Edward Copeland on Film

12 сердитых людей

2009-11-02T08:00:00.013-06:00

By Edward Copeland
I sure hope the estate of Reginald Rose or whomever owns the rights to 12 Angry Men got some sort of payment from the makers of the Russian film 12, because there is no question that the film is an unequivocal remake. Sure, there are some changes, but most of the story has merely been transplanted to Moscow, even the easy availability of supposedly unique knives. Director Nikita Mikhalkov's film does enough different to make the story seem fresh, but its length hampers the enjoyment.

Of course, 12, which was one of the Oscar nominees for foreign language film in 2007 though it didn't get a U.S. release until 2009, doesn't have the advantage that all the American incarnations of 12 Angry Men have in that most of the cast are made up of performers familiar to U.S. audiences, giving them a leg up to separating the characters. 12 can't quite differentiate as well. Even when you start to realize which one is the doctor, etc., part of it still plays in terms of Sidney Lumet's 1957 feature version, picking out the Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb stand-ins.

What really lengthens Mikhalkov's film and seems unnecessary are the flashback scenes fleshing out the story of the defendant. It really steps on the directorial flow of Mikhalkov, who also plays one of the jurors. Still, it's much better than the film Mikhalkov won the foreign language Oscar for, Burnt By the Sun. 12 wants to be story of a justice system struggling in post-Soviet Russia. There isn't a suitable jury room adjacent to the courthouse, so the jurors make their decision in a rundown school's gymnasium, complete with leaky pipes and asbestos falling from the ceiling.

Accused of murder is a young Chechen man who was adopted by a Russian soldier when his father was killed in Russian-Chechen combat. It does allow for a bit of the hatred between the Russians and Chechens to rear its head (along with some anti-Semitism between the jurors), but the scenes really do nothing to add to the deliberations, especially shots of the defendant spinning in dance in his jail cell as if he were Billy Elliott.

12 Angry Men is such a warhorse, that it almost always can work and this version, written by Mikhalkov, Aleksandr Novototsky-Vlasov and Vladimir Moiseyenko, does have a nice twist in the final stage of deliberations, focusing on what life will be like for the young man, that almost makes 12 reach a higher level of artistry. Unfortunately, it's such a long, predictable drive to get there.

A well of tradition to draw from

2009-10-29T08:00:00.002-05:00

By Edward Copeland
Something happens to the best filmmakers. Even when they are good, once they delve into their own ethnic or societal upbringing, they achieve a deeper greatness, whether the film in question is explicitly autobiographical or not.

Steven Spielberg finally seemed to grow up once he made Schindler's List, even though he'd made great films before that. Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman hit high watermarks early because they didn't delay those explorations. Other filmmakers such as Brian DePalma remain hollow ciphers with little interest in self-examination (or beyond making a couple of interesting film sequences per film).

Though No Country for Old Men showed a new step forward for the Coen brothers, A Serious Man is their first film that openly addresses growing up Jewish in late '60s Minnesota and it is unlike anything they've made before, displaying a maturity unseen in their work while still being great and entertaining.

After opening with a short Jewish fable set in the European past, A Serious Man settles into its Job-like tale of Lawrence Gopnik, a college physics professor in 1967 Minnesota who tries to lives a good life until realities he was completely oblivious to start striking him one after another as his son's bar mitzvah approaches and he's due to learn whether he will get tenure at his university.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Gopnik with a sense of wide-eyed disbelief at the array of misfortune the befalls him. For some reason early in the film, he momentarily struck me like Bryan Cranston's Walter White on television's great Breaking Bad, but Gopnik isn't that complicated nor terminally ill and he certainly isn't going to become an aspiring drug kingpin. Early in the film, the phrase "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you" appears on the screen and that appears to be Gopnik's approach except for a slight breakdown here or there.

When his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) suddenly announces that she wants a divorce so she can have a ritual Jewish marriage with their friend and widower Sy (Fred Melamed). Sy is an unusual man, wanting to be unusually compassionate and cooperative to Larry while he busts up his marriage. The Gopniks' two children seem disinterested in what's going on with the teen daughter trying to gather cash for a nose job and the son more worried about lousy TV reception for F Troop and money he owes his pot dealer.

Larry doesn't have it much better at his job. As he awaits the tenure decision, he's told that someone is sending anonymous notes questioning his moral turpitude and he's being harassed by a South Korean student and his family who feel that he's been harassed because he's flunking physics and Gopnik won't change his grade or accept his bribe which he may or may not have given the professor.

All of this sends Gopnik on a spiritual journey, embracing his Judaism in a way he never has before, trying to find answers to the all these questions. The Coens keep their own points-of-view close to their chest. You can't be sure if they find all this religiosity silly, if they are viewing Larry's travails from the viewpoint of God or if they take his search seriously.

Whatever the Coens' real-life take, A Serious Man works. In Broadcast News after Albert Brooks' character's disastrous try at anchoring the weekend news, he starts laughing when he describes it to Holly Hunter, explaining that, "At some point, it got so off-the-chart bad, it just got funny." Larry Gopnik never feels that way, but the audience of A Serious Man certainly will as its tone is humor of the darkest shade.

The Coens always have been strong filmmakers, but at times their tendency toward showiness got in the way, especially when the films in question were some of their lesser efforts. There is very little of that here as they do yeoman work on what may be the best screenplay they've written. They're aided ably by frequent collaborators such as composer Carter Burwell, cinematographer Roger Deakins and that phantom film editor Roderick Jaynes.

The entire cast, composed mostly of familiar faces and unknowns, all do good work. Of the supporting cast, I'd single out Melamed and George Wyner as one of the rabbis Larry sees. However, the film revolves around Larry, and the relatively unknown Stuhlbarg pulls it off. His performance is a wonder with so much contained in his face which reminded me of Harold Lloyd. The Coens were smart to place their faith in him to anchor A Serious Man because I can't visualize the film working with another actor as Larry Gopnik.

Drag Me to Hell: the tortured home viewer's cut

2009-10-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

By Edward Copeland
Whenever a film hits DVD with the "director's cut," I'm always torn. Should I watch the theatrical version and write about that, since it's what people saw in the theater, or go with the unrated version. With Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, I toyed with the idea (assuming I liked it) of watching the theatrical version first, which was rated PG-13, and then watch the unrated, unneutered version and compare the two. The best laid plans... Unfortunately, the first DVD that arrived kept freezing and skipping about an hour into the theatrical version. I did all the usual tricks to no avail and then assumed it was a bad disc before mailing it back for a replacement.

When the second disc arrived, the same thing happened, so I tried it out on a portable DVD player, but it didn't solve the problem. Then I noticed something on the screen where you picked between the unrated and theatrical versions: small print indicated that the theatrical version might have problems playing on some DVD players. So, I switched to approximately the same part of the story in the unrated version and finished the film. Therefore, the cut of Drag Me to Hell I saw really was one of my own invention.

Despite the technical problems and my own self-editing hodgepodge, I found Drag Me to Hell quite enjoyable. It's not campy in the way Raimi's early horror forays such as the Evil Dead series was, but Drag Me to Hell is a more straight-forward scarefest about Christine Brown, a sweet young loan officer (Alison Lohman) who makes the mistake of turning down the third mortgage extension to the wrong old gypsy and gets an awful curse placed upon her. Christine's inner, sympathetic instincts might have been to give the old woman (Lorna Raver) to pay what she owes, but her boss at the bank (David Paymer) discourages it and Christine is hoping for a promotion. Given the economic disaster our country has been facing, watching the movie, even though you know Christine doesn't deserve what she gets, you can't help but think it what fun it would have been if some of this country's foreclosure victims, tricked into subprime loans, had been well-versed in the dark arts and taken similar evil action against soulless financial institutions.

Christine does have a smart and attentive professor boyfriend (Justin Long) but she has problems beyond the gypsys's curse to contend with his snobby parents and in addition to her bank boss who still treats her as a secretary while dangling that promotion and a rival loan officer (Reggie Lee) who is after the same job and will sink to anything to steal it out from under her.

Most of the scares in the script by Raimi and his brother Ivan get to be predictable but Sam Raimi's direction moves the action along at such a swift pace that many of the frights catch you by surprise anyway. Lohman, who was so good in the underrated Matchstick Men, really has to carry the film and she does so admirably. Her transformation from sweet and well-meaning to angry, vengeful and willing to do anything to anyone and anything to rid herself of the gypsy's plague is played with great aplomb.

Drag Me to Hell won't go down in history as one of the all-time greats in the horror genre but it's certainly leagues above much of what has passed for good efforts in that field in recent years.

Class of 1984 blog-a-thon

2009-10-26T07:45:00.001-05:00

By Edward Copeland
Joe Valdez at This Distracted Globe is having film bloggers across the Internet take an Orwellian look back at the films of 1984. Because I like to do as little work as possible these days, I'm recycling my post from earlier this year marking the 25th anniversary of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension.

Lou Jacobi (1913-2009)

2009-10-25T10:21:00.003-05:00

His face is much more familiar than his name, but to some extent that is to be expected for a character actor with as lengthy a career as Lou Jacobi, who has died at 95.

He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in The Diary of Anne Frank as Mr. Van Daan, a role he repeated in the 1959 film version. His other Broadway work included Woody Allen's play Don't Drink the Water. He worked with Allen again on film playing the secret transvestite in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.

The size of Jacobi's roles varied from single scenes to more significant parts in film and on television. In movies, he appeared in Irma la Douce, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Little Murders, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Arthur, My Favorite Year and I.Q. Perhaps his best or most notable recent film role was as the cranky and stubborn uncle in Barry Levinson's Avalon, holding a grudge over when a Thanksgiving meal was served.

Jacobi's episodic television work was fairly prolific ranging from multiple appearances on the anthologies Love, American Style and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour as well as series such as Barney Miller, That Girl, St. Elsewhere, Cagney & Lacey, The Dick Van Dyke Show and many others. One of my personal favorites is an episode of Sanford & Son titled "Steinberg & Son" where Fred sues when a TV series appears obviously modeled on his life about a junk dealer and his son only the junk dealer is Jewish and played by Jacobi. In one memorable scene, Redd Foxx's Fred gives Jacobi's Steinberg tips on how he should react to the sitcom's version of Aunt Esther.

RIP Mr. Jacobi.

Fountain of Youth

2009-10-21T08:00:00.003-05:00

By Josh R
If you believe what you see on television – particularly during commercial breaks – you might be inclined to think that growing older is just one great big piece of heart-smart, low-cholesterol cake. Age is Just a Number and/or a State of Mind, and with the right battery of hormones and a fridge chock full of Activia, late middle-age can be one long, soft-focus stroll along the beach.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the callowness and callousness of youth, but I’ve always taken a rather dim view of aging – no matter what spin Madison Avenue puts on the process of growing older, the inescapable truth is that time takes its toll on every traveler. With age comes decay - the body weakens, senses diminish, abilities fall by the wayside and we become shadows of our former selves.

Or not.

Rosemary Harris, the Tony Award-winning actress currently starring in Manhattan Theatre Club’s well-presented revival of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s decidedly dated comedy The Royal Family, is 82 years of age. If this venerated veteran of the boards doesn’t really seem to register the implications of what’s printed on her birth certificate, it doesn’t appear that Father Time is paying much attention either. Whatever Faustian bargain she and fellow octogenarian Angela Lansbury – who has proved equally adept in turning back the clock - have struck to remain at the height of their powers well into their golden years is between them and their confessors. Regardless of whether or not they’ve made a deal with the devil to remain in peak form, the experience of seeing them light up Broadway is nothing short of heavenly.

The play itself, it must be noted, shows its age a bit more conspicuously than its leading lady. Examining the trials and tribulations of a theatrical dynasty none-too-loosely modeled on the Barrymores, it’s the sort of featherweight concoction that probably worked on the same level as You Can’t Take It With You or Arsenic and Old Lace for Depression Era audiences – rose-tinged escapism involving zany characters, slapstick, slamming doors and ludicrous plot devices, blissfully unencumbered by anything resembling dramatic substance. What probably seemed like giddy, spontaneous fun to audiences of yesteryear feels more than slightly labored in a contemporary context. With its rusty mechanics and somewhat stilted dialogue, the text seems so careworn that the experience of hearing it aloud is occasionally like leafing through the pages of a yellowed newspaper that disintegrates upon contact. It’s a testament to the tact and skill of director Doug Hughes that the production moves at a reasonably good pace (there are a few passages that no amount of talent could keep from dragging), and locates the laughs where they still exist and mines them for full impact. Not all octogenarians are as spry as Ms. Harris; The play premiered on Broadway in 1927, which was also the year of her birth. If it doesn’t bear the weight of its 82 years as lightly as she does, it still has its share of incidental pleasures, not the least of which are its performances.

