Shout is a rightfully forgotten movie in the John Travolta canon. It was released—barely—in 1991 and occupies a space in his oeuvre between two of his greatest successes, Look Who’s Talking (commercial success, 1989) and Pulp Fiction (commercial and critical success, 1994). Shout is like a mash-up of Footloose and Dead Poets Society, both of which the screenwriter Joe Gayton seems to have studied in exhaustive detail. The story takes place in a repressive small town in which rock and roll music is looked upon as verboten. And the chief proponent of rock and roll in the story is a music teacher played by Travolta, who introduces his students to the new sound’s joyfully rebellious beat.
The story is set in Texas in the very early 1950s just as the term rock and roll was first being coined. Travolta’s character comes to a boys’ reform school in the hinterlands of Texas to lead the student band. Travlota has relatively little screen time in the movie. His character’s obvious purpose is to inspire his wayward students the same way Robin Williams does his prep school boys in Dead Poets Society. Travolta does this by introducing rock and roll music into the Souza March program the band is supposed to be rehearsing for a patriotic town gathering. In the end, he shows his lost boys that rock and roll has the power to transcend race and class and one’s own emotional limitations, the same belief that now fuels such Broadway musicals as Hairspray and Memphis.
The most rebellious student is played by James Walters. After ringing a bell in a church tower to wake up the whole sleepy town, he is arrested and taken to the Benedict Home for Boys. (That Benedict name is a gratuitous nod to the Benedict clan of George Stevens’ 1956 adaptation of Edna Ferber’s, Giant, probably the most famous book and movie about the state of Texas.) The home is run by Richard Jordan, who is the designated heavy here and serves the same tyrannical function as John Lithgow’s minister in Footloose and Norman Lloyd’s headmaster in Dead Poets Society. Of course, Jordan’s college-age daughter (played by the fetching but forever acting-challenged Heather Graham) ends up falling in love with bad boy Walters.
The movie is directed by choreographer Jeffrey Hornaday, who created the dances for Flashdance, Dick Tracy and The Marrying Man. He is clearly in love with the Texas landscape and fills his movie with gorgeously empty canvases and honeyed sunsets. His direction, though, is pokey throughout, except, not surprisingly, for the scenes that include dancing. There is a rowdy number set at a roadhouse run by Linda Fiorentino, where some of the Benedict boys show up one night after escaping from the home. The roadhouse features the blues. And when the infectious music sets the Benedict boys and everyone else onto the dance floor in a paroxysm of joy, it shows that music that appeals to the lonely makes people feel a little less lonely when it is experienced as a group. The scene is like the Eddie Barnes painting, "Sugar Shack," brought vividly to life.
In another bravura scene, these same Benedict boys pay a late night visit to the local girl’s school. They are separated by a wrought iron fence that keeps the girls in and the boys out. But when the rock and roll music begins to play, the boys and girls nevertheless pair up and begin dancing in place on either side of the fence. Several of the girls dance as though possessed by the devil. This is Hornaday’s direction and choreography at its most rapturously impressive. And the fact that one of the girls is played by a nineteen-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow (in her movie debut) only adds to the frisson of the occasion.
Back to Travlota: it is interesting to watch him interact with Walters and the other Benedict boys. Having essayed the definitive high school greaser, Vinnie Barbarino, in the seventies sit-com Welcome Back, Kotter, it is touching to contemplate the adult Travolta now playing Kotter to another Barbarino and a new band of Sweathogs. The story ends with Travolta, who turns out to be a fugitive wanted for a crime he didn’t commit, giving himself up to the police in order to face the music and clear his name. His boys honor his brave decision by ditching Sousa and playing rock and roll at the patriotic town gathering. This is the equivalent of the final scene in Dead Poets’ Society in which the students show Robin Williams what he has meant to them by defying the headmaster and climbing on top of their desks. They are led by Ethan Hawke, who addresses Williams with Whitman’s immortal lines, “O Captain! My Captain!” Unable to put a stop to the rock and roll sound of the band, Richard Jordan ends up losing both his boys and his daughter to the siren call of this forbidden music.
In movies, Jordan often played captains of industry or hard men. Or both. He is Michael J. Fox’s overbearing boss in the populist business comedy, The Secret of My Success (1987). And in the 1976 NBC mini-series, Captains and the Kings (the title comes from a poem by Rudyard Kipling), Jordan plays an Irish immigrant, an escapee from the Potato Famine, who arrives in America and claws his way up the capitalist ladder until he, as a freshly minted plutocrat, stands poised to make his son the first Irish-Catholic president of the United States. Any resemblance to Joseph P. Kennedy and the Kennedy clan is purely intentional.
But Taylor Caldwell, author of the bestselling book upon which the mini-series is based, also adds a conspiratorial strain to her story. Jordan’s character, Joseph Armagh, is inducted into a secret society of industrialists who control the nation’s wealth by the covert manipulation of influential politicians. And beyond this, she posits an even more rarefied conspiracy of American and European business leaders who manipulate world affairs in the name of profit. These men give their stamp of approval to Jordan’s son’s presidential bid, then withdraw it when the bottom line indicates that their business interests would be better served by another candidate. In the end, Jordan turns on this secret society. But it is too late. His son is assassinated and Jordan, who has finally learned the meaning of love but has alienated or outlived anyone he could express this to, is left a bereft old man sitting alone in his mausoleum-like mansion. Minus the blood and the grease, it is an ending that anticipates the final act of Daniel Day-Lewis’ character in P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007).
With a huge cast and vast canvas spanning six decades of American life, Captains and the Kings was part of an umbrella NBC series broadcast on Sunday nights to feature mini-series based on best-selling novels. This was the golden age of the mini-series that also produced Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man on ABC. Other bestsellers adapted for the NBC series included Anton Myrers’ Once an Eagle (which many professional military men consider the best book ever written about the career soldier) and Norman Bogner’s Seventh Avenue. The production design of Captains and the Kings is a little on the cheesy side. The opulent interiors look totally unlived in. And most of the exteriors are done on the backlot. A scene set in New York during the Civil War was obviously shot on 20th Century-Fox’s Hello, Dolly set (the elevated subway station, always visible from Pico Boulevard as one cruised past the Fox lot, in the background is a dead giveaway). And the direction is entirely ham-handed, despite some (failed) attempts to emulate Orson Welles’ direction of Citizen Kane. But Joseph Armagh is no Charles Foster Kane, no matter how much the production wants him to be. And this is not just the judgment of hindsight. The direction and production design must have been pretty lackluster by mid-seventies standards, too.
Jordan was born into a wealthy and influential American family. He received his big acting break playing Henry Fonda’s son-in-law in the 1965 Broadway play, Generation (the two men even share several scenes in the mini-series, in which Jordan's character tries to blackmail Fonda's incorruptible senator). But his real acting breakthrough came when he was chosen to play the part of FBI agent Dave Foley in Peter Yates’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973). Now this movie is far from obscure. It received excellent reviews when it was first released, although it did mediocre business at the box-office. But since that time, the movie’s reputation has only appreciated and its virtues have recently been enshrined with a Criterion DVD release. So there is no reason to go into it here at length, except to say that Yates’ movie can stand alongside Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon and Joseph Sergeant’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three as one of the best crime dramas of the seventies.
