Saturday, May 19, 2012
Centennial Tributes: Richard Brooks Part II
By Edward Copeland
We pick up our tribute to Richard Brooks in 1956. If you missed Part I, click here. Of Brooks' two 1956 releases, I've only seen one of them. The Last Hunt stars Stewart Granger as a rancher who loses all his cattle to a stampeding herd of buffalo. Robert Taylor plays a buffalo hunter who asks him to join in an expedition to slaughter the animals, but the rancher, an ex-buffalo hunter himself, had quit because he'd grown weary of the killing. Brooks may be the auteur of antiviolence. Filmed in Technicolor Cinemascope, I imagine it looked great on the big screen. Bosley Crowther wrote in his New York Times review, "Even so, the killing of the great bulls—the cold-blooded shooting down of them as they stand in all their majesty and grandeur around a water hole—is startling and slightly nauseating. When the bullets crash into their heads and they plunge to the ground in grotesque heaps it is not very pleasant to observe. Of course, that is as it was intended, for The Last Hunt is aimed to display the low and demoralizing influence of a lust for slaughter upon the nature of man." The second 1956 film I did see and given the talents involved and the paths it would take, it's a fairly odd tale. The Catered Affair was the third and last film in Richard Brooks' entire directing career that he also didn't write or co-write.
It began life as a teleplay by the great Paddy Chayefsky in 1955 called A Catered Affair starring Thelma Ritter, J. Pat O'Malley and Pat Henning before its adaptation for the big screen the following year, the same journey Chayefsky's Marty took that ended up in Oscar glory. This time, Chayefsky didn't adapt his work for the movies — Gore Vidal did. Articles of speech changed in its title as well as the teleplay A Catered Affair became The Catered Affair for Brooks' film. (Chayefsky apparently wasn't a particular fan of this work of his — it never was published or appeared in a collection of his scripts.) We're at the point where the project just got screwy. The simple story concerns an overbearing Irish mom in the Bronx determined to give her daughter a ritzy wedding because of the bragging she hears her future in-laws go on about describing the nuptials thrown for their girls. Despite the fact that the Hurley family lacks the funds for it, Mrs. Hurley stays determined while her husband Tom sighs — he's been saving to buy his own cab. On TV, the casting of Ritter and O'Malley for certain sounded appropriate. For the film, which added characters since it had to expand the length, the cast appeared to have been picked out of a hat because they certainly didn't seem related, most didn't register as Irish and as for being from the Bronx — fuhgeddaboudit. Meet Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hurley, better known to you as Ernest Borgnine and
Bette Davis. Unlikely match though they be, somehow their genes combined and out popped the most Bronx-like of Irish girls — Debbie Reynolds. The new character of Uncle Jack does add a bit of real Irish flavor by tossing in Barry Fitzgerald for no apparent reason. Unbelievably, it made the list of the top 10 films of the year from the National Board of Review who also named Reynolds best supporting actress (nothing against Reynolds in general — just miscast here). You would think that this Affair would fade into oblivion, but you'd be wrong. In 2008, it changed articles again and re-emerged on the Broadway stage as the musical A Catered Affair. Faith
Prince and Tom Wopat(Yes — that Tom Wopat of Luke Duke fame) earned Tony nominations as the parents, Harvey Fierstein wrote the book and played the uncle (named Winston) and John Bucchino wrote the score. Why did Brooks make this one? Easy. He was under contract. MGM told him to make it, so he had no choice. From Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks, some of the cast talked on record about how Brooks could be a bit of a prick as a director. "I didn't know it at the time, but Brooks ate and digested actors for breakfast," Borgnine said later. "If things weren't working, he let you know it, and not gently." When a particular scene was not working to his satisfaction, (Brooks) ordered Borgnine and Davis to figure out the problem. Borgnine suggested a different pacing and Davis agreed the scene was better for it — as did (Brooks), though he offered Borgnine not praise but a putdown. 'Goddamn thinking actor.'" Reynolds also tells the author Douglass K. Daniel that from the first day she met Brooks he told her that he didn't want her in the part, but it wasn't his decision. "'He said he was stuck with me and he'd do the best he could with me,' Reynolds recalled. 'He hoped I could come through all right with him, because everybody else was so great, but he wasn't certain I could keep up with the others. He actually said he was stuck with me. And he said so in front of everybody, too. He was so cruel.'" Davis and Borgnine coached Reynolds on the side and Bette, not known to be a shrinking violet, told Reynolds once, according to the book, "'Don't pay any attention to him, the son of a bitch,' Davis told her. 'The only important thing is to work with the greats.'" Davis did get help from Brooks in her fight against the studio that a Bronx housewife shouldn't be wearing movie star costumes they wanted, so he supported her decision to buy clothes at a store like Mrs. Hurley would shop at in real life. Years later, Davis referred to Brooks as one of the greats. This wasn't the first time Brooks had treated a young actress oddly on a set, Anne Francis told Douglass Daniel for his book that he practically ignored her during the filming of Blackboard Jungle and she received no direction at all. Daniel suggests and, given the way Brooks ordered Borgnine and Davis to come up with an idea to fix a scene, that writing had been his greatest gift, he grew into a solid visual storyteller, but Brooks proved limited when it came to directing actors. Daniel wrote, "…(the accounts of Francis and Reynolds) suggested he had a limited ability to communicate what he wanted. He either paid them little attention…or tried to bully a performance from them." Despite that problem, 10 actors in Brooks-directed films earned Oscar nominations and three took home the statuette.
