Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Different ways of playing 'Cards'
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post contains spoilers for the three segment British miniseries House of Cards from the 1990s starring Ian Richardson and this year's 13-episode U.S. version made for Netflix, produced by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey. If you plan to watch either version and haven't yet, read no further.
By Edward Copeland
After giving people time to watch the American version of House of Cards and with its availability on DVD and Blu-ray for those without access to Netflix Instant, I thought enough time had transpired to discuss both the new version as well as the original BBC miniseries, whose first part premiered in 1990. Prior to watching the David Fincher-produced D.C.-set House of Cards with Kevin Spacey playing the wily lead, I felt I needed to see the British version to see how well the differences translated. (Obviously, Britain's parliamentary system of government works quite differently from our legislative branch — which, in its current state, doesn't work at all, but House of Cards exists in the land of make-believe. I lacked either the time or the energy given personal matters to attempt to read the novel by Michael Dobbs that spawned the BBC miniseries.)
Though the new version pads out its story to 13 roughly one-hour episodes while the first of the three British House of Cards miniseries told mostly the same story in four episodes of approximately the same length, the U.S. take does hit many of the same plot points except when it comes to the ending, but the makers of the U.S. House of Cards envision it as a continuing series. (I needn't have watched the second and third BBC miniseries, To Play the King and The Final Cut, since the stories in those sequels aren't covered in the first season of the U.S. House of Cards.) Both versions of the political chicanery, whether set here or across the pond, offer solid entertainment and mostly solid performances, though the U.S. House of Cards wins out in terms of production values. Unfortunately, when it comes to the battle of FUs (Francis Urquhart in the U.K., Francis Underwood in the U.S.), the late Ian Richardson wins hands down. Spacey proves capable as usual for the most part, but he burdens himself with an off-and-on Southern drawl that's wholly unnecessary and, at times, a major distraction. When Richardson's Urquhart speaks to the viewer in his well-mannered, upper-crust tone, it always works. When Spacey's Underwood attempts to pull it off while simultaneously putting on a generic son of the South voice for his South Carolina representative, at times it comes off as too cutesy by half.
Despite the differences in forms of government, both House of Cards begin with essentially the same kernel of a motivation for our two Francises. In the 1990 BBC version, Urquhart has served faithfully as an MP of the Conservative Party, functioning as their Chief Whip under Margaret Thatcher's reign as prime minister. In its fictionalized view of history, Thatcher's loss of support has led to her resignation and while the Conservatives look bound to keep a weakened majority hold of the British government, Urquhart expects
the new prime minister, Hal Collinridge (David Lyon, whose death at 72 was announced today), to appoint him to a long-sought Cabinet position and remove him from his duties as whip. Instead, with the slimmer majority, Collinridge decides not to shake up the Cabinet and an angry Urquhart starts maneuvering many people to get his revenge and build his own rise to power. In the 2013 U.S. take on the tale, Underwood long has held the title of Democratic Whip in the House, now the Majority Whip as a new Democratic president (not Barack Obama), Garrett Walker (Michael Gill), takes office. but Walker reneges on a promise to pick Underwood as his secretary of state. This begins Underwood's convoluted maneuvering. One problem that separates the two versions comes down to logic. You see why Urquhart longs to become the prime minister himself, but if you know U.S. history, it seems downright silly for Underwood to leap through all the hoops and commit all the deeds he does just to end up as vice president. When George H.W. Bush won the presidency, he was the first sitting vice president to manage the victory in his own right since Martin Van Buren. Unless Underwood plans to kill off Walker in a subsequent season of the U.S. House of Cards, why does he see that as a plausible path to the Oval Office?
What delineates our two Francises (the U.S. version only uses the FU joke once as its expected, vulgar stand-in by some of Underwood's opponents while the BBC call Urquhart FU frequently and affectionately by both friends and foes to his face without a hit of a double meaning) most distinctly comes from the difference in the way Spacey acts the words by Beau Willmon and his writing staff and Richardson's delivery of Andrew Davies' dialogue. Almost everyone appears to be on to what Frank Underwood conspires to do at all times, even if his machinations win in the end since Spacey doesn't take much of an effort to hide his moves from those he attempts to manipulate. In contrast, it takes some time for people to catch on to the lengths that Francis Urquhart will go to to accomplish his means thanks to Richardson's performance, which he keeps close to his vest. Both versions rely on the conceit that the Francises speak in asides to the television viewer about what they think and plan, only Spacey talks to audiences in the same basic tone as most of the other characters. Richardson confides to us, letting us in on secrets that others aren't aware of and it makes his performance much richer and, given the late actor's training, provides Francis Urquhart with an almost Shakespearean air. Urquhart picks off opponents with a variety of means and accomplishes most of this without leaving any fingerprints. The game plan in the U.S. House of Cards differs slightly as no list of vice presidential contenders stand in Underwood's way, but they do match in terms of subject matter. Urquhart must sink health and education ministers while those two issues become legislative hurdles that play a part in Underwood's climb.
Both House of Cards include two main women in the lives of their protagonists: their wives and young reporters who become the pols' lovers as well as their tool to help advance their plots. The idea of the female journalist follows fairly closely in both versions (except where they end up in the first installment and the level of their naïveté). In the BBC, the young reporter Mattie Storin (Susannah Harker) takes a long time (too long for her sake) to catch on to Urquhart's true nature and their illicit romance takes on a somewhat twisted father figure complex where the young Mattie tends to call the much older Francis "Daddy" during their dalliances. In the U.S. version, the young woman journalist Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara) contains a much more ambitious nature and she uses Underwood as much as he uses her. Both Mattie and Zoe do make colleagues jealous with their scoops and end up booted from their newspapers, only the U.S. version updates for technological changes and makes Zoe's success come via instant blog posts and finds her gaining new employment with an online political publication. Probably due to the way Mattie is written, Harker comes off as a weaker actress than Mara, who has a more fully developed character. The bigger difference presents itself in the portrayal
of the political wives. Elizabeth Urquhart (Diane Fletcher) truly serves as her husband's partner-in-crime. She knows of his affair with Mattie (and other women in the later installments) but approves wholeheartedly because she knows that letting him have his extracurricular activity with Mattie only serves the couple's ultimate goal and doesn't pose a threat to her position. Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) begins that way early in the U.S. House of Cards, but as the series develops she exhibits jealousy. showing up at Zoe's apartment, interfering with part of Underwood's legislative agenda and even leaving D.C. to renew an affair with a former lover, a famous photographer (Ben Daniels). Presumably, the part required beefing up in order to get someone of Wright's caliber to agree to accept it in the first place. Claire also gets her own sideline with story strands involving the charitable foundation that she runs whereas Elizabeth Urquhart basically serves as Francis' adornment at party and sounding board at home but little else.
Both versions equip our FUs with henchmen named Stamper to help him carry out the more unseemly parts of his schemes, though the portrayals as well as the job titles come off quite differently in each country. In England, Urquhart's underling, Tim Stamper, comes across as quite a weasel in the hands of actor Colin
Jeavons. Tim Stamper functions as the Assistant Whip for the Conservatives in the House of Commons until Urquhart succeeds at ascending to the position of prime minister and Stamper moves up to Chief Whip. Later, unhappily, Urquhart moves him to the post party chairman. The British Stamper not only gets his hands dirty with delight, he also overflows with ambition himself and it costs him in the end (part of which may have been necessitated by Jeavons' decision to retire from acting after completing the second installment, To Play the King). The American Stamper gets a new first name — Doug — and does show signs of conscience even while he performs Underwood's errands. Doug Stamper serves as the House Majority Whip's chief of staff and holds no elected position. Michael Kelly, who most people will recognize him from many roles on television and in film, doesn't get down and dirty with the same glee that Jeavons does, but Kelly creates a different persona and plays him well. Odds are, depending how many seasons House of Cards continues, Doug Stamper either will turn on his boss or become a liability to him.
