Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Bernard Herrmann Part I
”As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling.”
Bernard Herrmann in Bernard Herrmann: Hollywood’s Music-Dramatist by Edward Johnson
By Edward Copeland
Our centennial tributes tend to be of actor, actresses, directors and writers. We were honored when lyricist Bill Russell wrote a tribute to composer Frank Loesser, but he was a songwriter, providing both music and lyrics, who penned many memorable songs for stage and screen. We've never attempted to salute a composer known for his instrumental scores, particularly ones he wrote for movies, but Bernard Herrmann born 100 years ago today (exactly one year younger than Loesser), didn't like to be pigeonholed as a film composer since his musical work spanned opera, symphonies, concerts, radio and television in addition to some of the most memorable film scores of all time. That's why instead of just starting this post with a photo of the man and some words, I figured it's more fitting to use clips or links to clips to demonstrate his works such as his score that accompanied the Saul Bass title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, an example of one of his very best. Movie titles and still photographs don't do Bernard Herrmann justice, that's why I'm going to write less than usual in this tribute and let his music do the talking. However, the man was so prolific, I've had to divide the post in half so it doesn't grow so long anyway that it knocks other posts off the front page. While there will be some biography, mainly it will be about his music and I'm going to try to be chronological and, in a couple of occasions, show his influence. We even have a clip of the master musician discussing his craft relating to his scoring to a particular film. If you are reading this at work, I hope you have headphones.
His father encouraged his interest in music and he took up the violin, winning a $100 prize for one of his own compositions at the age of 13. Herrmann's interest in composition became more serious sometime around 1927 while he attended DeWitt Clinton High School and studied with Gustav Heine. His first notable work is considered to be a tone poem called "The Forest" he wrote in January 1929. He enrolled at New York University (while still in high school) and studied composition with Philip James and conducting with Albert Stoessel. Stoessel later headed the opera and orchestra at Juilliard and Herrmann landed a fellowship there in 1930 where he studied conducting and composition with Bernard Wagenaar. He officially finished high school in 1931 around the time he formed his own orchestra, The New York Chamber Orchestra. This was before he was 20. He left Juilliard in 1932 but without a degree. That fall, he attended lectures in advanced composition and orchestration at NYU by Percy Grainger. Herrmann also worked as a music editor and arranger at the Harms music publishing company around this period. That same fall, some dancers he knew from Juilliard asked him to arrange ballet music for a musical revue called +New Americana, which inadvertently led to his professional composing, conducting, and Broadway debuts when he went on to direct the orchestra during his arrangement of The Shakers and his own piece, "Amour à la Militaire," when it opened Oct. 5, 1932. It ran 77 performances.*
By 1934, he was a staff conductor with CBS radio. He seriously began his prolific composing work during this period, writing many scores to accompany CBS radio programs including "The City of Brass" which accompanied David Ross' narration of one of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights. In 1935, he composed the orchestral piece the Currier and Ives Suite. It was described as a short, five-movement piece on the Film Score website which has been running a series all year on Herrmann's centennial. The site notes that its composition occurred while he was employed by CBS because one of the pages of the composition was on CBS paper. Other than that, it says the origin of the piece is largely a mystery. There is a YouTube clip set against classic Currier and Ives drawings that has the orchestral piece.
Herrmann was named chief conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra in 1943 (a title he held until the orchestra disbanded in 1951 as TV began to displace radio), where it was said he introduced American audiences to more new musical works than any conductor in history. He particularly championed the American composer Charles Ives. Even before getting that post, Herrmann's output beyond the network and for mediums other than radio or orchestra bloomed. During the 1937-38 period, Herrmann got his feet wet for the first time in composing opera with a 45-minute cantata of Moby Dick. It didn't receive a world premiere until 1940 with The New York Philharmonic under the direction of Sir John Barbirolli. The cantata had never received a live performance in the United States since until April of this year when John Kendall Bailey conducted a 40-voice men's chorus and four soloists to perform it with the American Philharmonic-Sonoma County. Below are excerpts from the score, though it doesn't indicate from what recording it is taken and though it includes stills from John Huston's film of Moby Dick, note that Herrmann did not score that film.
While still just a staff conductor at CBS, the musical prodigy Herrmann would meet another young wunderkind making waves in New York named Orson Welles. He composed and arranged scores for Welles' Mercury Theater broadcasts, including the infamous 1938 War of the Worlds . While working at CBS, Welles lured Herrmann to Hollywood with him and when Welles made his astounding debut as the actor, writer and director of Citizen Kane in 1941, Herrmann had an equally impressive first year as a film composer. Not only did he make an impressive first showing with Citizen Kane and Welles' 1942 followup The Magnificent Ambersons, in between he composed the score for director William Dieterle's 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster aka All That Money Can Buy. In 1941, both the scores for Kane and Daniel Webster earned Herrmann Oscar nominations. His Daniel Webster score won (and there were 20 nominees). Though some of his greatest work still was to come, many for Hitchcock. He would receive another nomination in 1946 for director John Cromwell's Anna and the King of Siam but would not receive another nomination until he received two posthumous nominations in 1976. As is unfortunately the case with many YouTube clips, the embedding has been disabled, click here and listen to his lovely piece as the reporter reads Thatcher's diary leading into the flashback to Kane's childhood. Also, two pieces from Ambersons: Herrmann's subtle score running beneath Welles' narration of George's comeuppance and a much bouncier, holiday-theme Herrmann piece accompanying the snowride scene. I couldn't find a sample for The Devil and Daniel Webster/All That Money Can Buy.