From the moment Ms. Harris steps into the spotlight as Fanny Cavendish, the family matriarch who views the acting profession as something akin to a higher calling, time doesn’t just stand still – it seems to be working in reverse. The performance is so fresh and vibrant that, at times, the actress seems to radiate the very glow of youth, and when, as Fanny, she speaks of her love of the stage, there’s more than just a spirit of nostalgia at work; it’s as if an entire legacy of theatrical experience has been brought to vivid and resplendent life before your eyes. With her elegant self-possession and crystalline delivery, Ms. Harris is a performer in the classic tradition of the Helen Hayeses, Ina Claires and Katharine Cornells; you don’t have to read her Playbill bio (littered with Shakespeares, Shaws, Pinters and Cowards) to know that she’s been there and done that, and probably better than just about anyone else – the evidence is right there in front of you.

More than a bit of that majestic glow rubs off on Jan Maxwell, the protean actress who plays Fanny’s daughter Julie, a celebrated star who would handle her designated role as caretaker to a family of madcaps a bit more fluently if she weren’t so scattershot herself. Given how on point Ms. Harris is, it would be perfectly understandable if the actress playing Julie (the role Ms. Harris herself played in the acclaimed 1976 Broadway revival) didn’t register as much more than a daughter living in her mother’s shadow. With her droll mastery of period style, Ms. Maxwell not only avoids that trap, but brings to the role the kind of star quality that dispels any doubt that Julie can and should exist as a legend in her own right. She and Ms. Harris complement each other beautifully, and when Julie lets her composure fall by the wayside at the end of the second act and becomes unglued, Maxwell artfully whips her performance up to the level of screwball tour-de-force.

If none of the other performers manage to reach such blissful heights of fever-pitched hysteria, they are all more than game. As the rakish matinee idol Tony, Reg Rogers is more Marx Brothers than John Barrymore – it’s the rare instance of a performance that could perhaps benefit from a bit more cultured affectation – but his full-out manic energy is very, very funny. Although his delivery seems a bit wispy for the role of the preening has-been uncle, John Glover has certainly mastered the art of the grand theatrical gesture – as his clueless, classless wife, Ana Gasteyer gets her laughs, even though her performance style is exaggerated to the point that it tends to devolve into a catalog of facial tics (it’s the kind of caricature that would seem more at home in an SNL sketch). No one else in the cast makes as strong an impression, although they are a conscientious bunch of troupers, and provide the two leading ladies with plenty of material to play off of.

It’s Harris and Maxwell who make The Royal Family an essential ticket, even if the play itself seems to be stuck in a bit of a time warp. If you haven’t had the pleasure of witnessing Ms. Harris in her natural habitat prior to now, you’d better get a move on. As unchivalrous as it may be to point out, she isn’t getting any younger - then again, if The Royal Family is any indication, she may well remain blithely indifferent to that fact well into the next decade of her career. Even if time doesn’t really stand still, a great talent can create the illusion that it does.

The only causes worth fighting for

2009-10-19T08:00:00.001-05:00

By Edward Copeland
Whenever I prepare to write favorably about Frank Capra, I feel as if I should don a helmet first for the inevitable brickbats that will be launched my way. However, with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington celebrating its 70th birthday, I feel it needs recognition not only because it's a great film but it's a reminder of what a disappointment our elected representatives can be. Oh, if only filibusters were still real filibusters like the one Jefferson Smith gives at the film's climax instead of the toothless maneuver we're stuck with today that denies the right to simple majority rule. (We'll forget for the moment that since the entire Senate was against Smith in the movie, a cloture vote to cut him off would have been easily attainable.) Still, whenever I catch Mr. Smith, no matter how long it has been on, I have to watch until the end. It's the curse of being both a movie buff and a political junkie. In a way, with recent events, it seems to have a bit of timeliness beneath the treacle and idealistic love of how this country should work. (Of course, the film conveniently avoids placing any of the senators within political parties.) With all the recent Senate openings that had to be filled by appointment or fiat, Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) turns out not to be someone who can be controlled by the corrupt political boss of his home state Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), only Smith turns out to be reverent of the job he's taken, not a loose cannon like Illinois' Roland Burris, appointed by an embattled governor like Rod Blagojevich or someone who will do what he's told. The strength of Capra's film is its fine ensemble. In addition to Stewart and Arnold, you've got Jean Arthur as a cynical reporter who schools Jefferson Smith on the ways of Washington falls for his ideals, Thomas Mitchell as her fellow reporter, Harry Carey as the president of the Senate and last, but certainly not least, Claude Rains as the senior senator from Smith's state, a once great man who, as most long-serving lawmakers unfortunately seem to do, gets corrupted by the moneymen who keep him in office and call his shots. How little sadly has changed in 70 years. There also are bits with many other recognizable character actors such as William Demarest, Guy Kibbee, H.B. Warner, Charles Lane and Beulah Bondi. It garnered a slew of Oscar nominations in 1939, Hollywood's most fabled year for great films, though of its 11 nominations, it only won for best original story by Lewis R. Foster and Stewart's loss for best actor always has been believed to lead to his win the following year for The Philadelphia Story as a "makeup Oscar." Mitchell won the Oscar for supporting actor that year but not for Mr. Smith. He was amazingly great and busy in 1939, winning for Stagecoach but also giving solid support in Gone With the Wind and Only Angels Have Wings. Other than Stewart, the other two actors nominated by the Academy were Rains and, interestingly enough, Carey. Carey is good, but in a year as competitive as 1939, it's an odd choice to be sure. It's an odd second choice to pick just from Mr. Smith. Alas, the great Jean Arthur wasn't nominated at all. In fact, she only earned a single nomination in her entire career. As for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington itself, like Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, there is such a label of corniness that has been attached to the films that people forget (or never watch) and see there is a bit of darkness as well. Both films feature protagonists who get the shit kicked out of them by life. Of course, George Bailey is a dreamer, but a realist who recognizes the evil around him. Jefferson Smith also is a dreamer, but he's an naive idealist who is surprised to learn the ways D.C. really works. In the case of Mr. Smith, the chief villain is bad enough to run trucks carrying young boys off roads and give them life-threatening injuries when they aren't just using police to turn fire hoses on them. Still, Jefferson Smith doesn't quit and he doesn't cave and the crooks are defeated and right is victorious. It's a Wonderful Life may have an angel, but Mr. Smith in its own way is a bigger fantasy when you consider the crooks and dimwits we have in Congress today. Mr. Smith can give you a little lift and make you dream of a government that could be run for the people under the principles of the Founding Fathers instead of for the powerful and the pols addicted to the perks of their seats in Congress. Oh, and the movie's damn good, too.

Metal on celluloid

2009-10-16T08:00:00.001-05:00

By Edward Copeland
With my access to new films growing more limited with each passing week, it's hard for me to say with any certainty if the recent trend has remained true that nonfiction films still prove more consistently worthwhile than fictional efforts. This year, I've only seen one documentary so far, but it is by far one of the most satisfying film experiences I've had and I don't have a single heavy metal CD in my extensive collection, let alone one by Anvil, the subject of Anvil: The Story of Anvil.

Even in my youth I was never remotely a headbanger, yet for the second time in recent memory a documentary about a heavy metal band (the other being Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) kept me riveted. Of course, the stories of the two bands couldn't be more different.

Metallica enjoyed huge success. Somehow, despite critical acclaim within the genre and some early, highly touted albums, stardom eluded Anvil. Metallica's Lars Ulrich even gives an extended interview on the DVD talking about how he heard of Anvil and how big an influence the band's drummer, Robb Reiner, had at the time, fielding offers from many large acts.

Still, the Canadian band stuck together, having to work other jobs and recording albums on their or using vacation time to accept whatever tour or gigs they can book. As all the band's members, having been together for more than two decades, are near or past 50, director Sacha Gervasi chronicles the group and their lead singer Steve "Lips" Kudlow" as they embark on a disastrous European tour and then self-finance what appears to be a shot at a great, polished comeback album by a noted record producer who worked on some of their early albums as well as those of other notable artists'.

Lips provides the heart of the band and of the film. Anvil is his obsession and his life's work and even though other members of the band and their families know that on some level Lips is a heavy metal Don Quixote, tilting at windmills and pursuing campaigns that were lost to the band long ago, quit doesn't exist in his vocabulary. However, Lips is not a subject of mockery as far as the documentary is concerned. He is a dreamer and he loves his music and will keep making it. You can't help but think of This Is Spinal Tap with a drummer named Robb Reiner, a shot of a knob being turned to 11 and a visit to Stonehenge, but Anvil never laughs at the band's expense.

You root for these middle-age men even if you'd never buy one of their albums yourself. People this committed to what they love and willing to sacrifice so much to pursue it for so long turns out to pretty amazing and awe-inspiring. There also are lots of nice swipes at the record industry and though I have no first-hand knowledge of the industry, when Lips claims that an overwhelming number of musicians never get paid by the labels.

I have no trouble believing that when you see the greedy way they demand repeat payments, ruining old movies and TV shows with their Mafia-like extortion tactics. The actors and writers and so on keep getting residuals for their work, why do the owners of song have to get so specialized, restrictive deals that some shows never appear on DVD or get lame substitution music, ruining people's precious memories?

Forgive my digression. I got distracted and perhaps the world's distraction at a certain place and time is what prevented Anvil from becoming a megasuccess. Regardless, Lips still is doing what he loves and Sacha Gervasi has made a movie document that preserves for the ages that Anvil was here,

Another season, another reason

2009-10-13T08:00:00.001-05:00

By Edward Copeland
It's a cliche to say, "They don't make 'em like they used to." It's downright depressing when that trite saying is being employed to refer to a film such as The Fabulous Baker Boys that is just marking its 20th anniversary. Has Hollywood really degenerated this much this fast? In 1989, this was a big studio release. Now, we'd be lucky if someone would pick it up as an independent feature. Maybe if the Baker Boys were built out of Legos or transformed into robots.

When I first saw Steve Kloves' film in 1989, while I liked it, I didn't know quite what to think of it because it really was unlike any major studio release I was used to at the time. Here it was though: a film more like a tone poem than a heavily plotted release with Warner Bros. behind it and marquee names such as Sydney Pollack and Paula Weinstein backing a first-time writer-director on a film whose commercial prospects must have seemed limited. Before Kloves made The Fabulous Baker Boys, his main credit was as the screenwriter of the good but largely forgotten coming-of-age film Racing With the Moon starring Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth McGovern. Michelle Pfeiffer's star was just beginning to rise, but she couldn't be counted on to lure in audiences. Jeff Bridges was a much respected actor but hardly box office gold and that was even more the case with his co-star, brother Beau. They even dared to allow a film with an open-ended, ambiguous ending. Still, they took the chance and allowed this film to be made and it is one that grows better and better with each viewing, even though I know deep down that if all the planets hadn't been in alignment at the right moment in the late 1980s, this film gem would never have been made. That makes me sad. It also makes me sadder to think of Kloves' career direction. He made another film as writer-director, Flesh and Bone, a mixed bag of a movie most notable for first gaining notice for Gwyneth Paltrow. Since then, he's been purely a screenwriter, albeit a great one, doing a faithful and solid job at adapting Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and adapting every single Harry Potter book with the exception of The Order of the Phoenix. He got the job because The Fabulous Baker Boys is one of J.K. Rowlings' favorite films. Still, I wish Kloves had the chance to write and direct his own original work again.

Still, even if Kloves never directs again, he's left us a great one in The Fabulous Baker Boys where seemingly every aspect is top notch, from Dave Grusin's moody, jazz-like score which seems in perfect harmony with Michael Ballhaus' cinematography, full of smoke and shadows, almost creating a color noir look to this tale of two piano-playing brothers. You're never quite certain where this film is heading because plot is almost irrelevant, yet Kloves creates a fictional universe with such complete confidence that it's never a concern. Having real-life brothers Jeff and Beau Bridges play Jack and Frank Baker was a brilliant stroke. Not only do the true siblings have a short-hand that only a lifetime of knowing each other could have brought, Baker Boys also gives each of the actors what may well be their finest feature film roles. Most of Beau's best work came on TV after this, but his Frank is memorable as the passive-aggressive control freak, who fancies himself the business brains behind the act and who works to support his wife and kids, even though he knows that his brother is the one with the greater talent. Jack though is the center of the film and Jeff Bridges is superb as the chain-smoking, borderline alcoholic who hates the redundancy of his life and would rather be playing what he wants instead of the same set for the umpteenth time. He can be cruel and as one character describes him, cold as razorblades, yet he still takes time to be a pseudo-surrogate dad for the young girl who lives upstairs from him and frequently is abandoned by her mother for her frequent boyfriends. Bridges has been great so often in so many films sometimes it's easy to forget about him, but I've never forgotten his Jack Baker. Of course, the third member of this acting team is Pfeiffer as Susie Diamond, the singer the brothers hire when Frank decides that perhaps they need a vocalist to jump-start the act. Pfeiffer's work is both sultry and superb and there's a wisp of sadness when you remember when Pfeiffer was on the rise before she began turning down great roles and appeared to commit career suicide in crap such as I Am Sam. Susie not only revitalizes the act, she creates friction about other changes. When one of Frank's kids get sick and he has to let Jack and Susie perform alone, the two relish the chance to change the playlist. When Frank learns later they skipped "Feelings," an argument ensues over whether the song is filet mignon or parsley. In terms of movies, The Fabulous Baker Boys is most definitely filet. In fact, 1989 may be the most recent year to serve up so many delectable entrees and desserts in the form of movies. From the masterpieces to the solid good times, it truly was an amazing year and The Fabulous Baker Boys is another example of what cinematic magic that movie year managed to bestow as gifts to us who worship films.

