Wednesday, February 01, 2012

 

Or without Larry "Bud" either

By Edward Copeland
In fact, you could say literally that Late Night With David Letterman wouldn't have started without Larry "Bud" Melman (aka Calvert DeForest) since he literally opened the first episode as seen above. His appearances provided some of the most memorable and funniest moments on Late Night and deserve a separate remembrance — even if you had to wonder if Larry realized his role in the joke.

Even now. very little is known about how David Letterman came upon 60-year-old Calvert DeForest and turned him into Larry "Bud" Melman," let alone decided to take the gigantic risk of letting this odd little man with the giant glasses be the first thing audiences saw when they tuned in to Late Night with David Letterman for the first time on Feb, 1, 1982. Supposedly, for most of his life, DeForest worked for the pharmaceutical company Parke Davis, which Pfizer eventually took over. As awkward as he was in front of the camera DeForest actually worked some as an actor prior to Late Night, supposedly having appeared in five films prior to the talk show, not that any of those were memorable. The first credit was 1972's While the Cat's Away…, a soft-core sex comedy written and directed by an auteur in the genre, Chuck Vincent, who would go on to make late-night Skinemax classics such as Warrior Queen starring Sybil Danning and Donald Pleasence and Young Nurses in Love. In 1976, he was part of the entourage in a comedy called Apple Pie. DeForest is listed as part of the cast of 1979's Blond Poison. a film that IMDb provides no information about except that its cast also allegedly featured James Remar. 1980 found DeForest in the Greek production Savage Hunt. The fifth and final pre-Late Night film that DeForest made comes closet to a title people have heard. They filmed the crude comedy Waitress! in in 1981, though it didn't get released until 1982. Its large cast included in small roles Anthony Dennison (under the name Anthony Sarrero) who would find fame on Crime Story and Chris Noth who would go on to Law & Order and Sex and the City.

While DeForest might have been his real name, while Letterman worked on NBC, he always was Larry "Bud" Melman (unless he was Kenny the Gardener or Johnny Carson). When NBC screwed Dave over for The Chin, Larry followed Dave to CBS but NBC claimed that "Larry 'Bud' Melman" was part of the network's intellectual property, so on Late Show, he had to appear as Calvert DeForest, which he did through 2002 when his health declined too much for him to continue. DeForest died in 2006 at age 85. Thanks to YouTube, I don't need to try to describe some of the best Larry moments. You can see them for yourself. However, it can't be denied what a key role Melman played in the Late Night phenomenon. Carson played characters. Steve Allen "interviewed" them. Letterman mixed the real and the imagined into a potpourri of zaniness. Writer Chris Elliott provided his string of characters. Stage manager Biff Henderson played himself as did announcer Bill Wendell and his assistant Barbara Gaines. The driver of the NBC Bookmobile was really Kathleen Ankers, the show's scenic designer. Another writer, Gerard Mulligan, often became involved as well. The cue-card guy even got in on the action as did the show's director, Mr. Hal Gurtner "THAT'S GURNEE, EDWARD." CBS turned Paul Schaffer's band into an "orchestra." When they were an hour later on NBC, they were "the world's most dangerous band." One of the first memorable Melman moments claimed that he owned the show, starting it with the fortune made from his bus company.

Larry helps a viewer with insomnia,


"Ask Mr. Melman


Larry does a Top 10 list


Larry explains the Census


Kenny the Gardener


From the second Custom-Made Show, they put Larry in a bear suit and send him out in the halls of Rockefeller Center to try to get change for a $10 bill.


Finally, the classic: They sent Melman to the Port Authority Bus Station to greet arrivals with decidedy mixed results which only made it funnier. It comes in three parts.Part I:


PART II



PART III



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Thursday, September 15, 2011

 

After 40 years, I have far more
than just one thing to say about Columbo

"That's me — I'm paranoid. Every time I see a dead body, I think it's murder.…But that's me. I'd like to see everyone die of old age." — Lt. Columbo, "Étude in Black" (Season 2, Episode 1)


