Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Harry Morgan (1915-2011)
Harry Bratsburg made his Broadway debut in the original cast of The Group Theatre production of Clifford Odets' boxing drama Golden Boy on Nov. 4, 1937. His co-stars included Lee J. Cobb, Howard da Silva, Frances Farmer, Jules Garfield (who would later act under the first name of John) and two men who would become better known later as directors: Elia Kazan and Martin Ritt. Of course, Bratsburg would change his name as well. After appearing in a total of eight original Broadway plays through 1941 (all but two Group Theatre productions) with up-and-comers such as Burl Ives, Sidney Lumet (when he started out as an actor), Karl Malden, Sylvia Sidney, Franchot Tone, Shelley Winters and Jane Wyatt, Bratsburg headed West for the start of a lengthy film and television career where he'd become much better known as Harry Morgan. Morgan died Wednesday at 96. Actually, when he made his film debut in 1942's To the Shores of Tripoli, he was credited as Henry Morgan as he was well into the 1950s when he started frequently being cited as Henry (Harry) Morgan because of the comedian Henry Morgan who was popular on radio prior to Harry's career, so his screen credit eventually became just Harry Morgan.
It didn't take long for him to land in a classic film once he left the stage for Hollywood. His sixth film was William A. Wellman's masterful 1943 warning against lynch mobs, The Ox-Bow Incident, where he played Henry Fonda's trail companion. His career kept him busy, not always in classics, but always working. Some of his other notable films:
Morgan's greatest fame came from his roles as a regular on several television series throughout his career, beginning with his role as Pete Porter on the comedy December Bride from 1954-1959, which earned him an Emmy nomination. The role was spun off into its own series Pete & Gladys, which lasted from 1960-1962. The first series that probably garnered Morgan the most recognition was when he took the role of Officer Bill
Gannon in Dragnet 1967, Jack Webb's resurrection of his early '50s police drama, that in my mind may well be the funniest show ever to appear on network television. Watching Sgt. Joe Friday square off (pun intended) with spaced-out hippies is hysterical. Morgan reprised his Gannon role in Dan Aykroyd's 1987 spoof movie and merely vocally on an episode of The Simpsons. Morgan also did many guest appearances on other series, TV movies and miniseries, most notably playing another Harry, President Truman in the miniseries Backstairs at the White House. However, the role that will hold his place in TV viewers' hearts is as Col. Sherman T. Potter, the second commanding officer of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the last eight seasons of M*A*S*H. (We'll not talk about AfterMASH.) The role earned him eight consecutive Emmy nominations as outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series and he won once. He also received a nomination for directing an episode. For me though, I'll always love the performance he gave the year before on M*A*S*H in an Emmy-nominated guest appearance as Maj. Gen. Bartford Hamilton Steele in "The General Flipped at Dawn." Steele appears to be a by-the-book, high-ranking officer but everyone soon realizes, especially Alan Alda's Hawkeye who he tries to court-martial, that he's a raving loon. Morgan's hysterical performance was a thing of beauty. He could be just as funny as Potter but in a completely different way. Potter also frequently touched your heart as he drank a toast when the last of his old comrades died.We drink a toast to you, Harry Morgan. RIP.
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Labels: Alda, Awards, Aykroyd, H. Fonda, Jack Webb, Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Lumet, Malden, Obituary, Shelley Winters, Sylvia Sidney, Television, The Simpsons, Theater, Wellman
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Monday, August 15, 2011
An American Masterpiece
“A Place in the Sun was done right before I met George. It hadn’t come out yet, when I came to Paramount, but it had been finished. I remember seeing that film and being devastated by it. It was different in many ways than any film I had seen before coming out of Hollywood — including the style of other films by George Stevens. The use of close-ups in that film, the use of that liquid dissolve on top of dissolve in the love scenes between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor is the quintessential height of romantic filmmaking. And the scenes with Elizabeth Taylor are done with these extraordinary close-ups. The love scenes — I don’t think there are better kiss scenes in the history of film. It’s hard to do a kissing scene. It’s hard to do a love scene. First of all, kisses — especially in those days in Hollywood — when you could show nothing else, were supposed to indicate every kind of orgasmic pleasure, every kind of romantic fulfillment — and if lovers start to kiss too intensely on the screen, it can become embarrassing for the audience. What George did was that the camera came in and did a lot of the work. The camera came so close, dealing with two of the most beautiful faces in the world. I think the camera treasured those faces, and made them almost become one.” — director Alan J. Pakula
By John Cochrane
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the release of George Stevens’ 1951 film A Place in the Sun, a tragic romance that is one of the best motion pictures ever to come out of the Hollywood studio system. An updated abridgement of Theodore Dreiser’s epic novel An American Tragedy (1925) and its stage adaptation by Patrick Kearney, A Place in the Sun stars Montgomery Clift as George Eastman — a drifting, but earnest war veteran who seeks employment at his rich uncle’s clothing factory. George dreams of leaving his poor, staunchly religious upbringing behind and escaping into the privileged world of his relatives. Instead, he is ensnared in an ill-fated love triangle, and eventually accused of drowning of Alice Tripp — a plain co-worker that he once secretly dated and impregnated — so that he can be with Angela Vickers, a young and beautiful socialite with whom he has fallen deeply in love.
Based on the real life trial and execution of Chester Gillette in 1906, An American Tragedy is considered a classic of American fiction — its plot seemingly straight out of the murder ballads of American folk music. But its sprawling story already had been filmed by Josef von Sternberg in 1931, and Paramount was not eager to make the picture again. Using his already sizable talent and industry experience, producer/director George Stevens changed the characters names, recast the story after World War II, and cut the first third of the book — which depicts more of the protagonist’s youth and family life and his involvement as a passenger in a fatal car accident. Stevens also shifted the tone away from a more sympathetic tone for Alice and toward the blossoming relationship between George and Angela — capitalizing on the good looks and strong on-screen rapport of Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, in her first adult role. This change in audience identification becomes pivotal in the scene on the lake between George and Alice, where it becomes clear that although George has lured his ex-girlfriend to her demise, he does not have the heart to follow through with it.
Working with cinematographer William C. Mellor, Stevens avoids flashy photography, instead employing understated master shots — creating the feeling of an impartial observer who is watching fate play itself out. Only when George and Angela’s love affair takes off toward the middle of the film, do we really start to see
intimate close-ups — including tight over-the-shoulder shots, which draw the audience into their doomed courtship. Stevens and his editor William Hornbeck also are very effective in their use of montages, dissolves and wipes to condense the story’s plot to its simple essence. Throughout the movie, we see images superimposed on top of one another, indicating what or who a character is thinking about, or what is going on simultaneously in the story. This creates a number of unforgettable images — including a repeated motif showing George as a trapped outsider, and a distant shot of Angela in her room after George has been put on trial for murder — his newspaper picture burning up in a fireplace in the foreground. Believing that preparation and editing are the key ingredients in creating an effective motion picture, Stevens shot a lot of footage to cover himself in post-production. The result paid off in one of the best looking, effortlessly paced films ever made in Hollywood. Beyond the technical aspects, much of the success of A Place in the Sun comes from its cast. Montgomery Clift plays George Eastman with the perfect amount of dread and vulnerability — damned by forces that are beyond his control, and in some cases by his own poor decisions that have come back to haunt him. In his book Who The Hell’s In It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors, director, film historian and critic Peter Bogdanovich calls Clift, “the purest, least mannered of the method actors; perhaps the most sensitive, certainly the most poetic.” In addition to impossibly good looks, Montgomery Clift’s eyes are among the most tragic and unforgettable in the history of cinema. George truly sees himself as a victim of circumstance, but you can’t help but identify or feel sorry for his character. During the closing scenes in court and jail, as he comes to terms with his guilty conscience and accepts his fate, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else but Montgomery Clift in the part.
As the glamorous and energetic Angela Vickers, two-time Academy Award-winner Elizabeth Taylor — already considered one of the most beautiful women in the world at 17 — moves beyond the family films of her childhood to match Clift’s intensity and intuitive acting. Together, they create heart-rending scenes of initial hope and happiness, and then despair. Lines that might sound corny or false coming from others such as “It always seems like we spend the best part of our time saying goodbye” and “Love me for as long as I live, then forget me” ring true. You can feel the passion radiating from the screen. In an industry where genuine romantic chemistry is sought often and extremely hard to come by, they had it.
The third part of the triangle, Shelley Winters began her career as a blonde bombshell. She fought to be cast in the film against type — even going as far to attend a meeting with Stevens in drab disguise in order to get a screen test. She plays Alice as clingy, insecure and increasingly desperate — but not unreasonable or unsympathetic. Winters was so believable in the part that she would go onto play more vulnerable, doomed women who are manipulated by the men they love in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), eventually winning two supporting actress Oscars — including one for George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). Rounding out the cast is a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr as the aggressive prosecutor Mr. Marlowe — in a righteously determined supporting role that would foreshadow his future career.
Despite the 12-year-age difference, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor would remain great friends for life until Clift’s tragically early death in 1966. They would work together in two more pictures — once again as star-crossed lovers in Raintree County (1956) — a Gone With the Wind (1939) knock-off during which Taylor helped save a badly injured Clift’s life in a real-life car accident, and as a doctor and troubled patient in Suddenly Last Summer (1959) — a psychodrama based on the Tennessee Williams play. But neither film would approach the beauty of A Place in the Sun — which won six well-deserved Oscars at the Academy Awards for 1951, for directing, black & white cinematography, film editing, music score of a dramatic or comedy picture, black & white costume design, and writing (screenplay). Its only losses were actor (Clift) to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, actress (Winters) to Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, and picture to Vincente Minnelli’s musical An American in Paris.
George Stevens (1904-1975) is a figure whose name is not mentioned in film circles nowadays as often as it should be — probably because like other great directors such as Sidney Lumet and Louis Malle, he made terrific films in a number of different styles and genres, rather than developing an immediately identifiable brand — such as a John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock. Cutting his teeth as a cinematographer and gag writer for many of the Laurel & Hardy shorts, Stevens would go on to film such enduring pictures as the adventure movie Gunga
Din (1939), staring Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the classic Western Shane (1953), and Swing Time (1936) — considered by many of be the best of the Astaire and Rogers musicals. After volunteering and serving as a major in World War II, where he filmed vital, historic footage at Normandy and Dachau, his films show an increased depth and seriousness about the human condition. Nominated five times for best director, he won a second directing Oscar for Giant (1956), an epic soap opera with buried anti-racism themes which turned out to be James Dean's third and final film. It plays in many ways like a forerunner of such television shows as Dallas and Dynasty. In 1966, Stevens sued NBC Television and Paramount Pictures in an effort to prevent showing A Place in the Sun on television with commercials inserted — a battle that he would eventually lose, but that showed his commitment to the art of cinema — a gesture that was not lost on the other Hollywood filmmakers who had held him in high regard for years. Driving his family home from the Academy Awards — his best director Oscar for A Place in the Sun sitting between them — Stevens smiled at his over-excited son, George Jr., saying “We’ll have a better idea of what kind of picture this is, in about 25 years.” But the verdict on this timeless and distinctly American classic has never been in question. Tweet
Labels: 50s, Astaire, Bogart, Bogdanovich, Cary, Clift, G. Stevens, Ginger Rogers, Hitchcock, James Dean, John Ford, Kubrick, Laughton, Liz, Movie Tributes, Shelley Winters, Tennessee Williams, V. Leigh, von Sternberg
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Friday, July 01, 2011
We gave them virtue, they want vice
there lived a very successful motion picture producer named Felix Farmer.
He owned three beautiful houses, he had two lovely children and he was married to a gorgeous movie star. The people who ran the studio where he worked loved and admired him because he had never made
a movie that had lost money. Then one day he produced the biggest most expensive motion picture
of his career…and it flopped. The people who ran the studio were very angry at Felix
because they lost millions of dollars…
and Felix lost his mind.
By Edward Copeland
We see that title crawl after brief credits run while Julie Andrews as actress Sally Miles plays Gillian West in her producer husband Felix Farmer's multimillion extravaganza Night Wind. That photo above doesn't do justice to how garish that set is as Sally as Gillian cavorts with life-size toys dancing and singing "Polly Wolly Doodle" (There are even singing balloons and a Jack in the Box). It has to be seen. Click here. You can believe from that scene alone that Night Wind truly stinks as much as they say it does, though how they could calculate on its opening weekend that it's "the lowest-grossing film of all time," seems a bit suspect. I would imagine films that never open would have lower grosses. Maybe the biggest money loser in relation to cost? Oh, who cares? We're not here to be serious or particularly realistic. We're here to pay tribute to the 30th anniversary of writer-director Blake Edwards' mad spoof of the movie business. Blessed with an unbelievably large and talented cast, S.O.B. isn't as sophisticated as Robert Altman's The Player would be a little more than a decade later and its satire isn't as sharp as Sidney Lumet's film of Paddy Chayefsky's take on the television industry was in Network a mere five years earlier, but it was and remains damn funny.
