MovingPictureHistoryBlog

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

2011-07-21T10:17:00.000-07:00

If you accept the conventional wisdom regarding the late Stanley Kubrick, your worst suspicions will be confirmed by his crowning achievement, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You think Kubrick was an egomaniacal control freak? OK, maybe he was. But it’s hard to see how a modest Mr. Nice Guy could have convinced a major Hollywood studio – Metro Goldwyn Mayer, no less! -- to bankroll something this intellectually ambitious, tauntingly ambiguous and budget-bustingly expensive back in 1968. As Norman Kagan notes in The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, the director spent a year and a half shooting 205 special effects shots, “many of them possible only because of technical processes Kubrick himself invented.” Compared to this guy, even James Cameron seems like a meek under-achiever.

You say you’ve always heard Kubrick was a dour misanthrope with a sour view of humankind? Then check out the scene that signals the dawn of civilization: Man-apes learn how to kill more efficiently by reconfiguring animal bones as lethal weapons. And while you’re at it, fast-forward a bit, and contemplate the insufferable blandness of supposedly more advanced homo sapiens. Time and again, 2001 underscores the ironic contrast between the miraculous and the mundane, between the panoramic splendors of outer space and the narrow-focused behavior of smaller-than-life humans. There’s something borderline-sadistic about the way Kubrick caricatures a white-bread, charm-free scientist who gets his first glimpse at hard evidence of intelligent life on other planets. “Well,” he remarks with the empty cheer of a Kiwanis Club luncheon speaker, “I must say – you guys have certainly come up with something.”

Do you find yourself agreeing with Calder Willingham, co-screenwriter of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, who accused the director of “a near-psychotic indifference to and coldness toward the human beings” in his movies? Then consider this: HAL 9000, the soft-spoken super-computer, seems a lot more human than its flesh-and-blood traveling companions aboard a Jupiter-bound spacecraft. It’s so affecting, even tragic, when an astronaut (another personality-challenged human, played by Keir Dullea) disables HAL, you’re almost willing to forgive the digital paranoid for causing the deaths of every other crew member. Indeed, with the arguable exception of Tom Cruise’s obsessive seeker in Eyes Wide Shut, Hal is the closest thing to a genuinely charismatic and sympathetic character in any movie Kubrick made after Spartacus (1960).

Despite the absence of a significant human protagonist to generate a rooting interest, 2001 was a huge commercial success during its first theatrical run. (And not just because many chemically-enhanced viewers repeatedly savored it as a widescreen head trip.) More than four decades later, it is widely viewed as a masterpiece, even by some critics who expressed serious misgivings in their initial reviews. That it was, and continues to be, one of the past century’s most influential films is beyond dispute. And it is so firmly affixed in our collective pop-culture consciousness that even people who have never actually seen 2001 get the joke when someone makes a wink-wink, nudge-nudge allusion to the opening notes of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra (perhaps the most inspired musical choice ever made by a filmmaker) or the arrival of those imposing black Monoliths that encourage human beings to transcend themselves.

Trouble is, much of 2001 hasn’t aged very well. The mystifying climax of what one critic described as the film’s “shaggy God story” (concocted by Kubrick and visionary sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke) seems more than ever like a precocious sophomore’s idea of deep-dish philosophizing. (It doesn’t help that, when Dullea awakens after a dazzling sound-and-light show, he finds himself trapped inside what looks like the spectacularly garish luxury suite of a Las Vegas hotel.) Worse, Kubrick’s intricately and interminably detailed depiction of extra-terrestrial travel – meant to convey shock and awe at the miracle of space flight -- now seems, compared to more recent displays of high-tech wizardry, almost quaint.

Of course, some things – titles, for instance -- never go out of date. And just as 1984 continues to serve as shorthand for a dystopian vision of technologically-enhanced totalitarianism, 2001 retains its mythic resonance – an optimistic prediction of first contact with other, presumably wiser, life forms -- long after people stopped scribbling that cluster of numbers in checkbooks. Instead of inspiring awe, however, the film itself now is more likely to evoke a kind of wistful melancholy that Kubrick never intended. It’s sad, but true: These days, we simply don’t view interstellar exploration with the same wonder-fueled enthusiasm shared by Kubrick and millions of others back in 1968.

To be sure, there’s the occasional media frenzy about images beamed from Mars by unmanned spacecraft. And there’s always a ready audience for every new chapter of the Star Wars franchise. But with each passing year, it’s increasingly more difficult to imagine that anything short of a real-world appearance by a beckoning Monolith would re-ignite our intergalactic wanderlust. All you have to do is read news accounts of petty Congressional squabbling over NASA funding, and you’ll realize that, never mind what the calendar might tell you, we’re still a long, long way from the bold new age of discovery we were promised all those years ago.

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

2011-05-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

A textbook example of a hand-tooled star vehicle that forever labels the star in its driver’s seat, Smokey and the Bandit also is noteworthy for being the movie most often credited – or, perhaps more precisely, blamed – for kicking off an action-comedy subgenre best described as Cross-Country Demolition Derby.

Two lesser sequels and at least one long-running TV series (The Dukes of Hazzard) can be traced directly to this broadly played hodgepodge of high-speed driving, lowbrow humor and spectacular car crashes. But wait, there’s more: Smokey and the Bandit, the debut feature of stuntman-turned-filmmaker Hal Needham, also inspired literally dozens of other pedal-to-the-metal extravaganzas – mostly redneck melodramas and cornpone comedies, along with Needham’s own in-jokey Cannonball Run movies -- throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Decades later, its very title still serves as shorthand for a particular type of undemanding crowd-pleaser with smart-alecky heroes, dim-bulb authority figures and more high-octane action than a month of NASCAR events.

The thin plot is a serviceable excuse for stringing together scenes of cartoonish frivolity and vehicular misadventure. Bandit (Burt Reynolds), a swaggering prankster and maverick trucker, wagers that he can transport contraband beer from Texas to Georgia in record time. While a faithful friend (Jerry Reed) does much of the actual driving in the lager-stocked 18-wheeler, Bandit darts about in a souped-up Trans Am, on the lookout for any “Smokey” (i.e., highway cop) who might impede their high-speed progress.

Complications arise when Bandit arouses the ire of an especially grizzly Smokey, Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), by picking up a perky hitchhiker (Sally Field) who just happens to be the runaway bride of the sheriff’s cretinous son (Mike Henry).

Initially dismissed as a freakish regional hit at Deep South drive-ins, Smokey and the Bandit gradually proved equally popular in major metropolitan markets, and wound up in the record books as the second-highest grossing film (right behind Star Wars) of 1977. Some have credited its phenomenal popularity to its subversive allure as fantasy fulfillment: Bandit repeatedly outsmarts and humiliates Sheriff Justice and all other law-enforcement officials who dare to impinge on his God-given right to ignore any posted speed limit. (Some academic somewhere doubtless has earned a doctorate by explaining why so many pop tunes and popcorn flicks of the ’70s equated driving over 55 with all-American rebelliousness.) Most other observers, however, credit the movie’s appeal – for contemporary viewers as well as ’70s ticketbuyers -- to the once-in-a-lifetime matching of player and character.

Even moviegoers not yet born when Smokey and the Bandit first screeched into theaters reflexively think of the hard-driving, trash-talking trucker whenever they hear Reynolds’ name. Part of that can be explained by the virtually nonstop exposure of Needham’s movie on cable and home video. But it’s instructive to consider Reynolds’ own role in erasing the lines between actor and character, man and mythos.

In the wake of his becoming an “overnight success” after years of journeymen work in television and movies, Reynolds embraced typecasting – and tongue-in-cheeky self-promotion – with unseemly fervor. For the better part of a decade, he chronically reprised his Bandit shtick – winking insouciance, naughty-boy sarcasm, zero-cool self-assurance – in motion pictures and TV talk shows. It was funny, for a while, and then it wasn’t. Trouble is, by the time it stopped being funny, the image was firmly affixed in the public’s collective pop-culture consciousness. So much so, in fact, that even after demonstrating his versatility in a wide range of character roles -- most memorably, as the prideful porn-film director in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) – Reynolds appears destined to always be remembered best for one indelibly defining character.

On the other hand, there are far less pleasant ways for an actor to ensure his immortality. When asked about his enduring linkage to Bandit in 2003, more than a generation after playing the cocky trucker, Reynolds addressed the mixed blessing with typically self-effacing humor.

“I’m very flattered,” he said, “by how some people still respond to that character. I still have guys in Trans Ams pull up to me at stoplights and yell, ‘Dammit! You’re the reason I got this thing!’

“But I also remember a while back, when I was offering an acting seminar in Florida, that I was afraid they’d go over to the auto-racetrack looking for me, instead of the theater. And even when they did show up at the right place, I felt I should tell them: ‘Those of you who are wearing your racing gloves – take them off, we’re not going to need them, we’re going to talk about other things.’”

Of course, if the audience loves a character (and, better still, the actor playing that character) the character can get away with practically anything, even coming off as a bona fide egomaniac. Midway through Smokey and the Bandit, Reynolds recalled, “There’s a moment when Sally asks me, ‘What is it that you do best?’ And I say, ‘Show off.’ And she says, ‘Yeah, you do that well.’ At the time we made the film, I thought to myself, ‘If I can get that line out and they still like me – “they” being the audience – we’re home free.’ Because basically, that’s who (Bandit) was, what he was all about.”

The line got big laughs, indicating just how much the audience really, really liked Bandit. And, of course, the actor who played him.

Serpico (1973)

2011-04-09T18:58:00.000-07:00

Much has been made of the fresh ideas, revolutionary approaches and film-school-grad fervor – in short, the youth – of filmmakers at the vanguard of the 1970s New Hollywood era. Indeed, when Michael Pye and Lynda Myles wrote their contemporaneous account of the New Hollywood era, they chose as their title The Movie Brats – a then-trendy term used to describe auteurs such as, among others, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg, all representing “the first film school graduates and movie buffs to gain real power in the industry” during the 1960s and ‘70s.

But while it is undeniable that film brats prospered throughout the New Hollywood era – the first period in Hollywood history when significant numbers of movies were made by people who learned their craft through academic study of other movies – stage-trained directors, TV-trained craftsmen (including several with roots in live dramas of the 1950s) and sundry other grizzled veterans also enjoyed a heyday, and many were inspired to do some of their best work during the 1970s.

Chief among the relative graybeards who made impressive additions to their resumes even as the younger bucks grabbed most of the press coverage: Sam Peckinaph, who was 46 when his Straw Dogs (1971) was released; Robert Altman, already 50 when his Nashville (1975) premiered; Don Siegel, who unleashed Dirty Harry (1971) when he was 59; and John Huston, who delivered Fat City (1972) at age 66, and The Man Who Would Be King (1975) at 69.

Sidney Lumet was 49 when he started shooting Serpico, his street-smart, documentary-style drama based on the real-life story of New York police detective Frank Serpico, in July 1973. By that time, he already had to his credit 18 feature films – including the classic courtroom melodrama 12 Angry Men (1957), the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964), the taboo-shattering The Pawnbroker (1965) [1] and the high-tech caper The Anderson Tapes (1971) – and many acclaimed television dramas, including a live-broadcast version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, starring Jason Robards and featuring a young Robert Redford.

To put this resume in context: In 1957, when Lumet directed 12 Angry Men, his debut feature, at age 33, Roman Polanski was a 24-year-old student at the Lodz Film School, Francis Ford Coppola was an 18-year-old drama major at Hofstra University – and Steven Spielberg was 11 years old.

Unlike many, if not most, of his younger colleagues who prospered during the New Hollywood era [2], Lumet refrained from embracing the concept of director as auteur. “I don't know what the big geshrei is about, the big noise,” he told American Film magazine in 1982. “[A]ll the auteur theory did was make what had been natural self-conscious." Even as recently as 1995, when he published his memoir Making Pictures, Lumet disdained what he describes as the “pretentious” notion that any movie is shaped entirely by the artistic sensibility of a single individual:

[I]n the late fifties, walking the Champs Elysees, I saw in neon a sign over a theater: Douze Hommes en Colere – un Film de Sidney Lumet. 12 Angry Men was now in its second year. Fortunately for my psyche and my career, I’ve never believed it was un Film de Sidney Lumet. Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t false modesty. I’m the guy who says “Print,” and that’s what determines what goes up on that screen… But how much in charge am I? Is the movie un Film de Sidney Lumet? I’m dependent on weather, budget, what the leading lady had for breakfast, who the leading man is in love with. I’m dependent on the talents and idiosyncrasies, the moods and egos, the politics and personalities, of more than a hundred different people. And that’s just in the making of the movie. At this point, I won’t even begin to discuss the studio, financing, distribution, marketing, and so on.

