By the late 1960s, there were protesters of every stripe. There were college students who protested the war in Vietnam and blacks and whites who protested on behalf of civil rights. There were women who protested for equal rights for their sex. And homosexuals made their stand at the Stonewall Tavern in Greenwich Village, marking the opening salvo in the Gay Rights Movement. Among those movie voices who spoke most persuasively for societal change was Robert F. Lyons.
Robert F. who?
Robert F. Lyons, with his long hair and hippie-ish manner, was, for a short time, Hollywood’s go-to guy when it came to embodying the counterculture. He first came to prominence playing Elliott Gould’s whacked out friend in Richard Rush’s Getting Straight, one of three movies released in 1970, along with Stanley Kramer’s R.P.M. and Stuart Hagmann’s The Strawberry Statement, that attempted, although too late and in too bogus a fashion, to dramatize the student unrest on U.S. college campuses during the Vietnam War. Lyons is hilarious as a hippie who tries every trick in the book in order to escape conscription into the military. He walks around with a purse, has a black woman with a passel of kids pretend to be his wife. It’s all in very bad taste and all very funny, with the kicker that in those days a very simple formula applied to the draft--conscription = Vietnam = death. Based on this performance and a slightly laidback Jack Nicholson vibe, Lyons stood poised for movie stardom.
Lyons next shows up as sociopathic serial killer Skipper Todd in Barry Shear’s The Todd Killings (1971) opposite a pre-John Boy Richard Thomas. Perpetually clean-cut, Thomas himself had just played a sociopathic teenager, along with Bruce Davison and Barbara Hershey, in Frank Perry’s Last Summer (1969), which ends shockingly with the disaffected suburban characters played by these three actors gang raping a helpless victim touchingly played by Catherine Burns.
The Todd Killings is a fictionalized account of the true story of sixties’ thrill-killer Charles Schmidt, who was known as “The Pied Piper of Tucson.” Director Shear knew a thing or two about restless youth, having directed Wild in the Streets (1968), about a rock star who parlays his star power into a seat in the Oval Office, The Todd Killings perfectly captures the dark side of the peace and love subculture that eventually led to the Tate-LoBianco murders and the ultimate bad trip of the Altamont Free Concert, where Hell’s Angels employed to provide security at the speedway beat a fan to death while the Rolling Stones played on stage. This terrifying moment was captured in the Maysles Brothers’ famous documentary, Gimme Shelter (1971). Lyons’ chilling performance as Skipper Todd is the flip side of the beatific disposition he deployed so amusingly in Getting Straight.
In 1972, Lyons starred as the scruffy romantic lead in the marquee-bursting Dealing, or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues. The movie is based on a novel by Michael Douglas. No, not the son of Kirk, husband of Zeta-Jones and Academy Award-winning star of Wall Street. This Michael Douglas was the pseudonym for the writing team of the late Michael Crichton and his younger brother, Douglas. In it, Lyons plays a Harvard law student who travels to Berkeley to pick up forty bricks of marijuana for his friend, John Lithgow (hilarious in his movie debut as a dandified Harvard student), who is the campus drug dealer. In Berkeley, Lyons meets Sukie, played by Barbara Hershey, an actress who was the perfect embodiment of the hippie ideal, playing, among other roles, an earth mother who rents out her womb to a barren doctor’s wife in James Bridges’ The Baby Maker (1970) and the free spirited girl friend of Michael Sarrazin in Robert Mulligan’s The Pursuit of Happiness (1971). (In her real life, Ms. Hershey even added Seagull to her last name in recognition of the bird that was accidentally killed during the filming of Last Summer.) In the time-honored tradition of screwball comedy, Lyons is even given a straight-laced girl friend (Ellen Barber with her hair tied back tight in a chignon) to provide the proper contrast to the unconstrained--in every sense of the word--Ms. Hershey.
Almost every movie comedy of this period features a scene in which a straight character “turns on” for the first time and has some kind of epiphany. Think of Peter Sellers tasting those hash brownies proffered by Leigh Taylor-Young (the poor man’s Barbara Hershey) in Hy Averback’s I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968). Or Barbara Streisand offering uptight George Segal a toke of her marijuana cigarette in Herbert Ross’ The Owl and the Pussycat (1970). What’s interesting about Dealing is the fact that it contains no such scene. Marijuana is presented as a normal, everyday aspect of college life. In fact, Dealing, the book, is really a big shout out to law enforcement for the decriminalization of anti-marijuana statutes. But what’s funny about the book is that, instead of adapting the psychedelic stylings of a Ken Kesey, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Robbins, Dealing is written in a slightly hipper version (obviously the younger brother's influence) of the stolid, middlebrow style that is the mainstay of Crichton’s fiction, from his first, The Andromeda Strain, through Jurassic Park, to, sadly, his last, State of Fear.
In the movie, trouble happens when Hershey flies from Berkeley to Boston to visit Lyons, muling eighty pounds of marijuana. She is busted by a corrupt cop played by Charles Durning, who takes the marijuana for himself. And the story recounts what happens when Lyons tries to get the marijuana back from Durning. The movie goes the book one better and ends with a climactic shoot-out at—of all places—Walden Pond! In the same way that marijuana entered the soft underbelly of white middle class American life during the late sixties, hippies were eventually subsumed into the rest of mainstream society. And Robert F. Lyons went from hippie outsider sidekick in Getting Straight to handsome hippiesh leading man in Dealing.
Dealing is also notable for featuring an actress with the onomatopoeiac name of Joy Bang. She would also appear in Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), in which Rock Hudson, cast surprisingly against type, plays a popular high school gym teacher and guidance counselor who sleeps with his prettiest female students, then murders them. The movie is a virtual hymn to the enduring power of young female flesh (what else would you expect from the French auteur who directed his wife, Jane Fonda, as the scantily-clad Barbarella?).
Inexplicably, Robert F. Lyons never became a movie star, although he does have a long resume of acting in episodic TV (from The Rookies to Cold Case). Dealing was barely released by Warner Bros. in the winter of 1972 and was never given a chance to find its audience. Perhaps, when the spirit of the 1960s soured in the wake of Charles Manson and Altamont, actors such as Lyons suddenly found they weren’t needed any longer to embody an idea that no longer existed. Barbara Hershey went on to play more complex female characters in movies such as Phil Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983), as the wife of test pilot Chuck Yeager (an iconic Sam Shepard), and Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters (1986), as the object of brother-in-law Michael Caine’s romantic obsession. But for one brief moment, in 1972, Lyons and Hershey were the Tracy and Hepburn of the turn on, tune in, drop out set. The outcasts had become card-carrying members of the status quo. And Robert F. Lyons became an unintended victim of his own contribution to transform society.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
The Money Trap (1965) - The Last Noir?
It’s quite possible that Burt Kennedy’s The Money Trap (1965) is the last example of film noir to be actually shot in black and white. By the mid-sixties, black and white was not an artistic choice made by a director and dictated by the film’s subject matter, but was employed mainly in B-movies as a cost cutting measure, because the film stock was less expensive to use than color. And despite the august presence of Glenn Ford and Joseph Cotten, make no mistake about it--The Money Trap is definitely a B-movie.
As an L.A. detective with personal demons to overcome, Ford walks through the movie with a world-weary air. Or maybe it’s just that he’s tired of being reduced to B-List status and is going through the motions of making one more pulpish thriller. Gone is the charisma that made him such a complex villain in the original 3:10 to Yuma (much better than Russell Crowe in James Mangold‘s overstuffed remake of this 1957 western classic). Or the reassuring sense of decency that makes him such a strong foil for Ross Martin’s asthmatic bank extortionist in Blake Edwards’ noirish Experiment in Terror (1962). Or the glee he displays in playing straight man in Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (as Damon Runyon’s Dave the Dude) and those two World War II-era service comedies, Don’t Go Near the Water and The Teahouse of the August Moon (opposite Marlon Brando as Sakini, an Okinawan translator). And in Cotten’s wooden performance, one searches in vain for any trace of the actor whose Yankee brio enlivened Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Sir Carol Reed’s The Third Man, three of the best movies of the forties. The only bright spot in this movie comes from Ricardo Montalban playing Ford’s detective partner with an uncustomary-and much welcome-hint of bemusement in his smile.
There is, come to think of it, another bright spot-the character of Ford’s former girl friend from the old neighborhood, played by Rita Hayworth in what amounts to an act of bravery, as she drops all pretense of glamour and really allows her age to show. Ford and Hayworth were, of course, famously paired in Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946). And the casting of Hayworth is more than a stunt because it forces the audience to recall the Hayworth of old even as she now strips away her cosmetic facade to show how many miles she has traveled in the years between that movie and this one. She is probably the only untainted character in the movie, and she acquits herself with dignity in a role that calls for her to be bloodied but unbowed by life.
In The Money Trap, Ford plays a detective who is married to Elke Sommer. They live beyond their means in a cool sixties house (complete with swimming pool) and are in desperate need of money. So Ford, with the connivance of his partner, plans to break into the safe of a society doctor (Cotten) with mob ties who peddles heroin on the side. The story takes place in L.A, but is shot mainly on the M-G-M back lot. The climactic shoot-out in the rain takes place on a dead end street that looks déjà vu familiar because it was probably used as the street where Tom Hanks guns down Paul Newman (also in the rain) in Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition (2002). The interior sets look empty and unlived-in. And the movie is only enlivened by two scenes actually shot on location—one on the Bunker Hill funicular, the other at what looks to be the Ocean Park amusement pier.