On the road to nowhere

2009-10-12T08:00:00.004-05:00

By Edward Copeland
When a film is structured as a road trip, basically a series of vignettes, you're going to run into trouble when the characters your main protagonists meet along the way are infinitely more interesting than the film's stars are. Each time you run into a new set of potentially fascinating people, Away We Go jerks the characters away and sticks you back into the company of the two bores you began the journey with and from whom you were seeking respite.

John Krasinksi and Maya Rudolph star as Burt and Verona, a couple expecting their first child in Sam Mendes' film of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida's screenplay. The pair are uncertain where and how to make a life. Burt would like to wed, but Verona sees no need and two take off across North America seeing friends, acquaintances and relatives to get ideas of what to do and what not to do in their future. While Krasinksi and Rudolph each have their moments, especially Krasinski, the stars are overshadowed by the characters they meet on their journey,

First, there is an all-to-brief but fun appearance by Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara as Burt's parents. They are followed by hysterical turns by Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan as a long married couple and later by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton as a New Agey pair who believe they have all the answers and finally set Burt off.

The problem with Away We Go, as with most films of this sort of episodic nature, is that the structure comes prebuilt with its own inevitable series of ups and downs and some parts work better than others and the whole suffers as a result.

This is doubly the case here since we never get a good hook on who Burt and Verona are and why we should care enough to follow these two around to begin with. Away We Go isn't a bad film, it's just one that was flawed from its conception and the movie that ended up being born as a result just doesn't work.

Taxing driver

2009-10-09T07:15:00.000-05:00

By Edward Copeland
"When I Paint My Masterpiece" is one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs, even if I prefer his version to the cover by The Band that opens Observe and Report. It's a strange musical choice to open the movie, but then almost every choice made in writer-director Jody Hill's film is an odd one.

When this Seth Rogen vehicle opened earlier this year, much was made of the scene where Rogen's character basically rapes an unconscious Anna Faris, but I'm not so sure why that scene leaped out as disturbing when most of the tone of the film up to that point has been disturbing. I think Hill set out to make a jet black comedy only most of the comedy got left out and what's left is a fractured, uneven tale that I imagine might resemble what a long 1970s-style Dick Cavett interview with Crispin Glover would look like.

Rogen stars as Ronnie Barnhardt, head of security at a suburban mall afflicted with a parking lot flasher. To say Ronnie is wound tight is an understatement. He views the mall as his kingdom, the cosmetics girl (Faris) as his secret love and his word as the law. While Rogen can be hysterical, he plays it straight and it's only late in the film that it explicitly spells out that Ronnie suffers from bipolar disorder. Prior to that, you think you're just watching an unfunny, dry spoof of Travis Bickle, but the way the film is made, it's not designed to laugh at Ronnie or to feel sympathy for him either.

Rogen gives such a fierce, committed performance as Ronnie that you wish he was in a better movie. In fact, all the actors seem adrift in their own separate movies that somehow have been poured together in some kitchen sink to form an alcoholic jungle juice concoction at a high school party being held while the parents are out of town.

Michael Pena gets some funny moments as another mall guard and seems to be in a subtler comedy. Celia Weston can unfurl her comic talents in her sleep and does it again as Rogen's boozy mom, but again she seems out of another film. Ray Liotta plays his role as a police detective hampered by Rogen's delusions pretty straight, almost as if he realizes Ronnie is a psycho and this shouldn't be a funny movie. Faris seems to be doing an amalgamation of many of her past roles.

While you can't say that anyone gives a bad performance, they are all hostage to a screenplay that just doesn't know what the hell it wants to be. Then, to make matters worse, it tries to slap somewhat of a happy ending on the whole mess, even if it is a happy ending tinged with anger. Someone should have observed this film much more closely as it was being made and report to people in charge that a disaster was at hand.

A One-Note Shtick

2009-10-07T08:00:00.002-05:00

By Jonathan Pacheco
The initial draft of this review spent 850+ words droning on about the mockumentary aesthetic of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, going back and forth on whether or not to fault the film for abandoning said aesthetic halfway through the film. When I gave the draft to my friend and unofficial editor, her notes boiled down to this: “Why am I reading this?” My review of District 9 had no hook, no real reason to be read. I realized that my friend didn’t care about what I had to say because I didn’t care about this film. District 9, while not the instant classic many hyped it up to be, really isn’t a bad movie; I enjoyed myself watching it. So why, then, do I feel nothing for it?

When you get down to it, District 9 exists because of its gimmick concept: it’s a fake documentary about humans oppressing aliens -- and not the other way around. The film follows the recent effort by a private military contractor, Multinational United (MNU), to move all the aliens from their current home, the slum-like District 9, to the new, more controlled District 10. Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a by-the-books company man, leads this operation, bending morals and laws to make the move as swift as possible. His troubles begin when he’s exposed to an alien biotechnology during the operation.

Like Cloverfield before it, District 9 fascinates until one looks beyond the film’s thin stylistic veneer. I’ll admit, the incorporation of state-of-the-art CG into shaky-cam footage hypnotizes me; a few years ago this was barely possible. Now it’s the de facto technique to ensure your computer generated objects “seem more real,” and most of the time it works. But all you’ll find behind this aesthetic in District 9 is a fairly color-by-numbers action flick, as the movie takes few risks in its portrayal of its reluctant hero, the predictable villains, or any of their interactions. Even the characterization of the maltreated aliens offers little originality beyond the initial switcheroo setup. The “prawns,” as they’re degradingly called, are depicted as violent, relatively unintelligent, and slightly barbaric creatures (of course, not nearly as savage as the evil corporate white man). If the aliens were Africans and the intelligent “prawn” Christopher Johnson was played by Djimon Hounsou, you’d find yourself watching Blood Diamond.

Blomkamp flaunts the themes of racism and xenophobia, making no attempt at subtlety (though with a plot involving persecuted “aliens,” how subtle can you really get?). Consequently, District 9 subjects us to tried-and-true action flick scenes, such as when Wikus and Christopher join forces to tag-team their way through adversity, reaching their goals and gaining a greater appreciation for the other’s uniqueness. Right. Didn’t that also happen in Rush Hour? What seems to be the difference maker for a lot of critics and viewers is the film’s overt political metaphor involving the apartheid (and post-apartheid) system of segregation in South Africa’s history and present day. I won’t lie and tell you I knew the history of these occurrences when I watched District 9, but I also won’t lie and tell you that the symbolism makes much of a difference. I find myself trying to care about the film’s well-meaning usage of the metaphor, but it really has nothing interesting or resonating to say other than, “This is some bad stuff going on, man.”

Comparatively, yes, it’s 10 times more engaging and intelligent than the summer action fare that reigned over multiple screens at your local theater, but objectively, District 9 is a decent cinematic diversion and not much else. By resorting to character clichés and settling for shallow metaphors, Blomkamp prevents himself from elevating his film beyond much other than a stylistic gimmick. Gimmicks can be fun, but once they’re over, why should I care?

Capitalism: a love story

2009-10-06T08:00:00.001-05:00

By Edward Copeland
The words that appear on the screen at the opening of Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, 70 years old today, tells us that the film is set in Paris at the time when a siren was a brunette not an alarm and that when a Frenchman turned off a light, it wasn't because of an air raid. You have to think that those words came from the typewriters of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, who are credited with the screenplay along with Walter Reisch. Lubitsch, Wilder, Brackett and to top it all off, you've got Greta Garbo in a film that was marketed under the tag: Garbo Laughs. So will you. The tone in a way seems reminiscent of Wilder's classic from decades later, One, Two, Three. The story concerns a trio of bumbling of Soviets who come to Paris attempting to sell the jewels of a former grand duchess only to have the deal legally thwarted by the duchess's man in Paris, Leon (Melvyn Douglas), who gets an injunction saying the goods still belong to the woman (Ina Claire) and the Russians have no right to them. When he talks the trio (Sig Rumann, Felix Bressart and Alexander Granart) into messaging back to Moscow an agreement where the the duchess and the Soviets will split the proceeds of the sale, the communist superiors are furious and send a special envoy to straighten things out in the form of Garbo. Garbo plays Nina Yakushova Ivanoff or Ninotchka, a prim, pure committed communist, devoted to her country's ideals and the eventual fall of capitalism that its inherent corruption will bring. She's insulted that Parisians make an issue of her womanhood, feeling perfectly capable of carrying her own bags. She's shocked at the cost and extravagance of the hotel suite in which she's been booked, which could purchase seven cows for her Russian people a day. As she tours Paris, including the requisite trip to the Eiffel Tower, by coincidence she runs into Leon and the two competing economic systems can't get in the way of a mutual attraction, especially since Ninotchka doesn't know Leon is her legal rival at first. She appreciates he might have qualities despite being "the unfortunate product of a doomed culture." Ninotchka brought Garbo the third (or fourth, depending how you count the year she was nominated for two movies) and final Oscar nomination of her career and there is probably a good chance she might have won had she not been facing one of the all-time best actress juggernauts in Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara. Garbo is a wonder here, from her rigid beginnings, to the slow seduction the trappings of Parisian society and Douglas' flirtation make on her. Few times on film has such a humorless character been so hilarious, so much so that when Ninotchka finally lets loose with laughter, it is a true joy to behold. For many, Douglas also might prove to be a revelation as the charming Leon. Many may know him best from his Oscar-winning roles from much later in his career, as Paul Newman's tough, grizzled father in 1963's Hud and as the billionaire industrialist who takes a dim gardener under his wing in 1979's Being There. The younger Douglas is witty, charming, fleet on his feet and a great match with Garbo when the two do a drunken duet. Garbo and Douglas also get able support from the rest of the cast which includes Bela Lugosi who gets fourth billing for a single scene as a top Russian official. It's always nice to see Lugosi in a first-class production before his life and career fell apart. Still, it's Garbo and Douglas, with the strong underpinnings of Lubitsch's grace and Wilder and Brackett's wit, that make Ninotchka such a charmer, even 70 years later.

…and now for something completely different

2009-10-05T08:15:00.003-05:00

By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
The scene begins as a group of men and women are seated in an area near the counter of a pharmacy — or “chemist’s”, as they’re called in the U.K. There is a sign on the counter that reads “Dispensing Department” and a cheerful employee enters…

CHEMIST: Right. I've got some of your prescriptions here...er, who's got the pox? (Nobody reacts) ... Come on, who's got the pox ... come on... (A man timidly puts his hand up) . .. there you go. (throws bottle to the man with his hand up) Who's got a boil on the bum... boil on the botty... (throws bottle to the only man standing up) Who's got the chest rash? (a woman with a large bosom puts up hand) Have to get a bigger bottle...who's got wind? (throws bottle to a man sitting by himself) Catch...

The sketch is interrupted by an individual, apparently representing the British Broadcasting Corporation, who apologizes for the “poor quality of the writing in that sketch” by displaying a series of words on projector slides that he promises will “not be used again on this programme”: B*M, B*TTY, P*X, KN*CKERS, W**-W** and SEMPRINI. A woman enters the shot and asks innocently: “Semprini?” The BBC official demands she leave at once, and for the rest of the show anyone uttering this word is quickly hustled offstage by a uniformed policeman.

This was my introduction to a classic television show that debuted on this date 40 years ago: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

How did a sketch comedy program that Python member Michael Palin once described as only being watched by “insomniacs and burglars” become a pop culture phenomenon so huge that it added a new word to the dictionary — “Pythonesque” — to describe its unusual brand of anarchic, surreal humor? The success of Circus can be attributed to many factors, but chiefly among them were the six individuals responsible for writing and performing in the series: Palin, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and animator Terry Gilliam (the only Yank in the bunch). At the time of Circus’ debut, these men were prepared to take risks in the tradition of Beyond the Fringe and the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore series Not Only...But Also, frequently writing sketches in free-form fashion that eschewed the time-honored tradition of endings and punch lines (something they gleaned from Goon Show alumnus Spike Milligan and his comedy series Q5) and taking advantage of the show’s late scheduling to engage in any kind of silliness that tickled their collective fancies. But the educational background of many of the members in Python — Chapman, Cleese and Idle attended Cambridge; Jones and Palin were Oxford grads (collectively they referred to themselves as “Oxbridge”) — was frequently showcased in their sketches, with historical figures like Mozart, Trotsky, Lenin, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan often made the butt of the jokes. There was also a slight political tinge to the proceedings, with the six Pythons gleefully sending up and lampooning authority figures (politicians, policemen) and other idiosyncratic facets of British life.

