Monday, November 21, 2011
The Last Stand
By Eddie Selover
They Died With Their Boots On, which premiered 70 years ago today, is the eighth and final pairing of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. It's not as famous as some of the others — for example, the pirate swashbuckler Captain Blood or the bejeweled Technicolor storybook Adventures of Robin Hood — but it deserves to be. Those are happy, exuberant movies; this is a tragedy of slowly unfolding power that leaves you unsettled and upset. It's the rare adventure movie that gets under your skin; it achieves its epic qualities through emotion rather than action. The movie is based on the story of George Armstrong Custer, the general whose command of 500 cavalrymen was overwhelmed by ten times as many Native Americans in 1876. Never were the words "based on" more of a euphemism. As history, Boots On bears only a passing resemblance to actual events — in fact the more you know about Custer, the more outrageous the film's portrait becomes. Virtually every event is twisted almost 180 degrees in order to turn a vainglorious and highly flawed man into a noble figure.
Yet even as the film moves toward its barroom-painting view of Custer and his men staging their heroic last stand surrounded by savages, it has to explain how he got there. It does so by setting him up as vain, callow, physically daring but reckless and prone to troublemaking. Cleverly, the filmmakers play the first half of the movie as a light comedy, in which Custer gets himself into one mess after another and strikes ludicrous poses trying to act like a bigger man than he is. We see him making mistakes and extricating himself through charm and luck; instinctively we know it's only a matter of time before that luck runs out.
The fact that the same thing was true of Flynn in real life gives the movie an unusual resonance. He was at least as vain as Custer, and easily as reckless; his road to fame and success was just as fast and fortunate, and left him just as unprepared to deal with real challenges. During the making of this movie, Flynn had a couple of underage girls on his yacht, an escapade that led to a long and embarrassing trial for statutory rape that turned him into a public joke after the premiere — particularly after it was revealed in court that Flynn made love with his socks on. His pre-movie life of adventure had left him with an assortment of
chronic maladies that resulted in his being declared 4-F and ineligible for the draft. Because Warner Bros. hushed this up, the public thought him a slacker for not serving in World War II as other stars did. Personal and professional disasters came faster and faster, and his drinking and drug use kept pace. Eventually booze, narcotics and dissipation made him a puffy, slurring, dead-eyed zombie before they finally killed him at the age of 50. Some presentiment of this terrible fate seems to hang over Flynn throughout Boots On. He gives one of his most sensitive and aware performances. His eyes often look wide with fright and he seems more attuned to other actors than usual. Often he pauses and hesitates before taking action, as if genuinely unsure of himself, and when he does act, it's always a shade too swiftly. He's as dashing as ever, but often he dashes right into a brick wall. Some of the credit for this must go to the great Raoul Walsh, here directing Flynn for the first time, after the actor had quarreled with his usual director, Michael Curtiz (the fact that the much-younger Flynn was married to Curtiz's ex-wife Lili Damita is strangely never mentioned in accounts of the poisonously bad relationship between the two men). Curtiz had directed Flynn like a toy action figure, throwing him into the middle of clanging swords and galloping horses and trusting him to sail above it all. Walsh's action scenes were rougher than Curtiz's, less choreographed and clever, and always suggestive of real threat — as you might expect of a man who had lost an eye in an accident.At this point in her career, de Havilland had developed some serious ambitions and no longer wanted to be the clinging heroine of Flynn's boys-own-adventure movies. She only made the film at Flynn's express request, after they had cleared the air of several years of misunderstanding. By all accounts, including hers, they were seriously in love, but their relationship was undermined continually by his
immaturity and instability. Boots On is the only one of their films in which their characters have a real arc, moving from youthful high spirits into a serious relationship, into marriage and ultimately the tragedy of his death. To sweeten the deal for de Havilland, the producer Hal Wallis brought in the fine screenwriter Lenore Coffee for rewrites that rounded out the character of Libby Custer and made her a flesh-and-blood woman rather than a cardboard cutout. De Havilland responds with one of her best and most consistent performances. In their final scene, she helps him prepare for the battle of Little Big Horn. Both know he's not coming back, and they can barely look at each other while mouthing cheery sentiments they clearly don't believe for a second. They're almost getting away with it when he finds her diary and begins reading it aloud. In it, she confesses her terror over unshakable premonitions of his death. I must have written that every time you left for battle, she says. "Of course," he murmurs softly. They say their goodbyes and he leaves; she's rigid against a wall for support. The camera pulls in suddenly on her and she faints from the accumulated tension. Fainting in movies usually is phony as hell, but this time we've been holding our breaths too, and it feels like a natural reaction. In real life, de Havilland knew she'd never work with Flynn again, and she felt that he knew it as well. The scene is almost unbearable in its poignancy, for both the characters and the actors. Such is its enduring power that at a screening 40 years later, de Havilland, then about 65, walked out in the middle of it. She went to the lobby, sat down and began to cry.
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Labels: 40s, Curtiz, de Havilland, Erroll Flynn, Walsh
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Saturday, July 16, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Ginger Rogers
By Josh R
The studio system of the 1930s and '40s worked to both the advantage and detriment of those who lived and worked under its iron rule. Actors were under contract; the studio brass determined what films they appeared in, which roles they played and how they were presented to the public. Many didn’t mind or notice the degree of micromanagement that came with being a contract player — others rebelled against it. By the mid-'30s, Bette Davis had become increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the films to which she was being assigned and went to court in an effort to be released from her contract with Warner Bros. The bid failed, but earned her the respect of Jack Warner, who paid closer attention to her demands and gave her better material to work with as a result. A decade later, Olivia de Havilland — feeling like an ossified Dresden shepherdess after so many hours spent in frilly costumes being wooed by Errol Flynn — successfully managed to break her contract with Warners, in effect ushering in the era of free agency. Actors now had the ability to go their own way, choose their own projects and challenge their accepted personas in ways parochial studio heads never would have sanctioned.
It is fortunate — extremely fortunate — that the studio system was firmly in place during the heyday of Ginger Rogers, for there is the definitive example of a performer whose ambitions and tastes were almost completely at odds with her strengths and talents. Indeed, she was talented; so much so that it’s depressing to contemplate what kind of a career she might have had if left to her own devices — to say nothing of what would have been lost in the process. Certainly, she wouldn’t have stuck around for nine films with Fred Astaire, nor have appeared in as many comedies. If you’d asked Rogers what she considered her crowning achievement as an artist, she would have undoubtedly cited Kitty Foyle, a prosaic tearjerker that earned her an Academy Award and
only served to illustrate how inexplicably dull she could be when doing what she judged to be “serious acting.” After that win, she had more autonomy, turning down Ball of Fire because she felt it to be derivative; she had passed on His Girl Friday the year before. She did get to play Dolly Madison in a stately biopic of the former first lady, and always recalled Now, Voyager as “the one that got away.” The role she tried the hardest for during her tenure at RKO was Queen Elizabeth I in Mary of Scotland, going so far as to disguise herself for a screen test conducted under an assumed identity; the incredulity with which her efforts were met was enough to merit a Louella Parsons column, written in the spirit of a resounding guffaw. If the legacy she’d envisioned for herself was largely not to be — and there were probably days when she reckoned to herself that Greer Garson was the lucky one — the career RKO fashioned around her nimble footwork, trouper’s pluck and comic finesse is a cineaste’s delight and not to be sneered at by those who equate substance with seriousness. At her very best, Rogers was lighter than air; locked in Fred’s embrace, she didn’t simply move, she floated. When she struck out on her own, in a handful of roles that spoke to her spirit and sense of playfulness, the takeoff was just as smooth, and allowed her to travel at altitudes unmatched by all but a few gifted comediennes.
The driving force behind Virginia Katherine McMath — steering her firmly through the eddies and tributaries of the raucous vaudeville circuit to Broadway and beyond — was Mrs. Lela Rogers, whose plans for her tiny daughter were never less than awesome in scope. Mother was, by most accounts, a real piece of work; she remained permanently tethered to her offspring throughout her life and career, to the occasional chagrin of studio executives, directors and the five sons-in-law who came and went. She passed on to Ginger her ambition, reactionary conservatism and acute consciousness of class; if Ginger’s taste and judgment were occasionally suspect, her thinking usually was a reflection of Lela’s priorities. Fledgling success in vaudeville led to a stage career, culminating with the lead role in George & Ira Gershwin’s Girl Crazy. While Ethel Merman stopped the show belting out “Who Could Ask for Anything More?”, camera-ready Ginger was the one who caught the attention of Hollywood talent scouts. She worked hard in a variety of inconsequential parts — before teaming up with Astaire, she had already appeared in nearly 20 films. Two bouncy, lavish Busby Berkeley musicals showcased her to great effect — first, covered in shimmering gold pieces and singing “We’re in the Money” in Gold Diggers of 1933, then squinting through a monocle and trying not to let her English accent slip in 42nd Street. Those films boosted her stock while testifying to the fact that the camera served her well; but a key element still was missing in furthering her ascent to stardom.
