The Screengrab : anne bancroft

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Great Expectations (1998, Alfonso Cuaron)

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Since making his feature debut with 1991’s Solo con tu pareja, Alfonso Cuaron has become one of the world’s most acclaimed and distinctive filmmakers. That he has managed to do this is a credit not only to his talent but also his versatility. With a scant six features under his belt, he has managed to makes films both large and small, both light and dark, and in both English and Spanish. His breakthrough film A Little Princess is a lovely and underseen family film, and his instinctive feel for family-friendly entertainment helped him immeasurably on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, seen by many as the best big-screen Potter adventure to date. In between, he’s also managed to transcend the teenage sex film into transcendent cinema in Y Tu Mama Tambien, and crafted one of the most unique dystopian visions of the cinema in Children of Men.

But in the evaluation of Cuaron’s career to date, one film has gotten lost in the shuffle- 1998’s Great Expectations. A loose, lushly-mounted update of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, the film was released in 1998 in the dog days of February, in the wake of the Titanic juggernaut. Reviews were middling, and audience response was unenthusiastic. In the eyes of many Hollywood insiders, the project that should have been a stepping stone to Cuaron’s future as a big-name Hollywood filmmaker became a stumbling block that sent him tumbling back to Mexico to make his subsequent film. But while there’s no denying that the perception of Great Expectations didn’t help Cuaron’s career, the real question is here more simple- is the movie any good?

Having watched the film recently, I would maintain that it is, and certainly better than its reputation would suggest. That said, it’s hardly perfect. A number of critics took the film to task for being insufficiently faithful to Dickens, and certainly, Great Expectations didn’t benefit from being one of a rash of loose “re-imaginings” of classic novels that were in vogue during the mid- to late-nineties. But I found that the contemporary trappings suited the original story pretty well. More distracting was the way the screenplay, written by Mitch Glazer, pared down Dickens’ story to focus almost entirely on the relationship between Pip (now named Finn and played by Ethan Hawke) and Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow). In doing so, Glazer sketches over much of what makes the book really interesting, that story of a man who is carried along by destiny from one fascinating situation to another guided by two benefactors, one known to him (Miss Havisham), the other unseen. As a result, Great Expectations lacks much of the narrative interest that the novel had.

But if Cuaron’s film largely fails as Dickens, there’s plenty of other aspects to the film to enjoy. The majority of Dickens adaptations for film and television have emphasized the squalor and hardscrabble lifestyle of the period in which he wrote, but Cuaron’s style infuses the story with liberal amounts of magic realism, and the two are a surprisingly good fit. It helps that the film is set in two locations in the U.S. that are best suited for magic realism- the Gulf Coast of Florida (with its swamps and vegetation and distinctly Hispanic influence) and New York City. Look at the decaying manse of the film’s Miss Havisham character, here called Ms. Dinsmoor and played by Anne Bancroft. The home itself is based on the Alhambra in Spain, but everything is falling apart and overgrown, and the wedding party, still set out after three decades, is made all the more eerie by the Spanish moss that’s hanging from the trees. And the film’s version of New York is a city full of mysterious settings and endless possibilities, and Cuaron and regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki make good use of the weather to reflect the tone of the film, with the sun shining warmly when Finn is content, and rain pouring or leaves falling when his emotional state has become tumultuous.

Likewise, the film is ideally cast to suit Cuaron’s style. At first glance, Ethan Hawke seems too lightweight to work in the lead role, and certainly to intone the wholly gratuitous narration. But consider that Dickens’ main characters usually tended to be observers through whom the reader could experience the adventures of the story, so in this way the casting makes perfect sense. Gwyneth Paltrow makes a perfectly fine Estella, pulling off both the coldness that results from her upbringing by Ms. Dinsmoor and the sadness that she’s ill-equipped to love Finn because of this. Anne Bancroft, always a marvelous ham, digs into the role of Ms. Dinsmoor with plenty of relish, and no small amount of wit (listen to her response when young Finn asks about her cat). Chris Cooper is affecting as Finn’s Uncle Joe, who for the boy only to be cast aside when Finn became a famous artist. And Robert DeNiro gives perhaps his last great performance in the small role of the prisoner Joe (Magwitch in the book), successfully playing the frightening prisoner early on, only to turn up again years later as a shadowy, eccentric figure in the hero’s life.