In 1943, Herrmann composed the score for Jane Eyre directed by Robert Stevenson but involving many Mercury Theater players including Welles starring as Rochester, Agnes Moorehead as Mrs. Reed and John Houseman co-writing the script. Joan Fontaine starred in the title role. This is Herrmann's main title theme. He didn't score another film for two years when he did director John Brahm's 1945 psychological thriller Hangover Square, which I've never seen but certainly sounds interesting. It stars Laird Cregar as a composer suffering lapses in his memory who thinks he may have killed someone and seeks help from his doctor (George Sanders). Even though the composer is engaged, he somehow finds himself involved with a music hall dancer (Linda Darnell) and his temporary memory losses are threatening the concerto he has a deadline to finish. The following year, he composed the score for Anna and King of Siam, which earned him that third Oscar nomination.
In 1947, Herrmann penned the score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a film that's very popular on YouTube, only for some reason people like to use scenes and stills from the movie and place modern songs over them. The next year, Herrmann made his first foray into composing for television, making music for many installments of Studio One which went by about a half-dozen different titles during its run. That kept him busy until 1951 when he debuted his first full-fledged opera Wuthering Heights. In the clip below, Yves Saelens sings "Now art thou dear, my golden June" (Edgar Linton's aria) in a concert performance of the opera at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier 2010. Alain Altinoglu conducts the Orchestre National de Montpellier.
Directed by Robert Wise; Piece: Prelude/Outer Space/Radar
On Dangerous Ground (1952)
Directed by Nicholas Ray (Ida Lupino uncredited)
The Snows of Kiliminjaro (1952)
Directed by Henry King (Roy Ward Baker uncredited)
White Witch Doctor (1953) directed by Henry Hathaway
Now, I'm not going to list EVERY film or television show Herrmann scored, because it would grow too long. It's still going to be so long, that's why I've had to divide it into two posts so everything doesn't get knocked off the page. I'm tempted to leave out lesser titles or even bigger names if there isn't a music sample I can't find. Sometimes though, I'll find some other compelling reason to include a title figure anyone can click on his credits themselves.
Shower of Stars TV series (1954) Episode: "A Christmas Carol"
In 1955 when Burt Lancaster directed the first of the only two films he ever would helm, The Kentuckian, and he chose Herrmann for the score. Of course, that year was auspicious for another reason: It marked the first teaming of one of the most important director-composer partnerships in film history: Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock. What brought The Master of Suspense and Herrmann together for the first time actually wasn't one of Hitchcock's tense masterpieces but his dark comedy The Trouble With Harry about the small Vermont town with the problem of a body that just won't stay put. It also marked the film debut of Shirley MacLaine.
Directed by Nunnally Johnson; Pieces: Prelude, The Children's Hour
So this is where we will leave part I. Click here just in case Part II still doesn't show on the main page.
*Much of the information in this section comes from the Herrmann biography found on Artists Direct.
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Labels: Agnes M., Books, Curtiz, Frank Loesser, Gregory Peck, Herrmann, Hitchcock, Huston, Lancaster, Lupino, MacLaine, Mankiewicz, Music, N. Ray, Oscars, Sanders, Television, Theater, Welles, Wise
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Sunday, May 16, 2010
Celebrate the me (and you) yet to come
By Edward Copeland
Last year, they released a remake of Alan Parker's Fame, which opened 30 years ago today. Of course, I didn't bother to see the new version, not only because of my general rule not to see remakes of films that I thought were good in the first place (though I'm sure many will argue with me about Parker's film) but also because the new version had a PG rating, indicating to me that the new Fame would take place in a sanitized world. Parker's Fame did not. (As Roger Ebert opened his review of the remake: Why bother to remake Fame if you don't have a clue why the 1980 movie was special?)
Set in the New York of the late '70s, it was a film for mature teens and adults, earning its R rating with subject matter and without the glossy-eyed "anyone can be a star" attitude that permeates our American Idol-soaked culture of today. Fame emphasized work and the risk of failure, not the chance for easy fame or fluke stardom. Alan Parker's Fame looked at the students of the High School for the Performing Arts with an unblinking eye in a world much closer to what it takes to achieve artistic success than the easy climb reality TV tosses as a lure like a drug pusher offering that first free taste of crack before the user realizes that the saccharine fantasyland dream being sold to them is going to come at a very high price with inevitable lows.
Though not necessarily thought of as one, Fame belonged to that group of films of the late 1970s and early 1980s that treated coming of age tales with respect. The characters sprang from wide ranges of locales and social circles and dissimilar stories (Breaking Away, Saturday Night Fever), even variances in age groups (Over the Edge, Diner, My Bodyguard) and quality (Rich Kids, Foxes). As time went on, these types of films became rarer beasts, degenerating mostly into teen sex comedies such as Porky's or The Last American Virgin or superficial comedies from the John Hughes School of Formula Filmmaking. A few within those groups would break out as great such as Risky Business or Say Anything, but for the most part, they were a rarity and the heyday was over soon after the release of Fame.
