Friday, January 27, 2012

 

Ian Abercrombie (1934-2012)



Why is this man eating a Snickers bar with a knife and fork? You'll have to ask Tom Gammill & Max Pross who wrote the 1994 episode of Seinfeld "The Pledge Drive" that had Elaine's mercurial boss Mr Pitt do such a thing. Mr. Pitt was just one of a multitude of TV and movie roles played by the British character actor Ian Abercrombie, who died Thursday at the age of 77.

Most of Abercrombie's early work was on the British stage. He made his American stage debut in a production of Stalag 17 with Jason Robards. He made his television debut on an episode of Burke's Law in 1965 and his uncredited film debut the same year in Von Ryan's Express. In fact, all his early film work went uncredited — including some big movies such as Star, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, The Molly Maguires and Young Frankenstein. His first credited film role didn't come until 1978's Sextette, Mae West's final film co-starring Tony Curtis, Ringo Starr, Alice Cooper, Regis Philbin and Keith Moon, among many others.

During those 13 years of uncredited film work, Abercrombie did get credit (most of the time) for his many television series on shows such as Dragnet, Get Smart, Columbo, Barnaby Jones, Cannon and The Six Million Dollar Man.

While Abercrombie did do film work, television became his focus. Of his post-1978 feature films, the most notable ones include The Prisoner of Zenda with Peter Sellers, The Ice Pirates, The Public Eye with Joe Pesci, Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness, Addams Family Values, Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park II, David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE and the voice of Ambrose in last year's Rango.

When it came to TV, you could see or hear Abercrombie almost anywhere. Highlights of his post-1978 work (not counting Mr. Pitt) included: The original Battlestar Galactica, Quincy, M.E., Knots Landing, Happy Days, Fantasy Island, Three's Company, the soap Santa Barbara, L.A. Law, Moonlighting, playing himself on the "Fate" episode of "It's Garry Shandling's Show.", Murder, She Wrote, Dynasty, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Nip/Tuck, Desperate Housewives and How I Met Your Mother.

Abercrombie still was working on his final two roles at the time of his death: Playing Professor Crumbs on Wizards of Waverly Place and providing the voice for Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious on the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

RIP Mr. Abercrombie.

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Monday, November 14, 2011

 

"It's all true — every word he isn't saying"


By Eddie Selover
Is he or isn't he?

That was the question about Cary Grant throughout his life: gay or straight? This was based, it would seem, on little more than his having shared a house with Randolph Scott in the '30s and having posed for some goofy pictures of the two of them in aprons and frolicking in the pool. Grant was married five times, had some well-publicized affairs, yet the rumors never stopped, and everyone knew about them. Even my parents. In the early 1960s, they had a live album by Allan Sherman, the singing comedian of "Camp Granada" fame. One of the songs was a riff on a mover and shaker having his secretary call various celebrities, and the big ending went: "And then when you reach Cary Grant, tell him I'd love to, but I just…can't." The audience on the album roared; so did my parents.

Around the same time, Tony Curtis did his famous parody of Grant in Some Like It Hot, the humor of which comes not from the accuracy of the impersonation but from the portrait of Grant as a nearsighted, girl-shy millionaire in a silly nautical outfit. Curtis' very next movie co-starred Grant, so evidently there were no hard feelings. A decade later, when Chevy Chase jokingly used a homosexual slur to refer to Grant on a talk show, Grant sued him for slander and won a settlement; later, he was studiously casual about the whole thing. And it continues: just a few weeks ago, Grant's fifth wife Dyan Cannon shot down the rumors yet again in interviews promoting her book about him. But neither Cannon's testimony, or that of his daughter, his other wives, his former lovers and friends, or anybody else, seems to be enough to put the suspicion to rest.*

Because there's something about Cary Grant. Whatever he projects at any given moment, he somehow manages to suggest something else at the same time. He's remembered as the epitome of class and style, but with his strange, not-quite-Cockney accent and thick features, he's clearly no aristocrat. In his screwball comedies, he projects anger and a kind of general threat to the other actors. His spills and pratfalls are clearly the result of enormous physical mastery and athleticism. Playing heroes in adventure films, he's a joker and a clown. In love scenes, he's quizzical, wary, amused — anything but ardent. Often his eyes, his smile, the tilt of his head seem to convey something quite different, and usually more intelligent, than the dialogue coming out of his mouth.

Which is why Johnnie Aysgarth in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion is in many ways the ultimate Cary Grant role. Johnnie is married to Lina, a wealthy spinster from a small English village. He puts the moves on her and they marry quickly, but soon his evasions and subterfuges cause her to have doubts about him. He may have married her for her money (her father thinks so) and be planning to murder her for it too. Or he may be a misguided, misunderstood underdog who's uncomfortably adjusting to life with a woman who has more money than he does. Is he or isn't he guilty, that's what the entire movie is asking. It's not spoiling anything to tell you the ending (he isn't), because it satisfied neither the cast, writers, director, original audiences, or virtually anybody else who has seen the movie since its premiere 70 years ago. Everybody struggled with it during the writing and filming — nobody could come up with the right ending. Because there's no way to resolve this particular story. Suspicion is about something inexplicable: Cary Grant's personal ambiguity, his elisions, his ultimate mystery.

Joan Fontaine won the Oscar for playing Lina, an award generally assumed to be a consolation prize for her losing the previous year for Rebecca. She basically repeats the performance here, but with more flattering makeup, hair and clothes, and with a veneer of movie-star graciousness that probably drove Hitchcock a little crazy. Making Rebecca, he had used a variety of psychological tricks on set to undermine her confidence. Here, he improvised a nickname for Grant to call her throughout the film: "Monkeyface." It's like a slap every time he says it; he might as well be calling her "shithead" in that musical voice of his. Let it be said for the record that Joan Fontaine is beautiful and looks nothing like a monkey, but her role gives her little to do other than suffer and look elegantly worried while keeping a stiff upper. (Lina was a little more masochistically interesting in the original novel, "Before the Fact," in which she's correct about her husband's motivations but so in love with him that she knowingly drinks the glass of poisoned milk he brings her.)

