Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Let's talk about the black bird
By Edward Copeland
In 1941, one man's directing debut wowed the world — and with good reason — but Orson Welles' Citizen Kane wasn't the only impressive directing debut that year. Granted, John Huston grew up around movie sets as the son of actor Walter Huston and had a decade of screenwriting experience before he helmed his first feature, but it certainly could be argued that while The Maltese Falcon isn't as groundbreaking as Kane, it did launch a far more consistent directing career for Huston than Kane did for Welles. More importantly, Falcon served as the key film that transitioned Humphrey Bogart from the criminals and thugs that stereotyped his acting career into everybody's favorite antihero and a more multifaceted range of roles. Anyone who has read much of my writing or seen my comments in various venues know my typical disdain for remakes and my simple rule: Only remake movies that were flawed in the first place. Until recently, Huston's Maltese Falcon, marking its 70th anniversary today, happened to be the only film version of Dashiell Hammett's story that I'd seen. To be fair, I felt that I needed to watch director Roy Del Ruth's 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon. Boy, did my adage hold up. So much so that I'm running a separate review tomorrow of the 1931 film adaptation of Hammett's tale, which began as a five-part serial between September 1929 and January 1930 in the magazine Black Mask before being published as a hardback novel in February 1930.
to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a golden falcon
encrusted from beak to claw with the rarest jewels -----
but pirates seized the galley carrying the priceless token
and the fate of the Maltese Falcon
remains a mystery to this day ---
After this brief written prologue crawls up the screen following the opening credits, we get a panoramic shot of where our story takes place along with the superimposed words SAN FRANCISCO. Soon, we are inside the offices of SPADE AND ARCHER. Private detective Sam
Spade (Bogart) sits behind his desk fiddling with a tea bag and trying to roll his own cigarette when his faithful secretary Effie (Lee Patrick) comes in and tells him that there's a girl who wants to see him. "Her name's Wonderly," Effie adds. "A customer?" Spade asks. "I guess so. You'll want to see her anyway. She's a knockout," Effie tells him. Sam says to send her in. Miss Wonderly (Mary Astor) shares with Spade her concerns about her sister Corinne, who has hooked up with a no-good guy named Floyd Thursby. She wants to take her sister back home to New York. She has spoken with Thursby, but he won't tell her with Corinne is and 
claims her sister doesn't want to speak with her. This Thursby frightens Miss Wonderly, the woman admits. As she spins her tale, Spade's partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan), enters, practically salivating over their new client. He and Sam both agree that they should be able to handle Thursby and Miss Wonderly lays down two $100 bills for their services. When she leaves, Miles tells Sam, "Oh, she's sweet. Maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first." Never mind that Miles is married, especially since Sam and Miles' wife Iva (Gladys George) have been having an affair, which Spade very much has tried to sever. In a very interesting and foreshadowing shot, after Miles stakes his claim in the lustful pursuit of Miss Wonderly, the sun through the windows form a shadow of the SPADE AND ARCHER sign on the carpet of their office so that it resembles a tombstone. The very next scene happens to be the only one in the entire film in which Sam Spade isn't present. In a dark setting, a smiling Miles approaches someone who pulls a gun and shoots the private eye who then tumbles down the side of a cliff.
So begins the film's mystery and its first corpse, but as of yet there has been no mention of the fabled Maltese Falcon. I've never read Hammett's story to see how closely Huston's film, which he wrote as well as directed, follows it, though some reports I've read say it follows Hammett's work nearly scene for scene and line for line except for a couple of notable changes. In discussing the The Maltese Falcon, worrying about spelling out the plot or spilling its secrets hardly seems to matter because neither the story nor its resolution strengthens the spine of what makes this movie — pardon my French, but no more accurate way exists to describe it — what makes this movie so fucking great 70 years after its release. Since I've now seen the terrible 1931 film version which shares some of the same dialogue as Huston's film, I'm guessing those lines originated with Hammett, though in some cases it's clear how Huston took some words out of either the 1931 script or the Hammett story and rewrote them to make them better. The dialogue practically sparkles when you only read it. When it's placed in the mouths of the talented cast that was assembled for Huston's movie, it sings. In addition to the five performers that I would name as the principals — Bogart, Astor, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr. and, in his Oscar-nominated performance and, believe it or not, his film debut, the 61-year-old Sydney Greenstreet — The Maltese Falcon's ensemble boasted the aforementioned Lee Patrick, Gladys George and Jerome Cowan, Ward Bond, Barton McClane and, in a wordless cameo as the dying Captain Jacoby dumping the falcon at Sam's office before expiring, none other than John Huston's father Walter himself.
All that time on sets paid off for John Huston, who managed to include a lot of interesting touches the first time he got his chance to sit in the director's chair. I love the way he films Sam in his seedy apartment receiving the news of Miles' death. He goes directly from the darkness of Archer's tumble to a dark room where you can only see the outline of a phone on a bedside table because of a little light coming through the open window. The telephone rings and we simply see an arm extend into the shot to pick up the receiver and take it back out of the frame again. That's followed by Bogart's familiar voice saying, "Miles Archer — dead." After telling the cop on the other end of the line he'll be there soon, then Spade sits up and turns on the bedside lamp so he can call Effie to give her the news and assign her the task of informing
the widow Archer so he doesn't have to face Iva. Another visual moment I love comes late in the film when Gutman's henchman Wilmer (Cook) comes to after being knocked out by the principals when they've sequestered themselves in a hotel room all night to keep an eye on one another. Wilmer's head still spins so he awakes to distorted close-ups of Spade, Gutman (Greenstreet) and Cairo (Lorre). Huston gave great thought to how the entire film would go. After he wrote the screenplay, Huston storyboarded the entire film to prepare for the composition of scenes and the movement of the camera. He also rehearsed for two days. As I wrote earlier, so many of the lines were nearly the same as the 1931 version but turned out better here, either Huston improved on Hammett or the 1931 screenplay by Maude Hulton (who wrote the titles on John Barrymore's silent Don Juan) & Brown Holmes (who would go on to co-write I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang as well as the other pre-Huston Maltese Falcon adaptation, 1936's Satan Met a Lady with Bette Davis) with uncredited help by Lucien Hubbard (whose most famous film work also went uncredited — editing and production work on Wings).