The one area besides production design where the U.S. House of Cards bests the British original comes from the actor who portrays Underwood's actual victim and how the U.S. version fleshes out his character in the first place. Before I began this piece, I issued a spoiler warning, but the U.S. House of Cards doesn't make it a secret that Underwood's deviousness takes a lethal turn, thanks to some of its promotional posters, and the very first sequence of the series gives viewers that impression by showing Underwood putting an injured dog out of its misery with his bare hands but making it clear that he isn't doing it to be merciful. In the British take, even though the first installment only consists of four 1-hour installments, it doesn't
let the audience know that Urquhart's manipulations include murder. In the BBC version, the first life that Urquhart literally takes with his own hand belongs to Roger O'Neill (Miles Anderson), the P.R. consultant for the Conservative Party whom Urquhart gets to use his girlfriend, Penny Guy (Alphonsia Emmanuel), to seduce Foreign Secretary Patrick Woolton (Malcolm Tierney), one of Urquhart's competitors for the prime minister post. Unfortunately, O'Neill loves Penny as much as he loves cocaine and when she dumps him when she realizes O'Neill used her, O'Neill becomes a wild card that Urquhart can't trust. To make sure nothing comes out that damages FU's plan and reveals his role in the Woolton revelation, Urquhart spikes O'Neill's coke supply with rat poison, assuring Mattie who figures out he did it that he was just putting O'Neill out of his misery.
Overall, the American ensemble beats the British one. Granted, the U.S. version provides nine extra hours to fill with juicy parts for actors to the BBC's mere four, so the original lacks the room to develop many characters in depth so it's easy to see how Ian Richardson steals the show. Kevin Spacey, in addition to his aforementioned accent problem, shares time with a lot of great performers in parts large and small. On top of those mentioned already, Sebastian Arcelus, Reg E. Cathey, Kathleen Chalfant, Nathan Darrow, Sandrine Holt, Boris McGiver, Larry Pine, Al Sapienza, Constance Zimmer and Gerald McRaney all put in appearances. We also get three actors familiar to Treme fans in parts of various scope: Mahershala Ali, Lance E. Nichols and Dan Ziskie. The M.V.P. of the entire cast though turns out to be Corey Stoll, so great as Hemingway in
Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, as the U.S. equivalent of Roger O'Neill. Instead of a P.R. guy, Stoll plays Pennsylvania Rep. Peter Russo, a divorced father of two with a penchant for drugs, booze and sex, despite his deep feelings for and relationship with his chief of staff Christina Gallagher (Kristen Connolly). For those who only know Stoll from Midnight in Paris, he'll be unrecognizable. In the short number of episodes though, he takes Russo through the largest journey of any character in the series, battling to sobriety and attempting to believe in himself, unaware of his status as a pawn in Underwood's game (both Underwoods, actually), until it's too late. Stoll makes Russo the only character that the audience develops any sympathy for at all. Though Russo behaves badly, his mistakes all flow from his personal weaknesses. He doesn't do things maliciously the way that Underwood and other characters do. When he commits wrongs, it's because he can't control himself. Underwood always stays in control, even if unexpected events force him to improvise. You feel bad for Russo when he can't
stand up for himself and acts against his own interests and those of his constituents, just to be Underwood's toady and pay him back for covering up an incident when he got caught drunk with a prostitute. You get a sense of where this comes from a in a couple of brief scenes involving Russo and his hospitalized mother (a great Phyllis Somerville) that gives you insight into Russo and makes you feel sorry for the man at the same time it provides some wickedly dark humor. When he begins to turn himself around, you develop a rooting interest for him to succeed (even though having seen the U.K. version first, I figured what fate awaited Russo, though the U.S. changes the manner of his inevitable death at Underwood's hands slightly differently). Though the U.S. House of Cards contains a lot of great acting, no one comes close to turning in a performance as wonderful as Stoll's and no character gets as much development and detail as Rep. Peter Russo.
Since the British House of Cards only ran four hours, it had a sole director, Paul Seed, and writer, Andrew Davies. Davies and Seed returned to the same roles on the second installment, To Play the King, but Seed's directing work consists almost entirely of British television. Davies wrote the third and final part, The Final Cut, but Mike Vardy took over helming duties. Similarly, his directing work stayed restricted to British TV. Davies' writing extends to film including the screenplays for Circle of Friends, Emma, The Tailor of Panama, Bridget Jones's Diary, the 2008 feature of Brideshead Revisited and the 2011 version of The Three Musketeers directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.
While Beau Willmon had a hand in writing most of the U.S. episodes, he also had a staff of writers who either contributed or turned in their own episodes. On the directing side, Fincher started the series off by directing the first two episodes while James Foley directed the most at 4 episodes and Allen Coulter, Carl Franklin, Charles McDougall and Joel Schumacher helmed two each.
In the final assessment, the U.S. House of Cards moves fairly well except at times when it feels as if it stuffed itself with too many character and plot strands and an episode set at Underwood's reunion at The Citadel that, while OK, feels and plays like filler. The U.K. House of Cards comes off as far more efficient, even if most of the characters aside from Richardson's Urquhart prove far less compelling. In the second and third parts, they do at least give him actual adversaries, which make things slightly more interesting, but in the end all the British House of Cards episodes always belong to the great Richardson and his rich and delicious
performance. One really bizarre viewing experience for me came from the miniseries — which aired in 1990, 1995 and 1996 — incorporating Margaret Thatcher's fictional death. She died in the miniseries as I watched it before she died in real life earlier this year. Part of the subtext is that Francis Urquhart wants to break Thatcher's record for serving as prime minister longer in the post-WW2 era. One other thing that makes the British version slightly better than the American take is that the first installment ends with a great cliffhanger mystery that plays out over the course of the next two parts. The new House of Cards leaves us with reporters hot on Underwood's trail about Russo's "suicide," but it doesn't come off nearly as intriguing as the British version. I'm also curious where the U.S. version goes next. It obviously can't follow the storyline of the British To Play the King since we don't have a constitutional monarch and a newly sworn in Vice President Underwood wouldn't run into conflict with a recently crowned king. Presumably, that tension will present itself with his new boss, President Walker. It's a shame that Ian Richardson isn't with us anymore and that the third British House of Cards installment resolved the Francis Urquhart character. It might have been fun to see U.S. President Francis Underwood face off against British Prime Minister Francis Urquhart. I'd probably root for Urquhart, if only because he doesn't have that corny and awful Southern accent.
Labels: 10s, 90s, Books, Fiction, Fincher, Hemingway, Netflix, Robin Wright, Shakespeare, Spacey, Television, Treme, Woody
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Friday, May 18, 2012
Centennial Tributes: Richard Brooks Part I
By Edward Copeland
"First comes the word, then comes the rest" might be the most famous quote attributed to Richard Brooks, who began his life 100 years ago today in Philadelphia as Ruben Sax, son of Jewish immigrants Hyman and Esther Sax. He wrote a lot of words too — sometimes using only images. In fact, too many to tell the story in a single post. so it will be three. His parents came from Crimea in 1908 when it belonged to the Russian Empire. Like the parents of a great director of a much later generation and an Italian Catholic heritage, Hyman and Esther Sax also worked in the textile and clothing industry. Sax's entire adult working life revolved around the written word — even while he busied himself with other tasks. “I write in toilets, on planes, when I’m
walking, when I stop the car. I make notes. If I am working at a studio, I work at the studio in the morning, then come home. I am really writing two days instead of one. After the studio, I have my second day (at home). I write whenever I can,” Brooks said in an interview with Patrick McGilligan for his book Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. After high school, he entered Temple University where he majored in journalism, though he left early when he realized the financial hardship that his tuition put on his parents. After drifting around the eastern half of the U.S. for a while by train, Sax returned to Philadelphia and got a job as s sports reporter at The Philadelphia Record where he first adopted the name of Richard Brooks. When he later got hired by The Atlantic City Press-Union, he met another reporter with an independent streak who would eventually make his way to Hollywood by the name of Samuel Fuller. Shortly after moving to New York for a job with that city's World Telegram newspaper, only leaving the sports beat behind for crime reporting. Brooks discovered that radio jobs provided bigger paychecks so he took a job at the 24-hour radio station WNEW, first as a disc jockey. "Played records 23 of those hours," McGilligan described in the introduction to his interview. Later, the station promoted him to news where he edited four news broadcasts a day newspaper jobs and wrote one. His work there led to a news job at NBC Radio's Blue Network where he also got to do commentary. At the same time, in 1938, Brooks tried his hand at playwriting, which led in 1940 to co-founding The Mill Pond Theater in Roslyn, N.Y., with David Loew. It's on that stage that Brooks made his debut as a director, taking turns with Loew helming productions at the summer theater. A falling out with other members of the theater sent Brooks to California where he worked for NBC Radio from the other coast. Among his duties was writing and directing the broadcast Richard Sands. Brooks also began writing a short story every day and reading it on air. “I’d written some short stories before, but none was published. Anyway, every day, another short story. Everything became grist for a short story. It began to drive me crazy…a different plotline every day. My ambition: write one story a week instead of a different story every day. In about 11 months, I wrote over 250 stories. I even devised a system whereby on Fridays I wouldn't have to write a short story. I called that day 'Heels of History.' I would take a fable and convert it. As a matter of fact, I used one afterwards in The Blackboard Jungle,” Brooks told McGilligan. Brooks gave the example of how he took the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk," citing how while he's portrayed as a hero, Jack's actually a dumb, bad kid who ignores his mother's order, shows little concern for an ailing fire and steal, even if it's from a giant. Granted, it doesn't appear to have been broadcast nationally but I wonder if Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine came across this when