Flying Down to Rio was the game-changer, bringing with it the missing piece of the puzzle and the ideal yin to her yang. She and Astaire played secondary roles but effectively stole the film from its advertised stars with their otherworldly synchronicity of motion and seamless give-and-take. The powers at RKO knew a good thing
when they saw one and fashioned an entire series around the couple; if the films were largely interchangeable, their teamwork never became stale, or lost a fraction of its appeal for audiences. The Gay Divorcee, Roberta, Top Hat, Swing Time, Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance?, Carefree and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle provided welcome refuge from the bleak realities of the Depression; filmgoers were mesmerized by the deft movements of two figures gliding in perfect unison through an art deco paradise where ugly truths — war, poverty, privation — were never acknowledged. Katharine Hepburn famously said of the pair that “he gave her class, she gave him sex,” a canny assessment of the extent to which they both complemented and were enhanced by one another. Astaire, the perfectionist with an overweening attention to detail, lent Rogers an elegance and sophistication she may have lacked on her own, but she did more than make him seem virile and attractive. Her wry, unpretentious humor grounded him, making his rarefied persona more relaxed and consequently more accessible than it could have been otherwise; both on and off the dance floor, they each seemed to be basking in the other’s glow. Another famous quote — attributed to so many different people that it’s impossible to trace its true origin — insisted that Rogers had the tougher task of the two, since “she did everything he did, backwards — and in high heels.” Even more taxing may have been the effort it took to keep her million dollar smile fixed firmly in place through film after grinding film. Fred was too exacting, too controlling, and after the first few outings, both the material and the routine had grown increasingly repetitive; less than midway into their partnership, Ginger had become restless, fixing her sights on better things. Even before the duo had been dissolved officially, Rogers had been testing the waters as a solo act. The results were variable, but produced at least one genuine classic; there was a charge and intelligence to Rogers’ work in Stage Door, Gregory La Cava’s 1937 comic drama set in a theatrical boarding house, that the actress would never again equal in her career. Working alongside Hepburn, the other major female star at
RKO in the 1930s, brought out the best in her. It was a notoriously unfriendly rivalry; indeed, the lore surrounding their polite feud is just as entertaining, if less imbued with camp value, than the Davis-Crawford skirmishes of the mid-1960s. Rogers was jealous of Hepburn for several reasons; the latter had class, pedigree and commanded a much higher measure of regard than her stablemate. For her part, Hepburn — even more arrogant and aloof in Ginger’s presence than was the norm — probably was given to wonder why she had all the respect while Ginger enjoyed all the adoration; Rogers was a top draw with the public at the same time than Hepburn was continually at risk of being branded box office poison. It was necessary — perhaps predestined — that the two should meet in the celluloid arena at least once in their storied careers, and that the ensuing battle should give off sparks. Kate, along with everyone else, believed herself to be the better actress of the two, and made it known in subtle ways that she didn’t really consider Ginger an equal — or a threat. Ginger was self-conscious, insulted and, ultimately, not one to back down from a fight. When the two traded barbs in their scenes together, audiences were treated to an authentic battling rhythm fueled by genuine animosity and a spirit of competition. Maybe it took a slap in the face and a challenge to bring out both the toughness and the vulnerability in Ginger Rogers — whether that’s true or not, Stage Door represented her best work as an actress, demonstrating how easily she could segue from humor to pathos and back again without missing a beat.As wisecracking chorine Jean Maitland, Rogers showed that she had a devastating way with a quip — her delivery of the film’s zingy one-liners was so quick, sharp and assured that it often sounded like inspired improvisation. Viewing it today, her performance seems even more skillful given how much emotional complexity she brings to the role without sacrificing any of its humor. Jean is a tough cookie to be sure, but not immune to experiencing disappointment or, worse still, losing hope. The aspiring actresses at The Footlights Club live a precarious, uncertain existence — Rogers, more than any of the other performers, allows us to understand that comic banter is a necessary distraction from the fact that, at any moment, the girls might have their dreams and livelihoods taken away from them and fall off the grid. It’s not that Rogers simply lets us see the fear and fragility behind the snazzy retorts of these tart-tongued dames; she shows just how inextricably linked those seemingly self-contradictory properties are. She’s a smart-aleck blonde with a chip on her shoulder — as with any stand-up comedian, it’s the chip that’s the source of her comedy, even if the reality behind it is a source of hurt.
The success with Stage Door propelled her to other comedy outings, which proved the public’s fondness for her was not predicated solely on her dancing skills. She was delightful with James Stewart in Vivacious Lady, and scored a huge hit with Bachelor Mother; but the siren call of drama (to be more accurate, melodrama) and its attendant prestige tugged at her with a greater insistence. She dyed her trademark platinum tresses a dull shade of brown and got her Oscar for Kitty Foyle — for serious hair and serious acting — though, in truth,
she was much better in Primrose Path, a shantytown drama released that same year. Her earnest, unimaginative turn as Kitty the lovelorn shop girl — a blue collar sweetheart who suffers and overcomes — didn’t betray so much as an ounce of the spark and savvy that informed her best performances, but was nonetheless a solid piece of work; The Academy’s confusion of professionalism with excellence doubtless propelled her to seek out similarly themed exercises and tear-stained nobility soon became her stock in trade. Happily, she made a brief return to high form in 1942 with two very different showcases, both of which proved how on point her comic instincts could be when fully engaged. In The Major and the Minor, Billy Wilder’s maiden outing as a director, she was a short-tempered salesgirl posing as a 12-year-old in order to buy a half-price train ticket out of New York. The setup was ridiculous, but the performance was full of deft touches, even if her baby talk routine wore thin in patches. She was even better in William Wellman’s Roxie Hart, adapted from the Maurine Dallas Watkins play that also served as the basis for the stage and film musical Chicago. The role of a fame-hungry, gun-toting jazz baby was as close as she ever got to playing a genuine bad girl, and she warmed to the cynicism of the piece in ways that probably surprised even her. Even if the film chickened out towards the end, it still allowed the actress some welcome flashes of coarseness and naughtiness — qualities she had so studiously avoided for the bulk of her career, but which actually served her wry, knowing sensibility much better than conventional melodrama. The bathtub gin buzz didn’t last very long, and the actress retreated back to respectability too quickly for anyone to start questioning her integrity. The films and performances that rounded out the remainder of the '40s were not especially interesting, regardless that they represented the types of projects the dancing lady of the '30s had fought so assiduously to be considered for. Some were ambitious failures — Weill’s Lady in the Dark was simply beyond her, while Heartbeat was an attempt at European sophistication with about as much lightness and airiness to it as a freeze-dried croissant. Tender Comrade, a war-time romance featuring only the vaguest of socialist undertones, was notable only for the extent to which the actress completely disowned it once Hollywood’s red paranoia kicked into high gear. I’ll Be Seeing You, Weekend at the Waldorf and Magnificent Doll all fell flat for various reasons, the common denominator being how smug and arch Rogers could seem when affecting the posture of a great lady. 1949 brought an unexpected reunion with Astaire, after Judy Garland pulled out of The Barkleys of Broadway. While the couple’s timing on the dance floor was as precise and polished as ever, it was clear that Ginger, the actress, had grown too grand for Fred; while still light on her feet, she’d lost her lightness of touch, and Astaire’s wariness was such that you could practically see him rolling his eyes when her back was turned.
