Friday, April 20, 2012
What a glorious feeling
By Edward Copeland
Sixty years ago, another MGM musical extravaganza began to open across the country, premiering first in New York on March 27, 1952 — exactly one week after its star's previous lavish MGM musical, An American in Paris, took home the Oscar as 1951's best picture. An American in Paris just had opened about four-and-a-half months earlier in November 1951, so though both musicals came from the same studio, the same producer (Arthur Freed) and the same star (Gene Kelly), Paris essentially stole Singin' in the Rain's thunder, despite
good reviews and decent box office (ultimately, Rain only grossed about $1 million less than Paris did worldwide). Over the course of the ensuing decades, Singin' in the Rain displayed staying power as more generations and critics discovered and delighted in its infectious shenanigans to the point that it routinely grabs the label as the greatest movie musical ever made, a title it most richly deserves. When the film came out in 1952 though, the shower of awards that rightfully should have left Singin' in the Rain drenched in accolades didn't occur, but rarely do the movie classics earn the kudos they should upon their original release. How Casablanca managed to snag its best picture Oscar truly belongs on a list of the wonders of the world. Singin' in the Rain garnered a total of two Oscar nominations and lost them both. The Academy felt the best picture prize for 1952 belonged to The Greatest Show on Earth, which beat High Noon, Ivanhoe, John Huston's Moulin Rouge and The Quiet Man. Admittedly, I'm a fan of High Noon and The Quiet Man, but neither is better than Singin' in the Rain. I admire much of Huston's film, but I couldn't go for Ivanhoe and, as far as The Greatest Show on Earth goes, the movie doesn't just stage a spectacular train wreck, that sequence serves as a metaphor, not so much for the decidedly mediocre circus film but for the majority of the Academy's choices for best picture throughout the years. The nearly always wrong Academy found no room at the inn in the best picture category for Singin' in the Rain and, yet once again, history proves that that organization almost always has figured out ways to screw things up. Oh, well. As our hero, Don Lockwood, would say to his fans, "Dignity. Always dignity." It's true — I did, I really did have a feeling of lightness about me when I first saw Singin' in the Rain on a small TV set in my bedroom when I was in grade school. The local PBS station aired it during one of its pledge drives late on a Friday or Saturday. I almost wrote something to the effect that though my age at that time stood in single digits, I wasn't unfamiliar with "older films." Then, I started doing something out of character for someone who spent his professional years in journalism: math. When Singin' in the Rain and I first crossed paths, the film still had a few years to go before it would reach its 30th anniversary. Figuring further, I realized that when I was born, the movie had existed for a mere 17 years. I suppose the point I should have been aiming for was that even as a youngster, I wasn't completely ignorant of films made prior to my birth — a contrast to an all-too-pervasive attitude pushed by magazines such as Entertainment Weekly that discounts most things made prior to its existence. I took a detour from my main point which was that no classic up to that point in my young life seized my imagination and prompted me to rattle about it nonstop the way I would a new release such as Star Wars could capture my youthful enthusiasm, but Singin' in the Rain did.
It probably didn't hurt that back in 1974 my parents took me to That's Entertainment! and I saw many of the film's famous musical numbers before viewing the entire picture. My attention also likely got captured early in the showing when the first face I noticed after the opening credits belonged to Aunt Harriet (Madge Blake) of TV's Batman. Blake begins the fun as she stands before a microphone in as Hollywood columnist/gossip hound Dora Bailey covering the 1927 premiere of The Royal Rascal, the latest Monumental Pictures production starring the hot team (onscreen and off, so they say) Guy Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), live outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. When I fell for Singin' in the Rain as a youngster, I could enjoy it immensely for its music and comedy, but I needed to age and accumulate knowledge of cinema history in order to appreciate its references and some of the silent figures it parodies. For example, the first name that Dora announces stepping onto the red carpet belongs to Zelda Zanders (played by a 19-year-old Rita Moreno, who my young eyes failed to recognize as the "HEY YOU GUUYYSSS!!!" lady from The Electric Company), known as "The Zip Girl," a play on silent superstar Clara Bow's nickname as "The It Girl." Following Zelda, comes the mysterious Olga Mara (Judy Landon), merging mostly Pola Negri with a bit of Gloria Swanson, based on her latest spouse, an older, wealthy aristocrat. Of course, I didn't need to know any film history to get a kick out
of the exaggerated reactions of the starstruck fans crowding the barricades to catch a glimpse of the famous faces or to get the joke when Dora announces the arrival of Don's best friend Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor), who leaps out of his car and onto the red carpet only to watch the fans' faces fall in disappointment since he's a "nobody." With its marvelous screenplay by the legendary team of Betty Comden & Adolph Green, the songbook of lyricist Arthur Freed (yes, the same Freed producing the film) and composer Nacio Herb Brown and the second film pairing Kelly and Stanley Donen as co-directors following 1949's great On the Town, Singin' in the Rain had a damn strong team going in, even considering its start from such a vague kernel of an idea. Freed had left his songwriting days behind long ago, becoming a very successful producer at MGM, almost exclusively of musicals. (Last year, when I wrote my tribute to Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along , I said that I never thought it made sense for a successful composer like that musical's Franklin Shepherd to switch gears and become a successful movie producer, but lyricist Freed did that in real life. I'm surprised no one called me out on that.) According to the commentary on the 50th anniversary DVD, Freed called Comden & Green and told them he wanted them to write a musical based around the old songs he wrote with Brown to be called Singin' in the Rain. "We didn't have a clue as to what it would be other than there had to be a scene where someone would be singing and it would be raining," Comden said on the commentary, which included her, Green, O'Connor, Donen, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse, Kathleen Freeman, Baz Luhrmann (who horned his way in somehow) and film historian and author Rudy Behlmer. Of that group, only Donen, Reynolds, Luhrmann and Behlmer remain with us 10 years later. As Comden & Green thought about the era in which those songs had been written — the late 1920s and early 1930s — they conceived the idea of setting the film in that time period and from that sprang forth the idea of making Singin' in the Rain be about Hollywood's transition from silent films to talking pictures.At last, the car bringing the stars of The Royal Rascal, Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont, pulls up to the red carpet. Dora Bailey hardly can contain her excitement, telling her radio audience that Lockwood & Lamont go together "like bacon and eggs." If the parodies of silent screen stars flew over your head and the caricatures of overzealous fans somehow didn't give you an inkling of what type of musical comedy the behind-the-scenes team had devised for Singin' in the Rain, it becomes abundantly clear once Lockwood & Lamont arrive on the scene and Don steps up to Dora's microphone to recount to her listeners a brief primer of how he became the movie star he was that
day. At first, it might seem as if he's being rude to Ms. Lamont, who looks as if she's trying to move toward the microphone to say something, but Don doesn't allow her to say a word. If you've seen Singin' in the Rain before, you know why that is. If you haven't, what in the hell are you waiting for? However, like what could happen with sound film projectors to come, the words emanating from Lockwood's lips didn't match the visuals we saw as he and Cosmo, beginning as pint-size hustlers sneaking into pool halls, began careers playing violin and piano at any old dive where they could earn a few measly bucks. Gene Kelly always had the knack when it came to singing and dancing, but he never received enough credit for his acting and from his entrance as the public persona of Don Lockwood, you can tell that Kelly has stepped up his thespian skills a notch. While he will perform some of his best and most memorable song-and-dance moments at the same time he's co-directing the film itself, Kelly will end up giving the best performance of his career as Don Lockwood. The Academy did see fit to nominate him for acting once (in 1945's Anchors Aweigh) and gave him an honorary Oscar for the year 1951, when An American in Paris took best picture, "in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film." The Academy was only a year early because Kelly's best was yet to come. Lockwood's embellished flashback leads to the movie's first musical number. Once Don and Cosmo found their way on to the vaudeville circuit, they energetically performed the song "Fit as a Fiddle." The clip below begins with dialogue in another language, but the remainder is in English. 