conceiving Into the Woods?. Witches can be right, giants can be good… Brooks, like what happened when he learned radio paid more than newspapers, discovered in California that screenwriters earned bigger paychecks than broadcasters. He set up a meeting with George Waggner at Universal, where Waggner — who later would direct The Wolf Man and much episodic TV including many installments of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Batman — was the assistant producer of White Savage, a Maria Montez film directed by Arthur Lubin. Waggner asked if Brooks wrote because they desperately needed a rewrite. It was his first movie job and Brooks made "$100 (weekly) plus a day or two prorated, and they put my name on (the screen) as 'additional dialogue,'" Brooks told McGilligan. White Savage wasn't the first film Brooks worked on to be released though — two others and a serial came first. He also hung on to the NBC gig and got the chance to write for Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. Brooks produced countless sentences and paragraphs and but still lacked a "written by" credit on a screenplay credit. Once he did and, later, when he directed, he'd impact filmmaking both during and beyond his life, often with social themes few would touch (though occasionally in a heavy-handed way). He also managed to write some novels on the side — while with the Marines during World War II, where he'd also crank out a couple of screenplays (including his first credited one on Cobra Woman, directed by Robert Siodmak and again starring Montez) and report for Stars & Stripes as well while learning about filmmaking from Frank Capra's motion picture unit and eventually on his own editing combat footage into documentaries while attached to the 2nd Marines, Photographic Unit. If the Allies only needed a typewriter to defeat the Axis, Brooks might have been a good option for the weapon. First comes the word…
Though Brooks' legend derives predominantly from his film legacy, he experienced his first rush of acclaim with the publication of his debut novel, written while stationed at Quantico at night in the bathroom, according to the account in Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks by Douglass K. Daniel. Several publishers rejected it until Edward Aswell at Harper & Brothers, who also edited Thomas Wolfe, agreed to take it — and he shocked Brooks further by telling him (after a few suggestions) they planned to publish in May 1945. This news flabbergasted Brooks who obtained a weekend pass to go to New York because Aswell insisted on informing him in person. Now Brooks had to return to Quantico where the top officers of the Corps about shit bricks when The New York Times published a big review of The Brick Foxhole soon after it hit shelves. (Orville Prescott's take was mixed, assessing it as compulsively readable but weak on characterization.) Its story of hate and intolerance within the Marines brought threats of court-martialing Brooks, since he'd ignored procedure and never submitted the novel to Marine officials for approval ahead of time. They wanted to avoid bad publicity, especially with all the good feelings as the war wound down. "There was nothing in that book that violated security, but their rules and regulations were not for that purpose alone," Brooks told Daniel. Aswell prepared to launch a P.R. counteroffensive with literary giants such as Sinclair Lewis and Richard Wright ready to stand by Brooks. In case you don't know the story of the novel, it concerns a Marine unit in its barracks and on leave in Washington. Through their wartime experiences, some of the men truly turned ugly, suspecting cheating wives and tossing hate against any non-white Christian. It turns out, though the real Marines let the matter drop, what bothered them
about the book wasn't the anti-Semitism or racist tendencies of the characters but the murder of a Marine some of the other Marines learn is gay. The U.S. Marines didn't want to promote the idea there might be homosexuals serving in the military. Ironically, they got their wish when The Brick Foxhole transferred to the big screen in 1947 as Crossfire. Brooks wasn't involved in the film version, but they made the murdered Army (The Marines even got to toss it off to another military branch entirely) soldier Jewish in the film. The film actually happens to be very good and was nominated for best picture and earned Robert Ryan his only Oscar nomination ever as supporting actor. What's even sadder is that Crossfire ends up being a much more powerful film against anti-Semitism than the creaky Gentleman's Agreement that took on the same subject that year and won best picture. If there weren't already enough ironic twinges in that story for you, Gentleman's Agreement, probably the grandfather of that tried-and-true staple "let a white guy be the hero of a story about another ethnic group" with Gregory Peck playing a Christian going undercover as a Jew to learn about anti-Semitism, won Elia Kazan his first directing Oscar. Edward Dmytryk, one of The Hollywood Ten, directed Crossfire, which dealt straight on with anti-Semitism and the effects of warfare on men. Then again, once Dmytryk served his jail time, he became the only one of the 10 to name names to HUAC because he wanted to work again.
While he didn't want to make a movie of The Brick Foxhole himself, another former newspaperman turned socially conscious film artist met with Brooks about working with his independent production company. At first, Mark Hellinger tried to lure Brooks away from Universal with the promise of doubling his salary if he'd adapt a play he liked into a movie, but before Brooks could consider that offer, Hellinger called with a more pressing matter. He was producing an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's famous short story The Killers. The problem: someone had to dream up what happened after the brief tale ends because it certainly wouldn't last 90 minutes otherwise. Hellinger flew Brooks out to meet Papa himself, but he didn't get much out of him but he did come up with an idea for what would happen after the story ends. Hellinger liked it and sent it to John Huston, who wrote the screenplay as a favor. Since both Brooks and Huston had contracts at other studios, neither got screen credits, so Ernest Hemingway's The Killers' official screenplay credit goes to Anthony Veiller, who received an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. He'd previously shared a nomination in the same category for Stage Door. The film also made a star out of Burt Lancaster, who would work with Brooks several times and be his lifelong friend. In fact, Lancaster would star in the next screenplay that Brooks wrote, a Mark Hellinger production directed by one of those people Edward Dmytryk eventually would name before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film, of course, would be the still-powerful Brute Force, the director, Jules Dassin.
John Huston wasn't happy. Producer Jerry Wald called him, excitement in his voice, to tell him he'd secured the rights to Maxwell Anderson's Broadway play Key Largo for Huston to direct. This didn't thrill Huston, who thought the play gave new meaning to the word awful. Written in blank verse, Anderson's play concerned a deserter from the Spanish-American War. People at a hotel do get taken hostage, but by Mexican hostages. Essentially, Huston tossed the play in the trash bin. Huston hired Brooks to co-write an in-title only version and, still pissed at Wald, barred him from the set. Part of Huston's anger stemmed from the HUAC nonsense, (His outrage would drive him to move to Ireland for a large part of the 1950s.) so he couldn't stomach adapting a play by Anderson whom he considered a reactionary because of his hate of FDR. Despite Huston's distaste for the project, he
turned it into a classic film with a little help from Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor in her Oscar-winning role and, last but certainly not least, Edward G. Robinson as exiled mobster Johnny Rocco, who likes to brag about the power he used to wield. "I made 'em — like a tailor makes a suit of clothes," he tells a former associate. Knowing the story of what happened prior to filming makes you chuckle when you see the credit that reads, "As Produced on the Spoken Stage." It's great to watch Robinson and Bogart go toe-to-toe. Rocco makes a particularly memorable first appearance, lounging upstairs in a hotel bathtub, looking in a way like a prediction of that famous photo of Dalton Trumbo that would be taken decades later. Bogart, updated to a returning WWII veteran, perfectly plays his role of Frank McCloud so that you never know if he's being savvy or scared of the crimnals terrorizing them. "You don't like it, do you Rocco, the storm? Show it your gun, why don't you? If it doesn't stop, shoot it," Frank says at one point, but when he gets a chance to grab a gun and take him out (though Rocco's men would certainly finish Frank afterward), he nonchalantly declares, "One Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for." The script's dialogue crackles and for additional fun touches we get a great Max Steiner score and the multitalented German émigré Karl Freund as cinematographer. The most remarkable thing that Huston did though was to invite Brooks to stay on the set during the film's shooting, something he'd never done as a writer and that he talked about in this YouTube video in 1985.