The '50s were a mishmash of pretensions and delusions, pausing briefly for Monkey Business, hailed by many as her best late-career entry, although in truth somewhat disappointing given the caliber of the talent involved. Rogers gave it the old college try, indulging in infantile shenanigans with Howard Hawks and Cary Grant, but the film felt oddly stagnant — a second-tier entry from top-flight pros, and a warmed-over attempt to recapture screwball comedy glory at a time when the genre seemed to have lost confidence in itself. Forever Female somewhat clumsily attempted to expose the follies of an aging ingénue refusing to acknowledge the passage of time, while The First Traveling Saleslady was a grotesque illustration of the point — the high-pitched girlishness of the performance, shot through a soft-focus lens, lent the entire enterprise the feeling of a drag act. Rogers probably realized her mistake sometime after making it, and retreated to the more comfortable environs of television. She scored a personal success replacing Carol Channing in the Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! and toured extensively with a one-woman show that traded heavily in sequins and glamour, showing she’d lost none of the showgirl’s instinct and eagerness to please.
The more one learns about Ginger Rogers, the more difficult a figure she is to come to terms with. It goes beyond the fact that her political positions were as poorly thought out as many of her career choices; her blithe defense of her mother’s star turn as a cooperating witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee serves as one of the more uncomfortable passages to be read in any star autobiography (Ever an actress in search of a stage, Lela finally found one on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, moralizing and naming names.) The real problem lies in trying to reconcile the delightful presence of so many classic films — a quick-witted triple threat with an unpretentious, refreshingly candid approach to comedy — with the snobbish, rather bourgeois
attitudes of a woman who looked down on so many of the qualities for which she was cherished. How much greater her career could have been had she not turned up her nose at the things she excelled is a question with no easy answer – it’s possible the opportunities wouldn’t have been there for an actress in early middle age, even had her notion of quality been a little less narrow. Regardless of who Ginger Rogers was when the cameras stopped rolling — or what was going on in the back of her mind even as they were — in the handful of films that show her at her absolute best, she still is a wonder to behold. There are not many performers who bridged the gap between musical and non-musical careers as smoothly or as effortlessly as she did; even Garland always seemed a bit lost when she didn’t have her singing to lean on, or Gene Kelly his dancing. She had a beautiful understanding of the mechanics of her craft, as both an actress and a dancer, but wasn’t overly reliant on technical skill; there was an easy quality about her, as if she’d nailed the technical element down so completely that she didn’t even have to think about it when executing impossible feats of choreographic wizardry, or landing a wisecrack with a throwaway air than never smacked of premeditation. The greatness of her best performances lies in how comfortable she seemed with her own talent, and how naturally things came to her when she wasn’t bogged down by the notion of trying to seem impressive — when there were no Oscars to be won, and she felt free and loose, she came up with performances so good that they went right over the Academy’s head. That’s the Ginger Rogers we know and love; with or without Fred Astaire, she had all the right moves and an impeccable sense of how and when to use them.Tweet
Labels: Astaire, Bette, Cary, Crawford, de Havilland, Erroll Flynn, Garland, Garson, Ginger Rogers, Hawks, J. Stewart, K. Hepburn, Merman, Musicals, Oscars, Theater, Wellman, Wilder
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Friday, May 27, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Vincent Price
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Over at my usual stomping grounds at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, I’ve been known to jokingly refer to the time I spent living in Morgantown, W.Va. (1992-2000) as “my years in exile” — and one of my fondest memories during that period occurred when my co-workers at the company that saw fit to employ me decided to have an impromptu lunch at an Italian restaurant located in nearby Westover, a small burg just across the Monongahela River from Mo-town, better known as home to West Virginia University (Or as I have been known to call it — using a gag I swiped from Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman — “a stadium with a college attached”). The eatery was known as Rose’s, and I’d heartily recommend that you stop by for a nosh sometime when you’re in the area were it not for the awful fact that it closed its doors about five years back.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure — when it comes to Italian cuisine, it’s not my first choice on the menu…I’m more of a cheeseburger-and-onion rings kind of guy. But when I followed my co-workers into the restaurant I had a feeling the food was going to be first-rate (and it was…so much so that I went back on repeat occasions with a friend of mine from high school) because on one of the walls near the entrance was an article from the local newspaper that talked up the place…and mentioned that Rose’s (and her cooking in particular) was a favorite of actor Vincent Price, who made it a point to stop by whenever he was in the area. Price, known for his distinguished accomplishments on stage, screen, television, radio — just about any facet of show business you can name, as a matter of fact — also enjoyed a reputation as a gourmet cook…so if Rose’s fare had his seal of approval I certainly wasn’t going to argue. I know, it’s sort of odd that I would remember something like this but seeing as how the man christened Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was born 100 years ago on this date I guess I’m resorting to this “degree of separation” to pay tribute to one of my favorite actors on his “Vincentennial.”
Vincent Price was born a century ago in St. Louis, Mo., this date and to his dying day remained one of that city’s favorite sons…with good reason, of course. Truth be told, if Price had never set foot upon the stage his future would have been pretty secure; his father, Vincent, Sr., was president of the National Candy Company and his grandfather (also named Vincent) was the inventor of “Dr. Price’s Baking Powder” — the first cream of tartar baking powder. As a son of privilege, Vincent attended both St. Louis Country Day School and Yale University, where he developed his lifelong interest in art history and the fine arts. In the 1930s, he also began to acquire an interest in the theater and began appearing in stage productions in 1935. His big stage success came a year later, playing opposite Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina — a production that the superstitious actor believed brought him such good fortune that he named his first daughter “Victoria” (aided by the fact that her mother was raised in Victoria, British Columbia). Though he would eventually devote most of his time in show business to making movies, Price never completely abandoned his stage roots — among his triumphs in later years was a successful one-man production entitled Diversions and Delights in which he played the part of legendary author/playwright Oscar Wilde.
On the silver screen, Vincent made his debut in the 1938 film Service de Luxe — a movie he wasn’t particularly fond of, but it paved the way to future appearances in more prestigious films such as Michael
Curtiz's The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex starring Bette Davis, Erroll Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (1939), The House of the Seven Gables (1940), The Song of Bernadette (1943), The Eve of St. Mark and Wilson (both in 1944). In fact, 1944 was a big year for the actor for he also appeared in The Keys of the Kingdom and a movie I’ve long considered one of his signature roles (and is the personal favorite of daughter Victoria), Otto Preminger's film noir classic Laura. As the rakish scoundrel Shelby Carpenter, Price gave an amazing performance as a cad who lies as easily as taking a breath but whose courtly Southern manner and charm (“I can afford a blemish on my character but not on my clothes”) made him more a figure to be pitied than scorned. Price would later make two additional movies with Laura co-star Gene Tierney, Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and Dragonwyck (1946), and he began to develop a reputation for screen villainy with choice parts in films such as The Web (1947), The Three Musketeers (1948), The Bribe (1949) and The Baron of Arizona (1950).Playing the part of the Duke of Clarence in 1939’s Tower of London — a horror movie that co-starred Boris Karloff, a thesp with whom Price would work with time and time again — offered Vincent an indication of the direction his career would later take as a horror icon…and a year later, appeared as the titular undetectable character of The Invisible Man Returns. (Price would also play the unseen individual in a joke cameo near the end of the 1948 comedy classic Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.) His active participation in the horror genre reached full swing in 1953 with another unforgettable turn in the 3-D horror romp House of Wax, and Price followed that with such vehicles as The Mad Magician (1954), The Fly (1958) (and the 1959 sequel, Return of the Fly), The Bat (1959) and two movies he made for schlockmeister William Castle —
House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler (both 1959). The actor would occasionally get high profile gigs in movies such as The Ten Commandments and While the City Sleeps (both 1956), but by the 1960s, horror had a new name in Vincent Price, who would make many of his most memorable films during that decade…the ones that endlessly captivated me as a child watching “Chiller Theater” on Saturday nights while my parents were out for the evening.
Price starred in several films directed by “King of the B’s” Roger Corman that were heavily influenced by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, beginning in 1960 with House of Usher. Classic examples of the horror movie genre followed in the same vein, including Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven
(1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965). These movies serve to remind film buffs that, despite his B-movie pedigree, Corman was capable of turning out incredible work (particularly Pendulum and Red Death) but they also saddled its star with a reputation for “hamminess” that he simultaneously embraced and rejected. An example of Price capitalizing on this status is undoubtedly his starring turn in 1971’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes (a role he reprised in the sequel, 1972’s Dr. Phibes Rises Again) but Vincent demonstrated that he could reign in his hambone tendencies with an understated performance in Witchfinder General (1968; aka Conqueror Worm). As religious fanatic/evil madman Matthew Hopkins, Price could have pulled out all the stops but wisely chose not to do so…and for many fans (myself included), General ranks with some of the finest work Vincent ever did onscreen.