Kelly and O'Connor's choreographic chemistry confirms the correct choice in going with O'Connor as Cosmo instead of using Oscar Levant again following An American in Paris. On the commentary, O'Connor recalled that prior to rehearsal, Kelly had asked what his strongest dancing side was and expressed relief when O'Connor answered, "The right" which also was Kelly's strongest. O'Connor credited that for why they looked so well together as in "Fit as a Fiddle." Don's cursory version of his life story wraps up with him and Cosmo landing musician jobs at Monumental Pictures where Don soon finds himself working as a stuntman, hurtling over bars in the Old West, crashing airplanes and riding motorcycles to their doom. When he approaches Lina Lamont, already a star, she wants nothing to do with a lowly stuntman until the studio's president, R.F. Simpson (the great Millard Mitchell, notable in films such as Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway and Winchester '73, who died too young at age 50 in 1953), offers Don an acting contract — then Lina can't keep her hands off him, but Lockwood quickly removes
them. Following the showing of the swashbuckling Royal Rascal. Don and Lina come out and greet the audience briefly but, again, only Lockwood speaks. When they get off the stage, we finally hear Lina speak as she complains about never being allowed to talk and when you hear that squawk, which might have originated at a crossroads between The Bronx and Hell, you realize why it's best for all concerned that Lina Lamont stay mute. If anyone doubts me when I say how much this film enchanted me when young, I'll share a personal tale showing its magic holds for later generations as well. Several years ago, a friend of mine visited with her then 6- or 7-year-old daughter and as we drove, the subject of Singin' in the Rain came up. Mom asked her young daughter to do her Lina Lamont impression for me and the little girl did a dead-on Hagen repeating the line, "Waddya think I am, dumb or sumptin'?" That darling child turns 15 in a few months. Sigh… Hagen earned one of the film's only two Oscar nominations (losing to Gloria Grahame for her brief appearance in a more serious Hollywood story, The Bad and the Beautiful) and Hagen deserved that recognition. Two years earlier, Judy Holliday won an Oscar for perfecting the ditzy blonde by re-creating her stage
role as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday on the big screen. Lack of intelligence and hair color unify Holliday's Billie and Hagen's Lina, but where the characters diverge comes from inside. Billie Dawn may not be bright, but she means well. Lina isn't any smarter, but she's downright mean and devious when she feels her career needs protecting. Lina doesn't hear what everyone else does when she opens her mouth and that voice comes out. The studio fears the public hearing it then — and that's before talkies throw the studio into turmoil. What impresses even more about Hagen's hilarious work in Singin' in the Rain comes when they learn that the Hagen's primary reputation in theater and movies were dramas and film noirs such as The Asphalt Jungle and Side Street, where she inevitably played a moll or a femme fatale. "Jean Hagen was a legit actress. She'd never done comedy before so she didn't just play a ditzy blonde, she approached the role as if she were a ditzy blonde and she was brilliant," Donald O'Connor said on the DVD. Sadly, Hagen never really succeeded at capitalizing on her Singin' success except for earning three Emmy nominations playing Danny Thomas' wife on Make Room for Daddy. Hagen tired of the role though and quit, prompting a pissed off Thomas to kill her character off and change the show's title to The Danny Thomas Show. Hagen herself also died young, succumbing to throat cancer at 54 in 1977.Following the premiere of The Royal Rascal and Lina's complaints about never being able to talk, despite the studio P.R. flaks trying to explain that it's to preserve her image as well as her insistence that she and Don's engagement exists and their romance wasn't cooked up
by Monumental Pictures for publicity purposes. "Lina, you have to stop reading those fan magazines," Don tells her. "There's never been anything between us and there never will be." She just laughs it off, but the P.R. guys convince her that she and Don should travel to the after-party at R.F.'s house in separate cars to elude the fans and the press. Don hitches a ride with Cosmo in his jalopy which, unfortunately, gets a flat tire not too far from Grauman's, causing Don to be swarmed by fans seeking autographs, clothing and, perhaps one of his limbs. Cosmo offers no help to Don in this situation. When Don yells to him to call him a cab, Cosmo, standing out of range of the melee, simply says, "OK. You're
a cab." Lockwood manages to escape the frenzy by leaping over a car and onto the roof of a streetcar before jumping into a young woman's convertible, causing her to scream, convinced he's a criminal fleeing the law. He tries to calm her down, but she spots a police officer and pulls over and the cop immediately recognizes him and then the young lady (Debbie Reynolds) realizes why he looked so familiar to her in the first place. She tells him her name is Kathy Selden and agrees to drop him off at his house so he can get out of the shredded tuxedo that he's wearing, explaining that its ventilation resulted from "a little too much love from my adoring fans." Kathy expresses shock that they would do something like that to him and thinks it's just terrible. Don thinks her sympathy might give him the opportunity to make some moves on the girl, trying to wring as much as he can out of the "burden of stardom" line. "Well, we movie stars get the glory, I
guess we must take the little heartaches that go with it," he declares as he snakes his arm around her shoulder. "People think we lead lives of glamour and romance, but we're really lonely. Terribly lonely." Lockwood lays it on so thick even Lina would see through it and Kathy takes note of his hand and apologizes for mistaking him for a criminal before. She just knew she recognized him from somewhere. Don asks which of his movies she's seen, but Kathy can't remember which one it was. She thinks he was dueling in it and it had "that girl, Lina Lamont" in it. "I don't go to the movies much. If you've seen one, you've seen them all," Kathy says, putting a damper on his amorous mood rather quickly. His arm returns to his body, now crossed. "No offense. Movies are entertaining enough for the masses, but the personalities on the screen just don't impress me. They don't talk, they don't act. They just make a lot of dumb show," Kathy proclaims, scrunching her face in imitation of their facial mannerisms. "Like what I do," Don says. "Why yes," Kathy responds with a smile. Now, not only has Don lost any desire he had for this young woman, he's thoroughly pissed
off. Do Kathy's criticisms about silent acting sound or, more accurately, read as familiar to you? If you're having trouble visualizing the context, remove Don and Kathy from the car, make Kathy a miscast brunette and rising sound movie star speaking too loudly during a radio interview at an upscale restaurant while Don dines at a nearby table, sports a mustache and overhears the insults to his profession indirectly. Also, let's swap out the gorgeous Technicolor cinematography by Harold Rosson for supercrisp, 21st century black-and-white imagery. Getting the picture now? If you're still in the dark, I imagine this photograph I've placed on the right should jog your memory. I know I refer to his quote too often, but when Godard said, "The best way to criticize a film is to make another film," he spoke words that cried out for repeated use. What puzzles me is how Kelly and Donen, Comden & Green and the rest of the Singin' in the Rain creative team applied Godard's advice pre-emptively, making their film rebuttal to the lackluster Oscar winner of 2011, The Artist, nearly 60 years before Harvey Weinstein bought the film its best picture statuette (and before Godard said that quote either, for that matter). Too bad Irving Berlin composed "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)" for the musical Annie Get Your Gun instead of Freed & Brown — it would serve nicely as background accompaniment showing how Singin' in the Rain kicks The Artist's ass on every level. 
