Thursday, May 16, 2013
Leave the rooster story alone. That's human interest.
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared Jan. 18, 2010. I'm re-posting it as part of The Howard Hawks Blogathon occurring through May 31 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
By Edward Copeland
The list of remakes that exceed the original is a short one, especially when the original was a good one, but there never has been a better remake than Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, which took the brilliance of The Front Page and turned it to genius by making its high-energy farce of an editor determined by hook or by crook to hang on to his star reporter by turning the roles of the two men into ex-spouses. Icing this delicious cake, which marks its 70th anniversary today, comes from casting Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as the leads.
Words open His Girl Friday declaring that it takes place in the dark ages of journalism when getting that story justified anything short of murder, but insists that it bears no resemblance to the press of its day, 1940 in this case. What saddens me today is, despite the ethical lapses and underhandedness and downright lies
committed by the reporters in this version (and really all versions based on the original play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, themselves once Chicago journalists), their energetic devotion to capturing the story seems downright heroic compared to the herd mentality and lack of intellectual curiosity we see exhibited most of the time today by pack journalists such as the White House press corps. It's really why the first two film versions of the play are the only ones that work. The 1931 Lewis Milestone adaptation starring Adolphe Menjou definitely belonged to its time and Hawks' take with its inspired twist came along close enough to remain relevant. When Billy Wilder tried to remake the original in 1974 as a period piece with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, it fell flat because in the era of Vietnam and Watergate, journalists actually existed in a moment of heroism for their profession. The 1988 disaster Switching Channels returned to the His Girl Friday model with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner and tried to set it in the world of cable news but the only update they came up with was hiding the fugitive in a copy machine instead of a rolltop desk.Each time I write one of these anniversary tributes, no matter how many times I've seen the film in question (and I can't count that high when we're discussing Friday, I try to watch the movie again, in a quest for fresh thoughts and reminders of lines that may have slipped my mind. In nearly every, case I notice something new (and with the rapid-fire pace of Friday's dialogue, remembering them all borders on impossible). What stood out as I
started this salute wasn't just the work-a-day newshounds it depicts compared to the state of the industry today but the social subtext emerged more prominently this time. It's not that I've missed or ignored it before, but it's the light-speed comic hijinks that keeps me coming back. The story's main focus may concern Walter Burns (Grant), that sneaky editor of the Morning Post, trying to keep his ex-wife Hildy Johnson (Russell) from leaving the paper and his life to wed insurance agent Bruce Baldwin, who looks like that fellow in the movies, you know, Ralph Bellamy (who fortunately plays Bruce). However, the story Walter uses to keep his hooks into Hildy concerns that of Earl Williams (John Qualen), a man who killed a cop and received a ticket on a bullet train to the gallows by a politically hungry Republican mayor with an eye on unseating the Democratic, anti-death penalty governor, despite the fact the reporters and many others believe Earl's mental
illness should stop his hanging. Qualen, a solid character actor in many films, and Mollie Malloy (Helen Mack), a woman who befriended Earl prior to the slaying and who the tabloids misrepresent as his lover and a prostitute, stand apart as the only characters in this screwball farce who play it completely straight. (In an all-time bit of miscasting, in the Wilder remake, Carol Burnett got the Mollie Malloy role. Of course, the nearly 50-year-old Jack Lemmon also was engaged to the 28-year-old Susan Sarandon in that film.) His Girl Friday requires neither Qualen nor Mack to garner laughs like every other character. As the courthouse reporters behave particularly cruelly to Mollie at one point, only Hildy comforts her. "They ain't human," Mollie cries. "I know," Hildy sympathizes. "They're newspapermen." Hildy realizes the jobless Earl spent too much time listening to socialist speeches in the park and his fascination with the concept of "production for use" led to his fatal error.
Social message aside, it's the earth-shattering cosmic comic chemistry of Grant and Russell, aided by Bellamy's perfect innocent foil and countless supporting vets. (One of them, Billy Gilbert, plays Mr. Pettibone (Roz holds his tie in the photo above) and I wish I could have found a good closeup photo of him because I think it's hysterical how much 9/11 mastermind/terrorist asshole Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resembles Gilbert in KSM's arrest mugshot.) The lines come fast and furious. While many do come from the original Hecht-MacArthur play, Hawks gets the credit for the film's amazing speed (though screenwriter Charles Lederer deserves more kudos). Still, in the end, Cary and Roz make the dialogue sizzle and Grant's physical touches serve as a master class in comic movement on film. Watch every little bounce he makes as Hildy kicks him beneath the table when he's trying to get things past poor Bruce and you'll crack up every time. Originally, I was writing down all my favorite lines, planning to try to work them all into this tribute, but then I thought: Maybe not everyone has seen His Girl Friday, even after 70 years,
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Labels: 40s, Bellamy, Burt Reynolds, Cary, Hawks, Hecht, K. Turner, Lemmon, Matthau, Menjou, Milestone, Movie Tributes, Remakes, Roz Russell, Susan Sarandon, Wilder
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Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Jules Dassin Part III
By Edward Copeland
Between the years 1949-54, any opportunity Jules Dassin had to make a movie anywhere failed to materialize. Following his work on Night and the City in London, he returned to the United States only to find that people he once considered friends did their best not to be seen with him. In 1951, while Dassin attended the Cannes Film Festival he learned that he had been named by a cooperating witness during the second round of hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Before he had been an unofficial blacklistee because he'd been called to testify and hadn't — being named by a friendly witness was another matter. This wasn't just any friendly witness who had named him either — it was director Edward Dmytryk, the only member of The Hollywood Ten, the 10 artists who had lost their court fight claiming that they had the constitutional right NOT to testify before HUAC. The 10 lost their appeals and received six- to 12-month jail
sentences. Dmytryk served six months in jail, but still turned friendly witness anyway so he could work again, something for which most of the other nine men never forgave him. Dmytryk, whose best known films include Crossfire, The Caine Mutiny and Raintree County, said in his defense, "I had long been convinced that the fight of the Ten was political…I believed that I was being forced to sacrifice my family and my career in defense of the Communist Party, from which I had long been separated and which I had grown to dislike and distrust.…I would have to name names, and I knew the problems this would cause…my decision was made easier by the fact that…I couldn't name anybody who hadn't already been identified as a Party member. Weighing everything — pro and con, I knew I had to testify.…I did not want to remain a martyr to something that I absolutely believed was immoral and wrong." The Criterion DVD for Rififi contains the 2000 interview with Dassin which discusses in the most detail what the blacklist did to him and how the atmosphere affected others as well, especially the pressure families could put on the artists. "Your wife would say, 'What do you want us to do? What about raising your children? We don't care about your principles — think of your family.' A lot of that happened," Dassin said. That's one thing I've always thought about when the subject comes up now. It's easy for people like us who are discussing that era in theoretical terms to say we'd act with principles and fight against the forces of evil, but we might behave differently if we actually were in the situation and had families to support. Look how few people raise their voices against governmental abuses now. The Occupy protests have been heartening, but they've still been rather small in number and struck down by the establishment rather easily while the majority getting screwed today, as always, keep quiet. If you missed either Part I or Part II of this tribute, click on the appropriate link. 