There are those who believe that Price agreed to undertake a starring role in Theater of Blood (1973) — a film in which a Shakespearean actor takes revenge on the critics who denied him recognition — as an answer to all those naysayers who time and time again dismissed him as a big slice of ham but Price enjoyed himself in this movie because it allowed him to indulge in another of his passions, performing the words of the Immortal Bard himself. (Needless to say, Blood was one of Price’s particular
movie favorites.) Vincent’s involvement in films began to peter out around 1975 (mostly because the kind of horror movies he specialized in were on the wane) but by that time he was already making frequent guest appearances in shows on TV, including memorable turns in episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, F Troop, Get Smart, Night Gallery, The Brady Bunch, Columbo, Ellery Queen and The Bionic Woman. His best-known TV gig is probably that of his multiple appearances as the villainous Egghead on Batman, a program on which he started a legendary food fight by lobbing hen fruit at stars Adam West and Burt Ward. He also was a frequent panelist on the boob tube game show Hollywood Squares and a fixture on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he was in high demand as a raconteur telling tales of both show business and the culinary and art worlds.I mentioned Price’s expertise in gourmet cooking in the first two paragraphs of this essay; it was such a lifelong passion of the actor’s that he authored several cookbooks (including one with second wife Mary Grant, A Treasury of Great Recipes) and hosted a TV show entitled Cooking Price-Wise. But Price also excelled as an authority on art, having graduated from Yale with a degree in such and founding the Vincent and Mary Price Gallery at East Los Angeles College in the 1960s…kick-started by a donation of some 90 pieces from his personal collection to the school in 1951. Today, the gallery contains some 2,000 works, estimated at more than $5 million, and remains a testament to Price’s legacy. Price’s celebrity status was put to maximum use in merchandising not only art (Sears and Roebuck successfully touted art works under the banner of “The Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art”) but books (a series of mystery and detective novels offered in a mail-order book club), games (he was the spokesman for several board games put out by Milton Bradley), recordings (his one-of-a-kind sinister voice can be heard on albums by Alice Cooper…and most famously, Michael Jackson), theme parks and commercial products like Polaroid and Tilex.
In the 1980s, Vincent Price continued to maintain a presence on television and in film; beginning in 1981 he appeared weekly on public television stations as the host of Mystery! (a series he relinquished in 1989 due to failing health) and continued to appear in the occasional movie such as The Great Mouse Detective (1986; he supplied the voice of “Professor Ratigan”) and The Whales of August (1987), which gave him a wonderful showcase alongside such old pros as Bette Davis, Lillian Gish and Ann Sothern. And though it wasn’t his last project in the business it can be said that his final moment of celluloid glory was an appearance (unfortunately curtailed due to his precarious health) as the inventor of Edward Scissorhands (1990). Price had worked with director Tim Burton previously, narrating the memorable short Vincent (1982)…about a little boy who, appropriately, wants to be just like Vincent Price. Years devoted to “coffin nails” finally caught up with Price, however, and he succumbed to lung cancer in October 1993.
At We Are Movie Geeks, the proprietors of that website came up with a Top Ten list of the film performances they felt represent the crème de la crème of Price’s career…and while I certainly agree with the majority of their choices (I especially enjoyed that they included his — if you’ll pardon the pun — priceless comedic turn in 1950’s Champagne for Caesar…though I would have moved Laura up the list some) they left off one of my personal favorites (they explain, however, that all of the movies on the list will be shown at the ten-day Vincentennial celebration currently underway from May 19-28): 1951’s His Kind of Woman. Robert Mitchum is the star of this spoof of he-man heroic adventures (doing his patented sleepy-eyed lug schtick) and Jane Russell plays his love interest…but Price walks off with the film as (what else?) a hammy actor who comes to Big Bad Bob’s rescue when Mitchum is kidnapped by thugs working for deposed mobster Raymond Burr, who plans to croak Bob and use his identity to get back into the country. Price’s antics are falling-down funny in this one: I love his facial reactions as he watches an assembled crowd watch one of his movies (in which he engages in some swashbuckling derring-do) and such memorable lines of dialogue (spoken to rally volunteers who will help Price’s character save Mitchum) as “Survivors will all be given parts in my next picture.”
Victoria Price once commented that her father had so much fun making both Woman and Caesar, and the proof is in the pudding — but then I can’t imagine there ever being a time in the actor’s life when he didn’t have fun and make the most of his brief stay here on Earth. Chef, art collector, gardener, opera devotee, author and an exemplary performer in nearly all worlds of show business — Vincent Price was one of the most remarkable men of the 20th century. And as far as this fan goes, he is so terribly missed to this day.
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Labels: Abbott and Costello, Bette, Books, Carson, Corman, Curtiz, de Havilland, Erroll Flynn, G. Tierney, Karloff, Mitchum, Music, Preminger, Shakespeare, Television, Theater, Tim Burton, Vincent Price
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Thursday, July 01, 2010
Flynn at Sea
By Eddie Selover
Probably no actor ever got luckier with a first starring role in the movies than Errol Flynn. At the age of 25, he was given the lead in Captain Blood on the basis of his looks, intense lobbying by some well-connected lady friends, and the fact that the film had no leading man and an imminent start date. At the time, Flynn’s experience amounted to a year of repertory theater in England and minuscule roles in about four B-movies. Raw-boned and gauche, he acquired authority and panache as filming went on, so much so that the first sections of the movie were re-done at the end of the shoot.
But what made Flynn lucky wasn’t just the opportunity. Captain Blood is still the greatest pirate movie ever made — thanks to clever, dynamic direction by Michael Curtiz, a stirring score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and a strong cast including villainous brigand Basil Rathbone and 19-year old leading lady Olivia de Havilland. De Havilland had as little experience as Flynn, but as Rathbone wrote almost 30 years later, “a more enchantingly beautiful young girl it would be impossible to imagine.”
A big hit, the movie was nominated for the best picture Oscar (it was beaten by the far inferior sea epic Mutiny on the Bounty) and made Flynn a huge star overnight. More than that, it established a template that Warner Bros. followed, more or less, for the next couple of decades. Flynn made 12 movies with Curtiz, seven with Korngold, three with Rathbone, and eight with De Havilland. But as fate would have it, he made only one more swashbuckling pirate movie for Warners: The Sea Hawk, which debuted 70 years ago today.
Among movie buffs and Flynn fans, The Sea Hawk is highly regarded. There’s a lot to like about it: Flynn, here at the peak of his career, has far more acting authority than he’d had in Captain Blood; Curtiz and Korngold are back with their typically first-rate work; and Warners poured almost $2 million into the production at a time when a movie could gross half that amount and be a hit. In fact, the studio built a huge new soundstage and tank just for this film, as well as two full-scale sailing ships that were moved by hydraulics. The movie also re-purposed huge, vaulting sets and beautiful costumes from the previous year’s Flynn vehicle, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.
But as good as it is, The Sea Hawk doesn’t quite make it onto the list of truly magical movies. The cast and crew are in there pitching, and everyone does a professional, workmanlike job. Swords clash, sea shanties are sung, hordes of sailors swarm over the riggings, dark deeds are plotted in castles, galley slaves mount an escape…and yet you don’t particularly care about any of it. The reasons, I suppose, lie in the script and a couple of crucial casting mistakes.
Captain Blood was based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini and had a literary and beautifully structured screenplay by Casey Robinson. The Sea Hawk was ostensibly based on another Sabatini novel, but in fact used only the title. The original screenplay was by Seton I. Miller and in fact had a different title — Sabatini’s was used as audience bait (his name still meant something in 1940) and because, well, it’s a great title.
Miller’s screenplay was rewritten and sharpened by Howard Koch, a fine writer who had an instinct for how to punch up scenes with intelligent, ironic dialogue. Koch had the idea to make the story more timely by turning it into a metaphor for real-life events — England was already at war with Nazi Germany, and in the two years before the U.S. joined them, there was a widespread effort at solidarity and support in Hollywood. Koch’s angle was to turn Phillip of Spain into a Hitler intent on conquering the world, and Queen Elizabeth into a Chamberlain who attempts appeasement and then a Churchill who fights back openly.