Jordan’s acting here is astonishing. He plays a weasely FBI agent trying to convince small-time criminal Eddie Coyle (played with great sympathy by Robert Mitchum) to drop a dime on some bank robbers he is supplying with guns in order to escape the prison sentence that is hanging over him. Jordan is electrifying as this canny, manipulative FBI agent. And in one awe-inspiring moment, he does something I’ve never seen an actor do before. In the scene set in a suburban train station parking lot, where he rushes in to bust a gun supplier played by Steven Keats (in a matching live-wire performance and who coincidentally plays the lead in the mini-series adaptation of Seventh Avenue), Jordan’s voice is so charged with adrenaline that the words come out thick and fuzzy. How did he do that? How did he work himself up to this unique emotional state? We will never know the answer. Jordan died of a brain tumor in 1993 at the age of fifty-six. “O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done.”
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Landscape (with Biplane) (1965)
Flying dreams are common. And the 1965 movie Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 22 hours 11 Minutes plays like one long dream of flight. It takes place in 1910, four years before the beginning of World War I and has the dusky elegiac glow of a last glorious summer in the life of a soon-to-be-fallen empire.
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is not an obscure movie. Back in 1965, when it was released, it was a popular success and presented in road show format by 20th Century-Fox, complete with intermission (although completely unnecessary as the movie fails to build to the necessary act one curtain closer). It was also an epic production with fourteen major characters and an almost equal number of working period aircraft. It featured an international cast of dramatic and comedic actors drawn from England (Terry-Thomas, in a role originally intended for Peter Sellers), the U.S. (Stuart Whitman, Sam Wanamaker), France (Jean-Pierre Cassel, pere of Vincent), Italy (Alberto Sordi), Germany (Gert Frobe, Karl Michael Vogler) and Japan. The story concerns a British newspaper-sponsored contest to see which international aviator will be the first to fly across the English Channel from London to Paris—an incredible feat in those pioneering years of aviation.
In the past forty-five years since its initial release, this movie has become something of a forgotten classic. It has been released by Fox as part of its family DVD collection. It is a wholesome movie, to be sure, filmed in 1965, before the censor barriers fully came down, and takes place at a time when public decorum ruled the day. But the movie mildly subverted its family-friendly status by casting two up-and-coming actors, James Fox and Sarah Miles, who had recently appeared together in Joseph Losey’s very adult The Servant (1963), Harold Pinter’s typically enigmatic adaptation of a novel by Robin Maugham (nephew of W. Somerset). Sarah Miles had also played a student who accuses her teacher (Sir Laurence Olivier) of molestation in Peter Glenville’s Term of Trial (1962).
In real life, Miles had affairs with her co-stars, Olivier and Fox, before marrying playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons, Lawrence of Arabia), who wrote David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1971) as a starring vehicle for her. In Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, she is introduced wearing trousers, a Donegal sweater and Tam o'Shanter while riding a vintage motorcycle. Her character dreams of going up in a flying machine and learning to fly, but her stuffed-shirt aviator fiancé, Fox, won’t let her because he is afraid of angering her press lord father (Robert Morley). Soon after, Miles swaps her tomboy outfit for female finery of the period—long dresses, high-button shoes, very large hats, bloomers (source of a running gag). But even though she is dressed to a period T, there is something irrepressibly contemporary about Miles that animates her character. It is also a little surprising how much she resembles the current Hollywood It Girl, Carey Mulligan. In fact, Miles began her career in 1961, the year after An Education, the movie that won Carey Mulligan an Academy Award nomination, takes place.
In addition to Ms. Miles’ performance, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is a rare achievement in other ways as well. For one thing, its special effects hold up very well, even by today’s CGI standards. The movie is a mix of real vintage airplanes (flown by professional pilots), model photography, and actors filmed against a blue screen background or a blue sky backing in the studio. The blue screen shots are notable for not showing the halo around actors that marred so many process shots of the period. The actors actually seem to be flying their own planes. And the model shot of three vintage aircraft whizzing right by the Eiffel Tower is still a jaw-dropping effect. Christopher Challis’ cinematography contributes to the movie’s dreamlike ambience and references some beautiful Rembrandt-like landscapes (into which one or more vintage aircraft have been interposed).
The movie owes a great debt to the silent film comedies of Mack Sennet and is filled with slapstick scenes of airplane crashes and fire trucks racing across the field to rescue pilots. The chief of the airfield’s Keystone Kop-like fire brigade is none other than Benny Hill, several years before achieving fame as a bikini babe-bracketed TV comic and master of the double entendre. (The movie also features a cameo appearance by another famous TV comedian—Red Skelton, playing a caveman who dreams of flying and several other flight-happy incarnations down through the centuries.) But as funny as these scenes are, Daryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox at the time, ordered director Ken Annakin and screenwriter Jack Davies to place in the forefront the love triangle composed of Sarah Miles, Stuart Whitman and James Fox.
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines came out the same year as Blake Edwards’ The Great Race, a movie about an early automobile race from New York to Paris. It, too, mixes stars (Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Peter Falk) with vintage machines—in this case early model automobiles. And in 1969, Fox released a sort of auto-based sequel, the inferior Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (again starring Tony Curtis), but this had nowhere near the critical or box office success of its notable predecessor. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is a movie just waiting to be discovered by those who enjoy family-friendly entertainment, slapstick comedy, or charmingly-played love triangles. Or for those who dream of flying or wish the summer would never end.
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is not an obscure movie. Back in 1965, when it was released, it was a popular success and presented in road show format by 20th Century-Fox, complete with intermission (although completely unnecessary as the movie fails to build to the necessary act one curtain closer). It was also an epic production with fourteen major characters and an almost equal number of working period aircraft. It featured an international cast of dramatic and comedic actors drawn from England (Terry-Thomas, in a role originally intended for Peter Sellers), the U.S. (Stuart Whitman, Sam Wanamaker), France (Jean-Pierre Cassel, pere of Vincent), Italy (Alberto Sordi), Germany (Gert Frobe, Karl Michael Vogler) and Japan. The story concerns a British newspaper-sponsored contest to see which international aviator will be the first to fly across the English Channel from London to Paris—an incredible feat in those pioneering years of aviation.
In the past forty-five years since its initial release, this movie has become something of a forgotten classic. It has been released by Fox as part of its family DVD collection. It is a wholesome movie, to be sure, filmed in 1965, before the censor barriers fully came down, and takes place at a time when public decorum ruled the day. But the movie mildly subverted its family-friendly status by casting two up-and-coming actors, James Fox and Sarah Miles, who had recently appeared together in Joseph Losey’s very adult The Servant (1963), Harold Pinter’s typically enigmatic adaptation of a novel by Robin Maugham (nephew of W. Somerset). Sarah Miles had also played a student who accuses her teacher (Sir Laurence Olivier) of molestation in Peter Glenville’s Term of Trial (1962).