At the time Circus was putting up its tent, only John Cleese could be called the instantly recognizable member of the embryonic comedy troupe; in addition to writing for television comedian David Frost, he also appeared in sketches of Frost’s various series, notably The Frost Report. Chapman had worked with Cleese as both a writing partner and performer on a scarcely-seen sketch comedy called At Last the 1948 Show (which also featured an up-and-comer named Marty Feldman). Gilliam, Idle, Jones and Palin made each other’s acquaintances on the cult series Do Not Adjust Your Set, with Gilliam creating animated “links” for the series and the other three writing and performing. The BBC’s idea was to put both Cleese and Palin in a series — executives stressed that the word “circus” had to be in the title — but under the tutelage of writer-producer Barry Took (who at one point could have been the namesake of a series called Baron von Took’s Flying Circus) the others were asked to participate as well. The troupe kept the “Flying Circus” part of the title but decided to add “Monty Python” because it sounded like a disreputable agent in show business. (If the Beeb had not been so insistent on the “Circus” title, it’s possible that I could be writing right now about Whither Canada? or Owl Stretching Time — two of the many alternate appellations for the show that engaged the Pythons in spirited debate.)

Though the Pythons themselves took on the various characters played on the series — both male and female — there were a few other performers who appeared on Circus from time to time. The most famous of these was Carol Cleveland, who was usually cast as beautiful women with bodacious ta-ta’s, since the females played by the Python troupe had a tendency to be loud, shrill and unattractive ladies that the members referred to as “pepperpots.” Other regulars included Connie Booth (who was Cleese’s wife at the time — she would later team up with her husband to write and appear in one of the classic Britcoms, Fawlty Towers), Ian McNaughton (the show’s director), Neil Innes and the Fred Tomlinson Singers — who were used when a musical number needed performed. The Pythons also created some memorable characters who, unlike today’s Saturday Night Live, were used sparingly so as not to wear out their welcome. They included Graham Chapman’s bristling Army colonel (who would interrupt sketches that he felt were getting “too silly”); Terry Jones’ naked, smirking organist (also played by Terry Gilliam in the early episodes), Michael Palin’s “It’s” man, who was featured in the opening of many episodes — a hirsute hermit with torn, ragged clothing who just barely managed to get out the word “it’s” before being cut off by Gilliam’s animated credits and John Philip Sousa’s The Liberty Bell, the show’s theme song; and the Gumbys—the male counterpart to the Pepperpots; a group of mustachioed men wearing wire rim glasses, handkerchiefs on their head and gum boots. Cleese also created a dapper, tuxedo-wearing BBC continuity announcer that would often keep the show moving along with his pronouncement: “And now for something completely different…” — which served as the title for the troupe’s first feature film (a compilation of sketches from the first and second series) in 1971.

By the second series, Flying Circus had become such a cult favorite that members of the public would scramble to get hard-to-acquire tickets to attend tapings (a far cry from the early days, in which the audience would be made up of the same type of Women’s Institute members shown applauding in stock footage, another of Circus’ running gags) and the show was given the green light for a third go-round as well. It was then that writer-performer Cleese became disgruntled with Circus; it wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy performing with the other members of the troupe, it’s just that he felt they were repeating themselves in many of Series 3’s sketches. Cleese, who once described himself in an interview as having “a low threshold of boredom,” was also annoyed because he had become the most recognizable of the six-member group in the eyes of the public…due in large part to one of the show’s classic sketches in which he played a government bureaucrat who worked in “The Ministry of Silly Walks.” (Anyone familiar with this bit knows that the physical comedy demonstrated by Cleese is simply falling-down funny — but when constantly asked by people on the street to “do the silly walk” it quickly loses its novelty.) Cleese opted out of doing a fourth series, so the remaining members finished out Circus’ run with a truncated run of six episodes (also shortening the show’s title to Monty Python) that gave writing credits to the departing Cleese for some sketches they used that had been cut from their second feature film, the cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974). On Dec. 5, 1974, it mattered very little as to what the series was called; BBC-2 aired the final episode, cementing the show’s place in television history.

That same year, with the success of bringing series like Upstairs, Downstairs to American audiences, the BBC arranged for the thirty-nine Flying Circus repeats to be syndicated to PBS stations throughout the U.S. (they were first shown on Dallas’ KERA-TV). The six installments of the fourth series were purchased by ABC and featured on the network’s late-night Wide World of Entertainment program…but unfortunately the episodes were so heavily edited and censored viewers couldn’t make heads or tails of them —and the presentation of the shows infuriated the Pythons, who took steps to settle the matter through the justice system in a landmark case that ultimately granted them the right to control all subsequent U.S. broadcasts…and also allowed them to gain the rights to the programs from the BBC when their contracts with the network expired in 1980. (A little-known fact is that the Beeb originally had planned to “wipe” [erase] the original Circus videotapes in a cost-cutting measure that has since robbed TV historians to see some valuable British programs —the early episodes of the groundbreaking Till Death Us Do Part, for example. Someone working at the BBC tipped off the Pythons, who were able to sneak the tapes out and make copies for their own collection…until the emerging popularity of the series convinced the Beeb to change their plans.)

Since the end of the original Flying Circus transmissions, the remaining members of Python (Graham Chapman passed away in 1989) have gone on to both successful individual projects, reuniting on occasion for feature films like Life of Brian (1979), Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982) and The Meaning of Life (1983). All of these films are lofty testaments to the team’s success and talent, but I fervently believe that the original television series remains their crowning glory. One of the first major DVD box set purchases I made after acquiring a DVD player was The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus — a collection that was so pricey (even though I bought it at a substantial discount) I first had difficulty justifying its presence in my library. But I know that if I have a particularly shitty day, I can always pop one of the discs in the player…and as soon as I hear that rousing Sousa theme, my cares and worries have been wiped away. (Know what I mean, squire? Nudge nudge, wink wink?)

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, and continues to maintain that had he not been exposed to Monty Python’s Flying Circus as a kid he might have turned out to be a normal, productive member of society.

Submitted for your approval

2009-10-02T09:00:00.003-05:00

By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
I watched a lot of television in the summer of 1981, and most of that came courtesy of WGN in Chicago—which due to its “superstation” status was offered by our cable service in my hometown of Ravenswood, WV. Most people remember that summer as the year of the Major League Baseball strike (the fifth one since 1972) and while I haven’t forgotten it either, at the time it didn’t matter much to me. My team, the Atlanta Braves, were perennial cellar-dwellers but I also enjoyed watching Chicago Cubs games (the great thing about the Cubs was if they won, it was great...and if they didn’t…well, it’s not like it came as a surprise) and the strike meant WGN would have to fill up the usual time allotted for games with alternative programming. That summer introduced me to the delights of The Honeymooners, the landmark situation comedy starring Jackie Gleason, Audrey Meadows and Art Carney — a series that was culled from the popular sketches featured on Gleason’s Saturday night comedy-variety program.

But there was another series rerun at that same time that really made me sit up and take notice. A series that allowed me to travel through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead…next stop, The Twilight Zone!

Fifty years ago on this date in television history, CBS-TV introduced a brand-new television series that was shaping up to be a big question mark on its fall schedule. The series’ creator, Rod Serling, was a well-known and well-established TV playwright who had garnered both Emmy Awards and critical kudos for many of his televised plays. Patterns, The Rack, The Comedian, Requiem for a Heavyweight — these and many more were insightful pieces that examined and probed the human condition, and even years after their original appearances on the cathode ray tube, continue to pack a powerful dramatic punch today.

But Serling constantly ran up against walls of interference from the producers working on the programs on which his plays were presented. A dramatic anthology program forced him to change a line about the Nazis exterminating Jews with gas because the sponsor of said program…was a gas company. In A Town Has Turned to Dust, Serling was forced to water down the play’s content when his patrons objected to the subject matter — a thinly disguised dramatization of the Emmett Till trial. His political drama The Arena experienced similar problems — he would not be allowed to write about tariff (because this favored Republicans) or labor (Democrats). “To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited,” he later lamented.

Serling began to toy with the idea of doing a series that would be a blending of the science-fiction, fantasy, suspense and horror genres he so loved as a kid — with a special nod to one of his radio heroes, Norman Corwin, and to NBC’s landmark science-fiction radio drama X-Minus One. By putting his ideas “in other worlds,” he felt he would be able to deflect criticism from the people holding the purse strings by presenting his social commentary in the form of allegories or parables. His opportunity to test-drive this concept came when Bert Granet, the producer of Westinghouse’s Desilu Playhouse, found an old script of Rod’s in the CBS vaults entitled “The Time Element.” Granet insisted on doing Serling’s script on Playhouse, arguing that the author’s name would add a little prestige to a program whose biggest draw was an irregular run of hour-long I Love Lucy comedy specials starring Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz. “Element” featured William Bendix as a man who inexplicably found himself going back in time to Honolulu in 1941, prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Bendix is telling all this to a psychoanalyst played by Martin Balsam, who assures his patient that time travel is impossible…but in the production’s twist ending isn’t quite as confident about his theories as he once was when Bendix inexplicably vanishes into thin air.

Audiences and critics were delighted by “Element,” and buoyed by both a glowing New York Times review by Jack Gould and nearly 6,000 letters of viewer support; Granet had enough leverage to convince the network that Serling’s science-fiction/fantasy series idea had some merit. A second pilot for Zone, “Where is Everybody?” was produced (this production became the series’ inaugural episode), starring Earl Holliman as a man who finds himself completely alone in a seemingly deserted town. Despite the confidence placed in Serling, network executives still found getting sponsors on board a hard sell — and the creator himself was subjected to a great deal of skepticism before the show’s debut. In a now famous interview with future 60 Minutes regular Mike Wallace, Rod was submitted to a grilling from the tenacious pit-bull reporter, who felt that prestigious playwright Serling had obviously fallen out of his tree. Commented Wallace: "...[Y]ou're going to be, obviously, working so hard on The Twilight Zone that, in essence, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, you've given up on writing anything important for television, right?"

Ah, but as Aesop himself would say: “He who laughs last, laughs best.” Serling’s hard work paid off huge dividends (he even became a television icon by appearing as the series’ host) and though The Twilight Zone was never a monster hit, it drew a cult audience from the moment of its debut; an army of viewers who were only too happy to push the series into the national dialogue. U.S. intelligence analysts began to reference the “twilight zone” during the Cold War to define the “grey area” in diplomacy where the U.S. had no policy regarding certain countries. Serling thought he had made the term up, but a few years after the series’ run he learned that the term was used extensively by the U.S. Air Force to describe the imaginary border between “night” and “day” on a planetary body. Serling, who wrote the bulk of the original series’ 156 episodes, was allowed to let his imagination run loose and focus on taboo topics of the day like nuclear war, mass hysteria and McCarthyism — all coated with a fine fantasy/sci-fi sheen. Case in point: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which a suburban neighborhood comes apart at the seams when “strange things” like mysterious noises, lights and temporary loss of electricity begin to occur among its inhabitants. This classic half-hour beautifully illustrates the famous words of Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”

The prestige of The Twilight Zone was such that it attracted a slew of highly respected writers to pen the scripts Serling could not; they included the likes of Richard Mattheson, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, Jerry Sohl, Earl Hamner, Jr., Reginald Rose, Harlan Ellison and Serling’s boyhood hero, Ray Bradbury. Even today, the quality of Serling and company’s episodes attest to the high-water mark set by the series: “Time Enough at Last,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “The Howling Man,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” “The Invaders,” “The Obsolete Man,” “A Game of Pool,” “To Serve Man,” “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and so many more. My personal favorite — and in many ways the quintessential Zone episode — is “Walking Distance,” a bittersweet drama about a jaded, tired business executive (Gig Young) who finds himself back in the hometown of his youth. He achingly yearns to stay in a time of summer carnivals and soda shops, but his father implores him to return back to the present, advising him “there’s only one summer to every customer.” The mere mention of this poignant dramatic piece brings tears to my eyes…and if I happen to catch it on a repeat…Niagara Falls.

The success of the original Twilight Zone spurred on two attempts to capturing lightning twice — one that lasted two seasons on its original network (CBS) beginning in 1985 (it was also inspired by the success of a 1983 feature film based on the original), and a second revival on UPN in 2002-2003 (the 1985 version also had a short run in syndication). Neither of these could capture the specialness of the original show, earning enmity from both audiences and critics, but the Twilight Zone phenomenon continues on in the form of a successful radio series, books, musical tributes, comics, video games…and even a theme-park attraction entitled The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Rod Serling’s unassuming little series allowed many individuals to cash in on its fame — but it also taught me that there is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity; it is the middle ground between light and shadow between science and superstition and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. And for that, I am truly grateful.

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear…and is not at all ashamed to admit that when he first caught sight of the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” gremlin he did a stupendous back flip (from his seated position in front of the TV, of course). However, the judges were not impressed.

“If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a perfect kid…and SIX of them…yecch!”

2009-09-26T08:00:00.003-05:00

By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Forty years ago on this date in 1969, ABC-TV premiered a brand new family situation comedy that was inspired by a 1965 Los Angeles Times article creator Sherwood Schwartz read noting that nearly 40 percent of marriages in the United States had at least one child (and sometimes more) from a previous union. Schwartz, a veteran comedy scribe who at the time was reaping the benefits of his comic creation Gilligan’s Island, devised a pilot (entitled Yours and Mine) about such a family and passed it around to all three of the major networks — who insisted that major changes be made to the show’s concept before agreeing to airing the series…something that didn’t set well with the notoriously stubborn Schwartz. He held onto the script, but with the success of Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) — a movie starring Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball as a pair of newlyweds with multiple kids — the American Broadcasting Company contacted Schwartz to let him know they were interested in a second look.