The following year, Brooks made another film that revolved around the hunt of an animal, though that just leads to much bigger issues in Something of Value, sometimes known as Africa Ablaze. Starring Rock Hudson and filmed in Kenya, the film, which I haven't seen, concerns tensions that erupt between formerly friendly colonial white settlers and the Kenyan tribesmen. It also began a run of films that Brooks adapted from serious literary sources. Something of Value had been written by Robert C. Ruark, a former journalist like Brooks, who fictionalized his experiences being present in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion. In 1958, the two authors he adapted carried names more prestigious and recognizable. The first movie released derived from a particularly literary source and Brooks didn't do all that heavy lifting alone. Julius and Philip Epstein did the original adaptation, working from the English translation of the novel by Constance Garnett before Brooks began his work writing a worthwhile screenplay that didn't run more than two-and-a-half hours out of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. It wasn't easy. Brooks told Daniel that he "wrestled with the book for four months." What surprised me to learn, also according to what Brooks told Daniels, MGM assigned Karamazov to him. Brooks also said that he never initiated any of his films while under contract at MGM. I love Dostoyevsky. Hell, even a master such as Kurosawa couldn't pull off a screen adaptation of The Idiot. The only aspect of this film that holds your attention — actually it would be more accurate to say grabs you by your throat and keeps you awake for his moments — ends up being any scene with Lee J. Cobb playing the Father Karamazov. I don't know if Cobb realized that somebody needed to step up or what, but the brothers, with only Yul Brynner showing much charisma, also include William Shatner. It's almost embarrassing except for Cobb who got a deserved supporting actor Oscar nomination, the first of the 10 from Brooks-directed films.
The actor who Cobb lost that Oscar to that year had a major part in Brooks' other 1958 feature — the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. However, Burl Ives didn't win the prize for his great turn as Big Daddy, but for his role as a ruthless cattle baron fighting with another rancher over land and water in The Big Country. As with nearly all of Williams' works, movie versions castrated his plays' subtext (and sometimes just plain text) and this proved true with Cat as well, though the cast and its overriding theme of greed kept it involving enough. The film scored at the box office for MGM, taking in a (big for 1958) haul of $8.8 million — Leo the Lion's biggest hit of the year and third-biggest of the 1950s. It scored six Oscar nominations: best picture, best actress for Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat, best director for Brooks, best adapted screenplay for Brooks and James Poe best color cinematography for William Daniels and best actor for Paul Newman as Brick, Newman's first nomination and the film that truly cemented him as a star.
After the success of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brooks decided to take an ocean voyage to Europe as a vacation. The writer-director packed the essentials for a lengthy trip: some articles on evangelism, a Gideon Bible a copy of Sinclair Lewis' novel Elmer Gantry and Angie Dickinson. By the time the ship docked in Europe, a first draft of a screenplay, based on the novel by one of the men who stood ready to
defend Brooks during The Brick Foxhole brouhaha with the Marines, lay finished. Dickinson, on the other hand, departed the cruise quite a while back, having grown annoyed by Brooks ignoring her for Elmer. For many lives, 1960 would prove quite eventful either professionally, personally or both. Brooks filmed the highly entertaining movie version of Elmer Gantry early in the year, directing one of his best friends, Burt Lancaster, for the first time in the title role, which is good since the film got made under the auspices of an independent Burt Lancaster/Richard Brooks Production. Lancaster gives one of his best performances and won his first Oscar. The film co-starred Jean Simmons, giving one of her greatest, most mesmerizing turns as Sister Sharon Falconer, the traveling tent show evangelist who gets Elmer into the biz. She fell for Brooks on the set. Within the calendar year, she ended her unhappy marriage to Stewart Granger and became Brooks' wife. Unfortunately, when the Oscar nominations came out the next year, Simmons got left out of the nominations for Elmer Gantry. It received five total. In addition to Lancaster's nomination and win for best actor, it received nominations for best picture; Shirley Jones as supporting actress, which she won; Andre Previn for best score for a drama or comedy; and Brooks for best adapted screenplay. That cruise paid off. Brooks won an Oscar and found a wife. Below, a bit of Lancaster at work — and singing too.With his next film, Brooks finally received the key that unlocked the leg shackles that bound him to MGM. The studio once again assigned him to a Tennessee Williams play. Though Sweet Bird of Youth did moderately well on Broadway, it wasn't one of The Glorious Bird's triumphs and took a long time to get to New York, starting as a one-act, premiering as a full-length play with a reviled ending in Florida in 1956 and, finally, the revised version's
opening in NY in 1959. (The play has yet to be revived on Broadway whereas, in contrast, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been revived four times, including twice in this young century, and A Streetcar Named Desire 's eighth Broadway revival currently runs.) Originally, its plot concerned a retired actress and a gigolo with dreams of Hollywood who brings her to his old Southern hometown to get away and runs into trouble with the town's corrupt political boss (Ed Begley) when he woos his daughter (Shirley Knight). Williams said he'd hoped for Brando and Magnani to play the parts on stage. Eventually, she became merely an aging actress and Geraldine Page and Paul Newman played the leads on Broadway. When it came time for the movie, according to legend, MGM desperately wanted Elvis for Newman's part, but the Colonel nixed that because he didn't like the character's morals. Instead, the great Page and Newman repeated their stage roles as did Rip Torn as the son of the political boss. Once again, Hollywood castrated a Williams play or, in this instance, literally didn't castrate it (people who know both the play and movie get that joke. Page and Knight received Oscar nominations in the lead and supporting actress categories, respectively, and Begley won as best supporting actor. In this clip, you can see Newman's Chance try to get a handle on Page's wasted Alexandra in their hotel room.