And yet, as early as 1973, Lumet already had distinguished himself as a director with a unique flair for gritty urban drama, developing a style of brutally straightforward realism (as opposed to naturalism) that would in Serpico begin to evolve into what Richard Combs would describe in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary as “an embryonic epic form – a modern mosaic in which socioeconomic observations are assembled, not into a message, but into a deterministic trap which the hero willfully enters.” Serpico -- not unlike The Anderson Tapes -- pivots on a protagonist who follows his obsessions to a point near death, in a manner not always admirable or even entirely understandable. The formal dislocations caused by Lumet’s deliberately episodic, documentary-flavored approach results in what Roud calls a “prismatic representation” of Frank Serpico (played by Al Pacino, the reluctant heir apparent of The Godfather) as a flawed hero viewed from a multitude of different perspectives within the same film. [3]

It should be noted, however, that Lumet’s artistic temperament, and his feel for urban drama of moral complexity, were not the only reasons why he was assigned to direct Serpico when Paramount production chief Robert Evans green-lit the Dino Di Laurentiis production in 1973. Like the other “journeymen directors” Peter Biskind mentions respectfully – without examining exhaustively – in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Lumet already was known “not only for the quality of his projects, but also for the speed with which he films, the dexterity with which he handles both cast and crew, and his aptitude for location work,” all qualities that would suit him particularly well on a project with 106 speaking parts and scores of extras, that would start filming in early July 1973 with 100-plus shooting locations, and was due in theaters at December of the same year. [4]

While working at that breakneck pace, surmounting daunting logistical problems on a daily basis, Lumet somehow managed to make a movie that, decades later, remains among the enduringly influential [5] and highly regarded New Hollywood films released by Paramount during the Robert Evans regime. And in doing so, he captured and reflected the zeitgeist of a turbulent time as vividly as any movie released by any studio during the ‘70s.[6]

Crimes of the Time

Sidney Lumet’s Serpico tells the true-life story of Frank Serpico, the decorated New York City police detective who blew the whistle on the bribery and corruption that was rampant among his fellow cops in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. (In his book Making Movies, Lumet describes the film as “a portrait of a real rebel with a cause.”)

Working from a screenplay by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler, who based their script on the non-fiction best-seller by Peter Mass, Lumet offers a largely admiring yet not always flattering portrait of the man described by Mass as “the first police officer not only in the history of the New York Police Department, but in the history of any police department in the whole United States, to step forward to report and subsequently testify openly about widespread, systematic cop corruption-payoffs amounting to millions of dollars.”

The movie, which begins with Serpico’s near-fatal shooting by drug dealers while two fellow officer refrain from rushing to his aid, is for the most part a long flashback, depicting events that lead to the title character’s 1971 testimony before the Knapp Commission appointed by New York mayor John V. Lindsay. [7]

The concluding scenes pointedly refrain from giving the audience the emotional balm of an uplifting sense of triumph. In fact, the final scene announces that a bitter and disillusioned Frank Serpico left the police force and moved to Switzerland on June 15, 1972.

By dramatizing Frank Serpico’s story in such a manner, as a tale of corruption so intense and conspiracies so vast as to seem almost beyond the ability of just and honorable men to comprehend, confront and combat, Lumet and his screenwriters tapped into the worst suspicions and darkest assumptions of a moviegoing public battered on an almost daily basis by revelations and reverberations stemming from the ongoing Watergate scandal.

Serpico had its premiere in New York on Dec. 5, 1973, scarcely five weeks after a besieged President Richard Nixon, desperate to reverse his plummeting poll numbers, ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” two weeks after President Nixon felt compelled to inform an assemblage of 400 Associated Press managing editors that he was “not a crook” [8] – and one day before White House chief of staff Alexander Haig testified in federal court that maybe, just maybe, some “sinister force” was responsible for the 18 ¼-minute gap in a subpoenaed tape of Oval Office conversations.

But it wasn’t only Watergate that had poisoned minds and increased paranoia on both sides, left and right, of the political divide by the time Serpico was unspooling at theaters and drive-ins everywhere. Lumet’s movie arrived near the end of U.S. involvement in of the Vietnam War, a conflict that had divided the country like none since Civil War of more than a century earlier. In his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70's, historian David Frum claims: “Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing their faith in institutions [author’s italics].”

Serpico arrived at a time – during the revelations of Watergate and the winding down of Vietnam, in the wake of a decade rocked by assassinations, scandals and civil unrest -- when American moviegoers seemed atypically willing to accept, even embrace, movies with endings that were at best ambiguous -- and at worst, bleakly downbeat.

[1] The Pawnbroker (1965), a harrowing drama about a Holocaust survivor (Rod Steiger) who continues to be haunted by memories of his death camp experiences even after relocating to New York, very nearly was denied a Production Code seal because of a scene in which a prostitute fleetingly bares her breasts to the title character in the hope of obtaining money for her desperate boyfriend.

[2] A period during which Lumet also enjoyed critical and commercial success with Murder on the Orient Express (1974, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Network (1976).

[3] Lumet would take a similar approach to rendering the morally tarnished police-officer protagonists of Prince of the City (1981) and Q&A (1990).

[4] In order to complete Serpico in “an insanely short amount of time,” Lumet said in an interview taped for the 2002 DVD edition of the film, he and editor Dede Allen worked out a system of cutting the movie during actual production: “I finished a scene, and 48 hours later it was ready to turn over to the sound department.”

[5] Christopher Orr of The New Republic, Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly are just three of the critics who noted the influence of Serpico (and other ‘70s crime dramas) on Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007).

[6] Remarkably, Lumet completed the filming, originally scheduled to last 11 weeks, in 10 weeks and one day.

[7] The movie emphasizes that when his own superiors refused to listen to Serpico’s charges of dishonesty in the force – and even counseled him to accept the way things were, or possibly wind up “in the river” – Serpico tried to alert the mayor to the problem of police corruption, but was rebuffed through an intermediary, allegedly because of the mayor’s concerns about the need to sustain high morale among NYPD officers who might be needed to sustain a thin blue line of defense during “a long hot summer” rife with potential for rioting. Only after Serpico co-operated with a New York Times expose on police corruption did the mayor appoint the Knapp Commission investigators (Lumet, 1973).

[8] “When President Nixon pronounced that sentence,” writes historian David Frum, the Chief Executive “pointed the gun at his own temple at pulled the trigger. It might have been wiser, in fact, for him to go on television and proclaim – yes, I am a crook. With Americans as cynical as they then were, they might well have refused to believe him.” Frum goes on to note that an ABC News poll conducted within days of the “I am not a crook” comment found that 59 percent of Americans did not believe “much of what the president says these days.”

Detour (1945)

2010-12-09T21:03:00.000-08:00

Film rarely gets more noir than Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, a wide-awake nightmare of unforgiving fate and dead-end fatalism that may be the cruddiest great movie ever made. Filmed in six days on a bare minimum of locations for Producers Releasing Corporation, the most impoverished of the Old Hollywood B-movie outfits known collectively as Poverty Row, it fairly reeks of grungy, sweaty desperation on both sides of the cameras. Indeed, it’s tempting to imagine this 1945 must-see movie actually was written and directed by its own protagonist, a paranoid loser who’s furiously anguished, but not terribly surprised, as his hard-knock life devolves into a worst-case scenario.

We meet Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in a dingy roadside diner that, like most of the movie’s other claustrophobic interiors, does not appear to be a studio set so much as a hasty rough sketch for one. Unshaven and socially maladroit, if not borderline psychotic, Al almost immediately alienates everyone around him. Which means, of course, he must resort to voice-over narration – a classic film noir device, used to underscore the inevitability of an anti-hero’s destiny – when he’s stirred to spill his tale of woe.

Trouble is, it’s not easy to feel sorry, or even remain patient, while Al regales us in a tone pitched somewhere between a pathetic whine and a self-justifying snarl. And, truth to tell, it’s more than a little difficult to believe everything he says as he blames everyone but himself for his dire condition. “Whichever way you turn,” he complains, “fate sticks out a foot to trip you.” Maybe so, but Al appears quite capable of stumbling into damnation without any outside assistance.

The extended flashback begins with Al speaking of happier days, when he was a pianist, and his girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) was a singer, at a New York nightclub. Even here, however, Al sounds like a chronic malcontent – and not just because the nightclub looks only slightly more lavish than the aforementioned roadside diner. When someone slips him a ten-dollar tip, he’s underwhelmed: “What was it? A piece of paper, crawling with germs.” And when Sue suggests that – somehow, some way – he’ll be a great classical pianist, he snaps: “Yeah, someday! If I don’t get arthritis first!”

Sue eventually announces her plan to leave town, to try her luck in Hollywood. (At least, that’s her story, and she sticks with it.) Al decides to follow the only way he can afford – as a hitchhiker. He fortuitously finds a soul mate when he climbs into the convertible of Charlie Haskell (Edmund MacDonald), a glad-handing high-roller who seems, if such a thing can be imagined, even more misanthropic than Al. Asked about unsightly scratches on his hand, Haskell boasts: “I was tussling with the most dangerous animal in the world — a woman!” Al sympathizes: “There ought to be a law against dames with claws.”
Unfortunately, the budding friendship between likeminded fellows is cut short during a heavy rainstorm. While Al tries to open the convertible top, a slumbering Haskell falls out of the door – and fatally bumps his head.

Naturally, since Al is a film noir patsy and not a reasonably sentient human being, the poor lug decides that, since nobody would ever believe he didn’t kill Haskell, he should dump the body, plant his own I.D. on the corpse, and drive away with the dead man’s amply-stuffed wallet.

And then, as if to fully demonstrate his limitless capacity for self-destructive behavior, Al stops to pick up a hitchhiker a little further down the road. Yes, that’s right: He’s driving a dead man’s car, on his way to see a girlfriend he simply can’t live without, and he still can’t resist slowing down for a hottie with, as he puts it, “a beauty that’s almost homely because it’s so real.” Unfortunately, Vera (Ann Savage) – perhaps the most hard-bitten femme fatale in the entire pantheon of noir shady ladies -- is the “dame with claws” who scarred Haskell. Even more unfortunately, she doesn’t buy Al’s story about Haskell’s untimely demise. (“What did you do? Kiss him with a wrench?”) And even if he is innocent, she doesn’t give a damn: She’s ready to blow the whistle on him anyway, unless he co-operates in her dubious scheme to fleece big bucks from Haskell’s long-estranged family.

Vera doesn’t appear until midway through this 68-minute movie, and she doesn’t get to stick around until the final scene. (Big surprise, right?) But never mind: Once she sashays into the story, she dominates Detour like slumming royalty, bullying and browbeating the hapless, helpless Al for the sheer fun of it. Having sunk even deeper into the lower depths than her reluctant companion – if you can believe her, she’s dying of consumption – Vera is viciously eager to make a killing so she can finance her final days. But the more time she spends with Al inside the cramped quarters of a low-rent hotel room, the more energy and attention she diverts to a sadomasochistic relationship that, at its nastiest, makes the toxic byplay between George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seem like conjugal bliss. (A typical taunt: “I’d hate to see a fellow as young as you wind up sniffin’ that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers!”) Vera’s telling response to Al’s whiny pleading -- “Stop making noises like a husband!” – intensifies the impression that, intentionally or otherwise, the second half of Detour plays like a perverse parody of a deeply troubled marriage.

And speaking of perversity: Detour, a squalid Poverty Row quickie that only gradually gained acceptance as a classic, turned out to be the high point in the lives of almost everyone involved.

Edgar G. Ulmer began his career at the heart of German Expressionism, working as a set and production designer for such notables as F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch. After immigrating the United States, however, he toiled mostly as a director of low-budget genre films, often disguising his threadbare production values with artful applications of light, shadow and camera movement. (Peter Bogdanovich once marveled: “Nobody ever made good pictures faster or for less money than Edgar G. Ulmer.”) He maintains a loyal cult following for a few other works – most notably, The Black Cat (1934), a seriously creepy thriller featuring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and striking Bauhaus-inspired sets -- but remains best known for this single, singularly bleak B-movie.