Granted, Alan Parker's filmography hardly equals perfection, but it puzzles me how far his star has fallen when so many of his films, in my opinion, are pretty damn good. Looking over the list of his directing efforts, I noticed that most of the ones I remember most fondly link themselves intricately with music: Bugsy Malone, Pink Floyd The Wall, Angel Heart (a great thriller, pumped by Trevor Jones' score), The Commitments and the film we're discussing here, Fame. Even though I'm not that big a fan of Midnight Express, can anyone who has seen it forget its pulsating Giorgio Moroder score? On the other hand, Parker also helmed the bloated bore that was the movie version of the musical Evita.
Since Fame is set at the New York High School for the Performing Arts, the film written by Christopher Gore divides itself into appropriate sections to show progression through the years, assuming the potential students make it in in the first place.
Following white-on-black credits, the first image we see in Fame is a photo of Laurence Olivier as Shakespeare's Othello before we plunge into the chaos of the countless would-be students trying to gain entry to the prestigious school to hone their crafts in dance, acting or music while learning the academic basics at the same time. For the most part, the actors in the film are auditioning for us as well, since many of the main characters are played by relative newcomers or actually are making their film debuts. Film editor Gerry Hambling and Parker make a great team, building a wonderful rhythm that smoothly moves from one scene to another without the need for clunky transitions; they just glide from sequence to sequence.
What I so enjoyed about Fame the very first time I saw it (and what I generally like about works as different from Parker's film as HBO's late, great The Wire) is that Fame doesn't waste time with exposition scenes introducing us the important characters. In fact, during the audition section, viewers are treated to quite a few scenes of characters trying out for the school that we will never see again. The moviegoer just has to watch and learn as the film goes on which students will be pivotal.
Not only is this an approach I appreciate as a film or TV watcher, it also provides some of the funniest moments as when a potential drama student stumbles his way through Shakespeare, unaware that he's
It's funny that watching it now it should remind me of events from my own life, even though I never attended an arts high school, because even when I saw Fame the first time on cable around 1981 or 1982, it spoke to me, almost as if it were foreshadowing. Perhaps that's part of its appeal to me that remains lost on so many others: I recognized parts of it as things that would eventually occur in my life, even though it had to have been on a subconscious level. That didn't mean I knew or would know specifically a Coco (Irene Cara) or a Doris (Maureen Teefy); a Ralph (the superb Barry Miller) or a Bruno (Lee Curreri); a Leroy (Gene Anthony Ray) or a Hilary (Antonia Franceschi); a Lisa (Laura Dean) or a Montgomery (McCrane, whom ER fans will find delightful beneath his huge, bright red afro). Aspects of them may pop up in people in my life, but it was more the atmosphere that seemed familiar to a kid in junior high, even though I'd never been to New York City, never tried to fake tap shoes by attaching Pepsi bottle caps to the bottom of my tennis shoes or been convinced that I could replace an orchestra with the right assortment of keyboards and electronic equipment.
As the first school year begins to the strains of my favorite song from the soundtrack, "Dogs in the Yard," not only do we get to know the central students better, we also receiver tighter focus on the school's teachers.
Shepherding the would-be actors is Mr. Farrell (Jim Moody) who explains to his students from the outset what they are about to get into as "an underprivileged minority who are going to suffer for their craft" and he doesn't sugarcoat the fact that most actors are not working actors. One thing that is nice is that despite the
Teaching the musicians is the great Albert Hague as Shorofsky and most of his conflicts come with Bruno, who resents the idea of having to learn actual instruments. Bruno also has a strong booster in his cab driver father (Eddie Barth), who plays Bruno's compositions for his passengers and spends a fortune on his equipment. When he and and his brother drag the equipment into the high school, the brother asks why Bruno couldn't play a simple instrument like their father played the accordion. "My son's head is in the future," Barth replies, "and dad could never play the accordion." During one classroom exchange, as Bruno struggles to make music come out of a violin, he tries to make the case to Shorofsky that his ways are old fashioned and that if Mozart were alive, he'd be composing music more like Bruno is. "What about an orchestra?" the teacher asks. "Who needs an orchestra?" Bruno replies, explaining that his equipment can ape all the appropriate instruments and he could perform any work all by himself. "That's not music, it's masturbation," Shorofsky responds.
One thing all the craft teachers agree on, in a well-edited sequence, is that the art they teach is the most difficult, be it acting, music or dance. Still, the kids also have academics to deal with and the teacher who symbolizes that aspect is Mrs. Sherwood (Anne Meara, giving the best performance she's ever given on screen and a rare dramatic one). She butts heads early and often with Leroy, who tries to hide the fact that he is illiterate. It is one of the film's weaknesses that they are still having this battle by senior year, by which time you'd expect Leroy would have been flunked out no matter how great a dancer he is, but that's not addressed. However, Meara soars so high that I'll let it slide.