While I would have liked to have viewed more of Brooks' work that I've never seen (and to re-visit some which I have), time and availability, combined with his prolific nature and the industry's increasingly cavalier willingness to let both old and recent films fade into oblivion, proved to be a problem. After Huston's generosity, Brooks' directing debut would arrive two years later. Four films where Brooks worked
solely as a writer remained — the Paris-set spy thriller To the Victor; Any Number Can Play with Clark Gable as an underground casino owner advised by his doctor to get out of the business because of his heart disease; Mystery Street with detectives Ricardo Montalban and Wally Maher consult a Harvard forensics expert (Bruce Bennett) to solve a mystery when a decomposed body washes ashore; and Storm Warning, where model Ginger Rogers goes to visit her sister in a particularly unfriendly town and secretly witnesses a mob lynch a man that her sister (Doris Day) tells her was a reporter who denounced the KKK. Rogers' character gets a bigger shock when she realizes baby sis' husband participated in the lynching. After 1951, every film Brooks worked on he at least held the title of director, beginning with 1950's Crisis with Cary Grant as a doctor vacation with his wife in a small country when the dictator (José Ferrer) kidnaps them to force the doctor to treat his life-threatening condition. The doctor's ethics get tested by his oath and the idea that if he lets the man die, life for the country's people will improve. For a writing-directing debut, Brooks makes a pretty good start even if it doesn't come close to some of the films he wrote. His next four films as director and writer or co-writer I haven't seen, though I tried to watch the last one. The next film, The Light Touch (1952). starred George Sanders and Stewart Granger a collector of stolen art and an art thief, respectively, trying to get their hands on the masterpiece Granger stole and that his wife Pier Angeli stays busy counterfeiting
enters their lives. At the time, Granger was married in real life to Jean Simmons, who would become Brooks' second wife about 10 years later. The next two films both starred Bogart. First came Deadline-U.S.A. with Bogie playing an investigative reporter trying to expose a gangster as his paper faces imminent closing followed by Battle Circus co-starring June Allyson where they played medical personnel at a MASH unit during the Korean War. The final film, which I almost watched, was The Last Time I Saw Paris, based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and co-written by Brooks and the Epstein brothers, Van Johnson plays a former soldier returning to the city he liberated in the war, now despondent over his attempts to be a writer. He gets invited to parties with the city's beautiful people and finds one (Elizabeth Taylor) who enchants him. Unfortunately, the DVD transfer on Netflix’s rental copy proved abysmal. The Technicolor has faded beyond belief and it was filmed in an odd 1:75:1 spherical ratio, so every image looked distorted because they just flattened it full screen. After a few minutes, I had to shut it off. Apparently, it's a Warners Archive title now, but of course, they don't offer those for rental so the shitty DVDs will remain for people who don't believe in buying blind. I haven't caught his next two directing efforts either, but they stand out because they marked the first two times (and it only occurred three times) that Brooks directed screenplays written by someone else. In 1953, he directed Richard Widmark as a Korean War vet now serving as a tough drill instructor for new GIs bound for Korea while he's bitter that his request to return to Korea keeps being denied in Take the High Ground! In 1954, Brooks helmed Flame and the Flesh with Lana Turner as unlucky woman trying to get what she can for nothing visiting Europe who finds herself wooed by a gigolo.
With 1955, Brooks wrote and directed the first film that truly garnered him an identity as more than a writer who directs but as a director with Blackboard Jungle, a film that admittedly manages to look both dated and timely simultanouesly, First, as so many old films did, it had to start with a long scroll explaining that American schools maintain high standards, but we need to worry about these juvenile
deliquents before this gets out of hand. It gets off to a rockin' start — literally — with opening credits that can't help but make you think of the original beginning to TV's Happy Days as Bill Haley and the Comets get everything moving to "Rock Around the Clock" as new English teacher Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) arrives to work at all-boys high school North Manual Street. Most of the school overflows with miscreants, especially his class who start calling him "Daddy-O" to avoid pronouncing his name. (Though it's never been confirmed, many assume that the movie inspired Leiber & Stoller's lyric "Who called the English teacher Daddy-O?" in The Coasters' huge late '50s hit "Charlie Brown.") The ensemble Brooks assembled, including some of the "teens" who would make their names much later included Anne Francis as Dadier's pregnant (and, quite frankly, neurotic) wife; Louis Calhern as a veteran teacher left with nothing but cynicism and a
desire to beat the crap out of the punks; Richard Kiley as a nerdy math teacher with a love for jazz; Margaret Hayes as another new teacher who doesn't think about how she's dressing and nearly pays for it; Sidney Poitier as a student who appears to be one of the delinquents yet practices playing the piano and singing hymns; and Vic Morrow as the worst kid in the school, a downright criminal. Also, look for appearances by future writer-director Paul Mazursky as a student, Richard Deacon as a teacher and Jamie Farr as another student when he acted using the name Jameel Farah. While Blackboard Jungle offers much to praise, at times it comes off as too simplistic. It did dare to tackle bigotry and use the epithets. Sometimes, it feels eerily like the awful 1984 film Teachers. I kept expecting Calhern to turn out to be like the Royal Dano character and drop dead at his desk. I wonder what Brooks would have thought if he'd seen The Wire's fourth season. Blackboard Jungle earned Brooks his first Oscar nomination for best screenplay. Brooks' competition consisted of Millard Kaufman (who wrote Take the High Ground!) for Bad Day at Black Rock, Paul Osborn for East of Eden, Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart for Love Me or Leave Me and Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the teleplay that would be the basis for one of Brooks' 1956 films, for Marty. Chayefsky won his first Oscar. Nearly the entire cast excels in spite of some of the weaker parts of Blackboard Jungle (except Francis, burdened with a thankless role) but Morrow stands out in the ensemble as the worst punk.
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Labels: blacklist, Bogart, Capra, Cary, Dassin, Doris Day, Edward G., Fiction, Fitzgerald, Fuller, Ginger Rogers, Glenn Ford, Hemingway, Huston, Lancaster, Liz, Mazursky, Poitier, Robert Ryan, Widmark
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Monday, April 30, 2012
A vision for all — perhaps not meant for one man alone
NOTE: Ranked No. 11 on my all-time top 100 of 2012
"I was most jealous of Truffaut — in a friendly way — with Jules and Jim. I said, 'It's so good! How I wish I'd made it.' Certain scenes had me dying of jealousy. I said, 'I should've done that, not him.'" — Jean Renoir
By Edward Copeland
From the first time I saw Jules and Jim in high school, the movie became a personal touchstone and remains one as we mark its 50th anniversary. Truthfully, I know the parallels my teen eyes recognized between myself and others in my life then didn't mirror the characters on screen as closely as my imagination wanted to believe, but as that fantasy faded away, I began to appreciate more of the artistry of a film that I already loved. In addition to what Jules and Jim contains within its frames, the movie also forged the connection I've always felt with François Truffaut.
If you discovered, probably early in your life, that your genetic makeup left you susceptible to artistic impulses of some kind — it needn't matter whether that creative bent took the form of movies, writing, art, music, whatever — the odds weighed heavily toward you falling for at least one Catherine in your lifetime. (Now, I'm speaking from the point-of-view of a straight male. I wouldn't dare presume straight female or gay perspectives, though I've witnessed similar dynamics secondhand.) As far as we go, the Catherines of the real world function like those purple-hued bug zappers hanging on summer porches and inevitably drawing us like moths to their pulsating light and our doom — and we wouldn't trade one goddamn miserable minute of it if it meant losing a single second of the joy. This isn't a new phenomenon:
F. Scott had his Zelda and Tom had his Viv during the same era when Jules and Jim takes place. (A brief aside: I think Tom sent me a personal message from the past when he published The Waste Land in 1922 and penned those lines, "April is the cruellest month.") To casual and outside observers, proclaiming that Catherine must be crazy comes rather easily and mounting a counterargument against that assumption makes for a steep climb. Yes, our real world Catherines come with a fair amount of mental instability, as do we, but without our neuroses and idiosyncrasies, we probably wouldn't be drawn to these wild, wonderful, wounding women in the first place. Of course, Henri-Pierre Roché's novel and François Truffaut's film take the men's point-of-view, even when filtered through Michel Sobor's narration, so Jules and Jim aren't portrayed as being as unstable as Catherine. The closest the male friends come shows through Jules' fear and neediness at times. As for the Catherines of the real world, people do have the capacity for change, no matter what David Chase might believe, and can end up being vital parts of your life even as you become the one holding the monopoly on the madness in the friendship. It's a cliché, but it originates from truth: Most of the best art stems from suffering. Anyone remember Billy Joel during the years when he and Christie Brinkley were happily married? Jules and Jim, for me at least, represents a cinematic temple to that idea. Of course, it also begs the question that if misery breeds great art, why in the hell haven't I accomplished something of note?