In real life, Miles had affairs with her co-stars, Olivier and Fox, before marrying playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons, Lawrence of Arabia), who wrote David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1971) as a starring vehicle for her. In Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, she is introduced wearing trousers, a Donegal sweater and Tam o'Shanter while riding a vintage motorcycle. Her character dreams of going up in a flying machine and learning to fly, but her stuffed-shirt aviator fiancé, Fox, won’t let her because he is afraid of angering her press lord father (Robert Morley). Soon after, Miles swaps her tomboy outfit for female finery of the period—long dresses, high-button shoes, very large hats, bloomers (source of a running gag). But even though she is dressed to a period T, there is something irrepressibly contemporary about Miles that animates her character. It is also a little surprising how much she resembles the current Hollywood It Girl, Carey Mulligan. In fact, Miles began her career in 1961, the year after An Education, the movie that won Carey Mulligan an Academy Award nomination, takes place.
In addition to Ms. Miles’ performance, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is a rare achievement in other ways as well. For one thing, its special effects hold up very well, even by today’s CGI standards. The movie is a mix of real vintage airplanes (flown by professional pilots), model photography, and actors filmed against a blue screen background or a blue sky backing in the studio. The blue screen shots are notable for not showing the halo around actors that marred so many process shots of the period. The actors actually seem to be flying their own planes. And the model shot of three vintage aircraft whizzing right by the Eiffel Tower is still a jaw-dropping effect. Christopher Challis’ cinematography contributes to the movie’s dreamlike ambience and references some beautiful Rembrandt-like landscapes (into which one or more vintage aircraft have been interposed).
The movie owes a great debt to the silent film comedies of Mack Sennet and is filled with slapstick scenes of airplane crashes and fire trucks racing across the field to rescue pilots. The chief of the airfield’s Keystone Kop-like fire brigade is none other than Benny Hill, several years before achieving fame as a bikini babe-bracketed TV comic and master of the double entendre. (The movie also features a cameo appearance by another famous TV comedian—Red Skelton, playing a caveman who dreams of flying and several other flight-happy incarnations down through the centuries.) But as funny as these scenes are, Daryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox at the time, ordered director Ken Annakin and screenwriter Jack Davies to place in the forefront the love triangle composed of Sarah Miles, Stuart Whitman and James Fox.
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines came out the same year as Blake Edwards’ The Great Race, a movie about an early automobile race from New York to Paris. It, too, mixes stars (Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Peter Falk) with vintage machines—in this case early model automobiles. And in 1969, Fox released a sort of auto-based sequel, the inferior Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (again starring Tony Curtis), but this had nowhere near the critical or box office success of its notable predecessor. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is a movie just waiting to be discovered by those who enjoy family-friendly entertainment, slapstick comedy, or charmingly-played love triangles. Or for those who dream of flying or wish the summer would never end.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
And Now for Something Completely Different (Rex Reed and the New Journalism - 1968)
The New Journalism began in the pages of Esquire magazine in 1963 when Tom Wolfe was stumped as to how to write an article about a recent visit he made to a California custom car show featuring the futuristic fiberglass visions of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Wolfe showed his editor his rough notes and it was the editor’s genius to tell the dandy in the white ice cream suit that all the magazine had to do was publish his hyperbolic rough notes. And so “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” was born. And along with it the New Journalism.
The New Journalism employed novelistic techniques to tell a story or portray a subject. The scene, as opposed to the fact, became the basic unit of this form. Wolfe followed his initial offering with profiles of moonshiner turned race car driver Junior Johnson, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson, Yes!” (adapted into the 1973 movie The Last American Hero starring Jeff Bridges as Johnson and prominently featuring the Jim Croce classic, “I’ve Got a Name”), and Phil Spector, “The First Tycoon of Teen.” The latter includes the famous incident where the high-strung record producer demands to be let off a jetliner about to take off because he’s convinced everybody on board is a loser and the plane is sure to crash. (Conversely, Wolfe would later use the traditional tools of the journalist to sell the reality of his novels, such as The Bonfire of the Vanities.)
In 1966, the trajectory of the New Journalism in Esquire was fixed with the publication of Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” in which is recorded for posterity that famous confrontation between Old Blue Eyes and science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. In Huntington Hartford’s Show magazine, Gloria Steinen produced “A Bunny’s Tale,” her account of going undercover as a neophyte Bunny at Hugh Hefner’s New York Playboy Club (this article was the basis for a TV movie starring Kirstie Alley as Ms. Steinem). And in the New Yorker, Truman Capote published early chapters of what he would later refer to as his non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood.
It is very odd to think of movie critic and gossip writer Rex Reed in the same pantheon as these gods of New Journalism. But, in reading his Do You Sleep in the Nude?, a 1968 collection of articles originally published in The New York Times, New York Magazine (when it was the Sunday supplement of the eternally mourned Herald Tribune), Cosmopolitan and Esquire, one could make a case that Reed was also trying to change journalism by pushing back the frontiers of what was permissible in the celebrity interview. His method is artful in its simplicity: he simply sits back, observes his subjects and allows them to reveal themselves to him.
Reed was no mere handmaiden of the celebrity flack. Like Sidney Falco with J.J. Hunsecker, he was more than happy to bite the hand that fed him. Reed’s interview subjects are an unusual mix of Old Hollywood (Lucille Ball, Buster Keaton), New Hollywood (George Peppard, Sandy Dennis) Broadway (Leslie Uggams, Gwen Verdon), legends (Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya) and literary figures (Robert Anderson, Marianne Moore), with some occasional oddball ringers let in such as Governor Lester Maddox and the Living Theatre. Many of the New Hollywood types, such as Shirley Knight and Peter Fonda, seem to have an ambivalent attitude towards fame and success. And in similar fashion, Reed seems to have an ambivalent attitude about many of those he is interviewing. Reading this collection, one gets the sense that Reed’s journalistic persona was a work in progress, drawn to the glamour of the world he was covering while, at the same time, trying to penetrate its glitzy surface to find out what really lay underneath it.
Born in Texas, Reed seems to gravitate towards Southern subjects, such as Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams. He interviews the sick and elderly McCullers right before the release of the movie adaptation of her Reflections in a Golden Eye (an all-star disaster from 1967 directed by John Huston and starring Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Brian Keith and introducing Robert Forster). Reed does a wonderful job of describing McCullers’ life at February House, a Brooklyn literary collective of the forties made up of Christopher Isherwood, Richard Wright, W.H. Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles and--improbable but true--Gypsy Rose Lee (working on her novel, The G-String Murders), all living and working under the same roof. Reed’s account of life at February House is infectiously written and reads like a coming attraction for Sherill Tippins’ February House, published almost forty years later. (A musical adaptation of the book is currently in the works.)