The premise was devastatingly simple: Here’s the story of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls. All of them had hair of gold — like their mother — the youngest one in curls. Then there’s the story of a man named Brady, who was busy with three boys of his own. They were four men, living all together…but they were all alone.

Till the one day when the lady met this fellow — and they knew that it was much more than a hunch. That this group would somehow form a family…that’s the way they all became The Brady Bunch.

The “blended” family concept was “daring” for its time (but by no means new — Make Room for Daddy predates Bunch by several years), though in retrospect it hardly seems so since the only thing about the show that seemed remotely risqué was that Mike (Robert Reed) and Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) slept in the same bed — and even they weren’t the first, despite what you may have read. Formulaic family-oriented comedies have dotted the television landscape ever since the early cathode ray tube days of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet — whose radio incarnation once employed Brady creator Schwartz among its writing staff. The family shows of the 1950s, 1960s and beyond possess a tremendous nostalgic appeal to those who vegetated in front of a TV set back then, and while many of the shows have dated horribly, they are still beloved for their “wholesomeness” by their original fans. At one time, I thought My Three Sons was the most “white bread” of these TV families — but the Douglas clan had nothing on the Bradys, who were so square their idea of balls-out entertainment was vanilla ice cream for dessert. (At least Ozzie & Harriet flirted with tutti frutti every now and then.)

Bunch was a simplistic show; a warm-and-fuzzy half-hour whose sugary-sweet themes still resonate today with families, “blended” or no. Self-esteem was a recurring topic in many of the episodes, usually involving the jealousy emanating from disgruntled middle child Jan (Eve Plumb) over her sister Marcia’s good looks and popularity (“Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”). (My sister Kat, the middle sibling in my family, had a strong tendency to identify with Jan.) Relationships were another oft-dramatized subject; it seemed as if every week one of the kids was having boy or girl trouble — with the exception of Bobby (Mike Lookinland), who never seemed interested much in women…and when he did, he made out with some dame who later dropped the bombshell that she might have mono. (That’s about as daring as it got on Bunch — unless you consider the “controversial” episode where Carol was convinced that Greg [Barry Williams] was smoking cigarettes…Marlboros, naturally — not the other kind.)

During its five-year-run on ABC from 1969 to 1974, The Brady Bunch never managed to rank among the top 30 television shows each season — and yet the series was a huge success among young viewers for the network, anchoring a Friday night line-up that could very well be called the original “TGIF” alongside youth-oriented hits like The Partridge Family, Nanny and the Professor and Room 222. Despite its many detractors, the series continues to flourish in syndication — and in fact, was awarded with a marathon this week on the retro repeats channel TV Land in celebration of its 40th anniversary. Its continuing success is attributed to the fact that because the series was a smash among teenage audiences at the time it aired, many of those individuals have taken their affection for the show and transferred it to their kids, creating a whole new generation of Brady devotees.

The critical reaction to Bunch was pretty much the same as the brickbats tossed at Sherwood Schwartz’s Gilligan’s Island — but Schwartz had the last laugh, and it was usually on his way to the bank. “I honestly think I could sit down and write a show tonight that the critics would love, and I know it would be cancelled within four weeks,” Schwartz once said in an interview, responding to the negative reaction awarded to both shows over the years. “I know what the critics love. [I] write and produce for people, not for critics.” If H.L. Mencken was right — that “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”—then Schwartz is truly deserving of the title “genius.” He was able to turn an unassuming series into a true pop-culture phenomenon: while the original series was on the air, a Saturday morning cartoon version (The Brady Kids) also ran concurrently (1972-74), which featured the voices of the kids in the cast. When The Partridge Family became successful with its series debut in the fall of 1970, Schwartz got the idea to put the Brady kids (often called The Brady Six) into the music business in several episodes, which led to a series of albums showcasing their (somewhat limited) talent. And after Brady’s cancellation, numerous Brady follow-ups continued in the show’s wake: The Brady Bunch Hour (1977; a series that featured the entire cast in a variety show — a new book on this series has just been published, co-authored by former Brady Susan “Cindy” Olsen), The Brady Brides (1981), The Bradys (1990) — not to mention two successful adaptations to the silver screen, The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and A Very Brady Sequel (1986).

As a young kidlet, I devoured The Brady Bunch in both first-run episodes and reruns…and the jaded individual that I am today continues to convince himself it’s because I simply didn’t know any better. But I’m really only fooling myself; if I happen to come across a Bunch rerun I’ll watch it to the end of the half-hour because I’m thoroughly fascinated by the family — a clan who never had any of the real knock-down, drag-out squabbles or fights that constantly sprung up between my sisters and I but instead agreed at the end of each episode that it was all a “simple misunderstanding.” Oh, and one other burning question — if Mike Brady was such a super architect…why would he design a house that had only one bathroom for six kids?

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. is solely responsible for Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, a nostalgia blog that covers many family comedy series like The Brady Bunch and his attempts to figure out why he spent so much time as a youth watching them. Though he considers himself a Brady fan, he must demur to his sister Debbie’s obsession with the show—she has been known to be able to describe the plot of any Brady episode within the first 20 seconds

A modern tale set in a time gone by

2009-09-21T08:00:00.007-05:00

By Edward Copeland
Being a former journalist, even if I was never a reporter, sticking more with copy editing with a side order of criticism, it's always nice to see a film that focuses on a veteran reporter (Russell Crowe) as its hero, even as it acknowledges the financial problems of the industry, the constant corporate changeovers and the ignoring of the bread and butter of the operation, the newspaper itself, as it fumbles around in the Internet age. However, those are just asides in State of Play, which really is a thriller about solving a mystery and the risks, especially in a place like Washington, of being too friendly with people you might have to cover. The film is based on a British miniseries and directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) from a screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray (who wrote and directed an excellent film about journalism, Shattered Glass). Crowe stars as Cal McAffrey, a shaggy journalist who drives bosses nuts but comes up with the goods when the chips are down. He immediately causes friction with a rookie reporter Della Frye whose blog is rising on the paper's attempt to cause some Web ripples (Rachel McAdams). The paper's editor (Helen Mirren) tries to steer them both in the right direction as she copes with yet another new corporate owner. At the film's outset, McAffrey is investigating what appears to be a routine street drug shooting while Della's more gossipy column is working the apparent suicide by subway train of a congressional staffer of a Pennsylvania representative (Ben Affleck). Not only was the late aide having an affair with the married Affleck, he is the good friend and former college roommate of McAffrey. Of course, nothing is quite what it seems. Rep. Stephen Collins (Affleck) had been vocally trying to expose a Blackwater-type private mercenary force and evidence points toward the affair story being leaked in an effort to silence him. There are several twists along the way, so to divulge much more of the plot wouldn't be fair. Macdonald moves State of Play along at a very good pace, but I wish it had slowed down at times to ruminate over the many issues it passes fleetingly on the way. The film doesn't stop long to seriously look at the ethical conflict between Collins and McAffrey's friendship and McAffrey's duty to the story nor to the paper's duty itself to tell the truth and not protect corporate friends of the owners and cast ethical clouds on the entire paper. Perhaps the saddest part of State of Play is knowing that it lives in somewhat of a fantasyland of the past where veteran reporters like McAffrey can actually tutor rookies like Della so they can learn the ropes. In the environment of today's newspaper industry, most of the experienced journalists with institutional memory are pushed into early buyouts and young reporters never gain from their insights, left to their own devices and overseen by editors too preoccupied to offer much professional guidance, further diminishing the product as a whole.

Just the right amount of notes

2009-09-19T08:00:00.004-05:00

“Your God who tortures men with longings they can never fulfill…”

“That was God laughing at me through that obscene giggle.”

By Ali Arikan
The tragedy of Antonio Salieri is the driving force behind Miloš Forman’s film version of Peter Shaffer’s seminal play. Here is a pious man, in complete devotion to what he believes to be a God of Grace and Mercy. Salieri has rejected almost all of life’s earthly pleasures, has offered God his undying love, “his industry, his deepest humility,” and, of course, his chastity. All he’s ever asked for in return is a soupçon of that divine Grace to manifest itself in the form of talent. God, however, has picked as a favourite not Salieri, but instead a vulgar ninny, who is not only anathema to all that Salieri believes in, but, through whom, his lack of talent is only made more explicit. God has given Salieri deranged ambition for, and an infinite love of, music, but withheld from him the elements required to realise it. This contumelious God has shared with the world a part of himself, all the while making a mockery of his faithful servant Salieri by rejecting his piety. Knowing his predilection for irony, there’s no wonder Peter Shaffer called his play not Mozart, not even Salieri, but Amadeus.

Released 25 years ago today, Amadeus has not only held up well in the past quarter century, but, like a fine wine, or in fact a grandiose piece of classical music, has grown even more glorious. As in the case of the play from which it was spawned (in fact, the two are at times so vastly different that Shaffer likes to refer to them as parallel pieces), the film was widely popular and a huge critical hit, and winner of 8 Oscars, including best film. Since it came out around the time the Academy Awards had started getting increasingly less relevant, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was still as effective today as when I had first watched it in that darkened theater in Ankara almost a lifetime ago.

A sequence struck me in particular, in which Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) recalls the first time he had ever glanced at Mozart’s (Tom “Pinto” Hulce) sheet music, and I could not help but make an Armond Whitesque comparison with another Oscar winner for best film:

“Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I'd never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.”

Abraham’s delivery is delicate, a wrong note, an incongruous cadence, and the whole speech would be ruined. Forman’s direction is equally subtle, cutting back and forth between the old Salieri recounting the event, and his young self reading the music, all the while the adagio from "Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments" plays blissfully in the background. It’s cinema at its best.

Now, remember, the floating plastic bag in American Beauty, and Wes Bentley’s rambling, ridiculous, monologue. Regardless of the differences in writing (I will not stoop to making tawdry comparisons between Peter Shaffer and Alan Ball), both sequences are similar, in that the characters recall their first encounter with what they perceive to be a divine force. Yet where one merely hints at the notes, the other approaches them with the subtlety of a steamroller driven by a drunk. 1984 was definitely not a vintage year, and film, in general, hasn’t grown worse in the past 25 years. But the Oscars have. And the contrasting duality of the sheer awesome power of Amadeus and the anemic mediocrity of American Beauty only served to remind me of one of the motifs of Amadeus itself.

In a film of such layered richness, a few key elements stand out. The first is, of course, Mozart’s transcendental, marvelous music, ably conducted by Sir Neville Marriner and performed by his Academy of St Martin in the Fields chamber orchestra. Naturally, it’s there from the start. After the company credits (Orion, alas), the screen is left in complete darkness. Suddenly, the opening bass of the Overture to Don Giovanni, and a scream, a cry in the dark: “Mozart!” We follow two men in night gowns (one of them Vincent Schiavelli, Fredrickson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) rush toward the guttural roar, as they stop in front of a bedroom in a stately home to urge their master, Antonio Salieri, the erstwhile court composer to “The Musical King” Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones, in the finest performance of his career), to open the door. When we eventually barge into the room with them, we are confronted with a ghastly view: Salieri has tried to kill himself by slitting his own throat, convinced as he is that it was he, who, more than 30 years previously, killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Hulce), the young musical upstart, an uproarious, quirky, vulgar former child prodigy, from Salzburg who took the Hapsburg Empire by storm. As Salieri collapses on his back, blood gushing from his neck, Mozart’s "Symphony No. 25 in G minor" burst into the soundtrack. While he is hurried to hospital on a wheelbarrow, it is his rival’s enduring music, still being played in Viennese ballrooms, that torments him.

Salieri is summarily committed to an insane asylum, a setting not unfamiliar to Forman, and a young priest comes to visit him to hear his confession. The old man is unreceptive at first, but eventually decides to play with this most unwelcome caller for a while. Discovering that the young priest had studied music in his youth, Salieri plays a little melody on the forte-piano in his hospital room. The priest doesn’t recognise it. Salieri is annoyed, says it was a very popular tune in its day, and then proceeds to play a few notes from the finale to his opera Axur, Re D'ormus (as the scene shifts abruptly to show Salieri’s recollection of the opera's opening night). Again, the priest is nescient, and Salieri is unhappy.

Finally, the old man starts to play a few notes from the first movement of Mozart’s "Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major," better known as "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." He doesn’t have to play too long before the priest recognizes the tune and starts singing it, and expresses his delight in being in the company of the very man who had composed such a famous piece. Having won his little game, Salieri corrects him, smugly, that the piece is not his - it was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

In the first ten or so minutes, Forman introduces his chief antagonist through nothing but that character’s first person narration. He is old, decrepit, and consumed with malice. Contrast that with the way Mozart is introduced. Although we never see him, his music is omnipresent, from the opening darkness to the way it mocks Salieri in the form of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik."