Among the students, the one who is the most anxious for stardom and who views the school as merely a stepping stone to her inevitable rise to the top is Coco. She gets a reluctant Bruno to aid her by writing songs for her to sing, particularly after one impromptu lunch jam session that again as a young teen seemed to predict scenes from my future when myself and other bored teens would sit around various schools' gathering areas singing and dancing and awaiting results from drama contests in high school. What once played as something that I longed to be a part of, later reminded me of my current life and now drips in nostalgia for days long gone and friends very much missed. Sometimes reactions such as that trump any criticism you might have: a film strikes too many familiar chords for you to be able to distance yourself from it, especially when you fell for it at a young age.
As the students begin their second year, Mr. Farrell tells his drama students that their sophomore year will move them from simple observation to emotional states and the characters themselves begin to show more of this themselves, both in and out of class. Doris frets when Farrell assigns them to discuss one of their most
The two main girls on the dance track are facing quite different futures. Lisa continues to be more interested in being a chatterbox in class and, much to Miss Berg's chagrin, never seems to even work up a sweat. The teacher finally has enough and despite the girl's pleas, tells her it's time of her to go because she doesn't have the discipline to make it as a dancer. The story for Hilary is turning out quite different. She may come from wealth, but she lives for the craft and it shows, particularly in a lovely sequence where Leroy spies her practicing by herself and the street tough find himself wowed by her grace (and her body doesn't hurt either). Hilary returns the attraction and, always eager to shock her rich WASP parents, brings Leroy home with her "to study" just to see their jaws drop.
The second school year also brings us perhaps the film's most famous sequence, the one containing the film's Oscar-winning title song. It begins as Bruno's leading supporter, his father, parks his cab in front of the school, hooks up loud speakers and blasts the song "Fame," a composition in the movie's universe that Bruno composed using Coco's vocals. Coco couldn't be more thrilled. Bruno wants to hide away somewhere, he's so embarrassed. Everyone else just wants to dance in the streets, which they do, often on top of angry New Yorkers' cars, sparking a small scale riot over the traffic jam session. It's also an illustration of the universe where Fame resides, the old New York City, when it was grittier and scarier, before Times Square became the Disneyfied place it is today.
From this point on in the film, Parker and the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Christopher Gore does make what I think is their most serious mistake. Not that the remainder of the movie isn't good, it's just that from this point on, the school is largely forgotten. In this section in fact, there isn't a single scene involving the classroom at all. That's fine because the students' characters and stories continue to evolve, but it seems to undermine the movie's central premise at the same time. Early on, we do get one scene that takes place within the confines of the school where Coco sings the film's other Oscar-nominated song, the lovely "Out Here on My Own," (also written by Michael Gore with lyrics by Lesley Gore of "It's My Party" fame) which frankly I think is a vastly superior composition to "Fame" which won. Coco plays the piano as Bruno watches approvingly. I think this clip more that backs up my point.
We also begin to learn more why Ralph wants to escape his home life so badly as basically he is the surrogate father for his younger sisters as his unseen mother goes through husbands. Despite her initial animosity
The Ralph-Doris romance also introduced me to another phenomenon that was unfamiliar to me but which would later become a large part of my high school life, especially after returning from drama contests: The
For the most part, the senior year section also stays away from the classroom to look at what's happening to the students' lives outside of school, but I'm going to refrain from discussing too much of what happens to
The one character who does get a brief taste of success (and failure) in this section is Ralph, who finally lives up to his Freddie Prinze dreams by getting a chance at standup (introduced by a young Richard Belzer) and
Now, as I've been honest in saying, Fame strikes too close to me in many ways for me to look at it with completely objective vision and, as a critic, it's not my job to be objective anyway. Any opinion will inevitably prove subjective, be it based on personal factors or just the way a person judges films. However, all critics (professionals, amateurs and those in between) or plain old moviegoers can't always turn those feelings off but if we do our jobs well and right, readers should be able to recognize the biases that figure into our opinions. My God, does anyone really believe that the late great Pauline Kael loved ALL those De Palma films? However, though I do think the animosity against both Alan Parker and the original Fame are overstated, re-watching it made me aware of the one thing it needed to take it from being a very good movie to becoming a true masterpiece: With its multiple characters, unusual structure and characters and stories that go unresolved, this may be an Alan Parker film, but inside a Robert Altman film is trying to break out.
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Labels: 80s, A. Parker, Altman, C. Sheen, De Palma, Ebert, Gregory Peck, HBO, John Hughes, K. Hepburn, Kael, Movie Tributes, Musicals, Oliver Stone, Olivier, Remakes, Shakespeare, The Wire, Theater, Tracy
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Saturday, February 27, 2010
Centennial Tributes: Joan Bennett
By Josh R
The more one sees of Joan Bennett, the more there is to like — that is, if one is willing to undertake a cineaste’s version of a search-and-recovery effort. Of the major credits discussed in this piece, only a handful are readily available for viewing — most notably three of the four films she made for Fritz Lang, the German auteur who saw past her nondescript prettiness and found something both unique and uniquely unsettling simmering beneath her unperturbed ingénue’s countenance. The roles on which her reputation was based were atypical of American cinema of the 1940s. Her best work came for European directors, in films that were decidedly European in character, while her depiction of unvarnished feminine carnality was markedly different from anything Hollywood had attempted since the pre-Code era (and it should be noted that not even Harlow or Stanwyck in their pre-Code days can match the coarseness of Scarlet Street's ‘Lazy Legs’ — but more on that to follow).