When I wrote my review of The Artist, I admitted that I struggled to get a handle on the film. At first glance, it seems harmless but something gnawed at me. I watched it a second time before I wrote about it and figured out that it contained little beyond references and artifice. I did make a huge error on one point so blindingly obvious, I didn't see it at the time. I wrote, "Surprisingly, The Artist tends to steer clear of any direct references to the classic Singin' in the Rain… I don't think The Artist dared to go there because comparing it to Singin' in the Rain would be too dangerous. It can toss out references to great movies such as Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Sunset Blvd. because as a whole The Artist bears little resemblance to those films. Singin' in the Rain holds a mirror up to the essential emptiness inside The Artist."
How I missed the borderline plagiarism in both imagery and plot turns. (The Artist's George Valentin even transforms himself from an adventurer in films to a song-and-dance man just as Don Lockwood does in Singin' in the Rain only The Artist doesn't provide a backstory to show that Valentin had any previous musical experience; Kathy Selden similarly gets discovered by the studio head in the chorus of a musical, though she doesn't rise as Peppy does in The Artist because of other factors,) The only explanation I can propose for missing steals that obvious stems from The Artist being too pedestrian for me to notice its similarity to something that rises so much higher in the ranks of cinematic greatness. Back to the brilliant movie. Don asks Kathy what she plans to pursue as a career that allows her to look down so much on his profession and — surprise — her goal involves serious acting in the theater. She plans to move to New York eventually. Kathy manages to get Lockwood so steamed by the time she drops him off at his house that when he tries to depart with some cutting remarks, his coat stays behind in her car door, getting shredded further, much to Ms. Selden's delight. Don stomps inside his home while Kathy drives on, stopping at another house and asking a servant if it's R.F. Simpson's house, explaining that she's from The Cocoanut Grove. "For the floor show," the
servant says before pointing out where to park. Inside R.F.'s spacious mansion, the festivities commenced some time ago. Throngs of men surround Lina for a chance to light her cigarette; Olga Mara dominates the dance floor tangoing with some young buck; Cosmo makes time with a young lady with promises that he can get her into movies; R.F. holds court, wondering what's keeping Don. Lockwood finally appears in a tuxedo that hasn't been torn to pieces, but his spirits certainly could use boosting. He asks Cosmo if he thinks he's a good actor. "As long as Monumental Pictures signs my checks, I think you're the greatest actor in the world," Cosmo laughs before realizing that Lockwood isn't kidding around. He then tries to reassure Don sincerely. Don informs Cosmo he may need to be reminded occasionally. R.F greets Don, telling him that he's been holding his main attraction until he showed up. R.F. orders the movie screen opened, "A movie? We've just seen one," Don
declares. "This is a Hollywood party — it's the law," Cosmo responds. Simpson informs everyone that he's about to show them something this madman has been coming into his office and bugging him about for months. When he gets the signal that everything is ready, the lights go out. Shuffling papers echo throughout the room and the long narrow face of a mustachioed man (Julius Tannen) addresses the room. "Hello! This is a demonstration of a talking picture. Notice, it is a picture of me and I am talking. Note how my lips and the sound issuing from them are synchronized together in perfect unison." The party guests think it's a trick with one woman accusing R.F. of hiding behind the screen until Simpson speaks up behind here. After the clip ends, the opinions vary. "It's a toy," one man grunts. "It's a scream!" a woman shouts. "It's vulgar!" Olga proclaims. R.F. informs them that production already has started on Warner Bros.' first talkie, The Jazz Singer. "They'll lose their shirts," R.F. says with certitude. "What do you think of it, Dexter?" Simpson then asks of Monumental's biggest director, Roscoe Dexter (Douglas Fowley). "It'll never amount to a thing." Roscoe replies. "That's what they said about the horseless carriage," Cosmo adds. Unlike The Artist, everyone keeps their heads buried in the sand about the coming sound revolution instead of presenting it as only Valentin against the world — a much more realistic look at the state of the times in a flat-out comedy. After the partygoers finish laughing at the idea of talking pictures, R.F. announces another surprise for his "starlets" Don and Lina — and he takes the pair to another part of the room where a man wheels a huge cake in for all to see. It truly surprises Don when he sees who pops out of that cake — and he's ready to mock the "high standards" of Ms. Selden mercilessly (and we get to see Debbie Reynolds' first number of the movie).Where the clip ends, Don keeps pestering Kathy and a jealous Lina shows up. "Say, who is this dame anyway?" Lina wants to know. "Oh someone lofty and far above us all. She's an actress from the legitimate stage," Don informs Lina. Kathy has reached her limit and tells
Lockwood, "Here's something I learned from the movies" as she grabs a pie — only Don's reflexes are quick and Lina's aren't so she gets the face covered with cream pie as Kathy darts from the scene in horror while Lina screams. Lina vows to kill her despite Don's insistence that Kathy had been aiming at him. Cosmo, always willing to help a situation, tells Lina that she's never looked lovelier. "It was an accident," Don insists to Lina. "Sure. Happens to me five or six times a day," Cosmo adds. Lockwood, who could care less about Lina Lamont, goes off in search of Kathy Selden, leaving Lina alone and covered in pie, crying his name. The other Cocoanut Grove girls inform him that she just "took her things and bolted," Don runs outside in time to see her car speeding away. He yells her name to no avail. He starts to return to the party, but instead just looks off wistfully and smiles. According to film historian Rudy Behlmer on the DVD commentary, one of the early drafts of the screenplay called for Don to sing "All I Do Is Dream of You" as a ballad at his home while wearing pajamas. As much entertainment as Singin' in the Rain has provided so far, its excellence only will escalate in terms of comedy, songs and dance — and this behind-the-scenes Hollywood story harbors some doozies of behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories of its own.Tweet
Labels: 50s, Comden and Green, Cyd Charisse, Dassin, Debbie Reynolds, Donen, Gene Kelly, Gloria Swanson, Godard, H. Weinstein, Huston, Movie Tributes, Musicals, Oscars, Silents, Sondheim, Star Wars
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Friday, February 17, 2012
There is no point. That's the point.
By Edward Copeland
Tilda Swinton amazes. Each year, she delivers an incredible performance in a film that, in the hands of a Harvey Weinstein or experienced studio marketing team, would most assuredly land her in the best actress Oscar field. Granted, Swinton won an Oscar in the supporting category for Michael Clayton, but she's missed the cut three years running for Julia, I Am Love and now We Need to Talk About Kevin. The big difference this year is that I believe more saw We Need to Talk About Kevin than the two previous films since Swinton won several critic awards and was nominated for both the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards. Academy voters tend to skew more conservatively and I suspect they couldn't bring themselves to mark their ballots for a performance in a film so distinctly bizarre.