Later, in probably the film’s most famous scene, Mozart humiliates Salieri in the presence of the Emperor by “improving” a march the court composer had written in Mozart’s honor. In his fingers, the constipated melody turns into a proto medley of "Non più andrai" from Le nozze di Figaro, and the secondary melody of "Rondo alla Turca." Watch as F. Murray Abraham tries to hide his contempt behind a façade of forced equanimity.

And it is F. Murray Abraham who is perhaps the second most crucial ingredient to the film’s ultimate success. Abraham brings a plethora of emotions to Salieri – he is consumed, at various times, by malice, contempt, or envy, but he is always in complete awe of Mozart and his music. Salieri’s repudiation of God as dismissive of his pious subjects can never overshadow his elemental admiration of God’s work. Salieri’s only desire is to be loved -- by god and by the public. There's an implication that Salieri never thought he was all that great to begin with. Definitely, his exasperation with his fellow courtiers or musicians hint at an underlying awareness – as if he had always known that he was never that good, but could live it down, perhaps subconsciously, as long as he was never upstaged. It is when the love he longs for the most is abruptly ripped away from him by this new cynosure of the Viennese music scene that his envy finally consumes him. Abraham creates in Salieri one of the true tragic antiheroes of the Western canon, and utters him in the same breath as Cain, whose piety was also refused by God, and of Iago, whose jealousy of Cassio in being promoted to lieutenant by Othello (like with Shakespeare’s villain, there is a hint of homoerotic undercurrent to Salieri, as well) was equally palpable (another parallel is, of course, Aglaya’s feelings towards Natasya in The Idiot). His true tragedy is that Salieri’s only role in this world is to be the proverbial second fiddle.

In contrast to Abraham, Hulce plays Mozart as a perennial child. Certainly, his neighing is unnerving and ever so slightly annoying (for some reason, I kept thinking of Nathan Lane in The Birdcage – then again, when am I not thinking of Nathan Lane in The Birdcage). But he conveys natural genius so easily that it’s easy to overlook the shrieking. As Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Films review of the film, “This is not a vulgarization of Mozart, but a way of dramatizing that true geniuses rarely take their own work seriously, because it comes so easily for them… Salieri could strain and moan and bring forth tinkling jingles; Mozart could compose so joyously that he seemed … to be "taking dictation from God.”

Despite the protean wigs and masks, Hulce’s childlike approach to the role remains constant in depicting unparalleled genius. While being dressed down by his shrill mother-in-law, Mozart hears not the woman’s berating, but instead the coloratura of the Queen of the Night’s aria from Die Zauberflöte. Juggling work on his Requiem and the aforementioned Die Zauberflöte, he hears a few notes from one, and suddenly an aria from the other. Even on his deathbed, as he dictates the final notes of the Requiem to Salieri, his mind is still so active that the latter is unable to keep up with Mozart’s celerity. Hulce’s childlike demeanor makes Mozart’s genius more understandable, and down to earth.

Not unlike Salieri, Mozart is also constantly tortured. He was raised to be a musician by his disciplinarian father Leopold (Roy Dotrice), and in adulthood, Mozart grapples with loyalty to him, and, well, having fun. His father’s gaze is constantly upon Mozart, even after he dies, a portrait hangs on the wall, Leopold’s vituperative gaze perpetually judging his prodigal son. But Mozart is relentless. Hulce's performance reminds me of the controversial Victorian illustrator Aubrey Beardsley's famous words: "I have one aim - the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing."

Of course , historically, this is all hogwash. Salieri was married, for one thing, and, he and Mozart were almost contemporaries, with merely a seven year age difference, though in the film it seems much wider, and is also played for that effect. In fact, Simon Callow, who plays the vaudeville impresario Emanuel Schikaneder (with a wholly unconvincing American accent), had played the titular role at the National Theatre, and I would be interested to see his chemistry with Paul Scofield who had assayed Salieri. Also, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of such huge animosity between the two characters, or that Salieri had indeed caused Mozart’s death. But one can hardly blame Shaffer. As early as 1830, apocrypha abounded that Salieri had murdered Mozart, then Pushkin wrote a play about it, Rimsky-Korsakov adapted it to an opera, and the greatest of all musical urban legends was born (well, until, at least, Scotland Yard raided Redlands in 1967).

Like Mozart in Salzburg, Forman also was a formidable talent at home, and in the composer’s desire to relocate to Vienna, to be at the hub of contemporary music, one senses something almost autobiographical in the way Forman moved to Hollywood. Of course, the way Forman had to relocate to the United States followed the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets, but his initial success by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was followed by, what many believed to be, lesser films (Hair kicks ass, by the way), and in the reaction to some of Mozart’s later works in the film by the Viennese musical establishment, there is a hint of pathos on the part of the director that seeps through. Most certainly, Forman has always felt like an outsider, and Mozart, like McMurphy, Andy Kaufman or Larry Flynt, is one of history’s most well-known outsiders.

Miloš Forman’s awareness of Eastern and Central Europe helps the film immensely. He is attuned to the sense of history, and makes wonderful use of the Czech locales. Miroslav Ondrícek’s photography lovingly captures the classical architecture, and the production design by Patrizia Von Brandenstein (such a gloriously Old Europe name), and art direction by Karel Cerný recreates the rococo period with a cheeky modern twist.

But back to the music. As previously stated, the film starts off with the Overture to Don Giovanni. In that opera’s final scene, Forman finds yet another parallel with Mozart’s life. (In fact, Salieri's plot to "murder" Mozart is straight out of an opera - or an episode of Scooby-Doo) As the Commandatore’s ghost rises from the dead, he asks Don Giovanni to repent, but he refuses and is forever consumed by hellfire. By making the Commandatore a substitute for Mozart’s father, and Don Giovanni for Mozart, the composer makes his final stand against his father, refusing his call to obey the laws of society, and vowing to go his own way, even if that might mean damnation. Certainly, when Mozart’s body is thrown into a communal grave and quick lime is thrown upon him, the final shot looks like smoke and ash rising from the grave.

***
As he is slowly wheeled away from his room, Salieri lifts his hand in benediction, and starts to absolve his fellow inmates. And as the screen goes dark once more, as we hear Mozart get the last laugh, it is then that we fully grasp what has happened. Salieri has tricked us. It wasn’t a confession that we had just witnessed, it was a sermon by the “patron saint of mediocrity.”

Salieri is us.

The light goes out

2009-09-18T08:00:00.006-05:00

By Edward Copeland
I'm not going to pretend to be a regular, or even sporadic, viewer, of Guiding Light , but my mom is and my grandma was. At times in my life, I did. Summers as a child, bored afternoons as I waited to go work as a nighttime copy editor. Still, any drama that lasts a combined 72 years on radio and television deserves some notice when it time comes to an end, as the CBS soap opera will today. 72 years. That simply will never be equaled no matter how many times Law & Order refreshes its cast. Guiding Light began as a radio drama in 1937, at the beginning of FDR's second term. It began its television version in 1952 and kept the radio version as well for the first six years. The first few years of the radio version featured the voice talents of none other than future Oscar winner and future voice of the possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge. The title came from the central character, a reverend who tried to advise and give strength to his town's citzens and he was voiced by Arthur Peterson (seen on left), who would be noticed 40 years later as The Major on Soap. Another of the radio voices belonged to Betty Lou Gerson, better known as Cruella De Vil. Guiding Light boasts an impressive lists of actors who either served time on the show as characters or appeared as guests, among them: Sandy Dennis, Christopher Walken, Barnard Hughes, Joseph Campanella, Blythe Danner, Kevin Bacon, Sherry Stringfield, Melina Kankaredes, Teresa Wright, Joan Bennett, Dick Cavett, James Coco, Dorothy Loudon, Chita Rivera, Leslie Uggams, Tammy Grimes, Cindy Adams, Joan Collins, Philip Bosco, Jan Sterling, Allison Janney, Ruth Warrick (before All My Children), Chris Sarandon, Ed Begley Sr., Jesse L. Martin, Taye Diggs, Sorrell Booke, Everett McGill (Big Ed of Twin Peaks), Giancarlo Esposito and Adolph Caesar. The B-52s even dropped by once. Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton acted on the show from 1952-1962. James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson played a couple and when they left were replaced by Billy Dee Williams and Ruby Dee. Both of the Sopranos' neighbors the Cusamanos, Robert LuPone and Saundra Santiago, appeared at different times, though Santiago had the far more significant role as vindictive mobster Carmen Santos who, at last word, was still lying in a coma. She was deliciously bad, though you always had to blame her for killing off the great character of Ben (Hunt Block), which may have been one of the show's final, fatal missteps. The late Larry Gates had a long run as oil patriarch H.B. Lewis after a long career that included the films In the Heat of the Night, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Some Came Running and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Really, whether or not you ever watched any daytime drama, and if you don't soon you may not get the chance, because it's a dying breed in the expanded television universe, two paycheck households being the norm and the ratings of the survivors not justifying their costs, they are an amazing achievement. Some time they are bad, then they rebound. Some display some of the best television acting you'll see. Some also display the most awful amateurish acting you'll witness. However, when you consider they are on year-round for decades, the quality control is pretty remarkable. Some prime time shows have a hard time coming up with 22 good episodes in a season and run out of steam after a few seasons. Soap operas jump the shark, rise again, jump the shark again and repeat the whole cycle over and over again. That was the certainly the case with Guiding Light, at least with the times I watched. It had one of the best daytime villains (and actors) ever in the late Michael Zaslow as the nefarious Roger Thorpe. As with any good villain, he was thought dead and came back but he was a bit different that he was never a cartoony bad guy as some soap villains become. As dastardly as he could be, he also was defiantly human. You could hate him, but at times you could understand and even sympathize with him without the character doing a complete 180 from where he started. He was even part of a landmark soap storyline of the 1970s when his wife Holly (Maureen Garrett) accused him of marital rape. Zaslow was far from the only great actor/character to grace the show. Justin Deas will be on until today's last episode as blue collar good guy with rough edges Buzz Cooper who originally arrived as a Vietnam vet who had faked his death in that war. Between Guiding Light, As the World Turns and the canceled Santa Barbara, Deas has been the recipient of six Daytime Emmy Awards. Of course, one of the most fabled of all the show's characters is Reva (Kim Zimmer), herself the winner of four Emmys despite being stuck in some of the show's most ridiculous storylines. She was cloned. She had amnesia and became Amish after spending life in an island nation as its princess and having a secret child. After "dying," she came back as a ghost. There was a time traveling storyline, a period when she was suddenly psychic. She went through menopause and then years later became pregnant. It's a credit to Zimmer that she managed to keep Reva having any credibility at all. One of the best performances I ever witnessed on the show (which earned an Emmy) was Cynthia Watros as Annie, a nurse who became a woman scorned when her husband's former wife (Reva) came back from the dead and she slowly transformed into a double-barrelled psycho. It wasn't an abrupt change and included addiction to pills and drink that precipitated her fall but Watros was so great I often wonder why we don't see her in other venues. The character was so great, Annie even went so far as to kidnap a policewoman from another town and have plastic surgery to look like her to insinuate herself back into Springfield anonymously. Unfortunately, the face change meant no Watros. While soaps are often thought of mostly for the romance and trial and tribulations, not enough is made of their humor and Guiding Light was often very good at it, especially during the years Nola Reardon (Lisa Brown) was around with her crazy fantasies. So, even if you've never watched a soap and never plan to, raise a toast today to the passing of Guiding Light. The Bauers, the Spauldings, the Shaynes, the Coopers, the Lewises and the Reardons (are any of them left?) will live on in memories and an unaired Springfield after today and 72 years is one helluva broadcasting achievement. Replacing the show? A new version of Let's Make a Deal hosted by Wayne Brady. Now, that's depressing.

Henry Gibson (1935-2009)

2009-09-16T17:50:00.003-05:00

To paraphrase Haven Hamilton's anthem "200 Years" in Robert Altman's Nashville, Henry Gibson must have been doing something right to last as long as he did. Unfortunately, Gibson didn't make it 200 years, dying five days short of his 74th birthday. Not only did Gibson star as Haven, my favorite role of his, he also wrote the songs Haven sang as most of the actors in the Nashvile cast did. Gibson's TV and film career both began the same year in 1963, with roles in several episodic TV series and in Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor. His real entry into the public consciousness came in 1968 as a member of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. He delivered a hilarious fake public service announcement in Kentucky Fried Movie on behalf of the dead. Nashville was far from his only work with Altman, working with the director in The Long Goodbye, A Perfect Couple and HealtH. Pretender to the Altman throne Paul Thomas Anderson even cast him as a barfly (named Thurston Howell no less) in Magnolia. He led the Illinois Nazis chasing Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers. He was the evil doctor conducting experiments and holding former Laugh-In co-star Lily Tomlin hostage in The Incredible Shrinking Woman. He was a member of the supremely odd family living across the street from Tom Hanks in The 'burbs. He did recurring voicework as Bob Jenkins on King of the Hill. His last role turned out to be his frequent appearances as the exasperated judge who frequently saw Alan Shore and Denny Crane (James Spader, William Shatner) in his courtroom on Boston Legal. However, of all his prolific work, he'll always be Haven Hamilton to me. R.I.P. Mr. Gibson.