The director, Burt Kennedy, got his start as a screenwriter. Among his credits is the terrific western, The Tall T (1957), directed by Bud Boetticher and based on a short story by Elmore Leonard (3:10 to Yuma is also based on a Leonard story). As a director, Kennedy has mostly western films to his credit, such as The Rounders (1965-not to be confused with the Matt Damon/Edward Norton vehicle, Rounders) and the popular Support Your Local Sheriff (1969). The Money Trap is an anomaly among his oeuvre. No attempt is made on Kennedy’s part to turn it into a contemporary western. Instead, with a screenplay by the one-time blacklisted Walter Bernstein (adapted from a novel by Lionel White), it is a morality tale that exposes the corrupting influence of money (and its lack thereof). With the exception of Ford’s wife, everyone in the movie who comes in contact with the contents of Cotten’s safe ($250,000 cash and an equal amount of heroin) ends up falling victim to it. Ford and Montalban even grow mistrustful of one another and clash over it. Innocent people also lose their lives over it.
In true film noir fashion, Ford, too, becomes a victim of his own greed and corruption. But instead of dying outright, he is given the chance, like many noir heroes, to contemplate his own fall from grace before the final fade out. In the last scene, a wounded Ford returns to his cool sixties house. Elke Sommer sees that he is wounded, maybe even dying, and goes to call for an ambulance. As they wait, Ford, holding his gut with one hand, turns on the house lights, switches on the hi-fi, which floods the house with jazz, goes outside and turns on the pool lights. And so, surrounded by the empty signifiers of his materialistic lifestyle, Ford waits to meet his fate. In an ironic note, one of the first true film noirs to be shot in color, John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), features a scene in which, while spending the night at a mob boss’ empty house, Angie Dickinson awakens Lee Marvin, with whom she is on the run, by turning on every electric appliance in the kitchen—a brilliant comment on America’s consumerist culture run amuck.
In the course of the movie, beginning with the shock cut that ends the opening titles, Kennedy shows a love of women’s underthings that verges on the amusingly fetishistic. The jazz score that accompanies the movie’s action strikes a discordant note. And there is a subplot involving a man who kills his wife because she turned tricks to help make ends meet that is supposed to show the humane side of Ford’s detective. But Ford can’t seem to muster up enough energy to reveal this aspect of his character to the audience. And there is not enough desperation attached to Ford’s need for money. Can’t he just tell his wife to cut back the poolside cocktail parties to once a month? In the end, though, with its stripped-down plot and unsparing sense of fatalism, The Money Trap is a good enough example of neo-noir to help you make it through the night.
As an L.A. detective with personal demons to overcome, Ford walks through the movie with a world-weary air. Or maybe it’s just that he’s tired of being reduced to B-List status and is going through the motions of making one more pulpish thriller. Gone is the charisma that made him such a complex villain in the original 3:10 to Yuma (much better than Russell Crowe in James Mangold‘s overstuffed remake of this 1957 western classic). Or the reassuring sense of decency that makes him such a strong foil for Ross Martin’s asthmatic bank extortionist in Blake Edwards’ noirish Experiment in Terror (1962). Or the glee he displays in playing straight man in Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (as Damon Runyon’s Dave the Dude) and those two World War II-era service comedies, Don’t Go Near the Water and The Teahouse of the August Moon (opposite Marlon Brando as Sakini, an Okinawan translator). And in Cotten’s wooden performance, one searches in vain for any trace of the actor whose Yankee brio enlivened Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Sir Carol Reed’s The Third Man, three of the best movies of the forties. The only bright spot in this movie comes from Ricardo Montalban playing Ford’s detective partner with an uncustomary-and much welcome-hint of bemusement in his smile.
There is, come to think of it, another bright spot-the character of Ford’s former girl friend from the old neighborhood, played by Rita Hayworth in what amounts to an act of bravery, as she drops all pretense of glamour and really allows her age to show. Ford and Hayworth were, of course, famously paired in Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946). And the casting of Hayworth is more than a stunt because it forces the audience to recall the Hayworth of old even as she now strips away her cosmetic facade to show how many miles she has traveled in the years between that movie and this one. She is probably the only untainted character in the movie, and she acquits herself with dignity in a role that calls for her to be bloodied but unbowed by life.
In The Money Trap, Ford plays a detective who is married to Elke Sommer. They live beyond their means in a cool sixties house (complete with swimming pool) and are in desperate need of money. So Ford, with the connivance of his partner, plans to break into the safe of a society doctor (Cotten) with mob ties who peddles heroin on the side. The story takes place in L.A, but is shot mainly on the M-G-M back lot. The climactic shoot-out in the rain takes place on a dead end street that looks déjà vu familiar because it was probably used as the street where Tom Hanks guns down Paul Newman (also in the rain) in Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition (2002). The interior sets look empty and unlived-in. And the movie is only enlivened by two scenes actually shot on location—one on the Bunker Hill funicular, the other at what looks to be the Ocean Park amusement pier.
The director, Burt Kennedy, got his start as a screenwriter. Among his credits is the terrific western, The Tall T (1957), directed by Bud Boetticher and based on a short story by Elmore Leonard (3:10 to Yuma is also based on a Leonard story). As a director, Kennedy has mostly western films to his credit, such as The Rounders (1965-not to be confused with the Matt Damon/Edward Norton vehicle, Rounders) and the popular Support Your Local Sheriff (1969). The Money Trap is an anomaly among his oeuvre. No attempt is made on Kennedy’s part to turn it into a contemporary western. Instead, with a screenplay by the one-time blacklisted Walter Bernstein (adapted from a novel by Lionel White), it is a morality tale that exposes the corrupting influence of money (and its lack thereof). With the exception of Ford’s wife, everyone in the movie who comes in contact with the contents of Cotten’s safe ($250,000 cash and an equal amount of heroin) ends up falling victim to it. Ford and Montalban even grow mistrustful of one another and clash over it. Innocent people also lose their lives over it.
In true film noir fashion, Ford, too, becomes a victim of his own greed and corruption. But instead of dying outright, he is given the chance, like many noir heroes, to contemplate his own fall from grace before the final fade out. In the last scene, a wounded Ford returns to his cool sixties house. Elke Sommer sees that he is wounded, maybe even dying, and goes to call for an ambulance. As they wait, Ford, holding his gut with one hand, turns on the house lights, switches on the hi-fi, which floods the house with jazz, goes outside and turns on the pool lights. And so, surrounded by the empty signifiers of his materialistic lifestyle, Ford waits to meet his fate. In an ironic note, one of the first true film noirs to be shot in color, John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), features a scene in which, while spending the night at a mob boss’ empty house, Angie Dickinson awakens Lee Marvin, with whom she is on the run, by turning on every electric appliance in the kitchen—a brilliant comment on America’s consumerist culture run amuck.
In the course of the movie, beginning with the shock cut that ends the opening titles, Kennedy shows a love of women’s underthings that verges on the amusingly fetishistic. The jazz score that accompanies the movie’s action strikes a discordant note. And there is a subplot involving a man who kills his wife because she turned tricks to help make ends meet that is supposed to show the humane side of Ford’s detective. But Ford can’t seem to muster up enough energy to reveal this aspect of his character to the audience. And there is not enough desperation attached to Ford’s need for money. Can’t he just tell his wife to cut back the poolside cocktail parties to once a month? In the end, though, with its stripped-down plot and unsparing sense of fatalism, The Money Trap is a good enough example of neo-noir to help you make it through the night.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Men in Boxes (1962, 1980, 2004)
When a British scientist with pacifist leanings commits suicide under mysterious circumstances, after taking part in a sensory deprivation experiment, he stands accused of having been a traitor to his country. In order to prove that it was the sensory deprivation tank that caused his suspicious behavior, an Oxford colleague (Dirk Bogarde) agrees to repeat the experiment. But without his knowledge, another colleague and a government security official supervising the experiment use sensory deprivation to brainwash a susceptible Bogarde into believing that he despises his pregnant wife (Mary Ure, wife of Robert Shaw). If the experiment works, they think, Bogarde will be proven right and the dead scientist will be exonerated. Unfortunately, the experiment turns out to work all too well, and the second colleague and the security official have a difficult time deprogramming an increasingly unhinged Bogarde.
This is the plot of The Mind Benders (1962), an authentic artifact of Cold War paranoia, directed by Basil Dearden (Dead of Night and the father of James, author of the screenplay for Fatal Attraction), and written by James Kennaway, author of Tunes of Glory, one of the best novels and movies about the peacetime military. The Mind Benders cogently dramatizes the dangers inherent in the use of the experimental box. Bogarde enters it one way and comes out of it with a completely different personality.
In an interesting aside, in 1968, the newly formed film division of the Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd. purchased the rights to Kennaway’s novel, Some Gorgeous Accident, about a love triangle and a wife’s infidelity. It was supposedly inspired by Kennaway’s wife’s affair with spy novelist John Le Carre. In an ironic twist, Le Carre’s fictional alter ego, George Smiley, has a wife, Lady Anne, whose nymphomania is probably the worst kept secret in the history of the Circus—the Secret Intelligence Service. With its cool, probing intelligence and espionage overtones, The Mind Benders plays like a science fiction novel written by John Le Carre.
This movie about brainwashing and sensory deprivation is a contemporary of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and a forerunner of Ken Russell‘s Altered States (1980). Both movies are adaptations written by Broadway veterans—the former by George Axelrod, the latter by Paddy Chayefsky. In the case of Altered States, a scientist (William Hurt) uses a sensory deprivation tank, in conjunction with a decoction made up of magic mushrooms he picked up in Mexico, in order to locate the seat of human consciousness. What he discovers, when the experiment goes wildly out of control, is his enhanced mind’s ability to transform, first his own anatomy, regressing into a proto-human figure that wanders the nighttime streets of Boston in search of prey, then the nature of reality itself. The scientist enters the box that is the sensory deprivation tank in one state and exits it in a completely altered state, hence the movie’s title.