Now I don't know if Huston proved to be particularly gifted when it came to working with actors or he just lucked out in the casting or how big a part he played in the casting, but the film got stellar performances out of almost all of the players, even though some such as Lorre had given career-best performances elsewhere (in Fritz Lang's M). Though Elisha Cook Jr. had been acting on stage since he was 14 and full-time in movies since 1936, Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon truly proved to be the
breakthrough role for the man who had a career in film and television that lasted until the late 1980s. Ward Bond and Barton McClane, who played the two police detectives always questioning Spade about his possible role in the murders of Archer and Thursby, both had careers that put them in ruts of sorts. Despite his police work here, Bond mainly would be recognized for his work in Westerns such as My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, Johnny Guitar, The Searchers, Rio Bravo and the TV series Wagon Train, though he did go back on the beat as Bert the cop in It's a Wonderful Life. McClane did his share of Westerns, but he got to go to war a lot as well such as in The Glenn Miller Story. He worked with Bogart, director Huston and his dad again in Treasure of the Sierra Madre and thanks to reruns may be best known these days for his recurring role as General Peterson on I Dream of Jeannie. Lee Patrick worked steadily in roles such as Bert Pierce's mistress Maggie Biederhof in Mildred Pierce and did lots of TV work, most notably as Henrietta Topper in the 1950s sitcom version of Topper. Patrick and Cook also were the only original Falcon cast members to appear in the 1975 spoof The Black Bird starring George Segal as Sam Spade Jr.
Speaking of spoofs, though Gladys George's part as Iva Archer, widow of Miles and scorned lover of Sam Spade, isn't that large in Huston's version, if you've ever seen The Cheap Detective, it's hard not to envision
Marsha Mason's Georgia Merkle, especially when Gladys George's Iva wears her full mourning gear. It doesn't help that Sam doesn't take Iva seriously in the Falcon when she enters in that outfit either. The scene, where Iva comes in and basically asks Sam if he killed Miles so they could be together and he lashes out because she acts as if she hopes he did, is a joy because of the way Bogart plays it. Bogie claps his hands and says to her, "You killed my husband. Be kind to me." For those unfamiliar with The Cheap Detective, it was the second parody that Neil Simon wrote directly for the screen that featured Peter Falk playing Bogart. The more famous (and better) film, Murder By Death, had him as Sam Diamond and he was part of an ensemble of "the world's greatest detectives." Falk's performance was so hysterical they built The Cheap Detective around him doing Bogart again, only as a spoof of all Bogie movies with Falk's character named Lou Peckinpaugh. Gladys George's career dated back to the silent era and she made some other notable films including The Hard Way with Ida Lupino, The Best Years of Our Lives and Detective Story. She also earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actress in 1936 for Valiant Is the Word for Carrie.Though now (and with good reason), Bogart would be considered the biggest name in The Maltese Falcon (and he did receive top billing), at the time Mary Astor probably had the most star wattage in the cast. Astor begin working as an actress in silent films in 1921 and was one of the fortunate ones who had a voice and talent that allowed her to make the transfer to sound pictures easily. Astor also wrote the
often used line (just change the name) that there are five stages in the career of an actor: "Who's Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who's Mary Astor?" One of her silent vehicles included that John Barrymore Don Juan whose title writer co-wrote the 1931 Maltese Falcon. In the sound era, she went a little crazy on a rubber plantation with Gable and Harlow in Red Dust; joined Walter Huston in the underrated classic Dodsworth; and showed her penchant for comedy as well in the Billy Wilder/Charles Bracket scripted Midnight. Her career would continue in film and television for another 23 years after The Maltese Falcon and include reteaming with Bogart, Greenstreet and Huston as director the following year in Across the Pacific; Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story; Meet Me in St. Louis; Act of Violence; and her final film, Robert Aldrich's Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte in 1964. She actually won the Oscar for supporting actress for 1941, but not for The Maltese Falcon but for the melodrama The Great Lie starring Bette Davis. The award was very much deserved, but that in no way diminishes her work as Miss Wonderly alias Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Astor proves superb at balancing the seductive side of Brigid with the admittedly deadly side. Yes, she's a killer and it isn't a sister she's after, it's the black bird. Some of the conversations between her and Spade just mesmerize.(When Sam first learns of some of her lies and she tries to keep him on her side.)
BRIGID: I've got nobody to help me if you won't help me. Be generous, Mr. Spade. You're brave, you're strong. You can share some of that courage and strength. Help me, Mr. Spade. I need help so badly. I have no right to ask you, I know I haven't…
SAM: You won't need much of anybody's help. You're good. It's chiefly your eyes I think, and that throb you get in your voice. When you say things like, 'Be generous, Mr. Spade.'
BRIGID: I deserved that, but the lie was in the way I said it, not in the words. It's my own fault you can't trust me now.
SAM: Now you are dangerous.
Once Spade deduces that it was Brigid who killed his partner Miles in a botched plan where she thought that either he or Miles would kill Thursby or Thursby would kill one of them and she could send him to jail to get rid of him. Unfortunately, Thursby ended up being murdered by Wilmer before she could set him up. When Sam lets her know that he plans to turn her in for Miles' murder, Brigid can't believe her feminine wiles didn't win him over and Sam responds, quite cruelly at times.
SAM: I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I'm gonna send you over. The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you.
BRIGID: (trying to laugh) Don't, Sam. Don't say it even in fun. Ha, ha, ha. Oh, I was frightened for a minute. I really thought … You do such wild and unpredictable things.
SAM: Don't be silly. You're taking the fall.
BRIGID: You've been playing with me. Just pretending you care to trap me like this. You didn't care at all. You don't love me!
SAM: I won't play the sap for you!
…
BRIGID: You know down deep in your heart and in spite of anything I've done I love you…How can you do this to me, Sam? Surely, Mr. Archer wasn't so much to you as…(crying)
SAM: When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's — it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.
Outside of Spade, Sydney Greenstreet's Kaspar Gutman grabs the lion's share of memorable dialogue, often while conversing with Sam. As I mentioned earlier, the movie amazingly was Greenstreet's film debut at 61. He's spent considerable time in the theater, mostly on the English stage, but it's miraculous that he found his way to Hollywood. At one point, Gutman says of Spade, "By gad, sir, you are a character. There's never any telling what you'll say or do next, except that it's bound to be something astonishing." That applies to Greenstreet as well. He shows up in U.S. movies at 61-years-old, weighing around 300 pounds, earns an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for his film debut, makes 22 more films in the next eight years and dies 1ess than 13 years later. When his health prevented him from acting in film or television, he spent two years starring as Rex Stout's famous sleuth in "The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe" on NBC Radio. In his 23 movies, he made three that Huston directed, six that starred Bogart and nine that co-starred Lorre.