Fittingly, she wound up plying her trade more often than not on the margins of the commercial filmmaking establishment, if not altogether outside of it; there is no other leading lady of the 1940s whose resume can boast outings for Lang, Renoir and Ophuls. The films she made for the latter pair, as well as the fourth she did for Lang, remain stubbornly out of reach, consigned to the scrap heap of films deemed unworthy of release on video or DVD. If Joan Bennett’s career is one that has been sadly overlooked, with but a fraction of its treasures assigned their rightful value, the impression created by the remaining pieces testifies to an uncommonly adventurous and challenging body of work, at once both singular in character and aching for rediscovery.
In life, as on film, she proceeded to the beat of her own drummer, and her personal history was not without
If she had staked her claim to semi-stardom as an innocuous, diffident little blonde, raising her naturally husky voice several octaves to a strained helium-induced squeak so as not to seem abrasive, it didn’t take Joan Bennett too long to wise up, get practical and allow caution to fall by the wayside. When her second husband left her for the raven-haired exotic Hedy Lamarr, she dispensed with both the peroxide and the inhibitions, reinventing herself as a worldly brunette with enough sexual swagger to put any other screen siren, French or otherwise, in her place. The transformation literally occurred onscreen — in the opening scenes of 1938’s Trade Winds, she is a guileless, flaxen-haired debutante draped in ermine and demurely playing Chopin on the piano. Ten minutes into the film, she has shot a man in cold blood, eluded capture by the police by driving her roadster into San Francisco Bay and resurfaced on a Shanghai steamer with a forged passport, a survivalist mentality, and hair the identical shade of her ex-husband’s new paramour. Even her makeup was reminiscent of Lamarr’s, in a manner that could hardly be chalked up to coincidence; at the time, her defiant response to being jilted, in the form of a thinly veiled swipe at her romantic rival, was regarded as one of Hollywood’s better inside jokes.
She made a brave try for the coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara, and impressed David O. Selznick enough to have briefly been considered a leading contender for the assignment. Without the backing of a major studio, her
The theme of temptation was revisited by Robinson, Bennett and Lang — Man, Woman and The Devil, if you will — to even more stunning effect in 1945’s Scarlet Street. Adapted from Renoir’s La Chienne (once again, the European influence at work), the film observes a masochistic weakling who falls prey to the machinations of a particularly slovenly specimen of femme fatale, of a strain that would make Double Indemnity's Phyllis
If Scarlet Street marked Bennett’s crowning achievement, it wouldn’t be the actress’s last successful foray into the realm of film noir. Based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, The Macomber Affair cast Gregory Peck as a typically Hemingway-esque great white hunter/rugged individualist hired to lead a wealthy American
The Macomber Affair, like Trade Winds, is among the aforementioned films not to be found on VHS or DVD. Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach was butchered on the cutting room floor by anxious studio executives, and occasionally appears in its bastardized form on television (sadly, not soon enough for the writing of this piece). Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door is cited by film historians as one of her better vehicles; given Bennett’s track record with Lang, such assertions can be readily believed, even if circumstance requires they must be accepted on faith.
The postwar era marked a shift in values — once the boys were back and Ike was in, many of the no-good dames of the 1940s were expected to shove their trashy heels to the back of the closet and forsake their wayward ways. Implausible as it may seem, a scant five years after Lazy Legs had vamped her way to infamy,
In a day and age when film buffs and writers speak at length about glory deferred — Jeff Bridges is frequently cited as one of our most underrated actors — a case can be made for Joan Bennett as one of the more egregiously overlooked talents in the annals of film history. Academy Award nominations are often judged to be the barometer of career success; Bridges, it must be said, has been honored on five such occasions (and if people are still referring to him as underrated now, I suspect they won’t be after next Sunday night). Joan Bennett never received an Oscar nomination; but then, her best film work was ahead of its time. Sadder still is the realization that time has yet to catch up with her. Had she received a nomination or two, it’s tempting to wonder whether or not she’d enjoy a higher profile than she does now. ‘Lazy Legs’ stands as one of the more daring film noir performances of its era; her other efforts testify to the fact that she was more than a one-hit wonder. With or without the recognition she deserved, it must be asserted that she made an indelible mark on the American cinema. For whatever reason, The American Cinema has yet to recognize her true worth.