By Edward Copeland
Actually, television audiences met Lt. Columbo three times before his series debut 40 years ago on this date as part of the NBC Mystery Movie — and the first time he wasn't even played by Peter Falk. Though most who are old enough probably remember the series as part of a Sunday night rotation with NBC's other mystery series, McMillan & Wife and McCloud, the "wheel" actually started on Wednesday nights. The troika didn't move to Sunday until the second season. As far as the Columbo character goes, actor Bert Freed first played the cigar-chomping lieutenant in an episode of NBC's The Chevy Mystery Show , a summer anthology series hosted by Walter Slezak, that aired July 31, 1960, titled "Enough Rope." William Link and Richard Levinson, the creators of the Columbo character, adapted the teleplay from a story "Dear Corpus Delicti" that they published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine with Richard Carlson playing a murderous doctor. Two years later, the writers expanded the story into a stage play called Prescription: Murder which starred legendary Oscar-winning character actor Thomas Mitchell as Columbo with Joseph Cotten as the homicidal physician. By 1968, they decided to return Columbo to television with a movie version of Prescription: Murder. They sought Lee J. Cobb to play Columbo, but he was unavailable, but consider this frightening possibility: Their second choice was Bing Crosby. Fortunately, Bing's golf game proved more important to him than a television series and, though they thought he was too young for the part, Peter Falk won the role with Gene Barry playing the killer. They did a second TV movie, Ransom for a Dead Man, that aired in early 1971 with Lee Grant as the murderer (for which she received an Emmy nomination), and come that fall Columbo became a regular series as part of that mystery wheel and Falk's portrayal of the scruffy homicide detective with his junky car, tattered raincoat and ever-present cigar became an irreplaceable TV icon. In the first season episode "Lady in Waiting," a socialite mother (Jessie Royce Landis) arrives at her son's mansion after he's been shot to death and doesn't immediately recognize exactly who or what Lt. Columbo is. When he introduces himself as a police detective, she says, "I must say you hardly look the role." That may have been true, but no one but Peter Falk could have played the role any better.

I was too young to catch the early years in first run, but I remember how excited Henry Mancini's spooky theme music for The NBC Mystery Movie with the unknown figure waving a flashlight in all directions at whatever shows were in the rotation at the time followed by the announcer's booming voice announcing, "Tonight's episode —" It always punctured my balloon if he finished his statement with McMillan & Wife, McCloud or even Hec Ramsey. Thankfully, in this example, it is Columbo.


If you have never seen an episode of Columbo (and if that's the case, I must ask what the hell you've been doing with your life), you needn't worry that for a mystery series I'm being so carefree in identifying the various killers because what made Link & Levinson's creation (in this case the series, not the detective) so great was that you know from the outset who the murderer is. Spoiler alerts aren't necessary here because Columbo begins by showing the culprit plotting and carrying out his and her crime and Falk's intrepid homicide detective doesn't show up until later to play cat-and-mouse with the killer. In the first season, the movies (which, in essence, is what they were more than a series) ran 90 minutes with commercials while in later seasons they alternated between 90 minute and two hour installments. Sometimes, Columbo didn't turn up until as late as 30 minutes into the show. In the first episode when Columbo was a regularly scheduled series, "Murder By the Book," Falk's lieutenant first appears as a faint figure at the end of an office hallway as he approaches the wife (Rosemary Forsyth) of apparently kidnapped and possibly dead mystery writer Jim Ferris (Martin Milner), who is getting a drink from a water fountain. It's about 15 minutes into the story and the audience already knows that Ferris' soon-to-be-ex-writing partner Ken Franklin (Jack Cassidy) has lured Jim to his lakeside cabin, killed him and staged the entire kidnapping. Cassidy will be one of the show's favorite actors to cast as a killer: he'll play the villain two more times. Others in this rogues gallery include Robert Culp (three times as a murderer, once as the father of a murderer) and Patrick McGoohan (a killer four times, taking home Emmys for two of them; he also directed five episodes, one of which he wrote). It's also one of several Columbo mysteries that involve writers. Most interesting of all, the series premiere was written by the show's story editor at the time, Steven Bochco, who would go on to co-create Hill Street Blues, and was directed by a 24-year-old kid named Steven Spielberg.

Many directors whose names you'd recognize helmed a Columbo, though no one else who'd become a Spielberg. The other director who would probably go on to the most notable career would be Jonathan Demme, who directed an installment in its seventh season. Many known better for their acting gave it a try as well as some whose names might not ring a bell but who did direct some interesting features such as Jack Smight (No Way to Treat a Lady), Boris Sagal (The Omega Man), Richard Quine (My Sister Eileen, The Solid Gold Cadillac), Robert Butler (The Barefoot Executive, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes), Jeannot Szwarc (Somewhere in Time), Ted Post (Hang 'em High, Magnum Force) and James Frawley (The Muppet Movie). Other writers who would pass through included the prolific Stephen J. Cannell, Dean Hargrove, who went on to create or co-create The Father Dowling Mysteries and Matlock, and Larry Cohen who would go on to write and direct such quirky horror films as It's Alive and Q.