In both The Mind Benders and Altered States, the sensory deprivation tanks have jury-rigged looks to them, all exposed electrical cables, pipes and insulation. They are the stuff of real science, not sleek and futuristic science fiction. They have an authentic bootleg, bootstrap look to them that really sells the reality of their science fiction premises. In fact, The Mind Benders is in the tradition of British science fiction movies such as The Day of the Triffids, Village of the Damned (both based on novels by John Wyndham) and Children of the Damned, which tend to take their stories very seriously indeed, something that American science fiction movies from the same period, the early 1960s, could never be accused of.
Which brings us to the third box—the packing crate tied together with duct tape time travel device that is the centerpiece of Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), a science fiction movie shot on a $7,000 budget that had many viewers and critics scratching their heads when the movie enjoyed its brief theatrical release. This is literary science fiction, not movie science fiction. It is an intensely cerebral movie about the causality and potential paradoxes of time travel. But instead of George Pal’s Victorian chronocraft in his movie adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or the time-traveling DeLorean in Back to the Future, the time machine box here has a completely handmade look to it, just as Primer itself looks handmade (in a good way).
In Primer, two techno geeks, Abe and Aaron, are also best friends. Abe lives with a couple of roommates. Aaron is married and has a young daughter. Abe is like another member of their family. Both work for high tech companies, but perform scientific experiments in Aaron’s garage in their spare time. Abe and Aaron begin work on a superconductor that they accidentally discover has time travel applications. How this time travel device, kept in a storage locker, works, is part of the script’s rigorous approach toward its science fictional premise.
The two friends use the machine to go back in time six hours and make money by buying stocks they already know will go up in the course of the day. But then, something happens. Aaron wants to use the time machine to achieve more godlike powers of prescience. Abe wants to go back in time to sabotage the machine and prevent his previous self from discovering its use. Aaron goes back in time even further to frustrate Abe’s intentions. In the end, both the partnership and the friendships are dissolved as their two disparate philosophies force Abe and Aaron to quarrel violently with one another. They enter the box as friends, but depart it as bitter enemies.
These three movies are separated by roughly twenty years each. And yet the device, the box, used in the movies are virtually interchangeable. Dirk Bogarde could crawl into Abe and Aaron’s time machine and feel right at home. Abe and Aaron could use William Hurt’s sensory deprivation tank and believe that it came out of their garage band approach to scientific experimentation. At heart, all three movies are about the effects of science on human relationships: between husband and wife in The Mind Benders, between William Hurt and his estranged anthropologist wife (a radiant Blair Brown) in Altered States, and between two best friends in Primer.
The Mind Benders takes way too long to set up its premise and its climax is less than suspenseful. In between, though, the movie provides a resolutely keen anatomy of a contemporary marriage. But it seems like Basil Dearden was the wrong director for the job and one can only imagine the fun that Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, The Small Back Room), a far more flamboyant filmmaker, would have had visualizing the inside of Bogarde’s sensory deprived mind. No stranger to the psychedelic potential of cinema, Ken Russell turns Altered States into a real sixties-style headtrip. Paddy Chayefsky hated Russell’s direction of his dialogue and famously ordered his name taken off the film (the screenplay is credited to “Sidney Aaron”). Shane Carruth is far more restrained in his direction, constrained as he was by his miniscule budget. But he nevertheless manages to create one of the most lived-in depictions of the world of the techno geek.
In the end, despite their cautionary themes (distilled to its essence, Altered States’ is right out of The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.”), there is something hopeful about watching smart, dedicated men working on a shoestring budget to produce something new and exciting. That is exactly a metaphor for what Shane Carruth accomplished in Primer. One can’t wait to see what happens when he unveils his next box.
This is the plot of The Mind Benders (1962), an authentic artifact of Cold War paranoia, directed by Basil Dearden (Dead of Night and the father of James, author of the screenplay for Fatal Attraction), and written by James Kennaway, author of Tunes of Glory, one of the best novels and movies about the peacetime military. The Mind Benders cogently dramatizes the dangers inherent in the use of the experimental box. Bogarde enters it one way and comes out of it with a completely different personality.
In an interesting aside, in 1968, the newly formed film division of the Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd. purchased the rights to Kennaway’s novel, Some Gorgeous Accident, about a love triangle and a wife’s infidelity. It was supposedly inspired by Kennaway’s wife’s affair with spy novelist John Le Carre. In an ironic twist, Le Carre’s fictional alter ego, George Smiley, has a wife, Lady Anne, whose nymphomania is probably the worst kept secret in the history of the Circus—the Secret Intelligence Service. With its cool, probing intelligence and espionage overtones, The Mind Benders plays like a science fiction novel written by John Le Carre.
This movie about brainwashing and sensory deprivation is a contemporary of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and a forerunner of Ken Russell‘s Altered States (1980). Both movies are adaptations written by Broadway veterans—the former by George Axelrod, the latter by Paddy Chayefsky. In the case of Altered States, a scientist (William Hurt) uses a sensory deprivation tank, in conjunction with a decoction made up of magic mushrooms he picked up in Mexico, in order to locate the seat of human consciousness. What he discovers, when the experiment goes wildly out of control, is his enhanced mind’s ability to transform, first his own anatomy, regressing into a proto-human figure that wanders the nighttime streets of Boston in search of prey, then the nature of reality itself. The scientist enters the box that is the sensory deprivation tank in one state and exits it in a completely altered state, hence the movie’s title.
In both The Mind Benders and Altered States, the sensory deprivation tanks have jury-rigged looks to them, all exposed electrical cables, pipes and insulation. They are the stuff of real science, not sleek and futuristic science fiction. They have an authentic bootleg, bootstrap look to them that really sells the reality of their science fiction premises. In fact, The Mind Benders is in the tradition of British science fiction movies such as The Day of the Triffids, Village of the Damned (both based on novels by John Wyndham) and Children of the Damned, which tend to take their stories very seriously indeed, something that American science fiction movies from the same period, the early 1960s, could never be accused of.
Which brings us to the third box—the packing crate tied together with duct tape time travel device that is the centerpiece of Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), a science fiction movie shot on a $7,000 budget that had many viewers and critics scratching their heads when the movie enjoyed its brief theatrical release. This is literary science fiction, not movie science fiction. It is an intensely cerebral movie about the causality and potential paradoxes of time travel. But instead of George Pal’s Victorian chronocraft in his movie adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or the time-traveling DeLorean in Back to the Future, the time machine box here has a completely handmade look to it, just as Primer itself looks handmade (in a good way).
In Primer, two techno geeks, Abe and Aaron, are also best friends. Abe lives with a couple of roommates. Aaron is married and has a young daughter. Abe is like another member of their family. Both work for high tech companies, but perform scientific experiments in Aaron’s garage in their spare time. Abe and Aaron begin work on a superconductor that they accidentally discover has time travel applications. How this time travel device, kept in a storage locker, works, is part of the script’s rigorous approach toward its science fictional premise.
The two friends use the machine to go back in time six hours and make money by buying stocks they already know will go up in the course of the day. But then, something happens. Aaron wants to use the time machine to achieve more godlike powers of prescience. Abe wants to go back in time to sabotage the machine and prevent his previous self from discovering its use. Aaron goes back in time even further to frustrate Abe’s intentions. In the end, both the partnership and the friendships are dissolved as their two disparate philosophies force Abe and Aaron to quarrel violently with one another. They enter the box as friends, but depart it as bitter enemies.
These three movies are separated by roughly twenty years each. And yet the device, the box, used in the movies are virtually interchangeable. Dirk Bogarde could crawl into Abe and Aaron’s time machine and feel right at home. Abe and Aaron could use William Hurt’s sensory deprivation tank and believe that it came out of their garage band approach to scientific experimentation. At heart, all three movies are about the effects of science on human relationships: between husband and wife in The Mind Benders, between William Hurt and his estranged anthropologist wife (a radiant Blair Brown) in Altered States, and between two best friends in Primer.
The Mind Benders takes way too long to set up its premise and its climax is less than suspenseful. In between, though, the movie provides a resolutely keen anatomy of a contemporary marriage. But it seems like Basil Dearden was the wrong director for the job and one can only imagine the fun that Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, The Small Back Room), a far more flamboyant filmmaker, would have had visualizing the inside of Bogarde’s sensory deprived mind. No stranger to the psychedelic potential of cinema, Ken Russell turns Altered States into a real sixties-style headtrip. Paddy Chayefsky hated Russell’s direction of his dialogue and famously ordered his name taken off the film (the screenplay is credited to “Sidney Aaron”). Shane Carruth is far more restrained in his direction, constrained as he was by his miniscule budget. But he nevertheless manages to create one of the most lived-in depictions of the world of the techno geek.
In the end, despite their cautionary themes (distilled to its essence, Altered States’ is right out of The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.”), there is something hopeful about watching smart, dedicated men working on a shoestring budget to produce something new and exciting. That is exactly a metaphor for what Shane Carruth accomplished in Primer. One can’t wait to see what happens when he unveils his next box.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Man's Favorite Sport? (1964)
With the possible exception of Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark (both featuring Peter Sellers as Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the Surete), 1964 was not a banner year for American movie comedy. Comedies released for the year include David Swift’s Good Neighbor Sam, J. Lee Thompson’s star-stuffed (as opposed to star-studded) What a Way to Go! and Ralph Levy’s Bedtime Story (remade in 1990 as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). Most of these movies had sex on the brain, yet lacked the refinement of an Ernst Lubitsch to make the sex seem anything but witlessly vulgar.