On balance, Great Expectations is fairly flawed but ultimately a worthwhile film. As narrative, it’s sometimes less than compelling, and it certainly isn’t successful as an adaptation. But it’s so visually enchanting and full of vivid supporting characters that it hardly matters. The film’s failings are those of the script and of the studio who tried to make the film more palatable to mainstream sensibilities (which explains the narration), while the stuff that works is almost entirely Cuaron’s. Despite its reputation, Great Expectations is an interesting entry on Cuaron’s filmography, and one that bears a second look in light of his more recent work. I suspect time will be kind to it.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER (1949 - )

She was the undisputed queen of black '70s cinema. In tight pants, high heels and with razor blades in her Afro, Pam Grier burned up the screen in movies like Foxy Brown and Coffy. Independent black cinema fell on hard times by the end of that decade and she did not make the leap over to the Hollywood mainstream. For years she worked smaller film roles and TV here and there. That is, until Quentin Tarantino cast her in what might have been his — and her — best film ever, Jackie Brown. There Pam plays a middle-aged woman, a struggling air-hostess, slightly frayed at the edges but tough as nails...and what a sight to see.

SOPHIA LOREN (1934 - )

In pure feminine power and deliciousness, few can rival Sophia Loren in her glory years. It is hard to believe now, but the first lady of Italian film actually made her way onto the screen after fellow Italian bombshell Gina Lollobrigida. In fact she was discovered by (and subsequently married, then split with) Carlo Ponti, who also launched Lollobrigida's carreer. While works of Talmudic length could be written on Loren's looks, she's no mean actress. Get thee to a video store for Two Women or El Cid to appreciate her in the fullest.

ANNE BANCROFT (1931-2005)

Born Anna Maria Italiano in the Bronx, she followed that age-old tradition of taking a more WASPy sounding stage name. Anne Bancroft will, however, always be Mrs. Robinson to us. There are more prolific actresses out there, but you can't deny the power of her performance as a beautiful, sad, alcoholic older woman to Dustin Hoffman's younger man in The Graduate. Now that we are sniffing thirty ourselves we realize that (A) Mrs. Robinson wasn't supposed to be particularly old in the movie and (B) at 36, Anne Bancroft was only a few years older than Hoffman. In any case, leopard print never looked so good. And never did a lady lead with so much out-of-control control. It isn't easy to top one of the best movies of all time and nothing Bancroft did after that (no, not even being the voice of the Queen in Antz) made the same splash. Mel Brooks married her, though, so you know she was special.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE (1934 - )

My first Shirley MacLaine memory: sitting in front of my parents' stereo (approximately the size of the desk I'm sitting at now), playing my mother's copy of the Sweet Charity soundtrack and staring intently at the redhead on the album cover. I may have only been six or seven years old, but I had good taste. I lost track of Shirley after that, until she resurfaced as the kook on Larry King talking about her past lives in Atlantis and her UFO frequent-flier miles, just another Hollywood punchline. What a cad I was, forgetting what a beautiful thing we had there in front of the stereo all those years ago. But it all came back to me when I finally got around to seeing the work that made her famous in the first place. In her trademark roles – The Apartment, Irma la Douce, Sweet Charity and especially Some Came Running, she's pixie-cute, charming, funny, sometimes annoying and ultimately heartbreaking. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress five times, finally winning for Terms of Endearment. In 1993, I saw her open for Frank Sinatra at the Worcester Centrum; her show-stopper was, of course, "If My Friends Could See Me Now." I'd be lying if I said she looked like she'd stepped right off that long-ago album cover, but I will tell you she still had the gams.

