Wednesday, July 17, 2013
What he really wanted to do was be an actor
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of The Sydney Pollack Blogathon occurring through July 22 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
By Edward Copeland
For 40 years, from 1965 to 2005, Sydney Pollack directed 19 feature films. His last directing effort appeared as an installment of PBS' American Masters series on the architect Frank Gehry. Prior to that, he directed lots of episodic television. As Pollack reached the end of his life (and beyond it) he produced projects more than he directed and toward the end he also resumed the artistic endeavor where he started, acting more
and more often. When he ventured into show business, he aimed toward acting. His father hoped that Pollack would pursue a career in dentistry, but after catching the theater bug in high school in South Bend, Ind., he left for New York following graduation and studied with legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner at Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse (The same year he directed the American Masters special on Frank Gehry, he executive produce another episode of the series on Meisner). Eventually, he became an assistant to Meisner and even taught acting to others, though in a 2006 interview with Venice Magazine, Pollack resisted calling the technique he learned and passed on "The Method." "People call a lot of things 'The Method,' but there really isn’t one Method," Pollack said, "but it’s all derived from Stanislavsky. It’s all derived from Stanislavsky, but Stella Adler taught it different than Sandy Meisner and Strasberg taught it differently from both of them, and Harold Clurman taught it differently than the three of them, and Bobby Lewis took it in his own direction, as well. They each took The Moscow Art Theater of Stanislavsky and basic principles, and then developed their own approach. The goal was always the same: to find a way to analyze the construction of truthful behavior within imaginary circumstances."As he acted a lot in television of the 1950s, Pollack's interest turned to directing. While Pollack directed and produced some great and good films (my favorite being 1982's Tootsie, where he took his first substantial acting role since an episodic television appearance on a 1964 episode of the crime drama Brenner starring Edward Binns and James Broderick), after Tootsie, he acted or did voicework in more films and TV shows than his entire filmography. In many ways, I found Pollack more interesting at times as an actor than as a filmmaker, and that's where his career in the arts began, with his single Broadway role in 1955's The Dark Is Light Enough by Christopher Fry and starring Katharine Cornell, Tyrone Power and featuring Christopher Plummer.
Pollack began directing episodic television in 1961 and had ceased television acting in 1964 with that appearance on Brenner. As he jettisoned acting to concentrate on directing, he made a single movie: the 1962 Korean War drama War Hunt. The film starred John Saxon and Charles Aidman, but in addition to Pollack's supporting role, the movie offered appearances by Gavin MacLeod, Tom Skerritt and uncredited work by another future director, Francis Ford Coppola, as an Army truck driver. The biggest name among the ranks (at least he would be eventually) turned out to be a young Robert Redford. Pollack would direct Redford in seven films: This Property Is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman, Out of Africa and Havana. Redford served as one of the producers of A Civil Action which featured Pollack in an acting role.
The headline at the top of this piece isn't quite true. Pollack return to acting in 1982's Tootsie (aside from a brief cameo in 1979's The Electric Horseman) proved to be quite a reluctant one. He already had cast Dabney Coleman to play George Fields, agent to prima donna/unemployed actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) but Hoffman pushed Pollack into taking the role himself, seeing the dynamic they had in their disagreements over the script. Pollack didn't want to leave Coleman in the cold so he cast him in the role of movie's fictional soap opera's director instead. Hoffman's instincts didn't fail him or the film as his scenes with Pollack provide many of the movie's comic highlights. You get that in the scene above, in the scene in the Russian Tea Room where Michael surprises George by showing up as his new alter ego Dorothy Michaels and, in perhaps my favorite scene between the two of them, when Michael shows up at George's home late one night to try to explain the romantic complications, including the fact that the father (Charles Durning) of the woman he loves (Jessica Lange) bought Dorothy an engagement ring. Forgetting for a moment what this all means, Pollack's reaction to news of the proposal comes off as priceless.