Dmytryk's main motivation was to keep working while other members of The Hollywood Ten went straight from jail to the blacklist though many, such as Dalton Trumbo, wrote screenplays using pseudonyms. Several Oscars during the 1950s went to people who either didn't exist or were fronts. In the 2000 interview, Dassin admitted that Darryl Zanuck would buy story ideas from him during this xperiod. Dassin also told, "one particular story that was really so painful." Dassin went on to discuss Robert Rossen, writer-director of All the King's Men and The Hustler and director of Body and Soul. Like so many in the creative community, Rossen found the witchhunt deplorable, the politicians behind it despicable and the studio chiefs who caved to them cowards. At first, Dassin said in the interview, Rossen declared, "You can't do this to people. I will not cooperate with these committees and questions." Dassin told of vandalism that occurred at the homes of people whose names were mentioned in passing during the hearings, a detail I'd never heard before. Rossen had kids at the time to worry about but, "He explained to them why it was wrong to name friends and betray people and made the kids understand that and they handled it well," Dassin said. Unfortunately, the pressure got to Rossen and he broke down and named names. Rossen "named all kinds of people. Now he had to explain that to his kids. Those kids — I don't know how they are now — but they were in bad shape for many years," Dassin shared with the interviewer.
For the many like him who were denied employment because in their youth, they joined a party they soon renounced and had had no part of for years, it was frustrating. Dassin said they always waited for some kind of hero who could stand against them and when the natural choices to fill that role such as Elia Kazan or Clifford Odets instead broke down and named names, "It was heartbreaking," Dassin said. The director also told of how people such as him got so use to old friends trying to avoid them that he would try to spare them the embarrassment by hiding if he saw them first. In the same 2000 interview, Dassin told of attending the Cannes Film Festival once, though he couldn't recall the year — he was 89 then; I think he'd earned the right to forget some Cannes Film Festivals — and spotting Gene Kelly, Dassin went and hid around the corner when he felt this strong grip on this arm. "What do you think you are doing?" Kelly asked and led Dassin into the party where most of the Americans were hanging out. Not everyone was as gracious as Kelly though — Dassin described one former friend who hid under a table to avoid being seen with him.
Moviemaking opportunities seemed closed to Dassin. An American producer had arranged for him to film a movie called Public Enemy No. 1 in France featuring Zsa Zsa Gabor as one of its stars. Gabor called Dassin in tears to tell him that she'd been warned that if she made a film with him, her career would be through so she was forced to back out. Soon after, the producer told him that unions had delivered
the message that if he made the film, no film of his would ever receive distribution again. The film fell apart, though the French got angry and declared him a member of the French Director’s Union. His U.S. passport was revoked, but the French gave him papers which allowed him to travel He went to Rome with plans to make a film of the novel Mastro-don Gesualdo by Giovanni Vergan but Italy asked him to leave the country, ruling that he was an "undesirable." Dassin went to the U.S. Embassy for help, but they wouldn't even receive him. The U.S. Ambassador to Italy at the time was Clare Booth Luce who refused to see him. Dassin returned to the states and Broadway. Theater didn't recognize the blacklist and he directed Two's Company: Charles Sherman's Musical Revue starring Bette Davis. During the show's pre-Broadway tour of many U.S. cities, Dassin again received notice to appear before HUAC, but he declined because of the show's tour. By the time it opened in New York, he received a telegram informing him that his hearings had been canceled. Sherman wrote the sketches with Peter DeVries while among the various contributors to the songs in the show were Vernon Duke, Ogden Nash, Sammy Cahn and Sheldon Harnick. The dances were staged by Jerome Robbins, another person caught up in HUAC who was forced to name names by Ed Sullivan who threatened to expose his homosexuality if he didn't. One of the other members of the cast was Tina Louise aka Ginger on Gilligan's Island. It opened Dec. 15, 1952 and ran through March 8, 1953 at The Alvin Theatre before going on a road tour. Hiram Sherman won the Tony for best featured actor in a musical. Despite the musical's success, enough was enough and an offer to make a movie there combined with the warm treatment her received from the country led Dassin to move his family to France in 1953 where he was about to make his other masterpiece, Rififi.The 2004 L.A. County Museum of Art interview on the Criterion Naked City DVD took place after a screening of Rififi, part of a retrospective on the films of Dassin, so the bulk of the conversation concerned that movie. The person asking the questions was Bruce Goldstein, founder of Rialto Pictures and repertory director at New York's Film Forum. This was four years after his long interview where he spoke about the blacklist in detail, but it did show that he still kept abreast of current issues involving civil liberties well into his 90s.
GOLDSTEIN: How did you come to make a film in France?
DASSIN: A man was producing a film called Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes and he told me I was the only man who could make this film. Now this was after five years of nada, no work at all, but he still couldn't say why he needed me. He said he had a problem with Rififi — "All the bad guys are North Africans and at this time, France is having such problems with Algerians, you can make the bad guys Americans. When I said to him, "Have you thought of making them French?", he hadn't. Well, anyhow, I got that job for the same reason I was blacklisted.
GOLDSTEIN: That's all you wish to say about the blacklist?
DASSIN: Enough. We've got other things to worry about these days. I was thinking about The Patriot Act.
In his book The Films in My Life, François Truffaut wrote about Rififi, "Out of the worst crime novels I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I've ever seen." I haven't read the Auguste Le Breton novel, but I don't doubt Truffaut's word. Many people have said one of the elements Dassin didn't transfer to the movie from the novel were acts of necrophilia, so I think Dassin made the right choices in his adaptation of what might be the greatest heist film ever made. Dassin structures the film like
a solid three-act play. Act I: Planning the heist. Act II: Carrying it out. Act III: The aftermath. As has been the case since Brute Force, the technical aspects reach the highest levels of excellence from Alexandre Trauner's production design to Auguste Capelier's set decoration, from Roger Dwyre's editing (he'd go on to edit most of Dassin's films and had cut Rene Clement's Forbidden Games) to the evocative cinematography of Philippe Agostini. Much credit for the look belongs to Dassin, who admits in the 2000 interview on the Rififi DVD that he drove the producer crazy by refusing to shoot in sunlight because he wanted the film to be gray. Truffaut also wrote in his book that "Dassin revealed Paris to Frenchmen just as he revealed London to the English (Night and the City) and New York to the Americans (The Naked City)." Bosley Crowther was The New York Times film critic for 27 years until 1968. He tended to be a stick-in-the-mud who got off on meanness and dumping as many 10-cent words into a single sentence until it could hold no more, but he even managed a nice turn of praise phrase for Rififi: It has a flavor of crooks and kept women and Montmartre "boites" that you can just about smell. As great looking as Rififi is, a limited budget hampered what Dassin could do in terms of casting so for the part of Cesar the Milanese, the safecracking expert from Italy ("There's not a safe that can resist Cesar and not a woman that Cesar can resist."), he had to employ the actor Perlo Vita, which was the screen name used by a man known as Jules Dassin. In many of his later films, Dassin would end up playing a role because he'd run out of money to hire an actor with more experience. 