Now a free agent, Brooks decided to stay that way — in essence becoming an independent filmmaker toward the end of his career instead of the beginning, as the path usually goes. He also defied that typical indie move of starting small — this wasn't John Cassavetes — but beginning this stage of his career more like the final films (and current ones for 1965) of David Lean. He went BIG. He even nabbed Lean's Lawrence to star in his adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, a longtime obsession of Brooks that he bought the rights to in 1958 for a mere $6,500. The filming took place in Hong Kong, Singapore and, dangerously in Cambodia as things grew tense. The movie crew's interpreter happened to be Dith Pran, the man the late Haing S. Ngor won an Oscar for playing in Roland Joffe's 1984 film The Killing Fields. O'Toole hated his time there, complaining about the living conditions — he isn't a fan of mosquitoes and snakes. Later, he also admitted he thought he'd been wrong for the part itself. Portions of the film ended up shot in London's Shepperton Studios as Cambodia became full of anti-American rage. When the film opened, it bombed and badly. Sony put it on DVD briefly, but it's currently out of print so, alas, I've never seen this one. Brooks did make an impression on O'Toole though, who told Variety when he died that Brooks was "the man who lived at the top of his voice."
Having a flop on the scale of Lord Jim the first time you produce your own film could really discourage a guy. However, it sure didn't show in what he produced next because The Professionals turned out to be the most well-made, entertaining film he'd directed up until this point in his career. (His next film swipes the most well-made title, but The Professionals continues to hold the prize for being one hell of a ride.) Based on a novel by Frank O'Rourke, the movie teamed Brooks with his pal Lancaster again. Set soon after the 1917 Mexican Revolution, early in the 20th century when the Old West and modern movement intermingle near the U.S.-Mexican border, it almost plays like a rough draft for Sam Peckinpah's admittedly superior Wild Bunch. Ralph Bellamy plays a rich tycoon who hires a team of soldiers of fortune to go in to Mexico and rescue his daughter who has been kidnapped by a guerrilla bandit (Jack Palance, hysterically funny and good despite making no attempt to appear Mexican). The team consists of Lancaster as a dynamite expert, Lee Marvin as a professional soldier, Robert Ryan as a wrangler and packmaster and Woody Strode as the team's scout and tracker. The film turned out to be a huge hit with audiences and critics alike and earned Brooks Oscar nominations for directing and adapted screenplay. The Academy also cited the cinematography of its director of photography, the master Conrad L. Hall, who would do some of the finest work of his career in Brooks' next film. Below, one of The Professionals' action sequences.
I hoped to complete this in two parts and considered breaking out the next film as a separate review because In Cold Blood stands firmly as Richard Brooks' masterpiece (and then there remain some other films to mention after that). So, another temporary pause.
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Labels: Angie Dickinson, Bellamy, Bette, Borgnine, Chayefsky, Debbie Reynolds, Geraldine Page, Jean Simmons, Lancaster, Lee J. Cobb, Liz, Marvin, Newman, O'Toole, Peckinpah, Rip Torn, Shatner, Tennessee Williams, Vidal
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Sunday, March 04, 2012
Pearl Tributes: Rex Hamilton
By Edward Copeland
No, Rex Hamilton isn't really 30 years old, but today marks the pearl anniversary of his most famous performance. Sure, many fine actors have taken a shot at playing our 16th president — Ralph Ince, Benjamin Chapin and Francis Ford practically made entire careers out of playing Honest Abe in film after film after film during the silent era. Among the better-known names to don the stovepipe hat on the big screen and TV include Walter Huston, John Carradine, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, Hal Holbrook, Gregory Peck, Jason Robards and Sam Waterston. Many of those names would return to the role again and again — and we still haven't even seen Daniel Day-Lewis' take in Steven Spielberg's upcoming film. What none of these greats had that made Hamilton's portrait of Lincoln so much richer than any Lincoln before or since was his supporting cast: Ed Williams as Ted Olson; the great, recently passed William Duell as Johnny; Mission: Impossible veteran Peter Lupus as Officer Norberg; Alan North as Capt. Ed Hocken and, most importantly, Leslie Nielsen as Sgt. Frank Drebin, Detective Lieutenant, Police Squad! — a special division of the police force.