Directed by Lynne Ramsay from a screenplay she and Rory Kinnear adapted from the novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin tells, in a very disjointed fashion, the story of Eva (Swinton), an artist by trade, suburban wife and mother by choice, attempting to come to grips with her guilt over the wreckage caused by her son, Kevin. The movie isn't told in a linear direction, perhaps in an attempt to surprise the audience by dropping out-of-sequence clues like breadcrumbs left to mark a meandering path back out of the woods. However, given the title, the visuals and snippets of scenes that obviously come after the incident happened, it should be clear what kind of horror took place, if only in the abstract and not the specific. The trailer and discussion of the movie pretty well gives it away anyway, so fretting about spoilers seems pointless. However, if you don't know what occurs in We Need to Talk About Kevin, plan to see the film and suspect foreknowledge could ruin that experience, just cease reading this now.
When I described the movie's story as being told in a nonlinear way, that's a bit of an understatement. This isn't simply a film that's not told in chronological order like innumerable works throughout cinematic history such as Orson Welles' Citizen Kane or Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. For one thing, only in director Lynne Ramsay's dreams would We Need to Talk About Kevin be mentioned in the same breath as Citizen Kane or Pulp Fiction, at least as far as quality goes. Secondly, the film has been edited by Joe Bini as if all the movie's scenes had been handed over cut into single frames and then tossed in the air as if someone had asked him if he'd ever played 52 Card Pickup. We don't stay in one spot very long. It makes Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, which I once described as being made for people with the attention spans of gnats, look as if it moved at the pace of Tarkovsky's Solaris. This isn't meant to be complimentary. Bini has edited practically everything Werner Herzog has made both fictional and documentary since Little Dieter Needs to Fly, so this is not his usual style even if he did have to cut the execrable The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans.
It's a shame that Ramsay chose to employ this method to tell the story because it drains We Need to Talk About Kevin of any emotional power. For that matter, it also saps the opportunity to approach the material in any of the myriad ways it hints that it might in the brief segments that will pop up occasionally such as dark satire or horror. It never slows down long enough to explore the idea that Eva's husband Franklin (John C. Reilly, who seems either terribly miscast or was directed to play his role as if he were a clueless parent in a John Hughes film) raises that Eva resented her son Kevin from birth and every time she accuses the little bastard of doing some awful thing, Franklin insists, "He's just a little boy" and buys him fancier and more expensive bow and arrow sets as he ages.
We don't get those conversations in depth though because that would require stopping the fast-forward button and watching a scene play out. It takes their young daughter losing one of her eyes "in an accident" and the 15-year-old Kevin finally showing Dad his callous side for Franklin to catch on that he and his wife should have been on eBay looking for a Dagger of Megiddo to slay their own little Damien. The movie tosses in a brief scene of humor that seems out of place where men come to Eva's door after the high school massacre selling Christianity. One asks if she knows where she's going in the afterlife. "Oh! Yes! I do as a matter of fact. I'm going straight to hell. Eternal damnation, the whole bit. Thanks for asking," Eva replies before shutting the door.
That this chopped-up mess of a movie actually produced two great performances almost makes me believe in miracles. I assume that happened because they filmed scenes whole and then just butchered them later, but they couldn't ruin the performances trapped within. Swinton, as you would expect, delivers one of the two great portrayals. The other bravura turn comes from young Ezra Miller, so good in a completely different type of role in Another Happy Day, who plays Kevin from age 15 on. I also should praise the even younger Jasper Newell, who plays Kevin from ages 6-8. He's very good as well and matches Miller well physically.
As funny as Miller was in Another Happy Day, he's frightening here, even when forced to deliver some of the kitchen sink of topics that get thrown against the wall for a few minutes. Miller gets a good speech where he blames what he did on everyone's favorite target (after violent video games) — television. Never mind that the movie shows no scenes indicating the tube exerted undue influence on Kevin. It's just required to list one of those easy scapegoat favorites: It's the "Why did the teen go mad?" equivalent of Claude Rains' Renault's order in Casablanca to "Round up the usual suspects." Now, it isn't clear if Kevin really is appearing on television or if Eva, who's sleeping on a couch, just dreams his appearance where he says:
"I mean, it's gotten so bad that half the time the people on TV, the people inside the TV, they're watching TV. And what are all these people watching? People like me. And what are all of you doing right now but watching me? You don't think they'd change the channel by now if all I did was get an A in geometry?"
It may be true, but it ain't Paddy Chayefsky. I wasn't the biggest fan of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, but it had more to say coherently about school violence in the post-Columbine era. The brief bit that touched upon the subject in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls packed a bigger punch and came as more of a surprise. Just on a purely realistic level, once we finally see the sequence where Kevin massacres many of his classmates, how in the hell would he have been able to go on that long using a bow and an arrow as his weapon? We're supposed to believe that no one in that school could have swarmed him one of the numerous times he had to load a new arrow which was every time?
The filmmakers behind We Need to Talk About Kevin undermined their film in practically every conceivable way. It's a shame because two talented performers poured their hearts into characters for a film that treated their work as little more than jigsaw puzzle pieces and obviously had no idea in their collective heads what tone they wanted, what message to convey or even if they had any ideas lurking in their skulls at all.
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Labels: 10s, Awards, Chayefsky, H. Weinstein, HBO, Herzog, John C. Reilly, John Hughes, Oscars, Rains, Tarantino, Television, Tilda Swinton, Van Sant, Welles
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Wednesday, December 14, 2011
My Week with Halle
By Eddie Selover
Nobody knows about this but me and her. The tabloids never suspected. It was private, just between us. I want to protect that. But on the other hand, several days have passed since it ended, so I guess it’s OK to finally talk about it.
I spent a week with Halle Berry. Yes, me, Eddie Selover! Just a nobody. Until now.
It happened in Spain. Halle’s over there making a movie with Tom Hanks. She’ll be there for a while longer, because she broke her leg chasing a goat. Spain, ay caramba…there are goats everywhere. And the ground is so rocky! You really have to be careful. Anyway, she’s on the mend now, that’s the important thing. Heal fast, Baby.
On the set of this picture, I was at the bottom of the food chain. The lowest of the low. I mean even lower than the screenwriter. But there must have been something about me. Maybe because we’re the same age. Well, I’m ten years older, but you know. It was a chemistry we had, and I’m not just talking about the physical, though that was certainly there on my part. We had an understanding; we knew it the minute we looked in each other’s eyes. I’ll always remember how hers narrowed when she first looked at me. And her first words.
“Could you get me a cup of tea? Right away…?”
Soon we were inseparable. A gentleman doesn’t reveal the details, but there is one thing I want to talk about, and that was the night we watched a movie together. It was that new one about how Marilyn Monroe went to England back in the 1950s to make a film with Laurence Olivier. As an Academy member, Halle had a screener from Harvey Weinstein, and she insisted on watching it in bed. With me!
Who was I to refuse? So I climbed in with her.
“Watch my leg.”