Centennial Tributes: Elia Kazan

2009-09-07T08:00:00.005-05:00

By Edward Copeland
I can hear the grumbling already. Why does Elia Kazan deserve a tribute? He named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings under Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. It was the same cry that greeted him when he was given an honorary Oscar in 1998. (My own objection was that he didn't need one since he'd already won two Oscars competitively and there were plenty of film artists who'd received none who deserved honoring.) Was what he did honorable? No, but I was not in his position. Who knows what anyone would do in a similar position concerned about their family and their career? It also seems that he takes a worse beating than others involved in that despicable piece of American history. When Budd Schulberg recently died, little was made of his testimony. Jerome Robbins got a pass since Ed Sullivan basically blackmailed him into testifying by threatening to expose his homosexuality if he didn't. To me though, the greatest example of whitewashing is that of Robert Kennedy. He didn't testify, but he worked for McCarthy, believed in his cause and liked the man so much that he made McCarthy godfather to his daughter Kathleen. No one was pressuring him to do any of that and he never renounced McCarthy and only broke with the committee because he hated Roy Cohn. Anyway, let's face it: The true cowards were the studio heads and producers who didn't have the stones to stand up to intimidation and actually enforced the blacklist. Therefore, this tribute is not here to pass judgment on Kazan's character, because I didn't know him so I can't say. However, I do know Kazan as an artist and he made a lot of fine films and did a lot of legendary stage work I wish I could have seen. His work is what this tribute is about. So let's restrict the comments to that. Kazan was born in Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire before it became Istanbul, Turkey. Kazan began his Broadway career as an actor, but once he became a director, that's when his career and legend took off. To read the list of plays that Kazan was the first to stage on the Great White Way is astounding. Works by Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. Works by Arthur Miller: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman and After the Fall. There also was Tea and Sympathy, J.B., The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and The Skin of Our Teeth, to name but a few. If only I could have seen any of those, but not having been born yet does present that problem when it comes to live theater. His Broadway career began before the Tony Award did but he eventually earned nine nominations and won three for directing. As for his Hollywood career, Kazan made a short documentary called The People of the Cumberland in 1937 but didn't really get things going until he made his first feature in 1945 with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a well-made melodrama about a young woman (Dorothy McGuire) and her dream growing up in the poverty of a Brooklyn tenement in the early 20th century. It also set the course for the great success Kazan had with his film actors and Oscar, winning James Dunn the supporting actor award for playing the girl's happy-go-lucky if undependable and alcoholic father. In 1947, Kazan helmed three films and won his first Oscar. He made the lesser Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn vehicle The Sea of Grass, the noir courtroom drama Boomerang! and the year's best picture winner, Gentleman's Agreement. Gregory Peck starred as a reporter going undercover to investigate anti-Semitism. While certainly a noble topic, the film has not aged well and its best attributes today are Celeste Holm's Oscar-winning supporting performance and John Garfield. Ironically, one of the other best picture nominees that year, Crossfire, also dealt with anti-Semitism and holds up as a better film, though in the the story Crossfire was based on the murder victim wasn't Jewish, he was gay. Two years later, Kazan returned with the overly melodramatic Pinky, the tale of a light-skinned African-American woman who has passed for white but who returns home to her grandmother's home, engaged to a white doctor who didn't know the truth of her racial identity. As in most Kazan's films, it has solid performances, particularly from Oscar nominees Ethel Waters as Pinky's grandmother and Ethel Barrymore as a wealthy woman that Pinky cares for as a nurse. The part that is hard to get past is that Pinky is played by Jeanne Crain (who was also nominated). No wonder it was so easy for her to pass. Whenever Hollywood either in its Golden Age or as recently as its adaptation of Philip Roth's The Human Stain casts a white actor to play an African American passing for white, it just can't help but feel off. The next year came Panic in the Streets, which I haven't seen, which starred Richard Widmark and Jack Palance in a suspense tale about a 48 hour search for a killer infected with the plague. In 1951, Kazan got to re-create one of his Broadway triumphs when A Streetcar Named Desire came to the big screen with most of the Broadway cast, with the exception of Vivien Leigh replacing Jessica Tandy in the role of Blanche Du Bois. It made Marlon Brando a sensation as his stage triumph of Stanley Kowalski lit up movie theaters around the world. Ironically, of the four principles in the cast (Brando, Leigh, Karl Malden, Kim Hunter), Brando was the only member of the acting quartet to go home empty handed. Kazan had to tone down some of the sexuality due to the censors' restrictions of the day, though some of the moments were restored later and the version of the film you can see today is usually more daring than 1951 moviegoers were allowed to see. Brando and Kazan teamed again the following year in quite a different setting with Viva Zapata! Brando played Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata who led an uprising against the corrupt dictator Diaz in the early 20th century. Kazan's Oscar luck for actors continued as Anthony Quinn won his first supporting actor Oscar for the film. I haven't seen Kazan's next film, 1953's Man on a Tightrope starring Fredric March, but by the descriptions of it I could find, it would seem to line up with the change in his outlook on the Communist Party, coming the same year as his HUAC testimony. It details a circus trying to escape the oppressive boot of the Soviet Union by making an escape to Bavaria. The following year brought what many consider to be Kazan's masterpiece, his film of Budd Schulberg's screenplay for On the Waterfront. With its story of a man standing up to the rackets running the waterfront, Kazan and Schulberg were obviously making an allegory for the McCarthy hearings, only making the person who named names (as Kazan and Schulberg both did) the hero who suffers for doing it. Even those who disapproved of their real-life actions, couldn't dispute the power of Kazan's images, Schulberg's words and that cast, led by Brando's Oscar-winning Terry Malloy and supported by Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and, most especially, Lee J. Cobb. It took the Oscar for best picture and earned Kazan his second directing Oscar. The following year, Kazan tackled the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden which turned out to be one of the three feature films made by the legendary James Dean and, in my opinion, his best performance. It earned Dean the first of his two consecutive posthumous Oscar nominations for best actor and won the supporting actress honor for Jo Van Fleet. It's truly Dean who powers the film, which can be a bit plodding at time. Next up, Kazan teamed with Tennessee Williams again as Williams reworked two of his one-act plays into one of the most bizarre and, for its time, controversial films of his career, Baby Doll. A steamy Southern gothic tale with Karl Malden in a rare unsympathetic role playing a failed businessman who weds a 19-year-old virgin temptress (Carroll Baker) who sucks her thumb and sleeps in a crib with the condition that the marriage cannot be consummated until "she is ready for marriage." Complicating matters is a rival cotton gin owner (Eli Wallach), out for revenge because Malden burned his gin down, blaming him for the loss of his business. Wallach's sleazy Sicilian sees Baker as the perfect vehicle for Malden's comeuppance. 1957 brought the other Kazan/Schulberg collaboration, A Face in the Crowd, a decidedly underrated film that so wowed me upon re-watching it that I decided it deserves a separate review today. Kazan's film output slowed after that, directing only six more features between 1960 and 1976 of which I've only seen two. In 1961, there was the somewhat silly Natalie Wood-Warren Beatty vehicle Splendor in the Grass, which seems to send the message that sex makes young women CRAZY. In 1963, he adapted his own book about his uncle's 19th century immigrant experience in America, America, a filmwatching journey that's nearly as arduous as the real trip must have been except for Haskell Wexler's glorious cinematography. Kazan's final feature was an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel of Hollywood, The Last Tycoon, with a script by Harold Pinter and starring Robert De Niro, Robert Mitchum and Jack Nicholson, among others. Ever the actor's director to the end, he directed performers to 24 Oscar nominations and nine Oscar wins.

The greatest instrument of mass persuasion in history

2009-09-07T07:55:00.001-05:00

By Edward Copeland
When Budd Schulberg died last month, I felt bad that I didn't have time to write an appreciation. Then again, what would I have written? I've never read What Makes Sammy Run? and it had been quite some time since I'd seen A Face in the Crowd. Did I want to write solely about On the Waterfront? However, Elia Kazan's centennial was approaching, so I was planning to revisit A Face in the Crowd anyway. It was worth waiting, because the second teaming of Kazan and Schulberg may be the film both men will end up being remembered for or, at any rate, it should be. Schulberg not only wrote the screenplay for A Face in the Crowd, which was based on one of his short stories, "Arkansas Traveler," he even composed some of the songs Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith) sings in the films. Yes, any Keith Olbermann watchers out there confused when he refers to Glenn Beck as Lonesome Rhodes, this is the film from which the reference and the character originated. Patricia Neal plays Marcia Jeffries, host of an Arkansas radio program called "A Face in the Crowd" who believes, "People are fascinating wherever you find them." As the film opens, she takes her show into the county jail where she finds Rhodes, a surly man spending the night in the drunk tank with his guitar which he says "beats a woman any time." After being encouraged to entertain listeners with a tune, Rhodes makes an impression on Marcia and listeners and Marcia decides that Rhodes could be a sensation, giving him the nickname Lonesome. Marcia tracks Rhodes down as he's heading out of town following his release from jail and persuades him to delay his planned journey to Florida to try radio as a regular gig. It doesn't take long for Rhodes to realize the influence he can wield from his audio soapbox and he has a blast, attracting national attention and, before too long, an offer to transfer his show to television in Memphis. Rhodes acts sheepish and uncertain, but he knows exactly what he's doing and before long his audience and his stage is larger as he and Marcia make the move to Tennessee and he even inherits a a staff that includes writers such as Mel Miller (a great early turn by Walter Matthau), a well-educated cynic who soon recognizes Rhodes for what he really is and that he's selling out by working for him, but does it just the same. Marcia can't share Mel's opinion because she's found herself smitten with Rhodes, who's developed a dependency on her though he's a world class womanizer. Of course with television comes sponsors, and Rhodes doesn't take kindly to the on-air commercials he's supposed to do for a mattress company. Rhodes does do them, but in such a mocking, down home way that the business's owner goes ballistic and wants him fired, despite the fact that his silly attempts at "ads" crack up his audience and boost the mattress company's sales anyway. Besides, Rhodes has an ulterior motive at play. He's enlisted a sleazy New York agent (a spot-on turn by Anthony Franciosa who seems as if he's stepped off the set of the same year's Sweet Smell of Success) to secretly shop him around the Big Apple to find a national outlet. Sure enough, his ploy works and Rhodes is on his way to having a national following. The bigger he gets, the more he feels it's his place to tell his viewer how to think. As Matthau's character remarks at another point in the movie, "He has the courage of his ignorance." Rhodes is soon rubbing shoulders with corporate bigwigs, enthusiastically endorsing their products (the commercial they make for a product called Vitajax is priceless and like nothing you'd ever expect to see in an Elia Kazan film) and soon advising a right-wing Republican senator how to remake his image for a presidential run to make his isolationist and anti-Social Security ideas more palatable. He's introducing the concept of the political soundbite. In its own way, A Face in the Crowd is an ancestor to Paddy Chayefsky's Network. While funny, Crowd isn't as satirical or prescient as Network was in 1976. It's more straight-forward and of the moment, even if people weren't ready to admit it in 1957, despite cameos by real-life media figures such as John Cameron Swayze, Walter Winchell and Mike Wallace. "You have to be a saint to stand up to the power that little box can give you," Matthau tells Neal early on, but Rhodes was never a saint. He's not like Howard Beale, a good newsman who goes psychotic and is corrupted by television; Rhodes is corrupt to begin with. Still, A Face in the Crowd is pretty groundbreaking in its depiction of the convergence and intermingling of the media, corporate and political worlds. People who are only familiar with Andy Griffith as good old Sheriff Andy Taylor or Matlock are in for a shock when they meet Lonesome Rhodes. At one point, Rhodes says he puts his "whole self into everything he does" and that's what Griffith does with this performance. With a maniacal laugh which Kazan zooms into for closeups of its devilish grin, Griffith creates a funny charmer but never lets you forget the fraudulent asshole who lurks below. In fact, if you didn't see Kazan's credit, you might not even recognize A Face in the Crowd as a film he would have made. It's one of his loosest and least formal and moves with a fleetness often absent in most of his films. It's also funny which is an adjective that doesn't usually come to mind when describing Kazan's films. The film itself has a noirish look with crisp black and white cinematography by Gayne Rescher and Harry Stradling. After re-watching A Face in the Crowd, I was ready to watch it again and that's not something I can say about even Kazan's best films. Perhaps it's just because the media, particularly television news, has become such a joke capable of producing only sadness and anger knowing what a force for education and good it could be that makes films such as A Face in the Crowd and Network appeal to me in such a deep, profound way. Then again, it could just be that they are both examples of damn great movies with two of the best screenplays ever written and some of the most memorable performances ever placed on celluloid.

“Made it, Ma—top of the world!”

