Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

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)

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 in 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)

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 (1926)

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)

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)

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.