That crawl scrolls against the blue sky over Malibu beach where a man (Stiffe Tanney) jogs with his dog (Troubles). He suddenly suffers a heart attack and though he manages to crawl toward the deck of a large beachhouse and the dog barks up a storm, no one notices his emergency and he collapses. It sets the tone for an underlying theme that afflicts most of the film's characters: obliviousness, mostly stemming from self-absorption. As a result, a man drops dead on a beach with his dog barking loudly even though people keep coming and going on the deck a few feet above where a catatonic Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) sits among the trades reporting Night Wind's failure.
(A smaller headline in Variety reads N.Y. Critics Break 'Wind' — Edwards' humor doesn't always aim for the highbrow. Though from the descriptive crawl, you'd think that Felix is the film's main character. While S.O.B., which does not stand for what you think it does, revolves around him and his movie, the film truly stands as an ensemble piece. No character really serves as lead even though Andrews and William Holden as the film's director Tim Culley get top billing, all the other significant characters are listed alphabetically. In fact, Felix remains in his non-speaking state of depressed madness for a long time. When he does snap out of it and taks 44 minutes into the film, Mulligan at first does it in a way very reminiscent of reactions his character of Burt Campbell on television's Soap sometimes did.While S.O.B. retains its power to make me laugh decades after I first saw the movie, I have to admit that re-watching it for the first time in a long time, I found more problems than before, but not as an entertainment rather in how it chooses to take its shots at the always worthy target of movie studios. I first saw S.O.B. on cable when I was a teenager but as I've grown up, not only have my tastes grown more refined, so has my knowledge of how the film industry works. S.O.B. works on many comic levels, but this time the ludicrous nature of its story took me out of the movie at times. The crawl set up the basic premise, but it's more complicated than that. Even though Night Wind has opened to terrible reviews and
worse box office, Capitol Studios President David Blackman (Robert Vaughn) desperately tries to get his top executive Dick Benson (Larry Hagman, taking the relatively minor role when he was white hot as J.R. on Dallas, having just finished the season that resolved "Who Shot J.R.?") to talk to Felix so they can jerk the film out of theaters and do a major editing job on it which they can't do because of Farmer's ironclad contract that only allows him to make changes. Sure, there was a re-edited version of Leone's Once Upon a Time in America a few years later, but that wasn't a wide release. Blackman himself has been getting pressure from the chairman of the corporation that owns Capitol Studios, Harry Sandler, played by longtime dependable Hollywood character actor Paul Stewart whose first credited film role was the butler Raymond in Citizen Kane. Now, the studio and everyone involved in Night Wind had to know it was a turkey before it opened, so why didn't they try to get him to re-edit it before it opened? You can't tell me they didn't hold test screenings. He might have had a contract that stopped anyone else from making changes, but I doubt it required Capitol Studios to give it a wide release.While that part of the movie doesn't pass the credibility test, even for a farce, other aspects do. Sally and her team worry about damage to her career and Sally would like to exit the marriage. She gets conflicting advice from her attorney Herb (Robert Loggia), her press agent Ben Coogan (Robert Webber) and her agent Eva Brown (Shelley
Winters). While Loggia wants to help extricate her from the marriage, the agents advise against it. Eva in particular reminds her client that her image couldn't withstand a divorce or even a separation, especially now. "You know this town, sweetie. You can smoke dope and end up going steady with your Afghan and you're one of the gang, but you — you're Peter Pan," Eva tells her. Winters is a riot as is just about everyone in this sparkling cast and the cast makes the film overcome its weaknesses. There also are many hints of autobiography and inside jokes sprinkled throughout. Andrews never really played Peter Pan, but she did have that Mary Poppins/Maria von Trapp image. In real life, Edwards did cope with serious depression and supposedly studio interference on Darling Lili inspired S.O.B. Ironically, Hagman's mother Mary Martin originated the roles of both Peter Pan and Maria von Trapp when the characters made their stage musical debuts.The studio finally dispatches his good friend and the film's director Culley (Holden) to the beachhouse to keep watch on him and see if he can pull Farmer back to the real world. Culley is a hard-drinking womanizer. Culley, always on the lookout for young women to decorate his surroundings, picks up
two hitchhikers on the way, Lila and Babs (Jennifer Edwards, Blake's daughter; and Rosanna Arquette in a very early role). At Farmer's house, the servants and the man who mows the yard are so oblivious to what goes on around them that they don't notice when Felix heads to the garage, starts the Cadillac and closes the garage door again. The gardener (Bert Rosario) doesn't get an inkling until he finds a dead rat. When the gardener puts the mower up, he smells the carbon monoxide and sees Felix's red eyes staring at him through the car's rear window. "Not such a good idea to sit in here with the motor running," he tells Felix as he reaches inside to try to cut the engine. Instead, he shifts it into drive and the Caddy crashes through the back of the garage, down the beach and into the ocean, just in time for Culley, Lila and Babs to stare in disbelief.
Felix's attempt at suicide introduces us to the greatest asset that S.O.B. has — Robert Preston as physician to the stars, Dr. Irving Finegarten. Blake Edwards wrote Preston the part of Toddy for his next film, Victor/Victoria, and earned Preston his only Oscar nomination, but as great as he is there, I think his Irving Finegarten is even better. Once he joins the film, he enlivens every scene he's in. When Robert Webber's character Ben, though he works for Sally, starts feeling guilty and spends most of his time hanging out with Irving and Culley, a comic troika for the ages forms. Irving mildly sedates Felix and they sit around the bar. Ben has turned into a wreck. Irving suggests giving Ben a vitamin shot. As he removes bottle after bottle from his medical bag, Dr. Finegarten has second thoughts. "Come to think of it, why should I give you a vitamin shot? I'm the one with the hangover," Irving declares.
Before I forget, when Felix's car ended up in the ocean, it did attract police interest and they did discover the poor dead man and, after subduing the dog, retrieved the corpse who was identified as veteran character actor Burgess Webster. The dog escaped and continued to hang out on the beach. Irving didn't give Felix that strong a dose apparently because he wanders downstairs and that obliviousness theme continues as Ben follows him, trying to talk, not noticing as Felix sticks his head in the oven or scrounges successfully for rope and returns upstairs. Ben soon panics with the arrival of gossip columnist Polly Reed (Loretta Swit) at the front door. Everyone tries to ignore her, but then they can hear she's sneaking in the back. Irving whispers, "This reminds me of a scene in The Thing when a terrible monster is just on the other side of a door" which only sets Ben off more. Polly comes in cooing for Felix while he's upstairs trying to hang himself. The beam doen't hold and he crashes through the floor, landing on Polly below. She ends up in the hospital in traction with multiple injuries. Irving gives him a stronger dose this time and Culley sits beside him and gives him a speech that seems especially prophetic, knowing what fate awaits Holden so soon after the film's release. It's spooky, since we know that a little more than four months later, Holden would get drunk alone at home, fall, hit his head on the corner of a nightstand and bleed to death. This was his last film.
"Felix, for the last 40 years I've lived a life of dedicated debauchery. I've consumed enough booze to destroy a dozen healthy livers. I've filled my lungs with enough nicotine to poison the entire population of Orange County. I've engaged in sexual excesses that make Caligula look like a celibate monk. I have, in fact, conscientiously, day in and day out, for more years than you've been in this best of all possible worlds, tried to kill myself and I've never felt better in my life. So, if you're really going to end it all, I can show you at least a half-dozen better ways to do it."
This being Hollywood, everyone is sleeping with everyone else and cheating as one might expect. David Blackman's girlfriend Mavis (Marisa Berenson) also is seeing an up-and-coming young actor Sam Marshall (David Young) on the side. When Culley takes Lila to the store, they run into Sam who invites Culley to a party he's having in Malibu that night. Culley regretfully declines, but hits upon the idea that perhaps a party will lift Felix's spirits so Sam agrees to move the party there. It's really the key scene in the movie with most of the film's character's there. It reminds me of Blake Edwards' 1968 film The Party with Peter Sellers, which I never was that big a fan of, but it has that sort of feel with the wacky orgiastic vibe that occurs — only he could do a lot more in a R-rated 1981 film than a pre-rating system 1968 one. Lots of sex, drugs and punchlines a-plenty. Even the cops who came earlier when Felix's car ended up in the ocean, come back for the party (and one of them is Joe Penny, whom some might remember from TV's Riptide).
Also showing up at the party are studio exec Dick Benson (Hagman), Polly Reed's henpecked husband Willard (Craig Stevens), who is supposed to do the spying for his wife, and loads of hot young men and women eager to engage in scenes that would seem more at home in the "free love" era than the
beginning of the 1980s. Felix eventually awakens from Dr. Finegarten's magic medicine and as he walks, he's too out of it to remember that there's a hole in the bedroom floor that has been covered with a rug and he steps on it and glides rather easily to the party below. He does notice that one of the partying cops took off his holster and left his gun on the bar. Felix takes the gun and returns to the refuge beneath the rug, trying to point feel the barrel so while he's covered and he can shoot himself through the rug. Before he can, a topless young woman crawls under the rug and presumably
a different gun goes off because soon Felix has fired the gun in the air a couple of times until he appears, pants down in that Burt-esque moment I alluded to earlier shouting, "Woohoo. I've got it!" The next thing we know, Felix, who hasn't said a word and who we've only seen as slow-moving, glum and silent has transformed into a ball of energy. He bursts into a bedroom where Culley is enjoying the company of a young lady and bellows, "Sex, Culley! That's the answer. We'll give 'em a $40 million pornographic epic." Having been preoccupied at the time and not accustomed to seeing Felix up and around lately, Culley expresses a bit of understandable confusion. Felix explains that the times have passed them by. People don't want the goody-goody stuff they've fed them for years, so they'll re-shoot it. Gillian West's dream will no longer be of childhood good times but of repressed fantasies. The world wants sex. David Blackman, Dick Benson (wearing a cast from an injury he sustained at the party; it's a recurring gag that almost everyone ends up in a cast — Polly's husband Willard got hurt as well and ends up in the same hospital room), and two other execs (John Pleshette, John Lawlor) wait impatiently for Farmer. They begin to
think it's a put-on until they begin to hear his voice over the speakers singing "Polly Wolly Doodle" and describing the Night Wind that they know — "But we blew it!" Felix shouts through a megaphone as he appears from behind the Jack in the Box. "Because dying fathers and lying mothers are a dime a dozen these days. Home and family have become civilization's antiques along with the flag, Sunday school, Girl Scout cookies, C.B. de Mille and virginity," Felix tells them. "We gave them virtue, they want vice. We sold them schmaltz, they prefer sadomasochism. Instead of the American dream, it should have been the American wet dream." What's funny is that, to some extent, the situation has reversed in 30 years. Movies made for adults — and I don't mean porn, but subject matter — almost have become an endangered species. Films that earn an R because they aren't for the younger set seem to be a rare breed. Live Free or Die Hard mumbled Bruce
Willis' signature line as John McClane so it could get that all-important PG-13. The King's Speech never deserved an R for its single scene where Colin Firth unleashes a string of fucks, but when it started winning awards Harvey Weinstein cut that scene just to get a PG-13 so it would earn more money. Excuse me. Back to S.O.B. Felix explains his plan to re-shoot parts of Night Wind to change it from a woman's dream of childhood to her Freudian nightmare. Turn Gillian West into a nymphomaniac businesswoman. He just needs a few million for a re-shoot. Blackman doesn't seem to be listening, but he does pull out his pages for suggestions they have for cuts that can be made to the current version. "Cutting won't help," Felix teases. Blackman yells about how much he went overbudget and Farmer rightfully goes back at him saying he didn't go to his office and hold a gun to his head and demand more money. They approved the script and the budget. Blackman is firm and is ready to walk out — until Felix offers to buy Night Wind back. The execs whisper and then they agree to sell the movie back to Farmer. Apparently, Felix has been very good with his money, though he still has to do some asset shuffling to get the funds ready to shoot. Felix must fend off someone who isn't very happy with him right now: His wife. Several million dollars of that money that Felix put together to fund the Night Wind re-shoot rightfully belongs to Sally. Felix tries to explain his plan to her, including having her do a nude scene. "Peter Pan is dead. Long live Gillian West, nymphomaniac executive," he tells her. Sally seeks the advice of her attorney Herb and her agent Eva. Herb agrees that she has plenty of grounds to sue to try to get her money back but Eva, who admits she's always there to protect Sally's image, has to ask, "What if Felix is right?" Maybe it's not a bad idea for Sally to take the chance and go against her image and possibly get a lot of money out of the deal. If it doesn't work, she always can sue him for everything later. Sally reluctantly agrees that she'll film the revised Night Wind.