Likewise, Ann Savage had a fleeting career as a minor Hollywood contract player, but never found a better or showier role than the virulent Vera. Even so, she enjoyed more happily-ever-aftering than the seemingly cursed Tom Neal, a quick-tempered ex-boxer who spent most of his final years in prison for the “involuntary manslaughter” of his wife. Although prosecutors originally sought a first-degree murder conviction, Neal always claimed the fatal shooting was accidental. Just like his character in Detour insisted that Haskell died because of a fall -- and that Vera just happened to wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time when Al yanked on a telephone chord.
Knowing what happened to Neal two decades after Detour, you may be even more skeptical of Al’s account, and more inclined to interpret the improbabilities of the plot as unconvincing testimony by a guilty party.

In many ways, however, the movie is more potent, more devastating, if every word Al tells us is -- God help him -- absolutely true. Because if he isn’t lying, it’s all the more difficult to shake the chill evoked by his final line: “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.”

Day for Night (1973)

2010-12-09T20:29:00.000-08:00

Every so often, a motion picture will stake out a territory and lay eternal claim to it. Such is the case with Day for Night, a warm-hearted yet clear-eyed comedy-drama that persuasively argues, with ample evidence, that a movie set is the most magical place on earth.

The late, great Francois Truffaut’s Oscar-winning masterwork was not, strictly speaking, the first movie ever made about the joy of making movies. But it remains, decades after its Paris premiere, the yardstick by which almost every film on the subject inevitably is measured. Its very title, which refers to a process through which night scenes can be shot in daylight, continues to serves as critic-speak shorthand in reviews of everything from Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion (1995) to Oliver Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996) to Roman Coppola’s CQ (2001).

Truffaut cast himself in the central role of Ferrand, the affable, overworked auteur who’s trying to complete a sudsy romantic melodrama, Meet Pamela, within seven weeks at the Victorine Studios in Nice. The production is beset by mishaps and misadventures, some amusingly minor (a recalcitrant cat refuses to perform in a sight gag), some shatteringly tragic (a star dies in an auto mishap before completing a key scene). At one point, an egotistically impulsive male lead threatens to abandon the film because his current sweetheart has spurned him. Desperate times call for desperate measures by a selfless team player: The American-born leading lady, still vulnerable after a recent nervous breakdown, nevertheless volunteers to keep her feckless co-star interested in the production by feigning romantic interest in him.

Throughout the barely controlled chaos, Ferrand maintains his calm, though just barely, by keeping himself focused on the end that justifies any means. Making a movie, he says, is like taking a stagecoach ride in the Wild West: “At first, you hope for a nice trip. Then you just hope you reach your destination.”

Unlike Meet Pamela, Day for Night brings out the best in everyone involved. The stellar ensemble cast includes Jacqueline Bisset as the beautiful but emotionally fragile Hollywood star, Valentina Cortese as a fading leading lady who’s too flustered – and, quite often, too drunk – to remember her lines, Nathalie Baye as a frisky production assistant and Jean-Pierre Leaud (a.k.a. Antoine Doinel, Truffaut on-screen alter ego in The 400 Blows and subsequent sequels) as the callow, self-absorbed actor who repeatedly poses a question that Truffaut himself often pondered: “Are women magic?”

D.O.A. (1950)

2010-12-09T20:08:00.000-08:00

How's this for an entrance? In the opening minutes of D.O.A., Edmund O'Brien staggers into a police station, asks directions to the homicide division, then plops into a chair. "I'd like to report a murder," he rasps. The attentive investigator asks: "Who was murdered?" O'Brien replies: "I was."

No kidding. O'Brien plays Frank Bigelow, a small-town accountant who gets into big-time trouble when he takes an impulsive trip to San Francisco. He makes the journey primarily to avoid the marriage demands of his lovestruck secretary (Pamela Britton). Unfortunately, while he's having a drink with new friends in a jazz club, someone gives him a toxic cocktail. The next morning, Bigelow wakes up with a killer hangover, so he visits a local hospital. That's where he gets the bad news: He's been given a slow-acting poison, and has just a day or two left to live.

D.O.A. is a textbook example of film noir, a type of thriller -- vaguely defined but instantly recognizable -- that reached its peak of popularity in the decade following World War II, when hundreds of Hollywood features combined crime melodrama, aberrant psychology, sexual insecurity, Cold War paranoia and bizarrely lit, nightmarish camera work to varying degrees. Heavily influenced by German Expressionism, and frequently directed or photographed by German emigres, films noir are notorious for tell-tale visual hallmarks – trenchcoated tough guys, rainwashed streets, lazily spinning overhead fans, slats of light spilling through Venetian blinds into smoke-filled rooms – that continue to be evoked in everything from made-for-video B-movies to ultra-stylish TV spots for expensive toiletries. But the darkness in a true film noir isn’t so much a visual scheme as a state of mind, one best summed up by the hapless of protagonist of another noir classic, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945): “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on your or me for no good reason at all.”

The funny thing about film noir is, people who made undisputed classics of the genre during the 1940s and ‘50s didn’t think of their moody movies as anything other than conventional (albeit stylish) thrillers. If you'd been hanging around a studio commissary back then, you certainly wouldn't have heard one director tell another: “Yeah, I'm wrapping up that western, then I'm doing that film noir with Bogart . . .”

It wasn't until French critics much later coined the term film noir -- literally, dark or black film -- that film buffs became fully aware of the qualities that distinguish a film as truly noir. As Ephraim Katz notes in The Film Encyclopedia, film noir “characteristically abounds with night scenes, both interior and exterior, with sets that suggest dingy realism, and with lighting that emphasizes deep shadows and accents the mood of fatalism.” Heroes as well as villains in film noir are “cynical, disillusioned and often insecure loners, inextricably bound to the past and unsure and apathetic about the future.”

In D.O.A., O'Brien's Bigelow is a prototypical noir protagonist, a not-entirely-innocent bystander who's unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. At first, he suspects his death sentence was handed down by an elegant smuggler (Luther Adler) with whom he's had indirect business dealings. But the answer to the mystery really lies in a bill of sale that Bigelow notarized back home. The document is potentially incriminating evidence, and two co-conspirators want to destroy all trace of it.

Throughout a long flashback bracketed by Bigelow's fateful visit to the police station, D.O.A. shows how knowing you're about to die can be empowering, if not liberating. The movie refrains from stating the obvious, but there's little doubt that Bigelow behaves with uncharacteristic bravery while hunting for his killer only because he knows he has nothing left to lose, no one left to fear. He even keeps his cool during confrontations with the smuggler's chief henchman (Neville Brand), a grinning psychopath who does his best to make Bigelow's short life miserable.

O'Brien, always a dependable character actor, gives one of his finest performances here as a man who wants to make every minute count while he's running out of time. He's at his best in a surprisingly affecting scene that has Bigelow phoning his secretary, and trying very hard not to tell her what's wrong. From the look on his face and the pauses in his conversation, you can tell he's thinking about how different things might have been had he not been so quick to avoid a long-term commitment to this woman who loves him.

Polish-born Rudolph Mate (1899-1964) started out as a cameraman for the great Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc) before moving to the United States to work with such notables as Alfred Hitchcock (Foreign Correspondent) and Ernst Lubitsch (To Be or Not to Be). As a director, his resume includes everything from sci-fi spectacle (When Worlds Collide) to Tony Curtis star vehicles (The Black Shield of Falworth). But he remains best known to film buffs for D.O.A., an engrossing 1950 drama that sustains an unsettling atmosphere of noirish dread even during scenes shot in broad daylight.

Seven Samurai (1954)

2010-11-29T15:25:00.000-08:00

When Steven Spielberg hailed Akira Kurosawa as “the visual Shakespeare of our time,” the American admirer likely was thinking of the Japanese master’s Seven Samurai. Kurosawa’s stunning 1954 epic is one of those absolutely indispensable films that practically everyone has heard about, regardless of whether they’ve actually seen it. Indeed, even if you haven’t, you may think you’ve seen it, given its strong influence on so many other films and filmmakers. For five decades, directors ranging from John Sturges (who remade it as The Magnificent Seven) to John Sayles (who borrowed the basic plot while writing a 1980 sci-fi cheapie called Battle Beyond the Stars) have drawn from Kurosawa’s tale of honor among warriors in 16th-century Japan.

By turns sage and savage, avuncular and authoritarian, the great Takashi Shimura (Ikiru) heads the ensemble cast as Kambei, an unemployed samurai who agrees to help peasants defend their village against periodic pillaging by marauding bandits. Even though the pay is meager — a few handfuls of rice — Kambei is able to recruit other hired swords who have little else to do after being cast adrift by the lords they once served. By appealing to their pride, sense of justice and respect for tradition, he attracts such tough customers as Kyuzo (Seji Miyaguchi), a taciturn professional who never wastes a word or gesture, and Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a bearish hot-head who takes great pains to hide his less-than-noble ancestry.

Seven Samurai shows Kurosawa at the top of his form, demonstrating rigorous control of his medium with an inspired balance of formal precision and kinetic exuberance. His epic opens with rapid panning shots of bandits riding over hills, and climaxes with the thundering chaos of a rain-soaked, mud-and-blood battle. In between, there is scarcely a single shot that does not contain motion. Even when people in the frame are stationary, the camera itself glides, thrusts and recoils like a restless animal. A half-century after its initial release, Seven Samurai still makes most other action movies seem positively pokey.

Appropriately enough, this classic by “the most Western of Japanese filmmakers” is, at heart, an old-fashioned Hollywood Western in even older-fashioned Japanese regalia. Kurosawa made no apologies for embracing the style and substance of Occidentals as diverse as John Ford and Vincent Van Gogh. (He rendered the latter as a workaholic sage — played by Martin Scorsese, no less! — in his 1990 anthology film, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.) A lifelong student of Shakespeare, he audaciously re-imagined Macbeth as Throne of Blood (1957), an epic drama of medieval warfare; recycled elements of Hamlet in The Bad Sleep Well (1960), a modern-day tale of deadly serious corporate intrigue; and and reconstituted King Lear as Ran (1985), his last incontestable masterpiece.

Even so, despite his borrowings from other cultures, Kurosawa remained forever mindful of his roots. And while he refused to err on the side of romanticized nostalgia in his re-creations of Japan’s turbulent past, he viewed social changes, technological advancements and other breaks from tradition as extremely mixed blessings. It is well worth remembering that in Seven Samurai, the 16th-century swordsman who best represents the ancient bushido code of honor -- the very embodiment of revered tradition -- is felled by a rifle shot.

The Searchers (1956)

2010-10-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

Back in 1979, long before Kevin Bacon was designated the center of the pop-culture universe, critic Stuart Byron argued in a much-discussed New York magazine essay that John Ford’s The Searchers was the primary influence for an entire generation of American filmmakers. Indeed, according to Byron, everything from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) to George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977), from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), contained thematic and/or visual elements that could be traced to Ford’s classic drama of obsession and pursuit.

You could argue, of course, that Byron overstated his case. What’s beyond debate, however, is his judgment that The Searchers is one of the truly great American movies, an epic Western that expands and transcends the limitations of its genre by offering a darkly powerful counterpoint to the reassuring clichés of standard-issue horse operas. Even when viewed more than a half-century after its initial theatrical release, Ford’s masterwork seems fresh and vital -- and, yes, surprisingly contemporary -- as it undermines audience assumptions about what to expect from Westerns in general, and “a John Wayne movie” in particular.

Wayne gives one of his finest and most complex performances here as Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate soldier who returns to Texas in 1868 after a string of post-Civil War misadventures. (His favorite response to idle threats – “That’ll be the day!” – inspired the signature song of ’50s pop star Buddy Holly.) At first, Ethan is greeted with open arms by his brother, Aaron (Walter Coy), who lives with his family -- wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan), son Ben (Robert Lyndon), daughters Lucy (Pippa Scott) and Debbie (Lana Wood) -- on a remote homestead in an area where Indian raids are common. Gradually, however, long-simmering tensions between the two brothers bubble to the surface. More important, it becomes increasingly clear, to the audience if not to Aaron, that Martha secretly loves her errant brother-in-law.

Ethan's own feelings are indirectly revealed when, after he returns from a hunt for stolen cattle, he finds Aaron, Martha and Ben have been massacred -- and Lucy and Debbie have been abducted -- by marauding Comanches. Fearing a fate worse than death for his nieces, Ethan gives chase, accompanied by Marty (Jeffrey Hunter), a “half-breed” orphan raised to adulthood by Aaron, and Brad (Harry Carey Jr.), Lucy's boyfriend. Early on, Lucy is found slain, and Brad dies while trying to avenge her. But Ethan and Marty survive to continue their quest for several years -- for very different reasons.