The less said about Reed’s interview with Williams, the better. Inspired by the famous playwright, he strains for effect trying to emulate Tennessee’s inimitable Southern Gothic voice, as though he had overdosed on beignets at the Café du Monde (which in itself is an infelicitous imitation of Williams’ style). Similarly, when he writes about Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, Reed sounds like a lost character in one of Antonioni’s movies.
Reed’s portrayal of New Hollywood is generally more revelatory than his overly reverential depiction of Old Hollywood. The sole exception is Ava Gardner, who gets off the all-time greatest putdown of Frank Sinatra when describing his marriage to Mia Farrow: “I always knew Frank would end up with a boy.” Reed manages to capture those on the cusp of fame. He interviews Warren Beatty right before Bonnie and Clyde (elusive, as always) and Mike Nichols right before The Graduate (pretentious, as always). But Reed digs and gets Nichols to reveal his impoverished existence before he hit the big time with Elaine May.
And every now and then, Reed perfectly manages to capture both the subject and the time he is writing about, such as this description from his poolside interview with Peter Fonda, before the success of Easy Rider: “Lying on his back, talking to a tape recorder, getting it down straight, the sun burning into his skin, with imported Helena Rubenstein ‘Bikini’ lotion turning his tan to butterscotch and a four-inch scar slashing across his stomach where he once shot himself with a gun when he was ten years old, drinking Carlsbad beer while fourteen Bozak-610 speakers played Vivaldi and Ravi Shankar and ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ throwing it up to the hills above the tennis courts.” This is one impressive sentence, even if there is no subject or predicate in sight. And, if nothing else, this is all the proof we need that Reed should have been a card-carrying member of the New Journalism—like those others, he wasn’t afraid to break the rules to get to the truth of something.
The New Journalism employed novelistic techniques to tell a story or portray a subject. The scene, as opposed to the fact, became the basic unit of this form. Wolfe followed his initial offering with profiles of moonshiner turned race car driver Junior Johnson, “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson, Yes!” (adapted into the 1973 movie The Last American Hero starring Jeff Bridges as Johnson and prominently featuring the Jim Croce classic, “I’ve Got a Name”), and Phil Spector, “The First Tycoon of Teen.” The latter includes the famous incident where the high-strung record producer demands to be let off a jetliner about to take off because he’s convinced everybody on board is a loser and the plane is sure to crash. (Conversely, Wolfe would later use the traditional tools of the journalist to sell the reality of his novels, such as The Bonfire of the Vanities.)
In 1966, the trajectory of the New Journalism in Esquire was fixed with the publication of Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” in which is recorded for posterity that famous confrontation between Old Blue Eyes and science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. In Huntington Hartford’s Show magazine, Gloria Steinen produced “A Bunny’s Tale,” her account of going undercover as a neophyte Bunny at Hugh Hefner’s New York Playboy Club (this article was the basis for a TV movie starring Kirstie Alley as Ms. Steinem). And in the New Yorker, Truman Capote published early chapters of what he would later refer to as his non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood.
It is very odd to think of movie critic and gossip writer Rex Reed in the same pantheon as these gods of New Journalism. But, in reading his Do You Sleep in the Nude?, a 1968 collection of articles originally published in The New York Times, New York Magazine (when it was the Sunday supplement of the eternally mourned Herald Tribune), Cosmopolitan and Esquire, one could make a case that Reed was also trying to change journalism by pushing back the frontiers of what was permissible in the celebrity interview. His method is artful in its simplicity: he simply sits back, observes his subjects and allows them to reveal themselves to him.
Reed was no mere handmaiden of the celebrity flack. Like Sidney Falco with J.J. Hunsecker, he was more than happy to bite the hand that fed him. Reed’s interview subjects are an unusual mix of Old Hollywood (Lucille Ball, Buster Keaton), New Hollywood (George Peppard, Sandy Dennis) Broadway (Leslie Uggams, Gwen Verdon), legends (Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya) and literary figures (Robert Anderson, Marianne Moore), with some occasional oddball ringers let in such as Governor Lester Maddox and the Living Theatre. Many of the New Hollywood types, such as Shirley Knight and Peter Fonda, seem to have an ambivalent attitude towards fame and success. And in similar fashion, Reed seems to have an ambivalent attitude about many of those he is interviewing. Reading this collection, one gets the sense that Reed’s journalistic persona was a work in progress, drawn to the glamour of the world he was covering while, at the same time, trying to penetrate its glitzy surface to find out what really lay underneath it.
Born in Texas, Reed seems to gravitate towards Southern subjects, such as Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams. He interviews the sick and elderly McCullers right before the release of the movie adaptation of her Reflections in a Golden Eye (an all-star disaster from 1967 directed by John Huston and starring Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Brian Keith and introducing Robert Forster). Reed does a wonderful job of describing McCullers’ life at February House, a Brooklyn literary collective of the forties made up of Christopher Isherwood, Richard Wright, W.H. Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles and--improbable but true--Gypsy Rose Lee (working on her novel, The G-String Murders), all living and working under the same roof. Reed’s account of life at February House is infectiously written and reads like a coming attraction for Sherill Tippins’ February House, published almost forty years later. (A musical adaptation of the book is currently in the works.)
The less said about Reed’s interview with Williams, the better. Inspired by the famous playwright, he strains for effect trying to emulate Tennessee’s inimitable Southern Gothic voice, as though he had overdosed on beignets at the Café du Monde (which in itself is an infelicitous imitation of Williams’ style). Similarly, when he writes about Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, Reed sounds like a lost character in one of Antonioni’s movies.
Reed’s portrayal of New Hollywood is generally more revelatory than his overly reverential depiction of Old Hollywood. The sole exception is Ava Gardner, who gets off the all-time greatest putdown of Frank Sinatra when describing his marriage to Mia Farrow: “I always knew Frank would end up with a boy.” Reed manages to capture those on the cusp of fame. He interviews Warren Beatty right before Bonnie and Clyde (elusive, as always) and Mike Nichols right before The Graduate (pretentious, as always). But Reed digs and gets Nichols to reveal his impoverished existence before he hit the big time with Elaine May.
And every now and then, Reed perfectly manages to capture both the subject and the time he is writing about, such as this description from his poolside interview with Peter Fonda, before the success of Easy Rider: “Lying on his back, talking to a tape recorder, getting it down straight, the sun burning into his skin, with imported Helena Rubenstein ‘Bikini’ lotion turning his tan to butterscotch and a four-inch scar slashing across his stomach where he once shot himself with a gun when he was ten years old, drinking Carlsbad beer while fourteen Bozak-610 speakers played Vivaldi and Ravi Shankar and ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ throwing it up to the hills above the tennis courts.” This is one impressive sentence, even if there is no subject or predicate in sight. And, if nothing else, this is all the proof we need that Reed should have been a card-carrying member of the New Journalism—like those others, he wasn’t afraid to break the rules to get to the truth of something.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Idols of the Teens, Part 2 (Paul Anka, 1961)
In recent years, it’s become fashionable in movies such as American Beauty, Little Children and Revolutionary Road to attack suburbia. But suburbia has been under attack for years. The same year that Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road was published, 1961, Allied Artists released Look in Any Window, a movie that is profoundly obscure and deservedly overlooked. The movie is about a peeping tom who destroys the serenity of a peaceful SoCal suburban neighborhood. Coincidentally, the movie was released one year after English director Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a much more fully realized—and unsettling-treatment of the subject of voyeurism.