CLAUDIA JENNINGS (1949-1979)

If such redneck romps as Gator Bait, Truck Stop Women and Moonshine County Express aren't part of your cinematic education, you may not have even heard of Claudia Jennings, but in the mid-1970s she was the queen of the drive-in, the ultimate hick chick. Born Mary Eileen Chesterson in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jennings studied dramatic arts as a child and performed with the Hull House theater company in Chicago after graduating high school. She took a day job as a receptionist for Playboy magazine, where her knockout looks did not go unnoticed. She posed for the magazine in 1969 and again in 1970, when she was named Playmate of the Year. Moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting, she landed a supporting role in the 1972 roller derby flick Unholy Rollers. Her role in 1974's Truck Stop Woman, in which she hijacked trucks using sex as her primary weapon, became the model for the rest of Jennings' leading roles: drop-dead gorgeous, sexually uninhibited and tough enough to take on the big boys. Long before Thelma and Louise hit the road, Jennings and Jocelyn Jones played a sexy pair of bank-robbing outlaws in The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. In Gator Bait, Jennings is a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. A decade before Sigourney Weaver's supposedly groundbreaking turn in Aliens, Jennings was already kicking ass and taking names – and doing it in the tightest, tiniest pair of Daisy Dukes possible. Her final performance came in David Cronenberg's little-seen 1979 racing picture, Fast Company – ironic, in that Jennings was killed in an auto accident on the Pacific Coast Highway that year, a couple of months shy of her thirtieth birthday. Her cinematic legacy may be a minor one, but in the realm of the hick flick, Claudia Jennings still reigns.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER (1958 - )

Although it wasn't her first movie, most filmgoers got their first good gawk at Pfeiffer in the 1983 Scarface. Although opinions were mixed (and would remain so for a while) about whether she could act, the camera loved her, and the way she embraced the role of the world's surliest cokehead gangster's moll established that she wasn't persnickety about wanting to be liked. Any doubts about her acting had been pretty much cleared up by the time of Dangerous Liasons, in which she was excellent in one of the film's major roles that was probably the least fun to play. That movie and her other 1988 releases, Married to the Mob and Tequila Sunrise, made it clear that likability itself was comfortably within her range. Her singing sexpot in The Fabulous Baker Boys was pure starshine, her alienated early '60s runaway housewife in Love Field a terrific stretch, and with all due respect to Julie Newmar, her Catwoman gave the most insouciant reading of the line "Meow!" on record. Her movies have gotten worse, and her last one, I Could Never Be Your Man. ended up going straight to DVD. But she remains a welcome presence on-screen.

ANNA MAGNANI (1908-1973)

If Sophia Loren could have taken out a patent on the movie image of the Italian woman as lusty, ripe, and sensual, Magnani embodied the idea of the Italian as a woman who might have stepped off an opera stage, made of common clay but transcendently beautiful in a way that represents what people used to call "a force of nature." She had been acting in movies (and also singing and performing in cabaret and nightclubs) since the earliest days of sound pictures, but it was Roberto Rossellini's 1945 Open City, and in particular her death scene, that made her an international star. She continued to work in Europe with such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti (Bellissima), and Jean Renoir, who after using her in The Golden Coach proclaimed her the greatest actress he'd ever worked with. Hollywood never quite knew just what to do with her, but she did find something of a patron in Tennessee Williams, and she won an Oscar for the film version of The Rose Tattoo. Magnani once said that "Women like me can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me," and in that movie you can see what she meant: she looks at her co-star, Burt Lancaster, as if he were Arnold Stang. (She was apparently perceived as a bit much even by her co-star in The Fugitive Kind -- the ill-fated screen version of Williams' Orpheus Descending -- a shy, retiring fellow named Marlon Brando. "Every time I play a scene with her," Brando is supposed to have said, "I'm gonna have a rock in each hand.") Her death in Rome, at the age of 65 from pancreatic cancer, occasioned a public funeral ceremony rumored to have made the Pope jealous.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Screengrab's Back To School Round-Up: The Top 15 College Movies (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FRESHMAN (1990)

