The Screengrab : bing crosby

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Now that our favorite reality show is over and Barack Obama has officially been declared America’s Next Top Commander-in-Chief, we here at the Screengrab can finally breathe a sigh of relief and allow ourselves a few hope-filled dreams of a better world full of gay terrorists and socialized abortions and redistributed wealth for all...while up in Alaska, Track and Trig and Trots and Trickle-Down and all the other residents of Wasilla are having nightmares about the very same thing.

As Milton said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n,” and, frankly, given the overactive imaginations in our little corner of the blogosphere and all the campaign promises and scary robocalls of the past few weeks, we’ve spent WAY more time than usual contemplating any number of best and worst case scenarios for our nation and the future of humanity in general...

...which eventually led to us contemplating our Netflix queues instead, so we could stop thinking so much and just zone out for a while with the following movies, as we take a break from politics and go to our happy place (and a whole bunch of not so happy places) with our salute to The Screengrab's all-time favorite cinematic utopias and dark, dystopic futures!

IDIOCRACY (2006)

We already paid tribute to the brilliance of Idiocracy in a previous list, but it seemed appropriate to kick off with a nod to Mike Judge’s cult classic about a fast-food, monster-truck future where the average IQ has dropped to sub-Heidi & Spencer levels, anybody with an original thought is automatically labeled a “fag” and Ow, My Balls! is America’s number one show, since it features the endlessly hilarious spectacle of a man getting nailed in the nuts again and again and again and again and...anyway, let’s just say it’s the kind of “real” America a certain fake plumber I know might find utopian, while my elitist ass would be searching for the nearest “Time Masheen” home.

LOGAN'S RUN (1976)

There's always a catch, isn't there? The world of Logan's Run certainly seems like a utopian one, assuming your idea of an ideal society resembles a Dallas shopping mall circa the Bicentennial. Inside the domed city of the future, everything is provided for you, including all the sex, drugs and plastic surgery you could ever want. However, as your thirtieth birthday approaches, the red crystal implanted in your palm begins to blink, signaling that your time is just about up. On Last Day, you report to Carousel, which looks like a fun way to go if you like floating around in a colorful bodysuit and bursting into flames. Be advised that there is always the chance of "renewal" although no one really seems to know exactly what that is or if it has ever happened. If this seems like a bad deal, you can always run and seek Sanctuary outside the dome. There are two flaws in this plan: 1) Armed enforcers called Sandmen will try to kill you. 2) If you do manage to find Sanctuary, you'll probably be disappointed unless you want to spend the rest of your life with a smelly old man and his cats.

WALL*E (2008)

Let's face it -- for all the hard work that goes into designing them, most big-screen sci-fi and fantasy worlds aren't exactly the kinds of places we could imagine ourselves actually living in. To cite one example, we wouldn't want to live in a future full of feral Australians who power their city with pig shit, although to be certain, we'd consider it if Thunderdome was there. So compared to most movie futures, the world conjured up by Pixar's WALL*E looks pretty darned appealing. After all, doesn't it sound ever so wonderful to live forever in a deep-space colony where all of your daily responsibilities -- walking, feeding yourself, even procreating -- are taken care of for you by the latest in efficient yet people-friendly machines? In the world of WALL*E, all of this is possible. The catch? The space colonies aren't destinations for vacationers, but rather their new home after life on Earth became unsustainable as a result of excess consumption and pollution. Enabled by mega-corporate sponsor Buy-N-Large, the citizens of these brave new worlds become even lazier, not to mention universally obese. WALL*E was attacked by the right as being a pro-environmental screed (like that's really a bad thing?), but take a second look at the film and tell us it's not more of an attack on complacency, that unfortunate tendency on the part of most people to take the easy way out rather than do a little more work to save themselves in the long run. Luckily for the characters in WALL*E, life eventually finds a way, making it possible to resettle and rebuild the Earth. It's up to us to pull ourselves together enough to preserve our way of life before WALL*E becomes a reality.

ROAD TO UTOPIA (1946)

Okay, so it’s not really Utopia. It’s Alaska, which, judging by the quality of politicians they produce, is anything but. “Utopia” isn’t much more than the title of the final entry in the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby ‘road picture’ series; in fact, it’s just a hustle by Crosby’s Duke Johnson to swindle Hope’s Chester Hooton out of some cash. But Road to Utopia is far and away the funniest of the Road pictures, its self-reflexive, self-deprecating, mile-a-minute humor much more in keeping with the anarchic films of the Marx Brothers than the kind of hoke that Crosby usually associated himself with. There’s lots of inside jokes, an amiable hatred between the two leads, an absurd plot that never gets in the way of good gags, special guest appearances by master humorist Robert Benchley, and, of course, Dorothy Lamour, looking as lovely as ever. Watching Hope and Crosby take clever cheap shots at each other for an hour and a half may not be Utopia, but it’s close enough for us.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940)