“I can’t take my eyes off it.”
“And stop with the James Bond impression. It’s getting old.”
“Someone’s in a bad mood.”
She gave me that look I’d come to know so well. And then the movie began.
So turns out it’s about this guy, Colin Clark, who wangled a job as an assistant to Olivier and then worked on The Prince and the Showgirl, a film version of a play Sir Laurence had done on stage. In it, the Showgirl was played by Marilyn Monroe, who had bought the property, and hired Olivier to co-star and direct. Here, Olivier is played by Kenneth Branagh and Monroe by Michelle Williams.
I’ve seen The Prince and the Showgirl, actually. The plot is very thin: it’s a little one-situation comedy about a middle-European prince who invites a showgirl up to his chambers with the intention of seducing her, and how she evades him through a combination of innocence and guile. Olivier plays it with a monocle and a Dracula accent, very stiff and formal, and no humor whatsoever. Monroe looks fantastic, maybe the best she ever looked, and she’s very charming. But they don’t get any chemistry going. Partly because the film is nothing more than a very long tease (the best thing about it is the original poster, which shows Olivier pinning a ribbon on Monroe’s barely-there dress, and the words “Some countries have a medal for everything!”). Partly too it’s the difference in their acting styles: his all cold surface detail and polish; hers warm, spontaneous and messy.
The new movie gets a lot of comedy, in fact most of its comedy, out of this clash. The movie’s Olivier is arrogant, egomaniacal and rude — Monroe thwarts and frustrates him at every turn, and he’s driven half mad by her lateness, her poor memory, her retinue of coaches and enablers. What finally drives him over the brink is his realization that despite her lack of formal acting training, she wipes him off the screen when they’re on it together. (This isn’t really accurate; they both come across vividly in The Prince and the Showgirl, but the film is like a gleaming gold-plated serving dish with a mackerel and a marshmallow sitting on it.) Branagh makes a very funny Olivier, biting down on every last syllable and modulating his voice from a whisper to a roar. He takes many of the Great Man’s mannerisms and gives them a campy spin, for example rolling his eyes toward heaven in supplication, then lowering them suddenly and pursing his lips. He portrays Olivier and sends him up at the same time, and he’s the best thing in the movie.
Michelle Williams is not so juicy. She does an effective, almost eerie job of evoking Monroe, both the wide-eyed mock-innocent dumbbell and the pouting, soulful little-girl-lost. But it’s all evocation. Marilyn Monroe was ferociously, incandescently alive on the screen. It’s not just that Williams doesn’t have Monroe's looks or her amazing body. She doesn’t have her feral quality, the intense aggressive sexuality that flashes out in moments that are still startling to watch. Like Elvis Presley, Monroe was an extraordinary personality who bypassed traditional notions of “acting.” At her best, as with Olivier, she made conventional acting look stilted and contrived, but at her worst (usually in drama), with no real technique or training to draw on, she could be repetitive, self-involved, and amateurish. Williams is just the opposite — she’s all brains and technique, but no fire. It’s an Indie performance, small and readable and finely wrought. But this is a movie about giants (it also includes portraits of Vivien Leigh, Arthur Miller, Sybil Thorndike) and you can’t help noticing there are no giants around to play them.
In any case, the main character isn’t really Monroe, or Olivier. Like I said, it’s about this guy Colin Clark. The movie is supposedly based on his true story, as recounted in his published diary and in his book The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me. In Clark’s account, as a fresh-faced 24 year old, he was the only one on the set Monroe could relate to, and after her new husband Miller deserted her to return to America, she turned to Clark for comfort. The only person with no agenda, it seems (though he later went on to write two books and sell them to the movies). The central part of the movie is about Colin and Marilyn’s very special week, after they sneak away from the set to go frolicking around the English countryside. They walk aimlessly through a park, they go skinny dipping, she’s turned on by his innocence, and they share a kiss. If this seems like a particularly puerile fantasy involving borrowed bits of The Misfits, Something’s Got to Give, and Bus Stop, that’s because it is. You get tired of watching Eddie Redmayne's Colin stare wonderingly at Monroe, wet eyed and open mouthed, or for variety, the other way around. She opens herself up to him and reveals her hurts, her fears and insecurities, and they fall for each other, sort of. Alas, she has to go back to being Marilyn Monroe and he has to go back to being…well, who cares, really? All they had was their one magical time together, but it’s a time that changed them both. In fact, the movie is named for it: My Week with Marilyn.
What a coincidence, right? Especially considering who I watched it with! When it was over, Halle shifted discontentedly under the covers.
“This thing is unbelievable.”
“Why thank you.”
“Cut it out, Mr. Bond. I was talking about the movie. Harvey may manage to snag Michelle an Oscar, but I don’t buy a word of it.”
She saw my expression, and gave me one of her enigmatic smiles. Then she put her face close. The eternal temptress.
“Could you go for some popcorn?”
“Great idea, I’m starving!”
“No, seriously, I can’t get out of bed. Go get me some popcorn. Now.”
It was a long week we had together, Halle and me. But I will never, ever forget it.
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Labels: 10s, Arthur Miller, Books, Branagh, Elvis, H. Weinstein, Marilyn, Michelle Williams, Nonfiction, Olivier, V. Leigh
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Friday, July 01, 2011
We gave them virtue, they want vice
there lived a very successful motion picture producer named Felix Farmer.
He owned three beautiful houses, he had two lovely children and he was married to a gorgeous movie star. The people who ran the studio where he worked loved and admired him because he had never made
a movie that had lost money. Then one day he produced the biggest most expensive motion picture
of his career…and it flopped. The people who ran the studio were very angry at Felix
because they lost millions of dollars…
and Felix lost his mind.
By Edward Copeland
We see that title crawl after brief credits run while Julie Andrews as actress Sally Miles plays Gillian West in her producer husband Felix Farmer's multimillion extravaganza Night Wind. That photo above doesn't do justice to how garish that set is as Sally as Gillian cavorts with life-size toys dancing and singing "Polly Wolly Doodle" (There are even singing balloons and a Jack in the Box). It has to be seen. Click here. You can believe from that scene alone that Night Wind truly stinks as much as they say it does, though how they could calculate on its opening weekend that it's "the lowest-grossing film of all time," seems a bit suspect. I would imagine films that never open would have lower grosses. Maybe the biggest money loser in relation to cost? Oh, who cares? We're not here to be serious or particularly realistic. We're here to pay tribute to the 30th anniversary of writer-director Blake Edwards' mad spoof of the movie business. Blessed with an unbelievably large and talented cast, S.O.B. isn't as sophisticated as Robert Altman's The Player would be a little more than a decade later and its satire isn't as sharp as Sidney Lumet's film of Paddy Chayefsky's take on the television industry was in Network a mere five years earlier, but it was and remains damn funny.
That crawl scrolls against the blue sky over Malibu beach where a man (Stiffe Tanney) jogs with his dog (Troubles). He suddenly suffers a heart attack and though he manages to crawl toward the deck of a large beachhouse and the dog barks up a storm, no one notices his emergency and he collapses. It sets the tone for an underlying theme that afflicts most of the film's characters: obliviousness, mostly stemming from self-absorption. As a result, a man drops dead on a beach with his dog barking loudly even though people keep coming and going on the deck a few feet above where a catatonic Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) sits among the trades reporting Night Wind's failure.