Even Billy Wilder, a disciple of the “Lubitsch Touch,” co-wrote, produced and directed the misguided Kiss Me, Stupid, a movie about a would-be song writer (Ray Walston) who, in order to sell one of his songs, pimps out a stripper (Kim Novak) to a Vegas crooner passing through town (Dean Martin playing a character referred to in the script as “Dino”). It was considered so depraved that the movie was condemned in the strongest language possible by the Catholic League of Decency. Wilder blamed the failure of the movie on the fact that Ray Walston was a last minute substitute for a heart attack-stricken Peter Sellers, for whom the part of the song writer had originally been written. One year later, J. Lee Thompson’s strenuously unfunny John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (written by a pre-Exorcist William Peter Blatty), generated an equal amount of Catholic ire by showing the Notre Dame football team seduced by a band of harem girls.
Three of the biggest American comic stars of the decade were Cary Grant, Jack Lemmon and Rock Hudson. Grant was winding down his career with the romantic thriller, Charade (1963), and the family comedy, Father Goose, in which, cast against type, the usually suave Grant spent the entire movie barefoot, rumpled and unshaven. In 1964, Jack Lemmon was represented by Good Neighbor Sam, a comedy that timorously exploited that shocking new phenomenon of wife swapping, based on a minor novel by Jack Finney (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Time and Again). As for the well-named Rock Hudson, he appeared in two romantic comedies that year, as Doris Day’s foil in Norman Jewison’s Send Me No Flowers and as Paula Prentiss’ in Howard Hawks’ Man’s Favorite Sport?
At the time, Hawks was coming to the end of a distinguished career as one of the greatest American film directors, with a protean command of any genre. He could direct comedy (His Girl Friday) and drama (Only Angels Have Wings), contemporary films (To Have and Have Not) and historical epics (Land of the Pharaohs), crime melodramas (Scarface) and westerns (Red River), war movies (Air Force) and detective stories (The Big Sleep). It is even believed that, in addition to producing, he secretly directed The Thing from Another World (1951), which featured his trademark overlapping dialogue as well as another Hawksian staple—the lone female character who can hold her own in a world of male camaraderie.
In Man’s Favorite Sport?, Hawks generously steals from himself and recycles many of the most famous gags from what is probably his best screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby (1938). Although well regarded today, the movie was a disaster when it was released because the humor in the movie is so lacking in motivation that the entire picture has an absurdist air to it. Katharine Hepburn plays a mad heiress who becomes obsessed with winning the love of a man she barely knows, a distracted paleontologist played by Cary Grant. He seems more concerned with finding his Brontosaurus skeleton’s missing bone than in Hepburn’s flirtatious assaults. The bone in question, the intercostal clavicle, has been stolen by the heiress’ dog (played by Asta on loan from The Thin Man series). But that is not the Baby of the title. Baby is a leopard the mad heiress keeps in her Park Avenue apartment (and who goes after the dog who goes after the bone).
What is man’s favorite sport? According to Johnny Mercer’s lyrics to Henry Mancini’s title song, “the favorite sport of man is girls.” But in the movie, the sport in question is ostensibly fly-fishing, of which Rock Hudson, playing a San Francisco Abercrombie and Fitch salesman, is supposedly an expert. (In those days, A&F sold sporting goods and camping equipment instead of retailing teen erotica fantasies.) In reality, Hudson has never been fishing in his life and has faked his expertise. The plot kicks in when Hudson’s bosses ask him to take part in a fishing tournament held at a lodge north of San Francisco. Paula Prentiss is a P.R. woman who represents the lodge. Fearful of being exposed as a fraud, Hudson resents Prentiss for roping him into this potentially scandalous situation. The two of them spend most of the movie fighting tooth and nail, which, this being a screwball comedy, only makes them fall in love with one another. And along the way, we are treated to a series of scenes in which Hudson, the non-fisherman is forced to pretend to be an expert on fly-fishing (just as Hudson, the closeted gay man, is forced in all his movies to pretend to be a heterosexual ladies’ man).
Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss are Hawks’ contemporary stand-ins for Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, although they are pale copies when compared with the sparkling originals. Prentiss affects the same madcap air as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, but here, her attraction to Hudson really seems to come out of nowhere. And Rock Hudson’s indifference to Prentiss’ come-ons appears to come from a deeper place than just his opposition to her scheme of having him continue to fake his expertise during the fly-fishing tournament. The script even honors genre conventions by giving Hudson a requisite straight-laced fiancée to complete the love triangle according to the rules of screwball comedy (although, this being 1964, Hudson's fiancee is a slightly sexier version of Cary Grant's prim, ascetic fiancee in Bringing Up Baby).
The movie has a plodding pace compared to the headlong momentum of Hawks’ best movies of the thirties and forties. And there is a general air of mustiness that hangs over most of the jokes. And yet, Hawks still manages to supply some inspired moments. One occurs when Rock Hudson tries to wriggle his way head first into a locked car through its open sunroof. The sight of six-foot-five Hudson stuck upside down inside a tiny foreign car is a visual gem. As a leading man Hudson was never in Cary Grant’s league, but, in Man’s Favorite Sport?, he proved himself to be a very good sport when it came to making fun of his own manly image.
There is another fresh gag (in both senses of the word). It happens when Hudson, Prentiss and Maria Perschy, playing the lodge owner’s daughter, Isolde “Easy” Mueller (Easy: a Hawksian nickname if ever there was one), go into the woods for a private confab after Hudson has revealed to them that he is a phony. The two women have their backs to the camera. Hudson is facing them. It begins to rain. The rain makes Prentiss’ and Perschy’s blouses turn transparent, something they are unaware of as they gab on and on. And the humor in the situation is derived from Hudson’s growing frustration over his inability to inform the oblivious, chatting women that they “look like they haven’t any clothes on.” This racy gag must have come across as quite shocking to movie audiences in 1964.
But these examples aside, compare the otherwise creaky antics in Man’s Favorite Sport?, shot entirely on the hermetically sealed environs of the Universal backlot, to what was going on in British and Italian cinema at the same time. Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned, also released in 1964, is a maturely considered, savagely funny attack on Italian sexual hypocrisy with a plot that boldly demonstrates the courage of Germi’s satiric convictions. And in England, Clive Donner and Richard Lester were shaking up British cinema with, respectively, Nothing but the Best, the story of a charming sociopath played by Alan Bates, and A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles’s critic-defying movie debut.
One year later, in The Knack…and How to Get It, Lester would pull off an audacious comedy stunt by having three characters (played by a very young and very thin Michael Crawford, Rita Tushingham and Donal Donnelly) push, ride, tow and row an iron bed on wheels across London. The scene is a triumph of cinematic ingenuity as Lester playfully collapses time and space in order to work in every possible gag he can dream up for this rolling iron bed, one of the most iconographic images of British cinema of the sixties. Contrast this to the lack of cinematic spark found in these American comedies, directed for the most part by old men, dirty old men or studio hacks with no comedic flair whatsoever, to be consumed by a complacent, middle class, middlebrow audience. It would take Mike Nichols with The Graduate to break a few windows and let some fresh air into the room. But this advent was still three years in the future. And it couldn’t come soon enough to help shake the American cinema out of its doldrums.
Even Billy Wilder, a disciple of the “Lubitsch Touch,” co-wrote, produced and directed the misguided Kiss Me, Stupid, a movie about a would-be song writer (Ray Walston) who, in order to sell one of his songs, pimps out a stripper (Kim Novak) to a Vegas crooner passing through town (Dean Martin playing a character referred to in the script as “Dino”). It was considered so depraved that the movie was condemned in the strongest language possible by the Catholic League of Decency. Wilder blamed the failure of the movie on the fact that Ray Walston was a last minute substitute for a heart attack-stricken Peter Sellers, for whom the part of the song writer had originally been written. One year later, J. Lee Thompson’s strenuously unfunny John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (written by a pre-Exorcist William Peter Blatty), generated an equal amount of Catholic ire by showing the Notre Dame football team seduced by a band of harem girls.
Three of the biggest American comic stars of the decade were Cary Grant, Jack Lemmon and Rock Hudson. Grant was winding down his career with the romantic thriller, Charade (1963), and the family comedy, Father Goose, in which, cast against type, the usually suave Grant spent the entire movie barefoot, rumpled and unshaven. In 1964, Jack Lemmon was represented by Good Neighbor Sam, a comedy that timorously exploited that shocking new phenomenon of wife swapping, based on a minor novel by Jack Finney (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Time and Again). As for the well-named Rock Hudson, he appeared in two romantic comedies that year, as Doris Day’s foil in Norman Jewison’s Send Me No Flowers and as Paula Prentiss’ in Howard Hawks’ Man’s Favorite Sport?
At the time, Hawks was coming to the end of a distinguished career as one of the greatest American film directors, with a protean command of any genre. He could direct comedy (His Girl Friday) and drama (Only Angels Have Wings), contemporary films (To Have and Have Not) and historical epics (Land of the Pharaohs), crime melodramas (Scarface) and westerns (Red River), war movies (Air Force) and detective stories (The Big Sleep). It is even believed that, in addition to producing, he secretly directed The Thing from Another World (1951), which featured his trademark overlapping dialogue as well as another Hawksian staple—the lone female character who can hold her own in a world of male camaraderie.