Flynn’s character, Geoffrey Thorpe, is a gentlemanly sea captain who turns pirate in order to covertly serve the Queen and her political needs. Thorpe isn’t a great character like Peter Blood, a foppish doctor sold into slavery who becomes a pirate out of outrage and a desire for revenge — Thorpe is more like one of the anonymous G-men from innumerable Warners pictures of the era. While that may have satisfied the politics and censorship demands of 1940, it robs the movie of some fun…these are the cleanest and most morally upright pirates you’ve ever seen. Flynn, who wanted to be a serious actor and resented swashbuckling roles, plays the role in a restrained and almost dignified way, and you wonder why the inevitable haughty wench on board (the Spanish ambassador’s niece) doesn’t see what a great guy he is right away.
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The haughty wench is a problem, too. Maureen O’Hara perfected this part in the 40s; it’s too bad she didn’t meet up with Flynn until 1952, when drink and dissolution had made him a shadow of his former self. Here, the wench is played by Brenda Marshall. Who? Exactly. This movie was Marshall’s big chance, and it must be said that she muffs it. Her acting is wooden and totally conventional, her face a mask of pouting unhappiness that seems more related to her own personality than to the role. Marshall can’t even make you smile at a line like “Uncle, my jewels!” as her bedchamber is invaded by pirates.
Where’s Olivia de Havilland? At the time, she was fighting Warners for respect and better roles, and wanted something more than to be Flynn’s leading lady. She only played with him a couple more times before going on to prestige movies and a couple of Academy Awards. In her old age she seems to have realized, like Ginger Rogers and Myrna Loy, that her romantic partnership onscreen is her greatest claim to immortality. De Havilland and Flynn had a beautiful rapport as actors — his rashness and boldness seem to excite and offend her at the same time, which is quite funny; her gentle sweetness brings out a sensitivity in Flynn that almost seems to surprise him. “I really believe that he was deeply in love with her,” commented their co-star Bette Davis, and the feeling was very evidently mutual.
Marshall and Flynn, in contrast, have zero chemistry. And so you’re left to ponder the rote quality of so many old movie romances: hidden attraction, conflict, cleared-up misunderstandings and declarations of love, separation, longing and heartbreak, reconciliation, kiss, fade-out. The situation isn’t lost on Curtiz, who resorts to director’s tricks to make this non-romance come alive. When the two are parted, he alternates shots of them looking longingly into the distance as Flynn sails away — the movie seems to be shouting “LOOK, THEY’RE IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER!!!”
The villains aren’t much better. Claude Rains returns from Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood, but he has no memorable lines and lets his evil haircut and facial hair do his acting for him. In Captain Blood, Lionel Atwill played basically the same role and gave it dark hints of sexual obsession and sadism (OK, maybe it wasn’t too much of a stretch for him). Rains just coasts here. In Robin Hood, he was beautifully paired with Rathbone, who played the fiery man of action to his sly rascal. Here, the Rathbone role is filled by Henry Daniell, and that’s a pale carbon copy. Flynn’s chemistry with Rathbone was as magical as his rapport with de Havilland — they had the same energy level, and when they hurled challenges and insults at each other, you felt an underlying respect and affection. At some very elevated level, they were playacting, and every scene they shared crackles with exuberant antagonism.
Daniell, on the other hand, apparently was the cold fish he always played, and as an actor he had only one note of sneering superiority. And in fatal contrast to Rathbone, the best fencer in the business, he couldn’t handle a sword. A studio memo from the middle of production reported that “Mr. Daniell is absolutely helpless and his closeup in the duel will be mostly from the elbows up.” As in all Flynn swashbucklers, the climax is supposed to be the big duel to the death, but Daniell seems to barely be in the scene. As with the romance, Curtiz is forced to use director’s tricks to make it come off. Longshots, doubles, heavy shadows, furious cutting. Workmanlike, but unmagical.
Many commentators on The Sea Hawk have also noted the absence of Technicolor, but the movie does have strong black and white photography. This was an economic decision which allowed Warners to re-use battle shots from Captain Blood and a couple of other older epics…It also allows for a nice effect during the movie’s best sequence: a trap laid for Flynn and his men in the jungles of Panama. Sepia gives this sequence a real feeling for the heat of the swamps and the misery that our heroes endure, and it helps break up the movie as well — at more than two hours, it’s rather a long journey. Finally, England is once again purged of treason; the lovers are reunited, the trumpets flare, and the Warners' shield announces The End. You’re left admiring the craftsmanship that went into mounting this sea epic on a soundstage, but you haven’t ever really sailed away.
Eddie Selover is a writer and film buff living in Orlando, Fla.
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Labels: 40s, Bette, Curtiz, de Havilland, Erroll Flynn, Ginger Rogers, Loy, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Rains
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Tuesday, April 20, 2010
NY theater flashbacks: 1995
By Edward Copeland
It took me a year to get around to writing my second installment of my New York theater memories (if you missed the 1994 installment, click here). Of course many things have interfered in the interim and, quite honestly, the second installment doesn't contain shows that generated the excitement in me as a novice N.Y. theatergoer as the ones I saw in 1994 did. Still, I want all the years chronicled and as they go forward, the titles will become somewhat of a misnomer as well as they are identified by year but they really cover season, which always are split years in Broadway parlance. The first two outings just happened to actually occur in the post title years.
ARCADIA
Tom Stoppard is one of the most clever, cerebral playwrights working today and sometimes that can be a hindrance. It had been so long since I'd seen this play, I was fortunate that the Playbill had some notes to give me a vague idea of its subject matter which spanned time periods and concerned itself with geometry and styles of English garden landscaping. I do remember the cast, who all did a good job with the very dense subject matter, and included Blair Brown, Paul Giamatti, Robert Sean Leonard and the play's standout, a relative newcomer on the scene named Billy Crudup. Even with the help of the notes though, my memories are but a fog beyond Crudup and Jennifer Dundas and the fact that my seats in the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center were directly behind the late Garson Kanin and his wife Marian Seldes, whom I'd seen the year before in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women.
HAMLET
Shakespeare's great play lured Ralph Fiennes to Broadway and he picked up a much-deserved Tony for his effort. For me at least, it's damn hard to screw up Hamlet (though Kenneth Branagh tried with some of his stunt casting in his uncut film version). Admittedly, this Broadway production was the first time I'd ever seen the play staged and, as one would expect, cuts were made which I'm sure set purists' hair on fire. However, Fiennes' work was a wonder to me. Far too often, it seems to me that when people perform the Bard, they speak too deliberately, as if they are afraid the poetry will shatter in their mouths if they act too much. For the first time, Fiennes' Hamlet seemed to me as if he were spontaneously thinking the things he was saying, not just regurgitating memorized text. You can fake that on film sometimes, but in a live production, you can't and I was very impressed, even if the rest of the production didn't quite live up to Fiennes' standard.
HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
When I was in elementary school, my first contact with Frank Loesser's musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was the movie version with Robert Morse repeating his Tony Award-winning Broadway
role as J. Pierrepont Finch and I loved it. I'd seen it many times since, so I was anxious to see a stage version. Matthew Broderick now had the Morse role and Megan Mullally, who was new to me last year in the lame revival of Grease with Rosie O'Donnell, had the role of Rosemary that Michele Lee played in the film. For added fun, the narration of the book that gives the musical its title was recorded by none other than Walter Cronkite. The entire cast proved to be a blast from Victoria Clark as Smitty and Jeff Blumenkrantz as Bud Frump to Ron Carroll as J.B. Biggley and Jonathan Freeman as Bert Bratt. Plus, it's a show that's so entertaining with so many great songs by Loesser, that it's nearly impossible for someone to undermine it too badly, even though I thought Broderick mugged a little too much and his singing voice did leave something to be desired. The showstopper turned out to be a surprise when Lillias White, playing the secretary Miss Jones, really belted out her part of "The Brotherhood of Man" and brought the house down, despite it being a number that involved the entire company. On the celebrity sighting side, seated directly in the row behind me in the Richard Rodgers Theatre were Meat Loaf, his wife and his (I'm guessing) teenage daughter.
LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION!