Grant's real romance in Suspicion isn't with Fontaine anyway — it's with Nigel Bruce as his old friend Gordon Thwaite. Considering his snub nose, he has an inappropriate nickname too: "Beaky." In the 20 years Bruce mumbled and bumbled around Hollywood, he was never more appealing than in this part. Beaky always says the wrong thing and reveals Johnnie's tricks and lies, and then hangs his head as both the angry husband and the offended wife slap him around. Bruce and Grant get a real performance rapport going — they play their relationship as if Beaky was a big overgrown dog and Johnnie his affectionate but exasperated master. When Beaky has a brandy-induced choking fit and Johnnie stops Lina from coming to his aid, Grant is expertly unreadable. Is he frozen with concern, or callous indifference?

70 years later, it's not easy to appreciate what a daring performance this was in 1941. Grant had just come off the greatest string of movies any actor ever had — Topper, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday — and was now one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. What was bold of Grant was to take the charm that had brought him to the top and suggest that it might in fact be a cover for any number of repellent qualities. Johnnie is handsome, smooth, and commanding, but he's also a chronic fibber, con man and embezzler... a spider, as the photo at the top suggests. Essentially it's the darkest role Grant ever played. And though the director claimed (probably falsely) that the studio forced it on him, Hitchcock's "happy" ending (as with many of his happy endings) is anything but. Lina blames herself for everything, but she's still married to a man who lies at the drop of the hat and steals money every chance he gets. Johnnie has explained everything away, but he's still married to a woman who knows what he's capable of and shrinks from his touch. Contemplating the future of their relationship is actually the scariest thing about Suspicion.

*P.S.: What I've never understood is the need to have Grant to pick a team. Haven't people ever heard of bisexuality?

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Wednesday, October 26, 2011

 

“I live in a perpetual state of optimism…”


By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Artist and activist Harry Belafonte turned 84 in March of this year…and has lost none of his expertise for making headlines. On a recent edition of The Joy Behar Show, he was extremely critical of former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and now GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, labeling him “a bad apple” — and later remarked to Newsweek, “I’m pretty sure African Americans don’t take Cain seriously, but I’m not sure about white people. They believe this black man is the real deal. He isn’t. Anyone who says what he says isn’t.” Cain volleyed back, remarking “He’s been on that banana boat too long” — a reference to the actor-singer’s million-selling record in 1956, “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O).”

At the risk of getting into a political urination contest…Herman Cain can’t carry Harry Belafonte’s jockstrap. While Cain was content to shuck and jive in the back of the bus during the Civil Rights struggle, Belafonte was at the forefront of that movement…as a confidant to Martin Luther King, Jr., and an organizer/supporter of many of the landmark events during that era (the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, etc.). Long before celebrities such as Sean Penn and Angelina Jolie stretched beyond their chosen professions with defiant political stands and causes, Harry was one of the first to walk the walk and talk the talk…and as a new HBO documentary, Sing Your Song, demonstrates — he is “the real deal.”

The running time of Sing Your Song (1 hour and 45 minutes) can’t scratch the surface in documenting Belafonte’s remarkable career — in fact, the presentation is but one portion of a retrospective look at the actor-singer’s life; a memoir entitled My Song was published recently and allows Belafonte to take a more detailed and anecdotal look into his amazing past. Sing Your Song acts as a primer for those individuals whose only familiarity with the performer-activist boils down to asking the boss man to count his bananas. The documentary offers rich, rewarding archival footage of Harry’s TV appearances and clips from his movies, supplemented with Belafonte’s narration and on-camera interviews with the likes of Diahann Carroll, the late Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond, Rep. John Lewis and Sidney Poitier, to name just a few. Directed by Susanne Rostock and co-produced by his daughter Gina, Song tells the story of Belafonte’s triumph over a life of hardscrabble poverty to become a Emmy, Grammy and Tony Award-winning performer whose dedication to the cause of social justice was prompted by his mother once telling him “that I should never, ever awaken in a day where there wasn’t something in our agenda that would help set the course for the undermining of injustice.”

Harold George Belafonte, Jr. was born in Harlem in 1927 to immigrant parents — and when his father left his mother shortly after his birth, she was forced to compensate in a one-parent household by working as a domestic, sending Harry and his brother to live with their grandparents in Jamaica. His early life (1932-40) in that country would have a profound effect on his future profession. That career direction was decided one night back in New York when he attended a performance of Home is the Hunter at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem (he was working as a janitor’s assistant and received tickets to the play as a gratuity). He joined the theater company (his fellow students included Brock Peters and lifelong friend Poitier), and soon after became a pupil under the tutelage of German director Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research. (Among Harry’s classmates: Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur and Rod Steiger.)

To pay for his acting classes, Belafonte worked as a nightclub singer in New York — his first gig found the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Miles Davis playing as his “back-up band.” Belafonte had started out singing pop tunes in 1949, but he became interested in folk music after seeing a performance by Huddie Ledbetter and studied the history of that music at the archives of the Library of Congress. He soon became a regular at New York’s Village Vanguard, and it was there that the legendary actor-singer-activist Paul Robeson made Harry’s acquaintance, advising him: “Get them to sing your song and they will want to know you are.” (Hence the title of the documentary.) Robeson would become one of the many mentoring influences in Belafonte’s meteoric rise to fame, which all began with a Tony Award for his participation in a Broadway production of John Murray Anderson’s Almanac. With his first single released in 1953 and first LP a year later (Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites), Belafonte’s breakthrough album came in 1956, entitled Calypso — the first LP certified as a million seller. In clips from variety shows hosted by Ed Sullivan, Dinah Shore and Steve Allen, Sing Your Song features snippets of Harry’s popular hits such as “Jamaica Farewell,” “Mama Look at Bubu” and “Man Smart, Woman Smarter.”

Achieving success with a gold record album was not all peaches and cream for Belafonte, who was also carving out a niche in motion pictures beginning with his first film for MGM, Bright Road (1953), co-starring Dorothy Dandridge. During production on this film, Harry was staying with friends at a house in Beverly Hills when he decided to take a fresh air stroll one night and found himself stopped by the local constabulary, whose interest in him seemed to center around the fact that he was “walking around Beverly Hills while being black.” It wouldn’t be the first time the actor-singer would be on the receiving end of the cold water splash of prejudice; he details in Song how he wasn’t able to stay in the same hotels as co-stars Marge and Gower Champion when they toured with their revue 3 For Tonight (his encounter with a state trooper after attempting to relieve himself in a “whites only” restroom is particularly memorable) and how his protest over similar conditions at a Las Vegas hotel (he was the headliner but wasn't expected to use the main entrance or eat in the hotel’s main dining facilities) earned him a warning “that the only way I would leave Las Vegas if I didn’t fulfill that contract would be in a box.” (Harry gets the last laugh; Fran Scott Attaway, the wife of Belafonte’s bandleader, relates an incident in which Harry summons up the stones to take a dip in the hotel’s lily-white swimming pool.)