Working from a sprawling yet engrossing script by Frank S. Nugent, Ford subtly hints that Ethan may in fact be Debbie’s true father. And even if he isn’t, he is implacably determined to find his last living blood relative, and to save her from becoming the “squaw” of the notorious Chief Scar (Henry Brandon). In most other Westerns, Ethan’s obsession would be presented uncritically as a noble endeavor. But in The Searchers, Ford infuses his story with a troubling moral ambiguity by repeatedly emphasizing that Ethan is a fanatical racist who rarely hides his contempt for the “half-breed” Marty, and who likely will kill Debbie (played as a teen-ager by Lana's big sister, Natalie Wood) if he discovers she has been living as Scar’s wife.

Which is why Marty continues along for the ride: The younger man knows that, if they ever do find Debbie, he may have to kill Ethan to save her.

The Searchers is not without flaws. The aggressively raucous “comic relief” scenes are even more intrusive here than in most other Ford movies, and the subplot involving Marty and Laurie (Vera Miles), the girl he leaves behind while riding with Ethan, is astonishingly silly. It doesn't help much that, whether he’s seriously emoting or simply pratfalling, Jeffrey Hunter is, to put it charitably, overly intense. And it helps even less that Ken Curtis (as Marty's romantic rival) appears to have walked in from a Beverly Hillbillies rerun.

But these minor flaws are overshadowed by everything that is so stunningly right in The Searchers, a film justly famed for the extraordinary beauty and emotional impact of Ford’s widescreen compositions. Of the movie’s many striking images, two are especially worthy of note. In the first, during the opening minutes, a Texas Ranger (played with robust authority by Ward Bond) stands in the dining area of a frontier cabin, drinking a cup of coffee. Quite inadvertently, he spots Martha in the next room as she lovingly embraces Ethan's jacket. He quickly averts his eyes -- and leaves no room for doubt that he will never reveal what he has seen.

Ethan, the movie's heart of darkness, figures prominently in another unforgettable image. Throughout The Searchers, Wayne gives a performance that is profoundly eloquent as both a concise summation and a skeptical critique of his entire career in Westerns. But he is never more affecting than in the closing moments, as Ethan is viewed through the doorway of another cabin, standing alone far away, not quite able to move, while Debbie is warmly welcomed back into civilization. The door closes. For Ethan, it will never open again.

Stagecoach (1939)

2010-10-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

The disreputable doctor who cracks wise and drinks heavily, but sobers up when the chips are down. The golden-haired prostitute who brightens incandescently when a naive cowpoke calls her “a lady.” The shifty-eyed gambler with a gun at his side and, presumably, an ace up his sleeve.

And, of course: The square-jawed, slow-talking gunfighter who’s willing to hang up his shootin’ irons — who’s even agreeable to mending his ways and settling down on a small farm with a good woman — but not before he settles some unfinished business with the varmints who terminated his loved ones.

Why? Because, as the gunfighter tersely notes, “There are some things a man can’t run away from.”

These and other familiar figures had already established themselves as archetypes by 1939, that magical movie year in which Stagecoach premiered. Even so, director John Ford’s must-see masterwork arguably is the first significant Western of the talking-pictures era, the paradigm that cast the mold, set the rules and firmly established the dramatis personae for all later movies of its kind. Indeed, it single-handedly revived the genre after a long period of box-office doldrums, elevating the Western to a new level of critical and popular acceptance.

And unlike, say, Raoul Walsh’s creaky and badly dated The Big Trail (1930) — John Wayne’s first starring vehicle, but a career-stalling flop in its time —Stagecoach remains a lot of fun to watch.

Ford’s film is a classically simple tale of strangers united in close quarters for a brief but intensely dramatic interlude. In this case, the characters are passengers aboard an Overland Stage Line coach during a dangerous trek through Indian Territory. The journey begins in the small town of Tonto (no, really) as two social outcasts — Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), a gleefully roguish alcoholic, and Dallas (Claire Trevor), a tearfully vulnerable prostitute — are forcibly exiled by the good ladies of The Law and Order League.

These pariahs board the stage to Lordsburg along with Mrs. Mallory (Louise Platt), a very proper and very pregnant Army wife; Hartfield (John Carradine), a courtly gambler who appoints himself as Mrs. Mallory’s protector; Peacock (Donald Meek), a mild-mannered whiskey salesman whose sample case is progressively depleted by Doc Boone; and, at the last minute, Gatewood (Berton Churchill), a blustering banker who has absconded with the contents of his office safe. Buck (Andy Devine) is the driver, and Sheriff Wilcox (George Bancroft) rides shotgun. Just outside of Tonto, the travelers are joined by The Ringo Kid, a boyishly handsome gunfighter who has broken out of prison to avenge his murdered father and brothers.

As Ringo — the role that saved him from the professional purgatory of B-movies — John Wayne makes one of the greatest entrances in movie history: While he spins a rifle like a six-gun, the camera rapidly tracks toward him, then frames him heroically, almost worshipfully, in a flattering close-up. Ringo is a friendly and forthcoming fellow, even when dealing with Sheriff Wilcox. But he leaves no room for doubt that he’s quite capable of minding his own bloody business at the end of the line.

If you’re familiar with Stagecoach only through its reputation, or if you’ve seen nothing more than cut-and-paste highlights from Ford’s classic, you may be surprised by the movie’s intimacy. To be sure, the majestic landscapes of Monument Valley — to which Ford returned for several subsequent Westerns — are grandly impressive. And the much-imitated Indian assault on the speeding stagecoach, replete with breathtaking stunt work choreographed by the legendary Yakima Canutt, is every bit as exciting as its reputation attests.

But what really makes Stagecoach so vital and memorable is the emotionally charged interaction among its vividly drawn characters. Much of the movie consists of expressionistically lit interior scenes. (Orson Welles reportedly viewed Stagecoach several times as part of his preparations for making Citizen Kane.) And in many of its most memorable moments, the archetypes reveal unexpected depth and complexity. Even Carradine’s ostentatious gambler turns out to be truly chivalrous in his fashion, redeeming himself gracefully under fire. And Wayne demonstrates that, long before his speech patterns and body language ossified into self-parody, he could give as soulfully affecting a performance as any hero who ever rode hard and shot straight in the most American of movie genres.

And by the way: Has any film actor ever had a better year than Stagecoach co-star Thomas Mitchell did in 1939? Consider: In addition to earning an Oscar for his work in Ford's classic, he also contributed memorable performances to Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings, Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and (playing opposite Charles Laughton's Quasimodo) William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And, not incidentally, he played the heroine's dad in a little movie called Gone With the Wind. Cowabunga.

The Public Enemy (1931)

2010-10-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

Despite what you’ve heard from four or five four generations of nightclub comics and impressionists, James Cagney always insisted that he never really said “You dirty rat!” in any of his movies. Not even in William Wellman’s The Public Enemy, where such verbal belligerence typified his portrayal of Tom Powers, a cocky and crafty bootlegger whose unbound id, hair-trigger temper and insatiable appetites have enduringly defined the character as a prototype for cinema’s most memorably monstrous gangsters.

On the other hand, Cagney most certainly did shove a grapefruit into the face of co-star Mae Clark during a key moment of Wellman’s 1931 classic. Decades after the movie’s first release, this celebrated scene remains shocking in the sheer casualness of its brutality. Cagney’s bantamweight thug tires of nonstop nagging by his increasingly annoying girlfriend during breakfast, so he simply grabs the first object at hand to silence her yapping. It’s not merely a spontaneous gesture, it’s a wielding of absolute power -- he does it because, dammit, he’s entitled to do it. You won’t find a scarier example of nonchalant sociopathy this side of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), wherein Joe Pesci’s demented Mafioso matter-of-factly shoots a troublesome waiter, then kills the poor guy for complaining.

Cagney didn’t merely become a star, he established himself as an icon in The Public Enemy. With showboating displays of mannerisms that would forever define his on-screen persona -- the frightfully ambiguous smile, the insolent curl of his lip, the staccato delivery of dialogue, the chronic hitching of his pants with clenched fists – he gives a performance at once theatrically stylized and persuasively naturalistic. And if that sounds contradictory, well, that’s also part of his magic. As actor Malcolm McDowell, a Cagney admirer, perceptively noted, “The point is that you believed him – and he was real, but not realistic. They’re different worlds altogether.”

Cagney was the right man in the right role at the right time. During Wellman’s must-see movie, his Tom Powers traverses an arc that begins with increasingly violent juvenile delinquency – he’s betrayed by a Fagin-like crime boss, Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell), who later pays dearly for his treachery -- and reaches an apogee with his spectacular success as a mid-level mobster. Along with Matt Doyle (Edward Woods), a childhood friend and long-time partner in crime, Tom makes his mark as sales representative for a bootlegger with unforgiving rules regarding product placement. Tom enjoys fast women (including a sexy young Jean Harlow) and big money, much to the mounting concern of his saintly mother (Beryl Mercer) and Mike (Donald Cook), his honest brother.

Much of the violence in The Public Enemy – including the shooting of the traitorous Putty Nose, and the vengeance killing of a horse that may have inspired similar animal cruelty in The Godfather (1972) – occurs off-camera. (Steven Soderbergh makes a specific visual allusion to the film’s violent climax – Tom goes into a rival gangster’s den and, while the camera remains discreetly outside, wreaks bloody havoc – in his own 1999 drama, The Limey.) But there’s never any attempt to soft-pedal the unadulterated joy Tom takes in dishing out rough stuff. When Mike dares to complain about Tom’s murderous business methods, Tom sneers at his sibling, a decorated WWI vet, and sarcastically snaps: “You didn’t get those medals for holding hands with the Germans!”

In the end, of course, crime can’t pay and the criminal must die: The final scene has Tom deposited as a bandage-wrapped corpse on his poor mother’s doorstep. But that grisly quietus does relatively little to dim the attractive glow of earlier scenes that tend to glamorize strutting outlawry and conspicuous consumption. Those elements were potently symbolic, and politically charged, in an era before the Production Code curtailed violence and other antisocial behavior in movies. Many Depression Era audiences, enduring unemployment and deprivation in the wake of the stock market crash, dreamed of revenge against a system that had failed them. As a result, gangsters of the sort essayed by Cagney, Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar, 1930), Paul Muni (Scarface, 1932) and Humphrey Bogart (The Petrified Forest, 1936) frequently were greeted as fantasy fulfillments.

Even now, Tom Powers’ nose-thumbing disregard for convention (to say nothing of his lack of impulse control) is echoed in the protagonists of contemporary crime stories – Casino, The Sopranos, etc. – and gangsta-rapper music videos. Robert Warshaw insightfully illuminated the phenomenon in The Gangster as Tragic Hero, his seminal 1949 essay, when he noted that a character such as Cagney’s natural-born killer “appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the ‘normal’ possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster is the ‘no’ to the great American ‘yes’ which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives… And the story of his career is a nightmare inversion of the values of ambition and opportunity.”

His Girl Friday (1940)

2010-10-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

It’s the kind of grand Old Hollywood story that, if not true, should be. Filmmaker Howard Hawks claimed on several occasions, to a variety of sympathetic interviewers, that he was entertaining dinner guests in his home during the late 1930s when someone steered the conversation toward the fine art of movie dialogue. Hawks flatly announced that the best dialogue he’d ever heard came from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and that the very best Hecht-MacArthur dialogue came from The Front Page, their exuberantly cynical 1928 stage play about roguish reporters covering an execution in a colorfully corrupt Chicago.

To prove his point, Hawks produced two copies of the original Front Page script. (Pretty convenient, his just happening to have those scripts on hand, but never mind.) He gave one copy to a young lady in attendance, and asked her to read the part of Hildy Johnson, the veteran reporter who vows to quit the wordsmith racket so he can marry into wealth and respectability. Hawks himself read the part of Walter Burns, the robustly unscrupulous editor who will use any means, fair or foul, to keep Johnson on the staff of his newspaper.

“And in the middle of it,” Hawks recalled, “I said, ‘My Lord, it’s better with a girl reading it than the way it was!’” Which led, according to Hawks, to his remaking The Front Page – previously filmed in 1931 by Lewis Milestone, with Adolph Menjou and Pat O’Brien in the leads -- as His Girl Friday.

Fact or fiction? As author Todd McCarthy notes in his admiring biography, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, it’s mighty strange that no dinner guest, including the unidentified woman who read Hildy, ever mentioned being present during this fateful evening in Hawks’ home. And it’s even stranger to imagine Hawks, aptly described by McCarthy as “the antithesis of the fast-talking, hard-driving verbal type,” zipping through the rapid-fire repartee penned by Hecht and MacArthur.