The writing-directing team of brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams couldn't have been hotter following the surprise hit of their no-holds-barred comedy Airplane! Made for a mere $3.5 million, it tallied a domestic gross of $83,453,539 and became the fourth-biggest moneymaker of 1980. Paramount Pictures, headed then by Michael Eisner, was eager to work with the boys again. ZAZ (shorthand for the trio) had an idea to make a parody of old TV police dramas, but Paramount had offered them such a small window they couldn't figure out a way to turn the idea into a 90-minute script. Someone suggested that if they were spoofing a type of television show, why not make a television show? The idea appealed to them immediately since it meant having to produce a shorter script. According to commentaries on the DVD on two of the episodes by ZAZ and producer Robert Weiss (whose voices all sound terribly alike and hard to distinguish from each other), they sold the Police Squad! idea to ABC based on the opening credits sequence alone. As Airplane! took its premise from the 1957 film Zero Hour! (so much so that the rights to that film had to be acquired), Police Squad! was loosely based on the police drama M Squad that ran from 1957-1960 and starred Lee Marvin. Below are two YouTube clips. First, watch the memorable opening to Police Squad!, and then below it, the credits to M Squad, and see how closely ZAZ aped it, right down to the music.
The opening credits alone leave much to discuss. First, anyone old enough to remember series from the 1960s and 1970s such as Barnaby Jones, Cannon, The Fugitive and The Streets of San Francisco recalls the announcer who would proclaim the series "A Quinn Martin Production" as well as informing the viewer the title of the night's episode. In yet another instance of inaccuracy and inconsistency found on the Incompetent Movie Database, the entry for Police Squad! claims the narrator was Marvin Miller. However, the Quinn Martin announcer was Hank Simms, who IMDb also identifies as the narrator on Police Squad!, a fact verified by multiple sources across the Internet. You don't find Miller's name associated with Police Squad! anywhere else. The other distinctions that need to be pointed out about the credits is that when Simms announces the title, as in the premiere when he says, "Tonight's episode: The Broken Promise," on screen it would read, "tonight's episode: A SUBSTANTIAL GIFT." All six episodes had dual titles like that. Then there were the special guest
stars. In the clip, from the first episode, you saw it was Lorne Greene who rolled out of a car, a knife in his chest. It's never mentioned again. That happened each week with the special guest stars who always would be killed off and have nothing to do with the rest of that episode's story. In the second episode, they dropped a safe on Georg Stanford Brown, who made his name as an actor on The Rookies and went on to direct, including the third episode of Police Squad! In the third episode, Robert Goulet, the eventual villain in The Naked Gun 2½, bought it in front of a firing squad. The fourth special guest star honors went to William Shatner who dines with a beautiful blonde when a barrage of gunfire opens up on him. Shatner ducks, gets back up and fires back. He then smiles at his date and sips his wine and starts grabbing his throat. He points at her before keeling over. The fifth guest star death had Florence Henderson spoofing her Wesson Oil "Wessonality" commercials of the time. She's on a kitchen set holding a plate of fried chicken singing "Put on a Happy Face" when a hail of gunfire mows her down and she lets out a high note. We see her foot kicking up above the kitchen counter before it ends. The final celebrity death went to none other than an actual Quinn Martin production — William Conrad, Frank Cannon himself, doing a virtual shot-by-shot recreation of the Lorne Greene scene. The public has never seen the most infamous celebrity death scene and no one
knows if it has been lost or purposely destroyed. ZAZ met with John Belushi, who jokingly suggested they film him lying dead with a needle in his arm. What they did film was him having rocks attached to his feet and then sinking below the water, bubbles coming out of his mouth and a fish swimming by. The eerie part is that during the filming, something went wrong with the air, and when they pulled him out of the water, he started choking. Once he was OK, everyone was joking about mock obits saying, "Belushi was best known for his work on Saturday Night Live…" Two weeks later, Belushi did die of an overdose, so they didn't air his cameo. They thought about putting it on the DVD, but the footage couldn't be found. Of course, Greene, Goulet and Conrad all have passed on now. On the DVD, it includes a two-page memo of proposed celebrity death ideas they had (if the show had gone on) that included a shark attack, getting on the Hindenburg and signing a contract with ABC. The final credit detail worth noting is that, according to the commentary, ABC was uncomfortable with a show that aired at 7 p.m. in some time zones having a man run through the squad room on fire. ZAZ ignored them, but ABC kept complaining, and after three episodes had aired with that footage, ABC made them remove it, which was dumb considering the show was pulled after the fourth episode. Apparently for the DVD, they just used the same credits with the burning man for all six episodes.Yes, as beloved as many hold Police Squad! and Frank Drebin now, and even though less than two years earlier the comedy style employed by Abrahams and the Zucker brothers — namely having every kind of comedy running simultaneously as a nonstop bombardment of visual gags, puns, wordplay, very literal language, slapstick and more — reaped huge rewards in Airplane!, when ZAZ took that technique to TV, Police Squad! flopped badly. ABC didn't help the matter with where they placed Police Squad! on their schedule: the first show on Thursday nights opposite Magnum, P.I. on CBS and Fame on NBC (Yes Virginia, there once were only three commercial networks), filling in for Mork & Mindy. I'm uncertain what aired there for a couple weeks following its four-episode run, but then another short-lived (and truly bizarre) show, No Soap Radio, occupied the slot until Mork returned in May. While