In Man’s Favorite Sport?, Hawks generously steals from himself and recycles many of the most famous gags from what is probably his best screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby (1938). Although well regarded today, the movie was a disaster when it was released because the humor in the movie is so lacking in motivation that the entire picture has an absurdist air to it. Katharine Hepburn plays a mad heiress who becomes obsessed with winning the love of a man she barely knows, a distracted paleontologist played by Cary Grant. He seems more concerned with finding his Brontosaurus skeleton’s missing bone than in Hepburn’s flirtatious assaults. The bone in question, the intercostal clavicle, has been stolen by the heiress’ dog (played by Asta on loan from The Thin Man series). But that is not the Baby of the title. Baby is a leopard the mad heiress keeps in her Park Avenue apartment (and who goes after the dog who goes after the bone).
What is man’s favorite sport? According to Johnny Mercer’s lyrics to Henry Mancini’s title song, “the favorite sport of man is girls.” But in the movie, the sport in question is ostensibly fly-fishing, of which Rock Hudson, playing a San Francisco Abercrombie and Fitch salesman, is supposedly an expert. (In those days, A&F sold sporting goods and camping equipment instead of retailing teen erotica fantasies.) In reality, Hudson has never been fishing in his life and has faked his expertise. The plot kicks in when Hudson’s bosses ask him to take part in a fishing tournament held at a lodge north of San Francisco. Paula Prentiss is a P.R. woman who represents the lodge. Fearful of being exposed as a fraud, Hudson resents Prentiss for roping him into this potentially scandalous situation. The two of them spend most of the movie fighting tooth and nail, which, this being a screwball comedy, only makes them fall in love with one another. And along the way, we are treated to a series of scenes in which Hudson, the non-fisherman is forced to pretend to be an expert on fly-fishing (just as Hudson, the closeted gay man, is forced in all his movies to pretend to be a heterosexual ladies’ man).
Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss are Hawks’ contemporary stand-ins for Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, although they are pale copies when compared with the sparkling originals. Prentiss affects the same madcap air as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, but here, her attraction to Hudson really seems to come out of nowhere. And Rock Hudson’s indifference to Prentiss’ come-ons appears to come from a deeper place than just his opposition to her scheme of having him continue to fake his expertise during the fly-fishing tournament. The script even honors genre conventions by giving Hudson a requisite straight-laced fiancée to complete the love triangle according to the rules of screwball comedy (although, this being 1964, Hudson's fiancee is a slightly sexier version of Cary Grant's prim, ascetic fiancee in Bringing Up Baby).
The movie has a plodding pace compared to the headlong momentum of Hawks’ best movies of the thirties and forties. And there is a general air of mustiness that hangs over most of the jokes. And yet, Hawks still manages to supply some inspired moments. One occurs when Rock Hudson tries to wriggle his way head first into a locked car through its open sunroof. The sight of six-foot-five Hudson stuck upside down inside a tiny foreign car is a visual gem. As a leading man Hudson was never in Cary Grant’s league, but, in Man’s Favorite Sport?, he proved himself to be a very good sport when it came to making fun of his own manly image.
There is another fresh gag (in both senses of the word). It happens when Hudson, Prentiss and Maria Perschy, playing the lodge owner’s daughter, Isolde “Easy” Mueller (Easy: a Hawksian nickname if ever there was one), go into the woods for a private confab after Hudson has revealed to them that he is a phony. The two women have their backs to the camera. Hudson is facing them. It begins to rain. The rain makes Prentiss’ and Perschy’s blouses turn transparent, something they are unaware of as they gab on and on. And the humor in the situation is derived from Hudson’s growing frustration over his inability to inform the oblivious, chatting women that they “look like they haven’t any clothes on.” This racy gag must have come across as quite shocking to movie audiences in 1964.
But these examples aside, compare the otherwise creaky antics in Man’s Favorite Sport?, shot entirely on the hermetically sealed environs of the Universal backlot, to what was going on in British and Italian cinema at the same time. Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned, also released in 1964, is a maturely considered, savagely funny attack on Italian sexual hypocrisy with a plot that boldly demonstrates the courage of Germi’s satiric convictions. And in England, Clive Donner and Richard Lester were shaking up British cinema with, respectively, Nothing but the Best, the story of a charming sociopath played by Alan Bates, and A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles’s critic-defying movie debut.
One year later, in The Knack…and How to Get It, Lester would pull off an audacious comedy stunt by having three characters (played by a very young and very thin Michael Crawford, Rita Tushingham and Donal Donnelly) push, ride, tow and row an iron bed on wheels across London. The scene is a triumph of cinematic ingenuity as Lester playfully collapses time and space in order to work in every possible gag he can dream up for this rolling iron bed, one of the most iconographic images of British cinema of the sixties. Contrast this to the lack of cinematic spark found in these American comedies, directed for the most part by old men, dirty old men or studio hacks with no comedic flair whatsoever, to be consumed by a complacent, middle class, middlebrow audience. It would take Mike Nichols with The Graduate to break a few windows and let some fresh air into the room. But this advent was still three years in the future. And it couldn’t come soon enough to help shake the American cinema out of its doldrums.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
(Welcome To) Hard Times (1975)
He arrives in darkness and he departs in darkness. And in between he leads a stoic existence as a bare-knuckle brawler. That description can only fit one man—Charles Bronson, who became one of the biggest stars of the seventies in movies such as Michael Winner’s egregious Death Wish (1974). Bronson was never the world’s greatest actor. But he could be devastatingly effective in certain roles. And in Chaney, a Depression-era drifter, in Walter Hill’s directorial debut, Hard Times, he had the role of his career. His physical acting style fit in perfectly with Hill’s ethos that character can be defined by how many times the hero blinks when a gun is stuck in his face. This philosophy was to go on to serve Hill well in movies featuring such strong physical presences as Powers Boothe (Southern Comfort), David Carradine (The Long Riders) Nick Nolte (48 Hours) and Mickey Rourke (Johnny Handsome).
Hard Times was part of a trend of the 1970s in which American directors seemed obsessed with exploring the past. There were movies that took place during World War I (Roger Corman’s Von Richtofen and Brown) the Roaring Twenties (Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby) the home front during World War II (Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42, John Hancock’s Baby Blue Marine), the McCarthy Era (Martin Ritt’s The Front) the fifties (Terrence Malick’s Badlands) and the early sixties (George Lucas’ American Graffiti). One movie, Sydney Pollock’s The Way We Were, probably the best romantic drama of the decade, straddles three different time periods and locations (a small college campus in the thirties, New York in the forties, Hollywood in the fifties). It was almost as if the present, what was to become dubiously known as the “Me Decade,” held no great fascination for these directors.
Many directors chose to set their movies during the Great Depression. This trend was most probably ignited by the success of Bonnie and Clyde, which, from the smug remove of 1967, made the Depression look tragically fashionable. Other films taking place during this period include Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha (1972), George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973), Hal Ashby’s movie biography of Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (1976), Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973), Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), Andrew V. McLaglen’s Fool’s Parade (1971), John Milius’ Dillinger (1973), Howard Zieff’s love letter to the Gower Gulch cowboys, Hearts of the West (1975), Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North (1973) and Martin Ritt’s Sounder (1972). The Great Depression isn’t the theme of these movies, but works as an effective backdrop for stories about people driven to desperate acts because of the “hard times” in which they are living.
In Hard Times, Charles Bronson drifts into the city of New Orleans, where he comes to the attention of James Coburn, playing a fast-talking gambler who manages fighters involved in illegal bare-knuckle brawls. He goes on to manage Bronson, and it is a joy to watch the voluble Coburn and the monosyllabic Bronson trade verbal jabs with one another. Coburn is assisted by Strother Martin, playing a hopheaded ex-doctor who acts as Bronson’s cut man. Hill makes the most of his location shoot by having Bronson meet Martin for the first time in one of the above ground cemeteries that can be found throughout the city. New Orleans has been used many times as a movie location, beginning with Elia Kazin’s Panic in the Streets (1950), among the first American movies to be shot outside the confines of the studio back lot, and moving on most notably to Norman Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Jim McBride’s The Big Easy (1987) and the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990), in which, oddly enough, New Orleans doubles for an unnamed Midwestern city. But seldom has the Crescent City seemed as intensely gritty looking and feeling as the Hopperesque way it is presented in Hard Times.
For a time, Bronson and Coburn make a good team as fighter and manager. Eventually, though, they part company after Bronson decides that he has made enough money to quit being banged around. But Bronson, in true heroic fashion, reluctantly returns for one last fight to save Coburn, who has gotten himself in over his head with a couple of enforcers working for a loan shark. In the most eloquent moment of his career, Strother Martin shows his contempt for the bout by picking up a wrench, testing its weight in his hand, then announcing Bronson’s arrival by throwing the wrench through a warehouse office window where Coburn and the other fighter’s manager are waiting. This is also the most persuasive proof of Hill’s belief that a single telling gesture can have far more impact than ten lines of movie dialogue.
The movie ends where it begins, with Bronson disappearing into the darkness. In many ways, he is a throwback to a previous American type—the western hero who appears when he is needed only to silently disappear once the moment of danger or jeopardy has passed. Alan Ladd in Shane (1953) is probably the best example of this kind of hero, who is echoed by the character Clint Eastwood played in Pale Rider (1985). (The ending even echoes the earlier movie, with a teenaged Sydney Penny imploring Eastwood’s gunfighter character to stay, enacting a more sexualized version of Brandon de Wilde’s famous entreaties in the last scene of Shane).
Eastwood himself directed his own Depression drama, Honkytonk Man (1982), starring with his own son, Kyle, as an itinerant blues musician dying of tuberculosis. He then starred opposite Burt Reynolds in Richard Benjamin’s damp fizzle of a Depression era action comedy, City Heat (1984). Both Eastwood and Bronson were actors who worked best when their dialogue was pared to the bare minimum, allowing their imposing physicality to speak for them. And at no time during his career, whether caring for an orphaned cat or being chivalrous to a hard luck prostitute (played by his own wife, Jill Ireland) did Charles Bronson speak as gracefully as in Hard Times.