"I do like a man who tells you right out he's looking for himself. I do not trust a man who tells you he's not."
"I distrust a closed-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong kind of things. I'll tell youright now I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk."
"There are other means of persuasion other than killing or threats of killing."
"I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, it's possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon."
"I distrust a man who says 'when.' If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does."
"Seventeen years I've wanted that little item and I've been trying to get it. If we must spend another year on the quest…well, sir, it will be an additional expenditure in time of only…five and fifteen seventeenths percent."
"That's an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides. 'Cause as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away."
Before discussing the most important ingredient in The Maltese Falcon, a few more quick general points about the movie. One aspect that slips my mind between viewings of the film concerns its structure. Now, as I wrote at the outset, the puzzle and the plot hardly
matters but what's so unique for a detective story, especially one that many like to claim as the start date for film noir, it sets up its denouement almost like an Agatha Christie novel with all the central characters gathered in one room. What separates The Maltese Falcon from that type of mystery resolution is that Sam Spade in no way functions like a Hercule Poirot or a Miss Marple. What makes it daring in terms of filmmaking is that Falcon runs about one hour and 40 minutes long and nearly the last 30 minutes consists of Spade, Brigid, Gutman, Cairo and Wilmer all in the same room, explaining what happened and keeping an eye on each other until the bird gets delivered by Effie the next morning. It never loses the viewer during that time as it switches tones several times such as when Spade tries to convince the crooks that they need a fall guy to pin the murders on to an angry Wilmer who Sam teases that his associates plan to sell out and Gutman playing games, trying to make it look as if Brigid stole some cash. There's humor, suspense and, of course, the payoff — when the long-sought Maltese Falcon arrives and turns out to be a lead-based fake.
The most important element of The Maltese Falcon though has to be its impact on Humphrey Bogart's career. Brought to Hollywood to re-create his bad guy role in the film version of The Petrified Forest, Bogart had long been frustrated when his Warner Bros. contract stuck him in the rut of second-string hoods, often getting the roles George Raft refused. He knew he could do more and he wanted to do more. Through some chicanery on his part (and some help from John Huston who wrote the screenplay and may well be the person who wrote best for Bogart), Bogie started his transition earlier in 1941 by playing Roy "Mad Dog" Earle in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra. Earle may have been a lifetime crook just out of prison, but he planned a final job so he could go straight but finds his heart broken by a handicapped young woman who chooses to help. For the first time, he got to play a killer that was undeniably human, whose heart could break. Later that year, when Huston got his chance to direct, Bogart got to play Sam Spade (though Huston first sough Raft) and a world-class antihero was born. Bogart enjoys the chance to break the shackles of his stereotype so much, he literally leaps off the screen in The Maltese Falcon. It may have been Huston's directing debut and Greenstreet's film debut, but it might as well have been Bogart's introduction to the public as well because watching him as Sam Spade, he looks as if he is someone that has just been discovered. Bogart made fortysomething films prior to The Maltese Falcon, but Falcon may as well have been his start. I despise the phrase, since in its proper use it means something has gone terribly wrong with your computer, but the movie gave Bogart's film acting career one helluva reboot.
Bogart's Sam Spade lives and breathes cool and witty — or at least that's the image he projects. It's great to watch as he blows up at his first meeting with Gutman because he's not getting the answers he wants and storms out of his hotel room in a rage. Once he's in the hall though, he breaks into an immediate grin and claps his hands, practically skipping to the elevator. However, the meeting did get to him because when he reaches out to push the button, he sees that his hand has the shakes — yet he laughs at that. I've mentioned his sarcastic retorts to Iva and Brigid, but he gives it to everyone. When he's hauled in by the district attorney, hia assistant and a stenographer to answer questions, he unleashes a long and fast spiel, ranting, "Now, both you and the police have as much as accused me of being mixed up in the other night's murders. Well, I've had trouble with both of you before. And as far as I can see my best chance of clearing myself of the trouble you're trying to make for me, is by bringing in the murderers all tied up. And the only chance I've got of catching them, and tying them up, and bringing them in, is by staying as far away as possible from you and the police, because you'd only gum up the works." He then pauses and turns to the stenographer. "You getting this all right, son, or am I goin' too fast for ya?" he asks the stenographer. "No, sir, I'm getting it all right," the man answers. "Good work," Sam replies.
Of course, many of the funniest moments lie in Sam's run-ins with Wilmer, the tiniest, weakest tough guy in movie history. Spade always disarms him, knocks him around or belittles him. It's no wonder that Gutman is willing to sell him out at the end even though he thinks of him as a "son" and it's implied that he may be Gutman's gay lover. When Sam shows up for a meeting and Wilmer is waiting, he needles him as usual. "Keep on riding me and they're gonna be picking iron out of your liver," Wilmer threatens. "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, huh?" Sam responds. That's one change Huston made from Hammett's story: Wilmer still sneaks out but in the story, he kills Gutman out on the street. Another change concerns the film's famous closing line. When the cops ask Sam what the black bird is, he says, "The stuff that dreams are made of." Neither Hammett nor Huston wrote that, but Bogart improvised that reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest. In his book The Films in My Life, Francois Truffaut best summed up how big an impact this film had on Bogie's career. "Now the outlaw became private eye, with a police ID in his pocket just in case. He made the switch and added up the balance: in just under 40 films, he had died a dozen times in the electric chair, and had totaled more than 800 years at hard labor. Before, the only thing that spoke was his gun. Now, he spoke." Now look what we had to look forward to from Bogart: Casablanca, Sahara, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, In a Lonely Place, The African Queen, Beat the Devil, The Caine Mutiny and Sabrina, to name but a few.
John Huston's career went on even longer (and included some overlap) and acted as well as directed. The asterisks indicate films in which he acted only. Some examples: Across the Pacific, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, Moulin Rouge, Beat the Devil, The Misfits, Freud, The List of Adrian Messenger, The Cardinal*, The Night of the Iguana, Myra Breckenridge*, Fat City, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Chinatown*, Breakout*, The Man Who Would Be King, The Wind and the Lion*, Wise Blood, Winter Kills*, Lovesick*, Under the Volcano, Prizzi's Honor and The Dead.