While the two previous made-for-TV movies had set the basic mold for what a Columbo mystery would be, it truly wasn't until it became a regular network fixture that Falk could really cut loose as the lieutenant and the show could become a comedy as much as it was about catching the bad guy. That's really why I think Tony Shalhoub's Monk gets compared to Columbo so often — it's not because Columbo has a mental disorder but because Columbo and Monk both emphasize comedic elements. In fact, Monk tends to be more dramatic than Columbo with Monk's underlying mourning for his murdered wife while Columbo just got funnier the longer it went on. "Murder By the Book" really sets the template for the entire series and even if you have no interest in Columbo, it's fascinating to watch just as one of Spielberg's earliest credits. "Murder By the Book" opens with the sound of typing (sigh…typewriters) while the visual shows a car driving down an L.A. street. We soon see that Milner's Jim Ferris busily types away. On the wall, (Homage to Rear Window or not? You decide.) are plaques, painting and photos charting the partnership of Ferris and Ken Franklin (Cassidy). As the typing continues to be the only sound, the car we're watching pulls into the building's garage and parks on the roof. A hand reaches inside the glove compartment and removes a gun. A man exits the car and shuts the door and we see it is Franklin whom Spielberg films at a low angle as credits continue. The director throughout the episode uses a lot more adventurous angles and quick cuts than I've seen from him in years, but he was young and trying to gain notice. Upstairs, something only a grammarian or a copy editor would notice — Ferris types a quote but places the period outside the quotation mark. It turns out the gun was a joke — it's not even loaded — and he's not wearing gloves. Franklin was just trying a good-natured ruse to show Ferris that there aren't any hard feelings about severing their partnership and asks him Jim to his lakeside cabin near San Diego to mark the end of a fruitful relationship. Ferris doesn't know that it also will mark the end of his life.

It's obvious why they would re-team Falk with an actor such as Jack Cassidy more than once because some performers' chemistry with Falk's Columbo reached a perfection that you expect came from a lab and since the interplay between the lieutenant and the killer drove the show, why not go back to a proven winner as they did with Cassidy, who would return in seasons 3 and 5. He might have appeared again if he hadn't fallen asleep with a lit cigarette and died in 1976, 10 months after his third Columbo aired. Cassidy excelled at what was the most common Columbo scenario — a villain who's not only a killer, but a snob. In most cases, class comes into play with the murderer always assuming he or she is smarter and better than that rumpled lieutenant, but no one plays dumb on purpose better than this detective so when he makes the case on the cultured killer, they inevitably are surprised that this little man in the tattered raincoat, always seeming to be forgetful and driving that Peugeot 403 convertible that looks as if it could crumble into a million pieces at any moment beat them. In "Murder By the Book," it takes 35 minutes for Columbo to say his first, "There is one more thing." The comic highlight, harbinger of many to come in the series, occurs as Ken Franklin is being interviewed by a magazine writer and her photographer tries to take photos of him while in the background Falk does some great slapstick as Columbo, juggles an armful of books, cigar stuck in his mouth, looking for a place to put the books down.

The second episode of its first season had another three-time killer, Robert Culp, as Brimmer, the head of a big private investigation agency hired by Ray Milland to find out if his much younger wife (Patricia Crowley) is cheating on him in "Death Lends a Hand," which won Columbo creators Levinson & Link the Emmy for outstanding writing in a drama series, the only writing Emmy the series ever received though it earned a lot of nominations in that category. Brimmer proves she did, but lies (with the wife in a nearby room) and says she's faithful. She asks why he would do such a thing. "Oddly enough, I'm a moralist," he tells her. So moral that he lied to her husband to hold the truth over her head so she can feed him information about her husband's powerful friends and business interests. She balks, saying she'll expose the private eye instead and he kills her in a rage — the cleanup and coverup of which gets wonderfully filmed as reflections in the lenses of Culp's glasses. He stages her death to look like she was robbed and dumped in a vacant lot. Some interesting facts about L.A. life in 1971: 187 already was the police code for a homicide and when Brimmer tries to woo Columbo to take a job at his agency, Columbo learns a top position there can pull in $30,000 a year. That doesn't seem like much and in the first episode of season two, Columbo says his salary is $11,000 a year, which is the start of the poverty line for a single person today and the oft-mentioned Mrs. Columbo is a housewife. When they tried to spin her off in the form of Kate Mulgrew when Columbo ended the first time in 1978, she had a part-time job writing for a weekly neighborhood newspaper, until they decided to change her name to Callahan and forget that she was supposed to be related to Columbo at all (though at the start of Mrs. Columbo she even took their unnamed basset hound Dog with her).