In Look in Any Window, the peeping tom is played by teen idol Paul Anka, who takes the role of a lonely and misunderstood teenager. Peeping, he explains, gives him power. Anka dresses in the typical teen ensemble of that period—blue jeans and a tight white t-shirt. With his black curly hair, pouty expression, and wounded eyes, he comes across as a non-acting version of Sal Mineo. One year later, Anka would play, in unconvincing fashion, a U.S. Army Ranger in Darryl F. Zanuck’s star-studded production of The Longest Day. In one scene, Anka blows up a German pillbox by squatting on its roof, tossing a grenade through the gun slit, then lifting his legs so as not to get them blown off by the blast. The insouciant manner in which Anka does this is what makes the action the complete opposite of heroic.
Anka is not the main character in Look in Any Window. Rather he is the catalyst for the adult relationships that surround him. Like That Night or The Ice Storm, most of the story takes place in the course of one long, event-filled evening. Sickened by her drunken husband’s (Alex Nicol) weak nature, Ruth Roman, who plays Paul Anka’s mother, takes off for a Las Vegas whirl with Jack Cassidy, who has likewise been sickened by his wife’s (Carole Matthews) inability to do anything fun or exciting. She seeks solace in the arms of her new neighbor, Carlo (George Dolenz), a widowed foreigner who is so suave that he speaks with a thick accent, smokes a pipe and wears a clam digger outfit that would make Harry Belafonte green with envy.
Wandering through this whole night on his own is Paul Anka, a tortured youth who seems not to fit in anywhere. Returning home, he samples some of his passed out father’s liquor and goes for a midnight swim with Jack Cassidy’s daughter, Gigi Perreau. She, in turn, has just returned home from a date, who disdainfully pushed her out of his truck because she refused to put out for him. This whole saga is being observed by two police detectives on the lookout for the peeping tom, one a veteran who depends on his experience to crack the case, the other a newcomer who believes that psychological understanding of the perpetrator’s motivation will bring the peeping tom’s identity to light. The ironic thing is, with all the big suburban pictures windows for them to look into, the two detectives are every bit as much the voyeurs as the one they hope to catch.
Before English director Sam Mendes exposed the dry rot inside the walls of the typical American suburb in American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, Look in Any Window did the same thing at a time when American suburbs were still a new phenomenon and still new as a subject matter for books and movies. One character rebels against the materialism of the suburban lifestyle by saying, “There’s more to life than home improvement; there’s self-improvement.” And another indicts the entire suburbanization of America as being essentially voyeuristic when he ventures that because of the mass addiction to TV, “We’ve become a nation of peeping toms.”
Unfortunately, Look in Any Window is directed in incompetent fashion by William Alland, whose career was largely as a writer and producer of monster, horror and teen exploitation movies (his The Lively Ones stars James Darren, another South Philly teen idol turned actor). Alland is way out of his depth here, although he does have some good actors to work with, including Ruth Roman and Jack Cassidy, playing a car dealer who flaunts his infidelity at the Fourth of July pool party that is the climax of this movie. With his too-tight sansabelt slacks, shirt-jacs and ascot, Cassidy, who specialized in playing slick creeps, cuts quite a snazzy figure. But Alland has no idea where to put his camera or how to light a scene. One image, though, Paul Anka and Gigi Perreau trying to relax on a trampoline and looking like prey caught in a spider web, remains enduringly haunting. It seems to capture the fragility of youthful interaction. Young couples moved to the suburbs with the hope of starting new lives together. Who knew, this movie says, that they would end up ensnared in a spider web woven out of their own frustrated desires.
(My special thanks to Mary Ann Koenig for the recommendation and acquisition of this one-of-a-kind DVD treasure.)
In Look in Any Window, the peeping tom is played by teen idol Paul Anka, who takes the role of a lonely and misunderstood teenager. Peeping, he explains, gives him power. Anka dresses in the typical teen ensemble of that period—blue jeans and a tight white t-shirt. With his black curly hair, pouty expression, and wounded eyes, he comes across as a non-acting version of Sal Mineo. One year later, Anka would play, in unconvincing fashion, a U.S. Army Ranger in Darryl F. Zanuck’s star-studded production of The Longest Day. In one scene, Anka blows up a German pillbox by squatting on its roof, tossing a grenade through the gun slit, then lifting his legs so as not to get them blown off by the blast. The insouciant manner in which Anka does this is what makes the action the complete opposite of heroic.
Anka is not the main character in Look in Any Window. Rather he is the catalyst for the adult relationships that surround him. Like That Night or The Ice Storm, most of the story takes place in the course of one long, event-filled evening. Sickened by her drunken husband’s (Alex Nicol) weak nature, Ruth Roman, who plays Paul Anka’s mother, takes off for a Las Vegas whirl with Jack Cassidy, who has likewise been sickened by his wife’s (Carole Matthews) inability to do anything fun or exciting. She seeks solace in the arms of her new neighbor, Carlo (George Dolenz), a widowed foreigner who is so suave that he speaks with a thick accent, smokes a pipe and wears a clam digger outfit that would make Harry Belafonte green with envy.
Wandering through this whole night on his own is Paul Anka, a tortured youth who seems not to fit in anywhere. Returning home, he samples some of his passed out father’s liquor and goes for a midnight swim with Jack Cassidy’s daughter, Gigi Perreau. She, in turn, has just returned home from a date, who disdainfully pushed her out of his truck because she refused to put out for him. This whole saga is being observed by two police detectives on the lookout for the peeping tom, one a veteran who depends on his experience to crack the case, the other a newcomer who believes that psychological understanding of the perpetrator’s motivation will bring the peeping tom’s identity to light. The ironic thing is, with all the big suburban pictures windows for them to look into, the two detectives are every bit as much the voyeurs as the one they hope to catch.
Before English director Sam Mendes exposed the dry rot inside the walls of the typical American suburb in American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, Look in Any Window did the same thing at a time when American suburbs were still a new phenomenon and still new as a subject matter for books and movies. One character rebels against the materialism of the suburban lifestyle by saying, “There’s more to life than home improvement; there’s self-improvement.” And another indicts the entire suburbanization of America as being essentially voyeuristic when he ventures that because of the mass addiction to TV, “We’ve become a nation of peeping toms.”