(A smaller headline in Variety reads N.Y. Critics Break 'Wind' — Edwards' humor doesn't always aim for the highbrow. Though from the descriptive crawl, you'd think that Felix is the film's main character. While S.O.B., which does not stand for what you think it does, revolves around him and his movie, the film truly stands as an ensemble piece. No character really serves as lead even though Andrews and William Holden as the film's director Tim Culley get top billing, all the other significant characters are listed alphabetically. In fact, Felix remains in his non-speaking state of depressed madness for a long time. When he does snap out of it and taks 44 minutes into the film, Mulligan at first does it in a way very reminiscent of reactions his character of Burt Campbell on television's Soap sometimes did.While S.O.B. retains its power to make me laugh decades after I first saw the movie, I have to admit that re-watching it for the first time in a long time, I found more problems than before, but not as an entertainment rather in how it chooses to take its shots at the always worthy target of movie studios. I first saw S.O.B. on cable when I was a teenager but as I've grown up, not only have my tastes grown more refined, so has my knowledge of how the film industry works. S.O.B. works on many comic levels, but this time the ludicrous nature of its story took me out of the movie at times. The crawl set up the basic premise, but it's more complicated than that. Even though Night Wind has opened to terrible reviews and
worse box office, Capitol Studios President David Blackman (Robert Vaughn) desperately tries to get his top executive Dick Benson (Larry Hagman, taking the relatively minor role when he was white hot as J.R. on Dallas, having just finished the season that resolved "Who Shot J.R.?") to talk to Felix so they can jerk the film out of theaters and do a major editing job on it which they can't do because of Farmer's ironclad contract that only allows him to make changes. Sure, there was a re-edited version of Leone's Once Upon a Time in America a few years later, but that wasn't a wide release. Blackman himself has been getting pressure from the chairman of the corporation that owns Capitol Studios, Harry Sandler, played by longtime dependable Hollywood character actor Paul Stewart whose first credited film role was the butler Raymond in Citizen Kane. Now, the studio and everyone involved in Night Wind had to know it was a turkey before it opened, so why didn't they try to get him to re-edit it before it opened? You can't tell me they didn't hold test screenings. He might have had a contract that stopped anyone else from making changes, but I doubt it required Capitol Studios to give it a wide release.While that part of the movie doesn't pass the credibility test, even for a farce, other aspects do. Sally and her team worry about damage to her career and Sally would like to exit the marriage. She gets conflicting advice from her attorney Herb (Robert Loggia), her press agent Ben Coogan (Robert Webber) and her agent Eva Brown (Shelley
Winters). While Loggia wants to help extricate her from the marriage, the agents advise against it. Eva in particular reminds her client that her image couldn't withstand a divorce or even a separation, especially now. "You know this town, sweetie. You can smoke dope and end up going steady with your Afghan and you're one of the gang, but you — you're Peter Pan," Eva tells her. Winters is a riot as is just about everyone in this sparkling cast and the cast makes the film overcome its weaknesses. There also are many hints of autobiography and inside jokes sprinkled throughout. Andrews never really played Peter Pan, but she did have that Mary Poppins/Maria von Trapp image. In real life, Edwards did cope with serious depression and supposedly studio interference on Darling Lili inspired S.O.B. Ironically, Hagman's mother Mary Martin originated the roles of both Peter Pan and Maria von Trapp when the characters made their stage musical debuts.The studio finally dispatches his good friend and the film's director Culley (Holden) to the beachhouse to keep watch on him and see if he can pull Farmer back to the real world. Culley is a hard-drinking womanizer. Culley, always on the lookout for young women to decorate his surroundings, picks up
two hitchhikers on the way, Lila and Babs (Jennifer Edwards, Blake's daughter; and Rosanna Arquette in a very early role). At Farmer's house, the servants and the man who mows the yard are so oblivious to what goes on around them that they don't notice when Felix heads to the garage, starts the Cadillac and closes the garage door again. The gardener (Bert Rosario) doesn't get an inkling until he finds a dead rat. When the gardener puts the mower up, he smells the carbon monoxide and sees Felix's red eyes staring at him through the car's rear window. "Not such a good idea to sit in here with the motor running," he tells Felix as he reaches inside to try to cut the engine. Instead, he shifts it into drive and the Caddy crashes through the back of the garage, down the beach and into the ocean, just in time for Culley, Lila and Babs to stare in disbelief.
Felix's attempt at suicide introduces us to the greatest asset that S.O.B. has — Robert Preston as physician to the stars, Dr. Irving Finegarten. Blake Edwards wrote Preston the part of Toddy for his next film, Victor/Victoria, and earned Preston his only Oscar nomination, but as great as he is there, I think his Irving Finegarten is even better. Once he joins the film, he enlivens every scene he's in. When Robert Webber's character Ben, though he works for Sally, starts feeling guilty and spends most of his time hanging out with Irving and Culley, a comic troika for the ages forms. Irving mildly sedates Felix and they sit around the bar. Ben has turned into a wreck. Irving suggests giving Ben a vitamin shot. As he removes bottle after bottle from his medical bag, Dr. Finegarten has second thoughts. "Come to think of it, why should I give you a vitamin shot? I'm the one with the hangover," Irving declares.
Before I forget, when Felix's car ended up in the ocean, it did attract police interest and they did discover the poor dead man and, after subduing the dog, retrieved the corpse who was identified as veteran character actor Burgess Webster. The dog escaped and continued to hang out on the beach. Irving didn't give Felix that strong a dose apparently because he wanders downstairs and that obliviousness theme continues as Ben follows him, trying to talk, not noticing as Felix sticks his head in the oven or scrounges successfully for rope and returns upstairs. Ben soon panics with the arrival of gossip columnist Polly Reed (Loretta Swit) at the front door. Everyone tries to ignore her, but then they can hear she's sneaking in the back. Irving whispers, "This reminds me of a scene in The Thing when a terrible monster is just on the other side of a door" which only sets Ben off more. Polly comes in cooing for Felix while he's upstairs trying to hang himself. The beam doen't hold and he crashes through the floor, landing on Polly below. She ends up in the hospital in traction with multiple injuries. Irving gives him a stronger dose this time and Culley sits beside him and gives him a speech that seems especially prophetic, knowing what fate awaits Holden so soon after the film's release. It's spooky, since we know that a little more than four months later, Holden would get drunk alone at home, fall, hit his head on the corner of a nightstand and bleed to death. This was his last film.
"Felix, for the last 40 years I've lived a life of dedicated debauchery. I've consumed enough booze to destroy a dozen healthy livers. I've filled my lungs with enough nicotine to poison the entire population of Orange County. I've engaged in sexual excesses that make Caligula look like a celibate monk. I have, in fact, conscientiously, day in and day out, for more years than you've been in this best of all possible worlds, tried to kill myself and I've never felt better in my life. So, if you're really going to end it all, I can show you at least a half-dozen better ways to do it."