Having "Perlo Vita" play Cesar play a significant role didn't really cause a problem because for the most part, none of the performers were known outside of France and the one who was best known there — Jean Servais, who played Tony, the leader of the jewel thieves — hadn't made a film in France in a couple of years. Servais gives the film's performance as the stoic Tony, newly released from prison after five years and mad as hell that his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) has taken up with Louis Grutter (Pierre Grasset), the sleazy owner of the night club L'Âge d'Or, named after the famous Buñuel film on which Trauner also served as production designer. When Tony first gets out, his old pals Jo (Carl Möhner) and Mario (Robert Manuel) try to talk Tony into cutting out the display window of the jeweler Mappin & Webb (a real jewelry store who agreed to let their name and store be used in the movie. Tony opts out until he learns about Mado's betrayal and sees all the gifts that Grutter lavishes on her, so he contacts Jo and Mario with plans to go for the safe instead. They enlist Cesar the safecracker for the heist which will net them about 240 million francs worth of jewels. Ahh, but nothing comes easy, does it? In a way, Servais delivers the only performance, but Dassin fine-tunes each of the film's element to the point that Rififi practically runs as a machine all its own, rendering the quality of the acting nearly irrelevant. The various characters behave more as chess pieces to be moved around as the story's game requires than as representatives of people.
Dassin holds on to this material tightly, yet he still allows for some flourishes. At the club, a singer named Viviane (Magali Noël) performs a dance and sings the song "La chanson 'Le Rififi'" while a silhouette of a man with a gun dances behind a screen behind her. Among the lyrics: "It's the lingo of the streetwise/the battle cry of real tough guys/Rififi" followed by the sound of a gun punctuating the beat. By the way, Rififi is French slang for tough guy posturing by criminal elements in Paris. (If you haven't seen Rififi — and shame on you if you haven't — spoilers will abound from here on out, so I'd look away for the rest of this paragraph.) Grutter realizes that Tony
and his cohorts were behind the robbery when Cesar pockets a ring from the loot and shows it off to one of the girls who works at his club. First, Grutter gets rough with Cesar to get the address of Mario out of him. When Mario refuses to tell Grutter and his men where the jewels are, they demand he call Tony. Mario refuses, but his wife gives in and does it, only she warns Tony on the phone and Grutter's men kill them both. When Tony discovers the scene, he finds Cesar tied up at L'Âge d'Or, Cesar apologizes for giving up the address. In a departure from the novel, Tony tells Cesar he knows the rules for turning in your friends and kills him. Dassin admits in one of the interviews he added that because he was thinking of all those who betrayed friends by naming them to HUAC. Later, Grutter's gang kidnaps Jo's son and demand the jewels. When two of Grutter's men grab the little boy while he's in a park with his mom and push him in a car, his balloon floating aimlessly away, a passenger on a bus who witnesses the abduction warns his child, "Hold your balloon tight — see what can happen."
One single sequence though makes Rififi a landmark both in films and particularly in heist movies: the robbery itself. The way Tony and the guys steal the gems from Mappin & Webb is by breaking in to the apartment above the store and going in from above to do the rest of the safecracking, etc. Dassin films this in a 32-minute long silent sequence. No one speaks. Keeping everything as quiet as possible becomes the thieves' No. 1 priority. It's absolutely riveting. You'll be holding your breath as if you were involved in the crime yourself. Composer Georges Auric wrote Rififi's musical score.
Auric provided music for films from around the world including, up to this point in his career, Roman Holiday, The Wages of Fear, The Lavender Hill Mob, Orpheus, Beauty and the Beast and Blood of a Poet (the last three for Jean Cocteau) and Auric's first film score, Rene Clair's À Nous la Liberté. When Auric heard that Dassin had a 32-minute robbery sequence planned, he got excited and told him he was going to compose a huge piece of music for it. Dassin told him he didn't need to do this because he wanted it to play in silence, but Auric insisted and wrote the music anyway. When both the sequence and Auric's composition were done, Dassin asked Auric to come watch it with him — once with music, once without. Auric did as Dassin asked. Afterward, Auric turned to Dassin and told him to play the heist in silence.
Before Rififi began to be screened for public or professional consumption, Dassin showed it to his friend director Lewis Milestone, who won the Oscar for comedy direction the only time it was ever given for Two Arabian Knights as well as a second prize for All Quiet on the Western Front, and happened to be in Paris. His other credits included 1931's The Front Page and 1939's Of Mice and Men. Rififi wowed Milestone who advised Dassin that he should "make this film all your life and you'll be like Hitchcock." With the exception of one film in about a decade that was more or less a comic takeoff on the heist genre, Dassin did not follow Milestone's advice, compiling a quite eclectic filmography. Once Rififi began to be seen, critics kept saying Dassin owed a debt to John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, a film that Dassin had never seen. Several years later, Dassin did see The Asphalt Jungle, but he failed to see specific comparisons except slightly in that an attractive woman becomes a character's undoing. One of the funniest revelations that Dassin made in one of the DVD interviews was that, though he is referred to as one of the masters of film
noir, he had never even heard the term until he moved to France. Rififi received such good word-of-mouth that it was accepted into the official competition at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. Dassin himself was so broke he could barely go. When one of the film's producers gambled at a casino, he begged for a little cash so he could play. He asked what date they started shooting the movie. "The eighteenth," he was told. Dassin put all he was given down on the number 18 on a roulette table and it hit, providing his family with funds to live on for awhile. As for the festival, the perceived front-runner was the film Stella directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis (who would soon change his name to Michael Cacoyannis before he got around to directing Zorba the Greek) and featuring the film debut of actress Melina Mercouri. The Palme d'Or ended up going to the American film Marty while best director was shared between Dassin and Sergei Vasilyev for Heroes of Shipka. Six actress from the Russian film Bolshaya semya (A Big Family) shared best actress, leaving Mercouri empty-handed but she and Dassin met and soon became lifelong collaborators in every sense of the word, though he didn't divorce his first wife until 1962 and wed Mercouri until 1966. Ironically, the 1955 Cannes jury also awarded a prize for best dramatic film to Elia Kazan for East of Eden. I don't know if he and Dassin ran into each other. Of course, Dassin couldn't avoid controversy. There were complaints that Rififi could be viewed as a how-to film for would-be thieves. Dassin said his response always was that, if anything, the film showed that the price was too high and usually ended badly for those who attempted such adventures. When they captured the culprits behind a robbery spree in Mexico, they cited the movie as an inspiration. Critics of the film accused Dassin of making the core group of thieves too sympathetic (never mind that when Tony learns that Mado took on a new lover while he was in prison, he removes his belt and beats her savagely, though offscreen). Dassin admitted in one of the interviews that he couldn't help himself. "It's what's left of the old rebel in me — I always want my guys to succeed," he said.