Unfortunately, Look in Any Window is directed in incompetent fashion by William Alland, whose career was largely as a writer and producer of monster, horror and teen exploitation movies (his The Lively Ones stars James Darren, another South Philly teen idol turned actor). Alland is way out of his depth here, although he does have some good actors to work with, including Ruth Roman and Jack Cassidy, playing a car dealer who flaunts his infidelity at the Fourth of July pool party that is the climax of this movie. With his too-tight sansabelt slacks, shirt-jacs and ascot, Cassidy, who specialized in playing slick creeps, cuts quite a snazzy figure. But Alland has no idea where to put his camera or how to light a scene. One image, though, Paul Anka and Gigi Perreau trying to relax on a trampoline and looking like prey caught in a spider web, remains enduringly haunting. It seems to capture the fragility of youthful interaction. Young couples moved to the suburbs with the hope of starting new lives together. Who knew, this movie says, that they would end up ensnared in a spider web woven out of their own frustrated desires.
(My special thanks to Mary Ann Koenig for the recommendation and acquisition of this one-of-a-kind DVD treasure.)
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Idols of the Teens, Part 1 (Frankie Avalon, 1962)
In the summer of 1962, American-International released another exploitation film, Panic in Year Zero. The movie exploited the period’s commonly held fear of thermonuclear war. The Cold War was at its height and would reach its zenith in October with the discovery of offensive missiles placed in Cuba. But in the summer of ’62, there was Panic in Year Zero to tell us what surviving a nuclear Armageddon might be like.
In a terse 92 minutes, the movie is nothing less than a how-to primer on how to survive a nuclear war. Ray Milland, who also directed the movie, stars as a middle-class, middle-aged American who is about to embark on a fishing trip with his family. His wife is played by Jean Hagen, looking like a real early sixties housewife. One can’t believe that this is the same Jean Hagen who played Lina Lamont, the immortal screechy-voiced villainess of Stanley Donen’s Singin' in the Rain and Danny Thomas’ first wife on Make Room for Daddy. And Ray Milland, bullying and humorless here, seems light years away from the charmingly confused military officer he played opposite Ginger Rogers in Billy Wilder’s hilarious and touching directorial debut, The Major and the Minor (1942). In the movie, he and Jean Hagen have two teenaged children played by Mary Mitchel and Frankie Avalon.
At the time, Frankie Avalon was a teen singing sensation, having come out of that small talent-rich section of South Philadelphia that also produced Fabian, James Darren and Bobby Rydell. Before this movie, Frankie had already appeared in small roles in John Wayne’s The Alamo and Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. (As an aside, canny Wayne often cast young pop singers in his movies to attract the youth crowd, which is why you get Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo, Fabian in North to Alaska and Bobby Vinton in Big Jake). Frankie Avalon would go on to appear in several American-International beach movies with former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. This series would reach its apotheosis with Beach Blanket Bingo (1966). But in Panic in Year Zero, Frankie plays it straight and does a good job as a teenager (he was 23 at the time) dealing with the harsh realities of life after a nuclear conflagration has devastated America.
Throughout the movie, Ray Milland and Jean Hagen carry on a running debate about the importance of collective civilization versus individual survival. After an atomic bomb devastates their home in Los Angeles, Milland elects to head for the hills and remain there until order is restored. He becomes single-minded in providing for his family and protecting them from looters, rapists and marauders in the form of three hot-rod-riding hoods. Milland is absolutely ruthless in insuring the survival of himself and his family, even if it means risking the complete alienation of his wife. When two of the hoods try to rape Milland’s daughter in the woods, he and Frankie Avalon track them down and cold bloodedly exact their own form of justice. The odd thing about the movie is that it never attempts to color in Milland’s background to show how he makes the almost instantaneous transformation from civilized man to committed survivalist (two decades before the term was even coined). He is fully as resourceful and self-righteously determined as any hero created by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, or Robert Neville, the main character of Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, itself a how-to primer on how to survive a vampire plague (and first filmed by American-International as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price in 1964).
In the end, Panic in Year Zero is a movie whose low budget roots glaringly come through at times, which leads to some laughable faults in continuity. (The family car is towing a trailer. Yet, in scenes set inside the car, the rear projection seen through the car’s back window clearly shows the highway unwinding behind them.) But the low budget also helps concentrate the screenplay, whose narrative is never off the focus of Milland’s increasing obsession in keeping his wife and children safe from harm, even if it means destroying the fragile emotional bonds of the family unit. The movie begins and ends with close-ups of a car radio. This radio provides entertainment in the form of popular music and information in the form of updates on how America is responding to the nuclear attack. The radio is the family’s sole link with what remains of civilization, and in the summer of 1962, the radio that made Frankie Avalon a star also served notice that America had other, more important things on its mind.
In a terse 92 minutes, the movie is nothing less than a how-to primer on how to survive a nuclear war. Ray Milland, who also directed the movie, stars as a middle-class, middle-aged American who is about to embark on a fishing trip with his family. His wife is played by Jean Hagen, looking like a real early sixties housewife. One can’t believe that this is the same Jean Hagen who played Lina Lamont, the immortal screechy-voiced villainess of Stanley Donen’s Singin' in the Rain and Danny Thomas’ first wife on Make Room for Daddy. And Ray Milland, bullying and humorless here, seems light years away from the charmingly confused military officer he played opposite Ginger Rogers in Billy Wilder’s hilarious and touching directorial debut, The Major and the Minor (1942). In the movie, he and Jean Hagen have two teenaged children played by Mary Mitchel and Frankie Avalon.
At the time, Frankie Avalon was a teen singing sensation, having come out of that small talent-rich section of South Philadelphia that also produced Fabian, James Darren and Bobby Rydell. Before this movie, Frankie had already appeared in small roles in John Wayne’s The Alamo and Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. (As an aside, canny Wayne often cast young pop singers in his movies to attract the youth crowd, which is why you get Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo, Fabian in North to Alaska and Bobby Vinton in Big Jake). Frankie Avalon would go on to appear in several American-International beach movies with former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. This series would reach its apotheosis with Beach Blanket Bingo (1966). But in Panic in Year Zero, Frankie plays it straight and does a good job as a teenager (he was 23 at the time) dealing with the harsh realities of life after a nuclear conflagration has devastated America.
Throughout the movie, Ray Milland and Jean Hagen carry on a running debate about the importance of collective civilization versus individual survival. After an atomic bomb devastates their home in Los Angeles, Milland elects to head for the hills and remain there until order is restored. He becomes single-minded in providing for his family and protecting them from looters, rapists and marauders in the form of three hot-rod-riding hoods. Milland is absolutely ruthless in insuring the survival of himself and his family, even if it means risking the complete alienation of his wife. When two of the hoods try to rape Milland’s daughter in the woods, he and Frankie Avalon track them down and cold bloodedly exact their own form of justice. The odd thing about the movie is that it never attempts to color in Milland’s background to show how he makes the almost instantaneous transformation from civilized man to committed survivalist (two decades before the term was even coined). He is fully as resourceful and self-righteously determined as any hero created by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, or Robert Neville, the main character of Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, itself a how-to primer on how to survive a vampire plague (and first filmed by American-International as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price in 1964).