Jules and Jim made its U.S. premiere April 23, 1962, the same year the film made its initial debut in France on Jan. 23. Though it marked Truffaut's third feature film as a director following The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim was only the second of his films to reach U.S. movie theaters. Shoot the Piano Player, though it opened elsewhere in 1960, wouldn't get its U.S. release until July 23, 1962. (Like Jules and Jim, The 400 Blows reached U.S. shores in the same year, 1959, that Truffaut's directing
debut did elsewhere, just a few months later.) As I remind people as often as possible, all opinions about movies are subjective. Before beginning my lovesick tribute to what I think holds the title as the true masterpiece born of the French New Wave, I feel that I shouldn't pretend all critics agreed about Jules and Jim and I'd allow one to have his say before I got started. "With the years, I've sometimes felt the reputation of Jules and Jim is a bit exaggerated," this former critic said to Richard Roud, then-director of the New York Film Festival, in October 1977 on a television program called Camera Three. The ex-critic added, "and that I was too young when I made it." That appearance happened to be François Truffaut's first time on American television. I guess you can remove the man from the role of film critic but you can't take the critic out of the man. "I continue to re-read the book every year. It was one of my favorites. I've often felt that the film was too decorative, not cruel enough, that love was crueler that that," Truffaut went on to tell Roud. Now, François, don't be so hard on yourself. For those who haven't seen Jules and Jim, I'll be vague, I think you could call the film's dénouement fairly devastating. Besides, most recognize (or know from experience) that cruelty usually crosses love's path at some point. On top of that, the subject cuts too close to Truffaut for him to judge. Jules and Jim may speak to me in personal ways, but that isn't why the film rests among my 20 favorite films of all time. As John Houseman used to claim in TV commercials about how Smith Barney made money, Jules and Jim got that rank on my list "the old-fashioned way. It earned it."
While I knew that Jules and Jim originated as a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, it wasn't until I obtained the Criterion edition that I learned that Roché loosely based it on his relationship with Franz Hessel, a German writer who translated Proust into German (as Jim does in the film) and Helen Grund, who became Hessel's wife and herself translated Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita into German. Legend has it that Roché also introduced Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso through his original career as an art dealer and art collector. Though the circles that Roché circulated in preceded the time period of Woody Allen's recent Midnight in Paris, he did know many of the literary and artistic figures depicted in Allen's fantasy. The real-life coincidences that brought Truffaut and Roché together border on the extraordinary. Truffaut
stumbled upon the novel in a secondhand bookstore and it led to a letter-writing relationship between himself and Roché where the young critic Truffaut promised that if he ever made movies, he would bring Jules and Jim to the screen. Jules and Jim was the first novel that Roché ever wrote — which he did at the age of 74. His second novel, also autobiographical, Two English Girls and the Continent, eventually became the source material of a later Truffaut film, Two English Girls. Two English Girls, sort of the inverse of Jules and Jim with two women pining for the same man, marks its 40th anniversary this year but unfortunately, like too many other great films I'd like to write about this year, no proper DVD copy has been made for rental or at a reasonable price, the same situation that in the past two years has befallen other films such as Steven Soderbergh's Kafka, Barbet Schroeder's Barfly with its great performances by Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway and two of John Sayles' very best films — City of Hope and Matewan. Who said only old classics become lost films? With the constant format changes, some never made the leap from pan-and-scanned VHS. A true travesty, but I've digressed from the subject at hand. Roché didn't live long enough to see the movie of his first novel, but the film version brought best-seller status to his book that it never saw in his lifetime. One aspect that didn't occur to me until I re-watched the movie for this tribute: Not only has the film reached its 50th anniversary this year, 2012 also means a full century has passed from where its story begins in 1912.
The film starts in blackness — literally if you were in a French-speaking country or watching without subtitles. You hear a voice (Jeanne Moreau's as Catherine, though we wouldn't know that yet) say, "You said, 'I love you.' I said, 'Wait.' I was about to say, 'Take me.' You said, 'Go.'" Then, quite abruptly, Truffaut launches us into the film's imagery with a bouncy spirit, playing music beneath the credits that seems to herald that a carnival lies ahead courtesy of prolific film composer Georges Delerue, who scores the entire film, though it won't all sound like this energetic romp which accompanies clips, some of scenes that will arrive later in the film, others that just fit the tone of the piece — such as Jules and Jim jokingly fencing with brooms. As with many others, Delerue would collaborate with Truffaut on nearly all of his films, having first worked on Shoot the Piano Player. We'll also get a glimpse of an hourglass, its sand pouring through to clue us in advance of the importance the passage of time serves in the story. We see our first swift sightings of Moreau as Catherine, though her actual entrance
into the film doesn't occur immediately. While Catherine certainly acts as the catalyst for most events in Jules and Jim, her name isn't in the title for a reason. At its heart, Jules and Jim spins a story of friendship between two men. Oskar Werner's Jules acts as the outsider, the Austrian in Paris, until Henri Serre's Jim takes him beneath his wing, acting, quite literally, in the early days of their acquaintance as Jules' wingman. As with many Truffaut films, Jules and Jim employs a narrator (Michel Subor) not only to for exposition purposes but because Truffaut wanted to maintain as much of Roché's prose as possible in the adaptation he co-wrote with Jean Gruault. Jules and Jim's friendship begins when Jules, the foreigner in Paris, approaches Jim blindly to see if the Frenchman might wrangle him an invitation to the Quatres Arts Ball. Jim succeeds and a friendship blossoms as they search for a slave costume for Jules to wear to the event. From that, the men began to teach one another the other's language and culture and shared their poems,
which they'd translate into the other's native tongue. Before long, the men saw each other every day, talking endlessly, finding common ground such as, the narrator informs us, "a relative indifference toward money." The omniscient voice also tells the viewer, "They chatted easily. Neither had ever had such an attentive listener." Jules though lacks luck when it comes to love in Paris, even of the transitory kind while Jim draws women to him as if he were a magnet. Jim finds getting women so easy that he willingly hands some off to Jules, including a musician. "They were in love for about a week." This early setup runs us through the women, most of whom bear little importance to the story so they receive scant attention from the film. Desperate for some amorous action, Jules even ignores Jim's warning to stay away from the "professionals" only to learn that he should have trusted Jim's word and avoided the disappointment. This changes one evening, when the men encounter a woman named Thérèse (Marie Dubois) seeking refuge from her loutish anarchist boyfriend who blames her for a shortage of paint that he thinks will make people believe that anarchists don't know how to spell.
What separates Jules' and Jim's relationship with Thérèse from what lies ahead with Catherine comes from Thérèse clearly indicating a preference between the two men, in this case Jules. Though Dubois' role takes up very little screen time, she does prove a charmer (and remember that U.S. moviegoers, at the time of Jules and Jim's release, had yet to see her film debut as the waitress Lena in love with Charles Aznavour's piano-playing Charlie in Truffaut's second feature, Shoot the Piano Player). When they return to the house,
Jules acts the part of the gentleman, offering Thérèse his bed while he sleeps in a rocking chair, but romance occurs quickly and rectifies that situation. That hourglass first spotted in the opening credits reappears and Jules explains that he prefers it to a clock. When all the sand passes through to the bottom, that means it's time to go to sleep, he explains. She simply smiles and tells him he's sweet. Thérèse demonstrates for Jules her trick that she calls "the steam engine." She places a lit cigarette in her mouth and puffs out her cheeks like a blowfish and then chugs in a circle in the bedroom until she has reached Jules' chair, one of the many, recurrent visuals of circular imagery that Truffaut utilizes in the film. You shouldn't feel bad for Jim — he's busy bedding his frequent lover Gilberte (Vanna Urbino) and making excuses to depart her bed before the sun rises despite her request to lie beside her for a complete night for a change. Jim nixes that idea, saying that if they did that they might as well be married and she'd expect him to stay the next night as well. Gilberte expresses skepticism at his excuse, especially when he suggests that she imagine he's working at a factory, betting that his plan involves sleeping until noon. Later that night, Jules, Jim and Thérèse go to a café and no sooner have they sat down that after making eyes at another
man, Thérèse asks Jules for some change to play music. He complies, she takes the money and the man follows her. Thérèse asks if she can stay with him that night and the two depart. Jules starts to stand in outrage, but Jim grabs his arm and he sits back down. "Lose one, find 10 more," Jim advises. Jules admits that he didn't love Thérèse. "She was both mother and doting daughter at the same time," Jules says, sighing that he doesn't have luck with Parisian women. He shows Jim photos of some of the women back home he loves, presenting them in order of preference and contemplating returning for one of them in a couple of months if the situation in France doesn't change. However, Jules lacks a photograph of one named Helga so he sketches her in broad strokes on the café's table. Jim tries to buy the table, but the establishment's owner refuses unless he purchases the entire set.