Falk won the first of his four Emmys (out of 11 nominations) for playing Columbo for that first season. The sole time the show won an Emmy for best series, it actually was shared ith the other NBC Mystery Movie members for outstanding limited series. Throughout its two runs (the original NBC run from 1971-78 and the ABC return from 1989-2003), it earned 38 Emmy nominations and won 11 awards. Because of the shared time slot, it also meant shorter seasons than a regular series. Where a normal network show would be producing around 26 episodes a year at that time, Columbo only had seven installments in season one. Some of the other actors who played killers that year were Eddie Albert, Ross Martin, Susan Clark (in "Lady in Waiting" which featured Leslie Nielsen when he could still play it straight and was directed by veteran actor Norman Lloyd, who fell off the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Saboteur and would play Dr. Auschlander on St. Elsewhere), Patrick O'Neal, who played a homicidal architect in "Blueprint for Murder," the only Columbo episode that Falk directed himself, and perhaps most fun of all, Roddy McDowall in an episode titled "Short Fuse." Did you hear the one about the exploding cigar? You will in "Short Fuse," where we also learn aboute Columbo's famous fear of heights. Because McDowall's character Roger Stanford is a playboy and a prankster (oh — and there is that murder), he does fool around with things such as those cans that spray strings of sticky colored plastic. When Columbo snoops around his darkroom, he accidentally sets it off on himself and an entire scene consists of McDowall picking the goo out of Falk's hair.

As I mentioned when I sadly had to write my appreciation of Peter Falk when he passed away in late June, there was much more to the actor than just Lt. Columbo, as great and iconic as Columbo is. Between the time he made his first Columbo movie Prescription: Murder and prior to filming his second Ransom for a Dead Man and beginning the series, Falk began another important creative relationship — with John Cassavetes. The two actually had worked as actors in 1969 first in the Italian gangster flick Machine Gun McCain, which also featured Gena Rowlands but didn't open in the U.S. until October 1970. The important film they made together though was Husbands (subtitled A Comedy About Life, Death and Freedom) that was written and directed by Cassavetes and co-starred Ben Gazzara. Falk became a vital part of Cassavetes' unofficial repertory company appearing in A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night (as himself) and Big Trouble. The two also co-starred in Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky. The Cassavetes troupe all played with Falk on Columbo in some capacity. Rowlands appeared as the wife of a killer, Gazzara directed two episodes and Cassavetes starred as the killer in the second season premiere, "Étude in Black," one of the series' best episodes thanks to chemistry these two fine actors already had with one another.

Cassavetes plays gifted conductor and composer Alex Benedict who kills his pianist mistress (Anjanette Comer) after she threatens to tell his wife Janice (Blythe Danner) about their affair if he doesn't leave her. Benedict tries to make it look like a suicide, but Columbo sees through the ruse rather quickly. He and Mrs. Columbo also are big fans of Benedict, who is prepping a big concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The scenes between Cassavetes and Falk prove positively electric as their relationship switches from a killer who thinks Columbo's swooning will save him until he figures out that the lieutenant actually has more on the ball than he ever suspected and he starts challenging the cop to find the evidence. The episode has time for laughs as well as Benedict stumbles upon Columbo waiting for him on stage at the Hollywood Bowl playing "Chopsticks" on a concert piano. The cast also includes Myrna Loy as his mother-in-law and patron of the orchestra, concerned over the P.R. when another member of the orchestra who was the murdered woman's ex-boyfriend turns out to have a criminal past. Benedict defends the musician, telling the woman who played Nora Charles that it's not like she didn't drink gin during Prohibition. This excellent episode was written by Bochco from a story by Levinson & Link and was directed by none other Nicholas Colasanto, best known as Coach on Cheers. This also is the episode where Columbo gets the basset hound that he never bothers to give a name.

For a network series to have more good episodes than bad, especially when it involves a set formula that they didn't tinker with much, Columbo truly stands as a monumental television achievement. Of course, I refer only to NBC years from 1971-1978. In a way, they had the luxury that cable series have now by not having to deliver so many episodes a year. While they call it seven seasons, it only adds up to 45 episodes. The sixth season only produced three episodes and no season made more than eight. In a way, it was the Curb Your Enthusiasm of mystery shows: A formula and a limited number of shows per season. When ABC revived Columbo in 1989, they tried originally to pair it with other mysteries, but they all eventually flopped and it just turned into occasional movies. Some were OK, but they had a hard time getting worthy killers except for the two appearances by McGoohan and had some silly outing where Columbo went undercover in disguise with accents and one where there wasn't even a murder but a kidnapping. Faye Dunaway won a guest actress Emmy for what really was a controversial one, "It's All in the Game," because Columbo purposely lets the killer get away because of the victim's loathsomeness. They had two seasons where they were regularly scheduled between 1989 and 1991 and then just TV movies. They made 24 in all.