Dassin's next film went in an entirely different direction from anything he had made before. According to Truffaut's book, Dassin considered the movie, "'the film of my life,' the first film he really chose to make, and made with complete freedom, a film in which he succeeded in expressing totally." Based on Nikos Kazantzakis' 1948 novel The Greek Passion (which was published in England as Christ Recrucified) took place in Lycovrissi, a Greek village in the 1920s held under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Despite being Muslim, the Agha (Grégoire Aslan) who controls the village for the Turks allows the Greeks to stage the passion play they hold every seven years, even
though in private the Turks comment that "Allah is a cheerful artist, Jesus a melancholy god." Father Grigoris (Fernand Ledoux) picks who will play all the various roles and upsets some when he selects a stuttering shepherd named Manolios (Pierre Vaneck) to play Jesus. As you'd expect, the village's prostitute, Katerina, (Melina Mercouri, in her first film with her future husband) is cast as Mary Magdalene, An angry blacksmith Panagiotaros (Roger Hanin) who holds lots of grudges, including being passed over for the role of Christ, gets picked for the role of Judas. Outside the casting, there are other interesting characters such as the village's now figurehead of a leader, Archon Patriarcheas, who the Turks still allow to live well and for his own pleasure (played by Gert Frobe, who would go on to play Bond's best villain in the best 007 film, the title role of Goldfinger). The conflict comes when Greeks uprooted by Turks from another village arrive, starving and looking for shelter. They're led by their own priest, Father Fotis (Jean Servais from Rififi) but Father Grigoris suspects these new people aren't looking for charity but for land and spreads rumors of cholera about the newcomers, quarantining them to a mountainous area. It's all the reason the richer citizens of Lycovrissi need to ostracize them but, as you might expect, those involved in the passion play, start to take their roles seriously and Manolios dares to reach out to help the refugees. Georges Auric composed a boisterous score for the film and He Who Must Die contains many positive attributes, but I think Truffaut nailed the film's problems in his review in The Films in My Life:
"This time there is nothing but nobility, nobility, and more nobility — too much nobility for a film that displays an intellectual confusion seldom displayed in the history of cinema.…I must admit that this kind of subject, in which everyday people must transcend themselves by identifying with characters they personify, irritates me because it is so theatrical and so obvious. Knowing in advance that Judas will betray Christ, we pay attention only to how the blacksmith will betray the shepherd.…During the film, which I saw twice, I noted this sentence in the dialogue: 'The human brain is a fragile machine; one turn too many and it breaks down.' Jules Dassin gave one turn too many to his film; he has everything mixed up, tangled it all together, preaching and plasticity, reflections in mirrors, the lack of bread, rejected lovers, and children who die of cold."
He Who Must Die was in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, but lost to Friendly Persuasion. It did receive the OCIC (The International Catholic Organization for Cinema) Award — Special Mention.
Dassin went from the all-too-literal to the all-too-obscure with his next film, which didn't open in the U.S. until 1960 (and when it did, it was called Where the Hot Wind Blows!). Though Italy kicked Dassin out the last time he tried to make a movie there, the country allowed him to film there for his adaptation of French author Roger Vailland's 1957 La loi, which won France's highest literary prize, The Prix
Goncourt. Though the novel was written in French and Dassin would film the movie in French, it took place in a southern Italian fishing village on the Adriatic called Porto Manacore and starred Italian acting icons Gina Lollabrigida and Marcello Mastroianni and took its name from a game native to that part of Italy. Some non-Italians made the cast as well including French stars Yves Montand (The Wages of Fear) and Pierre Brasseur (Frédérick Lemaître in Children of Paradise) and, of course, Melina Mercouri. Brasseur plays Don Cesare, the aging, de facto leader of Porto Manacore. Lollabrigida is Marietta, one of the don's housekeepers, the object of lust for most of the village's men, and the object of scorn for others, especially Don Cesare's other
female servants who torture Marietta when they can since no one dreams of them. Montand, who gives the best performance of the film, plays Matteo Brigante, the local crime boss who loves to throw his weight around, but does it in a most charming way since he wants to assume Don Cesare's place of respect and wouldn't mind Marietta as well. He has his own personal problem in that his young son Franceso (Raf Mattioli, who died of a heart attack the next year at the young age of 24) has been having an affair with the judge's wife (Mercouri) and plans to run off with her. Mastroianni is Enrico Tosso, an agronomist from morthern Italy visiting the village who falls for Marietta (and she for him) but lacks the funds for a dowry. Marietta sets out to steal cash from a Swiss tourist so they can be together while Don Cesare advises that Enrico should go observe a session of The Law to see what it's all about, since it's such a regional phenomenon he's unfamiliar with the game. Almost nightly, men gather in a town tavern to play the game, but when Enrico shows up to be a spectator, Brigante forces him to participate even though he doesn't know the rules. Explaining The Law (the movie) proves less complicated than describing the game it's based on. Author Vailland appeared on the French talk show Lectures pour tous on Dec. 4, 1957, where host Michel Butor interviewed him about the game. The two-disc Oscilloscope DVD set of The Law includes the interview. VAILLAND: First off, it's a card game (that only exists) in southern Italy.
BUTOR: It's a card game that shows the feudal system still strong in this region…Let's say first the rules…and who plays…
VAILLAND: The rules are very simple. First, you need a winner, like in any game, but the game only starts when the winner has been designated by luck — by a card game or a dice roll — and The Law becomes an exciting and cruel game because the winner can impose The Law on the loser.
BUTOR: What does that mean?
VAILLAND: It means asking questions that they must answer which insult them in a more or less subtle way and they must endure it, even if it wounds their honor.
BUTOR: Is it the game of Truth?