Of course, getting Sally to that point is easier said than done, even if she has agreed to do it. She's too nervous. Everyone wants to be there on the set to see what happens that day. Polly Reed makes them take her by ambulance but a guard that Felix has hired named Harold Harrigan (Ken Swofford) refuses to let her in. Blackman and his toadies show up in a golf cart and Harrigan tells them to shove off as well. Blackman tells
Harrigan he won't work in Hollywood again. Felix may have control of the set, but it does reside on Capitol Studio's lot, so Blackman does succeed in having Harrigan tossed off. When Ben hears that Polly lurks, he lets her in and the two ambulance attendants are forced to hold her upright to watch. In her dressing room, nothing Felix, Culley or anyone can say can convince her to do the scene. Thankfully, Dr. Irving and his bag of tricks are on the scene (play clip above) to help and an artificially high Sally is ready to film the scene. Culley escorts her back to the set. "You know you are sexually notorious," Sally tells Culley. "A semi-fraudulent reputation which I do everything I can to encourage," Culley admits. Sally asks why he does that. "Because it's the best way for an old man to compete in a young man's world," Cully replies. Polly waves at Sally, trying to get her attention. Sally finally recognizes her, then asks, "Did you come to see my boobies?"When S.O.B. opened, reviews varied, but it was hard to hear them above the noise about Julie Andrews baring her breasts in a film for the first time. That trumped everything else about the movie. It doesn't help that the way it happens in the movie-within-the-movie makes it all about Sally Miles baring her breasts. It's not as if it comes in a Gillian West love scene, nymphomaniac or not, but it just comes at the end of a new dark dream sequence (Jack in the Box is now Jock in the Box and a stalker). As Jock chases Gillian through a maze and she enters the devil's mouth, the music builds to a crescendo, she holds out her hand for Jock to stop and simply pulls down the front of her dress and unveils her breasts. (To see something completely bizarre, here is a YouTube clip where you can see a great deal of the sequence except it has been set to the Chris de Burgh song "Lady in Red." I recommend hitting mute and just looking at the images.) Everyone present applauds, including the ambulance attendants who drop Polly as a result. Sally smiles gratefully and covers herself, before collapsing. However, this is Hollywood and scheming usually is going on. Sally's personal secretary Gary (Stuart Margolin) never has been trustworthy but he's been talking to Eva behind Sally's back in hopes of getting a career of his own. Now that Capitol Studios has no part of Night Wind, all the buzz that has been building has made the corporate boss bug Blackman about why they don't have a piece of it in case it turns into a hit. As a result, the studio has been using Eva who has been dangling a job in front of Gary in exchange for him putting the idea in Sally's head that since she technically owns half the film, she should sell distribution rights to Capitol since Felix can't very well distribute it himself. Sally agrees to do it and a judge backs up her right to do it. Felix, however, doesn't learn of it until after he screens a final cut of it with Cully and the lights come up in the screening room to reveal Blackman and his toadies. Blackman shows him the legal documents which basically means Night Wind has been stolen from him. Since his original contract was voided, they can do what they want. Blackman asks what the running time is. When he's told 164 minutes, he says they'll have to cut that.
Felix drives like a maniac, first going to his other house looking for Sally, but she's gone somewhere in the Far East to visit some kind of swami. He does see his kids briefly who want to play with daddy and squirt him with a squirt gun, which he takes. He even plows a car through the kitchen of the Malibu home. Because he's been speeding and driving recklessly, police have been pursuing him, but somehow he's able to switch cars and escape. He drives to the office where the original negative is stored in a vault. When he gets in the building, a friendly voice surprises him: It's Harrigan. He's working security there now. Felix is too preoccupied for small talk. He goes to the office of a Mr. Lipschitz (Hamilton Camp) and makes him take him to the film at "gunpoint." As Felix leads Lipschitz and the reels to the lobby, the squirt gun aimed at Lipschitz's head, Harrigan tries to calm him since by then a lot of armed police have arrived. Some distraction makes Felix aim the gun toward the cops and he gets hit by a fusillade of bullets. Harrigan leans over the dying producer. "I'm sorry, Mr. Farmer," Harrigan says. "It's alright, Harrigan. It'll mean another $10 million at the box office," Farmer tells him before he dies.
At this point, the film divides half into Hollywood hypocrisy, half into the funniest part of the film as the three characters most disgusted by Felix's treatment band together on a bender: Culley, Irving and Ben. It begins at a bar where Sinatra's "All the Way" begins playing and Culley informs them that he just put $6 of Sinatra into the jukebox. Ben, having worked for Sally, who they feel stabbed Felix in the back, feels the worst and tries to convince Culley to beat the shit out of him in the hope it will make him feel better. It's in this scene that we learn that the S.O.B. of the title stands for Standard Operational Bullshit, according to Ben. Culley agrees, lamenting that there are "so few people in this town with a conscience." Meanwhile, the rest of the industry plans a huge memorial service where Sally plans to sing and they all will pretend they treated him decently. The drunken trio, who christen themselves The Three Muscatels at one point, all agree they won't take part in the sham, which will be presided over by the guru Sally met in the Far East (Larry Storch). Sall also will sing. The triumvirate decides that they are going to give Felix the memorial he deserves and set out to steal Felix's body from the funeral home. Apparently, this is based on a Hollywood legend that director Raoul Walsh stole John Barrymore's corpse after he died and propped him up to scare Errol Flynn, but what the fictional characters do with Felix is a bit more elaborate.
When they get to the funeral home, the first coffin they check is no one they know. The next contains the late character actor Burgess Webster. The third time turns out to be the charm and they find Felix. Feeling that Webster's death hasn't received the attention it deserved, when they remove Felix, they put Webster in
his coffin and the other guy in Webster's. Upstairs, the couple (Byron Kane, Virginia Gregg) that owns the funeral parlor salivate over how much business the Farmer funeral will bring them when they hear a noise downstairs. They find the empty coffin but locate the body in Webster's place and Webster in Farmer's. The husband is beside himself: Their cash cow is gone. His wife slams the lid on Farmer's coffin, now holding Webster. "Who's to know?" On the streets, after initial difficulty bending Felix into the car, they make Ben sit in the back with him because he's been having a bad night of bodily functions and as Irving points out Felix is the only one who won't mind. They stick some sunglasses on Felix and proceed to drive him back to Culley's where they drink and play cards with Felix as guest. It was funny for a time when I'd see the movie because from the years 1989-2000, the only actor in these scenes who was still alive was Richard Mulligan, who was playing the corpse. As they wonder what they should do with Felix, Culley fetches something from another room and places it on Felix's head. It's a Viking helmet for a Viking funeral.The next morning, the men take Felix out to sea on his boat to prepare for their salute. At the same time, the rest of the industry begins gathering on a soundstage at the Capitol Studio lot for Felix's funeral. The
occasion doesn't stop anyone from continuing their deals or their affairs. Blackman congratulates Sam Harris on his new role and whispers to Mavis that he better be worth it, not noticing that Sam's hand is up Mavis' skirt. Gary and Eva finalize their deal. All the people with various injuries wheel in. Sally tells Gary that she doesn't know if she'll be able to sing. "You have to — it's the only reason everybody came," Gary says. Her guru sits up on the stage looking as if he can barely stay awake. Finally, he's roused and stands to give his eulogy. Is it full of Eastern philosophy? Not hardly. It's as show bizzy as it can be. This is where some of the unreality takes over again. Felix was shot and killed before the film was released and still in the funeral home, yet the guru gives new box office reports on the revised Night Wind. Farmer also was supposed to have had a record of nothing but hits prior to the first version of Night Wind, but when the guru reads off the list of his film titles they all sound ridiculous. Here is a clip of the eulogy so you can see what I mean.
As Culley drives the boat, Irving and Ben sit on deck with Felix in the fisherman's seat, complete with rod and reel in hand. Ben wonders what happens if he should catch something. Back at the other memorial, Sally finally rises and sings "Oh Promise Me." Irving reads the inscription on the Viking helmet which reads "From the cast and crew of The Pagan Plunder." "I don't think I saw that one," Irving says. "Terrible reviews," Ben tells him. "Grossed a fortune." Once Culley feels they've gone far enough out, they load Felix into a little wooden craft, cover him in blankets, soak it with gasoline and then Irving lights a match and drops it and Culley pulls the boat away as it starts burning. "So long pal," Culley says as they watch Felix and the little boat burn. Back on the beach, Burgess Webster's dog can see the smoke and wags his tail. Then a final crawl scrolls across the screen.
in motion picture history and Sally won another Academy Award and the people who ran the studio made
a ton of money and they all lived happily ever after…
until the next movie!
S.O.B. isn't the finest Hollywood satire ever made, but it's likely to put a smile on your face thanks to its great cast, most especially Robert Preston who I really can't say enough about here.
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Labels: 80s, Altman, Blake Edwards, Chayefsky, Colin Firth, Erroll Flynn, H. Weinstein, Holden, Julie Andrews, K. Douglas, Leone, Lumet, Movie Tributes, R. Preston, Richard Mulligan, Shelley Winters, Sinatra, Walsh, Willis
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Monday, July 12, 2010
“He said if a man had one friend, he was rich…I'm rich…”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I love classic movies, and though it may not seem fair to the ones I’ve not yet seen I have favorites that I return to again and again and again. There’s also a small handful of these films that, if I happen to run across one while channel-surfing, I have to stay and watch to the very end. A good example of one of these timeless classics is the 1942 version of The Glass Key — a film that I’ve lost count how many times I’ve sat through. It’s a classic tale of politics, murder and corruption…one of the earliest examples of the film style that would eventually become known as “film noir.”
But the granddaddy of all the “I’m-not-budging-until-the-end-credits-roll” films I’m fond of is Winchester ’73 (1950) — a Western fave that established so many milestones it would be difficult to list them all. It was one of the first Westerns made by motion picture star James Stewart (1950’s Broken Arrow would be the very first filmed, but released after Winchester), an actor not generally known for sagebrush sagas…and in fact, Stewart got some static in the press for this new direction in his career because the noble reporters of the fourth estate didn’t think he could pull off such a role. It also would be Stewart’s first film in which he collaborated with director Anthony Mann — the two men would go on to make a total of eight features together, including the classics Bend of the River (1952) and The Naked Spur (1953) — an individual who’d also never previously helmed an oater and was recommended to the film after the original director, Fritz Lang, took a pass (Stewart had worked with Mann previously in stage productions).
Sixty years ago on this date, Winchester ’73 was released to theaters. Its surprising success breathed new life into what many thought was a tired genre (beaten to death by singing cowboys and B-picture oaters) and ensured a slew of successful Western movies to come throughout the 1950s.
Lin McAdam (Stewart) and High-Spade Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell — “with a hyphen…that’s what I sit on when I get tired”) ride into Dodge City one Fourth of July in 1876 — just in time to enter a marksmanship contest in which the coveted prize is a genuine, “one-in-a-thousand” Winchester ’73 rifle—“the gun that won the West.” One of the contestants, a man named Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), exhibits a bit of animosity towards Lin — something that does not escape the attention of man who’s in charge of keeping the peace, Marshal Wyatt Earp (Will Geer). As the contest gets underway, it soon comes down to a showdown between Lin and Dutch Henry…with Lin ultimately emerging as the victor. When Dutch Henry offers to buy the rifle from McAdam (“That's too much gun for a man to have just for...shootin' rabbits,” Brown observes nastily) Lin tells him it’s not for sale. So Dutch Henry lies in wait for Lin in his hotel room, dry-gulches him and steals the rifle…hauling ass and elbows out of town in the process.
Dutch Henry and his pals (Steve Brodie, James Millican) arrive at a trading post where, even though Brown has the prized Winchester, they’re “naked” without guns and ammunition, which they left behind in Dodge. In an attempt to earn money to purchase some, Dutch Henry gets into a poker game with a crooked gambler/Indian trader named Joe Lamont (John McIntire), who ultimately ends up in control of the firearm. The weapon will continue to exchange multiple owners throughout the film; it passes through the hands of an Indian chief (Rock Hudson), a yellow coward (Charles Drake) who deserts his wife (Shelley Winters) while being ambushed by Apaches and notorious gunslinger “Waco” Johnnie Dean (Dan Duryea)…before winding up in the possession of Dutch Henry again. By that time, Lin and High-Spade have caught up to the thief — who is revealed during the course of events in the film to be Lin’s brother — and Brown and McAdam are forced to shoot it out in a tense climax set among a rocky cliff.
Before World War II, Jimmy Stewart had a reputation in films as the quintessential American boy-next-door, whose “aw, shucks” demeanor endeared him to a large audience of moviegoers (though he showed flashes of a darker nature on rare occasions before, notably in 1936’s After the Thin Man). Stewart enlisted in the service at the outbreak of the war and eventually worked his way up through the U.S. Air Force ranks to become a brigadier general…but after his hitch overseas concluded; he returned to his former profession and was anxious to start tackling roles that didn’t typecast him as Mr. Nice Guy. Audiences got a further look at Stewart’s slightly blemished psyche in the underappreciated (at the time) It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) — but it was Winchester that really let Jim talk a walk on the dark side. Granted, though he still plays the hero it was a bit uncomfortable to see Stewart exhibit uncharacteristic traits like disillusionment and obsession — throughout the film’s running time, he doggedly pursues McNally’s Brown with a ruthless determination that certainly made those individuals unfamiliar with this darker side of his screen persona a tad uneasy. The obsessive hero not above random acts of violence would become a hallmark in the subsequent Westerns Stewart made with director Mann — a man whose fixation on achieving certain ends often justified the questionable means needed to get there.