Terrence McNally's play about a group of gay men who gather together during three separate holiday weekends at a remote lake house about two hours outside of Manhattan won the Tony for best play. It's not a
bad play, but it did have the misfortune, in my mind, of following on the heels of the epic two-part Angels in America. Love! Valour! Compassion even played in the same theater that Angels did, the Walter Kerr, and its director was Joe Mantello, one of the Tony-nominated actors from Angels in America. As I mentioned in my 1994 theater flashback, Angels remains my greatest Broadway experience, so returning to the same theater and, though McNally's play's ambitions were nowhere near that of Tony Kushner's, it couldn't help but feel as if I were watching Neil Simon opening a comic take on The Seagull the week after Chekhov opened his original. Granted, McNally's play leans toward the comic, but it has its serious moments as well and it really was only the strength of its cast that lifted it for me. Justin Kirk was very good as the blind member of the group and Anthony Heald did a very good job in the role that Stephen Spinella had originally played when the show began off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club. By the time I saw the show, Nathan Lane had left the show and been replaced by Mario Cantone, probably still best known for his work on HBO's Sex and the City as Anthony, Charlotte's wedding planner friend. I wasn't familiar with his work at the time and it seemed to me that Cantone was trying too hard to do a Nathan Lane impression. The show's standout (for which he deservedly won a Tony) was John Glover in the role of twin brothers, one a bitter man, the other a sweetheart dying of AIDS. It was a wonder to see him pull off a scene with himself when he's doing it live. He was even more impressive in the film version when you saw how he modulated the characters for the new medium and was still just as great.
SUNSET BOULEVARD
Glenn Close owes me tickets to The Late Show With David Letterman. Let me explain. At this point, my Broadway obsession had grown beyond reason. Ignoring the fact that I disliked pretty much all things Andrew Lloyd Webber and that every instinct in my body told me that a musical made out of Billy Wilder's classic film,
one of my 10 favorite movies of all time, was a bad idea and sacrilegious, when they opened up ticket orders, which had to be done by mail, I sent one in. The minute I received my ticket and knew the date, knowing Letterman tickets also were hard to get, I wrote off for tickets to his show for that same time period and I got them. Then damn Glenn Close decided to take a vacation for that week. If I was spending that kind of money to see the damn show, I better see her, so I canceled my tickets and asked for replacement ones. Not only did that mean I lost my chance to see Letterman live, the replacement ticket they sent me was for summer, once Betty Buckley had replaced her as Norma in the show. To make matters worse, George Hearn also was gone and I had to sit through the god-awful show as well. At the time, I used to frequent the Playbill chat room on AOL and there would be endless debates about "Who was the best Norma?" Glenn Close? Patti LuPone? Faye Dunaway? Karen Mason? Betty Buckley? Screw them all. The best Norma still is and always will be Gloria Swanson. As far as the musical goes, have you ever seen the classic Simpsons episode "A Streetcar Named Marge?" That's what I couldn't get out of my mind because a lot of the lyrics were like that, trying to incorporate the film's classic lines into songs. She's still big/it's the pictures that got small. As for Buckley as Norma, all she really played was the vulnerability. You didn't get any sense of the manipulator, let alone the psycho. An impressive staircase does not a show make. What a waste.
SHOW BOAT
Widely considered the first modern American musical, Show Boat has long been a mainstay of musical theater since 1927 with its book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein but music by Jerome Kern prior to his more famous
pairing with Richard Rodgers. While I was more than familiar with the many famous songs from the show, I'd never seen it staged and hadn't even seen a film version. When I read that director Hal Prince had done some tinkering with the book to modernize it even further, I guess I was thinking even more broadly than anyone else. With the character of Julie (well-played by Lonette McKee), a light-skinned African-American passing for white, I kept expecting the revelation that Cap'n Andy, the owner of the title Show Boat, would turn out to be her father, but the show wasn't that far ahead of its time. Staged in the cavern that is the Gershwin Theatre, the talented cast did their best to overcome the hurdles of such a mammoth room. Unfortunately, Prince directs the show as if he wants to make sure you know it has a director. It always was busy to the point that you weren't sure where to look. Some of the montages to cover the passage of time truly were impressive, but much of it was just too frenetic so it was a relief when it slowed down and allowed its cast to sing its great songs. It also was no way to use the unique talent that is Elaine Stritch. In another celebrity sighting, the still alive-and-kicking (then anyway) Sylvia Sidney was in the audience.
THE HEIRESS
Who would think that the most satisfying theater experience I would have in this series of flashbacks would come in the revival of a 1947 play based on an 1880 Henry James novel and best known for its 1949 film
version, but that was indeed the case in 1995. Granted, a great deal of the credit for how wonderful a night of theater The Heiress turned out to be belongs to Cherry Jones in the title role, but the entire cast shone and the play held up well. Jones won a Tony for her work as did Frances Sternhagen as her aunt and both prizes were very much deserved in this Lincoln Center production that played at the Cort Theatre and also starred Donald Moffat and Michael Cumpsty. Praise needs to be given to Gerald Gutierrez's inspired direction as well. (He also won a Tony for his work, a prize he'd win again the following year for an even greater revival.) It seems funny that when I think of Jones, this is what I think of first while nowadays, what first comes to mind for most people is the president on TV's 24. If they'd seen Jones here, that wouldn't be the case. She'd make them forget Olivia de Havilland as well: Her work as the targeted spinster was that strong; it's forever seared in my memory. As for Sternhagen, as great as she was in the play, part of her was still Cliff's mom on Cheers to me, with some left over as Charlotte's awful mother-in-law Bunny on Sex and the City.
SYLVIA
The final play I took in for 1995 (or at least 1995 as far as this piece goes) was my only visit to off-Broadway for this year and it was a trip to the Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center to see A.R. Gurney's comedy about a romantic triangle between a husband (John Cunningham), his wife (Mariette Hartley) and his dog (Sarah Jessica Parker). Yes, Parker played a dog and this would seem, even if I were mean-spirited, an appropriate place to insert some sort of South Park joke. The play was very funny and Parker did play the bitch very well and you would think the gimmick of an actress pretending to be a dog would grow old after awhile, but Gurney and the rest of the cast managed to make it work for the entire evening. That doesn't mean Sylvia isn't a lightweight play, but I've certainly had worse nights at the theater. The real find of the evening though and the show's highlight was the least well-known member of the cast: Derek Smith. Smith played three roles, two of which were women, and he was an absolute riot. I would later to get to see him in other plays and it wasn't a fluke: Smith was a true comic acting find. Overall, my theatergoing experiences certainly were a letdown compared to 1994, but it didn't dim my enthusiasm. What's more, I was still traveling to New York from the middle of the country, which cut down on what I could see. However in the next year, I would move to Florida during the 1995-96 season, making N.Y. jaunts much easier, much more frequent and begin to spiral out of control. Hopefully, it won't take me a year to write about that year.
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It took me a year to get around to writing my second installment of my New York theater memories (if you missed the 1994 installment, click here). Of course many things have interfered in the interim and, quite honestly, the second installment doesn't contain shows that generated the excitement in me as a novice N.Y. theatergoer as the ones I saw in 1994 did. Still, I want all the years chronicled and as they go forward, the titles will become somewhat of a misnomer as well as they are identified by year but they really cover season, which always are split years in Broadway parlance. The first two outings just happened to actually occur in the post title years.
Tom Stoppard is one of the most clever, cerebral playwrights working today and sometimes that can be a hindrance. It had been so long since I'd seen this play, I was fortunate that the Playbill had some notes to give me a vague idea of its subject matter which spanned time periods and concerned itself with geometry and styles of English garden landscaping. I do remember the cast, who all did a good job with the very dense subject matter, and included Blair Brown, Paul Giamatti, Robert Sean Leonard and the play's standout, a relative newcomer on the scene named Billy Crudup. Even with the help of the notes though, my memories are but a fog beyond Crudup and Jennifer Dundas and the fact that my seats in the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center were directly behind the late Garson Kanin and his wife Marian Seldes, whom I'd seen the year before in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women.
Shakespeare's great play lured Ralph Fiennes to Broadway and he picked up a much-deserved Tony for his effort. For me at least, it's damn hard to screw up Hamlet (though Kenneth Branagh tried with some of his stunt casting in his uncut film version). Admittedly, this Broadway production was the first time I'd ever seen the play staged and, as one would expect, cuts were made which I'm sure set purists' hair on fire. However, Fiennes' work was a wonder to me. Far too often, it seems to me that when people perform the Bard, they speak too deliberately, as if they are afraid the poetry will shatter in their mouths if they act too much. For the first time, Fiennes' Hamlet seemed to me as if he were spontaneously thinking the things he was saying, not just regurgitating memorized text. You can fake that on film sometimes, but in a live production, you can't and I was very impressed, even if the rest of the production didn't quite live up to Fiennes' standard.