But so what? To paraphrase a line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – spoken, appropriately enough, by a newspaper editor – when the legend becomes accepted as fact, why print anything but the legend? The story may be apocryphal, but it exemplifies an anything-goes, seat-of-the-pants creative process that we’ve come to accept, even romanticize, as typical of Hollywood’s golden age.

In much the same way, His Girl Friday – arguably more than the Hecht-MacArthur original, and definitely more than any other film adaptation -- indelibly established the stereotype of reporters as rudely sarcastic iconoclasts who talk fast, crack wise and raise hell while they comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. When Hawks’ Hildy Johnson (a Hildegard rather than a Hildebrand) makes her grand entrance into the press office of the Chicago Criminal Courts Building, to join the deathwatch for a luckless bumbler who accidentally shot a cop, she rubs her fashionably padded shoulders with a vibrantly motley crew of ink-stained wretches. Despite her claims to the contrary, she looks and sounds like she’s precisely where she’s meant to be, because she can talk faster and crack wiser than anyone else in the room.

Rosalind Russell wasn’t Hawks’ first choice, or even his fifth, to play Hildy Johnson, but her image-defining performance as the sassy and brassy newspaperwoman is swell enough to suggest that no one could have done it better. (Whenever I screen His Girl Friday for college-level film courses, female students seem particularly impressed by Russell’s portrayal of a woman liberated way before women’s liberation was cool.) Her most attractive attribute: She is a spectacularly worthy opponent in verbal jousting with Cary Grant, perfectly cast as Walter Burns, her conniving ex-editor and, more important, ex-husband.

Months after divorcing Water, Hildy returns to the Morning Post newsroom, only to announce her engagement to Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), an affably bland insurance salesman. Bruce has no connection to the madcap world that Hildy wants to leave behind, a fact Hawks subtly underscores by having Walter wait outside a newsroom gate marked “No Admittance” while Hildy bids Walter good-bye.

But, of course, Hildy doesn’t fare well while trying to say farewell: Walter tricks her into doing what she really wants to do, which is remain a reporter who comes alive most fully when she’s on the prowl for a big story. And while Walter and Hildy may be, like Elyot and Amanda of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, unable to live happily either apart or together, there is no doubt that they are soul mates who speak the same language with the same warp-speed alacrity.

Such rhetorical virtuosity is a defining characteristic of screwball comedy, a genre that thrived throughout the 1930s and early ’40s. Films of this sort were an escape from the harsh realities of Depression Era life, offering carefree and attractive characters behaving with abandon and freedom in a world filled with colorful but (usually) harmless eccentrics and blustering but (usually) impotent authority figures.

Like many other screwball classics, Hawks’ must-see masterwork belongs to the sub-genre known as “Comedy of Re-Marriage,” being the story of divorced partners who simply must be reunited because they bring out the best in each other. Walter may be a sneak, and his motives are hardly selfless, but he genuinely admires – and values – Hildy’s professional abilities. Hildy has every reason to distrust Walter – except, of course, when he’s telling her that no one else would appreciate her, and encourage her, the way he does.

His Girl Friday ranks among the finest and funniest screwball comedies, largely because Hawks, with a little help from Hecht and MacArthur, gave his characters so much to say so quickly and memorably. Although chronically averse to theorizing or philosophizing about technique, he hinted at the key to his movie’s appeal with this pithy quip: “They’re moving pictures. Let’s make them move.”

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

2010-09-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

In an age when radio talk shows, all-news cable networks and seemingly infinite arrays of internet websites offer round-the-clock reports of thievery, adultery and brazen stupidity on the part of politicians, it may be well-nigh impossible to believe there ever was a time when Americans were less cynical, and more respectful, in their views of elected officials.

Indeed, as far back as 1939, when filmmaker Frank Capra unveiled Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, American voters already were accustomed to logrolling and pork-barreling as instinctive behavior of political animals. But the transition from healthy skepticism to deep-rooted distrust -- or profound disgust -- on the part of the electorate is a relatively recent phenomenon. Capra’s classic comedy about virtue triumphant (though just barely) over Washington corruption is throwback to the days when most people still wanted to believe that public servants really served the republic.

Jefferson Smith, the soft-spoken but steel-spined hero stirringly played by James Stewart, is a small-town do-gooder. He heads the local branch of a Boy Scouts-type organization, quotes Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln at exhaustive length and, evidently, thinks his best gal pal is his dear old mom.

(A random thought: Can you imagine the contortions that contemporary screenwriters would go through to immediately indicate that this bachelor scoutmaster isn’t really – well, you know, gay?)

In short, Jeff is such a starry-eyed naïf that he seems a perfect choice to serve as “honorary stooge” when one of his state’s U.S. Senators dies. Political boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), a robustly venal string-puller, voices a few doubts about appointing this “big-eyed patriot” to serve the remaining two months of the late legislator’s term. But the state’s other senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), a silver-haired paragon of faux virtue, insists that he’ll be able to keep the “simpleton” in line. Yeah, right.

Initially, Jeff appears every bit as green and gawky as his handlers hoped. As soon as he reaches Washington, D.C., he slips away on his own, to take a bus tour of the nation’s capital. (Cynics often point to this sequence – a shamelessly sentimental and spirit-pumping montage of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and similarly impressive icons – as representing the worst excesses of what detractors label as “Capra-corn.” In his defense, Capra claimed that when he first took the Washington tour, he felt the same rush of excitement – “I got a bad case of goose pimples!” – that inflames Jeff Smith.) Later, while Jeff is being tutored by his cynical secretary, Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), the dewy-eyed newcomer decides he should pay a visit to Mount Vernon, for inspiration, before his first day of duties in the Senate.

It doesn’t take long, however, before Jeff gets wise to the ways of Washington. Our hero is horrified to discover that Senator Paine – a long-time family friend who knew Jeff’s late father, a crusading newspaper editor – is part of a plot to procure federal funding for a dam on property purchased by Taylor and other scalawags. Worse, when he tries to expose the dirty dealing, Jeff is framed as a corrupt hypocrite by Senator Paine himself. But don’t worry: Jeff may have a few dark moments of doubt, but he ultimately rises to the occasion. In the movie’s most famous sequence, he defends himself – along with truth, justice and the American way – in a passionate filibuster that he sustains at great cost to his health and reputation. Gravely conscience-stricken, Senator Paine eventually admits his chicanery on the Senator floor, instantly vindicating Jeff.

As Woody Allen once said in an entirely different context: “If only life were like this!”

Viewed today by jaded audiences, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington might seem quaintly timid in its treatment of money-grubbing politicos, hard-drinking reporters and well-heeled power brokers. In 1939, however, many members of the political establishment loudly decried the movie as scurrilous libel. Washington reporters were enraged by Capra’s depiction of the Washington press corps as boozy and irresponsible. (Thomas Mitchell plays the booziest of the lot, and very nearly steals the picture.) The hostile response to a preview screening in Washington, D.C. remains the stuff of Hollywood legend. Joseph P. Kennedy, then U.S. ambassador to London, reportedly went so far as pressing Columbia not to release Mr. Smith in Europe, lest American prestige be undermined just as Adolf Hitler was making such a nuisance of himself.

The delicious irony is, Capra didn’t realize what a subversive piece of work he had concocted until long after the cameras stopped rolling. As he explained in his 1971 autobiography, The Name Above the Title, Capra intended Mr. Smith as a valentine to American democracy, a heartfelt tribute to a form of government that guaranteed a single, right-thinking individual had the opportunity to stand up and be counted. Propelled by the kind of foursquare, flag-waving patriotism that perhaps only an appreciative immigrant wouldn’t deem extreme, Capra – a Sicilian native who reached U.S. shores at the age of six – wanted his small-town hero to represent all that was noble, honest and idealistic about America and Americans.

(It’s worth noting that, unlike many other indie filmmakers – including some who profess to be deeply influenced by the late, great John Cassavetes – Cassavetes himself refused to sneer at the idealist who made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. “Frank Capra,” proclaimed Cassavetes, one of the founding fathers of American indie cinema, “is the greatest filmmaker that ever lived. Capra created a feeling of belief in a free country and in goodness in bad people… Idealism is not sentimental. It validates a hope for the future. Capra gave me hope, and in turn I wish to extend a sense of hope to my audiences.”)

Decades later, many Americans continue to view Jefferson Smith as the kind of elected official they’d like to have. In fact, politicians as diverse as Bill Clinton and the late Sonny Bono have cited Mr. Smith as a major influence on their decision to run for office. Trouble is, most Americans also recognize Senator Paine as the kind of elected official they usually have to settle for.

42nd Street (1933)

2010-09-27T12:40:00.000-07:00

Here they are, ladies and gents: Lads and lassies, sassy and brassy, singing and swaying as Broadway sensations of 1933 while they tap-tap-tap their way into your hearts.

There’s Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels), the delightful diva who juggles a sugar daddy (Guy Kibbee) and a hunky hoofer (George Brent) while celebrating her own superstardom. There’s Billy Lawler (Dick Powell), an all-American “juvenile” who’s catnip to ladies of all ages. There’s Ann Lowell (Ginger Rogers), a chorus girl with an eye for the boys and a naughty nickname – Anytime Annie – she’s bent over backwards to earn. There’s Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), a starry-eyed novice who’s ever-so-excited to be just another pretty face (and a pair of flashy gams) in the background of the big show.

And folks, we’re talking a really, really big show: The latest and greatest produced and directed by Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter), the living legend who’s fading fast, who’s determined to score once last triumph before he takes his final bow. Always the most demanding of taskmasters, Marsh is even more unforgivingly ferocious than usual as he hand-picks his cast, nitpicks his material – “Sure, I liked that number! I liked it 1905! What do you think we’re putting on, a revival?” – and rants and raves through rehearsals that push everyone, including Marsh, to egregious extremes.

Through sheer force of will, Marsh bends everyone and everything to his design. Even when fate tosses him a nasty curve – Dorothy breaks her ankle just before opening night – he barely slows his breakneck progress. Left without a suitable star, he simply plucks a replacement from the chorus: Peggy, the fresh-faced first-timer. Is she nervous? Sure. Is she game? You bet. But just to make sure she’s fully aware that it’s not just a show she is shouldering – after all, there is a Great Depression going on -- Marsh shoves her toward the spotlight with a last-minute pep talk:

“Miss Sawyer, you listen to me… and you listen hard! Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, $200,000, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend on you! It’s the lives of all these people who’ve worked with you! You’ve got to go on, and you’ve got to give and give and give! They’ve got to like you – got to! You understand? You can’t fall down, you can’t! Because your future’s in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you! All right now, I’m through! But you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours! And Sawyer – you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!”

Cowabunga!

Lloyd Bacon’s 42nd Street, the exuberantly campy classic in which chorus girls become overnight sensations and Broadway extravaganzas are literally matters of life or death, is widely viewed as the mother of all backstage musicals, as well as the lexicon containing every cliché of the genre. As such, it’s an easy target for cynics and satirists. But it’s quite capable of raising your spirit and touching your heart if you give it half a chance, because even the moldiest clichés can be surprisingly potent when you confront them in their original context. To put it another way: The characters here are so intensely sincere, even when they’re well aware of how silly they might seem, that it’s almost inconceivably cruel not to take them seriously.

To be sure, audiences of the 1930s were inclined to take 42nd Street very seriously indeed. As Martin Scorsese perceptively notes in his Personal Journey Through American Movies, the rise of the musical paralleled that of the gangster melodrama in early ’30s cinema. And just as dire economic conditions and widespread unemployment often figured into the motives of movie mobsters, Scorsese writes, “The harshness of the times, the Depression, colored this most escapist of film genres… In those times, if one showed any ambition, one either became a gangster or a showbiz performer – at least in the fantasy world of Warner Bros. Broadway offered a metaphor for a desperate, shattered country. Director or chorus girl, your life depended on the show’s success.”

All of which helps explain why, even during the leanest and meanest years of the Great Depression, movie attendance remained remarkably steady as anxious masses sought Hollywood products that either promised escape from hard realities of the day, or encouraged audiences by reinforcing a sense of solidarity in the face of adversity. To its considerable credit, 42nd Street did both.

Just as important – from a film historian’s view, at least -- 42nd Street did much to define the movie musical as an art form separate and distinct from the stage-bound variety, by introducing an aesthetic of dance conceived for the camera. Like him or loathe him, cheer him or jeer him, dance master Busby Berkeley envisioned a vigorously spectacular form of choreography involving beautifully leggy chorines, machine-like precision, intricate geometric design, surrealistic excess – and, what the hell, as much sexually charged imagery as he could slip past the Production Code bluenoses.

