Millard Kaufman, who died on Saturday at the age of 92, was a veteran screenwriter with a wide-ranging career that had a few notable highs. A graduate of John Hopkins University, Kaufman served as a marine in the Pacific during World War II. Upon his return to the States, he moved to California and broke in as a writer for UPA cartoons. He first made history as the co-creator, with director John Hubley and actor Jim Backus, of the near-sighted perambulator and Stag Beer pitchman Mr. Magoo. The character first appeared in Kaufman's script for the 1949 short Ragtime Bear; according to that distinguished on-line journal of film studies Wikipedia, "Columbia was reluctant to release the short, but did so, only because it included a bear." On this point, I refer you back to the film's title. (Apparently bears were big box office in those days.) Despite Harry Cohn's ursine fetish, Magoo turned out to be the chief audience attraction, and the blind sumbitch would become UPA's most enduring star character. A year later, Kaufman would officially break into live-action features as the credited author of the cult noir classic Gun Crazy, though in fact, he was fronting for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. On his own, Kaufman racked up two Academy Award nominations for writing Richard Brooks's Take the High Ground! (1953), starring Richard Widmark as a drill instructor, and John Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a taut melodrama notable for its muckraking focus on racist mistreatment of Asian-Americans during World War II.

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OLIVER & BARBARA ROSE, THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989)



Danny DeVito’s black-heart Valentine may not be a great movie, but it’s still a pretty good one, a neat little primer of stereotypes (and uncomfortable truths) of sexual politics in the late 20th century (as well as an emetic corrective to the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan oeuvre of junk food Hollywood romance. In the midst of a contentious turf battle with his soon to be ex-wife, DeVito’s character warns his client, Oliver, that when it comes to divorce, “There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!”  Naturally, Oliver doesn’t listen: not only is he arrogant and stubborn, but he’s also played by Michael Douglas, and so our sympathies at first are with his long-suffering spouse, Barbara (Kathleen Turner)...that is, until we realize Barbara is just as hateful in her cold, ruthless femininity as Oliver is in his chauvinist manhood. And so the couple’s mutual hostility escalates into an archetypal battle of the sexes where both sides are right and both sides are wrong: Barbara can’t stand her corporate asshole of a husband, yet feels entitled to the lavish house she transformed into a home with his corporate asshole money, prompting Oliver’s angry reminder, “It’s a lot easier to spend it than it is to make it, honeybun!” On the flip side of the gender equation, Oliver treats his wife like shit, yet naively expects her to keep providing love and validation (or, in Barbara’s words, “You expect me to keep reassuring you sexually even now when we disgust each other?”), leading to a grim moment of Pyrrhic victory in the movie’s final minutes that speaks volumes about the real balance of power in most American marriages.

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