However, those first 45, I could go on about them all. While it wasn't unusual in the NBC version to have killers who turned out to be more sympathetic than their victims, Columbo still took them to jail. Donald Pleasence's wine maker in "Any Old Port in a Storm" may be the best example. His playboy half-brother plans to sell the vineyards to another wine company, taking away his pride and joy and he kills him in a rage. He also was one of the few cultured characters who didn't look down on Columbo. When his longtime secretary (Julie Harris) figures out his guilt, she proposes he marry her to keep her quiet. Columbo solves the crime first and he gratefully confesses — finding prison preferable to marriage. "Freedom is purely relative," he tells Columbo, who brings out a special bottle of wine when he arrests him, which his high tastes approve. "You learn very well, lieutenant," he says. "Thank you, sir. That's about the nicest thing anyone has said to me," Columbo responds. All the Jack Cassidy episodes are great, but in the second outing, "Publish or Perish," it's neat to see him play a book publisher losing his biggest author and that they cast Mickey Spillane in the part. The episode also sends Columbo to Chasen's to interview some people and has the high-scale eatery whip him up some chili. Director Robert Butler also includes an imaginative triple split screen that shows Spillane's character at work dictating his book while the hired killer approaches down a hall and Cassidy is elsewhere, establishing his alibi. "Swan Song" from the third season proves to be another favorite of mine with probably the most unusual casting choice for a killer ever — Johnny Cash. He plays a gospel singer blackmailed by his controlling shrew of a wife (Ida Lupino) and turns in a solid acting performance. Cash's character drugs Lupino and a young girl singer that he had sex with when she was underage so he drugs the two of them when they are flying to the next concert site and bails out of the plane, making it look like a simple plane crash. As Columbo investigates, an air crash investigator asks Columbo if he flies. "My ears pop in an elevator. In fact, I don't even like being this tall," he replies. I can't leave out Patrick McGoohan, always great, but of his four I think his first episode, the one that got him the first Emmy, "By Dawn's Early Light," ranks first. His strict commandant at a boys' military academy would be a great performance on any series. Some of the best guest killers whose episodes I didn't have time or space to mention in detail (original 45 only): Anne Baxter, Leonard Nimoy, Laurence Harvey, Martin Landau (as twins), Vera Miles, Jackie Cooper, José Ferrer, Richard Kiley, Robert Conrad, Robert Vaughn, Janet Leigh, Hector Elizondo, Ricardo Montalban, William Shatner, Theodore Bikel, Ruth Gordon, Louis Jourdan and Nicol Williamson.

If I had to pick, the fourth season episode "Negative Reaction" might be my favorite Columbo of them all. Written by Peter S. Fischer, who would later create Murder, She Wrote and directed by Alf Kjelllin, it cast Dick Van Dyke against type as an asshole and a killer — even if what little we saw of his wife (Antoinette Bower) made it appear as if she had it coming. Van Dyke plays Paul Gallesko, an acclaimed photographer reduced to shooting portraits because he's under the thumb of his wife. He fakes her kidnapping and gets a recently released ex-con named Alvin Deschler (Don Gordon) he met while chronicling San Quentin to photograph possible houses for him to buy, unaware that Gallesko is setting him up to be the fall guy and eventually kills him and shoots himself in a faked ransom exchange gone awry. What makes "Negative Reaction" so great in addition to Van Dyke being a bad guy is that it also may be the funniest Columbo as well. When the lieutenant arrives in the beat-up Peugot at the junkyard where it was staged, he passes a sign that says "WE BUY JUNK CARS." It seems that Gallesko had an unexpected witness — a drunk bum played by character actor Vito Scotti who appeared in six episodes in vastly different parts. (In "Swan Song," he was a funeral director trying to sell Columbo on post-life planning.) After he gets sobered up and gives his statement, the police let him slip away and Columbo has to track him down at a Catholic mission where a nun (Joyce Van Patten, who will return in a later episode as a killer) mistakes Columbo as a homeless person and tries to find him a new coat and gets him a bowl of stew. Columbo keeps trying to explain that he's not homeless, but the nun replies, "No false pride between friends." When he finally finds the bum and talks with him, the nun returns with a coat and tries to take his and Columbo finally says, "I appreciate what you're doing ma'am, but I've had this coat for seven years and I'm very fond of it" and shows her his badge. The nun assumes he's undercover and compliments his disguise and promises not to blow his cover. Gallesko certainly isn't as friendly as the nun every time Columbo pops up to dig. "You're like a little shaggy-haired terrier. You've got a grip on my trousers and you won't let go. I can't turn around without you looking up at me with that blank innocent expression on your face," Gallesko growls. One of the other things that bothers Columbo is that Deschler was taking cabs everywhere until the last day, the day of the supposed ransom exchange, when he suddenly rented a car. It would have been a lot less expensive to rent a car earlier than taking all these cab rides, but then it dawns on the detective: He didn't have a driver's license yet. Columbo goes to the DMV to check it out and it turns out the man who gave him the driving test that day, Mr. Weekly (Larry Storch), is stuck out on a street because a car broke down. Columbo goes and picks him up to see if he can identify Deschler, but Mr. Weekly keeps being distracted over worries about the safety of Columbo's car and his reckless driving. It's a hysterical scene — and they chose to break for this bit of comedy with only 14 minutes left. On top of everything else, "Negative Reaction" contains one of those classic endings where Columbo tricks the killer by using his own arrogance against him to give himself away. That's why this YouTube clip of conductor Alex Benedict's parting words to Lt. Columbo sum him and his series up.