2009-09-02T08:00:00.007-05:00

By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
(Warning: possible spoilers contained within)

In “The Bells Toll at Noon,” a classic Hawaii Five-O outing from 1977, Rich Little portrays an impressionist (darn that typecasting!) who vows revenge on the individuals responsible for the death of a young girl from a drug overdose. His vengeance is meted out in the form of emulating death scenes from classic films; one victim (Milton Selzer) is even trussed up like a mummy like James Cagney at the conclusion of The Public Enemy (1931). The climax of the episode takes its cue from the fiery “blaze of glory” demise of another Cagney protagonist, Cody Jarrett, from the 1949 gangster classic White Heat (1949)—there’s even a choice moment when Steve McGarrett must view Heat on a movieola because he’s never seen the movie.

This was my introduction to what many Cagney devotees consider his finest hour onscreen. I didn’t see Heat until several years after the Five-O episode (at a time when you didn’t need channels like TCM or AMC to see classic movies), but the homage presented on the legendary crime drama has never left me…and continues to this very day, its 60th anniversary.

In White Heat, gangster Arthur “Cody” Jarrett (Cagney) successfully pulls off a $300,000 heist of Treasury money from a mail train even though a rookie named Zuckie (Ford Rainey) is scalded with third-degree burns after one of the engineers falls on the steam release lever, having been shot in cold blood by Jarrett. Holed up in a desolate mountain cabin, Jarrett takes advantage of an impending snowstorm to move his gang—including devoted mother (Margaret Wycherly) and slutty wife Verna (Virginia Mayo)—out of the area and towards freedom. Though he’s promised the injured man that he’ll get him medical attention, Jarrett orders an underling named “Cotton” (Wally Cassell) to terminate Zuckie with extreme prejudice—but the soft-hearted goon spares the “crispy critter” and in doing so, allows Treasury agents to find his fingerprints on a pack of cigarettes at the scene, effectively tying Jarrett’s gang to the robbery.

The T-Men close in on Jarrett at a trailer court in California, and after exchanging gunfire with Agent Philip Evans (John Archer), Cody successfully hides out at a drive-in movie theater, where he informs Ma and Verna that in order to beat the robbery rap he’ll cop to a lesser charge of a hotel robbery committed by a friend of his the same day the mail train was hit. The Treasury Department know Jarrett is full of it, but they arrange to work with the state of Illinois to keep Cody on ice and send special agent Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien) undercover to become Jarrett’s bunkmate; as Vic Pardo, Fallon’s assignment is to find out how Cody managed to launder the $300,000…and who’s doing his laundry.

Fallon has a close call or two while in the joint (he’s almost recognized by an ex-convict named “Bo” Creel [Ian MacDonald], who’d “know me in the dark”) but he’s able to gain Jarrett’s trust when Cody succumbs to one of his “episodes” (a splitting headache that, according to him, is “like a red-hot buzz saw going through my head”) and Fallon covers for him, massaging his temples in the same manner as Ma Jarrett. Cody takes Hank into his confidence and announces that he’s planning to “crash out” of the prison, and Fallon is able to relay this information to Evans and his men when he gets a visit from a “memory expert” posing as his wife.

Unfortunately, things do not quite go as smoothly as planned. Learning of his mother’s death, Jarrett goes berserk in the prison cafeteria and has to be restrained in a strait jacket; the governor then informs Evans that since Cody will be sent to a mental institution the plans for learning Jarrett’s methods and contact have been scotched. But Cody isn’t down for the count; he arranges a breakout anyway and takes Fallon and a couple of other inmates along for the ride. Once on the outside, Cody’s new gang mingles with his old one as the men make plans to rob the payroll office of a chemical plant by being smuggled in via a tanker truck,; a plan devised by Jarrett’s “laundryman,” known only to his associates as “Trader” (Fred Clark). Inside the plant, the truck’s driver—none other than the previously-introduced Mr. Creel — recognizes Fallon as a T-man and an exchange of gunfire between the Jarrett gang and the feds ensues. Jarrett, by this time completely insane, ends up on top of a large gas tank and blows himself to kingdom come by randomly firing his gun, leading Fallon to philosophize: “He finally got to the top of the world... and it blew right up in his face.”

Of the sixty-one feature films that credit James Cagney with an appearance during his lengthy movie career, only a small percentage feature him as a gangster or gangster-type; Cagney wasn’t particularly fond of the genre—no actor likes being typecast—but it was hard to deny a grudging respect for those movies that made him a household name among theatergoers…particularly since Cagney was so damned good in them. His silver screen breakthrough occurred when he was cast in the lead role in the aforementioned The Public Enemy. After quarreling with Warner Bros. in 1936 and embarking on a two-picture sojourn with the newly-formed Grand National he returned back to his stomping grounds for one of his biggest box-office (and gangster-themed) successes, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). Four years later, having copped his only Best Actor Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Cagney was afforded another opportunity to leave Warner’s stable of stars—but when his stint with independent production (partnered with brother William) produced duds like Johnny Come Lately (1943) and The Time of Your Life (1948), he returned again to the Warners’ fold…and his first smash success was, not surprisingly, White Heat.

When Heat first hit movie screens sixty years ago on this date, audiences were introduced to an older and paunchier Cagney—but by no means less effective. Cagney’s Cody Jarrett is every bit as ruthless (if not more so) than the characters he portrayed in Enemy, Angels and The Roaring Twenties (1939); he’s also more cunning, energetic, humorous and violent. But while the villains Cagney played in these thirties’ films were motivated largely by economic concerns (it was the height of the Depression, when times where tough and good jobs were hard to come by) Cody Jarrett’s primary driving force is that he is literally batshit-crazy. The subject of psychiatry was just getting a foothold in the movies at this time, and while the Jarrett character wasn’t the first seriously disturbed criminal (Chester Morris was having problems ten years earlier in Blind Alley) in the flickers, he was certainly the most unforgettable.

Jarrett’s insanity can be traced to what psychiatrists describe as an Oedipus complex; he lavishes affection on his doting mother, who in many ways is the root cause of his “episodes” (which some have attributed to migraines, others epileptic seizures) since the only explanation for those spasms are attributed by agent Evans as a series of psychosomatic attempts to get his mother’s intention (and that later became all too real). (Another explanation is that Jarrett’s insanity may be a hereditable condition; his father spent his final days in a mental institution as well.) Indeed, Ma Jarrett (who never blinks) is a real closet case, allowing her son to curl up in her lap as she helps him through another one of his “twinges” (I suspect the only reason this got past the censors was that the Jarrett character also had a wife).

The most memorable scene in Heat (its blazing conclusion not withstanding) is that moment when Cody, learning of his beloved Ma’s demise through the cafeteria grapevine, scrambles up on top of the tables and begins mewing and moaning in agony while various screws attempt to subdue him. Guards rush at him and he casually knocks them down like bowling pins until he is finally overcome by their greater numbers. If the extras at the beginning of all this look a bit surprised, it’s because they were—they didn’t expect Cagney to carry on in that fashion, the actor having received a stamp of approval from director Raoul Walsh to improvise after several approaches to the scene simply weren’t working.

Throughout the film, many of those in Cody’s employ remark about his instability (which kind of makes you wonder why they hooked up with him in the first place), particularly Big Ed (Steve Cochran), who appears to be biding his time, waiting for an opportunity to usurp Cody’s position on the throne. Ed gets his chance when Cody begins his prison vacation, but makes the fatal mistake of having tried to snuff out Jarrett while he was still in the joint; Cody gets his revenge by emptying his gun into Ed’s back at his hideout (Cody’s wife convinces him that Ed was responsible for his mom’s death—but Cody never learns that it was actually Verna who did the shooting) and cavalierly dispatching Ed’s lackey Parker (Paul Guilfoyle) by pumping more slugs into a car trunk that’s become Parker’s temporary residence. (I love how Cagney does this with all the nonchalance of a simple household chore, gnawing on a chicken leg in the process.) Jarrett gets crazier and crazier as the film rushes to its classic climax, until Cagney drives home the point of how much Jarrett is ready for the booby hatch when he’s surrounded at the end and remarks with a giggle to his man Ryley (Robert Osterloh): “They think they got Cody Jarrett…they haven’t got Cody Jarrett.”

Edmond O’Brien—known to readers at my blog Thrilling Days of Yesteryear as “the sweatiest man in noir”—handles an interesting and complex role as agent Fallon, who in many ways is presented by director Walsh as the real villain; a fellow convict who gains Cody’s trust and in the end is revealed to be an unrepentant fink (“A copper…a copper…how do you like that boys? A copper and his name is Fallon…and we went for it…I went for it…treated him like a kid brother…and I was gonna split fifty-fifty with a copper!”). Virginia Mayo—a favorite of Walsh’s—is equally top-notch; a dame struggling to act classy but unable to hide her trailer-trash origins (I love the bit where she spits out her gum before she kisses Cagney). It’s also hard to believe that the woman who plays Ma Jarrett is the same woman who played Gary Cooper’s sainted matriarch in Sergeant York (1941), but Wycherly’s performance is one for the ages.

Add to this a first-rate screenplay composed by scribes Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts (from a story by Virginia Kellogg), and that unforgettable score by Max Steiner, and it’s no wonder that this picture continues to hold audiences in its thrall sixty years after it was first shown at a theater near you. Towards the end, as the T-Men continue to air-condition Cody Jarrett with bullets, Fallon asks: “What’s holding him up?” All you have to do is sit down with Heat for the first—or even thirty-first—time and the answer will become all too clear.

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. is responsible for the weblog Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, which doesn’t pay him a great deal but keeps him out of the pool halls. He had no trouble remembering the deadline for this essay as it is the same date as his natal anniversary

From the Vault: Hard-Boiled

2009-09-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

Forget Jean-Claude Van Damme. If you want to see a movie that exemplifies how John Woo earned his reputation as an ace action director, see Hard-Boiled, an extremely violent but utterly fun example of his Hong Kong work. Even an experienced connoisseur of American action films should be blown away by the mind-numbing set pieces that Woo cooks up in Hard-Boiled. He's as much choreographer as director.

Just when you think he's reached a pinnacle of wow-inducing gunplay and fighting, he produces another sequence that tops what came before. By the end, when the protagonists search one corridor after another for each other, it's become less a film than a live-action video game.

The plot, really just a skeletal excuse for the action, concerns rival gun runners in Hong Kong, a duplicitous gangster caught between the two groups and the cop who wants to stop them all.

Chow Yun-Fat stars as Tequila, the crusading law officer who makes Dirty Harry look like a model of restraint in comparison. He doesn't leave the precinct without grabbing a healthy supply of weapons first.

The other main character is Tony, the gangster with divided loyalties played by Tony Leung (full name Tony Leung Chiu Wai to avoid confusion with Tony Leung Ka Fai who starred in the recent film The Lover).

In addition to the absurdly entertaining violence, Hard-Boiled provides an added comic kick by putting Hong Kong spins on American genre cliches.

A word of warning: Hard-Boiled is not for the squeamish. The violence and blood reaches such a high level that you probably would need someone schooled in higher mathematics to calculate the film's body count.

However, if you can enjoy it on its comic book level, Hard-Boiled takes the viewer on an incredibly fun thrill ride.

From the Vault: Menace II Society

2009-08-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

No recent film has deserved as much praise while simultaneously proving as difficult to recommend than Menace II Society. The first film by 21-year-old twins Albert and Allen Hughes, who directed and conceived the screenplay with Tyger Williams, provides yet another stunningly assured debut by the growing crop of young filmmakers.

Menace II Society takes a grim and somewhat depressing look at urban life in Los Angeles, never shying away from showing the brutality of 1993 Watts. The viewer may feel compelled to look away, but its artistry and shocking candor keeps eyes glued to the screen.

The film tells the story of Caine (Tyrin Turner), a recent high school grad who learned to survive on the streets after the deaths of both parents. He deals drugs and commits many crimes.

To its credit, the film doesn't portray Caine as a villain or a sympathetic victim of circumstance -- he's just a product of his environs.

The film probably will draw comparisons to John Singleton's excellent 1991 film Boyz N the Hood, but Menace II Society doesn't even offer the smallest dashes of hope that Boyz did and it avoids the melodramatic tendencies that hampered Singleton's film.

Menace II Society, for me at least, more closely resembles Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer with its unflinching portrait of a madman.

Both films are compelling and unpleasant and by the end of each, the audience longs for better lives for their protagonists, despite their heinous crimes. Toward the end of Menace II Society, when Caine lashes out at a drunken friend, you're relieved he only uses the butt of a gun instead of its bullets.

Luckily, like Henry, this film doesn't let the audience off the hook with the happy endings to which they've become accustomed. Instead, the Hughes brothers' strict adherence to their vision produces one of the most powerful films in recent memory. No other recent film has made me feel sadder or more helpless.

The actors excel, especially Turner in the difficult role of Caine, and Larenz Tate as his dangerous friend O-Dog, who earns comparisons to Joe Pesci's Tommy in GoodFellas. Veterans Samuel L. Jackson, Charles S. Dutton and Bill Duke also provide strong cameos.

Those brave enough to sit through this film will not only be rewarded with a great movie but will probably ponder Menace II Society for a long time. Given the subject matter, anything that spurs discussion and contemplation of the difficult issues it raises deserves accolades.