Following Tootsie, Pollack returned to the directing-producing track for a decade. During this decade he won his two Oscars for Out of Africa, but looking at the projects in that decade on which he worked solely as a producer or executive producer actually look more interesting than most of the movies he directed in that time. Some examples of his producing output from 1982 to 1991: Songwriter, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Presumed Innocent, White Palace, (surprisingly) King Ralph and Dead Again. With Tootsie, Pollack displayed a grounded, realistic comic side, but when 1992 arrived and he began to act up a storm, his range
widened, even if for the most part Pollack got pigeonholed as either a lawyer or a doctor, he played distinct members of each profession. Ten years after Tootsie, he managed roles in three films (and found time to executive produce two movies as well: HBO's A Private Matter and Leaving Normal, which had the misfortune of being too similar to Thelma & Louise and coming out a few months after the other film). The photo at the top of this post shows Pollack in his first 1992 role, Dick Mellon, business lawyer to besieged studio exec Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) in Robert Altman's The Player. As Mellon, Pollack plays a no-nonsense Hollywood figure who has seen it all and never changes his vocal tone, no matter how serious the situation becomes, and doles out truisms such as in this exchange with Mill. "Rumors are always true. You know that," Mellon tells Mill. "I'm always the last to hear about them," Griffin sighs. "No, you're always the last one to believe them," Dick corrects his client. Pollack, as in the case of his casting in Tootsie, hadn't been the first choice of the director. Of course, Pollack had helmed Tootsie and opposed casting himself as George Fields. With The Player, Altman tried to cast as many of the character parts with lesser-known faces because his film contained so many star cameos and he wanted to avoid as much audience
confusion as possible. Initially, Altman sought writer-director Blake Edwards, who also started his career as an actor, though he hadn't appeared on screen since 1948, for the part of Mellon, but it didn't work out and he went with Pollack, who only had that one role in Tootsie in 30 years. While The Player offers darker, satirical laughs than Tootsie did and Pollack doesn't get the laughs out of Dick Mellon that he did out of George Fields, he garnered more laughs in his most dramatic, deepest film role yet as Jack, the divorcing best friend of Gabe Roth (Woody Allen) in Husbands and Wives. I wasn't as crazy about the film as others, but Pollack delivered one of his greatest acting jobs, ranging from the at-ease midlife divorced man finding renewed vigor with a twentysomething aerobics instructor (Lysette Anthony) and then turning downright nasty on her at a party when she doesn't meet his standards for intellectual heft. He literally drags her from the soiree and tosses her toward his car, accusing her of being an "infant." It's a scary side of Pollack that we'll see more of in other roles. His third on-screen role of 1992 didn't receive a credit, but the cameo in Death Becomes Her provides what could be Pollack's funniest moments as an ER doctor examining Meryl Streep. The clip below leaves out his character's final punch line.Until his death from cancer in May 2008, seeing Pollack act became a much more common sight than spotting his directing credit. He turned up in legal entanglements again in films such as A Civil Action, Michael Clayton and Changing Lanes. He guided Tom Cruise into the sexual netherworld of the rich and powerful in Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut. He took roles in the last two films he directed, Random Hearts and The Interpreter. Pollack even provided the voice for the studio executive in The Majestic and the French film Avenue Montaigne. His final film role was in the romantic comedy Made of Honor where he played the father of the male maid of honor (Patrick Dempsey). On television, he did more voice work on comedies such as Frasier and King of the Hill. He also played a doctor on an episode of Mad About You and had a recurring role as Will's father on Will & Grace. He even played himself on an episode of Entourage, his last TV or movie appearance. Of all his late appearances though, the one that stands out to me also came in 2007 and put him in the role of another doctor. In the batch of the last nine episodes of The Sopranos, Pollack played jailed oncologist Warren Feldman, incarcerated with the dying Johnny Sac (Vincent Curatola) in the great episode "Stage 5." This scene I believe gives a great example of how talented Pollack truly could be as an actor.