their madness appeared to be a new style of humor, on the commentaries the creators freely credit the influences of the Marx Brothers, Ernie Kovacs and MAD magazine. The trio had the right man for their star in Leslie Nielsen. In an interview on the DVD, he talked about how when he was making Airplane!, he noticed the writing-directing team watching him very closely, especially during the scene where he's trying to lift the spirits of Ted Stryker (Robert Hays) by telling him about George Zipp ("I don't know where I'll be then — but it won't smell too good, that's for sure"). "I thought, 'You know, if they watch too much, they're gonna find out I'm a fraud.' But it never turned out that way because they were watching me because they had detected in me the same wavelength in humor that they had." Indeed, aside from a few exceptions such as an early, hilarious episode of M*A*S*H, Airplane! unleashed the comic actor in Nielsen that always existed and
Police Squad! sealed it. Rewatching the six episodes, while each episode had its share of funny bits, the premiere episode, the only episode actually written and directed by ZAZ, is a gem from beginning to end. It opens at ACME Finance Credit Union where Sally Decker (Kathryn Leigh Scott) argues with the teller Jim Johnson (Terry Wills) about skimming more money for her because she owes money to her dentist, but Jim won't steal anymore. Then poor Ralph Twice (Russell Shannon) comes in to cash his last paycheck after being laid off from his job at the tire factory, giving Sally an idea as she takes two guns from her desk. Viewers who didn't already realize this wasn't your average TV comedy started to realize it as they watched Sally prepare but still heard Jim ask Ralph the usual check-cashing questions: form of ID, two major credit cards, thumbprint. Then it gets odd as Jim asks Ralph to look into a camera, to turn his head and cough and, finally, to spread his toes. Sally finishes loading her guns and she shoots Ralph with one of them and he dies in horribly fake slow-motion before she shoots Jim with the other, though he's conscientious enough to finish his paperwork before falling dead. Sally makes it look like Ralph shot Jim in an attempted robbery, and then she shot him. This leads to Nielsen's introduction as Drebin as he's driving his car.
"My name is Sergeant Frank Drebin, Detective Lieutenant, Police Squad, a special detail of the police department. There'd been a recent wave of gorgeous fashion models found naked and unconscious in laundromats on the west side. Unfortunately, I was assigned to investigate holdups at neighborhood credit unions," he says in voiceover. When Drebin pulls up to the crime scene, his car crashes into a garbage can. They didn't end up getting to do it through all six episodes, but in each subsequent episode they would add a trash can for Drebin's car to strike, but for whatever reason the gag only got up to four cans in the fourth episode. The visual gags begin nonstop when he arrives and his boss, Capt. Ed Hocken (Alan North), awaits. One of the corpses is being brought out of the credit union on an insanely long gurney. As they go inside, they walk past the chalk outline of Ralph's body where there also is an Egyptian hieroglyphic on the floor. Someone takes a photo of a man posing on a bench with Ralph's corpse as Drebin and Hocken go to interview Sally, where Frank introduces himself with his third rank, this time captain. What follows is another great ZAZ variation on the classic Abbott & Costello "Who's on First?" routine, which they used in Airplane! among the pilot, co-pilot and navigator. It gives a great example of the absolute straight-faced style of Nielsen and North.Nielsen and this episode's writing earned Police Squad!'s only Emmy nominations. Nielsen was brilliant, playing Drebin more deadpan than he eventually would in the movies. In an interesting comparison to their inspiration, click here to watch a clip of Lee Marvin in an episode of M Squad alongside a young Leonard Nimoy. In his interview, Nielsen says he broached the idea of a movie when the show died so quickly, but ZAZ still couldn't imagine stretching it out for 90 minutes. At one point, there was talk of trying to edit the six episodes together into a feature. In fact, according to the ZAZ and Weiss commentary, that's what prompted the freeze frames at the end of each episode. It wasn't just to spoof the old TV shows that would do that, but to use them as planned transitions for a feature. Surely, they
can't be serious. That would mean the Zuckers, Abrahams and Weiss would have had to know before the episodes aired that the series would flame out in the ratings so spectacularly. Nielsen summed up fairly well why the series failed. "(Tony) Thomopolous, who was the head of ABC at that time, said the series didn't work because you had to watch it. Well, it sounds funny and it sounds dumb, but it was true. You had to pay attention. You couldn't look away," Nielsen said. "You had to watch to make sure you caught the humor or where it was coming from. People don't really watch TV…That's why you can have a laugh track. You can read a book, then look up and ask, 'Oh, what are they laughing at? Oh yeah, that's funny.' Then you go back to reading or do anything you want, but you don't really watch TV." ZAZ and Weiss said that ABC tried to get them to use a laugh track, but, by contract, the final decision on that matter rested with them. An episode actually was tested with a laugh track and without one, but the results were negligible so they got to go without one. As one of the Zuckers or Weiss or Abrahams asked, "How do you put a laugh track on a sight gag?" Remember, Drebin and Hocken had told Sally Decker that she needed to go down to the station and make a "formal statement." Several minutes passed between that direction and the payoff. Nielsen also put some of the blame on the size of TV screens at the time, which made some of the sight gags too small to catch whereas in Airplane! they were huge and hard to miss. Man cannot live on sight gags alone and that first episode contained what I think was Nielsen's greatest Frank Drebin moment as he and Hocken go interview Ralph Twice's widow (Barbara Tarbuck) in the Twices' apartment in Little Italy. Something Mrs. Twice says gets Frank a little distracted and nostalgic.In "A Substantial Gift"/"The Broken Promise," we meet two of the series' priceless recurring characters. First, we meet Mr. Ted Olson (Ed