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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

 

My Missing Picture Nominees: Sons and Lovers (1960)


By Edward Copeland
Before I begin discussing the 1960 best picture nominee Sons and Lovers, based on the famed D.H. Lawrence novel and which earned acclaimed Oscar-winning cinematographer Jack Cardiff his only nomination as a director, I'd like to use this occasion to point out yet another reason any true film lover should dump their streaming only Netflix option in favor of DVDs only. Sons and Lovers is one of the few Oscar nominees for best picture that I've never been able to see, but Netflix only carries it on streaming so I've been trying to watch any titles they have only on streaming before I switch to DVDs only. Cardiff filmed Sons and Lovers in luscious black-and-white CinemaScope (actually his d.p., the equally famous and lauded Freddie Francis was the cinematographer on the film). While you will see the opening and closing credits in the intended aspect ratio, the film in between will be cropped and squeezed for no good reason. Other streaming titles are shown in CinmaScope from beginning to end. Another strike against Netflix streaming. You won't get that on the DVD unless it's a DVD that only offers fullscreen.

As you might expect, a film being directed by Jack Cardiff, the brilliant d.p. behind the look of the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classics A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus (for which he won the Oscar for cinematography) and The Red Shoes. He also shot Under Capricorn for Hitchcock, The African Queen for Huston, War and Peace for King Vidor (earning another Oscar nomination) and garnered his final cinematography nomination for Joshua Logan's Fanny in 1961. Believe it or not, he even served as d.p. on Rambo: First Blood Part II. The Academy saw fit to give him an honorary Oscar for his long career of exceptional work at the ceremony held in 2001.

Freddie Francis, his d.p. for Sons and Lovers, took home the Oscar for his work on the film. Despite a long list of impressive work, Francis was only nominated for the Oscar one other time — for Glory — and he won. Some of Francis' other films included Scorsese's version of Cape Fear and, his final film, David Lynch's The Straight Story. Also on Cardiff's crew as an assistant director was Peter Yates, who would go on to direct films as diverse as Bullitt and Breaking Away.

I wish I could say that I've read the D.H. Lawrence novel upon which the film is based, but the title itself makes it obvious that the adaptation by Gavin Lambert (who co-wrote Nicholas Ray's films Bigger Than Life and Bitter Victory) and T.E.B. Clarke (Oscar-winning writer of The Lavender Hill Mob) has taken some big liberties from the book. I mean the title indicates multiple sons, but aside from one brief scene that kills off Arthur (Sean Barrett), son of Walter and Gertrude Morel (the great Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller, by far the film's greatest asset beyond its look and design), a couple of scenes with their son William (William Lucas), who lives in London, the film revolves around their son Paul (Dean Stockwell).

According to summaries of the novel online, Lawrence's book begins with a focus on the turbulent marriage of Walter, a working class miner in Nottingham, England, with a penchant for liquor and Gertrude, who develops unhealthy attachments to her sons. William still moves to London in the book, but is the eldest son and Gertrude's favorite, though he takes ill and dies. Arthur is an afterthought in the book and they also have a sister named Annie who doesn't exist in the film at all. None of the children follow dad into the mines. A near-death experience for Paul (in the novel, not the film) makes Gertrude transfer her obsession to him. Aspiring to be an artist, he gets a chance to move to London when a patron (Ernest Thesiger, who played Dr. Pretorious in 1935's Bride of Frankenstein) sees promise in Paul's work, but Paul abandons his chance to leave when he witness an incident of his drunken father mistreating his mother and stays, fearful of what his lout of a dad could do to his mom.

His mother also subtly and not so subtly interferes with Paul's romances, first with the overly pious Miriam (Heather Sears), who teases the poor lad unmercifully. and later with the married but separated suffragette Clara (Mary Ure) he meets when he takes a job at a sewing factory. (His boss is played by Donald Pleasence). While Miriam runs frigid, Clara burns hot and Paul eats her up, much to the disdain of Clara's cheating husband and his possessive mother.

Howard was nominated as best actor, though he's really supporting and deserved a nomination there. Ure was nominated as supporting actress. Hiller didn't get remembered at all, which is a shame. Given the five films up for best picture in 1960, they all were going to finish a distant second to Billy Wilder's The Apartment. John Wayne's starring in and directing The Alamo automatically lands in fifth. The middle three are tightly bunched, but I believe I'd rank Elmer Gantry second, then The Sundowners, and place Sons and Lovers fourth.