That night, they go to the home of Jules' friend Albert (played by Serge Rezvani, a renaissance artist, though he prefers the term multidisciplinarian, who billed himself as Bassiak here and added the first name Boris when taking credit as the composer of "Le Tourbillon" that Moreau memorably sings) to see his slides of ancient sculptures he found around the country. (Somehow it slips my mind between viewings of Jules and Jim how little dialogue the actors actually get to speak openly in the film in favor of voiceover. For example, when Jules and Jim enter Albert's place, they exchange introductions out loud but then Henri Serre as Jim doesn't simply ask Oskar Werner's Jules, "Who's Albert?" Instead, we hear Michel Subor's narrator say, "Jim asked" — When I first heard
this the first few times I watched the film, it sounded as if Subor narrated this entire dialogue. After hearing it for the umpteenth time, it sounds as if Subor merely starts it the Serre asks in voiceover, "Who's Albert?" with Werner's voice replying, "A friend to artists and sculptors. He knows everyone who'll be famous in 10 years." I can't say with 100% certainty which interpretation stands as the correct answer. I've looked for verification, but found none. Jules' response tipped me in that direction because Werner's voice can be distinguished easily from Subor's while Serre's falls in the same vocal range.) One slide of a stone face particularly strikes the friends' fancy — and Subor definitely
describes this, informing the viewer, "The tranquil smile of the crudely sculpted face mesmerized them. The statue was in an outdoor museum on an Adriatic island. They set out immediately to see it. They both had the same white suit made. They spent an hour by the statue. It exceeded their expectations. They walked rapidly around it in silence. They didn't speak of it until the next day. Had they ever met such a smile? Never. And if they ever did, they'd follow it. Jules and Jim returned home, full of this revelation. Paris took them gently back in." Later, Jules and Jim hit the gym where they spar with some kickboxing. Jules inquires about the progress of Jim's book. Jim tells him he thinks it's going well and will turn out to be very autobiographical and concern their friendship. He proceeds to read Jules a passage. "Jacques and Julien were inseparable. Julien's last novel had been a success. He had described, as if in a fairy tale, the women he had known before he met Jacques or even Lucienne. Jacques was proud for Jules' sake. People called them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and rumors circulated behind their
backs about their unusual friendship. They ate together in small restaurants, and each splurged on the best cigars to give the other." Jules finds the writing beautiful and offers to translate it to German. Jim's brief allusion in his novel to "rumors" about his friendship with Jules marks the closest the film ever comes to implying anything homoerotic between the men. While Jules and Jim opened the door for many cinematic variations on your standard triangle, we'd still need almost 40 years before Y Tu Mama Tambien. As the guys shower, Jules announces that his cousin wrote him and three girls that studied with him in Munich would be visiting Paris — one from Berlin, one from Holland and one from there in France, Jules plans to host a dinner for the visitors the next night. Neither friend has any idea who Catherine happens to be yet or that she will be the French girl in that group of visitors. This Quixote and Sancho soon will be tilting at a very shapely and unpredictable windmill that will change the course of all three lives forever. The next night, when Catherine (Moreau) descends the stairs and lifts the lace netting covering her face, her resemblance to the sculpture stuns Jules and Jim, something Truffaut emphasizes through quick cuts, and Michel Subor's narration, and the young men will keep the oath they made to that statue — they've found that smile, now they must follow it.
While for me, Jules and Jim stands at the high watermark of the French New Wave films, I know many others won't agree and when you look objectively at the story of Jules and Jim, it may employ many of that movement's techniques but many aspects of Truffaut's film set it apart from its cinematic brethren such as its period setting and a time span that covers more than two decades. Jules and Jim also caused moral uproars about the open relationships among the various characters in the film (and though Jules, Jim and Catherine might be involved simultaneously, they never took part in a ménage à trois). In a funny way, the 1962 film forecast the free love movement to come later that decade except its source material happened to be a semiautobiographical novel set in the early part of the 20th century. The prurience though lies in the mind of the fuddy duddy because part of what makes Jules and Jim so special comes from Truffaut's refusal to pass any judgment, be it positive or negative, upon the behavior of his characters. Despite the director's own criticism many years down the road that the film isn't cruel enough when it comes to love, the three main characters do suffer by the end but he doesn't paint it as punishment for their sins.
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Labels: 60s, Books, Criticism, Dunaway, Fiction, Fitzgerald, Foreign, Mickey Rourke, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Sayles, Soderbergh, Truffaut, Woody
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Friday, April 13, 2012
Pragmatic anarchy
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post concludes my main tribute piece to Robert Altman's The Player.
If you started reading here, click this and read the first part of the post before you read this.
When we met Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), he already carried a heavy load of burdens. Rumors swirled that his financially struggling studio would replace him soon, a hot executive at Fox named Larry Levy seemed to be "in his face" all the time and a screenwriter whose calls he never returned kept sending him threatening postcards. Oh, how Griffin longs for those good old days. Now, Pasadena police suspect he killed screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) — which he did, Levy (Peter Gallagher) has landed at Mill's studio and, perhaps most distressing of all his plights, it turns out that Kahane wasn't the writer threatening him — and those continue. Only one bright spot shines in the dark hole that Griffin dug himself into and she happens to be the intriguing June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), girlfriend to the late David Kahane. Trying to date her would look improper so soon after David's death and it wouldn't be a nice thing for Griffin to do to his girlfriend and executive assistant Bonnie (Cynthia Stevenson), the film's most decent character. My return visit to the Hollywood of Robert Altman's The Player clarified to me the pivotal roles the two women, particularly June, serve in making The Player much more than just a satire or even a thriller.
I never read Michael Tolkin's original novel The Player, but I did read his sequel The Return of The Player. While on the DVD commentary, Tolkin ultimately blamed himself for what changed in the movie from his novel, much of his tone on the disc tasted bitter, including frequent references to how he never wanted the novel turned into a film in the first place (something that sounds particularly odd given that he wrote and produced the movie as well as created and wrote a pilot for a proposed TV series version that never aired). Though Tolkin's name appears alone as the credited screenwriter, based on the sequel novel and what Robert Altman
said on the DVD, I have to believe that the director sparked the transformation of the novel's June into the June of the film. Based on The Return of The Player, June isn't a cypher of a character who says she comes from Iceland (though when asked by Griffin at a later time if she really hails from there, she responds, "Did I say that?") Altman said that he wanted June to be like an alien, almost to the point that you could believe she exists only in Griffin's imagination. I don't think Altman meant anyone to take that literally — June Gudmunsdottir definitely exists — but she does function as the only person in the film who doesn't speak Hollywood. She and Griffin both may communicate in English, but they speak entirely different languages and that's part of the attraction. June paints and creates other types of art, but when Griffin asks where she shows her work, she tells him she doesn't. For a man who greenlights movies for production so they eventually can be seen, this makes no sense to him. He inquires why June doesn't try to display her works in a gallery and she explains that it's because she never finishes them. The reason for their renewed contact after one phone call comes courtesy of David Kahane's funeral, which Griffin feels compelled to attend. When the graveside services end, June approaches him, recognizing immediately that he doesn't look like the other mourners, all writers. When Griffin explains who he is and that they spoke the night of Kahane's death, June remembers, adding, "You're the only person I know here." Griffin offers the standard funeral apology and tells June that David "was a real talent." She looks surprised. "You think so? I always suspected he was uniquely untalented," June declares, free of emotion before begging Griffin to drive her home because she can't deal with what's expected of her from the others. These people.I don't like it here. They're all expecting me to grieve and mourn. I can't talk to them. David's gone and I'm somewhere else already," she tells Griffin, who seems to be showing more genuine regret about Kahane's death than the slain writer's girlfriend.