VAILLAND: In the sense of honor, which is very strong in southern Italy. The same insult in real life would provoke a violent response, but in the game of Law, it's in the rules. The loser must lay his hands on the table and be subjected to The Law.
Did that clear things up? Didn't think so. It doesn't really match the movie's depictions of the game either. (He doesn't bring up the winner
being given the title of "the boss," picking a deputy boss, naming an idiot, etc.) In the end, it hardly matters. I imagine if you hail from southern Italy, it's conceivable that additional layers of meaning might be found in The Law that escapes viewers from the rest of the world. Since that includes the overwhelming majority of us, let's just forget about the game's relevance to the plot. They might as well be playing Quintet. In spite of The Law lacking a truly coherent story, Dassin does have a great, fluid sequence toward the opening of the film that begins with the release of a pigeon from the first scene landing on a building. From there, in seemingly one take, the camera moves along the windows of the building, catching the various goings-on in the apartments as if we're Jeff in Rear Window gazing through our telephoto lens as the people in the different rooms strain to see the source of a siren's song that turns out, of course, to be Marietta warbling while she washes the don's boots on a balcony of his nearby villa. Nearly the entire cast make the effort watchable, especially the great Montand who revels in Brigante's sleaze, even if you're unsure at the end what the hell you just watched.
I didn't get a chance to re-watch this one, but when I first saw this a few years back, I was underwhelmed, but it may be Dassin's most important post-blacklist film, not in terms of quality but in what it represented. First of all, it was a huge hit. Second, 1960 more or less brought an official end to the blacklist on several fronts. Kirk Douglas released Spartacus and defied the list by allowing screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's credit to appear. When the Oscar nominations came out, Dassin was nominated for both best director and best story and
screenplay for Never on Sunday, the only two Oscar nominations Dassin ever received. The movie as a whole received five nominations, including best actress for Melina Mercouri and won best original song for the title track. Mercouri had won best actress at Cannes, tying with Jeanne Moreau for her work in Peter Brook's Seven Days…Seven Nights (known as Moderato cantabile in France). Not everything was perfect: Nedrick Young who co-wrote Inherit the Wind was nominated under the pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas, though the Academy restored Young's name to the records in 1993. In one of the DVD interviews, Dassin told another funny anecdote. When he was making Never on Sunday, he ran short on financing and again had to cast himself, this time as the lead. Before the film had been released outside of Greece (where it was a huge hit anyway), Jack Lemmon happened to be Athens and Dassin showed it to him, hoping somehow that he could come up with money to re-shoot his scenes with Lemmon playing his part. After watching it, Lemmon told Dassin, "You're terrible in this film, but it's charming." He advised him to leave it the way it was. With Dassin's terrible performance intact, the movie was a hit everywhere, grossing an estimated $8 million as of January 1962 off a $151,000 budget. He returned to New York briefly in early 1962 to direct a new play on Broadway by Robert L. Joseph about a dying child called Isle of Children. It starred Patty Duke, the same year she would repeat her stage success as Helen Keller in movie of The Miracle Worker. The cast also included Bonnie Bedelia. The play got mixed reviews and ran for a mere 11 performances.
This attempt to do a modern twist on the ancient Greek myth of Phaedra falls into overheated melodrama and little else. Dassin manages some nice shots and the cinematography by Jacques Natteau and especially Max Douy's art direction are exceptional. Raf Vallone does what he can as the Greek shipping magnate and Melina Mercouri floats between good and bad as the title temptress, but Anthony Perkins at times almost goes as over-the-top as Vallone's son as he did as the weirdo priest in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion.
Sometimes it can be hysterical when someone satirizes one of their most famous roles or movies (Think Marlon Brando in The Freshman). Dassin should have been more than capable to do a comic riff on Rififi, but Topkapi is not that movie. It throws Maximilian Schell (who, by coincidence, would be hysterical in The Freshman), Melina Mercouri (as always), Robert Morley and Peter Ustinov, sweating up a storm and winning his second Oscar for supporting actor as the chase begins to abscond with a jeweled dagger from a museum in Istanbul. It's meant to be funny, but the jokes fall flat. What's most notable is that 22 years after Dassin directed his first feature film, Topkapi marked the first time he filmed in color. What always has bugged me is that, as much as I love Ustinov generally, how could he win the Oscar in 1964 for this? His official competition that he beat was John Gielgud in Becket, Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady, Edmond O'Brien in Seven Days in May and my choice of their nominees, Lee Tracy in The Best Man. This doesn't include people who didn't make the cut such as Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, Gert Frobe in Goldfinger, Richard Attenborough (Seance on a Wet Afternoon) — that's just a handful that come to mind.
I haven't seen Dassin's next film, 1966's 10:30 P.M. Summer, based on Marguerite Duras' novel Dix heures et demie du soir en été. Duras and Dassin co-wrote the screenplay. I borrowed part of a post that Roderick Heath wrote at Ferdy on Films
10:30 P.M. Summer looks to me like a transitional film. Today, spare, cryptic portraits of the psychic and sexual life are more common; how to create psychologically and emotionally penetrating works of film was a major question for earlier directors. This film, like Losey and Pinter’s Accident (1967), which possibly had an easier time of it for centering more happily on male sexual transgressions, or Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle (1966), stand somewhere between the stylistics of the “alienation” films of the early ’60s and the playfulness of the new wave, and the approaching full-bore works of Bertolucci, Breillat, Eustache and others.
…
Whilst no masterpiece, it’s far better than its reputation reflects, and it’s a film worth finding.
Dassin and Mercouri decided for their next project to return to the material that gave them their greatest success and they turned Never on Sunday into the Broadway musical Illya Darling. Mercouri repeated her role, but Dassin was glad to stick to directing and writing the musical's book. He let Orson Bean play his part from the movie. This might have been a sign that they were making a good move: the musical was booked into The Mark Hellinger Theatre, named after the independent producer of his first two great films, Brute Force and The Naked City, but who had a career as a New York theater critic and columnist prior to that. It no longer exists as a theater as the Nederlanders has leased the theater to the Times Square Church since 1989. The musical's cast also included Hal Linden and had music by Manos Hadjidakis and lyrics by Joe Darion (who wrote the lyrics for Man of La Mancha). Illya Darling received six Tony nominations (best musical, best composer & lyricist, best director, best choreography, best actress for Mercouri and best featured actor for Nikos Kourkoulos). Though it didn't win any Tonys, the show ran for 320 performances.