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Labels: Altman, Blake Edwards, Coppola, Cruise, Dabney Coleman, Durning, Dustin Hoffman, J. Lange, Kubrick, Plummer, Redford, Streep, Sydney Pollack, The Sopranos, Tim Robbins, Woody
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Friday, January 06, 2012
Version 2.0 Now in Finchervision
By VenetianBlond
I’m a fan. I’ve read the book by Stieg Larsson and watched the Swedish film more than once. Yes, the plot takes half the movie to really kick in, the leads are kept separate for too long, and who can believe that a print magazine is dangerous to the dominant paradigm anymore? However, I’m willing to forgive all those trespasses to take a spin through the American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher. My host, Edward Copeland, wrote about the Swedish version here.
The question of whether or not we need remakes of perfectly good international films is a larger issue than should be taken on here. Notable exceptions are found, of course, but I’ll assert that we don’t need remakes at all. The paradox occurs, though, with the question of whether or not we need a new David Fincher film. The answer to that question is yes.
Dragon Tattoo is just the same, only different. Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is an investigative journalist on the wrong end of a lawsuit. It seems his inability to prove certain assertions he made in print not only ruined his reputation, but also emptied his bank account. For this reason, he decides to listen to the pitch of a retired industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), who wants to hire him for his own investigation — that of his presumed dead niece, Harriet, who went missing 40 years ago.
Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) is a goth hacker — tiny, brilliant and completely antisocial. She’s been declared incompetent by the state, and must turn over her finances to a new guardian when her previous one had a stroke. The guardian, (Yorik van Wageningen) abuses her sexually, but she later gets her brutal revenge. She’s a photo negative of the Stuart Smalley platitude: she’s better than you, smarter than you, and doesn’t give a flying flip if you like her or not.
Due to her unusual skill at research, Salander is hired by the industrialist Vanger to do a background check on Blomkvist. Once he finds out who did the incredibly detailed work on him, he wants to hire that person to help him find out what happened to Harriet. Finally the two characters join forces and really get on with the investigation, and they not only discover what happened to Harriet, but also what happened to a number of other young women scattered across Sweden.
Fincher spends more time with relationships in his version. We see more of Lisbeth’s affection (or what stands for affection in her life) for her first guardian. He also gives us more of Blomkvist’s stilted relationship with his daughter. Even Lisbeth’s employer at the security firm, Armansky (Goran Visnjic), reveals a little more about how he feels about her as a person than in the Swedish films. There’s slightly more time for humor such as the look Salander shoots Blomkvist when he claims the information on his computer is encrypted.
The main difference is that it’s an American film. The actors are better looking and wear more expensive clothes. They have international pull (Plummer! Richardson! Skarsgard! Berkoff! Wright!) and perform admirably. Where the Swedish film was a workaday piece that doesn’t get in its own way, Fincher is inventive and puts his stamp on his version without reinventing the whole thing.
And there’s no good reason to since whatever plot points hold the mystery together, they aren't as important as the presence of Lisbeth Salander. Played slightly less closed off and less fierce (in my opinion) by Rooney Mara than Noomi Rapace, Salander is the reason for the international craze for the books and the greenlight of the remake. She’s not only a unique action hero, she’s a unique character. She’d be watchable even if she weren’t solving decades’ worth of brutal murders and finding the lost girl. You just have to be willing to sit through the explanations of family trees and who doesn’t speak to whom — not to mention the violence — to get to the good stuff.
But that makes it seem as if that character is the only good thing about the film, which isn’t true. It’s a thriller, and a good one, with random gunshots, secret agendas, old photographs and high tech gadgets. The original title of Larsson’s book was “Men Who Hate Women,” and viewed through that lens, the content rises above a paint-by-numbers investigative procedural. It opens up the proceedings from the individual to the societal — which becomes crucial in the second and third parts of the trilogy.