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Labels: Cukor, Edward G., G. Tierney, Gregory Peck, Harlow, Hemingway, Jeff Bridges, Joan Bennett, K. Hepburn, Lang, Liz, Ophuls, Preminger, Renoir, Selznick, Stanwyck, Television, Tracy
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Monday, September 07, 2009
Centennial Tributes: Elia Kazan
By Edward Copeland
I can hear the grumbling already. Why does Elia Kazan deserve a tribute? He named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings under Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. It was the same cry that greeted him when he was given an honorary Oscar in 1998. (My own objection was that he didn't need one since he'd already won two Oscars competitively and there were plenty of film artists who'd received none who deserved honoring.) Was what he did honorable? No, but I was not in his position. Who knows what anyone would do in a similar position concerned about their family and their career? It also seems that he takes a worse beating than others involved in that despicable piece of American history. When Budd Schulberg recently died, little was made of his testimony. Jerome Robbins got a pass since Ed Sullivan basically blackmailed him into testifying by threatening to expose his homosexuality if he didn't. To me though, the greatest example of whitewashing is that of Robert Kennedy. He didn't testify, but he worked for McCarthy, believed in his cause and liked the man so much that he made McCarthy godfather to his daughter Kathleen. No one was pressuring him to do any of that and he never renounced McCarthy and only broke with the committee because he hated Roy Cohn. Anyway, let's face it: The true cowards were the studio heads and producers who didn't have the stones to stand up to intimidation and actually enforced the blacklist. Therefore, this tribute is not here to pass judgment on Kazan's character, because I didn't know him so I can't say. However, I do know Kazan as an artist and he made a lot of fine films and did a lot of legendary stage work I wish I could have seen. His work is what this tribute is about. So let's restrict the comments to that.
Kazan was born in Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire before it became Istanbul, Turkey. Kazan began his Broadway career as an actor, but once he became a director, that's when his career and legend took off. To read the list of plays that Kazan was the first to stage on the Great White Way is astounding. Works by Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. Works by Arthur Miller: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman and After the Fall. There also was Tea and Sympathy, J.B., The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and The Skin of Our Teeth, to name but a few. If only I could have seen any of those, but not having been born yet does present that problem when it comes to live theater. His Broadway career began before the Tony Award did but he eventually earned nine nominations and won three for directing.
As for his Hollywood career, Kazan made a short documentary called The People of the Cumberland in 1937 but didn't really get things going until he made his first feature in 1945 with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a well-made melodrama about a young woman (Dorothy McGuire) and her dream growing up in the poverty of a Brooklyn tenement in the early 20th century. It also set the course for the great success Kazan had with his film actors and Oscar, winning James Dunn the supporting actor award for playing the girl's happy-go-lucky if undependable and alcoholic father. In 1947, Kazan helmed three films and won his first Oscar. He made the lesser Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn vehicle The Sea of Grass, the noir courtroom drama Boomerang! and the year's best picture winner, Gentleman's Agreement. Gregory Peck starred as a reporter going undercover to investigate anti-Semitism. While certainly a noble topic, the film has not aged well and its best attributes today are Celeste Holm's Oscar-winning supporting performance and John Garfield. Ironically, one of the other best picture nominees that year, Crossfire, also dealt with anti-Semitism and holds up as a better film, though in the the story Crossfire was based on the murder victim wasn't Jewish, he was gay.
Two years later, Kazan returned with the overly melodramatic Pinky, the tale of a light-skinned African-American woman who has passed for white but who returns home to her grandmother's home, engaged to a white doctor who didn't know the truth of her racial identity. As in most Kazan's films, it has solid performances, particularly from Oscar nominees Ethel Waters as Pinky's grandmother and Ethel Barrymore as a wealthy woman that Pinky cares for as a nurse. The part that is hard to get past is that Pinky is played by Jeanne Crain (who also was nominated). No wonder it was so easy for her to pass. Whenever Hollywood either in its Golden Age or as recently as its adaptation of Philip Roth's The Human Stain casts a white actor to play an African American passing for white, it just can't help but feel off. The next year came Panic in the Streets, which I haven't seen, which starred Richard Widmark and Jack Palance in a suspense tale about a 48 hour search for a killer infected with the plague.
In 1951, Kazan got to re-create one of his Broadway triumphs when A Streetcar Named Desire came to the big screen with most of the Broadway cast, with the exception of Vivien Leigh replacing Jessica Tandy in the role of Blanche Du Bois. It made Marlon Brando a sensation as his stage triumph of Stanley Kowalski lit up movie theaters around the world. Ironically, of the four principles in the cast (Brando, Leigh, Karl Malden, Kim Hunter), Brando was the only member of the acting quartet to go home empty handed. Kazan had to tone down some of the sexuality due to the censors' restrictions of the day, though some of the moments were restored later and the version of the film you can see today is usually more daring than 1951 moviegoers were allowed to see.
Brando and Kazan teamed again the following year in quite a different setting with Viva Zapata! Brando played Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata who led an uprising against the corrupt dictator Diaz in the early 20th century. Kazan's Oscar luck for actors continued as Anthony Quinn won his first supporting actor Oscar for the film. I haven't seen Kazan's next film, 1953's Man on a Tightrope starring Fredric March, but by the descriptions of it I could find, it would seem to line up with the change in his outlook on the Communist Party, coming the same year as his HUAC testimony. It details a circus trying to escape the oppressive boot of the Soviet Union by making an escape to Bavaria.