What finally brings Sons and Lovers down that low, despite its gorgeous look and design and mostly superb acting, is Dean Stockwell, who sticks out like a dandelion in a bouquet of roses. Amidst all this British authenticity, including filming on many locations that D.H. Lawrence actually traversed, Stockwell just doesn't belong. His accent isn't horrible, but he's so recognizable as an American (he was born in Hollywood and began acting as a child in the 1940s after all), you know that he wasn't spawned by Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller. Supposedly, one of the producers, American Jerry Wald, insisted on casting an American in hopes of better U.S. box office. Stockwell can be a great actor but when you think of all the marvelous actors in the right age range circulating in the U.K at that time, what a boneheaded move. Imagine if this film had starred an O'Toole or a Finney or a Caine or a Richard Harris or an Oliver Reed or an Alan Bates or a Laurence Harvey. It could have saved the movie.



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Sunday, July 10, 2011

 

The Next 60 Seconds Are All That Matter


By J.D.
John Carpenter is one of those rare filmmakers that entertains while also trying to say something about the society in which we live in. It is a tough balancing act that few can maintain but Carpenter's films make it look easy. From the special effects opus/remake drenched in paranoia of The Thing (1982) to the two-fisted diatribe against Reaganomics of They Live (1988), he hasn't been afraid to sandwich a thought-provoking message in between action sequences. In this respect, his films are much more than genre pictures; rather they critique the problems of contemporary society. And for its time, Escape From New York(1981) was no different. Carpenter's film examined the validity of the presidency and the increase of crime and disguised it as a slick, futuristic race against time that was very prescient, going on to influence similarly minded and looking films for years, including a fascinating subgenre of Italian rip-offs.

Escape From New York is set in 1997 (?!) and crime in the United States has grown so bad that Manhattan Island in New York has become a maximum security prison with one simple rule: "Once you go in, you don't come out." One night, the president's plane is taken over by terrorists who crash it into the prison. The president (Donald Pleasence) escapes but quickly becomes a prisoner of the inmates led by the Duke (Isaac Hayes). It seems that the president is carrying a vital piece of information that is to be delivered to a historical summit in Hartford. Enter Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-soldier, now legendary fugitive who has been captured by the government and is scheduled to be transferred into the prison. Instead, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) offers him a deal: go into the prison, find the president, and bring him and the information back in exchange for a full pardon. Sounds easy, right? There's a catch: Snake only has 22 hours to do all this because by then the conference will be over and the world will be thrown into chaos. As an incentive he has two explosive charges lodged in his neck to keep him focused on the task at hand. With this enticing opening, the film kicks into high gear as Snake enters the world's most dangerous prison to find the president and save the world.

Carpenter had just made Dark Star (1974) and no one wanted to hire him as a director so he shifted his focus to screenwriting. Inspired by the Charles Bronson film Death Wish (1974), Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay in 1974. He didn’t agree with the film’s philosophy but liked how it conveyed “the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make an SF film along these lines. He was also influenced by the Watergate scandal. "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the president. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it" because the general feeling was that “It was too violent, too scary, too weird.” And so the director went on to do other films with the intention of making Escape later. After the successes of Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), Carpenter was in a position to make a motion picture with a big budget. He decided to revive his Escape script, but something seemed to be missing. "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." So, he brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film school days at University of Southern California. Castle invented the Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) character and came up with the film's humorous conclusion that offset the bleak tone of the film with a skewed sense of satire.

The film's setting proved to be another potential problem for Carpenter. It is apocalyptic in tone: a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York. How could Carpenter create this world on only a budget of $6 million (his biggest at the time)? As fate would have it, in 1977 there was a big fire in St. Louis that burned out several blocks of the downtown area. Carpenter and his crew convinced the city to shut off the electricity to these blocks at night and then proceeded to transform the remains into a New York of the future. They even found an exact replica of Grand Central Station that was deserted and unused. It was a tough, demanding shoot that Carpenter had never experienced before. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 a.m. and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 p.m., depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going the sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange." This approach paid off, creating a dark, foreboding atmosphere of a futuristic film noir.

In addition, Carpenter shot parts of the film in Los Angeles and New York. He and his film company were the first ones ever to be allowed to shoot on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let Carpenter have free run of the entire island. He remembers, “We were lucky. It wasn’t easy to get that initial permission. They’d had a bombing three months earlier, and were worried about trouble.” With Escape, the director created two distinct looks: “one is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers. That was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England.”