Williams), sort of a forerunner of all those forensic specialists on the various CSI shows, only crossed with Mr. Wizard and perhaps someone who belongs on a neighborhood watch list. As Peter Graves' Capt. Clarence Oveur liked to ask young Joey uncomfortable questions such as, "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" in Airplane!, each week when Frank goes to Olson's lab, he's always visiting with a child (of either sex) trying to explain different scientific things that inevitably draw comparisons to their mothers getting out of showers or something along those lines. Each week, he leaves them with a hysterically odd line. For those six brief weeks, we hear Olson make these promises or requests to various kids:
What might be the biggest gag concerning Williams' great performance as Ted Olson is that it was his first acting role. Prior to auditioning for Police Squad! and winning the part, Williams had retired from a career actually teaching science. He's acted steadily in small roles ever since. Every visit to his lab, even in the lesser of the six episodes, usually proved worth it. In the perfection of the premiere, Olson discovers problems with Sally's story because of the depth and trajectory the bullets would have had to take to make her story true. He demonstrates this for Frank with a state-of-the-art ballistics test where he fires each weapon into videotapes of Barbara Walters interviews. His first firing goes all the way to her interview with Paul Newman where Walters "asks him if he's afraid to love." The bullet from the second gun goes through the entire row of tapes clear through "where she asks Katharine Hepburn what kind of tree she would be." For a first-time actor, one thing that sets Ed Williams apart is that when Police Squad! had its resurrection in the form of The Naked Gun movies, he was the only actor other than Nielsen to reprise his role. The Zuckers, Abraham and Weiss regret on the commentary not being able to bring Alan North back as Hocken, calling him "very good." The studio insisted on a better-known actor so George Kennedy got the role in the films and as (I think it was David Zucker) said, "We folded like a cheap suit."
Another recurring joke that Police Squad! spoofed from the Quinn Martin shows were mid-episode title cards that marked the start of an episode's second act. With that in mind, I will end the first half of the tribute here with my favorite second act joke. You can click here to go to Part II to read about the other recurring characters, the remainder of "A Substantial Gift/The Broken Promise," some of the best bits of the other episodes, other background tidbits and the lasting influence of Police Squad!
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Labels: 80s, Abbott and Costello, D. Zucker, G. Kennedy, J. Zucker, Jim Abrahams, K. Hepburn, Marvin, Marx Brothers, Newman, Nielsen, Nimoy, Shatner, TV Tribute
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Thursday, October 07, 2010
Take the Highway That Is Best
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
With the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957 — an autobiographical account of the author’s experiences traveling across the U.S. and Mexico with Neal Cassady and other members of “The Beat Generation” — it wasn’t long before television found the inspiration to start creating series placing protagonists in identical situations of “trying to find themselves” roaming the nation’s highways and bi-ways in similar fashion. You had The Fugitive’s Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen), a man who pursued a one-armed man for four years in an effort to prove that he had been falsely convicted of killing his wife. There was Run for Your Life’s Paul Bryan (Ben Gazzara), a man who decided to live his life to the fullest via endless travel after being diagnosed with having only two years to live. And Jim Bronson (Michael Parks), the hero of Then Came Bronson, got in touch with his inner Wild One and quit his newspaper job in favor of a life riding his “sickle” around from town to town after the suicide death of a close friend.
The urge to roam was certainly not a new theme in the medium of television; the heroes of numerous Western series had been doing it for years. But 50 years ago on this date, two young men named Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) and Buz Murdock (George Maharis) gassed up a powder-blue Corvette left to Tod by his late father and headed off for adventure or whatever came their way…without guns or horses. Today, Route 66 is recognized by critics and classic television fans alike as the one of the best and most unique of small screen dramas to be televised in the 1960s — a first-rate blend of episodic television and dramatic anthology of such quality that, sadly, isn’t likely to be seen on the boob tube ever again any time soon.
Television producer Herbert B. Leonard and Stirling Silliphant first explored the idea of a show in which the weekly episodes would concentrate more on the guest stars than the series’ principals in Naked City, a program loosely based on the 1948 film that premiered in the fall of 1958 as a half-hour and then sat out a season before returning in the fall of 1960 in the full hour format. Their second collaboration would be Route 66, and in the debut episode, “Black November,” we’re introduced to Murdock, an orphan from New York’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” and Stiles, a Yale-educated son of privilege whose only possession is the Corvette in which the two men would travel (Mr. Stiles died penniless). Though the premise had out heroes looking for “a place to plant roots and stick,” it was really more of a dropping-off to meet a myriad of unusual and offbeat characters that they would encounter in their “vision quest” and to hear their personal stories (we rarely learned much about Buz and Tod save for a few sketchy biographical details). The title of the series, Route 66, was even a bit of a misnomer — many of the stories featured on the show actually took place in areas where the famous highway made famous by Nat King Cole’s hit (written by Bobby Troup) didn’t reach (in fact, two episodes took place in Canada).
