Alan before shooting him are: “So long, pal…I’ll be seein’ ya soon”), Petrified Forest is considered by some critics to be an early example of what would later be known as film noir. These facets of the film and Bogart’s mesmerizing performance as Mantee immeasurably help a movie that sadly hasn’t held up as well as one would like — though I’m certainly not shy about admitting a bit of guilt by pointing out that I never particularly cottoned to Howard’s work as an actor and that I’m disappointed that Bogart doesn’t shoot him from the get-go to avoid all of Leslie’s irritating speechifying. (Then again, I get a tremendous amount of pleasure out of seeing the two men reunited in the following year’s Stand-In, so there may be another explanation for my lack of enthusiasm.) For a Bogart fan, however, Forest is must viewing — from the moment Duke Mantee is introduced onscreen, there can be no doubt that 75 years ago “a star is born.”
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Labels: 30s, Bacall, Bette, Bogart, Edward G., H. Fonda, Jack Benny, John Ford, Theater, Tracy
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Sunday, December 26, 2010
The course of true love gathers no moss
By Edward Copeland
Believe it or not, despite her early success in films including winning her first Oscar for Morning Glory in the split year 1932-33, by the end of the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn had begun to be known as box office poison and was dumped by RKO, so she retreated to the New York stage where she triumphed in the role of Tracy
Lord in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story, which debuted March 29, 1939 with Joseph Cotten, on loan from Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre, in the role of C.K. Dexter Haven and Van Heflin as Macaulay "Mike" Connor. As Josh R wrote in his Centennial Tribute to Hepburn, "(she) secured the film rights (thanks to Howard Hughes), and more or less strong-armed Louis B. Mayer into letting her repeat her performance for the MGM film adaptation. The role of Tracy Lord, a haughty socialite who views the imperfections of others as an insupportable blemish on her otherwise charmed existence, cannily exploited her natural imperiousness and debunked the prevailing notion that the actress was too proud to show her flaws." Now, she didn't get all the casting she sought. She'd hoped to either get Spencer Tracy or stage co-star Van Heflin, as Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. pointed out in his Centennial Tribute to Heflin, to play Mike alongside Clark Gable as Dexter, but work commitments prevented it and Cary Grant and James Stewart turned out to be more than acceptable and with Joseph L. Mankiewicz producing and George Cukor directing, the play made a fairly smooth transfer to the screen 70 years ago today.
The film begins with a nearly silent prologue detailing the quick but comically brutal end of the marriage between wealthy ship builder C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant) and socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn). As Dexter moves his things out of the Lord estate, Tracy follows with his golf bag, stopping to remove a club and snap it in half. A furious Dexter's first instinct is to sock Tracy in the jaw, but he holds back and just shoves her in the face, as if he's James Cagney and she's Mae Clarke only minus the chair and the grapefruit, and Tracy tumbles backward through the doorway and lands in the entryway. Flash forward two years later as Tracy prepares for her second wedding, to one George Kittredge (John Howard) though her little sister Dinah (scene-stealer Virginia Weidler) would rather Dexter return as well as her own father Seth Lord (John Halliday), who has left their mother Margaret (Mary Nash) to carouse elsewhere, though Tracy seems more upset about her father's actions than her mother does.
Meanwhile, at the offices of the tabloid magazine Spy, one of its top reporters, Macaulay Connor (Stewart) is ready to storm into the office of its unscrupulous owner Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell) and tell him he won't take
any more of his sleazy assignments because he's going to devote himself full-time to being a real writer. His frequent photography partner Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) would love to follow the same course, but she's too addicted to having a roof over her head and food in her stomach to quit in a huff. Before Connor, known as Mike to his friends, can get much of his spiel out, Kidd already has explained the new assignment: They are to infiltrate the upcoming nuptials of Tracy Lord and George Kittredge. When his employees suggest that getting in may not be an easy thing to do, Kidd has them show Dexter in, introducing him as a friend of Tracy's brother, though Liz recognizes him as her first husband because Liz was the only photographer whose camera he didn't break during his honeymoon with Tracy. Mike asks if he's doing it to get even and Dexter says it's something like that, but he doesn't sound convincing. Despite his plan to stand on principle, Mike agrees to cover the society wedding.