Film historian David Thomson may have said it best: “Berkeley was a lyricist of eroticism, the high-angle shot and the moving camera; he made it explicit that when the camera moves it has the thrust of the sexual act with it. It is only remarkable that some viewers smile on what they consider the ‘period charm’ of such libertinage.”

In the final third of 42nd Street – and even more so throughout Footlight Parade (1933), Dames (1934), Gold Diggers of 1935 and other films that employed him as choreographer and/or director – Berkeley devised elaborate musical sequences that could never be contained in a Broadway production. Nor could they ever appear as impressive on the Great White Way as they do in one of Berkeley’s trademark overhead shots. The grand and glorious irony of Berkeley’s career is that he brought to backstage musicals the type of spectacle that could never be replicated on stage. (No, not even in the popular Broadway musical adapted from the 1933 film.) By doing that, he earned a place of honor in the pantheon of those visionaries who helped establish the wondrous ways that movies move.

Of course, critics don’t always appreciate, or even understand, revolutionary innovation. Consider this snippy pan of 42nd Street, written by an uncredited (and, apparently, unqualified) movie critic for the March 18, 1933 edition of Newsweek: “Busby Berkeley, the dance director, has gone to a lot of ineffectual bother about his intricate formations, not having been told that masses of chorus girls mean something only in the flesh. His talent is wasted in the films.” Yeah, right.

City Lights (1931)

2010-09-07T15:39:00.000-07:00

There may be folks who can remain dry-eyed and hard-hearted during the final moments of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, but take care: Anyone that cynical shouldn’t be entirely trusted.

Chaplin’s silent masterworks, one-reelers and features alike, are continually rediscovered by new generations, and recognized as timeless classics by adoring audiences and fellow filmmakers. (“For me,” Francois Truffaut famously enthused, “they are the most beautiful films in the world. Chaplin means more to me than the idea of God.”) To be sure, Chaplin’s relatively few talking pictures -- especially Limelight (1952) and The Great Dictator (1940) -- also inspire admiration and affection. But his pre-talkie efforts are the wonderments that guarantee his immortality, that ensure his very name will forever serve as an adjective for any attempt, successful or otherwise, to mix pratfalling and heart-tugging in a crowd-pleasing comedy.

The Kid (1921) may be more aggressively sentimental, and The Gold Rush (1925) perhaps is more commonly acclaimed as his magnum opus, but City Lights (1931) is by far the most Chaplinesque of all Chaplin movies, being an absolutely magical commingling of graceful pantomime, knockabout tomfoolery, inspired silliness and – perhaps most important – profoundly affecting poignancy. It’s also, not incidentally, a project Chaplin insisted on shooting as a silent movie long after talking pictures had become the accepted norm.

City Lights begins, of course, with Chaplin cleverly introduced in his familiar role as The Little Tramp, the elegantly mustached gentleman whose shabby attire (derby hat, frock coat, baggy trousers, outsized shoes) is offset by his courtly manner and cane-twirling, hat-tipping panache. And it proceeds with the sort of seemingly improvised but intricately choreographed funny business that many comic actors still emulate. (Check out his classic bits in a raucous nightclub and a high-society party.) In the closing scenes, however, City Lights gradually builds to an epiphany of sweetly painful pathos, leading to a final, indelible image of a man smiling with hopeless longing at a woman whose love he fears he could never – not now, not in a million lifetimes – deserve.

Throughout much of City Lights, Chaplin maintains a lighter and mood, even as The Little Tramp – a.k.a. Charlie -- is repeatedly abused or embarrassed. (Chaplin customarily billed himself as Charles Chaplin for his writing and directorial credits, but always stuck with Charlie to identify himself as star of the show.) When a blind flower girl (Virginia Merrill) naively assumes he is a free-spending dandy, Charlie is so smitten that he resorts to drastic measures -- including, most hilariously, his participation in a boxing match -- to earn enough money to sustain the mistaken identity.

Periodically, Charlie enjoys an evening’s revelry with an alcoholic millionaire (Harry Myers) who drinks to steadily increasing excess in the wake of his wife’s departure. Whenever the millionaire sobers up, however, he never recognizes Charlie as his boon companion from the night before. His selective memory proves to be awfully inconvenient for Charlie: After giving the Little Tramp enough money for the flower girl to have an operation that will restore her eyesight, the millionaire forgets all about his generosity. Which, unfortunately, leads to Charlie’s arrest and imprisonment.

After his release, Charlie looks even more bedraggled and destitute than he does in the opening scenes. The good news is, the flower girl, who has opened a flower shop, can now see. The bad news is – well, she can now see him.

“She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her,” critic James Agee wrote in 1949. “And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies.”

The final image of Manhattan (1979), Woody Allen’s melancholy romantic comedy, is a loving homage to the heart-wrenching finale of City Lights. It’s to Allen’s considerable credit that his version is almost as affecting as Chaplin’s original, which Allen admits he carefully studied. “City Lights was funny and also tragic,” Allen told The New York Times in 2000. “Some think it’s sentimental, but to me, it’s an honest film about love.” For all his careful appraisal of Chaplin’s works, Allen says he still can’t fully deconstruct the magic of the master: “I don't believe Chaplin was aware of creating a new vocabulary for film comedy. He just happened to be that gifted, that superb. Very few have taken that extreme leap into a realm that is indefinable and unexplainable.”

The General (1927)

2010-09-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

An internationally acclaimed auteur follows the biggest hit of his career with a budget-busting action-comedy epic. The production values are prodigious – a single sight gag requires one of the most expensive single shots in movie history – and the death-defying stunt work is spectacular.

But the critical response is scathing. Variety bluntly blasts the production as “a flop.” Life magazine condemns the cringe-inducing mix of comedy and carnage. The New York Times huffily complains that the director “appears to have bitten off more than he can chew.” Negative buzz abounds, unfavorable word of mouth spreads. Despite the marquee allure of the above-the-title star, audiences stay away in droves.

Sound familiar? It could be the story of 1941, or Last Action Hero. But the embarrassing under-achievements of those box-office duds are fairly inconsequential when viewed in the big picture of Hollywood history. Buster Keaton’s The General, arguably the first action-comedy epic, merits special consideration as a far more significant “failure.”

Today, Keaton’s dauntingly ambitious and remarkably accomplished 1927 comedy is universally recognized as one of the enduring classics of the silent era. Indeed, many critics and academics insist The General is one of the greatest movies ever made in any period. Back in the 1920s, however, it was such a resounding flop that Keaton’s career was forever blighted by its long shadow.

To be sure, Keaton remained active -- most often as an actor, sometimes as a director or uncredited writer -- in features and shorts until his death in 1966. He appeared as a befuddled time-traveler in a memorable Twilight Zone segment, displayed remarkable dignity (and undiminished comic verve) in such teen-skewing trifles as Pajama Party (1964) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965), and gave a poignantly funny final performance in Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). But he never again enjoyed the artistic freedom and financial wherewithal he was granted when he made The General.

Even in his heyday, Keaton often found himself on the wrong end of unflattering comparisons to a more celebrated contemporary, Charlie Chaplin. Viewed in retrospect, however, the dissimilarities between the two comic greats are more pronounced. As critic Andrew Sarris astutely noted in The American Cinema, “The difference between Keaton and Chaplin is the difference between poise and poetry, between the aristocrat and the tramp, between adaptability and dislocation, between the function of things and the meaning of things...”

To put it another way: While Chaplin often risks everything, even his life, while soaring on flights of dream-stoked fancy, Keaton customarily remains more earthbound, doggedly ignoring the chaos around him while obsessively focused on purely practical matters. Chaplin romanticizes women as luminous mysteries to be worshipped; Keaton expects a woman to pull her weight even after he falls in love with her. (At one point in The General, his character is so exasperated by the clueless klutziness of his lady love that he very nearly strangles her before opting to kiss her instead.) Whereas Chaplin might be driven batty by his dehumanizing drudgery on a high-speed assembly line (Modern Times), Keaton is more determined to impose control over troublesome technology, likely through sheer force of will.

Consider one of the many unforgettable moments in The General, the Civil War saga of a Confederate engineer’s misadventures while trying to retrieve a wood-burning locomotive hijacked by Union spies. (The title refers to the locomotive, not a military officer.) As Johnnie Gray, the improbably and imperturbably heroic Southerner, Keaton is so busy chopping wood to keep his engine running while pursuing his stolen General, he remains totally oblivious as his train passes retreating Confederate forces, then an advancing Union army. His absurdly disproportionate attentiveness to detail is not unlike that of the bomber crewman in Dr. Strangelove who fastidiously corrects a log error while en route to the dawning of doomsday.

Throughout The General, Keaton lives up to his nickname as The Great Stone Face, making only the most minute adjustments to his expression to signal shifts between amusement (rare) and befuddlement (frequent), despair (he volunteers for the Confederate army, but is rejected because of his value as an engineer) and exultation (he proves his heroism to the Southern belle who once thought him a coward). Just as important, Keaton also illustrates the contradiction – the hilarious dichotomy between stillness of form and fluidity of movement – that is his hallmark as a comic artist.

After the enormous success of his Battling Butler (1926), a relatively slight farce about a faux boxer, Keaton co-wrote and co-directed The General (with Clyde Bruckman) as another star vehicle. Even so, the latter movie’s notoriously expensive sight gag (estimated cost: $42,000) is keyed to the flabbergasted response of a minor supporting character, a Union commander who watches helplessly while a train falls through a burning bridge and into a river far below. Keaton used a real bridge, a real river – and, yes, a real locomotive. Back in 1927, such excessive spectacle in a comedy struck many critics and audiences as bewildering, if not downright unseemly.

Viewers of the era were even more upset by the outrageously dark comedy of a scene in which Keaton fails to notice while his Confederate comrades are felled by a Union sniper. Just in the nick of time, our hero saves himself simply by waving his sword. The loosened blade flies off the handle, and plunges into the enemy marksman.

Mind you, we don’t see the moment of impalement, just a brief glimpse of the dead sniper. But that was too much for most folks in the 1920s. Critic Robert E. Sherwood complained in Life magazine: “Someone should have told Buster that it is difficult to derive laughter from the sight of men being killed in battle. Many of his gags at the end of (The General) are in such gruesomely bad taste that the sympathetic spectator is inclined to look the other way.” Time passes, tastes change: In 2000, when the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 funniest movies ever made, The General ranked higher – No. 18 – than any other silent comedy on the list.

Buster Keaton was far ahead of time, which is why he remains immortal.

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

2009-03-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

Raising Hell

If it is true that, as critic Andrew Sarris and other proponents of the “auteur theory” of filmmaking have postulated, a film’s director ultimately must be considered its true “author,” then it reasonable to hypothesize that the same film’s producer is that author’s editor – and, by extension, that someone in the gatekeeping position of Robert Evans during his 1966-74 tenure at Paramount is nothing less than the editor in chief.

Consider the case of Rosemary’s Baby, the second-highest grossing Paramount release of 1968 (according to box-office figures reported in the Jan. 8, 1969 edition of the trade paper Variety), and the widely acknowledged progenitor of an entire subgenre of novels and motion pictures dealing with children possessed and/or spawned by Satan.

Adapted by writer-director Roman Polanski from the 1967 novel of the same title by Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby is a subtly suspenseful drama of supernatural activity in modern-day Manhattan. In its time, it was enormously popular with audiences and extremely well-received by critics. The aforementioned Andrew Sarris, speaking for the majority of his colleagues, hailed the film as “an almost flawless entertainment”; Roger Ebert admired it as “a brooding, macabre film, filled with the sense of unthinkable danger”; and the estimable Pauline Kael embraced it as an unusually clever commingling of comedy and terror, the sacred and the profane:

Pregnant women sometimes look at their men as if to say, “What have you done to me?” Rosemary (Mia Farrow), the Omaha-born girl who’s now living in Manhattan, has reason to wonder, and this satirical gothic thriller… is told from her point of view. Rosemary’s actor-husband (John Cassavetes) conspires with a coven, drugs her, and mates her with Satan, in exchange for a Broadway hit. It’s genuinely funny, yet it’s also scary, especially for young women: it plays on their paranoid vulnerabilities. The queasy and the grisly are mixed with its entertaining hipness. (It’s probably more fun for women who are past their childbearing years.) Mia Farrow is enchanting in her fragility: she’s just about perfect for her role. And the darkly handsome Cassavetes is ideal as the narcissist who makes the deal for a cloven-hoofed infant.

Rosemary’s Baby initially was brought to the attention of Robert Evans by producer-director William Castle, who had purchased the rights to Ira Levin’s novel for $100,000 – with an additional $50,000 to be paid to Levin if the book became a best seller (which it did). Evans was impressed by the manuscript. But he was convinced that Castle, who intended to direct the film adaptation, was the wrong man for the material.