By the way, FYYFF, on one t-shirt Salander wears, is a phrase written by late New Orleans blogger Ashley Morris as a response to those who suggested that the city of New Orleans should just be left to sink into the sea after Hurricane Katrina.
Finally, the opening credits hit me like a golf club to the jaw — in a good way. A CGI music video of Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Karen O’s version of Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song,” it’s full of imaginative and nightmarish imagery of scales, tire treads, the actors, computer cords, insects and more.
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Labels: 10s, Books, Daniel Craig, Fiction, Fincher, Plummer, Remakes
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Monday, December 26, 2011
Factual healing
By Edward Copeland
When a filmmaker bases a movie on his own life, sometimes it hews so closely to those experiences that the film loses its elasticity, even if the writer-director attempts to avoid this trap by toying with timelines and using flashbacks as tools to tell his story. Fortunately for Mike Mills, Beginners has been blessed with performers who make his movie memoir stretch beyond the limits of his biography, but the cast only can do so much to overcome its overabundance of silly quirks on what could be a touching, human story all the way through.
Ewan McGregor stars as Oliver Fields, a graphic artist recalling the day shortly after his mother's death when his 75-year-old father Hal (Christopher Plummer) admitted to him that he was gay and had been during and before his 45-year marriage to Oliver's mother Georgia. Oliver's recollections come bubbling forth as he cleans out Hal's house after his passing from cancer several years after losing mom.
On a parallel track in the "current" time period (which sticks so closely to Mills' own that it must specifically take place in 2003), Oliver attempts to forge his first lasting relationship with an equally commitment-phobic French actress named Anna (Mélanie Laurent, Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds). Their initial meeting ventures beyond being a meet-cute and veers perilously close to a meet-puke as Oliver and Anna encounter each other at a costume party where he's dressed as Freud and she has laryngitis.
Plummer alone probably caused the torrent of praise poured upon Beginners and while he's good, the veteran actor doesn't deliver the performance of his lifetime either. It would be news if Plummer turned in a bad performance (not that he hasn't showed up in turkeys — I remember him as the cartoonish bad guy in the 1987 spoof Dragnet with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks). He's perfectly fine in Beginners, especially in the scene where Hal describes to his son what it was like to be a gay man in the 1950s and how Georgia knew and promised she could "change him." That scene aside, I'd still rank Plummer's Oscar-nominated role as Tolstoy in The Last Station and his criminally neglected work as Mike Wallace in Michael Mann's The Insider higher on his lengthy filmography.
The performer I didn't recognize and whose character I would liked to have seen more of was Mary Page Keller (whom I recall from the early Fox comedy Duet) as Oliver's mother Georgia in flashbacks when he was a child. Her scenes contain just the right amount of cleverness before they wear out their welcome. Too often, that's what hinders most scenes in Beginners.
Early on, McGregor gets to deliver a funny scene when he inherits his dad's Jack Russell terrier Arthur (Cosmo) and explains to the dog the history of his breed and how they're all trained now to act overly cute in television and movies. That could have remained a humorous memory — but then the movie uses Arthur the same way it accuses other entertainment works of doing by not only cutting to him for expressions but giving him subtitled dialogue as well.
Perhaps Mills would have been better served telling his story in a book and then, if someone were interested, letting a person not involved in the events make a movie version. (I also wonder what's the point of telling the world that a story has been based on you but then giving the characters fake names. Did Mills fear he might sue himself?)
Mills' film Thumbsucker turned out relatively well, but that was based on a novel someone else wrote. Perhaps Mills should stick to movies that stem from someone else's material to give him appropriate distance.
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Labels: 10s, Aykroyd, Ewan McGregor, Hanks, Michael Mann, Plummer
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Sunday, August 29, 2010
From the Vault: Malcolm X
Certain to be both overpraised and overcriticized, the best assessment of Malcolm X is that it's a good film with many flaws, though the problems are cinematic, not political. Adapted by Spike Lee from Malcolm X's autobiography and a screenplay by the late Arnold Perl, Malcolm X approaches its subject epically in both scope and length but still fails somehow to make the civil rights activist's evolution from drug-addicted thief to martyred leader consistently compelling.