While Dassin and Mercouri were in New York with the musical, a military coup took place in Greece. The couple were vocal in their opposition and accused of helping to finance the opposition so they were banned from returning to Greece for seven years. At first, they toured with the musical. Later, Dassin decided to make a documentary about the six-day war in the Middle East, another film I haven't seen. Titled Survival '67, it was filmed in Israel, written by Irwin Shaw and released in 1968. Here is an excerpt of Renata Adler's New York Times review:
By Renata Adler for The New York Times
"describes itself as 'a paean to Israel.' What gets lost is the brave, tragic war itself. (There is hardly any documentary war footage at all.) The film, which keeps crossing what little moving footage it has — wounded men, monuments to Babi Yar and Buchenwald — by an inability to shut up, is poor and ineffective propaganda.
…
It is also poor reporting — it simply does not tell us anything that we did not know already, and what it does tell — in fuzzy interviews about, for example, the Arab refugee problem — it tells unclearly. Everything about it is off."
While Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri were exiled from their home in Greece, they lived in New York. For the first time since Thieves' Highway, Dassin contracted to make a feature for an American studio (Paramount). For the first time since He Who Must Die, he also was making a feature that didn't have Mercouri in the cast because Uptight had an all-black cast. Truly a film of the moment, Uptight takes place in Cleveland four days after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. In another respect, it wasn't of the moment since Dassin was remaking The Informer, the film the won John Ford his first directing Oscar in 1935 and changing the milieu from Irish revolutionaries to black militants. It starts with a hyperactive animated credit sequence set to music by Booker T. Jones. Dassin co-wrote the screenplay with Ruby Dee and Julian Mayfield, both of whom played roles in the film. As a time capsule film, Uptight remains an interesting experience and it contains some really good performances, especially by Raymond St. Jacques as a militant leader and Roscoe Lee Browne as a smooth operator who'll sell anyone out for the right price. Dassin takes a lot of flights of fancy, particularly in one drugged-out sequence involving crazy mirrors at an amusement park.
In 1970, he directed Mercouri in Promise at Dawn. Of the film, Roger Ebert wrote:
Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn is a warmly drawn love poem in two parts, one dealing with style and the other with the story. Of the two, the first is more interesting: Dassin's treatment of his wife, Melina Mercouri, is a marriage of script, photography and performance designed to showcase her talent and beauty. The second love story — the love Melina's character has for her son — is rather static and even a little distracting in these decades after Freud.
In 1974. as described on the Melina Mercouri Foundation website, "On the occasion of the November 1974 Athens Polytechnic student revolt, Dassin, still exiled, filmed in New York The Rehearsal, a political documentary with the free participation of Olympia Dukakis, Lillian Hellman, Melina Mercouri, Sir Laurence Olivier, Manuella Pavlidou, Maximillian Schell, Mikis Theodorakis and others. Dassin considered this to have been one of his best films. It was due to be distributed on the day of the fall of the dictatorship and became untimely. Therefore it was never released. After the collapse of the junta, Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri returned to Greece where they settled for the rest of their lives. Melina was actively involved in the establishment and promotion of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party."
Dassin's penultimate film, A Dream of Passion, came out in 1978 and told the story of an actress (Mercouri) preparing to play Medea who spends time with an imprisoned American woman (Ellen Burstyn) who, like Medea, killed her own children. I'm ashamed to admit that Dassin's final film happens to be the first film of his that I saw, It was 1981's A Circle of Two starring Tatum O'Neal as a college-age student obsessed with a famous artist played by Richard Burton. This was on either HBO or Showtime soon after we had it for the first time and I was in junior high. All I knew was the girl I had a crush on since The Bad News Bears and Little Darlings took off her top in it. I couldn't tell you anything about the movie and I didn't know who the hell Jules Dassin was. I certainly do now. Everyone should.
Dassin continued to direct plays once he stopped making movies and Mercouri turned to politics, becoming the longest-serving cultural minister in Greece's history. She made it a campaign to get the Parthenon or Elgin Marbles returned to Greece from the British Museum in England that had held them for more than 200 years. Unfortunately, the debate has continued past the deaths of both Dassin and Mercouri, though popular opinion in both countries side with returning the marbles to Greece.
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Labels: Bette, blacklist, Brando, Buñuel, Burstyn, Ebert, Harold Pinter, Huston, J. Robbins, John Ford, Julie Christie, K. Douglas, Kazan, Lemmon, Mastroianni, Milestone, Montand, Olivier, Oscars, Truffaut
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Monday, April 04, 2011
This story is laid in a Mythical Kingdom
By Edward Copeland
Those words grace a title card before the credits for the 1931 version of The Front Page, literally set against the turning pages of a newspaper begin. The first screen version of the hit Broadway comedy (produced by Howard Hughes) about Chicago newspapermen covering an impending hanging written by former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur turns 80 years old today. It would go on to be revived three times on Broadway and remade three times on film, in one case accomplishing the rarest of things. The 1931 version remains a very good film and, typically, remakes of good movies fall flat on their ass but its first remake, 1940's His Girl Friday, actually improved on it. The same could not be said for the two later remakes, one of which was even directed by Billy Wilder. We may speak of the other films later, but today we salute the first film incarnation with Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as Hildy Johnson.