Despite motion picture success in films such as Carmen Jones (1954; which re-teamed him with Dandridge), Belafonte encountered similar hostile racial attitudes in the movie industry — controversy arose from his performance in the 1957 film Island in the Sun, which intimated that there was a romance going on between his character and that of Joan Fontaine’s — something that was anathema to Southern audiences (his publicist, Mike Merrick, observes that the ticklish situation nevertheless made curious onlookers more determined to see the film). Belafonte’s struggle to find good roles free of negative black stereotypes led him to start his own production company in HarBel — which produced movies such as The World, The Flesh and the Devil (an “end of the world” film whose ending was tampered with by MGM when the touchy issue of a romance between Harry and white Inger Stevens once again caused Southern audiences to revolt) and Odds Against Tomorrow (both 1959). (In an interview with The Daily Beast, Belafonte cited the last movie — a noir that mixes a heist film with a searing examination of racial prejudice — as “the centerpiece of my work in cinema.”) Everywhere Harry seemed to turn he would confront the specter of intolerance; his television specials Tonight with Belafonte and Belafonte, New York 19, despite winning critical and ratings accolades (Tonight won Harry a Emmy for outstanding performance in a variety or musical program or series) earned him enmity from the sponsors for his insistence on using racially integrated casts.

Belafonte recently related to an interviewer: “I was an activist before I was an actor. I was aware of all happening around me that was wrong in the midst of getting into this career. All of us did during those times, and we couldn’t sit back and worry about the consequences of doing something. We had to speak out about what was wrong in this country, and we did.” It is this portion of Harry’s life that makes much of Sing Your Song fascinating viewing; the audience learns that his friendships with Robeson and later Martin Luther King, Jr. earned him the unwelcome intrusion of the FBI (who was convinced back then that anyone fighting for the cause of equal rights must be some sort of Commie) — Belafonte’s first marriage to wife Marguerite Byrd suffered the severe strain of J. Edgar’s interest in the activist; Byrd simply couldn’t reconcile that the stories being handed to her about Belafonte by the bureau were complete bullshit. His closeness with Dr. King is even more remarkable and is choc-a-bloc with anecdotes; it was Belafonte who lobbied presidential candidate John F. Kennedy (then a senator) to intervene on King’s behalf when King was sentenced to work on a Georgia chain gang for a minor traffic violation. Later, Harry was needed to put the Kennedy administration’s fears to rest about the unrest that they believed would result from the 1963 March on Washington. Belafonte proudly relates how he persuaded the Kennedy people to eventually side with those in the civil rights movement, and in particular the part he played in educating Robert Kennedy, who may have been his brother’s attorney general but was still quite conservative in his politics (he had worked for Sen. Joseph McCarthy early in his career). (King once said to Belafonte about Bobby Kennedy: “In that mind resides good; go out and find that man’s moral center and win him to our cause.”)

Sing Your Song provides telling details about Belafonte’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Haiti, South Africa and other nations, particularly as one of the organizers behind USA for Africa and as goodwill ambassador to UNICEF …and comes full circle to the actor-singer’s struggle to make individuals aware of the growing problem with at-risk and incarcerated black/Latino gang youth (his palpable rage at seeing television news footage of a 9-year-old girl being handcuffed because she was “unruly” is not something easily forgotten). If there are any weak areas in Song, it’s that Belafonte’s controversial stance on the Iraq War (with headline-grabbing remarks directed toward its architects U.S. Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, not to mention President George W. Bush) is sort of glossed over, but then much of the material from later in his life (including some of his film work from the '70s up to today) is telescoped to fit the demands of the documentary’s running time.

“How could it be that the world is in the chaos and disorder and the consuming violence that we are all experiencing after so many had invested so much to change that fact?” Harry Belafonte asks the interviewer’s camera close to the end of Sing Your Song. The struggle against injustice is a constant one, and while Harry Belafonte was able to temper the fight on occasion through his music and acting, he would pay a price for his activism; several of his children and second wife Julie Robinson (the two of them later divorced and Belafonte married his third wife, Pamela in April 2008) relate in Song that while Harry wasn’t a bad father it was often a trial serving two families (his own and his activism) making demands on his time. The release of this documentary and his memoir My Song comes at a most opportune time when the U.S. is in a current state of upheaval over the issues of unemployment, health care and poverty. It is one thing to allow individuals to do the heavy lifting addressing the ills of the system in order for you to reap financial benefits (and perhaps run for president), it is another to commit yourself to a mindset that “from the time I go to sleep till the time I get up, I seek out the injustices done to humankind.” Harry Belafonte continues to sing his song…and we are all richer for his having done so.

The original HBO documentary Sing Your Song has an encore performance today at 11:30 a.m. EDT (10:30 a.m. Central) and also can be viewed later at 2:30 p.m. on HBO West. It will continue to air at various time and dates on various HBO channels through Nov. 22. The documentary also is available on HBO On Demand (where applicable) until Nov. 13. It will be accessible to HBO subscribers on HBO GO until Dec. 31, 2012. For more details, check out its entry on HBO’s website here.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

 

“I can handle big news and little news…and if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog…”


By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Cinephiles and classic movie fans alike marked off July 17, 2007 as the date when one of their Holy Grails was finally released to DVD: Ace in the Hole (1951), director Billy Wilder’s pungent portrayal of both the fourth estate and the public’s insatiable appetite for the sensationalism they publish and/or broadcast, had never previously been available on home video…and though I had seen the movie years ago on American Movie Classics (it still had its The Big Carnival credits, the title it went by when Paramount tried to recoup the dismal box office generated on its first release) I was amazed by how many online movie critics and bloggers admitted to not having seen the film.

It was the first major financial flop for Wilder (one studio wag dubbed the movie “Ass in the Wringer”) after a string of solid successes that had began in 1942 and because of its epic fail Billy himself wasn’t particularly fond of discussing Hole in later years — he not only ended up being sued by a screenwriter who claimed he gave the idea for the movie’s plot to Wilder’s secretary (Wilder and his lawyers eventually settled out of court) Paramount withheld from him some of the profits from his next feature, Stalag 17 (1953), claiming it was retribution for the financial “hole” Hole left them in. Sixty years ago on this date, the film I consider to be one of his finest works was released to theaters…a movie whose message is pithily summed up on an embroidered sign hanging on a newspaper office wall: “Tell the truth.”