For the recent high school graduate, going to college can feel like entering a strange new world, so it makes perfect metaphorical sense that this comedy, written and directed by the prankish Andrew Bergman, is about a film student (Matthew Broderick) who goes to a different school, in a different city, and finds himself entering a different movie: his new employer and mentor, played by Marlon Brando, is a heavyset, gray-haired Italian gentleman who talks in a gravelly near-whisper and is highly reminiscent of a certain classic American movie from the early 1970s in which a business negotiation involved a decapitated horse. No such atrocities occur here, but you do get to see longtime Miss America pageant host Bert Parks serenade a Komodo dragon.

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Watching Animal House in high school may have given me a somewhat warped idea about what to expect from my undergraduate years, but The Graduate turned out to be an unnervingly accurate depiction of the terrifying unstructured malaise waiting to devour the unwary in those first uncertain years after college graduation. True, my parents didn’t have a sunny Southern California pool for me to float around in while I tried to figure out my life, but their friends and they offered plenty of well-meaning but fantastically unhelpful advice of the “Plastics” variety, while embodying exactly the type of suburban sameness I was so desperate to avoid. And, no, I didn’t have an older Mrs. Robinson to school me in sex and cynicism, but Simon & Garfunkle soothed my weary, alienated soul on numerous occasions. Career highlight efforts by stars Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, director Mike Nichols, writer/cameo artiste Buck Henry and even wax effigy Katharine Ross make this film a best-of-show masterpiece of any genre, and the movie’s final shot of young lovers Ben & Elaine riding off into an unknowable future on a crosstown bus is an image of hope and terror for the ages...specifically, the ages 21-25.

GOOD NEWS (1947)

This candy-colored MGM musical is probably the best example of a lost genre, that of the collegiate musical that centers on football and builds to the big game. It had been enough of a mainstay of American entertainment for the Marx Brothers to have parodied it fifteen years earlier in Horse Feathers; in fact, this movie has its roots in a 1927 stage musical that was first filmed in 1930. By the time this remake was hatched, both the stage original and the first movie version were regarded as too dirty, by post-World War II standards, for Production Code-era Hollywood. So the script was laundered, and the most sexless, blandest leads in movie history, Peter Lawford and June Allyson, were brought into play as, respectively, the gridiron hero (no, seriously, that was Peter Lawford's role) and the brainy librarian who has to tutor him so that he doesn't do so badly in his courses that he's not allowed to remain on the football team. (Truly the American musical is a pure fantasy realm.) Part of what makes this bowdlerized production charming is that it represents nostalgia for the 1920s as seen from the vantage point of the late 1940s, which seen today gives it an odd, unearthly appeal. It also helps that the people hired to plug the holes left by the editing actually added some good songs and found people livelier than Lawford and Allyson to perform them. The movie's real star is the vivacious and weird Joan McCracken, a Broadway dancer-singer who died young without ever having built much of a movie career: she triumphs in the movie's opening and in her showcase number, the possibly-insulting-to-Native-Americans novelty piece "Pass That Peace Pipe."

DRUMLINE (2002)

This go-for-it movie, starring Nick Cannon as an unpolished bullet of raw talent who upsets the equilibrium of the marching band at a prestigious all-black university, has the kind of silly plot mechanics one expects from the genre, but it also has a lot of freshness and energy and a surprisingly impressive performance by Orlando Jones as the upright professor in charge of the band. As staged by director Charles Stone III, the precisely choreographed final battle of the bands at the big championship competition is a winner-take-all moment undreamt of in Sylvester Stallone's philosophy.