We meet two more of the farce's main characters as Tracy and Dinah go out to the stables to greet the usually inebriated Uncle Willie (Roland Young) and George Kittredge happens to be there as well. As if we didn't suspect from that the outset that the deck would be stacked against the self-made man Kittredge, his introduction solidifies it as he blanches at Tracy's attempt at getting his riding clothes dirty, his perusal of Spy for articles about their upcoming nuptials and his struggles mounting a horse whose sex he can't even identify. When Tracy's father Seth arrives later, he doesn't think much of Kittredge either, telling his daughter that George isn't "a tower of strength. He's just a tower." In high school, our drama department staged the play (I served merely as producer) and it always amazes me how Young underplays Uncle Willie compared to the friend who had the role in our version and tackled the role as if he were a
mutant Don Knotts in the middle of taking an incredibly painful shit. When Tracy, Dinah and Uncle Willie return to the main house, they are surprised to find the presence of Dexter and his two new friends. Both Dinah and Tracy's mother are pleased to see Haven back, but the same can't be said for Tracy who smells a rat. Dexter explains to his ex that Mike and Liz are indeed reporters for Spy, but he felt compelled to agree to help get them in because otherwise Sidney Kidd was going to publish a story linking Tracy's father to a young dancer. Tracy reluctantly agrees to go along with the charade, but since she won't allow her father Seth at the wedding, she recruits Uncle Willie to pretend to be her father. Soon though, Seth arrives anyway and must play the role of Uncle Willie. They take turns entertaining the reporting team, especially young Dinah who presents them with an enthusiastic rendition of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." (Still, she's no Groucho.)
Re-watching The Philadelphia Story this time, one thing I noticed that had escaped my attention before was how subtly they played Dexter's status as a reformed alcoholic and how his drinking may have had a great deal to do with the quick dissolution of his marriage to Tracy. At one point, when he talks to Mike, Mike mentions that he only drinks a little and Dexter responds, "I thought all writers drink to excess and beat their wives." then with a glance at Tracy, "You know, it occurs to me that at one time I wanted to be a writer." Later in the film, when Mike goes on a real bender and shows up on Dexter's doorstep, it's the first time Dexter explicitly says that he no longer drinks. Mike's there to berate Dexter for what he sees as his mistreatment of Tracy earlier in the day and by dragging him and Liz there to feed on her. When Mike confesses the things he could tell him about Sidney Kind, Dexter tells him the truth and starts to get some good blackmail stories of his own that he hopes to use against Kind to save Tracy's father's reputation.
In a way, The Philadelphia Story can be seen as Tracy Lord's transformation from a haughty socialite who looks down upon many to a human being, and Tracy is often couched in some pretty harsh terms. Dexter often compares
her disdainful look to the withering glance of a goddess and tells her that she's far and away her favorite person in the world. Kittredge sees in her a "kind of a beautiful purity, like a statue." It's her father who delivers the harshest blows when he all but blames her for his infidelities and for acting more jealous than his wife does. "What most wives fail to realize about their husband's philandering is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with their wife," he tells them both. When Tracy inquires further, Seth plunges deeper. "A reluctance to grow old, I think. A devoted young girl gives an old man the illusion of youth." When Tracy (correctly) accuses her father of blaming her for his cheating, he hits her with the hardest blow. "You have everything it takes to make a wonderful woman except one thing — an understanding heart. Without that, you might as well be made of bronze." In contrast, when Mike and Tracy later get their drunk on together (only the second time in her life she's imbibed), Mike doesn't compare her to a goddess or a statue, but "a radiant queen." At least royals are human, so rumor has it.
Donald Ogden Stewart's adaptation of Barry's play won one of the film's two Oscars, the other going to Stewart in what is widely considered to be one of the earliest occasions of a makeup Oscar since he lost the year before for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Truth be told though, Donat is great and he also faced Gable's Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, though Gable already had a statuette for It Happened One Night a mere five years earlier. Stewart's win may not only have been a makeup one, robbing Henry Fonda of a deserved trophy for John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, it may have been a miscategorization as well. While Hepburn is the ostensible lead of The Philadelphia Story, it truly is an ensemble piece where many of the major characters share an almost equal amount of time on the screen. Still, it has to be Stewart's delightful drunk scene that won Oscar voters over. (We'll ignore the fact that Grant wasn't nominated, not so much for this but for the same year's His Girl Friday and neither was his co-star, Rosalind Russell, in the lead actress category.)