Reporter Chuck Tatum finds himself busted flat in Albuquerque, N.M. — his car is en route to a garage via tow truck, and he’s looking for work after a checkered employment history with eleven major newspapers have shown him in the door for various infractions (adultery, slander, etc.). Introducing himself to editor Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall) of the city’s Sun-Bulletin, the quick-thinking, silver-tongued Tatum manages to talk himself into a $60-a-week job as a reporter even though he’s pining for the much faster pace of cities like Chicago and New York. His fellow employees — among them cub photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) — don’t quite know what to make of Tatum, but they find his demeanor and personality fascinating; Tatum, in the meantime, has cleaned up his act and managed to stay sober for a year though the tedious ennui of small-town life is threatening to kill him.

Assigned to cover a “rattlesnake roundup” story in a nearby county, Chuck and Herbie stop off to gas up and learn from a woman named Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling) that her husband Leo (Richard Benedict) has become trapped in an underground cave attraction near their souvenir stand looking for Indian artifacts. In investigating Leo’s predicament Tatum realizes he’s staring into the abyss of a potentially hot news story — very similar to the famous account of Kentuckian Floyd Collins, who was ensnared in a similar cave in 1925. With Herbie by his side, Chuck begins to milk the story for maximum impact; in cahoots with local sheriff Gus Kretzer (Ray Teal), Tatum not only strong-arms engineer Sam Smollett (Frank Jaquet) into using a prolonged method to reach Leo (which will allow for extra days of front-page treatment of the tragedy) but effectively eliminates the competition from other reporters covering the story, who are banished to a “press tent” by the corrupt Kretzer. (When his fellow scribes try appealing to Tatum’s “fair play” by observing that “we’re all in the same boat” he responds: “I’m in the boat…you’re in the water…now let’s see how you can swim.”) The news of Leo’s predicament quickly garners national attention and thousands of spectators and onlookers flock to the site where Lorraine greedily anticipates a financial windfall from the sales of food, drink, souvenirs and concessions from a carnival set up nearby.

Emboldened by the attention bestowed upon him as the reporter with an exclusive scoop (his services are now in demand by the very paper who gave him a pink slip), Tatum tells editor Boot to take a hike when he comes by in a futile attempt to rein him in…and Herbie, who’s also undergone a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation from idealistic young man to craven opportunist, elects to stay with Chuck when the prospect of selling his photos to magazines such as Look and Life becomes all-too-tantalizing. As for Leo, one of the few decent people characterized in the film (along with his parents, his physician and a priest), his time is running out — and Tatum’s reporter instincts tells him he needs to get Leo out of there fast because an unhappy ending is the kiss of death for his brand of tabloid journalism. But Chuck is too late: Smollett informs him that going back to the original rescue plan will surely endanger Leo in a slate fall. Chuck breaks the news to Lorraine when Leo succumbs to suffocation, and is so disgusted with both her and himself that he attempts to strangle her. Lorraine manages to fend him off by stabbing him with a pair of scissors, and with Herbie’s help Tatum returns to town and the Sun-Bulletin offices in a severely weakened condition. “How'd you like to make yourself a thousand dollars a day, Mr. Boot?” he asks the editor, who stares at him with pity. “I'm a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman…you can have me for nothing.” He then collapses and dies on the spot.

At the time of Ace in the Hole's release, Wilder was critically lambasted by both movie reviewers and real-life journalists, who strongly objected to the categorization of the news-gathering fraternity in the film as unscrupulous and self-serving. The passage of time has demonstrated that while the tone of Hole remains satirical the content remains disturbingly realistic. Tales of reporters who have tossed ethics and credibility off to the side and accounts of journalists whose integrity has been compromised by cozying up to subjects they are supposed to objectively cover are too numerous to cite here but filmmaker Guy Maddin, in an essay entitled “Chin Up for Mother,” gets to the crux of why the cynicism of Hole isn’t manufactured but reflective of its time:
Of course, the main theme is the rapacious hunger of tabloid news organizations for their scoops, and of a public for blood (an appetite in this case as sexy and naked as it was in Caesarean times). But these things are nothing more than accurately represented in the movie. The earnest young shutterbug who starts the picture as Tatum’s nemesis is utterly corrupted by him within seconds; the lad’s whiplash transformation from annoying goody-goody to sycophantic ponyboy puts the Oscar-winning mutative wizardry of Rick Baker to shame. Others within Tatum’s orbit — the sheriff and the contractor, particularly — undergo Fredric March-like personality shifts as well, though the cave rat’s wife, the perfectly cast Jan Sterling, appears to have come pre-Hoovered of all scruples. By the time the Great S&M Amusement Corp. rolls in, poor, mad [Leo] Minosa is clearly doomed to die like a dog in his cave.

The jaundiced portrayal of these characters may have turned off moviegoers here in the U.S. of A. but Ace in the Hole did very well overseas, where critics and audiences are able to look at America through a far less jingoistic fog. (The “big carnival” atmosphere surrounding the fictional tragedy in Hole is still around today; if you can turn on your TV set right now and avoid the spectacle that is the Casey Anthony trial I admire and respect your channel surfing skills.) For me, the fascinating moment of truth in the movie is when Tatum and Smollett the engineer are being interviewed by a radio reporter and a casual spectator has the stones to interrupt and point out that there’s something seriously wrong with their “Operation Rescue” setup. There always seems to be a lone voice decrying what is obviously madness in these kinds of situations (Iraq-Afghanistan war, anyone?) but is seldom able to be heard above the sensationalistic din.

Over at my stomping grounds at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, actor Kirk Douglas is revered as “the king of the rat bastards” — a title that he frequently trades off with other screen legends such as Richard Widmark and Robert Ryan, depending on which actor and his respective movie I’ve watched of late. But what gives Douglas an edge in the race is that he played his characters with an intense ferocity — Chuck Tatum is one of the actor’s best roles, a not-so-distant cousin to the unscrupulous boxer Midge Kelly in Douglas’ 1949 movie Champion. Both men are unrepentant scoundrels (Midge may actually be worse in that he rapes his ex-wife and punches out his crippled brother) but it is interesting to note that they are also motivated by “the American dream” — each individual is determined to rise to the top of his profession and enjoy the fruits of success.