Although Winchester ’73 pioneered a new “adult” western, it would be folly not to point out that the film in its entirety isn’t necessarily a downer; there are some wonderfully scripted sequences highlighting the amusing byplay between Stewart and sidekick Mitchell, and the screenplay by Borden Chase and Robert L. Richards (based on Stuart N. Lake’s story) allows for a first-rate mix of lighter scenes mixed with its more somber moments. There’s endlessly quotable dialogue in Winchester, but my favorite is the observation made by High-Spade as he contemplates being attacked by Indians: “It was such pretty hair. I've had it ever since I was a kid. A little thin on top... but I sure would like to keep it.”
I don’t think there’s ever been a better-cast movie than Winchester ’73. Stewart is great, of course, and Mitchell is superb as his best saddle pal — but there also are outstanding turns from McNally, Winters, Duryea (at his narcissistic nastiest), Drake, McIntire and Jay C. Flippen as a cavalry commander who, after receiving a buss from a grateful Shelley and a “That’s for savin’ my life”, says sheepishly: “Now you disappoint me. I thought it was 'cause I'm pretty.” I’ve seen a lot of fine actors portray the legendary Wyatt Earp: Randolph Scott, Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Burt Lancaster, Hugh O’Brian (on TV) — but to this day, Will Geer is the man I think of when I think of Earp (and surprisingly, Geer originally thought himself miscast). Rock Hudson, in one of his early roles, makes quite an impression as the savage Young Bull…and this was also one of the early showcases for a young Tony Curtis, who plays a cavalry grunt.
This was one of three Westerns that director Mann would tackle in 1950 — the others being The Furies and Devil’s Doorway — and he brought a wonderfully dark, paranoiac sensibility to the traditional oater, directing these films in the same dark, moody style as he did his celebrated film noirs such as T-Men (1947) and Border Incident (1949). And for those who “can’t abide” black-and-white films, the cinematography of Oscar winner William H. Daniels should be enough to convince even the last monochromatic holdout — it’s every bit as beautiful as the Monument Valley scenery that accompanied many a John Ford film.
During the planning stages of Winchester ’73, Universal couldn’t afford to pony up Stewart’s asking price of $200,000 — so they cut a deal with the actor whereupon he would achieve a percentage of the profits upon making both Winchester and Harvey (1950). Both films were immensely successful at the box office, and this unusual arrangement of “profit-sharing” would eventually change the partnership between studio, actor and agent…and bring about the demise of the studio system and long-term contracts. (Stewart, it is said, netted a tidy sum of $600,000 from Winchester — which was not a bad chunk of change at the time.)
The partnership between actor Stewart and director Mann that would lead to successes such as The Man From Laramie (1955) and The Far Country (1955) was, unfortunately, not destined to last — they had a falling out during the making of Night Passage (1957) and neither man worked with one another again. Stewart’s new Western image (he practiced for hours-on-end with the Winchester rifle in an effort to look authentic, and even insisted on wearing the same sweat-stained hat and riding the same horse in every oater afterward) would stretch to other classic sagas like John Ford’s Two Rode Together (1961) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)…but for my money, he never worked for a better director on oaters than Anthony Mann. Winchester, interestingly enough, is the only film of his for which Stewart provided commentary for its initial laserdisc and subsequent DVD releases. This is a positive boon to yours truly, because ever since the decline of the once-proud American Movie Classics channel...I have to put the DVD on to once again fully enjoy this timeless film classic.
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, and hasn’t been able to see actor Charles Drake in a positive light in any subsequent film because that rat bastard left Shelley Winters behind to save his own sorry ass from an Indian massacre.
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Labels: 50s, Anthony Mann, H. Fonda, J. Stewart, Joel McCrea, John Ford, Lancaster, Lang, Movie Tributes, Rock Hudson, Shelley Winters, Tony Curtis
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Hidden in the shadows
This post is part of the Montgomery Clift blog-a-thon being coordinated by Nathaniel R at Film Experience.
By Edward Copeland
For a long time, I was sort of stumped about something to write about for the Monty Clift blog-a-thon. While I admired the actor in many films, nothing evoked much passion in me. Then, when I happened to catch up with the documentary George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey, it awakened my interest in that director again so A Place in the Sun seemed a likely place to revisit. Alas, my reaction was one of disappointment in terms of the film and Clift's performance.
Based on Theodore Dreiser's early 20th-century novel An American Tragedy, A Place in the Sun has a lot going for it, but it never seems to really get going, especially once Raymond Burr shows up as one of the hammiest district attorneys in the history of film. For those unfamiliar with the basic outlines of the story, Clift plays George Eastman, the nephew of a rich California magnate who comes his uncle's way in search of a job following his rearing by an extremely religious branch of the Eastman family. George is quiet and unassuming and once he gets a job with his uncle, he starts to date Alice, a co-worker (Shelley Winters), against the rules of the company. More importantly though, he begins to fall for high society deb Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor) and much of the conflict stems from the class struggles and upper-class snobbery heaped upon George.
Of course, things get complicated when Alice finds herself with child and threatens George's preferred future with Angela. While A Place in the Sun does offer some crisp dialogue and an interesting premise, (I particularly like that the good girl/bad girl dichotomy is upended a bit, since Alice is the good girl and ends up pregnant but Angela is most decidedly the bad girl, taking chances at every turn.) the problem stems from the character of George and Clift's portrayal. Whether it was the actor's inclination, the director's instructions or the way it is supposed to be, George is a cipher. I have to believe this is intentional since so many of his scenes show him covered in shadows or with his back to the camera.
The opening shot of the film where he's hitchhiking along the highway sets this up to the point that in his dark clothing, he'd be nothing but a black blur at one point if it weren't for the credits running over his image. This could have been truly touching and sad, but once events lead to the introduction of Burr's D.A., it almost seems comical. It isn't helped that I kept thinking about two bits of comedy that stemmed from the movie and the original book. I remember in Horse Feathers, nearly 20 years older than A Place in the Sun, when Groucho takes the college widow out on the lake and mentions he's been afraid to get into a boat ever since he read Dreiser's novel. The other joke I remember comes from one of the multitude of AFI specials where A Place in the Sun popped up on the list and had commentary from noted film historians Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. I can't remember who said which, but one asked the other, "Would you kill your wife for Elizabeth Taylor?" to which the other comic responded, "I'd kill my wife for Shelley Winters."
Montgomery Clift was a fine actor who gave many memorable performances, but A Place in the Sun really didn't serve him well.
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Labels: 50s, Blog-a-thons, Clift, G. Stevens, Liz, Marx Brothers, Shelley Winters
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Monday, April 23, 2007
Tales Told By Idiots: Bad Bard, Bad Bard, Whatchagonnado?
This post is part of the Shakespeare Blog-a-Thon being coordinated at Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee. Check there for links to other posts.
By Odienator
Shakespeare wrote some of the most stirring and beautiful lines trapped in paper, but you wouldn't know it listening to some of the actors who tried to speak them. For every Gielgud, O'Toole and Olivier, there are double the number of actors who just couldn't get their mouths around that iambic pentameter. Why do they even try? Is it the paycheck? Or the notion that reciting Shakespeare will win you an Oscar, as it did for Sir Larry O and Richard Dreyfuss?
In honor of the Shakespeare-Blog-a-Thon, here is a brief list of actors who should never have attempted to tell us what a piece of work man is, or who did so for nefarious Oscar purposes. Who should have taken Shakespeare's "and the rest is silence" seriously?
Stunt Casting, Thy Name is Kenneth Branagh
I used to think Kenneth Branagh was a great Shakespearean actor, but I am starting to question if he seemed so good because he cast people who were so bad and played scenes with them. I appreciate how he tries to bring Shakespeare to the groundlings of today, and I've liked most of his adaptations, but he sure likes his stunt casting. The phenomenon is not new — John Wayne as Genghis Khan, anyone? — but Shakespeare's dialogue is a perilous mixture of rhythm, elocution and emotion. It is not about the physicality of the actor, it is about their vocal delivery. Director Branagh, in his admirable desire to make the teenagers saddled with reading Shakespeare grow to love it, apparently ignored the train wrecks he witnessed in his viewfinder. For every great performance he recorded (Derek Jacobi, Emma Thompson), Branagh gave us:
Believe it or not, Keanu Reeves can be an effective actor. I'm not one of those people who pick on "Mr. Whoa" because it's fashionable; credit is deserved where it is due. While he is nowhere as bad as some have reported, he is still out of his league. Reeves has a perpetual scowl and a flat delivery; he is a verbal deer caught in the Bard's headlights. Reeves would have benefited greatly if Ted Logan had met Shakespeare in that time-travelling phone booth. I had an easier time buying that Reeves and Denzel Washington were brothers than anything coming out of Reeves' mouth.
Jack Lemmon was so effective in Glengarry Glen Ross because his vocal pauses, stammers and ticks fit well with Mamet's "cuss cuss cuss pause cuss cuss pause pause cuss cuss cuss cuss pause" style of writing. Like the Bard, Mamet's dialogue is musical and needs the right interpreter to make it sing. Can you imagine Bob Newhart doing Marc Antony's speech in Julius Caesar or Christopher Walken doing Hamlet? ("What ... a piece of work is man How noble ... in reason...") Lemmon's tics and Shakespeare's verse fit as well as Slowpoke Rodriguez singing a rap by Krayzie Bone, or Shirley Bassey doing Metallica. Every line is delivered differently as Lemmon tries in vain to bend the Bard toward his Lemmon-isms. It's painful to watch him flail. As much as I love Jack Lemmon, his performance here lives up to his last name.
In the court of Hollywood, I propose the Cruz-Depardieu Law, which states that Gerard Depardieu and Penélope Cruz should NEVER act in English. In Hamlet, Depardieu becomes Depar-don't, an amazing feat since all he has to say is "Yes, my lord" about 12 times. While I'm proposing laws, might I add the "Williams Anti-Caricature Law," which states that, if clueless on how to play a role, Robin Williams must never fall back on stereotypical racial and homosexual voices. Williams' Osric has an odd gay vibe that thankfully distracts from his horrendous line readings. Perhaps he was trying to get an Oscar; it worked for Richard Dreyfuss' Chelsea boy Richard III.
As Felix Unger Would say: Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!
Sometimes actors think they can tackle Shakespeare simply because they have been praised or honored for other work. Others believe their star is so big that they are invincible. Still others believe that Shakespeare is the way to that elusive Oscar. This is why some of these actors tried their luck at the Bard.
Look up "feast or famine" in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of Jessica Lange. Either she's superb (Men Don't Leave, All That Jazz, Frances, Tootsie) or superbad (God, where do I start? Hush, Big Fish, King Kong). The failure of Titus rests on the shoulders of director Julie Taymor whose film completely misses the point of the Bard's play: this is a sick parody. She turns it into a sick ABC Afterschool Special Done by MTV. The play's violence is so gruesome and over-the-top, and the situations so telenovela-dramatic that it is impossible to take with the seriousness and the underlying social commentary Taymor tries to push. If any Bard adaptation screamed out for the geeky, caressing hands of Quentin Tarantino, it's this one. After Lange played Blanche DuBois opposite daughter cusser-outer Alec Baldwin, she started adding Blanche to almost every role she played afterward. As the Queen of the Goths, she looks less Goth and more Glam, like Ziggy Stardust crossed with Divine, and she attacks her lines as if she were the Queen of the Southern Gothics. Vengeful lines come out goofy, seductive lines come out cold, and she is histrionic in all the wrong places. There is no rhythm nor rhyme to her performance, and for Shakespeare, that's the kiss of death.
I once heard this anecdote about A Double Life: during the course of the film, one of the audience members turned to his wife and said "So when does he sing 'Mammy?'" Whether this is true I've no idea, but Colman's performance as an actor driven mad by his performance in Othello couldn't have been any worse had he done Jolson's signature tune. While there is less Shakespeare in this film than in the aforementioned adaptations, what's here plays an integral part in this loony film noir directed by George Cukor. Colman plays the original Method Actor, a man who becomes the characters he plays. Knowing this, someone still suggests he tackle Othello. (Why not Joan of Arc? At least he wouldn't kill anybody.) Colman starts spouting Othello's lines at inopportune moments, then takes his delusion to its logical conclusion by giving Shelley Winters a really effective neck rub. Colman's Othello is so hammy it makes Vincent Price's turn in the superior Theater of Blood look like vintage Gielgud, and I found myself feeling envious for Shelley — at least she didn't have to listen to him anymore. Oscar fell for it, and they gave him Best Actor. Colman strangled the Oscar onstage during the ceremony. (Just kidding.)