Since His Girl Friday is one of my favorite films of all time, the story of The Front Page plays quite familiarly to me and since I've the seen the original several times as well (though not recently), I decided to focus on different aspects upon my return trip for this 80th anniversary piece. First, for those who might know the story only through His Girl Friday or aren't acquainted with the story at all, a brief plot summary. The main conflict concerns Walter Burns, editor of The Morning Post, a Chicago tabloid, who doesn't want to lose his ace
reporter Hildy Johnson, who is planning to leave the state and start a new life after getting married. It's set against the backdrop of the impending execution of a particularly controversial convicted killer that has been politicized by the town's mayor and sheriff who face re-election and the governor, who belongs to the opposite party. The key difference, and what really made His Girl Friday work even better, is that they made Hildy a woman and Walter's ex-wife. In the original, Hildy is a man and as great and funny as The Front Page is, something strange lurks in the idea that a newspaper editor would be so possessive of his reporter that he'd want to thwart his marriage and his exit to another state and a better job just to keep his hooks in him. It isn't just Hildy that the Walter of The Front Page acts this way about either. The boys in the criminal courts newsroom mention the time another reporter tried to leave the Post and Walter tricked him into a fight so he'd get arrested and thrown in jail on assault and battery charges and only Walter could bail him out provided he returned to his job.Synopsis out of the way, what stood out the most to me this time about The Front Page was how exceptional Lewis Milestone's direction was. In the very first year of the Oscars, they had for the first and last time the category of best comedy direction and the prize went to Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights, a silent which, despite its title, actually was set during World War I. To show how diverse he could be, he won best director again two years later for another WWI tale, that year's best picture, All Quiet on the Western Front. The following year, he received his third and final best director nomination for The Front Page and a quite deserved nomination it was. The fast-paced, overlapping dialogue that everyone tends to credit as an invention of Howard Hawks in His Girl
Friday really can be found nine years earlier in Milestone's The Front Page, albeit not executed by as interesting actors as in His Girl Friday. In fact, I think the inability to match that pacing doomed Wilder's 1974 remake and was just one of the many reasons that the 1988 remake Switching Channels starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner resulted in such a disaster. That isn't Milestone's only contribution though. As he showed in Western Front, he also happened to be one of cinema's early visual masters. When it gets to the point in the story when condemned man Earl Williams (George E. Stone) escapes and the reporters in the criminal courts press room clear out, Milestone combines a wonderful montage of their editors back at their newspapers calling for them as he keeps cutting back to a continuous pan of the unmanned phones in the press room. One of my other favorite shots comes later in the film when Hildy and Walter (O'Brien, Menjou) try to keep everyone out because they are hiding Earl in the press room and Hildy's fiancee Peggy (Mary Brian) shows up to see why Hildy hasn't made it to the train station. Peggy argues with Hildy who tries to flee her walking backward, still clutching his typewriter, while they circle Burns who is giving orders over the phone at the same time he interjects his own comments in Hildy and Peggy's dispute.This Front Page also existed in that glorious pre-Code era where it could get away with lots of things films just a handful of years later wouldn't be able to do. It opens with gallows humor — literally. We open with a closeup of a large sack of flour whose slogan reads "SUNSHINE FLOUR INSURES DOMESTIC HAPPINESS." The camera pulls back to show that it's being used to test the rope that will be used to hang Earl Williams the following morning. As it's released and the bag of flour drops through the platform, one man tells another to make certain that the rope works well enough this time. "Last time the guy bounced up and down like he was on a rubber band." The man insists he allowed for the proper weight, but the guy below says the last condemned inmate added weight like they all usually do by stuffing himself during his last meal and "The sheriff wants his neck to snap this time." The noise below disturbs the men of the press who can see and hear the scene a few stories above from the criminal courts press room. One thing that does set The Front Page apart from its remakes, even His Girl Friday, is that the other reporters are more distinctive as characters. Not that they have their own stories, but they stand out more as individuals, especially with standout character actors such as Edward Everett Horton, Frank McHugh, Slim Summerville and others filling the roles.
In another pre-Code touch, the character of Mollie Malloy, the woman abused by the members of the press by having befriended Williams, actually refers to herself as a streetwalker where I don't remember any of the other movie versions coming out and calling her a prostitute. I know they didn't in His Girl Friday and it's been a long time since I've seen the Wilder version with the horribly miscast Carol Burnett. Switching Channels is such a wretched piece of filmmaking that I only saw that once and checking IMDb, every character's name was changed and I don't recall a Mollie Malloy equivalent anyway since they tried to
update it by setting it in the world of cable news. One other thing I always find interesting is the slight physical resemblance between Stone as Earl Williams here and John Qualen as Earl in His Girl Friday, though the characters are quite different otherwise. In the 1931 Front Page, Mae Clarke played Mollie and, as in the two other versions in which her character appears, she does take the dive out the window as a distraction, so it makes the grapefruit Clarke took to the face from James Cagney the same year in The Public Enemy not seem as bad. While the reporters' portrayal comes off as callous and cruel in His Girl Friday and even Wilder's 1974 version, they prove to be even harsher and more heartless in the original. As
Mollie tells them at one point, "If you were worth breaking my fingernail on, I'd tear your faces off." In the very first scene of the film, we see the reporter McCue (Frank McHugh) calling a peeping tom victim on the phone and harassing her while the other newsmen in the room shout lewd remarks. She finally hangs up on him when he asks if she played Lady Godiva once for charity. The films, to say the least, do not offer the most noble or shining examples of The Fourth Estate. Even the ostensible hero of the piece, Hildy Johnson, who actually seems to be a good reporter who strives to get the facts right while the other reporters have no qualms about making up stories as trivial as what Williams will be having for his last meal, isn't above chicanery to get what he needs. Granted, it's a story from the days of yellow journalism, but one has to wonder if more truth managed to sneak out then than now when so many government reporters seem to be little more than stenographers.
The most famous supporting actor playing one of the reporters is the incomparable Edward Everett Horton and, as in many of his films such as the countless Astaire-Rogers musicals in which he took part, he's the standout here as Roy V. Bensinger, a germ-obsessed, prissy writer who isn't quite as nasty as the rest and who owns that rolltop desk that proves so pivotal in the plot (and holds his rhyming dictionary as well). We first meet Bensinger when he returns from a trip to the "death house" where Earl Williams awaits his execution and the conditions drive Bensinger batty, saying they are so awful they need to be reported to health authorities. "It's amazing these prisoners live long enough to be killed," he tells the other reporters. Of course, he becomes a victim of Walter Burns' scheming later when he and Hildy have hidden an escaped Earl Williams within his rolltop desk and need to sneak it out of the building, so Burns hires Bensinger to get him out of the building while telling his man Duffy to look over his work, tell him it stinks and stick him somewhere else. It's one of the things Walter does that makes Hildy want to get as far away from him as possible, though Burns argues than it will teach Bensinger for leaving his newspaper without giving notice.
What I'd also forgotten and that sets the 1931 Front Page apart from later versions stems from a racial undercurrent in the storyline. Now, no African-American characters appear in the film (though one slur term for them is used) but Earl Williams has been painted by the corrupt mayor and sheriff (James Gordon, Clarence H. Wilson) as a communist who took part in a demonstration and killed an African-American police officer as part of their plan to woo the black vote for re-election the week following Williams' execution. Of course, it's mostly lies, printed by the always willing-to-run-anything press. The truth comes out when a few hours before his execution, the sheriff is forced to make Williams meet with another psychologist, one Professor Englehoffer (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who suggests re-creating the crime so the sheriff hands Earl his gun and William promptly shoots the professor in the gut and escapes.
As Earl ends up being hidden by Hildy (with Mollie helping at first and eventually Burns), he tells his story. He was a man who had been fired from his job after 14 years and was at wit's end. He declares, "I'm not a Bolshevik, I'm an anarchist." Earl also begs for people to let him die. He wants to go back and await the hangman's noose, but there are too many people with too many agendas to let that happen. "Better to die for a cause than the way most people die — for no reason." Hildy's problem is that as much as he hates Burns and the job he does, he is addicted to the job and every time a new development falls into his lap, he can't stop himself from calling it in to Walter and trying to write it up so they can scoop everyone, even if it results in alienating fiancee Peggy further and even watching as Burns has his crooked henchman Diamond Louie (Maurice Black) abduct Hildy's future mother-in-law (Effie Esler).