Having been sired from the same stable that produced Naked City, there were naturally a good many similarities between the two shows. Both programs often relied on offbeat episode titles — some of the wackier ones for Route 66 include “How Much a Pound is Albatross?”, “Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma?” and the ever-popular “Is it True There are Poxies at the Bottom of Landfair Lake?” These whimsical titles often provided camouflage for first-rate scripting (which often tackled controversial and adult issues like mercy killing, drug addiction and the threat of nuclear annihilation) supplied by the likes of creator Silliphant (who scripted the bulk of the show’s output, close to 75 episodes), Howard Rodman, Shimon Wincelberg and Arnold Manoff. Movie veterans and up-and-comers who received credit for directing on both series include Arthur Hiller, Elliot Silverstein, David Lowell Rich, James Sheldon, George Sherman, Robert Gist, Robert Ellis Miller and Ralph Serensky.
Like its Naked sister, Route 66 also relied on the cream of the crop of acting talent, some of who were just getting a foothold in the business. James Caan, Robert Duvall, George Kennedy, Walter Matthau, Robert Redford and Martin Sheen all guested on the show — with veterans such as Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, Rod Steiger and Lee Marvin (who appeared twice) also putting in appearances. One of Route 66’s classic outings, “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing,” spotlighted a horror film triumvirate of Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney, Jr. — all three who played themselves in tongue-in-cheek fashion. In Route’s fourth season, an episode entitled “Where are the Sounds of Celia Brahms?” even featured former Naked City regulars Horace McMahon and Harry Bellaver; (McMahon’s character, in a sly wink to the audience, is told that he resembles a policeman in New York City.)
Naked City was a trendsetter in the use of on-location shooting, and not only did Route 66 do the same it surpassed it in so many ways (of course, City rarely ventured beyond the Big Apple) by filming exclusively “on the road.” It was estimated that by the time the series ended its four-year run the Route 66 “caravan” (often numbering 50 people) had traveled to 25 states, led by Silliphant and location manager Sam Manners. Not only did this help fuel the show’s passion for realism, but it provides a sort of historical travelogue for today’s viewer — a look at a time when these United States of America weren’t quite so homogeneous. The Web site TV Party wryly summed up the nomadic nature of the show by observing: “If Star Trek was meant to be ‘Wagon Train in space,’ then Route 66 was Wagon Train in a rag top.”
For two-and-a-half seasons, the clean-cut Tod (and moral compass of the duo) and his volatile buddy Buz cruised around meeting new people and romancing women until co-star George Maharis (Buz) came down with a case of hepatitis that sidelined him for several episodes in the third season, and left Martin Milner (Tod) with no one to ride shotgun. Upon his return, Maharis let it be known that he had no love for Milner (the two men had always had a prickly working relationship) or the show’s producers and crew…and while producer Leonard (along with everyone else) interpreted Maharis’ actions as a ploy to renegotiate his contract he refused to play ball, so Maharis up and left. His character was replaced in March of 1963 with Lincoln Case (Glenn Corbett), a disillusioned war hero just back from Vietnam…and though viewers weren’t probably supposed to notice, a dead ringer for the departed Buz. Fans of the show weren’t happy with the switch, and Route 66 came to the end of the road in March 1964, with a two-part episode (“Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way”) that closed the chapter on the lives of its protagonists (Tod eventually settles down and marries guest star Barbara Eden).
In its first season, Route 66 benefited from a cushy time slot: it followed the Top Ten favorite Rawhide on Friday nights at 8:30 p.m. The problem was that the show had to compete for the same youth audience against formidable competition on ABC, with The Flintstones and 77 Sunset Strip — which goes a long way toward explaining why Route ranked an anemic (if respectable) No. 30 in the Nielsens for that season. Moving the show to another night of the week might have helped it considerably; it made only one other appearance in the Top 30 ( No. 27 in the 1962-63 season) before the exit of Maharis sealed its fate for good.
Nick at Nite provided a home for Route 66 reruns during its early years in operation but since that time fans have only the DVD releases of the program’s first three seasons to satisfy their wanderlust — and sadly, the company that brought Route to disc has done so in a lackluster, substandard fashion. But the strength of the scripts, the first-rate acting talent and exhilarating cinematography make up for these presentational shortcomings, as a new generation of viewers tune into one of the era’s finest dramatic shows. Though there have been other series that featured “traveling” themes — Movin’ On, Highway to Heaven and Touched by an Angel, to name just a few of the many — the original Route 66 stands head and shoulders above the rest. And when the attempt to revive the concept in 1993 lasted only a scant four weeks, it demonstrated that not only can you not go home again…you can’t even do it in a bitchin’ Corvette.
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear and even hearing just a few bars of Nelson Riddle’s classic theme for the show makes him want to take to the road in search of adventure…or at least as far as the local Dairy Queen.
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Labels: 60s, Caan, Crawford, Duvall, G. Kennedy, Karloff, Keaton, Lon Chaney Jr., Lorre, M. Sheen, Marvin, Matthau, Redford, TV Tribute
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Tuesday, October 17, 2006
"I didn't know one man could bleed that much"
BLOGGER'S NOTE: We're a little late to the fest here, but Wagstaff has produced a great piece on Attack for the Robert Aldrich blog-a-thon being coordinated over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.
THIS IS A STORY OF MEN AT WAR… THE STORY EVERY SOLDIER KNEW, BUT NONE WOULD DARE TELL… THIS IS
THIS IS THE RAW, NAKED FACE OF
THIS IS WAR STRIPPED OF EVERYTHING BUT THE TRUTH! THE WAR STORY SO HOT NO ONE DARED FILM IT TILL NOW!