Much of the problem lies in the fact that while Malcolm's early life of crime and love of lindy-hopping is fascinating, it doesn't justify taking up more than a third of the film's 201-minute running time with Lee's stylized, nostalgic look at that chapter. While it is important and inspiring to see where Malcolm came from and what he overcame, the reason Malcolm X is well-known is because of what he did following his prison conversion to Islam, not before.
The film itself best emphasizes this point as it picks up speed once the imprisoned Malcolm (Denzel Washington) begins to learn about and becomes a follower of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.). Despite the drag they make on the entire film, the early sequences are notable for containing the film's best performance, Delroy Lindo as West Indian Archie, who becomes a sort of criminal mentor to the young Malcolm.
As for the latter two-thirds of Malcolm X, the news is much better as the slain leader's words and deeds fill the screen with powerful sequences, including a march on a police station when an acquaintance is beaten and arrested. There also are quieter sequences that work, such as Malcolm's gradual realization that Elijah Muhammad may not be all that he says, culminating in Malcolm's Hajj to Mecca, as well as a prison debate between Malcolm and a priest (a nice cameo by Christopher Plummer).
One of the film's other major weaknesses is an instrumental score by Terence Blanchard that is so overblown and intrusive, I had to check the credits to make certain Lee hadn't hired John Williams by mistake. When the soundtrack relies on music of the different eras, it works, but Blanchard's composition is often distracting.
For anyone who has read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, they may have some questions about the choices Lee makes. For example: Why does Malcolm's pilgrimage to Mecca, a pivotal chapter in the book, seem to take up so little screen time? When Malcolm announces how the trip changes him, the film audience isn't as clear on what caused the effect as a reader of the book is.
Why was the composite character of Baines (Albert Hall) created? In the film, Baines is supposed to be a fellow prisoner who reinforces Malcolm's grammatical skills, turns him on to Elijah Muhammad and grows jealous of Malcolm's notoriety to the point of omitting him from the Nation of Islam's newspaper. Readers will realize that these actions were attributed to (at least) three different individuals: a prisoner who only helped Malcolm within the prison's walls, his brother Reginald, who brought Malcolm into contact with the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad's son, who ran the publication.
Finally, why are Malcolm's siblings, such as half-sister Ella and the aforementioned Reginald, nonexistent in the film when they each played important roles in Malcolm's life?
Washington's performance is subtle. There are few big moments, but plenty of small ones, from a marriage proposal by phone to the small smile of relief before assassins shoot him down.
As for Lee as writer and director, he has again failed to hit the artistic heights of the incomparable Do the Right Thing. His direction is obvious and plodding at times and, once again, his script seems to lack structure and focus, though this may have something to do with how he adapted the previously written screenplay.
Despite my reservations about the film, Malcolm X is often riveting and works well as a sort of historical Cliff Note on the life of a man few today know much about. By the time, Lee brings Malcolm's story to a close with two powerful epilogues, most of the gaps the film has had until that point are filled and Malcolm's message becomes loud and clear, resonating with the viewer long after the credits end.
By the end, one has witnessed the evolution of a man and his philosophy, and a scope of American history seldom seen on screen. It's a shame that so much of what precedes those final passages is sloppy, but the power of its ending and of isolated moments before make the journey more than worthwhile.
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Labels: 90s, Denzel, John Williams, Plummer, Spike Lee
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Wednesday, June 30, 2010
How many make up a literary marriage?
By Edward Copeland
More often than not, biopics of writers or artists turn out to be unbearable bores, mainly because trying to cinematically convey the creative process proves very hard. Thankfully, this doesn't hinder The Last Station which covers the final days in the life of Leo Tolstoy (marvelously played by Oscar nominee Christopher Plummer) because the film isn't concerned with his writing but rather the battle between his wife of 48 years (Oscar nominee Helen Mirren) and a disciple (Paul Giamatti) over whether the inheritance of his works and his late-in-life views should be given over to the Russian people and the world or to his heirs as his wife believes they are due.