This being Hollywood, everyone is sleeping with everyone else and cheating as one might expect. David Blackman's girlfriend Mavis (Marisa Berenson) also is seeing an up-and-coming young actor Sam Marshall (David Young) on the side. When Culley takes Lila to the store, they run into Sam who invites Culley to a party he's having in Malibu that night. Culley regretfully declines, but hits upon the idea that perhaps a party will lift Felix's spirits so Sam agrees to move the party there. It's really the key scene in the movie with most of the film's character's there. It reminds me of Blake Edwards' 1968 film The Party with Peter Sellers, which I never was that big a fan of, but it has that sort of feel with the wacky orgiastic vibe that occurs — only he could do a lot more in a R-rated 1981 film than a pre-rating system 1968 one. Lots of sex, drugs and punchlines a-plenty. Even the cops who came earlier when Felix's car ended up in the ocean, come back for the party (and one of them is Joe Penny, whom some might remember from TV's Riptide).
Also showing up at the party are studio exec Dick Benson (Hagman), Polly Reed's henpecked husband Willard (Craig Stevens), who is supposed to do the spying for his wife, and loads of hot young men and women eager to engage in scenes that would seem more at home in the "free love" era than the
beginning of the 1980s. Felix eventually awakens from Dr. Finegarten's magic medicine and as he walks, he's too out of it to remember that there's a hole in the bedroom floor that has been covered with a rug and he steps on it and glides rather easily to the party below. He does notice that one of the partying cops took off his holster and left his gun on the bar. Felix takes the gun and returns to the refuge beneath the rug, trying to point feel the barrel so while he's covered and he can shoot himself through the rug. Before he can, a topless young woman crawls under the rug and presumably
a different gun goes off because soon Felix has fired the gun in the air a couple of times until he appears, pants down in that Burt-esque moment I alluded to earlier shouting, "Woohoo. I've got it!" The next thing we know, Felix, who hasn't said a word and who we've only seen as slow-moving, glum and silent has transformed into a ball of energy. He bursts into a bedroom where Culley is enjoying the company of a young lady and bellows, "Sex, Culley! That's the answer. We'll give 'em a $40 million pornographic epic." Having been preoccupied at the time and not accustomed to seeing Felix up and around lately, Culley expresses a bit of understandable confusion. Felix explains that the times have passed them by. People don't want the goody-goody stuff they've fed them for years, so they'll re-shoot it. Gillian West's dream will no longer be of childhood good times but of repressed fantasies. The world wants sex. David Blackman, Dick Benson (wearing a cast from an injury he sustained at the party; it's a recurring gag that almost everyone ends up in a cast — Polly's husband Willard got hurt as well and ends up in the same hospital room), and two other execs (John Pleshette, John Lawlor) wait impatiently for Farmer. They begin to
think it's a put-on until they begin to hear his voice over the speakers singing "Polly Wolly Doodle" and describing the Night Wind that they know — "But we blew it!" Felix shouts through a megaphone as he appears from behind the Jack in the Box. "Because dying fathers and lying mothers are a dime a dozen these days. Home and family have become civilization's antiques along with the flag, Sunday school, Girl Scout cookies, C.B. de Mille and virginity," Felix tells them. "We gave them virtue, they want vice. We sold them schmaltz, they prefer sadomasochism. Instead of the American dream, it should have been the American wet dream." What's funny is that, to some extent, the situation has reversed in 30 years. Movies made for adults — and I don't mean porn, but subject matter — almost have become an endangered species. Films that earn an R because they aren't for the younger set seem to be a rare breed. Live Free or Die Hard mumbled Bruce
Willis' signature line as John McClane so it could get that all-important PG-13. The King's Speech never deserved an R for its single scene where Colin Firth unleashes a string of fucks, but when it started winning awards Harvey Weinstein cut that scene just to get a PG-13 so it would earn more money. Excuse me. Back to S.O.B. Felix explains his plan to re-shoot parts of Night Wind to change it from a woman's dream of childhood to her Freudian nightmare. Turn Gillian West into a nymphomaniac businesswoman. He just needs a few million for a re-shoot. Blackman doesn't seem to be listening, but he does pull out his pages for suggestions they have for cuts that can be made to the current version. "Cutting won't help," Felix teases. Blackman yells about how much he went overbudget and Farmer rightfully goes back at him saying he didn't go to his office and hold a gun to his head and demand more money. They approved the script and the budget. Blackman is firm and is ready to walk out — until Felix offers to buy Night Wind back. The execs whisper and then they agree to sell the movie back to Farmer. Apparently, Felix has been very good with his money, though he still has to do some asset shuffling to get the funds ready to shoot. Felix must fend off someone who isn't very happy with him right now: His wife. Several million dollars of that money that Felix put together to fund the Night Wind re-shoot rightfully belongs to Sally. Felix tries to explain his plan to her, including having her do a nude scene. "Peter Pan is dead. Long live Gillian West, nymphomaniac executive," he tells her. Sally seeks the advice of her attorney Herb and her agent Eva. Herb agrees that she has plenty of grounds to sue to try to get her money back but Eva, who admits she's always there to protect Sally's image, has to ask, "What if Felix is right?" Maybe it's not a bad idea for Sally to take the chance and go against her image and possibly get a lot of money out of the deal. If it doesn't work, she always can sue him for everything later. Sally reluctantly agrees that she'll film the revised Night Wind.
Of course, getting Sally to that point is easier said than done, even if she has agreed to do it. She's too nervous. Everyone wants to be there on the set to see what happens that day. Polly Reed makes them take her by ambulance but a guard that Felix has hired named Harold Harrigan (Ken Swofford) refuses to let her in. Blackman and his toadies show up in a golf cart and Harrigan tells them to shove off as well. Blackman tells
Harrigan he won't work in Hollywood again. Felix may have control of the set, but it does reside on Capitol Studio's lot, so Blackman does succeed in having Harrigan tossed off. When Ben hears that Polly lurks, he lets her in and the two ambulance attendants are forced to hold her upright to watch. In her dressing room, nothing Felix, Culley or anyone can say can convince her to do the scene. Thankfully, Dr. Irving and his bag of tricks are on the scene (play clip above) to help and an artificially high Sally is ready to film the scene. Culley escorts her back to the set. "You know you are sexually notorious," Sally tells Culley. "A semi-fraudulent reputation which I do everything I can to encourage," Culley admits. Sally asks why he does that. "Because it's the best way for an old man to compete in a young man's world," Cully replies. Polly waves at Sally, trying to get her attention. Sally finally recognizes her, then asks, "Did you come to see my boobies?"When S.O.B. opened, reviews varied, but it was hard to hear them above the noise about Julie Andrews baring her breasts in a film for the first time. That trumped everything else about the movie. It doesn't help that the way it happens in the movie-within-the-movie makes it all about Sally Miles baring her breasts. It's not as if it comes in a Gillian West love scene, nymphomaniac or not, but it just comes at the end of a new dark dream sequence (Jack in the Box is now Jock in the Box and a stalker). As Jock chases Gillian through a maze and she enters the devil's mouth, the music builds to a crescendo, she holds out her hand for Jock to stop and simply pulls down the front of her dress and unveils her breasts. (To see something completely bizarre, here is a YouTube clip where you can see a great deal of the sequence except it has been set to the Chris de Burgh song "Lady in Red." I recommend hitting mute and just looking at the images.) Everyone present applauds, including the ambulance attendants who drop Polly as a result. Sally smiles gratefully and covers herself, before collapsing. However, this is Hollywood and scheming usually is going on. Sally's personal secretary Gary (Stuart Margolin) never has been trustworthy but he's been talking to Eva behind Sally's back in hopes of getting a career of his own. Now that Capitol Studios has no part of Night Wind, all the buzz that has been building has made the corporate boss bug Blackman about why they don't have a piece of it in case it turns into a hit. As a result, the studio has been using Eva who has been dangling a job in front of Gary in exchange for him putting the idea in Sally's head that since she technically owns half the film, she should sell distribution rights to Capitol since Felix can't very well distribute it himself. Sally agrees to do it and a judge backs up her right to do it. Felix, however, doesn't learn of it until after he screens a final cut of it with Cully and the lights come up in the screening room to reveal Blackman and his toadies. Blackman shows him the legal documents which basically means Night Wind has been stolen from him. Since his original contract was voided, they can do what they want. Blackman asks what the running time is. When he's told 164 minutes, he says they'll have to cut that.