The director of such high-grossing, low-budget horror movies as Macabre (1958), The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill (both 1959), Castle had made his mark by dint of exuberant showmanship, not filmmaking artistry. His promotional stunts for his critically reviled B-movies were the stuff of instant Hollywood legend. (At various movie theaters throughout the United States, Castle arranged for a faux skeleton to be dangled over the heads of screaming moviegoers during a key scene in House on Haunted Hill.) But even after he landed a production deal with Paramount in the mid 1960s, and began to manufacture slightly pricier and more prestigious products, he never managed to completely escape his self-invented image as a shameless huckster – an image he audaciously referenced in the title of his autobiography, Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America (Putnam, 1976).

Evans played his trump card – i.e., Castle’s multiyear production deal with Paramount – to lure Castle out of the director’s chair, and into the highly remunerative but largely ceremonial position of producer for Rosemary’s Baby. (Various sources – most notably, the autobiographies of Robert Evans and Roman Polanski, and a documentary featuring commentary by both men and production designer Richard Sylbert -- indicate that all final decisions regarding budget, casting and locations were made by Evans, not Castle.) With that out of the way, the Paramount chief set his sights on Roman Polanski, a Polish-born director who had gained international acclaim for what Evans described as “three really offbeat thrillers”: Knife in the Water (1962), Polanski’s debut feature, a suspenseful drama fueled by the tensions that ensue when a couple invites a handsome hitchhiker along for a sailing weekend; Repulsion (1965), a psychological thriller about a troubled young woman (played by Catherine Deneuve) who, not unlike the heroine of Rosemary’s Baby, is driven to extremes by mounting paranoia; and Cul-de-Sac (1966), a bleakly funny black comedy about a May-December couple (Donald Pleasence, Francoise Dorleac) whose remote home is invaded by a fugitive gangster (Lionel Stander).

Undeterred by the difficulties Polanski was experiencing at the time with his first Hollywood-produced film – Dance of the Vampires (1967), which was taken out of Polanski’s hands, drastically re-edited, and fleetingly released in the United States under the title The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck – Evans actively recruited the Polish filmmaker take the job of delivering Rosemary’s Baby to moviegoers.

Such bold willingness to gamble on idiosyncratic talents was a defining feature of the New Hollywood era in general, and Robert Evans' Paramount regime in particular. As Peter Bart, Evan’s second-in-command, recalls, “Everybody was looking for an answer. One answer seemed to be, if you found a brilliant young director with a vision, go with him. It was [Stanley] Kubrick, more than anybody, that had an impact on us.”

Knowing that Polanski was an avid ski buff, Evans invited Polanski to the United States to “take a meeting” to discuss a promising project that eventually would be known as Downhill Racer. (The script was filmed in 1969 by director Michael Ritchie with one of Polanski’s original choices for the male lead in Rosemary’s Baby – Robert Redford.) At the meeting, the Paramount chief also suggested that Polanski take home the galley proofs for a new novel, Rosemary’s Baby, to gauge the book’s potential for film adaptation. Polanski initially was unimpressed – the first few chapters struck him as “a soap opera” – but he pressed on. By the time he reached the final page, he was ready to sign on.

The actual filming of Rosemary’s Baby proved to be quite stressful for both Polanski, an artist whose penchant for perfectionism caused production delays, and Evans, who repeatedly had to defend Polanski whenever chairman Charles Bluhdorn and other board members at Gulf + Western (the New York-based conglomerate that owned Paramount at the time) complained about cost and schedule over-runs. Evans recalls:

By the end of the first week’s shooting in New York, Roman was a week behind schedule. His dailies were brilliant, but everyone from Bluhdorn to Bill Castle wanted me to throw him off the picture…

Roman’s dailies touched an ominous sense of fright – one I’d never seen on film before. At the same time, Bill Castle was pressing the right buttons getting the New York brass unnerved over my Polish discovery. “Fire the Polack” was the word from New York. I flew to New York and confronted the accusers. “If he goes, I go.” And I would have. You can’t make a deal unless you’re prepared to blow it. For a moment, I thought I’d have to pay my own plane fare back. Not with a smile, they acquiesced.

That night, I grabbed Roman aside. “Pick up the pace, will ya, or we’ll both end up in Warsaw.”

The casting of Mia Farrow in the lead role also caused problems. At first, Polanski was eager to hire Tuesday Weld; Evans insisted on Farrow, then a popular actress because of her role on the TV soap opera Peyton Place. Much to the relief of all parties involved, Polanski quickly recognized Farrow’s talent, and agreed to use her without even asking for a screen test. Indeed, once production began, Polanski recalls, he and Farrow “enjoyed a marvelous rapport.”

Three-quarters of the way through filming, however, superstar entertainer Frank Sinatra, Farrow’s husband at the time, pulled a power play that very nearly sunk the entire project. Sinatra was adamant that his wife complete work on Rosemary’s Baby by Thanksgiving, so she would be able co-star in his next film – ironically, a film adaptation of The Detective, the novel that had established Robert Evans as a producer in the first place. When told that Polanski would not wrap his picture until after Christmas, Sinatra demanded that Farrow simply walk off the set.

Farrow might have done that, Evans claims, had he not prepared for her private viewing an hour-long rough cut of Rosemary’s Baby footage. After the screening, Evans sealed the deal by telling her – inaccurately, as it turned out – that she was a shoo-in for an Academy Award nomination. Farrow decided to defy Sinatra. Sinatra responded by having his lawyer serve her with divorce papers – on the set of Rosemary’s Baby. Farrow was upset by this real-life drama – but never missed a day of shooting until the film was completed.

Catching Hell

Completed at a cost of $2.3 million, Rosemary’s Baby earned $30 million worldwide. Its box-office performance was all the more impressive in light of the movie’s most significant negative review – a “Condemned” rating by the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (NCOMP), the watchdog organization that had been founded by Roman Catholic bishops in 1933 as the Catholic Legion of Decency, and was known from 1934 to 1966 as the National Legion of Decency.

By any name, the organization had held immeasurable influence over the content of motion pictures produced and/or distributed in the United States for over three decades prior to the 1968 release of Rosemary’s Baby. From the early 1930s onward, Hollywood moguls appreciated – and feared – the power that Catholic clergy might wield if moved to rally the faithful against individual films, or the film industry as a whole. Will Hays -- the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), later known as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) -- went so as to publicly acknowledge the Legion’s role in the establishment of the Production Code of America (a.k.a. “The Hays Code” or “The Hays Office”), the “self-regulatory body” body charged with maintaining moral standards in movies made by studios that were signatories to the code. (Such a code, industry leaders dearly hoped, would prevent, or at least diminish, censorious regulations by federal, state or local government entities.) By 1935, Garth Jowett writes in his book Film: The Democratic Art:

[T]he motion picture industry was essentially under the control of a Catholic hegemony… Protestants could debate control, and social scientists could measure, but only organized power and authoritative morality could achieve effective control. The result was not the smooth integration into American society which the industry and its supporters had hoped for, but instead it placed a superficial Catholic veneer on the medium which remained in effect until after the end of the Second World War.

It is arguable that the first significant cracks in that “Catholic veneer” were caused by NCOMP’s Condemned (or “C”) rating of Rosemary’s Baby. (Other NCOMP ratings: A-I [Suitable for All Audiences], A-II [Suitable for Adults and Adolescents], A-III [Suitable for Adults], A-IV [Suitable for Adults with Reservations] and B [Morally Objectionable in Part for All].)

Within days of the official announcement of it condemnation of Rosemary's Baby, Rev. Patrick J. Sullivan Jr., executive secretary and director of NCOMP, insisted that while his organization was opposed to censorship, it would continue to brand offensive films with the dreaded “C”: “We find it is still a force, particularly when the film producer has his mind on the TV [sales],” he was quoted in an article that appeared in the June 19, 1968 issue of the show business trade paper Variety. Rev. Sullivan also claimed that, even though his organization never placed direct pressure on exhibitors, the public continued to place great stock in NCOMP ratings: “[T]he fact that theaters have been able to show any film they wish without any static from our office leads [exhibitors] to believe the public is accepting this fare. This just is not so. We get hundreds and hundreds of complaints each month concerning violence and sex in films.”

In the same issue of Variety, however, staff writer Stuart Byron noted that NCOMP risked overstepping its bounds and losing its credibility, in the eyes of both film industry leaders and the general public, by condemning Rosemary’s Baby not just because of brief female nudity or impolite language [1], but primarily because of what NCOMP perceived as the film’s “sacrilegious” elements. Byron quoted the official wording of the NCOMP announcement: “Because of several scenes of nudity, this contemporary horror story about devil worship would qualify for a condemned rating. Much more serious, however, is the perverted use which the film makes of fundamental Christian beliefs, especially in the events surrounding the birth of Christ, and its mockery of religious persons and practices. The very technical excellence of the film serves to intensity its defamatory nature.”

Thus [Byron wrote] the issue looms clearcut to showmen: a film with obvious mass appeal vs. the Catholic office. No other recent [movie] receiving a “C” rating really has presented this issue so starkly, it is argued. Among the big Hollywood films condemned were such as Kiss Me, Stupid, Hurry Sundown [2] and Reflections in a Golden Eye, [films] never considered to have that much commercial potential and all of which ended up breaking even at best. As for such specialized fare as Blow-Up, The Pawnbroker and the current The Fox, though they were or are spectacular successes, they scored largely by appealing to the biggest possible extension of the art market. Against all these, Rosemary’s Baby is clearly a film for general audiences and will succeed or fall on a mass base.

That Rosemary’s Baby did indeed succeed on a mass basis was yet another sign that a “New Hollywood” era had arrived, an era that dawned largely because the general public appeared willing to accept edgier, envelope-pushing fare. And because there is more than one way for a studio production chief to serve as an agent of change for the diffusion of innovations.

[1] As Variety film critic A.D. Murphy (a.k.a. “Murf”) disapprovingly noted in his May 29, 1968 review, Rosemary Baby “probably is the first U.S.-made, major studio film to utilize a four-letter English-language vulgarism of debatable justification,” possibly limiting its box-office potential, however slightly, because of “individuals who may be alienated by that gratuitous crudity.” It’s worth noting that producer William Castle was not at all ashamed when he referred to this “gratuitous crudity” thusly: “I was the first one that brought shit to the public… I’m talking about the word, not the film.”

[2] A 1967 Paramount release, directed by Otto Preminger, infamous for a suggestive scene involving Michael Caine, Jane Fonda and a saxophone.

Harold and Maude (1971)

2009-02-26T20:05:00.000-08:00

The Mavericks of North Canon Drive

In 1970, at a time when across-the-board cost-cutting was a primary mandate, if not an obsession, for Stanley Jaffe, chief operating officer of Paramount, the decision was made to move the studio’s production staff, headed by Jaffe, Robert Evans and Peter Bart, from the Paramount lot to a modest four-story building at 202 North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills – not coincidentally, just a few doors down from the movie industry’s newest power restaurant, and one of Evans’ favorite eateries, The Bistro. “The entire executive entourage,” Bart recalls, “was reduced to six people. Stars were notified there would be no more perks. When you arrive at the airport, don’t even expect a limo.”

And yet, as Paramount historian Bernard F. Dick notes, this downsizing proved to be a blessing in disguise:

The move was a boon for Bart and Evans; less bureaucracy resulted in greater creativity, for it was during those five years on Canon Drive that some of the greatest films of the post-studio era were made – e.g., The Godfather (1972), Paper Moon (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974), Serpico (1974), The Conversation (1974), Chinatown (1974), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and Nashville (1975), all of which were Paramount releases .

The decision-making process was extraordinary streamlined, and the gatekeepers were empowered to make bold, even eccentric, artistic choices (influenced, of course, by financial considerations) during the heyday of the New Hollywood era. To better understand the corporate mindset that prevailed at this time, it is instructive to consider the standard operational procedure of Arthur Krim, chairman of United Artists, another studio that was home to many daring films of the 1960s and ‘70s. Prior to green-lighting a project, Krim often would invite a filmmaker to a Sunday brunch of lox and cream cheese. "He'd look into your eyes," said screenwriter Marshall Brickman. “And if you didn't look that crazy and [the film] didn't seem that expensive, he'd say, 'Go make your movie, invite me to the opening'”

“The thing to remember,” Bart says, “is that, during the period, the studios were relatively small. Sort of fragile, under-capitalized companies that weren’t all owned by multinationals. If you liked a project, and that was generally because the filmmaker had a passion for making it, you could get it made right away. You didn’t need to go through bureaucracy. You didn’t need to go through marketing committees or get advice from the ad department and the distribution department and all that.”