At 70, The Maltese Falcon remains as great as ever and it created one of the great acting-directing teams in John Huston and Humphrey Bogart. Most of their films truly were the stuff that dreams are made of.
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Labels: 40s, Aldrich, Bette, Bogart, Falk, Harlow, Huston, Lorre, Lupino, Mary Astor, Movie Tributes, Neil Simon, P. Sturges, Raft, Remakes, Shakespeare, Truffaut, W. Huston, Walsh, Welles
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Friday, September 23, 2011
The Beautiful American
By Eddie Selover
Why isn’t Dodsworth better known, even among film buffs? It premiered 75 years ago, in 1936 — a great year for movies — and it was nominated for the best picture Academy Award. Maybe if it had won, as it deserved to, more people would be aware of it. The actual winner, an endless, tedious “musical” biography called The Great Ziegfeld, would almost certainly be forgotten today without the dubious distinction of a best picture Oscar. Dodsworth's other unrewarded nominations were for actor, screenplay, direction, supporting actress, and sound recording, and it should have won the first three as well. The only Oscar it did receive was for Richard Day’s outstanding art direction, which conjures up a trip across Europe on a series of Los Angeles sound stages, subtly echoing and intensifying the emotional states of the characters in any given scene.
The story is about Sam Dodsworth, an auto tycoon who has just sold the company that bears his name. We first see him as he stands alone in his office looking out over his factory, with a newspaper announcing the sale…and then as he walks through a crowd of employees who offer their thanks and goodbyes. Due to the immense skill of the director William Wyler, we learn a great deal about Sam in these brief, wordless moments. In the first shot, his slightly slumped and motionless posture expresses his regret, and the fact that he has his back to us makes him seem remote and slightly larger than life. His back is still to us in the next scene, but the camera is tracking close behind, so we experience his point of view as the huge group of blue collar auto workers parts slowly and respectfully. We understand that Sam is a good and beloved man, a leader, who is on the cusp of a major life change and full of mixed feelings about it. We like him and identify with him before we’ve even met him.
He’s driven home, taking a last look at the factory receding behind him. At his big, luxurious but cavernously impersonal house, he’s greeted by Fran, his wife. Fran, at least, has no regrets about Sam's retirement. She tells him that they’re free to start life over from the beginning and she’s eager to go to Europe and leave behind “this half-baked Middle West town.” She’s spent the past 20 years raising their daughter and being a dutiful wife, belonging to dull women’s clubs and keeping up appearances. It’s supposed to be a pep talk for Sam’s sake, but there’s an edge of self pity and resentment in her voice; she brightens up when he calls her on it. She wants to start enjoying life, that’s all, while she still can. After all, she says, “no one takes me for over 32 — 30 even.” And in Europe, a woman such as her is just getting to the age when a man starts taking a serious interest in her. Sam reacts to this ludicrous assertion with a blend of incredulity, awareness and affection, but he doesn’t challenge it. He adores Fran and he’s ready to indulge her and learn more about Europe while he’s at it.
And so the stage is set. You can feel what’s about to happen. The Dodsworths are a happy, devoted couple, but for 20 years that happiness has depended on their roles — he’s had his company and his career, she’s had their daughter and social position. Now, in middle age, the differences are starting to show. He’s open-minded, curious, action oriented, plain spoken and direct, and the giver in their relationship. She’s judgmental, superficial, deeply unhappy with herself and taking it out on others. The movie shows the fissures in their relationship widening sharply and alarmingly, with his patience and affection tested by her deluded and increasingly reckless behavior. She starts out by flirting with gigolos and ends up in full-blown affairs with wildly inappropriate men, subtly and then openly blaming Sam for it all because he's middle-aged and unsophisticated.
On the surface, Dodsworth is a calm, decorous drama about the troubles of two rich white people, but just below the surface, it’s an emotional horror story. Fran isn’t the monster, exactly. It’s her selfishness that’s the beast — and it does as much damage to her as to Sam. “I’m ashamed deep down inside me,” she tells him after her first shipboard flirtation leads her into deeper waters faster than she’d expected. “I don’t trust myself. I’m afraid of myself.” Ruth Chatterton, who plays Fran, gives these lines a harrowing urgency and truth, as she lets us see the baffled, suffering person beneath the foolish, phony-baloney surface. A serious, somewhat upper-crust and “dignified” actress, she achieved greatness just once, with this performance. Not that it helped. Chatterton was 43, a shade too plump, and fiercely intelligent. Three strikes and you’re out—this was her last appearance in an American film. She didn’t even get nominated for an Oscar, probably because her dead-on portrait of vanity and self-deception made a lot of people in Hollywood very uncomfortable.
Walter Huston, as Sam, did get nominated, and won the New York Film Critics’ award for best actor. He’d played the role on stage and was legendary in it, but there’s no trace of staginess in his film performance. It’s not all that easy to play a virtuous character, and Sam isn't just virtuous but a wealthy captain of industry without a trace of greed, ruthlessness or ego. Unlikely, to say the least. Huston disarms us and draws us in by showing the eager young boy who still lives inside the 52-year old man. Sam’s enthusiasms are sudden and unguarded, and so is his vulnerability. He’s not a fool — he has a shrewd understanding of other people, and nothing much gets past him. There have been lots of movies about the Ugly American, but Dodsworth is the Beautiful American encountering corrupt, cynical, decadent old Europe. He’s the idealized American of a vanished age, the sort of guy Ronald Reagan was playing when he acted the part of the president: tolerant, wryly humorous, deceptively tough and patient with the failings of others…to a point. Except that Sam actually begins to crack under the unrelenting pressure of his wife’s emotional abuse, and as played beautifully and sensitively by Huston, he goes through some very convincing stages of grief.