The following year brought what many consider to be Kazan's masterpiece, his film of Budd Schulberg's screenplay for On the Waterfront. With its story of a man standing up to the rackets running the waterfront, Kazan and Schulberg were obviously making an allegory for the McCarthy hearings, only making the person who named names (as Kazan and Schulberg both did) the hero who suffers for doing it. Even those who disapproved of their real-life actions, couldn't dispute the power of Kazan's images, Schulberg's words and that cast, led by Brando's Oscar-winning Terry Malloy and supported by Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and, most especially, Lee J. Cobb. It took the Oscar for best picture and earned Kazan his second directing Oscar.
In 1955, Kazan tackled the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden which turned out to be one of the three feature films made by the legendary James Dean and, in my opinion, his best performance. It earned Dean the first of his two consecutive posthumous Oscar nominations for best actor and won the supporting actress honor for Jo Van Fleet. It's truly Dean who powers the film, which can be a bit plodding.
Next up, Kazan teamed with Tennessee Williams again as Williams reworked two of his one-act plays into one of the most bizarre and, for its time, controversial films of his career, Baby Doll. A steamy Southern gothic tale with Karl Malden in a rare unsympathetic role playing a failed businessman who weds a 19-year-old virgin temptress (Carroll Baker) who sucks her thumb and sleeps in a crib with the condition that the marriage cannot be consummated until "she is ready for marriage." Complicating matters is a rival cotton gin owner (Eli Wallach), out for revenge because Malden burned his gin down, blaming him for the loss of his business. Wallach's sleazy Sicilian sees Baker as the perfect vehicle for him to bring about Malden's comeuppance.
1957 brought the other Kazan/Schulberg collaboration, A Face in the Crowd, a decidedly underrated film that so wowed me upon re-watching it that I decided it deserves a separate review today. Kazan's film output slowed after that, directing only six more features between 1960 and 1976 of which I've only seen two. In 1961, there was the somewhat silly Natalie Wood-Warren Beatty vehicle Splendor in the Grass, which seems to send the message that sex makes young women CRAZY. In 1963, he adapted his own book about his uncle's 19th century immigrant experience in America, America, a filmwatching journey that's nearly as arduous as the real trip must have been except for Haskell Wexler's glorious cinematography. Kazan's final feature was an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel of Hollywood, The Last Tycoon, with a script by Harold Pinter and starring Robert De Niro, Robert Mitchum and Jack Nicholson, among others. Ever the actor's director to the end, he directed performers to 24 Oscar nominations and nine Oscar wins.
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Labels: Arthur Miller, blacklist, Brando, De Niro, Finney, Fitzgerald, Gregory Peck, Harold Pinter, James Dean, K. Hepburn, Lee J. Cobb, Malden, Mitchum, Nicholson, Tandy, Tennessee Williams, V. Leigh, W. Beatty, Wallach, Wexler
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Monday, December 22, 2008
Robert Mulligan (1925-2008)
By Edward Copeland
Robert Mulligan, who died Saturday at 83, was a solid workman-like director. Not all of his films were good or memorable by any means but the ones that were more than merit his inclusion among the best, if for To Kill a Mockingbird alone.
That movie version of Harper Lee's great novel remains one of the most faithful adaptations of a wonderful book ever brought to the big screen in Horton Foote's screenplay. Beyond that achievement was his astonishing work with the cast, bringing great performances out of the children, including an Oscar nomination for Mary Badham as Scout. He also elicited Gregory Peck's best work ever as the noble Atticus Finch and got Peck a deserved Oscar for the performance.
Mulligan, whose brother was the late actor Richard Mulligan of Soap and Empty Nest fame, got his directing start in 1950s live television before moving into film with such efforts as Fear Strikes Out starring Anthony Perkins and two Natalie Wood vehicles: Love with the Proper Stranger and Inside Daisy Clover.
In 1978, he directed a guilty pleasure of mine: Alan Alda and the great Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year, which even now, decades after I first saw it, if I catch it on TV, I have to watch it until the end. I can hear Johnny Mathis singing right now.
Fittingly, one of his best films was his last one and also featured another great performance by a youngster when he made The Man in the Moon starring a then-14-year-old Reese Witherspoon.
RIP Mr. Mulligan.
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Labels: Alda, Books, Burstyn, Fiction, Gregory Peck, Obituary, Richard Mulligan
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Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Centennial Tributes: Laurence Olivier
"I take a simple view of living. It is keep your eyes open and get on with it."
Lord Laurence Olivier
By Edward Copeland
Lord Laurence Olivier was often referred to as one of the all-time greats on stage and I wish I could have seen him perform in that capacity. He co-founded with Sir Ralph Richardson a new Old Vic Theatre Company in 1944. Later, he was one of the founders of the Royal National Theatre in 1963. He retired from the stage in 1974. He also was the fifth actor to be given the honor of burial in Westminster Abbey. Despite his legendary status as a stage actor and appearing frequently on Broadway between 1929 and 1961 and directing two productions after that, he only received a single Tony nomination for acting (for The Entertainer in 1958) and he lost. As it is, myself and many others have had to make do with his admittedly massive body of screen and television work, work which the actor often expressed embarrassment about, understandable when you consider some of the roles he took, presumably just for the paycheck.