Unless you can give me another reason why the Washington Wizards player even attempted Shakespeare in this film, I'm going to have to go with the Dreyfuss Defense: Quoting Shakespeare gets you an Oscar nomination! At least he didn't play a rapping genie like that OTHER basketball player.
in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Both Flockhart and the usually reliable David Straithairn have a hard time convincingly spouting their dialogue. Straithairn is stiff and uncomfortable and Flockhart is an 18th century Ally McBeal clone, as if that series had been reimagined as Black Adder. Her last scene in the film made me want to poke my eyes out and ram Q-tips into my ears.
Peter O'Toole CAN do Shakespeare. My beef (and I realize I'm cheating here) is that he does it solely to get an Oscar nomination. There is no need for him to do it in this film, and considering that we already know how great he is at it, I saw his Venus recitation as a shameful pander. There really is nothing here that is Oscar worthy — O'Toole playing a dirty old boozy pussy hound actor is akin to me playing someone with a Y-chromosome — so this is thrown in to remind us how good O'Toole once was and why Oscar should be shamed into giving him the Oscar he so richly deserved elsewhere. Thankfully, it didn't work.
There are many others (Bruce Willis in Moonlighting's "Atomic Shakespeare" episode, to name one) but as Polonius said, "brevity is the soul of wit," so I shall exeunt here. Parting is such sweet sorrow.
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Labels: Blog-a-thons, Branagh, Cukor, Denzel, Emma Thompson, Gielgud, J. Lange, Lemmon, Mamet, O'Toole, Olivier, Penélope Cruz, R. Colman, Robin, Shakespeare, Shelley Winters, Television, Walken, Willis
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Thursday, February 22, 2007
The performances Oscar forgot
By Odienator
Since there are only five spots to be had for each acting category at the Oscars, names are bound to be missing come nomination day. Every year the battle rages over who got snubbed. Sometimes Oscar “rights these wrongs” by nominating the snubbed person for a lesser performance the following year, as it did with Bette Davis and Paul Giamatti. Other times, folks are just outta luck. Today, I salute some of the outta luck folks, people who should have heard their names on nomination morning.
Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter
Mitchum, with his hooded eyelids, velvety voice and aura of menace, assays the iconic image of evil in Charles Laughton’s creepy, ethereal fable. Mitchum’s preacher is suave enough to seduce Shelley Winters yet fake enough for her kids to see through his musings on right and wrong. The entire film is purposefully fake, but Mitchum’s menace is still jarring; he’s a big bad wolf threatening to leap off the screen and blow down the viewer’s house. The preacher shows us the tattooed hands bearing the words love and hate, but we know which hand we’re being dealt.
Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction
Fiorentino's fiery femme fatale "Wendy Kroy" appeared on HBO before being released theatrically, which caused the Academy to disqualify the best female performance of 1994 from best actress consideration. Fiorentino is fearless, exposing her hot body and her cold heart as she leads man after man by his dong to his doom. Her performance shows Wendy thinking quickly on (and off) her feet, scheming, plotting, and most importantly, getting away with murder. Barbara Stanwyck would be proud.
Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and wins the filibuster but loses the Oscar, so they gave it to him one year later for getting drunk. Meanwhile, Cary Grant gives a charming, comic performance, stealing the film from both Stewart and Katharine Hepburn. The real story behind The Philadelphia Story is that the wrong actor got the gold. Cary, you wuz robbed.
Debbi Morgan in Eve's Bayou
This Southern Gothic benefits from fine performances all around, including a surprisingly erotic Samuel L. Jackson, but Angie Hubbard from All My Children leaves a lasting impression as a clairvoyant whose bad luck with men is comical yet deadly. The scene that always sticks with me is her soliloquy where, while describing the fate of one of her husbands, she steps into a mirror and into her past. Later, she has one of those scenes of quiet devastation, the type of scene I love so much when an actor nails it. Had the Academy seen this film, I'm sure she, and the sweltering cinematography, would have gotten a nod.
Steve Buscemi in Fargo
The Coens love to cast, then abuse, Steve Buscemi. In Fargo, he suffers perhaps their cruelest fate, but before he does, his frustrated, hapless performance leaps from slapstick to smarminess to sadism without missing a beat. Buscemi never shuts up, and seems to wear his socks in every scene, even during sex. The Coens' constant focus on those socks pays off in the most revoltingly funny scene of the film, and one is almost sad to see Buscemi go. For an extra Oscar omission, see Buscemi in an even better performance in Ghost World.
Irma P. Hall in A Family Thing
The Coens misuse Hall in The LadyKillers, but this performance is probably what made them cast her in the first place. A fine example of what a supporting performance is supposed to be, Hall's blind Aunt Tee is an amusing adviser to lead actor Robert Duvall. Her hilarious dialogue, by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, sounds real, down to the Southern Black cadences and phrases. When Duvall, while looking at pictures of a young Hall says "you were beautiful back then," Hall snaps back "ain't nothing wrong with me now!" Apparently Oscar thought differently.
Robin Williams in Awakenings
I once wrote "Robin Williams has appeared on my ten worst lists more than the numbers 1 through 10." And he has. Awakenings is the good movie where he plays a doctor (please don't make me invoke the name of the bad one) and if the Academy saw fit to nominate De Niro, they should have nominated the other half of his performance as well.
Jennifer Jason Leigh in Georgia
Mare Winningham got the Oscar nod, which seems appropriate considering the luck of Leigh's character in this film. The movie is named after Winningham's character, but it's about Leigh's self-destructive Sadie. Sadie lives in her sister Georgia's shadow, refusing to believe that Georgia is the more talented singer. Anyone who has siblings can relate to the rivalry, but Sadie brings far too much upon herself to be truly forgiven. Leigh has been accused of being grating, and here she pushes the envelope of audience endurance with a horrible 9 minute rendition of a Van Morrison tune, a scene that either pulls you in sympathy toward Sadie or pushes you away from her forever. Either way, it's sheer bravery, and Leigh's bloody, open wound of a performance went unrewarded by an Academy that obviously saw the movie.
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Since there are only five spots to be had for each acting category at the Oscars, names are bound to be missing come nomination day. Every year the battle rages over who got snubbed. Sometimes Oscar “rights these wrongs” by nominating the snubbed person for a lesser performance the following year, as it did with Bette Davis and Paul Giamatti. Other times, folks are just outta luck. Today, I salute some of the outta luck folks, people who should have heard their names on nomination morning.
Mitchum, with his hooded eyelids, velvety voice and aura of menace, assays the iconic image of evil in Charles Laughton’s creepy, ethereal fable. Mitchum’s preacher is suave enough to seduce Shelley Winters yet fake enough for her kids to see through his musings on right and wrong. The entire film is purposefully fake, but Mitchum’s menace is still jarring; he’s a big bad wolf threatening to leap off the screen and blow down the viewer’s house. The preacher shows us the tattooed hands bearing the words love and hate, but we know which hand we’re being dealt.
Fiorentino's fiery femme fatale "Wendy Kroy" appeared on HBO before being released theatrically, which caused the Academy to disqualify the best female performance of 1994 from best actress consideration. Fiorentino is fearless, exposing her hot body and her cold heart as she leads man after man by his dong to his doom. Her performance shows Wendy thinking quickly on (and off) her feet, scheming, plotting, and most importantly, getting away with murder. Barbara Stanwyck would be proud.
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and wins the filibuster but loses the Oscar, so they gave it to him one year later for getting drunk. Meanwhile, Cary Grant gives a charming, comic performance, stealing the film from both Stewart and Katharine Hepburn. The real story behind The Philadelphia Story is that the wrong actor got the gold. Cary, you wuz robbed.
This Southern Gothic benefits from fine performances all around, including a surprisingly erotic Samuel L. Jackson, but Angie Hubbard from All My Children leaves a lasting impression as a clairvoyant whose bad luck with men is comical yet deadly. The scene that always sticks with me is her soliloquy where, while describing the fate of one of her husbands, she steps into a mirror and into her past. Later, she has one of those scenes of quiet devastation, the type of scene I love so much when an actor nails it. Had the Academy seen this film, I'm sure she, and the sweltering cinematography, would have gotten a nod.
The Coens love to cast, then abuse, Steve Buscemi. In Fargo, he suffers perhaps their cruelest fate, but before he does, his frustrated, hapless performance leaps from slapstick to smarminess to sadism without missing a beat. Buscemi never shuts up, and seems to wear his socks in every scene, even during sex. The Coens' constant focus on those socks pays off in the most revoltingly funny scene of the film, and one is almost sad to see Buscemi go. For an extra Oscar omission, see Buscemi in an even better performance in Ghost World.
The Coens misuse Hall in The LadyKillers, but this performance is probably what made them cast her in the first place. A fine example of what a supporting performance is supposed to be, Hall's blind Aunt Tee is an amusing adviser to lead actor Robert Duvall. Her hilarious dialogue, by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, sounds real, down to the Southern Black cadences and phrases. When Duvall, while looking at pictures of a young Hall says "you were beautiful back then," Hall snaps back "ain't nothing wrong with me now!" Apparently Oscar thought differently.
I once wrote "Robin Williams has appeared on my ten worst lists more than the numbers 1 through 10." And he has. Awakenings is the good movie where he plays a doctor (please don't make me invoke the name of the bad one) and if the Academy saw fit to nominate De Niro, they should have nominated the other half of his performance as well.
Mare Winningham got the Oscar nod, which seems appropriate considering the luck of Leigh's character in this film. The movie is named after Winningham's character, but it's about Leigh's self-destructive Sadie. Sadie lives in her sister Georgia's shadow, refusing to believe that Georgia is the more talented singer. Anyone who has siblings can relate to the rivalry, but Sadie brings far too much upon herself to be truly forgiven. Leigh has been accused of being grating, and here she pushes the envelope of audience endurance with a horrible 9 minute rendition of a Van Morrison tune, a scene that either pulls you in sympathy toward Sadie or pushes you away from her forever. Either way, it's sheer bravery, and Leigh's bloody, open wound of a performance went unrewarded by an Academy that obviously saw the movie.
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Labels: Bette, Buscemi, Cary, Coens, De Niro, Duvall, Giamatti, J.J. Leigh, K. Hepburn, Mitchum, Oscars, Robin, Samuel L. Jackson, Shelley Winters, Stanwyck
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Monday, August 14, 2006
When Oscar Drops the Ball
By Josh R
Josh R here — after several weeks without full Internet access (and a new computer that’s been a problem child), I’ve decided to celebrate my return to cyberspace by resuming one of my favorite pastimes: Oscar-bashing. As we all know, the year’s best performances usually go home empty handed — quite often, they aren’t even nominated. I decided to try to pick out the 20 most (to borrow a phrase from Dame Julie Andrews) egregiously overlooked performances in the history of the Academy Awards — the kind of omissions that just make you scratch your head, if not bang it against the wall out of sheer frustration.
Entertainment Weekly attempted something like this a year or two ago — I believe their list went all the way up to 100 — and the results ranged from the obvious and expected to the puzzling and obscure. I’m not sure if there’s anything on my list that wasn’t included on theirs (I don’t have it in front of me to cross-reference), but I’m not going to make any strained effort at originality; all of the performances cited are, I imagine, ones that most of the visitors to this site will be familiar with, if not through first-hand viewing experience, than certainly by reputation. If this doesn’t exactly reflect what I think the best unnominated performances of all time are in the strictest of order, it’s because, in the interest of fairness, I’ve decided not to cite any individual actor more than once — if I’d chosen to do otherwise, the performances of Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart alone might have accounted for at least 25% of what emerged from the elimination process.
Needless to say, paring down the list turned out to be very, very tough — there were a lot of painful cuts I had to make, but in the interest of time and space (and in order not to try Mr. Copeland’s patience more than I had to), I was determined to limit myself to 20. This has resulted in some bruised feelings in several quarters — No. 21, Danny Kaye from The Court Jester, still isn’t returning my phone calls. Based on the elimination process, I would not have difficulty finding enough performances to fill out a top 100, and might even make it to 200 if sanity would allow. My natural preference for older films will be is very much in evidence — the closest any “contemporary” performance came to making the cut was Gene Hackman for The Conversation — and only one of the performers cited is, in fact, still living. Feel free to agree or disagree with my choices, and mention any that you feel ought to have been included.