WONDER BOYS (2000)

Michael Douglas gives one of his most winning performances in this adaptation of Michael Chabon's terrific novel about Grady Tripp, a stalled novelist and aging pothead whose gig teaching creative writing at a Pittsburgh university has turned into a not unpleasant form of limbo. This is one of the few movies that features a halfway believable facsimile of some form of the writer's life, a virtue that extends to Tobey Maguire's amazing turn as the most talented and mercurial of Tripp's students, and also for a characteristically high-wire performance by Robert Downey, Jr. as the great man's literary agent. The studio had enough faith in the movie's entertainment value that, after it bombed in its initial run, they rolled it out again a few months later with a new ad campaign, whereupon it bombed all over again. It still hasn't developed the cult following on DVD that one might have hoped for, and Tobey Maguire remains much better known as Peter Parker than as James Leek, but the movie did win Bob Dylan an Academy Award for his original theme song, "Things Have Changed."

Click Here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

The Ten Worst Hairdos In Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Yeah, we know, we know, that haircut soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Javier Bardem sports in the soon-to-be-Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is pretty disturbing and awful. But that's not even the worst haircut of Javier Bardem's career. (Read on!) Indeed, thinking about No Country got us thinking about some of the other truly monstrous 'dos we've encountered over the years on the screen. Here's our list of the Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History.

Mickey Rourke, YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

In his shambling youth, Mickey Rourke had a tough veneer with a sensitive undertone. He might have become a major movie star (as opposed to an object of cult worship in France and some of your better dorm rooms) in the Hollywood Heartthrob, Good-Bad-but-Not-Evil division, if he'd found a few more roles like the Baltimore honeydripper he played in Diner. But he drove his career into a ditch in a misguided effort to show what a tough, hard-slugging badass he was. His performance in this descent into the Michael Cimino-Oliver Stone Thunderdome tells you everything about what went wrong, and much of it is concentrated on his hair. Twenty-eight years old when the film was shot, Rourke seemed a little young for the role of a much-decorated NYPD veteran who learned about the deviousness of the Asian criminal mind while serving in Vietnam, more than ten years earlier. So the decision was made to send him down to the high school and have the erasers clapped together over his head. His chalk-encrusted tresses here make his entrance a guaranteed laugh-getter, especially since he wears a hat that he must have borrowed from a flatfoot in a Bogart movie; when he plops it down onto his noggin, you expect a cloud of white dust to envelop the room. (In some scenes his hair darkens to a grayish tint and then goes white again, suggesting that the testosterone release of beating up Chinese punks and having sex with Dutch-Japanese-supermodel-slash-godawful-actress "Ariane" has youth-restoring benefits, but they wear off fast.)

Sean Penn, CARLITO'S WAY (1993)

Penn's performance as Al Pacino's fast-talking lawyer, who lusts after the bad-boy cred and sleazy thrills that his client has outgrown, is a beautiful comic turn, and the selflessness that makes it possible extends fully to his scalp. With a little mop of frizzy curlicues that suggest that he's had his pubic hair transplanted onto his head, he looks like Art Garfunkel, Superstar. (This effect was especially funny back in 1993, when it was possible to go from this movie to see Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena and see that the actual Art Garfunkel had turned into Larry Fine, C.P.A.) His red mop grows more excitable and unruly as his character grows ever more dangerously unhinged. At the end, we hear a gunshot that signals that his character has been put out of Carlito's misery, and it is a great disappointment that the camera cuts away without showing his hair scurrying away under its own power. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to set up a sequel anymore.

Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO (1997)

You think his hair in No Country for Old Men is bad? Pfft. For some of us, our first impression of Javier Bardem was with another bad hair cut, the one he had in Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (aka Dance With the Devil). Playing a homicidal, kidnapping voodoo priest, Bardem sports an unholy mullet that could scar your eyeballs. It's a scary character, and the hair cut makes him scarier because you know he knows he can get away with it. And you fear what would happen if you accidentally made fun of it. Nobody's making "business in front, party in the back" jokes around him, we guarantee you.