When I was in elementary school, my first contact with Frank Loesser's musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was the movie version with Robert Morse repeating his Tony Award-winning Broadway
role as J. Pierrepont Finch and I loved it. I'd seen it many times since, so I was anxious to see a stage version. Matthew Broderick now had the Morse role and Megan Mullally, who was new to me last year in the lame revival of Grease with Rosie O'Donnell, had the role of Rosemary that Michele Lee played in the film. For added fun, the narration of the book that gives the musical its title was recorded by none other than Walter Cronkite. The entire cast proved to be a blast from Victoria Clark as Smitty and Jeff Blumenkrantz as Bud Frump to Ron Carroll as J.B. Biggley and Jonathan Freeman as Bert Bratt. Plus, it's a show that's so entertaining with so many great songs by Loesser, that it's nearly impossible for someone to undermine it too badly, even though I thought Broderick mugged a little too much and his singing voice did leave something to be desired. The showstopper turned out to be a surprise when Lillias White, playing the secretary Miss Jones, really belted out her part of "The Brotherhood of Man" and brought the house down, despite it being a number that involved the entire company. On the celebrity sighting side, seated directly in the row behind me in the Richard Rodgers Theatre were Meat Loaf, his wife and his (I'm guessing) teenage daughter.Terrence McNally's play about a group of gay men who gather together during three separate holiday weekends at a remote lake house about two hours outside of Manhattan won the Tony for best play. It's not a
bad play, but it did have the misfortune, in my mind, of following on the heels of the epic two-part Angels in America. Love! Valour! Compassion even played in the same theater that Angels did, the Walter Kerr, and its director was Joe Mantello, one of the Tony-nominated actors from Angels in America. As I mentioned in my 1994 theater flashback, Angels remains my greatest Broadway experience, so returning to the same theater and, though McNally's play's ambitions were nowhere near that of Tony Kushner's, it couldn't help but feel as if I were watching Neil Simon opening a comic take on The Seagull the week after Chekhov opened his original. Granted, McNally's play leans toward the comic, but it has its serious moments as well and it really was only the strength of its cast that lifted it for me. Justin Kirk was very good as the blind member of the group and Anthony Heald did a very good job in the role that Stephen Spinella had originally played when the show began off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club. By the time I saw the show, Nathan Lane had left the show and been replaced by Mario Cantone, probably still best known for his work on HBO's Sex and the City as Anthony, Charlotte's wedding planner friend. I wasn't familiar with his work at the time and it seemed to me that Cantone was trying too hard to do a Nathan Lane impression. The show's standout (for which he deservedly won a Tony) was John Glover in the role of twin brothers, one a bitter man, the other a sweetheart dying of AIDS. It was a wonder to see him pull off a scene with himself when he's doing it live. He was even more impressive in the film version when you saw how he modulated the characters for the new medium and was still just as great.
Glenn Close owes me tickets to The Late Show With David Letterman. Let me explain. At this point, my Broadway obsession had grown beyond reason. Ignoring the fact that I disliked pretty much all things Andrew Lloyd Webber and that every instinct in my body told me that a musical made out of Billy Wilder's classic film,
one of my 10 favorite movies of all time, was a bad idea and sacrilegious, when they opened up ticket orders, which had to be done by mail, I sent one in. The minute I received my ticket and knew the date, knowing Letterman tickets also were hard to get, I wrote off for tickets to his show for that same time period and I got them. Then damn Glenn Close decided to take a vacation for that week. If I was spending that kind of money to see the damn show, I better see her, so I canceled my tickets and asked for replacement ones. Not only did that mean I lost my chance to see Letterman live, the replacement ticket they sent me was for summer, once Betty Buckley had replaced her as Norma in the show. To make matters worse, George Hearn also was gone and I had to sit through the god-awful show as well. At the time, I used to frequent the Playbill chat room on AOL and there would be endless debates about "Who was the best Norma?" Glenn Close? Patti LuPone? Faye Dunaway? Karen Mason? Betty Buckley? Screw them all. The best Norma still is and always will be Gloria Swanson. As far as the musical goes, have you ever seen the classic Simpsons episode "A Streetcar Named Marge?" That's what I couldn't get out of my mind because a lot of the lyrics were like that, trying to incorporate the film's classic lines into songs. She's still big/it's the pictures that got small. As for Buckley as Norma, all she really played was the vulnerability. You didn't get any sense of the manipulator, let alone the psycho. An impressive staircase does not a show make. What a waste.Widely considered the first modern American musical, Show Boat has long been a mainstay of musical theater since 1927 with its book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein but music by Jerome Kern prior to his more famous
pairing with Richard Rodgers. While I was more than familiar with the many famous songs from the show, I'd never seen it staged and hadn't even seen a film version. When I read that director Hal Prince had done some tinkering with the book to modernize it even further, I guess I was thinking even more broadly than anyone else. With the character of Julie (well-played by Lonette McKee), a light-skinned African-American passing for white, I kept expecting the revelation that Cap'n Andy, the owner of the title Show Boat, would turn out to be her father, but the show wasn't that far ahead of its time. Staged in the cavern that is the Gershwin Theatre, the talented cast did their best to overcome the hurdles of such a mammoth room. Unfortunately, Prince directs the show as if he wants to make sure you know it has a director. It always was busy to the point that you weren't sure where to look. Some of the montages to cover the passage of time truly were impressive, but much of it was just too frenetic so it was a relief when it slowed down and allowed its cast to sing its great songs. It also was no way to use the unique talent that is Elaine Stritch. In another celebrity sighting, the still alive-and-kicking (then anyway) Sylvia Sidney was in the audience.
Who would think that the most satisfying theater experience I would have in this series of flashbacks would come in the revival of a 1947 play based on an 1880 Henry James novel and best known for its 1949 film
version, but that was indeed the case in 1995. Granted, a great deal of the credit for how wonderful a night of theater The Heiress turned out to be belongs to Cherry Jones in the title role, but the entire cast shone and the play held up well. Jones won a Tony for her work as did Frances Sternhagen as her aunt and both prizes were very much deserved in this Lincoln Center production that played at the Cort Theatre and also starred Donald Moffat and Michael Cumpsty. Praise needs to be given to Gerald Gutierrez's inspired direction as well. (He also won a Tony for his work, a prize he'd win again the following year for an even greater revival.) It seems funny that when I think of Jones, this is what I think of first while nowadays, what first comes to mind for most people is the president on TV's 24. If they'd seen Jones here, that wouldn't be the case. She'd make them forget Olivia de Havilland as well: Her work as the targeted spinster was that strong; it's forever seared in my memory. As for Sternhagen, as great as she was in the play, part of her was still Cliff's mom on Cheers to me, with some left over as Charlotte's awful mother-in-law Bunny on Sex and the City.
The final play I took in for 1995 (or at least 1995 as far as this piece goes) was my only visit to off-Broadway for this year and it was a trip to the Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center to see A.R. Gurney's comedy about a romantic triangle between a husband (John Cunningham), his wife (Mariette Hartley) and his dog (Sarah Jessica Parker). Yes, Parker played a dog and this would seem, even if I were mean-spirited, an appropriate place to insert some sort of South Park joke. The play was very funny and Parker did play the bitch very well and you would think the gimmick of an actress pretending to be a dog would grow old after awhile, but Gurney and the rest of the cast managed to make it work for the entire evening. That doesn't mean Sylvia isn't a lightweight play, but I've certainly had worse nights at the theater. The real find of the evening though and the show's highlight was the least well-known member of the cast: Derek Smith. Smith played three roles, two of which were women, and he was an absolute riot. I would later to get to see him in other plays and it wasn't a fluke: Smith was a true comic acting find. Overall, my theatergoing experiences certainly were a letdown compared to 1994, but it didn't dim my enthusiasm. What's more, I was still traveling to New York from the middle of the country, which cut down on what I could see. However in the next year, I would move to Florida during the 1995-96 season, making N.Y. jaunts much easier, much more frequent and begin to spiral out of control. Hopefully, it won't take me a year to write about that year.