Really, Olivier is the one who inspired me to use my running gag "All British actors are whores." That's not to say he wasn't great, but it did often exemplify itself in his seeming willingness to appear in just about anything that passed his way. At the same time, he did manage for a long time to hold the record for acting Oscar nominations among men with 10 nominations until Jack Nicholson tied him with his nomination for A Few Good Men and passed him with his nomination for As Good As It Gets. Instead of just going chronologically through his works that I've seen, I've decided to divide this tribute into four acts.
"My stage successes have provided me with the greatest moments outside myself; my film successes the best moments, professionally, within myself."
Olivier's first Oscar nomination came in 1939 for the film which really put him on the map as far as movies were concerned, Wuthering Heights. Really it is one of the few times he played an almost purely romantic role on film, seeming to slip into more character-type parts almost immediately afterward. Still, his Heathcliff can make hearts flutter to this very day. in 1940, he scored his second consecutive nomination as best actor and worked with the legendary Alfred Hitchcock on Rebecca, the only Hitchcock film to win best picture, even though Hitch failed to pick up director. Olivier's Max de Winter perfectly blended mystery as to what his character may or may not have done to his previous wife with enough appeal to understand why Joan Fontaine's unnamed second wife would fall for the rich and eccentric man living in the wondrous estate of Manderley with the housekeeper from hell, even if his marriage proposal was vague enough that he had to add, "I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool." As World War II preoccupied most of England, Olivier originally joined the actual
"I believe in the theater. I believe in it as the first glamorizer of thoughts. It restores dramatic dynamics and their relations to life size."
Olivier won five Emmys for his acting work on television and two of those wins were for performances that probably come closest to approximating what it would have been like to see him on the stage. I was unable to see his first win for a 1960 special of The Moon and Sixpence or his 1975 win for Love Among the Ruins, which paired him with Katharine Hepburn. I did see his 1973 win for a production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, and I must say he was great as the elder Tyrone, the tired actor not nearly as great as he wanted to be nor that he thought he was. The production itself is as flawed as the 1962 film version starring Katharine Hepburn and none of the other cast members really soar the way Olivier did. I also saw his winning performance in the 1982 British miniseries Brideshead Revisited, whose reputation far exceeds the production's actual worth. Olivier only appeared in two of the 11 laborious chapters and I was sort of surprised as it unfolded that he beat the far-more interesting work by John Gielgud — until I saw the episode Olivier won for, which happened to be the final installment. His performance overpowers the entire episode (thank goodness something did) as a family's dying patriarch. The finest television work I saw him give
"I don't know what is better than the work that is given to the actor, to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself."
Olivier also appeared in many other notable films, some of which attracted award attention, even if not for him. The same year he made Rebecca, he also played Mr. Darcy in the great 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, even if Greer Garson was too old for her part. The next year, he appeared in the great Powell-Pressburger film 49th Parallel aka The Invaders, as well as perhaps his best collaboration with second wife Vivien Leigh in That Hamilton Woman. You know, it's always odd to hear Leigh act with her own British accent. Another film worth checking out is William Wyler's 1952 film Carrie, one of Jennifer Jones' best efforts as a girl looking for success in the big city of Chicago but running into a spate of bad luck and falling for a married restaurant manager (Olivier). Also, it goes without saying that anyone would be remiss if they missed Olivier's campy turn as Crassus in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. Kubrick basically disowned the film, but it's still worth seeing, if only for the ridiculous amount of innuendo in the scenes between Olivier and Tony Curtis.
"Without acting, I cannot breathe."
For most of the 1970s until the end of his life, Olivier battled many illnesses and I have to hope that they explain some of the motivation. Sometimes, the roles worked out in spite of themselves (I can't imagine that he expected that his fine turn in A Little Romance or the movie itself would turn out as well they did.) Other times, they turned out to be a campy treat in spite of themselves such as his role as Zeus in Clash of the Titans, which also contained a fun turn by fellow Brit Maggie Smith as the devious Thetis. However, other times things didn't turn out nearly so well and Olivier's work turned out campy and over-the-top in movies that ranged from the dull 1979 Dracula where he hammed it up as Van Helsing to the disaster that was Neil Diamond's version of The Jazz Singer where Lord Olivier took the role of the singer's cantor father intoning, "I haf no son." Then there is something that goes beyond the pale in putridness, his role as an American auto magnate (with an awful American accent in the soapy adaptation of Harold Robbins' potboiler The Betsy. The Betsy also proved that it's not just Brits that need paychecks, because I can see no other explanation for the presence of great American actors such as Robert Duvall, Jane Alexander, Tommy Lee Jones and Edward Herrmann in this 1978 lemon. Fortunately, I never saw Olivier take on the role of Douglas MacArthur in the fabled big-budget monstrosity Inchon, most notable for being financed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church (better known as "Moonies") and owner of The Washington Times newspaper. Hell, death hasn't even stopped Olivier who, through the creepy magic of CGI, turned up as the villain in 2004's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, released 15 years after his death.
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Labels: Archers, Caine, Coppola, Duvall, Fontaine, Garson, Gielgud, Gregory Peck, Hitchcock, Huston, K. Hepburn, Kubrick, Maggie Smith, O'Neill, Olivier, Shakespeare, Tony Curtis, V. Leigh, Wyler
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