Hard Times was part of a trend of the 1970s in which American directors seemed obsessed with exploring the past. There were movies that took place during World War I (Roger Corman’s Von Richtofen and Brown) the Roaring Twenties (Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby) the home front during World War II (Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42, John Hancock’s Baby Blue Marine), the McCarthy Era (Martin Ritt’s The Front) the fifties (Terrence Malick’s Badlands) and the early sixties (George Lucas’ American Graffiti). One movie, Sydney Pollock’s The Way We Were, probably the best romantic drama of the decade, straddles three different time periods and locations (a small college campus in the thirties, New York in the forties, Hollywood in the fifties). It was almost as if the present, what was to become dubiously known as the “Me Decade,” held no great fascination for these directors.
Many directors chose to set their movies during the Great Depression. This trend was most probably ignited by the success of Bonnie and Clyde, which, from the smug remove of 1967, made the Depression look tragically fashionable. Other films taking place during this period include Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha (1972), George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973), Hal Ashby’s movie biography of Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (1976), Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973), Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), Andrew V. McLaglen’s Fool’s Parade (1971), John Milius’ Dillinger (1973), Howard Zieff’s love letter to the Gower Gulch cowboys, Hearts of the West (1975), Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North (1973) and Martin Ritt’s Sounder (1972). The Great Depression isn’t the theme of these movies, but works as an effective backdrop for stories about people driven to desperate acts because of the “hard times” in which they are living.
In Hard Times, Charles Bronson drifts into the city of New Orleans, where he comes to the attention of James Coburn, playing a fast-talking gambler who manages fighters involved in illegal bare-knuckle brawls. He goes on to manage Bronson, and it is a joy to watch the voluble Coburn and the monosyllabic Bronson trade verbal jabs with one another. Coburn is assisted by Strother Martin, playing a hopheaded ex-doctor who acts as Bronson’s cut man. Hill makes the most of his location shoot by having Bronson meet Martin for the first time in one of the above ground cemeteries that can be found throughout the city. New Orleans has been used many times as a movie location, beginning with Elia Kazin’s Panic in the Streets (1950), among the first American movies to be shot outside the confines of the studio back lot, and moving on most notably to Norman Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Jim McBride’s The Big Easy (1987) and the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990), in which, oddly enough, New Orleans doubles for an unnamed Midwestern city. But seldom has the Crescent City seemed as intensely gritty looking and feeling as the Hopperesque way it is presented in Hard Times.
For a time, Bronson and Coburn make a good team as fighter and manager. Eventually, though, they part company after Bronson decides that he has made enough money to quit being banged around. But Bronson, in true heroic fashion, reluctantly returns for one last fight to save Coburn, who has gotten himself in over his head with a couple of enforcers working for a loan shark. In the most eloquent moment of his career, Strother Martin shows his contempt for the bout by picking up a wrench, testing its weight in his hand, then announcing Bronson’s arrival by throwing the wrench through a warehouse office window where Coburn and the other fighter’s manager are waiting. This is also the most persuasive proof of Hill’s belief that a single telling gesture can have far more impact than ten lines of movie dialogue.
The movie ends where it begins, with Bronson disappearing into the darkness. In many ways, he is a throwback to a previous American type—the western hero who appears when he is needed only to silently disappear once the moment of danger or jeopardy has passed. Alan Ladd in Shane (1953) is probably the best example of this kind of hero, who is echoed by the character Clint Eastwood played in Pale Rider (1985). (The ending even echoes the earlier movie, with a teenaged Sydney Penny imploring Eastwood’s gunfighter character to stay, enacting a more sexualized version of Brandon de Wilde’s famous entreaties in the last scene of Shane).
Eastwood himself directed his own Depression drama, Honkytonk Man (1982), starring with his own son, Kyle, as an itinerant blues musician dying of tuberculosis. He then starred opposite Burt Reynolds in Richard Benjamin’s damp fizzle of a Depression era action comedy, City Heat (1984). Both Eastwood and Bronson were actors who worked best when their dialogue was pared to the bare minimum, allowing their imposing physicality to speak for them. And at no time during his career, whether caring for an orphaned cat or being chivalrous to a hard luck prostitute (played by his own wife, Jill Ireland) did Charles Bronson speak as gracefully as in Hard Times.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Clive Donner - Hello, Young Lovers
The English cinema of the 1960s was dedicated to the youth of the country. And this is not a reference to the pandering movies made to show off popular musical groups of the period, such as the Dave Clark Five (Having A Wild Weekend) or Herman’s Hermits (Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter), in vehicles that tried to capitalize on the success that Richard Lester, a Yank expatriate, had putting the Beatles on film (A Hard Day’s Night, Help!). No, I am actually talking about the American Lester’s English counterpart, Clive Donner, whose sixties movies really tapped into the country’s emerging youth movement and reflected it back in ways both complimentary and strange.
After an established career as a film editor, Donner went on to direct such early sixties fare as Nothing but the Best (1964), and what an amazing pedigree this movie has. It is based on a short story by American thriller writer Stanley Ellin (House of Cards). The story is adapted by young British novelist Frderic Raphael, two years before he won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for John Schlesinger’s Darling (the origins of which comprise episode three of Raphael’s groundbreaking 1976 mini-series, The Glittering Prizes). And the movie stars the young Alan Bates as a working class climber who befriends a remittance man (Denholm Elliot) in order to achieve some class and rise through the ranks at his job. (A remittance man is, of course, a black sheep who receives money to stay far away from his family.) When Elliot turns his back on him, Bates’ character commits murder, and the complications that ensue are both comedic and chilling as we watch the lengths this amoral character will go to in order to achieve his life’s ambition of having the best of everything. (In an interesting aside, that’s the name of Ellin’s short story, which had to be changed to Nothing but the Best because The Best of Everything was also the title of a famous best-selling American novel and movie, by Rona Jaffe, about the New York publishing business.) (Musical group featured on soundtrack: the Eagles—no, not the Eagles.)
One year later, Donner directed What’s New Pussycat (1965), based on a screenplay by a young New York stand-up comedian named Woody Allen. Allen appears in the movie, but is not the star. That role is reserved for an ultra-relaxed Peter O’Toole, flexing his comic muscle after the heavy dramatic lifting of Lawrence of Arabia and Becket. The movie also stars Peter Sellers (in velvet suits and an hysterical page boy wig), Romy Schneider, Ursula Andress and Capucine. Allen aside, this is hardly a cast of ingénues, but the comic story, set in Paris, is filled with youthful energy (provided perhaps by its director’s deliberately sophomoric take on the material and a zingy score by budding popmeister Burt Bacharach). O’Toole plays a ladies man who tries to settle down with the help of his girl friend (Ms. Schneider), best friend (Allen) and shrink (Sellers), but finds that doing so is not as easy as it sounds when surrounded by pussycats such as the sexy (and suicidal) one played by Paula Prentiss. With an American producer (Charles K. Feldman), a British director, a polyglot cast and a Paris setting, this movie is an example of mid-sixties international filmmaking at its most riotously felicitous. (Musical group featured on soundtrack: Manfred Mann.)
Two years later, Donner took on the English youth culture full on in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), based on a novel by Hunter Davies, who would go on to become the first official biographer of the Beatles. (His book, The Beatles, was published in 1968, well before the saga of the Fab Four really hit its stride.) In this movie filled with psychedelic imagery (all of it now rendered laughably quaint), Barry Evans plays a young man who wants to lose his virginity. He has several “birds” to choose from, played by, among others, intimidating Angela Scoular and approachable Sheila White, but he only has eyes for the cool blonde beauty embodied so perfectly by Judy Geeson (equally memorable as the apple of her teacher, Sidney Poitier’s, eye in that same year’s To Sir, With Love). Evans’ character wants to take advantage of the decade’s loosening morality and sexual confusion in order to get laid. But when he finally lands the girl of his dreams, she turns out to want the same thing he does. This sends him scrambling right back to monogamy. Judy Geeson’s character calls him a “romantic,” and it’s not meant as a compliment. The movie ends with Evans’ character about to matriculate at the University of Manchester, where he sets his sights on Ms. Geeson’s slightly more attainable best friend. Evans’ character is charming enough that we wish him well in his subsequent search for love. (Musical group featured on soundtrack: The Spencer Davis Group.)
After a disastrous attempt at making a movie in America, the critically lambasted Luv, Donner returned to English soil to direct Alfred the Great (1969). It stars David Hemmings, the shaggy-haired protagonist of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (probably the definitive English movie of the sixties, even though it was directed by an Italian) as the equally shaggy-haired ninth century king of England. When we first see young Alfred, he is about to be ordained as a priest. Then comes word that Danish invaders have attacked the coast of Wessex, killing men, raping women and stealing cattle. With his brother, the king, rendered temporarily hors de combat, Prince Alfred successfully leads the army into battle against the Danes. After his brother dies, Alfred reluctantly allows himself to be made king. He takes a bride, Aelhswith (Prunella Ransome), but, in order to parlay a peace treaty, is forced to give her up as hostage to the Viking leader, Guthrum (Michael York). Physically unprepossessing, Hemmings is an unusual choice to play Alfred, but his undisguised sixties sensibility underscores the warrior king’s ambivalence in becoming the leader of the ninth century “Establishment.” One would have to reach forward in time to Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), St. Francis of Assisi portrayed as the first hippie, to find a more youth-oriented, revisionist treatment of an historical figure. (Musical group featured on soundtrack: Unsourced Gregorian Chants.)