Hepburn should have been a leading contender for her second Oscar in her screen comeback, but she lost to her Stage Door co-star Ginger Rogers, someone who deserved a win at one time or another but instead got it for a somewhat out-of-character turn in the soapy Kitty Foyle. One thing about Hepburn's performance that stood out for me this time was her excellent use of hand gestures. Many times, she completes sentences and thoughts with simple sweeps of her hands instead of words and it's perfect, subtle and funny. Of course, the Academy more than made it up to Kate decades later. Still, while half of Stewart's schnockered sequence gets played with Grant, the real magic comes in the scenes he plays with an equally hammered Hepburn. Her interest in the young reporter already had prompted her to look up the book he'd written and left her suitably impressed, telling him he talks so big and tough but then writes like that. It's part of Tracy's humanization, the other coming when Dexter's wedding gift turns out to be a model of a ship he built for them that met an
untimely end. It annoys Kittredge, but touches Tracy. If her heart is bronze, it's melting. Still, even in her drunken state, she thinks that Mike may be a snob, at least against High Society (the title of the later musical version of the story). "The prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying their privileges," Mike slurs to her, before she wheels him in a chaisse lounge off for a late-night swim. Mike, who has never allowed himself time for women, has convinced himself he's falling for Tracy while Liz Imbrie pines in silence for him. Dexter asks her, after she ends up staying to help him type up his blackmail note to Kind, why she doesn't marry Mike. "He still has a lot to learn and I don't want to get in his way," the photographer tells him. Dexter asks Liz what she'll do if another woman gets to him first and then she admits she guesses she'll be forced to scratch her eyes out. By this time, it's early morning when Dexter has returned Liz to the Lord estate and before he can exit he spots Kittredge coming with something on his mind. Over his shoulder, Dexter sees the returning Mike and Tracy and failing to get Kittredge out of the way tries to pre-emptively stop the explosion about to occur.
Clad in bathing robes, Mike and Tracy appear on the horizon with the writer crooning, "Over the Rainbow" to the socialite bundled in his arms. A still loopy Tracy gleefully greets Dexter and Mike, but significantly lowers her voice to say, "Hello, George." Dexter urges Mike to take Tracy to her room and try not to wake Dinah, unaware that the little dickens already is up and spying from her window. Dexter tries to calm George, but to little avail. When Mike returns a little while later, Kittredge is ready for war so to prevent too much damage, Dexter acts just as outraged and socks Mike himself, apologizing but explaining he figured he'd hurt him less after Kittredge leaves. A little while later, as a hungover Uncle Willie greets the day against his will, he's informed by the butler that Dinah is waiting for him outside and she takes him on a horse and buggy ride (which his head certainly did not need) and fills him on what she saw. Dexter joins them and does his best to convince her
that she dreamed it. When Tracy arises later, she gets a letter from George so outraged by her actions, that he thinks they should call off the wedding, but Kittredge arrives as she reads it aloud to everyone within shouting distance. However, when Kittredge realizes that Dexter knows Sidney Kind and Mike and Liz work for him, he suddenly has a change of heart, considering the publicity potential. With so many suitors, even if you've never seen The Philadelphia Story, you can probably guess how it turns out. Cukor moves it along well for a farce, even if some of its attitudes are hopelessly dated and it is a bit too long, but coming from the stage with that many characters, it would be hard not to be. Still, with a cast this great, it makes it all worthwhile. Of course, in the end, Dinah takes credit for making everything work out the way it did.
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Labels: 40s, Cagney, Cary, Cukor, Gable, Ginger Rogers, H. Fonda, Howard Hughes, J. Stewart, John Ford, Joseph Cotten, K. Hepburn, Mankiewicz, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Roz Russell, Theater, Tracy, Van Hefiin, Welles
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