The third great actor in Dodsworth is Mary Astor, playing Edith Cortright, whom the Dodsworths meet on the boat to Europe. Divorced and rootless, she lives in Italy because, she says frankly, it’s cheap. Like Fran, she has reasons to be bitter…but unlike her, she has
accepted life’s inevitable disappointments and found a way to live with them. She’s open and direct like Sam, and becomes a friend to him as Fran begins to pull away. By the end of the film, the movie is all Astor's, and you just want to be rid of Chatterton. In her memoirs, she noted that Chatterton was unhappy with her role, and fought with Wyler, because like Fran, she was faced with losing her youth. Interestingly, both actresses turned to writing novels when their acting careers dried up. In contrast to Chatterton, of course, Astor got the chance to prove her immense talent in dozens of movies over four decades, usually as some kind of bitch: Red Dust, The Palm Beach Story, The Maltese Falcon, Desert Fury, Act of Violence, Return to Peyton Place (no, really) among them. Here, like Huston, she pulls off the difficult task of making decency interesting. She has a wonderful moment when she accidentally catches Fran murmuring sweet nothings with Arnold Iselin (Paul Lukas), a Eurotrash “financier” and ladies' man. Edith, who really does have the old-world sophistication Fran tries to fake, sizes up the situation immediately. “My dear,” she says softly and gravely, looking Fran in the eyes, “don’t.” Astor gives this one word of girl-talk warning the impact of a sudden smack in the face.In real life, Astor was undergoing a personal ordeal during the filming of Dodsworth: her divorce and custody battle were getting ugly and a purported diary full of lurid sexual details was leaked to the press. Years later, she said that playing Edith Cortright saved her — that she drew on Edith’s serenity and groundedness throughout the court case and its screaming headlines. Among other things, Astor underwent the humiliating experience of being called to producer Samuel Goldwyn’s office and being grilled about it by all the major studio heads, for whom she was a popular free-lancer. To his credit, Goldwyn kept her on the picture. In fact, the whole movie — a courageous exploration of serious themes without big stars or any other box-office concession — is to his credit. It wasn't a financial success, but it was an artistic one; in a career full of tripe and misfires, this film and The Best Years of Our Lives are Goldwyn's monuments.
Dodsworth could have been made today, except for the sad fact that movies this beautifully written, directed and acted are rarer even now than they were then.
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Labels: 30s, Mary Astor, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Theater, W. Huston, Wyler
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Monday, June 14, 2010
“Do what? Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which one of dese?”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
(Warning: possible spoilers contained within)
The year was 1985, and though I really didn’t need to take any more college electives I had decided to add a film class to my schedule that semester simply because I’d never experienced one before. The instructor of that class had very eclectic tastes in movies, but one of the films he unspooled for the students was John Huston’s Fat City (1972), a warts-and-all look at “the fight game” that in retrospect was one of the better choices he had selected for what was again a most diverse lineup.
He and I discussed Huston’s work after class, and I recall telling him that John was one of my favorite directors; we debated back-and-forth such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The African Queen (1951). The professor then asked me if I had taken the opportunity to see Huston’s latest film — a jet-black Mafia comedy entitled Prizzi’s Honor (1985), based on the novel by The Manchurian Candidate author Richard Condon. “You really need to see it,” he enthused. “It’s simply his best work in years.”
And he wasn’t being hyperbolic. Twenty-five years ago on this date, John Huston’s penultimate film — about the ill-fated romance between a pair of contract killers — was released to theaters and it still remains one of the director’s finest cinematic achievements.
Hit man Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) is in the employ of the powerful Prizzi family, headed up by the aging but still formidable Don Corrado Prizzi (William Hickey). The daughter of one of Don Corrado’s sons, Dominic (Lee Richardson), is getting married and as a member of the “family,” Partanna is on hand to make certain the wedding goes off without a hitch. During the ceremony, he spots a woman (Kathleen Turner) in the “cheap seats” whom he tries to make time with during the reception — but she disappears shortly after, and Charley desperately tries to learn who she was. He finally meets up with the mystery woman — she’s Irene Walker, and she states that she’s employed as a tax consultant. Partanna learns from his father Angelo (John Randolph) that Irene is not who she claims to be — she’s actually a contract killer, in the same business as Charley. With mixed emotions as to what to do in this most unusual of romantic situations, Partanna listens to his heart and not his head…and the two of them get married.
Things get rocky after the couple tie the knot. Charley learns that Irene’s former husband, a man named Marxie Heller (Joseph Ruskin), was involved in the theft of a huge sum of money from a casino in which the Prizzi family has an interest...and that Irene may have possibly been in on the theft as well. Furthermore, Charley and Irene end up “working together” on a job that involves kidnapping a banker (Michael Lombardi) who’s stealing from the Prizzis — and while this is going down, Irene is forced to shoot a witness to the kidnapping…who turns out to be the wife of one of New York’s finest. When Don Corrado learns from his granddaughter Maerose (Anjelica Huston) — a former flame of Charley’s — of Irene’s participation in the casino theft, he confronts Irene and insists she pay a stiff penalty to make things right. But with the pressure being applied on the family’s business interests by both the police — who insist that the family turn over the person responsible for the murder of the witness — and rival families, Charley is informed by Don Corrado and his son Eduardo (Robert Loggia) that Irene must be offered up as a sacrificial lamb for the sake of the family. Nothing personal — it’s just “business.”
When I watched Prizzi’s Honor for the first time, I knew I had seen an entertaining movie and its subject matter — involving the conniving machinations of a Mafia family — suggested to me that my mother, who has long since romanticized the Cosa Nostra (“One thing about the Mafia, they take care of their own” is a phrase she often uses), would flip over this film. So I went back to see it a second time, accompanied by both my mother and father…and my mother’s reaction was stony silence. She hated the film. My father, on the other hand, thought it was brilliant — and this from a man who doesn’t express anything resembling a sense of humor when the need arises.
I’ve seen Honor several more times since my original trip to the theater, and to me it’s a movie that becomes more and more brilliant with each successive viewing. At the time of Honor’s release, Jack Nicholson was riding high after coming off a best supporting actor Oscar win two years previous for his turn as the laconically lascivious astronaut Garrett Breedlove in the four-hankie weeper Terms of Endearment (1983). His interpretation of the dull-witted Partanna is, in my opinion, one of his all-time best film roles — a masterful comic performance in which his portrayal of a stereotypical dese-dem-and-dose mobster (similar to the kind played by actors like Nat Pendleton, Warren Hymer or Guinn “Big Boy” Williams in the films of the 1930s) masks a very dangerous individual to be around (the police only half-jokingly refer to Charley as “the All-American hood”). Film historian Danny Peary once posited in his wonderful book Alternative Oscars that Nicholson — nominated for his performance as best actor — should have taken home the trophy for his first-rate turn…and I’m not entirely unconvinced that Peary isn’t right. (It certainly wasn’t without precedent — Nicholson won a Golden Globe and recognition from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics and the Boston Society of Film Critics for his outstanding performance.)