Felix drives like a maniac, first going to his other house looking for Sally, but she's gone somewhere in the Far East to visit some kind of swami. He does see his kids briefly who want to play with daddy and squirt him with a squirt gun, which he takes. He even plows a car through the kitchen of the Malibu home. Because he's been speeding and driving recklessly, police have been pursuing him, but somehow he's able to switch cars and escape. He drives to the office where the original negative is stored in a vault. When he gets in the building, a friendly voice surprises him: It's Harrigan. He's working security there now. Felix is too preoccupied for small talk. He goes to the office of a Mr. Lipschitz (Hamilton Camp) and makes him take him to the film at "gunpoint." As Felix leads Lipschitz and the reels to the lobby, the squirt gun aimed at Lipschitz's head, Harrigan tries to calm him since by then a lot of armed police have arrived. Some distraction makes Felix aim the gun toward the cops and he gets hit by a fusillade of bullets. Harrigan leans over the dying producer. "I'm sorry, Mr. Farmer," Harrigan says. "It's alright, Harrigan. It'll mean another $10 million at the box office," Farmer tells him before he dies.
At this point, the film divides half into Hollywood hypocrisy, half into the funniest part of the film as the three characters most disgusted by Felix's treatment band together on a bender: Culley, Irving and Ben. It begins at a bar where Sinatra's "All the Way" begins playing and Culley informs them that he just put $6 of Sinatra into the jukebox. Ben, having worked for Sally, who they feel stabbed Felix in the back, feels the worst and tries to convince Culley to beat the shit out of him in the hope it will make him feel better. It's in this scene that we learn that the S.O.B. of the title stands for Standard Operational Bullshit, according to Ben. Culley agrees, lamenting that there are "so few people in this town with a conscience." Meanwhile, the rest of the industry plans a huge memorial service where Sally plans to sing and they all will pretend they treated him decently. The drunken trio, who christen themselves The Three Muscatels at one point, all agree they won't take part in the sham, which will be presided over by the guru Sally met in the Far East (Larry Storch). Sall also will sing. The triumvirate decides that they are going to give Felix the memorial he deserves and set out to steal Felix's body from the funeral home. Apparently, this is based on a Hollywood legend that director Raoul Walsh stole John Barrymore's corpse after he died and propped him up to scare Errol Flynn, but what the fictional characters do with Felix is a bit more elaborate.
When they get to the funeral home, the first coffin they check is no one they know. The next contains the late character actor Burgess Webster. The third time turns out to be the charm and they find Felix. Feeling that Webster's death hasn't received the attention it deserved, when they remove Felix, they put Webster in
his coffin and the other guy in Webster's. Upstairs, the couple (Byron Kane, Virginia Gregg) that owns the funeral parlor salivate over how much business the Farmer funeral will bring them when they hear a noise downstairs. They find the empty coffin but locate the body in Webster's place and Webster in Farmer's. The husband is beside himself: Their cash cow is gone. His wife slams the lid on Farmer's coffin, now holding Webster. "Who's to know?" On the streets, after initial difficulty bending Felix into the car, they make Ben sit in the back with him because he's been having a bad night of bodily functions and as Irving points out Felix is the only one who won't mind. They stick some sunglasses on Felix and proceed to drive him back to Culley's where they drink and play cards with Felix as guest. It was funny for a time when I'd see the movie because from the years 1989-2000, the only actor in these scenes who was still alive was Richard Mulligan, who was playing the corpse. As they wonder what they should do with Felix, Culley fetches something from another room and places it on Felix's head. It's a Viking helmet for a Viking funeral.The next morning, the men take Felix out to sea on his boat to prepare for their salute. At the same time, the rest of the industry begins gathering on a soundstage at the Capitol Studio lot for Felix's funeral. The
occasion doesn't stop anyone from continuing their deals or their affairs. Blackman congratulates Sam Harris on his new role and whispers to Mavis that he better be worth it, not noticing that Sam's hand is up Mavis' skirt. Gary and Eva finalize their deal. All the people with various injuries wheel in. Sally tells Gary that she doesn't know if she'll be able to sing. "You have to — it's the only reason everybody came," Gary says. Her guru sits up on the stage looking as if he can barely stay awake. Finally, he's roused and stands to give his eulogy. Is it full of Eastern philosophy? Not hardly. It's as show bizzy as it can be. This is where some of the unreality takes over again. Felix was shot and killed before the film was released and still in the funeral home, yet the guru gives new box office reports on the revised Night Wind. Farmer also was supposed to have had a record of nothing but hits prior to the first version of Night Wind, but when the guru reads off the list of his film titles they all sound ridiculous. Here is a clip of the eulogy so you can see what I mean.
As Culley drives the boat, Irving and Ben sit on deck with Felix in the fisherman's seat, complete with rod and reel in hand. Ben wonders what happens if he should catch something. Back at the other memorial, Sally finally rises and sings "Oh Promise Me." Irving reads the inscription on the Viking helmet which reads "From the cast and crew of The Pagan Plunder." "I don't think I saw that one," Irving says. "Terrible reviews," Ben tells him. "Grossed a fortune." Once Culley feels they've gone far enough out, they load Felix into a little wooden craft, cover him in blankets, soak it with gasoline and then Irving lights a match and drops it and Culley pulls the boat away as it starts burning. "So long pal," Culley says as they watch Felix and the little boat burn. Back on the beach, Burgess Webster's dog can see the smoke and wags his tail. Then a final crawl scrolls across the screen.
in motion picture history and Sally won another Academy Award and the people who ran the studio made
a ton of money and they all lived happily ever after…
until the next movie!
S.O.B. isn't the finest Hollywood satire ever made, but it's likely to put a smile on your face thanks to its great cast, most especially Robert Preston who I really can't say enough about here.
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Labels: 80s, Altman, Blake Edwards, Chayefsky, Colin Firth, Erroll Flynn, H. Weinstein, Holden, Julie Andrews, K. Douglas, Leone, Lumet, Movie Tributes, R. Preston, Richard Mulligan, Shelley Winters, Sinatra, Walsh, Willis
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