In the end, Panic in Year Zero is a movie whose low budget roots glaringly come through at times, which leads to some laughable faults in continuity. (The family car is towing a trailer. Yet, in scenes set inside the car, the rear projection seen through the car’s back window clearly shows the highway unwinding behind them.) But the low budget also helps concentrate the screenplay, whose narrative is never off the focus of Milland’s increasing obsession in keeping his wife and children safe from harm, even if it means destroying the fragile emotional bonds of the family unit. The movie begins and ends with close-ups of a car radio. This radio provides entertainment in the form of popular music and information in the form of updates on how America is responding to the nuclear attack. The radio is the family’s sole link with what remains of civilization, and in the summer of 1962, the radio that made Frankie Avalon a star also served notice that America had other, more important things on its mind.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Tribes Are Gathering (1970)
On November 10, 1970, ABC brought the war in Vietnam home to the TV viewer with the Movie of the Week, Tribes. In it, a young and effective Jan-Michael Vincent is a hippie draftee who squares off with his Marine Corps D.I., played by a solid Darren McGavin in a performance that is part of a twenty year continuum extending from Jack Webb in his self-directed The D.I. (1957) to Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge (1986) and R. Lee Ermey in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Ermey also plays a D.I. in Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys in Company C (1978), one of the first movies about the Vietnam War to dramatize the futility and irony of that seemingly endless conflict.
In Tribes, Vincent is a pacifist recruit who refuses to bend to the will of his D.I., using his hippie wiles to create an alternate reality for himself and some of his fellow recruits. McGavin plays an essentially decent gunnery sergeant who tries to work with Vincent and whip him into shape. But he is frustrated by fellow gunny, Earl Holliman, who makes it his personal mission to break the spirit of the anti-establishment recruit, who he recognizes as a subversive threat to the basic training routine that has been the backbone of the Marine Corps for 190 years. In a terse ninety minutes, these three men square off until the story reaches its inevitably sad conclusion. “Tribes are gathering,” goes the movie’s theme song, which sounds like a lost song from Hair, but this is a hegira that Vincent will ultimately have to make on his own and the movie makes it clear that his journey will be a lonely one.
The movie is directed by Joseph Sergeant, a director mainly of TV movies who got the occasional shot at features. The highlight of his movie career is probably the original version of The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974), which perfectly captures the downbeat zeitgeist of New York in the mid-seventies (along with Michael Winner’s Death Wish and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver). Among his more notable TV movies are Amber Waves, a paean to the American heartland, and Warm Springs, the moving account of FDR’s battle with polio. Sergeant is not in the pantheon of great directors, but his work is always technically accomplished and his movies always have the virtue of being cleanly dramatized.
Tribes is a model of efficient movie-making as it and other MOWs were part of a creative assembly line that hadn’t been seen since the heyday of the Hollywood studio production system in the thirties and forties. And yet, it stands out and rises above the pack because of the way it succinctly crystalizes a moment in time when the establishment seemed corrupt and played out, but the counter-culture no longer seemed to have all the answers. Tribes are gathering, yes, but what will happen then? The movie has no real answers, something soon to be borne out by the changing cultural landscape as the tribes of the sixties were replaced by the "Me Decade" of the seventies.
In Tribes, Vincent is a pacifist recruit who refuses to bend to the will of his D.I., using his hippie wiles to create an alternate reality for himself and some of his fellow recruits. McGavin plays an essentially decent gunnery sergeant who tries to work with Vincent and whip him into shape. But he is frustrated by fellow gunny, Earl Holliman, who makes it his personal mission to break the spirit of the anti-establishment recruit, who he recognizes as a subversive threat to the basic training routine that has been the backbone of the Marine Corps for 190 years. In a terse ninety minutes, these three men square off until the story reaches its inevitably sad conclusion. “Tribes are gathering,” goes the movie’s theme song, which sounds like a lost song from Hair, but this is a hegira that Vincent will ultimately have to make on his own and the movie makes it clear that his journey will be a lonely one.
The movie is directed by Joseph Sergeant, a director mainly of TV movies who got the occasional shot at features. The highlight of his movie career is probably the original version of The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974), which perfectly captures the downbeat zeitgeist of New York in the mid-seventies (along with Michael Winner’s Death Wish and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver). Among his more notable TV movies are Amber Waves, a paean to the American heartland, and Warm Springs, the moving account of FDR’s battle with polio. Sergeant is not in the pantheon of great directors, but his work is always technically accomplished and his movies always have the virtue of being cleanly dramatized.
Tribes is a model of efficient movie-making as it and other MOWs were part of a creative assembly line that hadn’t been seen since the heyday of the Hollywood studio production system in the thirties and forties. And yet, it stands out and rises above the pack because of the way it succinctly crystalizes a moment in time when the establishment seemed corrupt and played out, but the counter-culture no longer seemed to have all the answers. Tribes are gathering, yes, but what will happen then? The movie has no real answers, something soon to be borne out by the changing cultural landscape as the tribes of the sixties were replaced by the "Me Decade" of the seventies.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Lock Up Your Daughters (1969)
For those who ask, why aren’t there more Restoration Comedies in the movies, have I got a small gem for you. Released in 1969, Lock Up Your Daughters is an oddball combination of the latest (then) in cinematic gimmickry combined with ripe period dialogue and a fidelity to the bedlam and bombast of the period that borders on the obsessive.
Like a Restoration Comedy version of On the Town, this is the story of three sailors on shore leave, having just returned to London from ten months at sea and in the West Indies. Lusty (Jim Dale, the once and future narrator of the Harry Potter audio books) is unable to see his prostitute lover, Nell (Georgia Brown, the original Nancy in the musical, Oliver!), who is busy seducing Lord Foppington (Christopher Plummer). While those two are otherwise engaged, Lusty impersonates Foppington so he can wed and bed the lord’s virginal fiancée Hoyden (Vanessa Howard), who comes to the marriage with a two thousand pound dowry. Shaftoe (Tom Bell, Helen Mirren’s departmental nemesis in the first Prime Suspect) longs to be married to Hilaret (Susannah York), over the objections of her father, Gossip (Roy Dotrice before he went on to lead the underground denizens of Manhattan in Beauty and the Beast). A third sailor, Ramble (Ian Bannen, master of the cricket pitch known as the googly in John Boorman’s Hope and Glory), pines for his drowned wife, Cloris, but drowns his sorrows by trying to seduce Magistrate Squeezum’s wife (Glynis Johns, with a slight borrowing of Joan Greenwood’s insouciant purr). All three men end up in Magistrate’s Squeezum’s court, accused of rape. It all ends happily, though, with Shaftoe and Hilaret wed, Ramble reunited with his supposedly dead wife (who turns out to be Hilaret’s maid), and Lusty married to his virgin bride (and learning in the bargain that he and Hilaret are long lost brother and sister).
Lock Up Your Daughters has an unusual provenance. It is a non-musical adaptation of the West End musical, with music by Laurie Johnson (the sprightly theme to The Avengers) and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse (Stop the World, I Want to Get Off as well as the Goldfinger theme by John Barry), which, in turn, is based on a play by Henry Fielding (author, of course, of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews). The only real singing in the film comes from a men’s chorus belting out some kind of faux sea chantey on the soundtrack.