What makes Tatum a fascinating personage is, yeah, he’s a ruthless essobee but he’s also damn good at his job — the papers that dispensed with his services did not do so because he’s a lousy reporter. Despite all the grief Chuck hands him, Boot recognizes how invaluable his work has come to be (he admits that the newspaper’s circulation is up) and earnestly attempts to dissuade him from continuing the Minosa charade because he doesn’t like the stench of the corruption involved (Boot: “Phony, below-the-belt journalism….that’s what it is.” Tatum: “Not below-the-belt…right from the gut!”). In his essay, Maddin contrasts the Tatum character with another legendary cinematic heel, Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), who shares the same ambition to make good as Tatum but who comes across as a guy who really sucks at being a publicist. Chuck Tatum is also a man who, despite his shortcomings, has a reservoir of charm and a snappy rejoinder in his holster when necessary. During his “interview” he is asked by Boot “Do you drink a lot?” Tatum’s response: “Not a lot…just frequently…” Watching Douglas-as-Tatum is akin to being hypnotized by a cobra, and though he’s unlikable there is also no denying that he’s a tragic character in that his attempts to rein in a situation that has spun out of his control are doomed to despair.

Jan Sterling is magnificent in the role of unfaithful Lorraine Minosa, and she gets one of the classic lines in Ace in the Hole when she tells reporter Tatum: “I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you...you're twenty minutes.” (I think it’s interesting that this bit of dialogue is contradicted by her other famous declaration, “I don’t go to church…kneeling bags my nylons” — suggesting that she’s spent a little extra time in a boiling saucepan herself.) Shamelessly flirting with both Tatum and pretty much anything that’s walked into the souvenir stand wearing work pants, the final shot of Lorraine furiously trying to catch up to the Trailways coach speeding away from the establishment (a great visual pun in that she’s “missed the bus” on everything in her life) has a special poignancy that’s remained with me all these years.

Billy Wilder’s often corrosive take on American customs and mores in his movies were tempered through his collaborations with writer Charles Brackett; Ace in the Hole would be the first film Wilder would do without Brackett’s influence (the script was written in tandem with Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels) and it would also be his first offering as producer. His dissatisfaction with Paramount’s decision to salvage what they could from Hole's dismal b.o. take, however, did produce a positive result in that he was able to renegotiate his contract to allow him greater creative control. With the wider accessibility of Hole, a fresh generation of moviegoers are now able to see why Wilder remains one of the most American of filmmakers (despite his Austrian pedigree) and that Hole (along with Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face in the Crowd) was a film far ahead of its time, daring to lampoon and criticize the media for its weaknesses and excesses. In Ace in the Hole, Wilder tells the truth.


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Friday, June 24, 2011

 

Peter Falk (1927-2011)


One more thing…before I get started talking about the great Peter Falk, who died Thursday at 83 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease, as memorable as his creation of Lt. Columbo was in the pantheon of iconic television characters, he needs to be remembered for far more than just that role, even if it may have been his most famous — maybe even his best — and earned him four Emmys and 10 Emmy nominations. He also did considerable screen work and some Broadway. He was capable of the most searing drama of John Cassavetes and the broadest of comedy. He was a talent.

As with many actors of his generation, he began his career on live television in the 1950s, appearing in many of the shows that featured theatrical productions staged for viewers at home as well as the occasional guest appearance in an episode of a recurring series. According to IMDb, his first television appearance came in 1957 on Robert Montgomery Presents in a presentation of Return Visit. This came shortly after his Broadway debut in 1956 in a revival of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan where Falk played an English guard. Also in the cast as a member of the ensemble was none other than Robert Ludlum, before he abandoned acting to become a novelist. Also in 1956 on Broadway, Falk appeared as a servant in the comedy Diary of a Scoundrel whose cast included Roddy McDowall, Howard da Silva, Margaret Hamilton, Jerry Stiller and future killer on multiple episodes of Columbo, Robert Culp. Falk didn't return to Broadway for about seven years, concentrating on television and movies.

In 1960, he made his film debut in Pretty Boy Floyd. The same year, he also appeared in Murder, Inc. as a violent hit man for the notorious crime syndicate of Jewish gangsters run by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter in the 1930s. It earned Falk his first Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. He still stuck mainly to TV after that, though an appearance on a 1961 episode of The Law and Mr. Jones won him an Emmy. He hit most of the big series of the time at some point: The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables, Have Gun — Will Travel.

In 1961, he made another big feature, this time with some big names. He co-starred with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford in Frank Capra's remake of his own Lady for a Day, retitled A Pocketful of Miracles. Falk played gangster Ford's none-too-swift sidekick and it earned him his second consecutive Oscar nomination for supporting actor. Movie roles started to come easier after that, though he still did a lot of television, including an appearance on a 1962 episode of The Dick Powell Theatre called "The Price of Tomatoes" that garnered Falk another Emmy nomination.

As the film roles started coming more frequently, he took advantage. In 1963, he was one of the two cab drivers caught up in the chase for the money buried under that big W in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The next year, he appeared in The Rat Pack vehicle Robin and the 7 Hoods when it was released. He did take time off to return to Broadway in 1964 to star as Stalin in The Passion of Josef D. by Paddy Chayefsky. In 1965, he joined Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis for The Great Race. That same year, he tried his hand as the lead of his first television series, The Trials of O'Brien, but it only lasted one season.

Heading back to the big screen, he made the comedy Penelope with Natalie Wood in 1966; Clive Donner's adaptation of the play Luv in 1967, again with Lemmon and with Elaine May; and Anzio in 1968 featuring a cast that included Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. Falk also made a TV movie in 1968 called Prescription for Murder that introduced the world to a homicide detective named Lt. Columbo, even though he would not reappear again until 1971.

In 1970, Falk made his first collaboration with John Cassavetes in Husbands. Cassavetes' films remain an acquired taste for just about everyone, film lovers included, but he brought out sides and shadings in Falk that you never saw anywhere else. He directed Falk again opposite his wife Gena Rowlands in 1975's A Woman Under the Influence and his portrait of a blue collar Italian husband trying to deal with a mentally unbalanced wife really is a thing of wonder. Falk and Cassavetes worked again on screen together in 1976's Mikey and Nicky, a very unusual portrait of a friendship, only it was Elaine May in the director's chair in that case. Cassavetes even appeared as one of the killers on an installment of Columbo. He made a cameo as himself in Cassavetes' underrated Opening Night. He worked for Cassavetes on his final film, Big Trouble in 1986, which reunited Falk with Alan Arkin and Andrew Bergman, Falk's co-star and writer of The In-Laws, but I haven't seen that one since word was not good.