I realize that there are some purists out there who believe that Oscars should only be awarded for what falls under the traditional definition of “great acting” — that is to say, how an actor inhabits a role, how convincing or life-like they are as the character, how they
express themselves through their delivery of dialogue, outward displays of emotion, physical transformation, etc. I can’t fully agree with that assessment — if you want to be technical about it, the category is best performance by an actor in a lead or supporting role, and that term encompasses a whole lot more than what falls under the narrow definition outlined above. When people say that Mikhail Baryshnikov gave one of the greatest performances they’ve ever seen in Balanchine’s production of Swan Lake, or Jessye Norman in the title role in Tosca, they’re not talking about their acting, at least not in terms of what it is that makes the performance great. That being the case, I can say without hesitation that in Singin’ in the Rain, Gene Kelly gives one of the best, most skillful and most enjoyable performances in the history of motion pictures. For the record, I also think he does a good acting job, which is only incidental to what qualifies this performance for a mention on this list. Singin’ in the Rain represents Kelly at the pinnacle of his powers — the most complete and virtuosic demonstration of his ability and craft. Watching him dance the extended Broadway Rhythm ballet, lending his light, supple tenor to “You Were Meant for Me” or “You Are My Lucky Star,” navigating Hollywood traffic to get to Debbie Reynolds’ car with deftly executed acrobatics, or best of all, singing and dancing in the rain, is to understand what made Kelly one of the greatest talents the cinema has ever produced. The title number may be the purest expression of joy ever captured on film — a moment of unabashed euphoria that communicates more about the experience of being in love than anything any other actor could do with pages of dialogue. It is Kelly’s crowning achievement as an artist, and it deserved — at the very least — a nomination.Spencer Tracy was, in fact, nominated for best actor in 1958 — for his performance in an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea that managed to be both trite and stuffy at the same time. Right actor, right year…wrong performance. In John Ford’s
The Last Hurrah, Tracy is at his most engaged and assured — the role of an old-school, slightly shady machine politician, a shambling Irishman with a bit of the blarney in him, fits the actor like a well-worn glove, giving the Golden Age’s great naturalist the chance to show his full range. It’s a truly layered performance — irascible and slyly comic in one moment and frail and heartbreaking in the next, Tracy shows how the hyper-energized drive and charisma of an dynamic, outsized personality exists at painful odds with the weariness and strain of a body that can no longer comfortably accommodate such attributes. Several of Tracy’s 10 nominations seem more like ceremonial gestures made out of respect for the actor’s reputation than anything else — which is to say, all but a few seem to be based on the merits of the actual performances. Apart from the Hemingway adaptation, his four final best actor nominations came for playing grand old men delivering high-minded sermons; at some point, he stopped being an actor and became the nation’s conscience. The Last Hurrah brought out the mischief and the sadness in Tracy that few of his other later roles allowed him to express — it’s his most human and humane work as an actor.He was known for most of his career as The Profile — a giant of the stage and an iconic figure of celebrity who never fully found his
bearings on film. He was never nominated for an Oscar, despite several successful films and a measure of standing within the film community. Truth be told, he was more than a bit past his prime by the time the medium of film came into its own, and was mostly content to coast on his reputation. At least once in the sound era, he did rise gloriously to the occasion, in a role that made full and hilarious use of his theatrical brio and larger-than-life persona. In Twentieth Century, Barrymore is pure ham — narcissistic, domineering, pompous, preening, more than slightly crazed and wickedly, wickedly funny. His Oscar Jaffe, a theatrical impresario trying to con his wayward protégé into coming back to him, has the bulging, burning eyes of a man possessed, the twisted Machiavellian grin of a cat eyeing the canary, and the ridiculously florid cadence of someone for whom the concept of going over the top exists only in theory — he’s a daffy Rasputin whose cunning and wit become even sharper with each additional marble he loses. Watching him and the peerless Carole Lombard driving each other into fits of hysteria with endlessly inventive bits of comic business is a wonder to behold.Bette Davis was just a run-of-the-mill contract player of (what was judged to be) average ability until she landed the role that put her on the map — and it was a role than nobody else wanted. Every major star in town passed on the project, and given the nature of the
material, it’s little wonder. Crass, trashy, thoroughly unremarkable in any respect other than her utter lack of sensitivity, the character of Mildred in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage was the kind of blatantly unsympathetic role that looked and smelled like a career-killer. No shrinking violet, Davis saw it as a golden opportunity, and convinced Jack Warner (over his objections) to let her do it. The results were so startling and unnerving that they forever changed the rules for actresses in Hollywood. Screen heroines of the '20s and '30s were affected and refined — even the bad girls never succumbed to total ugliness, or raised their voices beyond a respectable decibel level. Such was the conviction and raw energy that Davis brought to her performance that it must have landed like a shovel to the stomach for audiences of the time. It still does. The actress didn’t allow vanity or caution to temper her portrayal of the role — her cockney tart is stupid and vulgar, an altogether ordinary woman incapable of any thought or feeling beyond her own narrow self-regard. She’s a nightmare version of Eliza Doolittle as imagined by Zola, only barely a level or two on the evolutionary ladder above grisly creatures risen from prehistoric muck….you can understand why Leslie Howard’s wimpy masochist doesn’t stand any kind of a chance against her. When he finally tries to break free of her clutches, Davis unleashes a raw working of anger and hostility unlike virtually any ever attempted on film. Contorting her face and body like a rabid dog pouncing on its prey while the bile issues forth from her twisted mouth, you cower in your seat at the sheer volcanic force of it. Only you can’t look away.Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita features a spectacular trio of performances, with James Mason and scene-stealing Peter Sellers usually
commanding the bulk of the critical attention, but it’s Shelley Winters, in a career-best performance, that I keep coming back to. Winters’ Charlotte Haze, who has the bad luck of being the dumpy custodian to every middle-age man’s fantasy nymphette, is not, to put it mildly, the brightest bulb on the Christmas Tree. She’s a mass of silly pretensions and hormonal urges, driven in equal measure by a desire to attain of measure of sophistication and a panicky, menopausal sexual hunger. Of course, her ideas about what qualifies as sophisticated are mostly wrong, and her romantic ideals and sexual energies are woefully misplaced if not completely inappropriate. She's an clod who fancies herself the heroine in a play by Noel Coward; everything about her is based in folly, and it would be easy to write her off as a walking punchline — that is, if the actress didn’t give us such harrowing glimpses of the loneliness and desperation that have shaped her character’s ridiculousness. Of course, Winters is howlingly funny playing up her character’s vulgarity and idiocy, but what ultimately emerges is a genuinely tragic figure — one who is made all too achingly aware of her own pathetic limitations. Credit the talent and skill of Shelley Winters that Charlotte Haze is a joke that, in the end, is just too painful to laugh at.In 1940, Ginger Rogers dyed her trademark platinum tresses a dull shade of brown and got her Oscar — for serious hair and serious acting. Her earnest, unimaginative work in Kitty Foyle didn’t betray so much as an ounce of the spark and savvy that informed the performances for which she is cherished. There’s a charge and intelligence to Rogers’ work in Stage Door that the actress would never again equal in her career. Perhaps working alongside Katharine Hepburn brought out the best in her. They were the two biggest female stars at RKO in the 1930s — it was a notoriously unfriendly rivalry. Kate, along with everyone else, believed herself to be the better actress of the two,
and made it known in subtle ways that she didn’t really consider Ginger an equal — or a threat. Ginger was self-conscious, insulted, and ultimately, not one to back down from a fight. When the two trade barbs in their scenes together, what you’re hearing is an authentic battling rhythm fueled by genuine animosity and a spirit of competition. Maybe it took a slap in the face and a challenge to bring out both the toughness and the vulnerability in Ginger Rogers — whether that’s true or not, watching Stage Door, you’re glad it’s there, because the actress is unmistakably at the top of her form. As wisecracking chorine Jean Maitland, Rogers has a devastating way with a quip — her delivery of the film’s zingy one-liners is so quick, sharp and assured that it sounds like inspired improvisation. She’s a tough cookie, sure, but not immune to experiencing disappointment, or worse still, losing hope. The aspiring actresses at The Footlights Club live a precarious, uncertain existence — Rogers, more than any of the other performers, allows us to understand that comic banter is a necessary distraction from the fact that, at any moment, the girls might have their dreams and livelihoods taken away from them and fall off the grid. It’s not that Rogers simply lets us see the fear and fragility behind the snazzy retorts of these tart-tongued dames; she shows just how inextricably linked those seemingly self-contradictory properties are. She’s a smart-aleck blonde with a chip on her shoulder — as with any stand-up comedian, it’s the chip that’s the source of her comedy, even if the reality behind it is a source of hurt.Sex on the silver screen has taken many different forms since the cinematic medium came into being. It can be smart and subtle, or bold and in-your-face. Sometimes it can be a tad lurid (or more than a tad) and erotically charged, other times it can be light, sophisticated fun. It can take the form of a smoldering slow-burn, creeping up on you gradually, or it can hit you right smack between the eyes like a
guided missile. At its very best, when it’s done correctly, it can encompass all of those things, and that’s where Lauren Bacall comes in. In To Have and Have Not, she is pure sex, and it’s no wonder the characters go through so many cigarettes even when they’re just making chit-chat. Foreplay never felt so good. The film marked Bacall’s film debut — not that you’d know it from watching her. Her performance is so smooth and knowing that it feels like the work of a seasoned professional. She was (by her own admission) still a virgin when she made it, and you wouldn’t know that either. Her performance is so smooth and knowing that it feels like the work of…never mind. Her character’s name is Slim, a shady lady stranded in exotic, dangerous Martinique (sort of an island stand-in for Casablanca), and when she strikes up a flirtation with Humphrey Bogart, the sparks all but burn holes in the celluloid. Her husky-voiced sultriness is utterly intoxicating, and when, in the film’s most oft-quoted sequence, she instructs Bogie’s Steve how to whistle, it’s a moment of pure magic. Even if you’ve seen the clip or heard the words before, in context, it still sends shivers down your spine. Had anyone before attempted such a forthright sexuality on the screen? Would anyone do so as successfully again? Bacall created the template for all sirens to follow, and very few (if any) have ever really measured up to it.1927 marked the inaugural year of the Academy Awards. The acting nominations were largely forgettable. It would have been a golden opportunity for the Academy to recognize one of the screen’s great comic geniuses giving, quite possibly, his very best performance. At the time of its release, however, The General was not regarded as a masterpiece, or really, as much of anything at all beyond a slight and amusing comedy that hadn’t made money. Just as Keaton’s lovelorn hero, Johnnie Gray, must suffer the indignities of rejection by
the draft board and the subsequent disdain of his prospective bride, the film’s true worth would not be recognized until it had proved itself over the course of time. Keaton’s acrobatic style, his daredevil attitude toward stuntwork and athletic enactment of the slapstick element, marked him as perhaps the most versatile physical comedian in the history of the medium. The Keaton persona functioned, on some level, as a contradiction in terms, and to glorious effect; the juxtapostion of the vibrant, hyper-animated physical comedy with a face that rarely changed expression (deadpan, dour stoicism) heightened the audience’s enjoyment of the routine. Keaton understood the value of contrast; while his body was forever in motion, contorting itself in sublime and ridiculous ways, the earnest expression always remained intact. In The General, his clowning is inspired, to be sure, but he also provides the audience with a character worth rooting for. Endearingly mawkish in his sweetheart’s presence, he must summon his inner hero when she is placed at risk. Johnnie Gray has a wistful obliviousness to everything going on around him, which only serves to enhance the comedy — his pursuit of his kidnapped ladylove is so single-minded, and his focus on his objective so intense, that he barely has time to register the dangers in his midst. It’s a deft, dextrous performance that impresses with more than just the technical skill that went into it; Keaton imbues his character with an indomitable spirit and a plucky refusal to accept defeat that put the audience firmly in his corner.Robert Walker was a very ordinary looking man with a very ordinary looking career. He spent the 1940s trading on his bland handsomeness by playing blandly wholesome boy-next-door types. He played them blandly. For anyone bored or disbelieving enough to challenge this assertion, his most notable films of the period are Since You Went Away and The Clock. The Age of Bloodless Blandness ended abruptly in
the mid-'40s when the actor’s life took a precipitous tailspin into hell. His wife, Jennifer Jones, left him for producer David O. Selznick, taking their two young sons with her. His career went nowhere. He started drinking, became paranoid and prone to suicidal depression. Alcoholism and the mental strain of believing the world was against him gradually eroded his boyish good looks. He had a breakdown, and was institutionalized briefly. Then he met Alfred Hitchcock. The rest of the industry had written him off as a bland nicety onscreen and a walking trainwreck off — but Hitch knew exactly what he was looking at, and exactly how to exploit it. For the record, Walker died within a year of having completed Strangers on a Train — it’s tempting to think that by surrendering so completely to the sad wreckage of his life and madness in order to give the performance of a lifetime, he quite simply had nothing left. In the film, Walker plays Bruno, the mercurial, demented and diabolical architect of another man’s near-undoing. Disturbed and disturbing, there’s an eerie calm to the character as Walker plays him; it’s as if he can’t help but smile, ruefully and with a certain degree of fatalistic pleasure, at the sad joke that his life has become and the misery that his mere existence can inflict on others. It’s difficult to know how much of Walker’s performance qualifies as acting and how much of it is the genuine spectacle of tortured soul giving way to his inner demons, drowning before our very eyes. Either way, it’s mesmerizing.Robert Mitchum had the easy, insolent manner of a guy who knew he’d never be taken seriously by the snobs and didn’t really give a shit. He was a maverick, and by Hollywood standards, a bit of a punk. The media pegged him for a dumb lug, an inarticulate slab of beefcake with biceps for brains and a bad boy attitude — it was an image that stuck for years, in spite of the fact that it bore very little relation to