In a June 1996 essay for GQ magazine, Bart described, only half-jokingly, how he managed to slip Harold and Maude, one of the most idiosyncratic of all New Hollywood movies, past a few skeptics at a studio conference. “In that era,” he wrote, “studio meetings were considerably less formal than they are today, and they were attended by a mere handful of functionaries, compared with the fifty or so who clamor to be heard at studios” in contemporary Hollywood.

As I recall [Bart wrote], the meeting went something like this:

BART: I believe we should make this movie. It’s… different, but I believe in it.

EXECUTIVE A: Different? What’s the story line?

BART: It’s what you might call a love story, only it involves an 80-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy.

EXECUTIVE B (wincing): I’ll say it’s different! And the cast?

BART: No big stars. A young director – he’s done one picture. There’s music tied in, too – a rock star, or at least I think he will become a star off this picture.

EXECUTIVE C (mopping his brow): So far I’m carried away. At least tell me that the old lady and the kid don’t –

BART: Well, actually, there’s a scene in which the woman and the boy… I mean, the audience won’t see anything graphic… Besides, the boy is gay and –

EXECUTIVE D: Look, can we move on? I mean, we’ve got three pictures shooting that are way over budget and –

BART: Look, this project will cost $3 million tops. There’s comedy, there’s empathy, and no downside risk.

EXECUTIVE A: Tell me, at least, that a really top writer wrote the script.

BART: Actually, it was written by a kid who cleans a neighbor’s pool. He left the script on a pool chair and –

EXECUTIVE B (exasperation setting in): OK, OK. Three million bucks. We’ll make it, providing we don’t have to talk about it anymore and I don’t have to see the dailies.

BART: Seems fair to me.

EXECUTIVE D: Now, moving on to these other pictures…

(While there are strong indications in the film that Harold is asexual, and possibly a virgin before having sexual congress with his older partner, Bart’s categorizing the character as “gay” seems a bit of a stretch. This may be dismissed as Bart’s attempt to either shock the Paramount executives, or amuse his GQ readers through exaggeration. Also: In the movie, Harold is identified as 20, not 17. )

For all its tongue-in-cheekiness, Bart’s anecdote is not terribly far removed from reality. Harold and Maude is indeed the story of a cross-generational relationship between polar opposites: Harold (played in the 1971 movie by Bud Cort), a well-to-do but deeply troubled young man who repeatedly stages fake suicides to shock his oppressively proper mother, gets a shot of spiritual rejuvenation through his friendship – and, fleetingly, romance – with Maude (played by Ruth Gordon, who earned an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in Rosemary’s Baby), a feisty near-octogenarian who delights in stealing cars, planting trees, cracking wise and generally promoting the philosophy of living every day to the fullest. In short, a neurasthenic young man in love with death is fatefully affected by a hyperkinetic old woman in love with life.

(Her love for life, the movie suggests, is so strong because of her familiarity with death: A very quick shot of a number tattooed on Maude’s arm identifies her as a Holocaust survivor.)

Harold and Maude really was only the second film directed by Hal Ashby, a former protégé of director Norman Jewison who had earned an Academy Award as Best Editor for his work on Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967). Ashby’s first directorial effort, a racially-charged comedy-drama titled The Landlord, about a wealthy young white man whose consciousness is raised while he interacts with the African-American occupants of an inner-city tenement he purchases on impulse, had not yet been released when Bart made his pitch. Pop singer-composer Cat Stevens wrote the movie’s musical score, which included several songs from his popular 1970 “Tea for the Tillerman” album.

And Colin Higgins, who wrote the script, was a 28-year-old UCLA graduate student who originally envisioned the black comedy as a 20-minute short that would be the basis for his master’s thesis. He was short on funds at the time and, in return for lodging at the home of Hollywood producer Eddie Lewis, he cleaned the pool and swept the tennis court on the producer’s estate.

Higgins showed a feature-length version of the screenplay to Mildred Lewis, the producer’s wife, who recommended it to Howard Jaffe, Stanley Jaffe’s brother, who in turn passed it on to Bart -- who immediately warmed to the scenario, thinking it would be an apt project for a promising new director named Hal Ashby.

But before he could get the movie made, Bart had to get the green light from Robert Evans. It wasn’t easy: When his right-hand man described the project to him, Evans began having second thoughts about Bart. Only when he heard of the script’s Stanley Jaffe connection did he agree to read it. And even after he read it, and found that he liked it, he suspected that the combination of “an unknown director, a pool boy writer, [and] two-impossible-to-cast parts” would ensure a box-office disaster that, during that pre-Love Story period, would be enough to get him, and Bart, fired.

Twenty-six years later, Evans recalled the exchange he had with Bart after he expressed his misgivings about the project:

Bart laughed. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll blame it on Ashby, say he went crazy.”

I looked at Bart. “Is Ashby crazy? He must be, wanting to take this on. Peter, I gotta ask you something. How come a conservative guy like you has more weird ideas than Timothy Leary?”

He thought for a moment, took off his glasses, eyed me. “Good cover, huh?”

Evans opted to trust his associate’s judgment, and green-lit the picture. “That’s called putting your ass on the line,” Evans recalls, “and very few people know how to put their ass on the line. But we didn’t care.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

On July 2, 2007, Harold and Maude received its long-delayed official premiere in the Czech Republic, at the 42nd annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. At the end of the screening, the audience gave the movie five minutes of sustained applause, bringing tears to the eyes of the film’s lead actor, Bud Cort, who was in attendance – and inspiring bittersweet recollections from another festival guest, Peter Bart.

The movie was shown as part of a special sidebar showcase devoted to films made during the New Hollywood period, many of which were virtually unknown in the Czech Republic due to Cold War era censorship. During a post-screening question-and-answer session, Bart joked that, along with the collapse of the studio system, the “revolutionary” New Hollywood era was accompanied by rampant drug use: “[B]etter cinema resulted from a substantial intake of very good pot.” On a more serious note, however, he added: “[I]n the end, so many, like Hal, were defeated by drugs.”

Indeed, as Peter Biskind repeatedly notes in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, drug and alcohol abuse impeded, interrupted and, in some cases, prematurely ended the careers of several major actors and filmmakers who came to prominence during the New Hollywood era. Directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper and Paul Schrader admitted to using cocaine extensively -- sometimes to stoke creativity, but mostly to party hearty at a heady time when old rules, legal restrictions and common-sense self-restraint were widely viewed as obsolete.

Among his New Hollywood contemporaries, Hal Ashby sustained one of the era’s most remarkable streaks of creative and commercial success. From 1981 onward, however, he spiraled into a personal and professional decline from which he never recovered. The poor quality of his films during this period – including The Slugger’s Wife (1985), a “dull and disjointed” (according to critic Leonard Maltin) comedy based on a Neil Simon screenplay – have been widely attributed, even by admirers, to Ashby’s increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol. Because of his unreliable behavior, films often were taken away from him during post-production and turned over to others for final editing. Long before his death from liver and colon cancer at age 59 in 1988, he was considered virtually unemployable.

As early as 1967 -- when In the Heat of the Night, the movie that would earn him his only Oscar, first hit theaters -- Ashby already had developed the image of the “quintessential flower child” (even though he was 38 at the time) and ever-mellow fellow that would define him to the end of his days. Charles Mulvehill, a Mirisch Corporation executive who resigned to serve as co-producer on Harold and Maude, recalled in Peter Biskind’s book that, when he and Ashby went to a meeting at Paramount to go over the budget line by line, they both were so stoned that they could barely read the numbers – but still managed to get the “suits” to approve $1.2 million for the movie.

Later, during the third week of filming in and around San Francisco, Peter Bart paid an unannounced visit to the set, a stately mansion in nearby Burlingame. The dailies looked great, Bart told the filmmaker. But the pace of production was unacceptably slow. The reason? Bart suspected excessive toking by cast and crew – and director – throughout every day of shooting. “Look around you, Hal,” he told Ashby, indicating the tell-tale haze wafting through the mansion. “You could smoke a ham in here.” Again, Bart rendered his recollection as a reconstructed dialogue:

ASHBY: (a sheepish grin) It’s a mellow company.

BART: I like mellow. I’d like faster mellow. No one lights up till after work – that could help.

ASHBY: Maybe not until after lunch…

I took out a packet of one-way airline tickets from San Francisco to Los Angeles and handed them to Ashby.

BART: A suggestion, Hal. If any technician lights up on the set, just hand him his ticket back to L.A. No scenes, nothing…

ASHBY: (a thoughtful nod) I guess we’ve been slowing down a little lately.

BART: But stay mellow, Hal.

ASHBY: Very mellow.

After that, according to Bart, “the pace of the shooting started picking up markedly. And the film kept getting better.” So much better, in fact, that Mulvehill figured he and Ashby were bound for glory: “We felt it was going to be the best film of the year, it was gonna knock ’em dead.” Bart and Robert Evans shared their enthusiasm, so Harold and Maude was slated to open during the Christmas 1971 season, just in time for Oscar consideration.

Unfortunately, when it did open, the movie wasn’t considered very highly.

Rise and Fall and Rise

A.D. Murphy of Variety took the first shot: “Harold and Maude has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage.” Vincent Canby of The New York Times chimed in: Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon “are so aggressive, so creepy and off-putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life-affirming pretensions.” “And so what we get,” wrote Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, “is a movie of attitudes. Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life’s hardly worth the extra bother. The visual style makes everyone look fresh from the Wax Museum, and all the movie lacks is a lot of day-old gardenias and lilies and roses in the lobby, filling the place with a cloying sweet smell.”

The early box-office reports were even worse than the reviews. Mulvehill recalls:

You couldn’t drag people in. The idea of a twenty-year-old boy [sic] with an eighty-year-old woman just made people want to vomit. If you asked people what it was about, ultimately it became a boy who was fucking his grandmother. We were devastated, couldn’t believe it, and the scripts and phone calls that had been coming in just stopped. It was as though somebody had taken an ax to the phone lines. It was really a rude awakening. It was a big, big shock to Hal.

Only gradually did Harold and Maude begin to connect with the college-age audiences that would help turn the dark comedy into a pop-culture phenomenon. The movie settled in for improbably long runs in such cities as Detroit, Montreal and, most remarkably, Minneapolis, where residents took the drastic step of picketing the Westgate Theater, urging management to replace the picture after an astonishing three-year run. Eventually, Harold and Maude became a staple of repertory theaters around the world, and continued to appear in heavy rotation on U.S. screens – often on a double bill with another cult favorite, Philippe de Broca’s King of Hearts (1966) – well into the 1980s.

And while Academy voters may have totally ignored the film, even in the Best Song and Original Score categories, it received Golden Globe nominations for Cort and Gordon. Two years later, Cort won a Crystal Star, the French equivalent of an Oscar, in Paris, where the movie enjoyed a long and successful run, and ultimately inspired a stage adaptation that toured Japan, Turkey, Iceland and Brazil.

Years later, Colin Higgins suggested a reason for the film’s enduring popularity: “We’re all Harold, and we all want to be Maude. We’re all repressed and trying to be free, to be ourselves, to be vitally interested in living, to be everything we want.” It’s a message that had an especially compelling relevance to the “youth market” of 1971 as the then-ongoing Vietnam War (which is subtly referenced at several points in the film) continued to dominate the news and polarize the populace.

Even as a cause célèbre, Harold and Maude took several years – by at least one estimate, more than a decade – to actually turn a profit for Paramount. But Robert Evans never held that against the film that his second-in-command had championed, and he himself had approved as Paramount’s gatekeeper. “It was an impossible dream,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The dream became the longest-playing cult picture in cinema history.”

The story of Harold and Maude – the movie and its mythos, its makers and its making – can be read as emblematic of the New Hollywood era, incorporating both the best intentions and the worst impulses, the most free-spirited risk-taking and the most wrong-headed self-indulgence, that have come to define the American New Wave.

It is also a story, Peter Bart insists, that underscores some brutal facts of life that must be faced by those who want to make movies, and those who want to decide which movies get made, in 21st-century Hollywood: Harold and Maude “could never happen in today’s studio system. For one thing, a screenplay written by a pool cleaner would never work its way up the myriad layers of studio bureaucracy. The subject matter would be deemed unacceptable, the story line could never provide the basis for a theme-park ride or a tie-in with McDonald’s, prospects in TV would be dim, et cetera.”

A sad commentary, some might say, on the New New Hollywood.