In March 1971, Lt. Columbo appeared again in a television movie called Ransom for a Dead Man, but that fall, Columbo became a regular series — or as regular a series can be when it's on irregularly. It was part of NBC's rotating lineup of Mystery of the Week and would share its time slot with McMillan & Wife and McCloud. Columbo stayed on the air until 1978. Then, in 1989, ABC brought the rumpled detective with the broken-down car back. They tried an alternating format, but their other series sucked so they just continued doing occasional Columbo movies until 2003, only Falk also was the executive producer now. He also wrote an episode. He directed two outings back in 1972.

In early 1971, Falk made his last appearance on Broadway in the original production of Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue. He and Simon must have been good partners, because Falk later appeared in two original spoofs that Simon wrote for the big screen. The first was 1976's delightful Murder By Death with a truly all-star cast: Eileen Brennan, James Coco, Alec Guinness, Elsa Lanchester, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith, Nancy Walker, Estelle Winwood and, of course, Truman Capote. Also playing a small role, and up until then probably most recognizable as Stretch Cunningham on All in the Family, a younger James Cromwell. The premise had the stars playing spoofs of famous literary detectives and Falk plays Sam Diamond, which means Sam Spade which to most people means Bogart and Falk does a hilarious Bogart satire. So funny in fact that Simon resurrected it in the 1978 film The Cheap Detective where Falk did Lou Peckinpaugh with another all-star cast in a spoof of all Bogart films. It wasn't as good as Murder By Death, but Falk was just as great.

Falk had another release in 1978, now largely forgotten, that I haven't seen in years but that I do remember enjoying when I was a lot younger and that was The Brink's Job. Directed by William Friedkin, it told the true story of a hard-luck would-be criminal who manages to rip off an armored car for a sizable amount of cash. He's surprised to find that the robbery doesn't even make the news and after some snooping, he discovers it's because Brink's has such poor security they didn't want it reported. Of course, it goes to his head so he and his gang plot an even bigger score. In 1979, Falk made what's probably one of the purest comic pleasures put on film, a movie so funny that even having Arthur Hiller as director didn't screw it up. Of course, I'm referring to The In-Laws where, frankly, I think Falk's off-the-wall portrayal of Vincent Ricardo and Alan Arkin's work as dentist Sheldon Kornpett, his flabbergasted, unwilling partner in hijinks, both deserved Oscar consideration in this crazy farce written by Andrew Bergman. If you've never seen it, you owe it to yourself to do so, but don't get the recent remake by mistake. Serpentine!

The remainder of Falk's film credits contained two certified gems and a lot of misses such as 1981's All the Marbles, where he managed female wrestlers; a cameo in the underwhelming The Great Muppet Caper the same year; 1987's Happy New Year, where the makeup was the star; Cyndi Lauper's try at screen fame in 1988's Vibes; a mobster in the dumb 1989 comedy Cookie; and 2001's Corky Romano. However, he did appear in some films that earned some good notices that I didn't see such as Joe Mantegna's directing debut of a David Mamet script called Lakeboat in 2000. He also made a very funny appearance in the first season of The Larry Sanders Show. The two film classics he made post-1979 were Wim Wenders' exquisite Wings of Desire, where he played himself but he had the ability to talk to the angels (click here to see the scene), and The Princess Bride, where he played the kindly grandfather reading the story to his sick grandson (Fred Savage) and us.

He wasn't done with the stage yet either. In 1998, he earned raves appearing off-Broadway in Arthur Miller's Mr. Peters' Connections.

What a range and I can't even add up the hours of enjoyment this man has given me through his work all my life. Thankfully, the work still remains to enjoy.

Rest in peace, Mr. Falk.

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Friday, December 31, 2010

 

The Year in Appreciations

By Edward Copeland
Now this is hardly a comprehensive list of the artists who left us in the calendar year 2010, but just of those we had the time and energy to do write-ups on. Sometimes the death announcements hit at an inopportune time for me such as when we lost Dino De Laurentiis. I was on the way to a lengthy doctor's appointment and by the time I got home, I was so worn out the news was so old, I didn't have the stamina to type something out. Othertimes, even important artists who deserved mention, I wouldn't have had much to say about, even someone as great (and a Facebook friend) such as George Hickenlooper. I wouldn't have had much to say about Barbara Billingsley or Ronni Chasen, but they deserved notice as did Mitch Miller, Jerry Bock, Sally Menke and many others. It's meant as no slight on those we didn't. There are a lot of names, but I doubt that even this list is comprehensive.

Jean Simmons (January 23)


J.D. Salinger (January 28)


Peter Graves (March 14)


Robert Culp (March 24)


David Mills (March 31)


John Forsythe (April 2)


Dixie Carter (April 10)


Lynn Redgrave (May 3)


Lena Horne (May 10)


Dennis Hopper (May 29)


Rue McClanahan (June 3)


James Gammon (July 17)

in Major League


Patricia Neal (August 8)


Kevin McCarthy (September 12)


Harold Gould (September 13)


Arthur Penn (September 29)


Tony Curtis (September 30)


Stephen J. Cannell (October 1)


Tom Bosley (October 19)


Monica Johnson (November 2)


Jill Clayburgh (November 5)


Leslie Nielsen (November 28)


Blake Edwards (December 16)