Anne Bancroft in THE HINDENBURG (1975)

In 1937, a German passenger zeppelin caught fire and exploded as it was preparing to land in New Jersey. The catastrophe was captured on film by a newsreel cameraman, and in 1975, some master of taste and sensitivity got the inspiration of trying to tap into the mid-'70s "disaster movie" fad by making a period melodrama leading up to the horror. Looking to tone this idea up a little, the movie posits that the explosion was set off deliberately, as an act of anti-Nazi sabotage. An alternate theory is that the saboteur felt that it was necessary to wipe Anne Bancroft's hair off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost. Bancroft plays a German countess who is also a morphine addict, which must be pretty mild stuff compared to whatever the hell her hairdresser is on. Since this is the kind of movie that tries to impress you with the historical accuracy of its fashions and knick knacks, Bancroft's grisly coiffure must have been the result of intense research. But could the researchers not have kept it to themselves that the stylish German junkie of 1937 walked around looking, as Pauline Kael put it with baleful accuracy, as if she had "black potato chips stuck to her head"?

Keith Carradine in TROUBLE IN MIND (1986)

Every once in a while, the writer-director Alan Rudolph feels the need to make a movie so strange that all his other movies will consider reporting it to Homeland Security if it threatens to move into their neighborhood. At present, the holder of this title is probably his 1999 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions, but Trouble in Mind, a sort-of-futuristic daydream set in "Rain City", a drizzly place where the local criminal kingpin is played by Divine, took on all comers for quite a while there. This is one of the few times Divine played a non-drag role, but he must have brought his make-up case with him, because it looks as if Carradine got into it and made a hell of a mess. He plays a dopey young punk from the sticks who falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes overly enamored of the decadent thrills that Rain City has to offer. The most garish of these are apparently dispensed at the local Supercuts, because he keeps disappearing for awhile and then returning with his hair drenched in sticky-looking glop and twisted into fun house shapes, with his face painted as if he'd gotten a job as David Bowie's stunt double on the cover of Aladdin Sane. All in all, this may have been Keith Carradine's unstudliest hour.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

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Suzanne Pleshette, 1937 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Suzanne Pleshette died this past week, at the age of seventy, after a long bout with cancer. The husky-voiced Brooklyn-born actress, who James Wolcott once likened to "a beautiful black swan", made her stage debut in 1957 in Ira Levin's Compulsion and would go on to successfully replace Anne Bancroft in the original Broadway production of The Miracle Worker. She made her film debut in 1958 in Jerry Lewis's The Geisha Boy , and would go on to give affecting supporting performances in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Nevada Smith with Steve McQueen, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, and the minor camp classic Youngblood Hawke, in which, as the editor of the title character, the great novelist (author of Alms for Oblivion) played by James Franciscus, she got to adjust her eyeglasses while staring at his manly form and ask, "Should I call you Youngy or Bloody?" Perhaps fearing that anything else Hollywood had to offer would seem anticlimactic after a beaut like that, Pleshette spent more and more of her time acting on television; eventually, of course, she would become most closely associated with her role on one of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, The Bob Newhart Show, where for five seasons she pulled off the neat trick of being stylish and funny while making it seem plausible that her potato-like co-star was a sexual being.

Most of the rest of her career was spent on TV: she played inappropriately loving mother of young Tom Berenger in the controversial 1979 TV film Flesh & Blood, glued black caterpillars to her eyebrows for the title role in Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990), and had recurring, motherly roles on such comedies as Good Morning, Miami, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, and Will & Grace. She also made the occasional return trip to the movie screen; most of her film roles were forgettable, but she did get a piece of one great movie towards the end of her career when she voiced the characters of Yubaba and Zeniba in the English language version of Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 animated masterpiece, Spirited Away. That same year, she married the actor Tom Poston, with whom she had appeared more than forty years earlier in the Broadway play Golden Fleecing (and who would be a regular on Newhart's second long-running sitcom,Newhart). Poston himself died last year. Suzanne Pleshette will posthumously receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on January 31, which would have been her seventy-first birthday.