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Labels: Awards, Branagh, de Havilland, Dunaway, Frank Loesser, Giamatti, Glenn Close, Gloria Swanson, Hammerstein, HBO, Letterman, Matthew Broderick, Neil Simon, Ralph Fiennes, Rodgers, Shakespeare, Stoppard, The Simpsons, Theater, Wilder
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Friday, January 11, 2008
The Lady is a Scamp
By Josh R
Miss Daisy Tillou is all atwitter — and when she starts fussing and chirping, she’s practically her own ornithological kingdom. Fluttering around her well-appointed drawing room like a skittish butterfly fretting over where to alight, her manner — consisting of equal parts daintiness and dizziness — represents a perfect marriage of the Victorian ideal of feminine behavior and the combustible nervous energy of a born drama queen. When people pay her compliments, she bills and coos like a puffed-up pigeon, batting her eyelashes in giddy delight. Swathed in reams of ruffles and frills, her round little face framed by mountains of ringlets which bob up and down as she moves (she looks rather like a giant dessert), she primps and flounces with the self-satisfied air of a plump turkey flaunting its plumage with the certainty of a peacock. When something occurs to offend her delicate sensibilities, her eyes widen in horror as she clasps a lace handkerchief to her ample bosom (she’s as well-upholstered as the plush Victorian furnishings that surround her) while her heart-shape mouth contracts into a taut little circle from which a high-pitched squeak of disapproval is emitted. She’s the kind of dish that once inspired poets to reel off verses extolling “the delicate flower of womanhood.”
It may come as a mild shock, then, to realize that Daisy is the creation of two men, born over a hundred years apart but working together with the conspiratorial delight of long-lost twins. The first is Mark Twain, whose previously unproduced play Is He Dead? is receiving its belated Broadway premiere at the Lyceum Theatre, in a spiffy adaptation by contemporary playwright David Ives. The second is Norbert Leo Butz, the delightfully nimble comic actor who prances, preens and pouts his way through the role of Daisy as if the concept of cross-dressing for laughs had just been invented. As to the question posed by the play’s title, the answer is a decisive no — but the coming together of Mr. Twain and Mr. Butz does represent a match made in heaven.
Twain’s play — which was only recently discovered among musty volumes in a university archive — is built around the kind of far-fetched contrivances that would never fly in an enterprise that took itself seriously. Since its author is justly renowned as one of the greatest vernacular satirists this country ever produced, there isn’t much risk of that; the surprise is how effortlessly Twain adapts his style to the creation of a work that functions as pure farce. The featherweight plot is really little more than an excuse to put a man in a dress; still, the central conceit is a clever one. Jean-Francois Millet is a struggling Parisian painter in dire financial straits; since there is no market for the work of living artists, he can’t sell a painting to save his life. That being the case, he fakes his own death and assumes the guise of his only surviving heir — a fictitious sister named Daisy, who supervises bidding wars over the work of her deceased brother and makes a killing from the proceeds. Complications naturally ensue — mostly as an excuse for the kind of comic hijinks that would embarrass the likes of Aristophanes. Unlike the recent revival of The Ritz, Is He Dead? finds ways to make the antiquated devices of farce seem fresh and inventive; the gags, which involve an empty coffin stocked with limburger cheese to keep suspicious mourners at a distance and an ingénue with detachable limbs, are so patently ridiculous that you feel like a sucker for laughing at them; but then, low comedy, when done correctly, can transform silliness into sophistication with disarming sleight-of-hand.
The lion’s share of the credit for this must be conferred upon Michael Blakemore, who directed the original production of Noises Off! and clearly understands the ins and outs of farce as well anyone who’s ever attempted the genre. His entire cast, which features nary a weak link, seems to be acting in clover. It includes Michael McGrath, John Alan Robbins and Jeremy Bobb as Millet’s motley collection of cohorts, who help him to perpetrate the ruse; veteran character actor John McMartin as a respectably dirty old man; LoveMusik’s David Pittu, who triples in three different roles with a deliciously florid array of accents; Bridget Regan as a jealous girlfriend who thinks Daisy is poaching on her turf, and winds up in drag for reasons too silly to explain; and Patricia Connolly and Marylouise Burke as an addlepated pair of landladies. Best of all are Byron Jennings, who does everything but twirl his mustache as the kind of villain who would make Basil Rathbone snicker with delight, and Jennifer Gambatese as the dewy-eyed ingénue, who looks like Olivia de Havilland in Gone With the Wind and speaks in the same soothing, honeyed tones. “Your kisses are so like Jean-Francois’,” she marvels in perplexed befuddlement, demurely oblivious to the fact that she is all but being ravished on a divan chair by her newfound best friend.
But the evening belongs, as it should, to its leading lady — or rather, its leading man. As Mr. Butz so ably demonstrated in his Tony-winning turn in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, he is a clown par excellence, with a talent for slapstick that transforms run-of-the-mill sight gags into bravura feats of comic ingenuity. If his scenes as Jean-Francois don’t give him quite as much opportunity to really let loose, once he straps on the hoopskirts, he’s pretty much unstoppable.
The critical reaction to Is He Dead?, it should be noted, has been one of mild shock. The fact that it has become, however unexpectedly, one of the most well-received new productions of the season, shouldn’t prompt too much head-scratching. Is He Dead? isn’t a work of any historic importance such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — but it has the same trademark wit that distinguished both the best and the least of Mark Twain’s oeuvre. It’s been many years since Mr. Twain went off to his heavenly reward — but on the stage of the Lyceum Theatre, darned if he isn’t alive and kicking.
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Labels: de Havilland, Theater, Twain
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Thursday, September 27, 2007
From the Vault: Gone With the Wind
on my all-time top 100 of 2007
Even after 50 years, Gone With the Wind still manages to delight and entertain, especially when one gets the opportunity to see it projected on the big screen in all its Technicolor glory instead of viewing the faded copy that has played in recent years. Having seen the film many times before, I found myself focusing more on the visuals and trying to ignore the story, a quite difficult task when you have Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh's caustic chemistry to distract you.
This time, the hands of the director (or more accurately, directors) were more evident to me. I'm not sure if all the scenes and shots I liked should be attributed to Victor Fleming, George Cukor or Sam Wood, but the scenes were stunning no matter who directed them.
One sequence, which escaped my notice watching the film on television, depicts a minister speaking in front of large stained-glass window of Jesus Christ as an explosion rips through Christ's midsection. The minister continues to speak and the camera pulls back to reveal that the minister is speaking to a wounded soldier, one of many who have turned the church into a makeshift hospital.
The restoration also highlights other stunning shots and their vivid colors. There are some flaws in the print — certain parts still seem faded and occasionally blotches of red, blue and green bleed through the image.
The film itself may be unsurpassed in terms of storytelling, holding your interest for 222 minutes, something even films less than 90 minutes long have trouble doing today. In fact, one should admire Gone With the Wind for doing what television miniseries such as North and South do today at more than twice the running time.
The pacing flows naturally, with the exception of the final portion of the film beginning with Scarlett's acceptance of Rhett's marriage proposal. From there through the birth, life and death of their child and the resolution of the remainder of the film almost feels rushed.
Then again, who cares? When you build up to the final scene with no less than three memorable lines including the first, and arguably the most famous, piece of profanity ever put on screen. In 1939, Gable's "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" shocked and almost didn't make the cut. Thank goodness it did.
The main problem I've always had with Gone With the Wind still bothered me when I watched it again and that problem is named Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes. Having never read Margaret Mitchell's classic novel, I don't know if the problem lies in Wilkes' character or in Howard's interpretation, but he has always bothered me as being weaker than the rest of the cast.
Howard looks too gaunt, too bland and too boring to be believable as someone Scarlett would carry a torch for for decades. His indecisiveness and weakness seems unbecoming for someone who's supposed to be a leading officer in the Confederate Army.
Howard aside, the rest of the performances are unsurpassed. Olivia de Havilland stood out for this time. Melanie, the most kind person Rhett ever knew and Ashley's wife, could come off as a goody two-shoes, but de Havilland overcomes that. Melanie is nice and loyal, but you can see that she also is very bright. Scarlett may believe Melanie is naive, but the audience knows better.
It doesn't need to be said, but Gable excels as Rhett, who actually is on screen less than you might think, but the times when he is never bores. His sparks with Leigh stand with any of the great antagonistic love interests of all time.
What more can be said about Leigh that hasn't already been said. She is Scarlett O'Hara. You forget she's British, something you always notice as far as Howard is concerned. Her facial expressions, her delivery — nothing she does misses the mark. One forgets that this same actress made just as indelible an impression as a very different Southerner — Blanche DuBois — 12 years later.
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Labels: 30s, Cukor, de Havilland, Gable, Movie Tributes, Television, V. Leigh
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