The movie is directed by Peter Coe, a theatre director making his film debut, and it’s obvious that he studied Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963) and the collected works of Richard Lester, not to mention Hogarth’s the Seven Deadly Sins and A Rake’s Progress, before even gazing through his viewfinder. The movie is steeped in early 18th century atmosphere. It was shot on location in the Republic of Ireland, with the town of Kilkenny doubling for period London. The streets of this London are covered with mud, dung and straw. Each frame of film is crammed with acrobats, begging children, hanging corpses, emptied chamber pots, milling crowds, marching soldiers, drunken carousers, fairground rides, pilloried prisoners, fighting cocks and flocks of sheep disrupting traffic. Every interior is stuffed to the rafters with people and furnishings. In the house of Hoyden’s parents, paintings are askew and chickens and pigs run wild. In Magistrate Squeezum’s chambers, books and papers are piled haphazardly on every available horizontal surface. The result is one of the most lived-in looking movies made up to this point in time
The director pays so much attention to the background details that he totally forgets the story going on in the foreground, which is more antic than it is actually funny. The performances are completely over the top, but to too little effect. Even the glorious Susannah York is wasted, playing the ingénue, even though it is obvious that she is a little too mature for the part (this is nine years after she played the ingenue role in Tunes of Glory). This being the Restoration period, Ms. York and the other actresses are squeezed into tight-fitting corsets that make their breasts pop up so high it’a a wonder they can see over them. Peter Bull (owner of the largest Teddy Bear collection in the British Isles) is quite droll as Reverend Bull, who has a mercenary idea of how religious benefits should be doled out. The second best performance is given by Jim Dale, a supple performer (as he proved on the boards in Scapino) as the false Lord Foppington. And even better, Christopher Plummer is hilarious as Lord Foppington himself. He moves his arms and legs like a spastic marionette. The idea here is that Foppington spends so much time being carted around town in a sedan chair that he has little working knowledge of how to walk. With made-up bow lips and rouged cheeks that make him look like a china doll, and a lisping, languid way of speaking, as though the very idea of talking is too great a physical burden to him, Lord Foppington is a walking Restoration cartoon come brilliantly to life.
The highlight of the movie is a food fight that erupts after two stubborn burghers in sedan chairs get into a disagreement about which one has the right of way. The scene takes place in a narrow alley lined with food stalls. The scene also serves the important function of separating the two main lovers, Shaftoe and Hilaret, on their way to the altar. Playing like an 18th century version of the food fight from National Lampoon’s Animal House, this scene is both an affront and a delight—an affront that a movie could stoop this low, a delight because it does.
Like a Restoration Comedy version of On the Town, this is the story of three sailors on shore leave, having just returned to London from ten months at sea and in the West Indies. Lusty (Jim Dale, the once and future narrator of the Harry Potter audio books) is unable to see his prostitute lover, Nell (Georgia Brown, the original Nancy in the musical, Oliver!), who is busy seducing Lord Foppington (Christopher Plummer). While those two are otherwise engaged, Lusty impersonates Foppington so he can wed and bed the lord’s virginal fiancée Hoyden (Vanessa Howard), who comes to the marriage with a two thousand pound dowry. Shaftoe (Tom Bell, Helen Mirren’s departmental nemesis in the first Prime Suspect) longs to be married to Hilaret (Susannah York), over the objections of her father, Gossip (Roy Dotrice before he went on to lead the underground denizens of Manhattan in Beauty and the Beast). A third sailor, Ramble (Ian Bannen, master of the cricket pitch known as the googly in John Boorman’s Hope and Glory), pines for his drowned wife, Cloris, but drowns his sorrows by trying to seduce Magistrate Squeezum’s wife (Glynis Johns, with a slight borrowing of Joan Greenwood’s insouciant purr). All three men end up in Magistrate’s Squeezum’s court, accused of rape. It all ends happily, though, with Shaftoe and Hilaret wed, Ramble reunited with his supposedly dead wife (who turns out to be Hilaret’s maid), and Lusty married to his virgin bride (and learning in the bargain that he and Hilaret are long lost brother and sister).
Lock Up Your Daughters has an unusual provenance. It is a non-musical adaptation of the West End musical, with music by Laurie Johnson (the sprightly theme to The Avengers) and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse (Stop the World, I Want to Get Off as well as the Goldfinger theme by John Barry), which, in turn, is based on a play by Henry Fielding (author, of course, of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews). The only real singing in the film comes from a men’s chorus belting out some kind of faux sea chantey on the soundtrack.
The movie is directed by Peter Coe, a theatre director making his film debut, and it’s obvious that he studied Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963) and the collected works of Richard Lester, not to mention Hogarth’s the Seven Deadly Sins and A Rake’s Progress, before even gazing through his viewfinder. The movie is steeped in early 18th century atmosphere. It was shot on location in the Republic of Ireland, with the town of Kilkenny doubling for period London. The streets of this London are covered with mud, dung and straw. Each frame of film is crammed with acrobats, begging children, hanging corpses, emptied chamber pots, milling crowds, marching soldiers, drunken carousers, fairground rides, pilloried prisoners, fighting cocks and flocks of sheep disrupting traffic. Every interior is stuffed to the rafters with people and furnishings. In the house of Hoyden’s parents, paintings are askew and chickens and pigs run wild. In Magistrate Squeezum’s chambers, books and papers are piled haphazardly on every available horizontal surface. The result is one of the most lived-in looking movies made up to this point in time
The director pays so much attention to the background details that he totally forgets the story going on in the foreground, which is more antic than it is actually funny. The performances are completely over the top, but to too little effect. Even the glorious Susannah York is wasted, playing the ingénue, even though it is obvious that she is a little too mature for the part (this is nine years after she played the ingenue role in Tunes of Glory). This being the Restoration period, Ms. York and the other actresses are squeezed into tight-fitting corsets that make their breasts pop up so high it’a a wonder they can see over them. Peter Bull (owner of the largest Teddy Bear collection in the British Isles) is quite droll as Reverend Bull, who has a mercenary idea of how religious benefits should be doled out. The second best performance is given by Jim Dale, a supple performer (as he proved on the boards in Scapino) as the false Lord Foppington. And even better, Christopher Plummer is hilarious as Lord Foppington himself. He moves his arms and legs like a spastic marionette. The idea here is that Foppington spends so much time being carted around town in a sedan chair that he has little working knowledge of how to walk. With made-up bow lips and rouged cheeks that make him look like a china doll, and a lisping, languid way of speaking, as though the very idea of talking is too great a physical burden to him, Lord Foppington is a walking Restoration cartoon come brilliantly to life.
The highlight of the movie is a food fight that erupts after two stubborn burghers in sedan chairs get into a disagreement about which one has the right of way. The scene takes place in a narrow alley lined with food stalls. The scene also serves the important function of separating the two main lovers, Shaftoe and Hilaret, on their way to the altar. Playing like an 18th century version of the food fight from National Lampoon’s Animal House, this scene is both an affront and a delight—an affront that a movie could stoop this low, a delight because it does.
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