Others who deserve remembering in alphabetical order: Corey Allen, Dede Allen, Sparky Anderson, Louis Auchincloss, Beryl Bainbridge, Roy Ward Baker, Eddie Barth, Martin Baum, Captain Beefheart, Martin Benson, Luis Garcia Berlanga, Lisa Blount, Denise Borino-Quinn, Vance Bourjaily, Robert F. Boyle, David Brown, Solomon Burke, Jackie Burroughs, Christopher Cazenove, Claude Chabrol, Maury Chaykin, Chao Li Chi, Alex Chilton, John Clifford, Art Clokey, Hank Cochran, Clay Cole, Gary Coleman, Paul Conrad, Leo Cullum, Joe Deal, Jimmy Dean, Richard Devon, George DiCenzo, Ronnie James Dio, Nancy Dolman, Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Donal Donnelly, Clive Donner, Paul Dunlap, Doris Eaton, Bill Erwin, Doug Fieger, Eddie Fisher, Maureen Forrester, Fred Foy, William A. Fraker, Dick Francis, David Froman, Frank Giering, Jackson Gillis, Greg Giraldo, Mark Gordon, Henryk Gorecki, John Graysmark, Kathryn Grayson, Bud Greenspan, Bob Guccione, Corey Haim, Barry Hannah, Capt. Phil Harris, Peter Haskell, June Havoc, Peter Hofmann, Alan Hume, Gregory Isaacs, Marvin Isley, Peter Jamison, Mitch Jayne, Lionel Jeffries, Lamont Johnson, Elliott Kastner, Larry Keith, Irvin Kershner, Andrew Koenig, Michael Kuchwara, Steve Landesberg, Jack Levine, Marcia Lewis, Abbey Lincoln, Art Linkletter, James MacArthur, Simon MacCorkindale, Tom Mankiewicz, Joe Mantell, Teena Marie, Jim Marshall, Grant McCune, Kate McGarrigle, Vonetta McGee, Malcolm McLaren, Caroline McWilliams, Justin Mentell, Don Meredith, James Mitchell, Willie Mitchell, Mario Monicelli, Elizabeth Moody, Ronald Neame, Edwin Newman, Kazuo Ohno, Merlin Olsen, Nikos Papatakis, Fess Parker, Robert B. Parker, Robert Paynter, Harvey Pekar, Teddy Pendergrass, Charles Pierce, Ingrid Pitt, Belva Plain, Sigmar Polke, Dorothy Provine, Pete Quaife, Irving Ravetch, Corin Redgrave, Frances Reid, Pernell Roberts, Eric Rohmer, Lina Romay, Aaron Ruben, Zelda Rubinstein, Bruno S., Jose Saramago, Furio Scarpelli, Robert Schimmel, Karen Schmeer, Daniel Schorr, Erich Segal, Robert J. Serling, Glenn Shadix, Ted Sorenson, David Soyer, Joseph Stein, George Steinbrenner, Joseph Strick, Gloria Stuart, Joan Sutherland, Hideko Takamine, Billy Taylor, Derek Vanlint, Shirley Verrett, Helen Wagner, Albertina Walker, Earl Wild, Norman Wisdom, David L. Wolper, Ilene Woods, Lorene Yarnell and Howard Zinn.


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Thursday, December 16, 2010

 

Blake Edwards (1922-2010)



Blake Edwards' reputation as a film director seems locked by some in the realm of lowbrow slapstick comedy and, in many cases, not particularly good ones, but Edwards' work as a director and a writer was more multifaceted than that. Born in Tulsa, Okla., in 1922, Edwards died this morning at 88.

True, at his heart he was a clown. A few years ago when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences finally saw fit to bestow an honorary Oscar upon Edwards, he used his acceptance speech as an occasion for a gag, abetted by presenter Jim Carrey, showing up in a wheelchair with a broken leg and making it appear as if it went out of control and crashed through the wall of part of the awards show set. Like many recent honorary Oscar presentations, it was a highlight until the youth hungry, ratings-obsessed execs in charge segregated honorary awards to a nontelevised dinner where movie buffs couldn't celebrate significant players in film history such as Edwards anymore.

His work in the film industry began as a screenwriter in the late '40s with his most notable work probably being the screenplay for 1955's My Sister Eileen starring Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon. In this same period he also did a lot of television work, including creating several shows in the late 1950s, the most famous being Peter Gunn starring Craig Stevens and Richard Diamond, Private Detective starring David Janssen and the legs of one Mary Tyler Moore.

His feature directing debut came in 1955 on the musical Bring Your Smile Along. He directed a few more films but the one that was his first standout was 1959's Operation Petticoat starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis.

In 1961, he helmed the adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn. The following year, he made two films that no one could accuse of being slapstick: Experiment in Terror with Glenn Ford and Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick battling alcoholism.

Though it opened in 1963 elsewhere, the film that would launch his most famous film series didn't open in the U.S. until 1964: Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther. The first followup, A Shot in the Dark, came out the very same year. Edwards became so attached to the series that he kept it going for decades, even after Sellers had died.

Other notable films of the 1960s included The Great Race, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? and The Party.

In 1970, he directed the woman he wed in 1969, Julie Andrews, for the first time in Darling Lili. He tried a Western in 1971 with William Holden in Wild Rovers. He directed the adaptation of the Michael Crichton thriller The Carey Treatment in 1972. In 1974, he directed Omar Sharif and his wife in a romantic drama called The Tamarind Seed.

It wasn't until 1979 that he got out of a Pink Panther rut and introduced the world to Bo Derek in the Dudley Moore comedy 10, which also managed to make composer Ravel's piece "Bolero" popular again.

He followed that up with the wicked Hollywood satire S.O.B. with an all-star cast led by William Holden and including Julie Andrews' first topless scene.

In 1982, he made his last really big hit with Victor/Victoria, earning Andrews an Oscar nomination as best actress. More than a decade later, he tried his hand at turning it into a Broadway musical with terrible results.

Most of his films after that were not worth mentioning, though Micki & Maude with Dudley Moore as a bigamist had its moments and you have to mention Skin Deep since it is the only film with a glow-in-the-dark condom chase scene.

Still, Edwards' resume was far more eclectic than you'd think and he did produce some classics. His only competitive Oscar nomination came for writing the adapted screenplay for Victor/Victoria. He received two Emmy nominations for Peter Gunn, for writing and directing the same episode. He also earned a Directors Guild nomination for Breakfast at Tiffany's.

RIP Mr. Edwards.


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Friday, October 08, 2010

 

A '60s film search for a serial killer


By Edward Copeland
We've become so accustomed to movies about the hunts for serial killers, both real and imagined, that it's a bit unusual to see one that dates back to 1968. Granted, I would never have put The Boston Strangler into the Netflix queue if it hadn't been for the recent passing of Tony Curtis, but it was interesting to watch the film because it's more of a detached crime procedural than some of the serial killer romps that have come around in the past couple of decades. It also was surprising to find that as much as it's sold as a Curtis vehicle, we don't even meet him until the film is half over and the ostensible lead (if there really is a lead) is Henry Fonda.