Cynicism seeps from the pores of all the characters in The Player to some degree, though most would call it a pragmatic and realistic attitude spawned by the industry in which they work. Bonnie Sherow and Griffin Mill speak the same language — that's why they work (and play) well together. Admittedly, Griffin keeps his guard up, even with Bonnie. As they relax in his hot tube one night where she reads him part of a horribly lurid script, Griffin tries to talk to her about the threats he's received, but he phrases it in the form of a movie pitch, making the victim someone who works in advertising. He wants her opinion on how many months of these threats it would take before the sender should be considered dangerous. Thinking he's actually discussing a pitch someone gave him, she responds sourly, "Does he have to be in advertising?" Bonnie can be tough on her assistant Whitney (Gina Gershon) and likewise Griffin can point out when Bonnie makes a social faux pas ("Never bring up script changes at a party"), but, at least at the beginning, nothing comes off as mean-spirited. She also displays a wit as cutting as anyone when the opportunity presents itself. When Larry Levy conducts his exercise in picking newspaper stories to show he can envision movies without needing a writer, Bonnie latches on to the headline, "Further bond losses push Dow down." Before Levy responds, she quickly adds, "I see Connery as Bond." Bonnie's unambiguous sense of right and wrong and her streak of moral clarity distiguish her from the rest of her universe. It almost goes without saying that some sort of doom awaits her.
Altman always had a great eye for casting, even if he did tend to return to his unofficial repertory company time and again, but hiring Cynthia Stevenson to play Bonnie might have been the best choice since, of the performers in The Player's major roles, she was the least-known to most. I had followed her for some time, first noticing her on a very short-lived, quirky and one-of-a-kind show called My Talk Show which was an unusual sitcom where she played a young woman who hosted a Wisconsin talk show from her living room mostly with friends and neighbors as guests, often while she did other things, though celebrities wandered through town sometimes such as William Shatner and, to my joyous surprise, there's a YouTube clip. Altman said that he came close to hiring Julianne Moore for the role of Bonnie, but decided she was "too glamorous" and he wanted someone who didn't look like an actress. He'd seen Stevenson on an episode of Cheers (She appeared twice in the later seasons as Norm's secretary who suffered from extremely low self-esteem.) When Altman informed Stevenson that the role required her to take off her top for the hot tub scene, the actress couldn't believe it. "Why me? No one has ever asked me to take my top off?" Altman said she asked him. "That's the reason," he responded. As he explained, that afforded him another chance to upset expectations and Hollywood conventions. "You never see Greta Scacchi nude," he pointed out. He wanted to use Stevenson's nudity to comment on the beauty in all types of female nudity, not just the usual kind you see in movies, as well as the state of Bonnie and Griffin's relationship.
While Bonnie, like Alan Rudolph's movie pitch, has heart in the right spot, the question of whether a cardiac organ beats within June's chest remains unresolved, despite Kahane telling Griffin sarcastically that Mill and June both were "all heart." The late screenwriter's nicknames for his girlfriend and the movie executive though seem to be honest assessments: June's the Ice Queen, Griffin's The Dead Man. Bonnie gave Griffin a tenuous hold on humanity and, ironically, his killing of Kahane actually brought Mill to life. "Although the novel was very much about Hollywood, I also was really writing about guilt," Tolkin said on the DVD. June's manner, tone shows stays at a constant level no matter what has happened, almost like a flatline on a heart
monitor. When Griffin takes her home after David's burial, she immediately starts working on the art she never finishes or sells. She asks Mill why he met with Kahane that night and Griffin tells her that he planned to share an idea he'd thought of that would improve his script. When she says, "the Japan story," Griffin fears he'll be caught, so he gets vague, suggesting that it needed an "up" ending before asking June what she thought of the ending. "I never read it. I don't like reading," she admits. This woman intrigues Griffin further. She doesn't go to movies/ She doesn't like reading. "Do you like books?" he inquires. "I like words and letters, but I'm not crazy about complete sentences," she tells him. June then asks Griffin to place his face behind this shower curtain so she can photograph it. She plans to put him in one of her paintings, one of an Icelandic hero. "He's a thief and he's made of fire. You might not like that," June says. Griffin asks her why. She figures that given his job, he couldn't see thieves as heroes. "I don't know about that. We have a long tradition of gangsters in movies," Griffin informs her with a smile. The exchange that follows illuminates Griffin's thoughts clearly, but makes June more mysterious.
JUNE: Yes, but they always have to suffer for their crimes, don't they?
GRIFFIN: We should pay for our crimes, shouldn't we?
JUNE: I think knowing you've committed a crime is suffering enough. If you don't suffer, maybe it wasn't a crime after all. Anyway — what difference does it make? It has nothing to do with how things really are.
GRIFFIN: Do you really believe that?
JUNE: I don't know what I believe, Mr. Mill. It's just what I feel.
GRIFFIN: You know what you are, June whatever-your-name-is? A pragmatic anarchist.
JUNE: Is that what I am? I never was sure.
Of course, if Griffin succeeds at juggling his women and getting away with murder, he still must contend with the matter of the shaky hold on his job and the stalking screenwriter who lurks somewhere, probably with a fair idea of why David Kahane got killed in a movie
theater parking lot and who did it. (The film never spells out explicitly the identity of the real stalker, though Altman did on the commentary track of the old Criterion laserdisc edition of The Player. I wrote about it in my sidebar Untold Stories of Robert Altman's The Player or Who the Hell is Thereza Ellis? if you haven't read that and would like to know.) While looking at dailies at the studio, he gets a message from a Joe Gillis telling him to meet him at the patio bar of the St. James Club that night alone. Griffin actually has to ask the others in the screening room if they've heard of a Joe Gillis and studio president Levison (Brion James) informs him that Gillis is the name of the character William Holden played in Sunset Blvd. "You know, the screenwriter who gets killed by the movie star." Mill tries to laugh it off, saying the guy called before claiming to be Charles Foster Kane. When he goes to the hotel that night, he runs into the two most over=the-top characters in the film — writer-director Tom Oakley (Richard E. Grant) and Andy Civella (Dean Stockwell). If the movie they corner Griffin into listening to a pitch for weren't so pivotal to one of the biggest laughs in movie history, they might a bit too annoying. Griffin does his best to get rid of them, but he relents and Tom takes over.
TOM: We open outside the largest penitentiary in California. It's night. It's raining. A limousine comes through the gate past demonstrators holding a candlelight vigil. The candles under the umbrellas glow like Japanese lanterns.
GRIFFIN: That's nice. I haven't seen that before.
TOM: A lone demonstrator, a black woman, steps in front of the limousine. The lights illuminate her like a spirit. Her eyes fix upon those of the sole passenger. The moment is devastating between them.
GRIFFIN: He's the D.A. She's the mother of the person being executed.
ANDY: You're good! I told you he's good.
TOM: The D.A. believes in the death penalty and the execution is a hard case — black and definitely guilty. The greatest democracy in the world, and 42 percent of people on death row are black. Poor, disadvantaged black. He swears the next person he sees to die will be smart, rich and white. Cut from the D.A. To an up-market suburban neighborhood. A couple have a fight. He leaves in a fit, gets in a car. It's the same rainy night. The car spins out and goes into a ravine. The body is swept away. When the police examine the car, they find the brakes have been tampered with. It's murder, and the D.A. decides to go for the big one. He's going to put the wife in the gas chamber. but the D.A. falls in love with the wife.
GRIFFIN: Of course.
TOM: But he puts her in the gas chamber anyway. Then he finds that the husband is alive. That he faked his death. The D.A. breaks into the prison, runs down death row -- but he gets there too late. The gas pellets have been dropped. She's dead. I tell you, there's not a dry eye in the house.
GRIFFIN: She's dead?
TOM: She's dead because that's the reality. The innocent die.
GRIFFIN: Who's the D.A.?
TOM: No stars on this project. We're going out on a limb on this one. This story is too fucking important to risk being overwhelmed by personality. We don't want people coming with any preconceived notions. We want them to see a district attorney.
ANDY: (whispering) Bruce Willis.
TOM: Not Bruce Willis or Kevin Costner. This is an innocent woman fighting for her life.
ANDY: (whiapering) Julia Roberts.
Griffin tells Tom his pitch had more than 25 words. "But it was brilliant. What's the verdict?" Andy asks. Griffin doesn't betray his thoughts one way or the other when a waiter comes by with a postcard he says a man left for him at the front desk. It reads, "I TOLD YOU TO COME ALONE!" Mill gets up, telling Tom and Andy that the person he was waiting to meet isn't coming. Andy pushes again for an answer about a deal and Mill admits it's an intriguing idea and suggests they call him at the studio the next day. Griffin returns to his Range Rover and finds a note on his steering wheel suggesting he look beneath his raincoat, which covers something on the passenger seat's floor. He lifts the coat and finds a metal box that reads, "DO NOT OPEN TIL XMAS." He flips it open anyway and discovers a live, hissing rattlesnake inside. Scared shitless, he drives erratically until he gets to the side of the road, gets an umbrella from the back of the vehicle and beats the snake to death while cursing the mystery writer. In his rage, paranoia and vulnerability, Griffin drives to June's.