In Alfred the Great, one is delighted to find a young Sir Ian McKellen, the once and future Gandalf, his mellifluous voice instantly recognizable, in the small but pivotal role of a swamp bandit chief. And an actor named Julian Chagrin contributes some nice acrobatic business as Ivar, a fearsome, red-haired Viking berserker. Unfortunately, Donner was completely out of his depth with this epic period drama. The failure of Alfred the Great more or less put paid to his movie career and forced him into television, where he found success directing TV movies and mini-series. He was brought back to the movies as the second unit director of Superman II, directed by his sixties contemporary, Richard Lester, after Richard Donner (no relation) was fired off the film. Lester himself had a great triumph in 1968 with his movie adaptation of Petulia, starring Julie Christie as a young woman who develops a mad crush on the San Francisco doctor (George C. Scott) who saved the life of a Mexican boy in her care. The movie is alive to what was going on in the culture of the moment and accurately captures in the background the heyday of the flower power movement in San Francisco. Judy Geeson can now be found on reruns of the sit-com Mad about You as the snobbish English neighbor across the hall. David Hemmings got more rumpled as he got older, an image that perfectly suited him in a TV series about the rumpled English spy, Charlie Muffin. Unfortunately, Nothing but the Best is not available on DVD. Like a phantom, it crops up every now and then on late night TV. Catch it if you can.
After an established career as a film editor, Donner went on to direct such early sixties fare as Nothing but the Best (1964), and what an amazing pedigree this movie has. It is based on a short story by American thriller writer Stanley Ellin (House of Cards). The story is adapted by young British novelist Frderic Raphael, two years before he won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for John Schlesinger’s Darling (the origins of which comprise episode three of Raphael’s groundbreaking 1976 mini-series, The Glittering Prizes). And the movie stars the young Alan Bates as a working class climber who befriends a remittance man (Denholm Elliot) in order to achieve some class and rise through the ranks at his job. (A remittance man is, of course, a black sheep who receives money to stay far away from his family.) When Elliot turns his back on him, Bates’ character commits murder, and the complications that ensue are both comedic and chilling as we watch the lengths this amoral character will go to in order to achieve his life’s ambition of having the best of everything. (In an interesting aside, that’s the name of Ellin’s short story, which had to be changed to Nothing but the Best because The Best of Everything was also the title of a famous best-selling American novel and movie, by Rona Jaffe, about the New York publishing business.) (Musical group featured on soundtrack: the Eagles—no, not the Eagles.)
One year later, Donner directed What’s New Pussycat (1965), based on a screenplay by a young New York stand-up comedian named Woody Allen. Allen appears in the movie, but is not the star. That role is reserved for an ultra-relaxed Peter O’Toole, flexing his comic muscle after the heavy dramatic lifting of Lawrence of Arabia and Becket. The movie also stars Peter Sellers (in velvet suits and an hysterical page boy wig), Romy Schneider, Ursula Andress and Capucine. Allen aside, this is hardly a cast of ingénues, but the comic story, set in Paris, is filled with youthful energy (provided perhaps by its director’s deliberately sophomoric take on the material and a zingy score by budding popmeister Burt Bacharach). O’Toole plays a ladies man who tries to settle down with the help of his girl friend (Ms. Schneider), best friend (Allen) and shrink (Sellers), but finds that doing so is not as easy as it sounds when surrounded by pussycats such as the sexy (and suicidal) one played by Paula Prentiss. With an American producer (Charles K. Feldman), a British director, a polyglot cast and a Paris setting, this movie is an example of mid-sixties international filmmaking at its most riotously felicitous. (Musical group featured on soundtrack: Manfred Mann.)
Two years later, Donner took on the English youth culture full on in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), based on a novel by Hunter Davies, who would go on to become the first official biographer of the Beatles. (His book, The Beatles, was published in 1968, well before the saga of the Fab Four really hit its stride.) In this movie filled with psychedelic imagery (all of it now rendered laughably quaint), Barry Evans plays a young man who wants to lose his virginity. He has several “birds” to choose from, played by, among others, intimidating Angela Scoular and approachable Sheila White, but he only has eyes for the cool blonde beauty embodied so perfectly by Judy Geeson (equally memorable as the apple of her teacher, Sidney Poitier’s, eye in that same year’s To Sir, With Love). Evans’ character wants to take advantage of the decade’s loosening morality and sexual confusion in order to get laid. But when he finally lands the girl of his dreams, she turns out to want the same thing he does. This sends him scrambling right back to monogamy. Judy Geeson’s character calls him a “romantic,” and it’s not meant as a compliment. The movie ends with Evans’ character about to matriculate at the University of Manchester, where he sets his sights on Ms. Geeson’s slightly more attainable best friend. Evans’ character is charming enough that we wish him well in his subsequent search for love. (Musical group featured on soundtrack: The Spencer Davis Group.)
After a disastrous attempt at making a movie in America, the critically lambasted Luv, Donner returned to English soil to direct Alfred the Great (1969). It stars David Hemmings, the shaggy-haired protagonist of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (probably the definitive English movie of the sixties, even though it was directed by an Italian) as the equally shaggy-haired ninth century king of England. When we first see young Alfred, he is about to be ordained as a priest. Then comes word that Danish invaders have attacked the coast of Wessex, killing men, raping women and stealing cattle. With his brother, the king, rendered temporarily hors de combat, Prince Alfred successfully leads the army into battle against the Danes. After his brother dies, Alfred reluctantly allows himself to be made king. He takes a bride, Aelhswith (Prunella Ransome), but, in order to parlay a peace treaty, is forced to give her up as hostage to the Viking leader, Guthrum (Michael York). Physically unprepossessing, Hemmings is an unusual choice to play Alfred, but his undisguised sixties sensibility underscores the warrior king’s ambivalence in becoming the leader of the ninth century “Establishment.” One would have to reach forward in time to Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), St. Francis of Assisi portrayed as the first hippie, to find a more youth-oriented, revisionist treatment of an historical figure. (Musical group featured on soundtrack: Unsourced Gregorian Chants.)
In Alfred the Great, one is delighted to find a young Sir Ian McKellen, the once and future Gandalf, his mellifluous voice instantly recognizable, in the small but pivotal role of a swamp bandit chief. And an actor named Julian Chagrin contributes some nice acrobatic business as Ivar, a fearsome, red-haired Viking berserker. Unfortunately, Donner was completely out of his depth with this epic period drama. The failure of Alfred the Great more or less put paid to his movie career and forced him into television, where he found success directing TV movies and mini-series. He was brought back to the movies as the second unit director of Superman II, directed by his sixties contemporary, Richard Lester, after Richard Donner (no relation) was fired off the film. Lester himself had a great triumph in 1968 with his movie adaptation of Petulia, starring Julie Christie as a young woman who develops a mad crush on the San Francisco doctor (George C. Scott) who saved the life of a Mexican boy in her care. The movie is alive to what was going on in the culture of the moment and accurately captures in the background the heyday of the flower power movement in San Francisco. Judy Geeson can now be found on reruns of the sit-com Mad about You as the snobbish English neighbor across the hall. David Hemmings got more rumpled as he got older, an image that perfectly suited him in a TV series about the rumpled English spy, Charlie Muffin. Unfortunately, Nothing but the Best is not available on DVD. Like a phantom, it crops up every now and then on late night TV. Catch it if you can.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Michelle Meyrink, Meet Diana Lynn
The decade of the 1980s was not a golden age in American cinema, but it was a golden period for movies about high school and about teenagers getting laid. These movies ran the gamut from the good (Sixteen Candles and everything else written and directed by John Hughes, except for Weird Science) to the great (Say Anything and anything else written and directed by Cameron Crowe, except for The Wild Life) to the just plain awful (Porky’s and anything with the word “virgin” in the title). And in between stood such oddities as Losin’ It (1983), about three friends driving across the border to lose their virginity in Tijuana. The mind-boggling cast included Tom Cruise, Jackie Earle Haley and Shelley Long (in other words, Top Gun’s Maverick meets Little Children’s sex pervert and Diane from Cheers).
Another anomalous movie from this same period is Real Genius. The anomaly comes from the fact that the teenagers in this story are smart and have more on their minds than just getting laid. Like normal teenagers, they enjoy playing pranks. But here, the pranks involve turning their dorm into an ice skating rink, installing a micro-receiver in an obnoxious student’s mouth so he thinks he is hearing the voice of God when they broadcast instructions to him, and, in the movie’s climax, turning a professor’s house into an enormous popcorn popper (with the aid of a weaponized space-based laser projector).
The difference is these teenagers are students at Pacific Tech, a West Coast university obviously modeled after Cal Tech (although the movie was actually shot at Pomona College and Occidental College). One of the characters is a reclusive genius who lives in the steam tunnels under the campus. He is played by Jon Gries, the son of the late movie director Tom Gries (Will Penny), who later achieved movie immortality as the repulsive Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite. The main character is a super-smart senior played in ever so insouciant fashion by Val Kilmer in one of his earliest screen performances (after Z-A-Z’s Top Secret). The wisecracking character he plays, Chris Knight, is studly and smart in equal measure. And yet, he is not the romantic center of the story.
That role is reserved for Gabriel Jarret as Mitch Taylor, a naïve fifteen-year-old freshman at Pacific Tech recruited by a scheming professor (William Atherton in a scene-stealing role) for his experimental laser program. Thanks to Chris Knight’s cracked idea of what it means to be a mentor, Mitch doesn’t stay naïve for long. Although an older woman (Patti D’Arbanville) with a thing for geniuses, tries to seduce him (and fails), the true object of his affection is a nineteen-year-old student named Jordan Cochran, played in indelible fashion by Michelle Meyrink in what has to be one of the most original and appealing character turns to appear in any teen film in the eighties.