By Wagstaff
All caps aside, the preceding sales pitch that runs over the trailer for Attack! (1956) is remarkably accurate. Producer-director Robert Aldrich took Norman Brooks’ play Fragile Fox about men functioning (and not functioning) under the stress of war, and ventilated the drama with mortar shells and machine gun fire. In doing so, Aldrich turned this surprisingly frank and straight-forward war story into one of the best combat films of the 1950s.
The setting is the battle-torn Europe of 1944. Fox Company is having serious morale problems due to the incompetent leadership of Capt. Erskine Cooney (Eddie Albert). The captain’s fecklessness and ostrich-like dereliction of duty got several of his men killed during their last action, and has cost him the respect of his company.
It also has made him the target of the everlasting mistrust and vengeful wrath of one Lt. Joe Costa (Jack Palance). Lt. Costa’s pal, Lt. Woodruff, played by William Smithers, hatches a plan to convince the Battalion Commander, Lt. Col. Clyde Bartlett (Lee Marvin), to kick the captain upstairs with a promotion in order to get him out of the way. Lt. Costa, however, doesn’t see the efficacy of any of this; the political maneuvering of the officer class has increased his cynicism to the point where he only cares about the safety of his own men. Lt. Woodruff tries to convince the colonel anyway, over poker and a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, but fails. Lt. Col. Bartlett is a battle-hardened and competent soldier that harbors no illusions about Capt. Cooney’s character, but they both hail from the same small town; and Bartlett plans to use Cooney’s father’s political connections to run for office once the war is over. He tells the disappointed Woodruff not to worry, though; the scuttlebutt from on high says it’s a hundred-to-one that the company will see any more action. They’re out of the shooting for the rest of the war.
Lt. Costa doesn’t find any comfort in the hundred-to-one odds, and of course he’s right; that very day the company is ordered to take a town as part of a broader offensive. Capt. Cooney’s piss-poor plan is for Costa’s platoon to traverse 400 yards of open, vulnerable ground to test the enemy’s strength, and then to take refuge in an old farm house if things get hairy. If the operation does get ugly, he promises on his word to come in with reinforcements. Lt. Costa isn’t fooled by any of this, and promises to come back and kill Cooney if he goes back on his word. “I’ll shove this grenade down your throat and pull the pin.”
Things do go wrong and get plenty ugly. The town is heavily occupied by Germans, with mechanized support and Panzer tanks. Only five men from Costa’s platoon make it to the farmhouse. Lt. Costa’s desperate radio calls for reinforcements are ignored by Capt. Cooney, as he drowns his despicable inaction in a bottle of bourbon with deadly consequences. Lt. Costa’s men are surrounded — trapped; and I will stop here to keep from spoiling the rest of the movie.
Jack Palance’s performance in Attack! is a revelation. What kid scared out of his wits by Palance’s portrait of an evil killer in Shane would ever guess that the actor could show the kind of tenderness and anguished vulnerability that he does here. Outside, Jack Palance looks like the perfect dogface grunt — his face and large presence look like they were carved from a block of granite by blasting it with dynamite — but inside, a sensitive soul that the heart aches for shines through. When Jack Palance hobbles down a stairway, his arm badly mangled after being partially run over by a tank, and seeks his revenge on Capt. Cooney; his demeanor is positively ghostlike. The scene reminded me of a Creepshow-style tale of morality, comeuppance, and revenge. His acting is great even after his character’s demise; if they ever gave out Academy Awards for the best performance as a corpse, then Jack Palance would have won hands down in 1956.
Eddie Albert also is good in a way we’ve seldom seen him. His Capt. Cooney is a man eaten away by the consciousness of his own inadequacies and cowardice. He’s crippled by the fact that he never became the man his father wanted him to be. Imagine Maj. Frank Burns from the TV show M*A*S*H, subtract the humor and put him in a situation that makes him 20 times more dangerous to those around him, and you’ll get the idea of his characterization.
Lee Marvin is great as always. What couldn’t this actor do with the utmost naturalness? The movie’s trailer describes Lt. Col. Bartlett as “a cigar-chomping brass hat, who played war like he played poker: hard and dirty” and I can’t improve upon that description.
Robert Aldrich directs the combat scenes in a ways that are easy to follow. The soldier’s objectives are easy to grasp so that we can keep our bearings after the chaos of battle begins. Between the action scenes, he never soft-pedals the philosophical implications of the dramatic situations. During the climactic final act, there is a bewildering array of ethical conundrums, and nothing is black or white; yet the moral and philosophical conflicts remain clear. We witness how the agreed upon reality of what happens in combat goes through three or four drafts and revisions before it even leaves the principle players involved, and after that, once it leaves and goes out into the broader world… who knows? Attack ends on a righteous note of idealism and defiance, when Lt. Woodruff decides to tell the truth about what happened, against his own best interests, but I doubt the viewer carries this note away. After all we’ve seen preceding it — the twisting and turning of the officially sanctioned narrative of what transpired as reality, and the many conflicting agendas that are served by it — the whole riddle of perceived reality feels like it could go on ad infinitum.
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Labels: 50s, Aldrich, Blog-a-thons, Marvin
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