As the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina grew into old age, he began to develop ideas that took on an almost cult-like following: no private property; looking down on sexual relationships; and passive resistance. They focused on the teachings of Jesus Christ, but more as a human and less as the son of God and were thought by many to be a form of Christian anarchists. The followers of this philosophy even adopted the name of Tolstoyans, the most prominent one being his longtime friend and promoter Vladimir Chertkov (Giamatti) who regularly installs secretaries in Tolstoy's estate to keep watch over the activities of Countess Sofya (Mirren), whom he views as a threat to the movement's future because of her desire to protect her family's legacy and she sees her husband's late-in-life philosophical turn as a lot of bunk.
When both Mirren and Plummer received deserved Oscar nominations, she as lead, he as supporting, many complained that he was as much a lead as she was, but now that I've seen the film, the truth is the both really are supporting to the true main character of The Last Station, Valentin (James McAvoy), the latest secretary whose eyes all activities are seen through. I haven't been impressed much with McAvoy in his career so far in films such as The Last King of Scotland or Atonement, but this is the first time I thought he actually turned in a good performance.
Though Valentin begins his job as Chertkov's latest plant, instructed to keep a diary of every move Countess Sofya makes and every word she utters in order to the protect the Tolstoyans, it doesn't take long for the virginal would-be writer to develop sympathy for the entire Tolstoy family (even to the point that Sofya gives him a diary to perform the same task for her). What really turns Valentin around are his dealings with the renowned writer himself and his crush and eventual surrender of his celibacy vow to Tolstoy's daughter Masha (Kerry Condon).
Written and directed by Michael Hoffman from the novel by Jay Parini, The Last Station is a little gem of fine acting and interesting ideas. The entire cast plays at the top of their game. So often, material of this sort can be so obsessed with the details of the period that any drama gets lost, but The Last Station doesn't make this mistake, presenting flesh-and-blood characters instead of museum pieces and lively interplay instead of stolid exposition. When he's nervous, he sneezes and there's a great scene of shock when he meets Tolstoy and the master writer asks how the young man's own writing is going.
Plummer turns in an absolutely joyous performance as Tolstoy, funny, stubborn and indignant. Even though his new philosophy has cast a suspicious eye on sexual relations, he finds it surprising that his new secretary Valentin is truly such a celibate and recounts past sexual escapades, admitting that Tolstoy himself is far from the best Tolstoyan.
Mirren's great as always as the high-strung Sofya. It's easy to see how some could perceive her actions as meddling, but her exasperation at outsiders who meddle with her family and the love of her life make it clear who is in the right and she's brilliant.
Giamatti also adds to the film, though at times, even though Chertkov is merely a true believer, he does come off too much as a devilish villain, especially when he lies to prevent Sofya from seeing her husband as his health is on the decline.
The Last Station ended up being a pleasant surprise for me. I expected to find fine performances when I started watching, but the fact that the film was a compelling and held my interest as much as it did was an unexpected reward.