Hildy tries his best to escape Walter's net, which starts out with Burns offering cash to anyone who can find Hildy, who at the time is obtaining his marriage license with Peggy. Hildy dreams of moving to New York where he has a job lined up with an ad agency for $150 a week. Peggy's bright enough to know that
he's too addicted to the news game to give it up easily, no matter how hard Hildy tries to convince her. "Ever climbed out of the sewer and smelled the cool, fresh air? You are the cool, fresh air," Hildy tells her. When Peggy does bust in on the newsroom in that one scene and Hildy tries to explain that it's a big story, she does sort of put him in his place with a line of dialogue that seems particularly timely even today. "It's always a big story, the biggest story in the world and the next day you can't remember what it was about," she tells him. It reminds me of when we were transfixed as the Iranian people took to the streets protesting their stolen election and fraudulent dictatorship only to have it instantly vanish from view the moment Michael Jackson dropped dead and sucked all the air out of the news for a week or more. O'Brien does fine as Hildy, but it's Menjou's Burns who steals the show. It earned him an Oscar nomination, though as good as Menjou is, he's no Cary Grant. The Front Page itself also earned a best picture nomination. The only one of the five nominees from 1930-31 I haven't seen is East Lynne, but of the four I have, The Front Page wins by a mile and the fact that Cimarron won best picture at all is ridiculous. If not The Front Page, Skippy or Trader Horn deserved it before that dusty Western.
As The Front Page ends, Menjou's Burns even manages to charm Peggy and convince her that he's not all bad. As a wedding gift, he gives Hildy his golden pocketwatch engraved, "To the finest newspaperman I've ever known Walter Burns" and tells him he can scratch his name out and put in his if he likes. They drop the sound, so you can't hear the last word of the final punchline, which Walter Matthau at least got to deliver in Billy Wilder's version, when Burns calls Duffy and tells him to radio ahead to the train's first stop and give the sheriff Hildy's description and have him arrested. "The son of a bitch stole my watch."
His Girl Friday remains my favorite, but this 80-year-old version of a play which premiered in 1928 is pretty damn good as well. I've never seen The Front Page staged in its play form, but it would have been fun to see either of its last two Broadway revivals since the 1986 revival's Walter Burns was John Lithgow and, even more intriguing, the very successful 1969 revival starred Robert Ryan as its Walter Burns. When is that time machine getting built for me already?
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Labels: 30s, Astaire, Burt Reynolds, Cagney, Cary, Ginger Rogers, Hawks, Hecht, Howard Hughes, Lithgow, Matthau, Menjou, Milestone, Movie Tributes, Musicals, Oscars, Remakes, Robert Ryan, Silents, Wilder
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Friday, November 16, 2007
Centennial Tributes: Burgess Meredith
By Edward Copeland
Not enough credit goes to our best character actors, actors who, more times than not, never fail, even if they seldom get near top billing. That's certainly the case with the late, great Burgess Meredith, who would have turned 100 today. He truly was a utility player: You could get the serious Burgess, the campy Burgess, the eccentrically fun Burgess or even the flat-out hammy Burgess, and he seldom failed at any of those. I wonder what he's most remembered for now, 10 years after his death. Is it his fantastic interpretation of The Penguin on the 1960s Batman TV series? Could it be Jack Lemmon's father in Grumpy Old Men? Is it Rocky Balboa's crotchety trainer in the first three Rocky movies? Meredith was all of these roles and so much more.
He made his film debut in 1936, six years after he made his debut on the Broadway stage in a production of Romeo and Juliet starring and directed by Eva Le Gallienne. He would return frequently to Broadway, often as a director (including a Tony nomination as director of a play for Ulysses in Nighttown in 1974.
Still, film and TV were where Meredith would leave his strongest impressions and he did that just three years into his career in the role of George in Lewis Milestone's film adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Two years later, Meredith gave what is, for me, my favorite performance, depicted in the photo at the top of this post. In Ernst Lubitsch's That Uncertain Feeling Meredith gave a delightfully odd performance as concert pianist Alexander Sebastian, who manages to break up the marriage of the Bakers (Melvyn Douglas, Merle Oberon). The scene that introduces him, set in the lobby of a psychiatrist's office, is priceless even when standing alone. Sebastian describes himself as an "individualist" and insists that "I hate humankind and humankind hates me." The film itself is by far a lesser Lubitsch, but Meredith's performance makes the whole enterprise worthwhile.
He took on the role of real-life WWII journalist Ernie Pyle in 1945's The Story of G.I. Joe, which earned Robert Mitchum his only Oscar nomination. He continued to work frequently in film, including three films with Otto Preminger: 1962's Advise and Consent, 1963's The Cardinal and 1965's In Harm's Way. In the latter two, he mostly lent solid support, but Advise and Consent gave Meredith one of his very best screen roles as an extremely nervous witness in a congressional hearing.
Of course, 1966 brought him the role that first made me aware of him (and endeared me to the actor as well): The Penguin on TV's Batman. His, as just about everyone on that show, was a comic tour de force and I still prefer him to a Danny DeVito version of the role. After the TV show ended, he still made forays into film, including achieving the rare goal of winning two supporting actor nominations in a row. The first came for 1975's The Day of the Locust, an adaptation of Nathanael West's novella, which I saw a young child, dragging my parents to it because I knew The Penguin was in it. I haven't seen the film in more than 30 years, but I can still remember his character cackling from a coffin. The following year, he got his second Oscar nomination for another of his best-known turns: Rocky Balboa's trainer Mickey in the original Rocky, a role he repeated in the first two sequels. Meredith managed to make the crusty old dude fresh without being corny.
I also enjoyed him as Goldie Hawn's karate-fighting landlord in 1978's Foul Play. His melee with Rachel Roberts still makes me laugh. He also appeared as one of the many stars in 1981's Clash of the Titans. Late in his career, he enjoyed another resurgence as Lemmon's foul-mouthed dad in Grumpy Old Men and its sequel.
Still, aside from all these other memorable roles, I have a feeling he might get a big dose of fond remembrance for his appearances on Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, on which he guest-starred four times, including in what, for me at least, was that series' finest episode: 1959's "Time Enough at Last." Playing a geeky bookworm who repeatedly sneaks away from his duties at a bank to read in the vault, his choice of hiding place ends up making him the sole survivor of a nuclear attack. The man is giddy with excitement: No one is left to mock him and he has all the time and all the books in the world at his disposal, until the script gives him one of the series' most cruel twists.
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Labels: Awards, Burgess Meredith, DeVito, Lemmon, Lubitsch, Milestone, Mitchum, Oscars, Preminger, Television, Theater
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