The Player remains one of Tim Robbins' best performances and the scene where he arrives disheveled in the middle of the night at June's gives him his finest in the movie. It also provides the most solid evidence of the multiple layers the movie functions on. Altman may have called The Player at one point in his commentary possibly the "most contrived" film he ever made (which, quite frankly, I can't imagine a more ludicrous statement coming from the great filmmaker who had films such as Beyond Therapy, Quintet and Ready to Wear in his filmography), but Robbins gets to a deep core of emotional truth here. His brush with death via snake prompts him to try to confess to June, but it's as if she knows intuitively and doesn't want him to confirm it. He admits that she was all he could think about when he saw the snake and thought it would kill him. "Are you making love to me?" she asks. He says he supposes that he is; he knows he wants to make love to her. "It's too soon. It's so strange how things happen. David was here, then he left. You arrived. Maybe it's just the timing, but I feel like I
would go anywhere with you if you asked, but we mustn't hurry things. We can't hurry things any more than we can stop them," June tells him. Most of the many times I've watched The Player before, it seemed clear to me that Griffin pursued June. This time, it looked more to me as if she was pulling him into her web. Both the DVD and the dear departed laserdisc contain the same deleted scene that I found to be a rarity among deleted scenes. Most of the time, you view them and you see exactly why the scissors snipped them out of the final cut. One of The Player's cut scenes I've always thought to be an exception and I hadn't thought of it in awhile. When Griffin and June finally start dating, they go on a trip to the Two Bunch Palms resort. The film abounds with posters and references to noir and crime movies as it is, why not plant the idea that June could be a most unusual type of femme fatale? Immediately before they leave on the trip and Bonnie learns he's embarking with another woman, Altman shoots a close-up of a movie poster for M. At the resort, Griffin gets greeted as Mr. M. and his reserved seat at dinner has a card with the same shortened name and courtesy title. They stay in the cabin Al Capone used when he visited California. June leaves her purse open on a dresser and Griffin notices that she's packing a gun. She tells him that
Kahane got it for her and, in fact, had it in his satchel the night he got killed. She wondered why David wasn't able to use it. The cut scene set at the resort cast an entirely new aura of mystery about her character. One masterful scene set kept in the film captures the consummation of Griffin and June's relationship. Not only did Altman not use nudity, he filmed their lovenaking entirely from the neck up, but it never gets the notice it deserves when it's competing with eight-minute single takes and 60 celebrity cameos. Regardless, you definitely see with certainty that as the movie progresses and Griffin spends more time with June and less with Bonnie, he becomes a more soulless creature. If June isn't a femme fatale or an alien as Altman suggested, she's some kind of vampire, and on the ethical scale of the film, June doesn't even seem to register, floating above it in an amoral cloud as Bonnie stays on the moral side and Griffin weighs down the immoral one further and further. In the DVD video interview, Altman admits that the scene was the very last one to be taken out and, if he was making The Player when they did that interview, he would probably have kept it in. The tightrope that Altman walked while juggling the various styles and genres in The Player without ending up with a complete mess boggles the mind.
The final subversion of expectations comes with Griffin's ultimate victory on all levels. First, he tricks Levy into selling Levison on producing Tom and Andy's no-stars-woman dies movie (titled Habeas Corpus). Levy sound leery at first, especially about having no name actors playing the leads, but Mill tells him that Levison made his reputation on two hits with nobodies and his motto used to be, "No stars, just talent." Afterward, he confides to his secretary Jan that he just set Levy up with a dog of a script with no second act and a downbeat ending, but Levison will do it because he's hot to make a movie with him and when they both fall on their faces, he'll sweep in and save the day. Poor Bonnie though has been seeing through Griffin for a while.
"Why are you bullshitting me? You never used to bullshit me," she tells him at one point. The Pasadena police appear to be closing in on him, having found a witness, so Griffin faces a lineup. However, the lady with fairly poor eyesight ends up picking the police detective played by Lyle Lovett. "That's him! I swear on my mother's grave," the woman declares. Detective Avery asks the woman if she can be personal and then inquires, "Where the fuck is your mother buried?" As Griffin walks out of the courthouse a free man, his defense attorney states the obvious of how that witness really made his case by picking that cop out of the lineup. A title card appears telling us it's one year later and we see several stars, obviously playing parts before the witness room of a gas chamber. We realize that we're seeing the ending moments of Habeas Corpus. The camera moves down the hall of the execution unit and we see that, yes, Julia Roberts indeed is playing the part of the condemned wife. She's led off to the gas chamber, strapped in and fumes start to rise when suddenly a guard yells into a phone, "WHAT?!" A man comes running down the hallway. Understandably, it's Bruce Willis. He grabs a shotgun, blows out the glass of the gas chamber runs in and whisks Julia to safety. "What took you so long?" she asks. "Traffic was a bitch," he replies. THE END.
Many movies have made me laugh in my lifetime, but few offer moments so funny that just thinking about them — even months later — can cause convulsions of chuckling. Off the top of my head, I recall two. One comes from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut when the Army
general tries to show his plan to his troops, but Windows 98 keeps crashing so he orders men to bring Bill Gates to him. "You told us that Windows 98 would be faster, and more efficient with better access to the Internet!" the general yells at Gates. "It is faster! Over five million — " That's all Gates gets to say before the general blows his head off to the cheers of his troops. I didn't hear the cheers. The theater audience and I were too busy laughing and applauding. Habeas Corpus in The Player takes the prize for the other moment. When I first saw this film in a screening and I saw Julia Roberts, I started to laugh, but then when Bruce Willis barrels in and grabs the shotgun, I literally was on the floor. I had to watch
the movie two or three times until I could concentrate on what took place after the moment. It pushed me into that heavy a fit of hysterical laughter. Eventually, I did see what happened as Bonnie turned to Tom Oakley in the screening room, asking him how he could have sold out. "What about truth? What about reality? she asks the writer-director. What about the way the old ending tested in Canoga Park? Everybody hated it. We reshot it, now everybody loves it. That’s reality," Tom tells her. Bonnie stands her ground, insisting that it didn't have to end this way. Larry Levy shakes his head, tells her it's a hit and that's why they work there before firing her. Bonnie promises to go over his head. As she marches toward the president's office, breaking a heel on the way, Claire
tries to stop her. She begs to see him. "I'm not just me. I'm also the job." Claire informs her, before feeling sorry and going in where Walter and retrieves basketballs that Griffin shoots from his spot in the president's chair. Claire tells him that Bonnie wants to see him. "Did Levy fire her?" he asks. "Looks that way," she replies. Griffin declares he can't talk to her now and gets up to head home. On the way out the door, Jan informs him that Levy is on the phone for him. He tells her to wait a few minutes then transfer it to the car. Bonnie tries
to get Griffin’s attention. "Bonnie, don't worry. I know you'll kind on your feet," Mill tells her as he gets in his car. He takes the Levy call and it's a pitch from a writer, but not just any writer, one who used to sell postcards. He describes a story about a movie executive who is being threatened by a screenwriter so he kills him, only he kills the wrong guy. The twist: He gets away with it. He ends up married to the dead writer's girlfriend and it's a happy ending. Mill asks Levy to get off the line so he can talk to the writer alone. "Can you guarantee that ending?" Griffin asks. "If the price is right, you got it," the writer replies. Griffin tells him that if it's guaranteed, it's a deal and inquires about the title. "The Player," the writer answers. "The Player. I like that," Griffin says as he pulls into his driveway where a very pregnant June waits. "What took you so long?" June asks. "Traffic was a bitch," Griffin replies as he puts his arm around her and leads her into the house. Altman and Tolkin's funhouse mirror has turned back around on itself again for its final, perfect closing moment. What started in flat-out satire, ends in irony with plenty of suspense, truth and reality managing to sneak into the picture along the way. Altman couldn't live forever, but don't we deserve someone close to his daring and talent? (First one to mention Paul Thomas Anderson gets spit on.) I fear a large part of my interest in new movies somehow died the moment he did.
Labels: 90s, Altman, Books, Connery, Dean Stockwell, Fiction, Holden, Julianne Moore, Movie Tributes, Shatner, South Park, Television, Tim Robbins
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