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Labels: 00s, Giamatti, McAvoy, Mirren, Oscars, Plummer
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Friday, May 15, 2009
Centennial Tributes: James Mason
By Edward Copeland
When an artist is called prolific, it is usually an adjective being attached to a writer or if it's in the film medium, perhaps a director, but there probably is no better word to describe the amount of film and television work churned out by James Mason as an actor. Check out his filmography at IMDb. Even if all his work were available on DVD, I doubt anyone would have time to watch it all. Hell, I doubt Mason himself, who was born 100 years ago today, could have even been able to view everything he was in. He was too damn busy. His first
credited film role dates to 1935 in a mystery titled Late Extra and it seems as if he never stopped working after that in films originating in all parts of the world. Mason turned in one of his best performances for director Carol Reed in 1947's Odd Man Out, which tragically is not available on Region 1 DVD. Mason turns in a superb outing as an Irish nationalist who tries to evade police after a robbery, despite the fact that he's been seriously wounded. As I mentioned, Mason's filmography is so extensive, there is no way I could be comprehensive, even if I wanted to be, so I'm sticking to the films I've seen or that I recognize as being notable. There were several more I'd hoped to catch, but an unexpected hospitalization interferred with my plans. In 1949, Mason co-starred with Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Ava Gardner and Cyd Charisse in Mervyn LeRoy's odd but watchable hybrid of soap opera melodrama, romance and noir in East Side, West Side. Mason plays Stanwyck's husband, who truly loves his wife but can't bring an end to his caddish playboy ways. 1951 brought two distinctive roles for Mason. He played Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in The Desert Fox, making the man a sympathetic soldier who had no use for Hitler's lunacy and politics. He even reprised the role in a cameo in 1953's The Desert Rats, which focused on Richard Burton as a Scottish army officer. His other 1951 offering had the look of a Powell-Pressburger production thanks to the great color cinematography of Jack Cardiff, but Albert Lewin directed Pandora and the Flying Dutchman which reunited Mason and Gardner in a modern interpretation of the mythical tale. 1952 brought another of Mason's greatest roles and yet another film frustratingly not found on Region 1 DVD: Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 5
Fingers. Mason excels as the valet for the British ambassador to Turkey during World War II who envisions a cushy existence for himself, one he intends to finance by becoming a spy for Germany. It's another example of what Mason brought to all his greatest roles: a certain gravity that tethered him to the ground and made almost all his roles seem real even in the most questionable of films. In 1953, he teamed with Mankiewicz again and while Marlon Brando garnered most of the attention as Antony in Julius Caesar, Mason was no slouch as Brutus either. The following year brought two of Mason's most recognizable roles: His first Oscar nomination as Norman Maine in the remake of A Star is Born opposite Judy Garland and as the legendary Captain Nemo in the adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea opposite Kirk Douglas. Mason made an odd choice in 1956 when he appeared opposite Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in Forever, Darling. In their second feature film during the run of I Love Lucy, Desi and Lucy played a couple with a struggling marriage and Lucy starts being visited by her guardian angel who wants to help her save her marriage, the main joke of the film being that her angel is a dead ringer for James Mason, her favorite movie star, which does lead to a funny sequence where they go to see a positively awful looking James Mason movie. Three years later, he starred in one of his time capsule candidates: playing the suave bad guy mistakenly chasing Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest. That same year, he returned to Jules Verne as a professor who becomes obsessed with the idea of finding his way to the earth's core in Journey to the Center of the Earth. I can only assume his descent into partial madness was sped along by having to endure Pat Boone's attempt at a Scottish accent and frequent slips into lip-synching pop songs. Throughout the late 1950s period, the ever-busy Mason started being seen with more frequency on the various theater anthology series on television, work on the small
screen he continued in the 1960s while still appearing on the big screen. When 1962 arrived, Mason took on the character of Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita. Once again, while he was surrounded by some silliness around him (provided mainly by Peter Sellers), Mason kept Humbert grounded in the real world even as he obsessed about the young teen (Sue Lyons). Throughout the 1960s, Mason continued to appear in film productions around the world as well as on television, including a four-episode run on TV's medical drama Ben Casey. In 1966, he scored his second Oscar nomination, this time in supporting, as the older London businessman obsessed with making a carefree, somewhat homely teacher his mistress (Lynn Redgrave) in
Georgy Girl. Be careful what you wish for. Mason continued to balance classics with potboilers and paychecks, such as a film of The Sea Gull or exploitation classics such as Mandingo. Sometimes, the stars aligned and a little gem sprang force such as The Last of Sheila. Written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, it's a mystery disguised as Hollywood satire featuring Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, James Coburn, Richard Benjamin, Joan Hackett and none other than young Ian McShane long before we ever met Al Swearengen. He returned to the Nazi military for Sam Peckinpah for Cross of Iron and returned to a heavenly guise, this time trying to guide Warren Beatty in an afterlife screwup in Heaven Can Wait, the 1978 remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan. The story requires more than just a little suspension of belief but like most of Mason's roles, he manages to sell it somehow even if others in a production descend to camp. The next year he got to spar lovingly as Dr. Watson to Christopher Plummer's Sherlock Holmes in Murder By Decree, making the most out of a night at the theater or a meal's last pea. He worked for another monster, a vampire, (see comments) when TV adapted Stephen King's Salem's Lot in 1979 and he earned a final Oscar nomination as supporting actor as the wily defense attorney of a crooked hospital in The Verdict in 1982. Mason never managed to nab the golden guy, but he sure knew how to put on a good show.