the man himself; those who worked with him invariably described him as both highly intelligent and a consummate professional. He received but one nomination — as best supporting actor for an early role in The Story of G.I. Joe — while his four-plus decades of work as a star were completely ignored. As if to shame the establishment’s self-righteous sense of the natural order, the lunkhead produced a body of work which made the careers of his Oscar-winning contemporaries (such as David Niven, Hollywood’s Mr. Class President, for example) look shallow and irrelevant by comparison. From a bumper crop of egregiously overlooked performances, I submit The Night of the Hunter as his very best. As the wayward preacher whose gleaming smile disguises a black heart, the actor creates a study in villainy that manages to be both charming and chilling at the same time. Traditional movie sociopaths (and there are several on this list) are withdrawn and enclosed, wound as tightly as watches and wrapped up in their own inner torment. Mitchum’s Harry Powell has a big, expansive personality, with the engaging manner, sweeping cadence and seductive charm of a born evangelist. A not-so-distant cousin to Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry, he’s equal parts false prophet and barnstorming huckster — butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and when he’s working his wiles on the gullible country boobs who comprise his congregation, they’re spoonfed easy-to-swallow morsels of fire and brimstone drenched in buttermilk gravy. He’s a counterfeit quarter that shines as brightly as a new silver dollar, and it’s only when you note the cold, dead look in his eyes that you can begin to hear the hollow ring of his sermons. It’s an astute, measured performance; the character is brazen, alright, but Mitchum resists the urge to turn him into a caricature. A cunning and deliberate predator as opposed to a wild-eyed maniac, Mitchum doesn’t run after his prey; whistling a tune, he strolls.Beloved by the public, Charlie Chaplin was never fully embraced by Hollywood. Nor was he particularly trusted. His work, which always contained subtle social commentary even when it was at its most side-splittingly comic, was suspected of being subversive — even when those made most uneasy by it couldn’t fully grasp what made it so. Perhaps Hollywood wasn’t quite ready for comedy with a heart, or
worse still, a mind. He was nominated twice for best actor — first for The Circus, and again for The Great Dictator, which was deemed acceptable since it was in keeping with the political sympathies of the establishment (Hitler was the villain, as supposed to modern industry or class hypocrisy). His two undisputed masterpieces, City Lights and Modern Times, were left out in the cold. As a film, I slightly prefer the latter, but Chaplin probably gave his best and most heartfelt performance in City Lights. As one might expect, Chaplin’s talent for physical comedy is on full display in City Lights, in several ingeniously conceived and executed sequences (the boxing match is one of the funniest ever filmed). But what really makes the performance shine is its humanity — more so than in any other film he made, Chaplin’s Little Tramp exists as beacon of hope and kindness in a cold and unfeeling world. He’s a resilient everyman whose fundamental decency keeps him afloat in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It would have been easy to cast himself as a victim — he’s bullied, batted around and generally humiliated by the callous “respectable” people he’s encounters, including the police, but he always retains his dignity and his belief in the existence of good in the world. That’s the reason people cry at the ending of the film — the sensitivity and compassion of Chaplin’s performance convince us that life, in spite of its cruelties, can truly be beautiful.There are certain things in life I will never be able to explain or understand. I could not, for instance, explain the process by which a tennis match being played in Brazil can be viewed, live and as clear as daylight, in my living room here in Albany, NY — I take it for granted that it’s possible, but for the life of me, I have no idea how it happens. Similarly, I can’t even begin to fathom how Edward G. Robinson, in a career spanning more than 40 years, was not once ever nominated for an Academy Award. Was it the fact that no movie star has ever looked less like a movie star? Was he too old by the time he broke through, too much of a character actor as opposed to a traditional
leading man? Too much of a class act to play the campaigning game? Too Jewish? I have no idea. In any case, it’s a travesty which the Academy, bless them, attempted to correct with an honorary award toward the end of his life. I suppose it’s the thought that counts. In Billy Wilder’s classic tale of lust, murder and betrayal — generally regarded as the definitive film noir — Robinson plays Keyes, the chief claims investigator for an insurance company, who knows in his gut that “grieving widow” Barbara Stanwyck is a tarantula in sheep’s clothing. Dogged, determined, and shrewd to the point of having supernatural ability, Keyes is a bloodhound hot on the scent. He exists in the great tradition of classic sleuths such as Hercule Poirot — a keen student of human behavior with unimpeachable instincts, he doesn’t allow so much as the smallest detail to escape his bug-eyed vigilance. Such pillars of indefatigability can be one-note and wearying, often inspiring more admiration than affection, but Robinson makes Keyes such an endearingly idiosyncratic presence that you only sit back and marvel at his scowling certitude and inexhaustible vitality. Synapses clicking at warp speed, he paces back and forth while irritably chomping on his cigar in restless anticipation of a moment of clarity. When it inevitably comes, his face lights up like a kid on Christmas morning. You can understand how Fred MacMurray’s anxious murderer can’t help rooting for Keyes to figure it out, even though it means his own neck. As much fun as he is, Robinson’s performance ends on a note of almost unbearable grace and humanity. Having finally collared his criminal, all his hunches having born out, there is no room for celebration or smug self-satisfaction. Instead, Robinson shows us only disappointment, pity, and on some level, a rueful kind of empathy. Sometimes, there’s no pleasure to be had in having been right.For the first decade of her career, Ingrid Bergman’s halo never touched the ground. She was nominated for best actress four times in the 1940s, twice for playing angelic victims of male cruelty, and twice for playing saints. Even her Ilsa in Casablanca was wholesome girl at heart whom no one would think twice about bringing home to mother. Her style was so open and natural that, as beautiful as she was, it was impossible to conceive of anything base or impure in her; in every role, she positively glowed. Thankfully, Alfred Hitchcock was either canny or perverse enough to see things in popular performers that other people hardly even dared to imagine. Cary Grant was the personification of breezy affability onscreen — his wives (there were five or so) described him as guarded and remote. Hitch was the only filmmaker ever to catch a whiff of the coldness in Grant, and in Suspicion (and even more explicitly in this film), he brought it to the forefront. Similarly, he was the only one who ever picked up on Ingrid Bergman’s inner wantonness — by the end of the '40s, the actress
would be embroiled in a tabloid sex scandal involving Italian director Roberto Rossellini, denounced on the floor of the U.S. Congress as a scarlet woman, and find herself blackballed by Hollywood for seven years. It was the kind of mess you’d expect Alicia Huberman, the character she played so memorably in Notorious, to find herself mixed up in. Unfortunately, in 1946, the Academy simply wasn’t ready to accept a more complicated version of their reigning virgin goddess. When we first encounter Bergman’s character, it comes as something of a shock. Instead of the serene enchantress we’ve come to expect, we see a dissolute, damaged woman consumed by self-loathing and working with reckless abandon towards her own self-destruction. She holds herself in even lower regard than the men whom she allows herself to be casually used by. In a cruel twist of fate, once she finally gains a measure of self-respect and a reason to reform, she must literally prostitute herself for her country’s benefit. Bergman shows us the hurt and shame her character feels when Grant refuses to acknowledge the ways in which she’s changed; his withering contempt only stiffens her resolve to prove her worth — to him and to herself. As a government spy married off to a Nazi criminal, her entire life has become a lie, but she’s never had more of a sense of purpose. In the second half of the film, Bergman registers the growing dread of someone who realizes she’s been employed as a sacrificial lamb and is walking a tightrope through a minefield; the slightest misstep could spell catastrophe, but she keeps her nerve. It’s a fearless, gutsy performance, not least because of the uninhibited sexuality Bergman gets to express — the famous single-take kissing scene, where Grant and Bergman make out for no less than four minutes while the camera orbits around them in swoony delight, is such a decadent feat of showmanship that it’s a wonder they got away with it. Bergman is no less radiant here than in her other performances, but Notorious was the only film brave enough to give her a sexual appetite.There are other sociopaths on this list — Walker, Mitchum, and Cagney — but there was, and is, only one Psycho. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, proceed with caution — this entry includes some spoilers. As a young actor in Hollywood, Anthony Perkins never really fit in anywhere. Too skinny and self-consciously awkward to be a heartthrob, too delicately handsome to qualify as a character actor, in the 1950s he drifted with a reasonable degree of success through a series of juvenile roles, typically cast as a misunderstood adolescent. The fact that he never fully seemed comfortable in his own skin was only partially an act — Perkins was, up until the time of his death of AIDS in 1992, a closeted homosexual who was never able to shake the conviction that something was deeply wrong with him. From the late
1950s until his marriage in the 1970s, he received treatment from a controversial psychotherapist whose field of specialty was curing the “affliction” from which he suffered. Riddled with anguish and guilt, he never came to terms with who he was, nor managed to break free of the sense of stigma that was, to some degree, self-imposed. One of the themes to emerge from this assignment has been the canny ability of Alfred Hitchcock for pairing actors with roles that gave telling expression to their hidden selves. As Norman Bates, Perkins gives a painful account of an unformed personality, stunted in his growth by a cruel and overbearing mother who exerts her tyranny over him even from beyond the grave. A prisoner of his own isolation and sense of inadequacy, his attempts to reach out to another human being, Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, are touching in their pathetic, halting ineptitude. For allowing himself to feel, whether it’s sexual attraction or simply a bond of kindred spirits, he must be punished, and the dispensing of bloody justice falls to his demonic alter ego. He simply isn’t equipped to handle the feelings that interaction with the kind, accepting Marion produces; in the end, both fall victim to Norman’s sense of shame. The way that Perkins registers the guilt and horror of what “Mother” has done is the crux of the film’s tragedy; the object of the murder is never to destroy Marion, but rather to suppress and ultimately extinguish the feelings that Norman has no means of coping with. It isn’t the celebrated shower scene that makes Psycho one of the most frightening films ever made; it’s the realization that Norman Bates isn’t a monster.One of the most shocking realizations of my adult life is that “Over the Rainbow” is not, in fact, a great song. The melody is simplistic and the lyrics are sappy to the point of revulsion — that is, unless you can keep a straight face when hearing about troubles melting like lemon drops and happy little bluebirds flying over pretty rainbows. Otherwise, one must concede that it’s the kind of sugary junk that would give even the cuddliest of Care Bears a toothache. This painful realization came only after I’d heard someone other than Judy Garland try to sing it — a few other people actually, and mostly very accomplished performers. The folly lay in the attempt, for Garland’s rendition has never, and will never, be matched. It is, without question, the greatest single piece of music ever created for the screen and the most hauntingly poetic, if not for any of its own qualities, then quite simply because she sang it. Make no mistake — there’s a lot more to the performance than “Over the Rainbow.” No role, with the possible exception of A Star is Born, made more demands of Garland as an actress, and not even the 1954 film brought her vulnerability as strongly into focus. As with the majority of the performances on this list, there’s a story behind the story — and perhaps no other characterization was informed as strongly by an actor’s reality. Although she is most closely associated with the timeless children’s tale by L. Frank Baum, Garland’s own childhood bore a closer resemblance to something out of The Brothers Grimm. At the age of 13, Frances Gumm was sold to MGM by an apathetic father and
opportunistic mother, neither of whom saw any need to question the studio’s peculiar practices regarding the management and maintenance of juvenile talent. In the dark, quasi-Dickensian era before the passage of child labor laws, the rechristened Judy Garland became a full-time working professional, was prevented from pursuing much of a social life beyond the iron gates of the studio, given pills to help manage her weight, and still more pills to see her through the grueling 14 hour work days. The scars of these early years, which the actress would ruefully recall as among the most difficult in her life, would never fully heal. Life only became more complicated with the transition to adulthood. As a film, The Wizard of Oz may be about as far away from realism one can get; yet somehow, in the midst of all the Technicolor sorcery, Judy Garland creates a character based in recognizable truth. It’s a deceptively simple, natural performance; in a way, Judy Garland and Dorothy Gale are one in the same, trying to make sense of the world around them and their own unspoken fears and insecurities. There’s a scene that stands out for me – when she’s trapped in the witch’s tower, terrified and alone, she cries out for Auntie Em (“Auntie Em, I’m frightened…”). The emotion that fuels the scene is visceral and genuine — doubtless Garland could relate to the desperate need for some kind of stable, nurturing influence, not only to shield and protect, but dispel the darkness that exists just beneath the surface of the wonderful world of make-believe and fantasy (Oz could just as easily be Hollywood). When she sings “Over the Rainbow,” leaning against a haystack and gazing wistfully up to the skies, it’s the ultimate expression of the inchoate yearnings of adolescence, the need for acceptance and deliverance from isolation and loneliness. The song promises escape to a world where contentment and freedom from worry are attainable properties. Listen closely to Judy Garland when she sings the words — she means them. The simplicity and the conviction with which the character’s inner life is made explicit in this moment is a marvel to behold — sad, beguiling and utterly haunting. Whenever the actress would perform “Over the Rainbow” in numerous late-career concert appearances, she did so with a catch in her voice and a tear in her eye — on some occasions she’d be sobbing profusely by the song’s conclusion. It’s more likely than not that there was an element of showmanship in these displays, but her delivery revealed the existence of something more — a sad recognition of the fact that, unlike the character she played, Judy Garland never quite made it to that place where troubles melt like lemon drops and dreams really do come true. Real life doesn’t often afford such opportunities.Rosalind Russell was a tall, almost ungainly woman with a raspy contralto voice and plain, sensible features. Her non-nonsense appearance, which was smart and well-tailored without being austere, suggested both a practical outlook and a bemused sense of irony. No one would ever mistake her for an ingénue or a sex goddess, which probably suited her just fine. Never beautiful in the conventional sense, she could generate more heat with an arched eyebrow and a deadpan retort than any of the glamour girls could with smoldering looks and coy