Kathleen Turner also is sensational (and also won a Golden Globe), using her Body Heat smolder to make the mysterious Irene a most entrancing female at the film’s beginning…and then after we learn more about her, bringing in much of the appealing qualities of the heroine she played in Romancing the Stone (1984) to make her someone to root for — and ultimately someone to mourn when her Irene meets her tragic fate. Turner didn’t get nominated, but Anjelica Huston (as the treacherous Maerose) did for best supporting actress…and won, continuing a tradition of Oscar wins in the Huston family that began with her father and grandfather Walter’s trophy take-homes for the 1948 film classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. William Hickey’s turn as the cadaverous Don Corrado also snagged a nom; all-in-all, Honor racked up eight selections in the 1985 Academy Awards race, including best picture, best cirector and best zdapted screenplay (Condon and Janet Roach).
Hickey’s pallid Mafia don is a perfect example of what my instructor liked to refer to as Huston’s “flair for the grotesque,” and though it sort of typecast the actor in “crazy old man roles” (One Crazy Summer [1986], National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation [1989]) it made me curious to seek out his earlier turns in films such as A Hatful of Rain (1957), Happy Birthday, Wanda June 1971) and Huston’s earlier Wise Blood (1979). The same applies to John Randolph, an actor who before I saw him in Honor was recognizable for his turn as father to Robert Hays in the short-lived sitcom Angie (1979-80). His finely modulated work as Charley’s fiercely loyal but pragmatic “Pop” led me to discoveries of previous performances in classic films such as Seconds (1966) and Pretty Poison (1968). The beauty of Honor is the fine casting all around — including Loggia, Lombardi and a brief appearance by noir icon Lawrence Tierney as a cop who explains to the Prizzis that it won’t be “business as usual” if they insist on maintaining their silence as to who croaked the cop’s wife.
Two years after the release of Prizzi’s Honor, John Huston’s final film The Dead (1987) was released to theaters — and though I wasn’t particularly wowed when I saw it the first time (in the same multiplex that I saw Honor) subsequent viewings have convinced me that it’s a most exquisite work, and that it was incredible that Huston went out on such a high note (a rare occurrence among film directors). But even if Huston hadn’t managed to hit one last triple before retiring from the game, Honor would stand as a lasting testament to his talent.
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, and has been known to use Jack Nicholson’s falling-down funny Prizzi’s observation: “If Marxie Heller’s so f**kin' smart, how come he's so f**kin' dead?” on many an occasion…substituting “Marxie Heller” with the name of the individual who’s ticked him off, of course.
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Labels: 80s, A. Huston, Huston, K. Turner, Movie Tributes, Nicholson, Oscars, W. Huston
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Thursday, June 18, 2009
Your word isn't what counts, it's who you give it to
By Edward Copeland
You know a film is powerful when it's controversial when it opens and when a restored version is planned for re-release 25 years later, an MPAA ratings dispute over its violent images delays the re-release until it was 26 years old. Now 40 years old, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch not only retains its power, the film grows in magnificence. If re-watching it evokes anything negative, it's the sadness that great films such as this hardly ever get re-releases anymore, affording movie fans the chance to see movies made before their time in a theater. As theaters move toward digital, it's probably sadly passed. Still, DVD and a good home setup keep The Wild Bunch vibrantly alive, if not ideally viewed.
You can't begin any conversation about The Wild Bunch (or Sam Peckinpah) without inevitably hitting the topic of violence and whether or not the film glorifies it or not but watching it again, it's beyond me how
anyone can see it that way. In fact, this time it seemed to me that Peckinpah builds the violence in the film to the crescendo of its finale. There is some use of slow-motion in the film's earlier gunbattles, the killings are quicker, more typical of what audiences are used to seeing in normal Westerns, without lingering on the wounds or carnage. Each subsequent encounter ups the ante leading to the famous finale, where the bloodshed contains the most meaning because the fight has the most meaning. When the bunch goes out in their blaze of glory, they aren't involved in a theft or running from a heist or a quick act of revenge, they are doing it because morally it's the correct thing for them to do, no matter that it is a suicide mission. That final melee is where you see the agony, the anguish and the pain. It's the way Peckinpah has set it up and the way it had to go because it needs to unfold this way for the characters to become flesh-and-blood people the audience cares about instead of just outlaws of a dying breed trying to hang on to a dying lifestyle in a fast-changing era.As The Wild Bunch opens, the viewer can't really be certain what time period they are in. The military uniforms that the bunch are wearing seem to
be early 20th century Army issue, but everything else seems to be from any Old West time period. It isn't until nearly an hour into the film when the would-be Mexican despot arrives in a fancy automobile and the bunch reacts with amazement and speak of reports of vehicles like birds that might be used in the next war that you realize we are several years into the 20th century and the Western lifestyle the bunch has enjoyed is passing the aging men by. Pike Bishop (William Holden), the group's leader admits that they aren't getting any younger and it's time they start "thinking beyond their guns." The impetus for this reappraisal of their lifework comes after the gang's latest assault on their favorite archenemy, the railroad. Peckinpah's opening setpiece really gets the movie galloping as we are introduced to the ruthlessness of the gang, taking the railroad's office as well as the equal ruthlessness of the railroad, who have staged a setup involving a team of bounty hunters in place to take out the bunch once and for all. There is no easy route taken of making the violent gang likable protagonists from the beginning. They are willing to leave an accomplice behind to almost certain death and kill another one with emotionless efficiency. This is their job and fun times come later. The fly in the ointment turns out to be the unexpected temperance union parade by a local church. When the siege is over, there are far more dead civilians than there are crooks or bounty
hunters and the clergyman (Dub Taylor) lets the railroadman know it, but he's indifferent as big businessmen continue to be to this day as his interests and bottom line supersede the public's. This "do it on the cheap" mentality extends to the bounty hunters that the railroad hires. The leaders is a former member of the bunch, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who has been promised an end to his prison sentence if he brings them back dead. Unfortunately, as help he's been given a motley group of misfits led by Strother Martin, who aren't above pillaging the corpses of the accidentally slain. Martin proves to be comic relief extraordinaire, especially with his large crucifix hanging around his neck. Ryan's performance as Thornton, the bounty hunter whose heart lies with his prey, grows deeper and better with each viewing. The actors who comprise the bunch are a strong ensemble. Three had won Oscars by the time The Wild