The heart of Escape From New York lies in its main character: Snake Plissken. His cynical, world-weary attitude flies in the face of the earnest authorities who send him off to the save the world. Snake could care less. All that matters to him is "the next 60 seconds," as Kurt Russell commented in an interview. "Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." It is this kind of intensity that makes Snake such an interesting character. He is the ideal antihero — intent on getting the job done and content on being left alone. Snake doesn't need anyone. Russell's performance clearly echoes Clint Eastwood's style of acting — the strong, silent type. Snake is a clever hybrid of The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry. It is an amusing riff on Eastwood's two most famous characters, which is only reinforced by the appearance of Lee Van Cleef (who appeared in a few films opposite Eastwood). It is to Russell's credit that he makes Snake a character you want to root for, that you want to see win at the end. There is something charismatic about Snake that makes you automatically want to like him. What is so great about the character is that Carpenter and co-screenwriter Nick Castle remain true to him throughout. They don’t saddle him with a love interest or dilute his intensity by having him crack the occasional joke. Snake remains an unrepentant badass, the proverbial fly in the ointment with a surly disregard for authority right up to the last shot of the film.

And to think that the studio did not want Carpenter to cast Russell in the role. Up until then the actor had done a string of Disney films as a youth and worked with Carpenter on a TV movie about Elvis Presley. The studio did not see Russell as a tough action hero. In fact, Charles Bronson expressed an interest in playing Snake (Tommy Lee Jones also was considered). However, by Carpenter’s own admission, “I was afraid of working with him. He was a big star and I was this little-shit nobody.” Fortunately, the filmmaker had faith in Russell and Escape From New York continued a long-standing relationship between the two men — both personal and professional — that continues to this day.

Escape From New York also features a strong supporting cast of character actors such as veteran thespian Harry Dean Stanton as Brain, the smartest man in the prison, and Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, a hack who stayed in New York even after it changed into a prison. Let’s not forget Adrienne Barbeau as the Brain’s girlfriend Maggie and yet she is anything but that, as the talented actress plays her character as the tough-minded female equivalent of Snake. The film contains an eccentric assortment of characters each of who get their moment to shine and this only enhances the enjoyment of watching Escape. One of the best things about it is how these characters interact with Snake and how he views them. The supporting cast also fleshes out more of this fascinating world. They continually offer all sorts of tantalizing tidbits that allude to Snake's colorful past, to conditions in the prison and how the inmates have created their own world.

Escape from New York received mostly positive reviews when it was released. Newsweek magazine felt that Carpenter had a “deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility — which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. He uses Russell well, however.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip worth taking.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "[The film] is not to be analyzed too solemnly, though. It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season." However, the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr felt that the film, “fails to satisfy — it gives us too little of too much.”

First and foremost Escape From New York is a fast-paced action film that is never dull to watch. However, the film also contains a dark, satirical edge that never falters, even right up to the film's conclusion. One the most frustrating problems of most films is how they end. No one seems to know how to end a film without relying on tried and true clichés. Carpenter's film does not fall into this trap. Escape may be an action film but it also makes some very interesting comments about crime in the United States that are still relevant even today. One could argue that Carpenter's film is almost intended to be a warning. That if things get any worse, the world that is depicted in this film isn't that far off. It is these sobering thoughts that make Escape From New York as powerful and entertaining today as it was when it first hit the screens in 1981.

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Saturday, October 25, 2008

 

He came home 30 years ago today


By Edward Copeland
The credits perfectly set the mood. A black screen with just a creepy jack-o-lantern, lit by candle from inside, as the camera moves in tighter and tighter, accompanied by John Carpenter's brilliant and memorable score. Halloween turns 30 years old today and though it spawned countless awful imitators and its own terrible sequels, the original remains great and unsurpassed in the slasher genre.

Looking at Halloween again, it's amazing how little blood it displays. Only four murders occur on screen and one of those is in the 1963 prologue, with its shocking dénouement that reveals the slasher as a 6-year-old boy.

Carpenter's film follows fairly standard cinematic rules, emphasizing voyeurism much as Hitchcock and others did. He also creates suspense from the simplest things such as blowing laundry, ringing phones. For me, Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis separates Halloween and even most of its awful sequels from dreck such as the Friday the 13th series. That way you not only have the same bad guy in Michael Myers but the same person dedicated to trying to stop him. As Loomis tells the Haddonfield sheriff about Michael, he spent eight years trying to reach Myers and then the next seven trying to keep him locked up. Jamie Lee Curtis, with her fine genetic history as Janet Leigh's daughter, remains a solid presence as the principal baby sitter who becomes one of Myers' targets. Carpenter also includes bits of dry humor, such as the little girl who seems to do nothing but stare at the horror films on the TV. (Is she a Myers in the making?) Then we also get to see Loomis having perhaps a bit too much fun scaring kids away from Michael's old house.

One of my favorite oddball moments comes from the quizzical way Myers cocks his head back and forth like a dog after he impales a teen on a kitchen door. Of course, you still have to wonder why a killing machine wastes so much time setting up bodies so they can spring out and be discovered or why — after Myers hasn't died after about the third time Curtis thought he was dead — she didn't think to try to dismember him by hacking his head off with that butcher knife. Still, who cares? Halloween remains one of the best horror films ever made and did I mention that John Carpenter score?


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