Previous to this role, Michelle Meyrink had a pretty undistinguished career. She is the co-star, opposite Cameron Dye, of National Lampoon’s Joy of Sex (directed by Martha Coolidge, who also directed Valley Girl as well as Real Genius), had a brief run as one of Michael J. Fox’s girl friends (don’t ask me which one) on Family Ties, and chummed around as Diane Lane’s best friend in The Outsiders. (On The Outsiders’ DVD commentary track, it is embarrassing to hear director Francis Food Coppola gush over Diane Lane’s beauty while barely giving mention to Michelle Meyrink).
But with Jordan, Ms. Meyrink found a role she could really sink her teeth into. When we first meet her, Jordan is wearing overalls and a crash helmet while she sleds down an ice-covered dorm hallway. She removes the crash helmet to reveal an endearing Louise Brooks bob and begins speaking at a rapid clip that sounds like a speeded-up version of shorthand. She is hyperkinetic, hyper-voluble and, owing to the fact that she can’t sleep, tries to impress Mitch by staying up all night knitting him a sweater, and even offers to build him a new bed for his dorm room.
In one throw away scene, it is hilarious to watch Jordan trying to act nonchalant as she stands watch, but she can’t keep herself from squirming in place and darting her eyes around suspiciously, thus creating exactly the opposite effect. Her relationship with Mitch Taylor is charmingly chaste. Jordan herself is both brainy and sexy and adorably idiosyncratic. In many ways, she is the distaff eighties’ complement to Eddie Deezen’s uber-nerdish character in I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
And in other ways, the character Michelle Meyrink plays here is reminiscent of the kid sister teen characters played by Diana Lynn in two of the most well-remembered movies of World War II—Billy Wilder’s directorial debut, The Major and the Minor, and Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (which, along with his Hail the Conquering Hero, also marks the apex of Eddie Bracken‘s movie career). In the former, Diana Lynn plays the younger sister of Ray Milland's fiancee who becomes buddy-buddy with Ginger Rogers, here improbably disguised as a twelve-year-old (for reasons that are too complicated to go into here). Level-headed Diana Lynn is the only one able to penetrate Ginger Rogers' disguise
In the latter, she is the younger sister of Betty Hutton, a single girl who finds herself scandalizingly pregnant after attending a USO dance. When everything is going to hell around her and all the adult characters are acting like children, Diana Lynn can be depended on to keep her head and exert a well-needed dollop of common sense. Tart rather than sweet, she is a bracing tonic to the types of goody-goody teen characters reliably played by Shirley Temple, Margaret O’Brien (except in The Secret Garden) and Bonita Granville in other movies of the forties.
Unlike those three young actresses, Diana Lynn went on to have a career as an adult actress, although to see her ludicrously miscast as a femme fatale seducing Glenn Ford in John Farrow’s Plunder of the Sun (1953) is to make one selfishly wish that she had stopped making movies when Tojo surrendered to MacArthur on the deck of the USS Missouri. In the fifties and sixties, Diana Lynn went back and forth between Hollywood and Broadway before choosing semi-retirement. Tragically, she died at age 45 just as she was about to return to the screen to play Anthony Perkins’ wife in Frank Perry’s film adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (wonderful novel, pretentious movie).
As for Michelle Meyrink, she never again had a role as meaty and memorable as Jordan Cochran. Her last screen performance was with Keanu Reeves in Marisa Silver’s earnest but inert Permanent Record (1988). In Real Genius, her performance is the authentic work of genius. She gave teenagers a good name at a time when teenagers, at least in movies, were more apt to think with their genitals instead of their brains. Diana Lynn was a breath of fresh air compared to the saccharine teens who surrounded her. In many ways, Diana Lynn is the spiritual forbear of Michelle Meyrink. Who knows which young actress will, hopefully in the near future, pick up their torch and run with it, run all the way past teenhood to a long and fruitful adult acting career.
Another anomalous movie from this same period is Real Genius. The anomaly comes from the fact that the teenagers in this story are smart and have more on their minds than just getting laid. Like normal teenagers, they enjoy playing pranks. But here, the pranks involve turning their dorm into an ice skating rink, installing a micro-receiver in an obnoxious student’s mouth so he thinks he is hearing the voice of God when they broadcast instructions to him, and, in the movie’s climax, turning a professor’s house into an enormous popcorn popper (with the aid of a weaponized space-based laser projector).
The difference is these teenagers are students at Pacific Tech, a West Coast university obviously modeled after Cal Tech (although the movie was actually shot at Pomona College and Occidental College). One of the characters is a reclusive genius who lives in the steam tunnels under the campus. He is played by Jon Gries, the son of the late movie director Tom Gries (Will Penny), who later achieved movie immortality as the repulsive Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite. The main character is a super-smart senior played in ever so insouciant fashion by Val Kilmer in one of his earliest screen performances (after Z-A-Z’s Top Secret). The wisecracking character he plays, Chris Knight, is studly and smart in equal measure. And yet, he is not the romantic center of the story.
That role is reserved for Gabriel Jarret as Mitch Taylor, a naïve fifteen-year-old freshman at Pacific Tech recruited by a scheming professor (William Atherton in a scene-stealing role) for his experimental laser program. Thanks to Chris Knight’s cracked idea of what it means to be a mentor, Mitch doesn’t stay naïve for long. Although an older woman (Patti D’Arbanville) with a thing for geniuses, tries to seduce him (and fails), the true object of his affection is a nineteen-year-old student named Jordan Cochran, played in indelible fashion by Michelle Meyrink in what has to be one of the most original and appealing character turns to appear in any teen film in the eighties.
Previous to this role, Michelle Meyrink had a pretty undistinguished career. She is the co-star, opposite Cameron Dye, of National Lampoon’s Joy of Sex (directed by Martha Coolidge, who also directed Valley Girl as well as Real Genius), had a brief run as one of Michael J. Fox’s girl friends (don’t ask me which one) on Family Ties, and chummed around as Diane Lane’s best friend in The Outsiders. (On The Outsiders’ DVD commentary track, it is embarrassing to hear director Francis Food Coppola gush over Diane Lane’s beauty while barely giving mention to Michelle Meyrink).
But with Jordan, Ms. Meyrink found a role she could really sink her teeth into. When we first meet her, Jordan is wearing overalls and a crash helmet while she sleds down an ice-covered dorm hallway. She removes the crash helmet to reveal an endearing Louise Brooks bob and begins speaking at a rapid clip that sounds like a speeded-up version of shorthand. She is hyperkinetic, hyper-voluble and, owing to the fact that she can’t sleep, tries to impress Mitch by staying up all night knitting him a sweater, and even offers to build him a new bed for his dorm room.
In one throw away scene, it is hilarious to watch Jordan trying to act nonchalant as she stands watch, but she can’t keep herself from squirming in place and darting her eyes around suspiciously, thus creating exactly the opposite effect. Her relationship with Mitch Taylor is charmingly chaste. Jordan herself is both brainy and sexy and adorably idiosyncratic. In many ways, she is the distaff eighties’ complement to Eddie Deezen’s uber-nerdish character in I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
And in other ways, the character Michelle Meyrink plays here is reminiscent of the kid sister teen characters played by Diana Lynn in two of the most well-remembered movies of World War II—Billy Wilder’s directorial debut, The Major and the Minor, and Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (which, along with his Hail the Conquering Hero, also marks the apex of Eddie Bracken‘s movie career). In the former, Diana Lynn plays the younger sister of Ray Milland's fiancee who becomes buddy-buddy with Ginger Rogers, here improbably disguised as a twelve-year-old (for reasons that are too complicated to go into here). Level-headed Diana Lynn is the only one able to penetrate Ginger Rogers' disguise
In the latter, she is the younger sister of Betty Hutton, a single girl who finds herself scandalizingly pregnant after attending a USO dance. When everything is going to hell around her and all the adult characters are acting like children, Diana Lynn can be depended on to keep her head and exert a well-needed dollop of common sense. Tart rather than sweet, she is a bracing tonic to the types of goody-goody teen characters reliably played by Shirley Temple, Margaret O’Brien (except in The Secret Garden) and Bonita Granville in other movies of the forties.
Unlike those three young actresses, Diana Lynn went on to have a career as an adult actress, although to see her ludicrously miscast as a femme fatale seducing Glenn Ford in John Farrow’s Plunder of the Sun (1953) is to make one selfishly wish that she had stopped making movies when Tojo surrendered to MacArthur on the deck of the USS Missouri. In the fifties and sixties, Diana Lynn went back and forth between Hollywood and Broadway before choosing semi-retirement. Tragically, she died at age 45 just as she was about to return to the screen to play Anthony Perkins’ wife in Frank Perry’s film adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (wonderful novel, pretentious movie).
As for Michelle Meyrink, she never again had a role as meaty and memorable as Jordan Cochran. Her last screen performance was with Keanu Reeves in Marisa Silver’s earnest but inert Permanent Record (1988). In Real Genius, her performance is the authentic work of genius. She gave teenagers a good name at a time when teenagers, at least in movies, were more apt to think with their genitals instead of their brains. Diana Lynn was a breath of fresh air compared to the saccharine teens who surrounded her. In many ways, Diana Lynn is the spiritual forbear of Michelle Meyrink. Who knows which young actress will, hopefully in the near future, pick up their torch and run with it, run all the way past teenhood to a long and fruitful adult acting career.
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