Bunch was made and a fourth would win one two years later. In nearly every case, it's one of the actors' strongest performances and, in one case, I consider it his best. Holden is great as Pike and of course the list of great roles he played are legendary spanning from Sunset Blvd. to Network and many in between. Pike Bishop belongs in that hallowed company as Holden gives him a taciturn strength but isn't afraid to show his vulnerabilities and the toll time has taken on the robber. Often forgotten, since he's not as active in the gang's criminal exploits, is the great Edmond O'Brien as Sykes, who used to ride and kill with the best of them but now basically holds down the fort while the bunch is away. O'Brien is a riot, even if at times he borders on cliche and seems to be channelling Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. More comedy is provided by Warren Oates and
Ben Johnson as the drinkin', whorin' Gorch brothers. (In the DVD commentary, one of the Peckinpah experts mentions that Johnson's wife never let him return to the sites of their Mexican scenes because of the scenes of his character's lechery depicted there. TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer even saluted Oates' character with a vampire bounty hunter with cowboy sensibility named Lyle Gorch on a couple of episodes. The youngest and newest member of the gang, the one who gets them in trouble and helps them find their moral compass, is Angel (Jaime Sanchez), a Mexican who wants to help his people get out from under the thumb of the minidictators who ruled Mexico at the time. Politics is anathema to the others but when they witness the mistreatment that goes on of the poor, eventually even the aging crooks discover there are some fights worth joining. Of course, the
second most important member of the bunch is Dutch (Ernest Borgnine). Though Borgnine has given many good performances, including his Oscar-winning one in Marty, it's clear to me after watching The Wild Bunch again that this is easily his greatest performance. He's always the one who seems to have the smartest take, the most regrets, and Dutch gets the others to realize their obligations when the final battle comes about. The grin that Borgnine lets loose before the gunfire is a sight to behold as are his quieter moments, turning his back when he's afraid to admit something tender to Pike or he's just sitting on a stoop whittling waiting for the others to finish their debauchery.As all conversations about The Wild Bunch inevitably focus on the violence, I think we should end this anniversary discussing those aspects that are too often overlooked. In addition to the performances, not
enough is made of the comic relief (the last images of the bunch are of them laughing at better times) as when the Mexican generale lets a machine gun go wild despite his German visitor's plea that he must place it upon a tripod. There's also the imagery. The kids torturing the scorpions gets cited often, but there also are nice touches such as a shot of a mother breastfeeding her baby while a belt of ammunition hangs across her torso. Finally, there is the suspense. Like all great suspense scenes, no matter how many times you see them, you still wonder what will happen, as when that wagon gets stuck on the bridge that's already set to detonate. I'd also be remiss if I didn't shower some praise on some of the film's other collaborators such as Peckinpah's co-writer Walon Green, the vivid photography of Lucien Ballard, the fine score by Jerry Fielding and the absolutely irreplaceable editing of Lou Lombardo.
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Labels: 60s, B. Johnson, Borgnine, Dub Taylor, Holden, Movie Tributes, Oates, Peckinpah, Robert Ryan, W. Huston
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Sunday, August 05, 2007
Loving Huston not temporary
By Edward CopelandBack in 1985, before Goodfellas and The Sopranos really mixed mob stories with jet black comedy, the great director John Huston, in his second-to-last film, brought to the screen an adaptation of Richard Condon's Mafia satire Prizzi's Honor, complete with great performances and some of the most memorable lines ever collected in a single film. Huston may have been in the twilight of his days, but his filmmaking prowess was as strong as ever. Huston still had one more great one in him too (The Dead, which he always intended to be his swan song, came out in 1987). Still, of his late work, Prizzi's Honor is the one nearest to my heart. There was such synchronicity in Huston directing his father to a supporting actor Oscar back in 1948 for Treasure of the Sierra Madre and then doing the same for his daughter Anjelica in 1985's Prizzi's Honor.
The downside: Huston didn't get a directing Oscar for Prizzi's Honor and you could read the disappointment on his face when he lost. What a clusterfuck the 1985 directing Oscar race was. First, as Steven Spielberg tried to make his first "grownup" movie with The Color Purple, they gave that film 11 nominations but none for Spielberg. Then on top of Huston's much-deserved nomination, they also named the master Akira Kurosawa for Ran, but the Academy gave the directing prize to Sydney Pollack's uninspired work in the equally uninspired Out of Africa.
Like most great mob stories, you have to stage a wedding scene and that's where the real story of Prizzi's Honor begins following three brief prologues tracing the formative years of eventual Prizzi family soldier Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson, in one of the greatest examples of him disappearing completely into a role
without any of the typical Jack mannerisms). First, Charley's father Angelo (John Randolph) shows off his newborn son to Don Corrado Prizzi (William Hickey), who swears to him in the nursery that he will be a second father to Charley and always will protect his future. We also get a glimpse of young Charley as a Boy Scout at Christmas excitedly opening a present of brass knuckles before as an adult he's formally sworn in to the "family." Then we flash forward to the wedding of one of the don's granddaughters and nearly all the characters of note are present at the wedding. Beginning with a shot of the stained glass, John Huston does a wonderfully slow pullback to the strains of "Ave Maria," stopping briefly to visually introduce the main characters. 
There is the now aged don, (we're never certain whether he's napping or dead in the pew); the father of the bride Dominic (Lee Richardson, photo at left); the uncle of the bride Eduardo (Robert Loggia); and the return of the scandalous Maerose (Anjelica Huston), spurned by father Dominic over a busted romance in the past with Charley, who also is present and spots a stranger, a vision of beauty in the church balcony (Kathleen Turner). The cathedral's pews also are filled with many members of New York's finest, on the dole of the Brooklyn-based Prizzi family. The ties between the police and the Prizzis are so strong, Charley even hitches a ride to the wedding reception in a squad car. Of course, Charley would want to get there fast since he's on a mission: To find out who that beauty in the lavender dress was. He asks his ex-fiancee Maerose, who has no idea but still finds herself getting the cold shoulder from her father. "Screw them," Charley tells her. "They don't deserve you." Then he spots her and asks her to dance, neglecting to get her name before she is told she has a phone call and vanishes once again.