displays of their natural assets. She could be delightfully over-the-top in films that tapped into the zanier side of her nature — Auntie Mame is probably still the role with which she is most identified — but it’s His Girl Friday that really showcases the full and glorious spectrum of her talent. The role of Hildy Johnson was originally written for a man, and in its transmogrified incarnation could have easily come across as a shrill, insulting parody of the tough-minded career woman as a masculine (or worse still, asexual) entity. But Rosalind Russell was much too smart, and far too inventive, to fall into that trap — her Hildy is one of the boys, alright, but she’s more woman than ever. For the first time in motion pictures, here was a truly modern woman — not only the professional equal of her male counterparts, but with a quickness and creativity that leaves them in the dust. Russell’s Hildy is an ace reporter who can outtalk, outthink and out-maneuver every man in the room, and rather than resent her for it, they can only peer out from under their porkpie hats and newsman’s visors with a mixture of awe and respect as she runs circles around the rest of them. The actress is a whirling dervish of energy, and you’ll be amazed at how fast her motor runs — she sprints through entire pages of dialogue at warp speed without missing a beat, and her inflections throughout are priceless. She throws herself into the part with the same kind of edgy, go-for-broke tenacity that her character exhibits when chasing headlines, and makes it clear that, for Hildy Johnson, no other kind of life is possible. She needs the thrill of the chase, and a guy like Walter Burns who can not only keep up with her, but is only too happy to let her run with the wolves. That’s why nice, bland Ralph Bellamy has to be sent packing at the end of the picture — there’s no way he could avoid being blown away by this sonic boom in heels.The cartoon shenanigans of contemporary action and horror films are pretty tame fare compared to a show of genuine violence — whether expressed through deeds, behavior, or even something as simple as an attitude. Explosions and decapitations are all fine and good, and may even prompt a few happy hours of shrieking in the dark. But real violence — when it’s given a human face — can still make audiences squirm in their seats, and the sense of discomfort it produces can be much harder to shake in the days and weeks afterward. Cagney was emblematic of the movie tough guy — the pint-size bruiser from the wrong side of the tracks whose scrappy belligerence could detonate into bloody mayhem at a moment’s notice. It took a while for the Academy to get over their initial response of shock. His star-making turn in The Public Enemy was ignored, and an even more galvanizing performance in Angels with Dirty Faces was pushed to the
side in favor of Spencer Tracy’s benign Father Flannagan in Boys Town. It was only when Cagney stopped being scary and starting playing nice — for his spry, ingratiating turn in Yankee Doodle Dandy — that the Academy relented and awarded him his Best Actor trophy. The award was deserved, certainly, but the impact of that performance pales in comparison to what would become the actor’s most frightening and indelible creation. Once again, Oscar was too busy averting his gaze, most likely out of fear, to give the devil his due. For the role of Cody Jarrett, for whom the term ‘mentally imbalanced’ would only barely scratch the surface, Cagney dug deeper than he ever had before, and revealed a naked emotionalism that was all the more startling for its proximity to his character’s psychotic impulses. Jarrett is a ticking time bomb of a human being, given to panic attacks and fainting spells (shades of Tony Soprano) and apt to unleash his volcanic anger upon anyone or anything in his path at any given moment. He’s defensive, defiant, and gleefully unhampered by anything akin to a moral compass. Unable to experience anything like joy or remorse, he is almost equally incapable of love….almost, that is, because of the pathological attachment he has toward his rotten old crone of a mother. When he hears of her death in prison, Cagney’s trademark sneer gives way to a working of grief and pain that is so raw in its intensity that it tears right through the fourth wall and grips the audience by the throat. The time bomb has finally gone off, and it keeps going off over and over again. Reduced to a wounded animal, Cagney rages blindly through his despair, moaning, howling, punching at the wind. It’s unthinkable that any other actor of the golden era would be willing to make himself so utterly pathetic and wretched in service to his concept of character — nowadays, it’s used as the kind of flashy pyrotechnical trick employed to garner nominations. With Cagney, it amounted to sheer nerve.Where was the love for Humphrey Bogart? It finally revealed itself in 1951 when the criminally neglected actor received his one and only Oscar for his delightful performance in The African Queen. Taking nothing away from his acting in that film, it would have been just as nice if they’d acknowledged him when he’d really deserved it. His one prior nomination had been for Casablanca; history shows that he lost to someone named Paul Lukas, whose performance in Watch on the Rhine now registers as a complete zero — neither good nor bad enough to be memorable in any way, shape or form (it’s the kind of performance you’ll forget about even while you’re watching it). Bogart was not nominated for — among other things — The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra, To Have and Have Not,
The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place and most shockingly of all, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. John Huston’s masterpiece, an unlikely fusion of film noir and western, is an intricately structured morality tale examining the corruptive influence of greed; as observed here, not only does it take away men’s souls, it erodes their sanity as well. Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, a down-and-out wastrel who is reduced to a state of twitching paranoia when he hits the mother lode, a mountain rich with untapped gold deposits. As the wealth accumulates, it brings with it an atmosphere of tension and mistrust. The actor creates an unflinching, harrowing study of a man unraveling before our very eyes, struggling to hold onto whatever clarity he may still possess and losing the battle in a spectacular fashion. Bogart’s monologues, when the character begins talking to himself (often referring to himself in the third person), are stunningly executed — they build in intensity as the character’s incipient hysteria bubbles to the surface and a sense of crazed panic overtakes his instincts. This was a Bogart no one had seen before — the consummate movie tough guy as the living embodiment of weakness…a loser. The physical transformation alone is striking, and not because the actor’s appearance was radically altered for the role, the change has more to do with body language. Whereas other Bogart performances are remarkable for their calm self-possession — their stillness, if you will — here the actor is a mass of tics and twitches, a walking catalog of the visible markings of human frailty. His slumped shoulders, the halting step of his walk, the slight tremor in his hands, and his darting eye movements communicate volumes about where Fred C. Dobbs has been, and the even darker depths toward which he’s bound.In a career filled with wonderful characters and performances, Katharine Hepburn always was her own greatest creation. In the 1930s, she stood apart from the crowd; none of her contemporaries could touch her for originality, incisiveness or audacity. Very few films she made in the early stages of her career had the courage to run with her — at her worst, and sometimes even at her best, she could seem hopelessly affected and refined, too rare a bird to be credible as a mere mortal. She was occasionally a tomboy, but always with an element of idiosyncratic New England exoticism — a haughty Bryn Mawr elitism coupled with an air of high-starch Yankee breeding. She was not the obvious choice for the role of a dizzy heiress in a screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks — that would have been Carole Lombard. Offbeat casting decisions often yield the highest dividends. Bringing Up Baby is nearly everyone’s favorite Katharine Hepburn
film, and features arguably the best performance she ever gave. As Susan Vance, Hepburn decided to throw caution to the wind and let down her hair — there’s a spirit of giddy abandon in her performance, a willingness to act silly and be silly, that frees the actress from her own confining persona while at the same time referencing it in sly, nodding fashion. In a way, Hepburn spends much of the film poking fun at Hepburn. Susan has a refinement of manner and speech — doubtless the product of years of scrupulous training at the tawny prep schools and top-drawer society functions — but there’s a brittle frivolity to her cadence and attitudes that makes it impossible to take her too seriously (I could listen to clipped delivery of “No…to drop an olive…” all day long). Acting on whim and a freewheeling improvisatory logic that she alone can follow, she’ll say and do whatever pops into her head, with a blithe indifference to the precepts of decorum or any measure of reason. She seems to thrive on chaos - it brings out the romantic, adventurous side of her nature, and makes her impulsiveness that much more pronounced. When ever she utters her chirpy catchphrase — the ominous “Everything’s going to be alright” — the other characters hold their breath, waiting for the other show to drop. Breezing through the din like a typhoid Mary on roller skates, Hepburn is blissfully uninhibited and deliriously funny from start to finish; her teamwork with Cary Grant, as the bespectacled paleontologist who becomes the hapless object of her unwanted attentions, is one of the most exhilarating examples of great comic teamwork in all of films. There are so many moments to cherish — perhaps none more so when Hepburn dons the persona of ‘Swingin’ Door Susie,’ an East Side debutante’s hilariously off-kilter approximation of a hard-bitten gun moll. As much fun as she seems to be having, the actress never loses sight of what drives Susan’s eccentric and erratic behavior; at heart, she’s just a lovestruck, sentimental goof who just can’t keep her emotions in check long enough to act like a normal human being. Thank God.In the nearly 80 years of its existence, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ quaint system of awards-giving has never failed as conspicuously, or as disgracefully, as in the case of Cary Grant. He was nominated exactly twice — for those keeping score, that’s one less than Tom Cruise — and both times for subdued performances in lesser-known melodramatic weepies. He was never nominated for a comedy, nor for any of the films he made with Alfred Hitchcock. Although honored for his body of work in the form of a Lifetime Achievement Award, he never won a competitive Oscar. Theories abound for why Grant never received his full due as an actor, either from the critics of the period or from the Hollywood community. Some insist there was an element of jealousy involved: every man wanted to be Cary Grant, every woman wanted to be with him. Others credit it to the fact that he was considered, first and foremost, a comedian. The most plausible explanation is also the simplest — whether in comedy or drama, Cary Grant was guilty of Hollywood’s cardinal sin: He made it look easy. There’s a commonly held belief that the measure of great acting is the extent to which the effort is visible. This accounts for the fact that many of the cinema’s most celebrated performances are those which rely on strenuous theatrics or extreme transformation. From time to time, it’s been suggested that Cary Grant always played Cary Grant — the implication being that
he was more of a movie star than an actor. Nonsense. As Grant himself was quoted as saying, “I wish I actually was Cary Grant.” It’s a part that took talent and imagination to play, and the results were always fascinating. There are at least six or seven performances that should have been nominated; I can’t say that one is definitively better than any of the others, so the easiest thing to do is simply to go with my favorite. The character of Walter Burns in His Girl Friday — the altogether shameless editor of a metropolitan daily tinged with more than a bit of yellow around its edges — ties together every facet of the Grant persona. Dapper, clowning, brash, methodical, ingratiating, bullying, heroic, maddening, irresistible…he’s a mass of contradictions, and yet somehow, it all makes sense. In lesser hands, the character’s conduct might come across as boorish or even repugnant, but the actor places the behavior in context and keeps everything in balance. Even at his most tyrannical, he retains a certain jauntiness, a buoyancy of spirit that can’t help but turn everyone in the audience into gleeful co-conspirators. He’s a puppet master putting everyone through their paces with machiavellian delight, but there’s an integrity to what he does and why he does it. His methods may be dishonest, but the intentions are ultimately honorable — unscrupulous and oddly principled at the same time. Walter Burns knows, as the audience does, that a life of quiet domesticity will never do for Hildy Johnson; he treasures all the qualities in her that his rival is too dull-witted to recognize and appreciate. Hildy thinks he’s out to sabotage her happiness; we know he’s trying to protect it…and lest you mistake his impulses as being entirely noble, he’s also looking out for number one. If I make it sound as if Grant’s performance is too firmly rooted in an emotional reality, rest assured that the actor doesn’t forsake his obligation as an entertainer. The performance is all-out funny — the actor doesn’t just land a punch line, he pounces on it, and indulges in enough mugging to incur the jealousy of a thousand vaudeville clowns. You can’t help falling in love with Walter Burns, or with Cary Grant — as Hildy Johnson discovers, resistance is futile. It’s hard to encapsulate exactly what makes Grant’s performance so bloody good, or put into words the exact qualities that he brings to it. Whenever I review something, I try to avoid saying “so-and-so was brilliant” and just leaving it at that, as a stand-alone statement — I think big statements need to be backed up. In this one instance, I think I may have to just leave it at that. Grant is simply brilliant.Tweet
Labels: Bacall, Bette, Bogart, Cagney, Cary, Chaplin, Edward G., Garland, Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, Hackman, Ingrid Bergman, K. Hepburn, Keaton, Mitchum, Roz Russell, Shelley Winters, Tracy
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