Coming so soon after I caught up with Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, which in turn reminded me of David Fincher's great Zodiac and an aborted attempt at watching The Red Riding Trilogy, it proved especially interesting to watch a film that was one of the forerunners of the low-tech large-scale murder investigation movies. (If anyone thinks I should have given Red Riding more of a chance instead of bailing out after watching much of part one, read Craig's great review at The Man from Porlock who did sit through all three and came to the conclusion I already was starting to form.)

Based on Gerold Frank's book about the string of slayings that terrorized the Boston area in the early 1960s, The Boston Strangler was adapted by Edward Anhalt (Oscar winner for Becket — talk about range) and directed by Richard Fleischer, whose filmography stretched all over the map from the solid thriller The Narrow Margin (1952) to Doctor Dolittle, perhaps the worst best picture nominee in history. His directing career stretched from 1943 to 1989 and included the good (Fantastic Voyage), the bad (Conan the Destroyer) and the ugly (The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond). I'll let you decide where to place Soylent Green.

Thankfully, The Boston Strangler belongs on the list of Fleischer's better efforts and it takes some kind of director who can switch gears from the tomfoolery of Doctor Dolittle to the darkness of this story the very next year. He does go a little overboard with the use of split screen and multiple images projected at once. The technique can be very effective and works quite well at times here, but Fleischer uses it so much that it kind of wears out it welcome.

The Boston Strangler contains an amazing number of familiar names and faces in roles large and small in roles of cops, suspects and victims. Look at this list of performers in minor parts: Hurd Hatfield (the third time he's appeared in a movie I've written about this week), Jeff Corey, Sally Kellerman, William "Blacula" Marshall, George Furth, William Hickey, James Brolin, Dana Elcar, Carole Shelley, David Lewis and Alex Rocco.

As in Zodiac, part of the problem for investigators comes from the murders crossing jurisdictional lines, meaning different departments have different pieces of the puzzle so Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke (Marshall), who would later go on to become the state's first African-American U.S. senator, taps one of his lawyers John Bottomly (Fonda) to head up a task force to collect all the investigations under one umbrella. Bottomly has no interest in the job since he has no law enforcement experience — he'd rather keep working on eminent domain issues — but Brooke basically orders him, despite the fact that the state really doesn't have funds to provide him for his investigation.

Even before Fonda enters the picture, we get the grunt work of various detectives trying to get a handle on what kind of maniac has descended on their city, leading to possible suspects and many dead ends. Two of the detectives who stand out the most are played by George Kennedy, fresh off his Oscar win for supporting actor for Cool Hand Luke, and Murray Hamilton, the year after playing the cuckolded Mr. Robinson in The Graduate and one of the rare times I can recall Hamilton being a good guy (this was the Amity mayor in Jaws, after all). By now, it's a staple for homicide detectives to have a streak of dark humor running through their veins, and Hamilton actually gets some of those best lines, welcome because the tale needs levity to lessen the darkness.

At one point, Bottomly even consults a psychic who amazingly describes the scene of a murder and the contents of a letter they received from a seemingly troubled man named Eugene O' Rourke. They believe they have their man and go to question him and, while he's not the strangler, he does need psychological help. More importantly, he's played by William Hickey and having never discovered the man until his wonderful Oscar-nominated turn as Don Corrado Prizzi in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor, it's always great to find Hickey in another film, especially when he gets as meaty a scene as he does here.

When the film hits the hour mark, we suddenly meet Albert DeSalvo (Curtis) and see things from his point of view briefly through the last of his 13 murders. For fans of the TV series Dexter, his introduction will seem awfully similar to the fourth season scene when Dexter follows John Lithgow's character home and discovers that he's not the loner that he presumed but a family man. In fact, the scenes mirror each other so closely, I can't help but believe that the writers on Dexter had this movie in mind for that plot twist.

DeSalvo's capture and identification happens because of a series of mistakes by him and a happy accident on the part of Bottomly and Detective DiNatale (Kennedy). Because of DeSalvo's seeming inability to understand charges against him (which are unrelated to the murders), he's sent to a mental hospital. The remainder of the film mostly consists of Bottomly questioning DeSalvo, who they believe suffers from a split personality, to see if they can find the part of him that committed the crimes. When we first see DeSalvo in the room where he will be questioned, it is a blank room with just a table and a one-way window where people can watch him. He's dressed in all white and again it's hard not to believe that there's not some inspiration found in The Silence of the Lambs. Many of the obituaries for Curtis said that he was disappointed that he didn't get the Oscar for this and some even called it his best work and while he's very good in a part unlike any other he played, I still think his best is Sweet Smell of Success, followed by Some Like It Hot.

As it is, The Boston Strangler works best now as a time capsule item. It seems to have wanted to make larger points about helping people with mental problems earlier, but it almost seems tacked on as a justification.

As a footnote, I discovered an interesting thing as I searched IMDb for the name of the actor who portrayed the psychic. I'd forgotten the character's name and though I was fairly certain which actor it was, I didn't want to make a mistake. I thought perhaps if I perused the external reviews, I might stumble upon the answer but though I didn't, I did discover in reviews written at the time of release, one by Roger Ebert, the other by Renata Adler at The New York Times, that The Boston Strangler was viewed as quite exploitative at the time. Ebert thought it was a good film, but questioned if it should have been made and was disturbed by the reaction of two young girls and its promotional materials while Adler found the movie absolutely repugnant.

Is my generation (and those coming up behind) really so jaded that we view something such as The Boston Strangler as tame? Is there some truth to the idea that mass media has hardened our hearts and minds to the point that we're harder to shock? It's sort of a running gang between me and a friend whenever some talking head declares "the loss of our innocence," how many times does that make that we've lost it now?

A key scene of the movie takes place on the day of JFK's funeral. When I was growing up, we knew about all of the upheaval of the 1960s: the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King as well as Vietnam. When John Lennon was murdered and Reagan and Pope John Paul II were shot and Sadat assassinated in an 11-month time period, they didn't hold the same trauma because we all knew of the ones before we were born and while they were awful events, it almost seemed like business as usual in our dangerous world. It really took horrific events such as 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing to capture our attention and leave scars, because those catastrophes were beyond our imaginations.

On the other hand, should people be protected from the horrors of the world to the point that when they grow up and learn of them, the shock could prove too much to bear? The girls laughing that Ebert saw would disturb me too: Not feeling or having empathy is a bad thing, but not being able to deal with the fact that bad things happen isn't right either. Movies can be exploitative but, in the end, it's just a movie. It's the so-called news when it's exploitative that disturbs me more.


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