Once the smitten Charley gets back to his apartment and makes a few calls, trying to determine who that beauty was (including waking up an annoyed Maerose), he prepares to leave again only to run in to the cops who have to take him in for questioning about a hit that occurred while he was at the wedding. Of course, his pop gets him out in no time since Charley truly is ignorant of this particular crime. Angelo explains to his son that they had an outside hitter do the job while everyone had an airtight alibi at the wedding. Later, back at
his apartment gets a call from an Irene Walker, who turns out to be the woman in the lavender dress and apologizes for her sudden departure. Charley immediately asks to see her, but Irene informs him that she had to rush home to California suddenly so Charley sets up a date on the West Coast for the next day, adding yet another layer to Huston's brilliant comedy: the difficulty of long-distance relationships. Once there, Charley wastes little time in declaring his love for Irene, even after she informs him that she's married, though her husband walked out years ago and she doesn't even know where he is and hopes he stays lost. It's here we learn that Charley is a connoisseur of magazines and relationship speak. When he declares his love for Irene and she mistakenly says she's "in love" with him too, Charley gets upset. "In love" is temporary, he tells her, some sort of fleeting chemical reaction that can evaporate. He loves her in a concrete, permanent way. "In love? Who needs it?" he tells her.Once he's back in Brooklyn, he shows his father the photo of Irene and while pop is happy for him, he sets out to start burning it up. Charley is puzzled until Angelo explains that Irene was the outside hitter they'd brought in to do the job while they were at the wedding. Pop questions his choice in women, but things are
about to get even more complicated. Apparently, some of their Vegas people have been conducting a scam, skimming from the Prizzis and Charley needs to fly out there and take care of it. One of the pair has already turned up dead, presumably whacked by the other, Marxie Heller, for a bigger slice of the pie. Charley finds Heller and roughs him up. "I think you broke my wrist," Heller complains. "You won't need it," Charley tells him before taking him to his garage to finish him off. Charley then waits for the return of Mrs. Heller. Unfortunately, she turns out to be Irene. She insists to Charley that Marxie had just returned and she was going to ask him for a divorce and she had no part in the scam. "If you was anyone else, I'd blow you away," Charley tells her. Later, when she suggests taking part in a kidnapping plot, Charley laments that he didn't get married so his wife could go on working.To avoid revealing too much more in the way of plot details for those who haven't seen Prizzi's Honor, I thought I'd instead praise one of my favorite screenplays of all time. Richard Condon who wrote the novel (and the novel of The Manchurian Candidate) co-wrote the screenplay with Janet Roach and there are so many memorable lines of dialogue that it's remarkable. (Condon also wrote the novel Winter Kills, whose film version by William Richert gave John Huston one of his most fun acting roles.) In fact, the lines were so great, they were used in the film's Oscar ad campaign. A few examples:
Irene: Charley, I've been doin' three to four hits a year for the past couple of years, most at full pay.
Charley: That many?
Irene: Well, it's not many when you consider the size of the population.
Maerose: So let's do it.
Charley: With all the lights on?
Maerose: Yeah. Right here. On the Oriental. With all the lights on.
Charley: How can I live with this? I gotta do something about it. I gotta straighten it out.
Maerose: Then do.
Charley: Do what? Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which one of dese?
Maerose: Marry her, Charley. Just because she's a thief and a hitter doesn't mean she's not a good woman in all the other departments.
Irene: (discussing her car, an Excalibur) The Japanese make them in England for the Arab market. It's a great California car.
Charley: It's a great anyplace car.
Irene: (imitating her husband Marxie) The Jews in this business are bad enough, sweetheart, but them Sicilians! They'd rather eat their children than part with money and they are very fond of children."
Charley: If Marxie Heller's so fuckin' smart, how come he's so fuckin' dead?
William Hickey was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for his great work as Don Corrado Prizzi, yet aside from the prologue, he doesn't speak until nearly an hour into the film, but boy is it worth the wait. Until then,
he appears as walking (or sometimes sitting) death, usually with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Don't let Corrado's ghostly pallor or odd, halting way of speaking fool you. He bears the title don for a reason. He can seem kindly and sinister at the same time when he offers someone a cookie and he can strike as quickly as a rattlesnake, just when grabbing someone's hand. Hickey's performance is one of the most unusual I'd ever seen up until that point and I relished every odd inflection he came up with when saying things such as "This killing of the police captain's wife is costing us ALL TOO MUCH," which each one-syllable word rising in tenor and force. He can even say a word as common as Nevada and make it sound as if you've never heard it before. Of course, Hickey didn't win. One of his competitors was even the actor who played one of his sons in Prizzi's Honor, Robert Loggia, though his nomination came for Jagged Edge. Hickey lost to Don Ameche in Cocoon, when he wasn't even the best supporting actor in Cocoon. Life isn't fair and neither are the Oscars.Anjelica Huston has a remarkable pedigree: Daughter of John Huston, granddaughter of Walter Huston. Like
he did for her grandfather, John Huston gave Anjelica a remarkable role in a film and she deservedly won an Oscar for it. (I wonder, if John were still here, could he do anything about his son Danny's lack of acting talent?) The character of Maerose Prizzi shares much in common with her onscreen grandfather in her ability to manipulate and scheme to get what she wants. Maerose, shunned by her
father and her family because of a scandal she caused when engaged to Charley years earlier, is eager to get back into the fold. "The calendar takes care of everything," one character says and that is something Maerose is counting on since, as Charley explains to Irene, she can't even go to Brooklyn unless it's a special occasion. Maerose is ready to play every card and angle she can, regardless of the consequences. She gets her grandfather to intervene, even though the wily old man knows what she's up to, and sets out to get her father, Charley and Irene in hot water as long as things work out for her in the end. Anjelica Huston is brilliant and her Oscar win is one of the best of all time.
I've spent a lot of time discussing the great script and performances that help make Prizzi's Honor such a special film, but since this is for a John Huston blog-a-thon, I feel I need to talk more about what he brought to this film. The pacing is great and there are many interesting shots and use of the camera, but nothing too showy. Huston was not one to show off, but when he did unusual takes, it was to serve the story. There were numerous great sequences, many aided by an original score by Alex North as well as the use of classical pieces by greats such as Rossini and Puccini. He especially used it well in the entire sequence involving the kidnapping of a bank executive, one of the most fluid sequences Huston ever filmed. He also mastered the deft blending of the comic moments with more suspenseful elements, right down to the film's climax.
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Labels: 80s, A. Huston, Blog-a-thons, Huston, K. Turner, Kurosawa, Movie Tributes, Nicholson, Oscars, Spielberg, Sydney Pollack, W. Huston
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