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Labels: Brando, Carol Reed, Cary, Cyd Charisse, Garland, Hitchcock, James Coburn, K. Douglas, Kubrick, L. Ball, Mankiewicz, Mason, Peckinpah, Plummer, Sellers, Sondheim, Stanwyck, Van Hefiin, W. Beatty
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Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Spike's 2nd 2006 home run
By Edward Copeland
Spike Lee has roared back in 2006 in a big way. I had all but written off the talented filmmaker, but then this year brought a one-two punch of a great documentary and a great action film. Inside Man actually preceded his great When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, but I just caught up with it on DVD and I was impressed. It's probably the film of his I've liked best since his work in the early 1990s.
Looking back at old reviews of his films I wrote at the time, I noticed the recurring theme of fault usually lay with Spike Lee's screenwriting. In the case of Inside Man, he works from a script by first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz and it seems to have freed Lee up as a director and he moves this heist thriller along at a breakneck pace with much style.
Sure, he still feels required to use that damn moving sidewalk shot that he's been using in practically every film he's made for more than a decade, but it's so brief that you let it slide. Hell, Lee even manages to get a score from his favorite composer, Terence Blanchard, that enhances the film instead of serving as a suffocating distraction.
The story, which I'll only provide in the vaguest of terms in order to let the movie unfold for those who haven't seen it, concerns the takeover of a Manhattan bank by a team of thieves led by Clive Owen. Thanks to a vacationing detective, Detective Harry Frazier (Denzel Washington) and his partner Detective Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) get the assignment, despite the fact that Frazier remains under suspicion for stealing some money from a case. The setup seems familiar from many other films, most notably Dog Day Afternoon and more fictional heist tales, but Lee and Gerwitz's script keeps springing surprises on the audience and makes the entire enterprise fresh. On top of the great performances by Washington and Owen, who has to act most of the time beneath a mask, Inside Man also includes a mysterious fixer played by Jodie Foster in her best role in ages and the bank's aging founder (Christopher Plummer) who secures her services to make certain that some things in the bank don't get out with the robbers. I can't recall a performance from Foster that seems less mechanical or embraces glamour the way she does here as Madeline White. Her screen time is limited, but she gives the movie a jolt every time she appears, whether she's opposite Washington, Owen or Plummer.
Still the real star of Inside Man is Spike Lee, who seems to have rediscovered his talent both in fiction and documentary. After many years of disappointments from him, it brings a smile to your face to know Lee still has it. It makes you wish Woody Allen could follow his cue and film someone else's script. Aside from the great movie itself, the DVD offers an often funny commentary by Lee (so much so that he often cracks himself up). He even offers advice (If you ever meet Christopher Plummer, do NOT bring up The Sound of Music) and gives lots of insight as to how shots were set up, asides about gangsta rap and even frequent updates about how the movie crew's baseball team performed. Inside Man provides a great ride — and I for one am grateful that Spike Lee seems to be back and I hope he gets to make his long-sought project with the 93-year-old Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) about Joe Louis.
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Labels: 00s, Clive Owen, Denzel, Jodie Foster, Plummer, Spike Lee, Woody
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