In Barack Obama’s America, “socialism” is a word that got thrown around before his election to scare people. Betting on the ignorance of Americans that dozens of prosperous countries get along just fine with some state control of the private sector, right-wing scaremongers used to imply that Obama was a new Stalin who would centralize the Wal-Mart and send anyone who owned a shotgun to a gulag somewhere outside of Wasilla. In John Ford’s Hollywood, though, “socialism” was a new and tempting word for a country that had been beaten to the point of utter despair by the worst economic depression in history. To millions of Americans, the limited socialism advocated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed like it might be the country’s salvation at the same time the nation’s rich excoriated him as a communist who would be America's doom. While much of Europe turned to the poison of fascism to rescue it from the Depression, FDR’s mad notion that the government’s job was to help those who can’t help themselves found a receptive audience among most citizens – a notion reflected in The Grapes of Wrath. Late in the book, Tom Joad’s migrant Okie family, near shattered from death and poverty and hostile, exploitative bosses – come upon a farm camp called the Wheat Patch, which seems like a utopia: no cops allowed without a warrant, free food and shelter for those who work for it, and “the best dances in the county, every Saturday night”. Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad, in utter disbelief that such a place exists free from the cops and bosses who have tried to squeeze him every step of his journey, goggles: “Who runs this place?” Told it’s a government facility, he asks why there aren’t more of them. “You find out,” replies a caretaker with some cynicism. “I can’t.”

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Take Five: Road Trip

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Opening this Friday, Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is a bit of a gamble as a follow-up to The Illusionist. Following the plight of three soldiers recently returned from Iraq (played by Tim Robbins, Michael Pena and Rachel McAdams), it quickly turns into a sort of social statement-cum-sign o' the times story as they find themselves on a road trip together across the country. It's hard to predict how The Lucky Ones will be received; Iraq movies are always a crapshoot, and the movie's curious blend of comedy and drama may not fit in with the subject matter. But it's always fun to see a new road movie, especially this late in the year when the possibility taking real-world road trips becomes more and more daunting. Road pictures have a long and storied history in Hollywood, and filmmakers have managed to fold everything from bone-chilling noir to high-concept comedy to existential drama into the format. America is especially adept at making road pictures, not only because of the grand canvas that is the national geography, but because of our total immersion in car culture. Here's five of our favorites.

DETOUR (1945)

Film noir, despite its association with the urban environment, was never afraid to take its show on the road as long as there was a nice juicy crime at the center of the story, and Detour serves up a doozy. A grade-z Poverty Row picture made for the cost of Clark Gable's lunch, Detour nonetheless proved to be one of the most effective noir films of its day, thanks to its relentless, grubby energy. Tom Neal, who starts the picture looking like he's had his insides scooped out and just gets worse from there, plays a sad-sack piano player who just wants to get to the west coast so he can be united with his former flame. But along the way he gets framed for murder after running afoul of Ann Savage in one of the most terrifying femme fatale roles of all time. A terrific, unsparingly bleak little film that proves a little can go a long way.

ROAD TO UTOPIA (1946)

The term "road picture" was more or less invented to describe the handful of movies made in the 1940s to showcase the comedic talents of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby team. The movies, which always featured the boys making an arduous comic trek to some picaresque location, were of varied quality, but were alway huge moneymakers. The last of these was the best; it featured Hope and Crosby (accompanied, as always, by Dorothy Lamour) as turn-of-the-century con artists heading to Alaska to strike gold. That was just the set-up, though, for one of the most anarchic comedies of the decade; scanning more like a Marx Brothers movie, Road to Utopia featured in-jokes, metahumor, wordplay, surreal gags, and even some inexplicable albeit hilarious voice-overs by master humorist Robert Benchley.

TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971)

A beloved film among your loyal Screengrab scribes, Monte Hellman's throat-clutching existential race movie Two Lane Blacktop opened to great praise and almost as quickly faded out of existence. It's not hard to see why: for all its greatness, it's a remarkably strange little flick, curiously aimless despite its implacable velocity, with characters who are little more than cyphers, as much as they intrigue us. Two of its 'stars', James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, basically never acted again, and Warren Oates turns in a performance -- as the impenetrable, self-inventing G.T.O., named after his car -- that's bizarre even weighed against his filmography. Still, it's probably the pinnacle of the road movie as metaphor for existence, and once seen, it's never forgotten. A real underground classic that's finally gotten its due.

NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION (1983)

Nowadays, the presence of the National Lampoon imprint is practically a guarantee that a movie is going to be a colossal pile of shit. There are those of us old enough to remember how lucky we were back in the days when only the next installment of the venerable National Lampoon's Vacation franchise was going to be a piece of shit, but even for us old cranks, it does us good to remember that the original was actually a pretty solid ensemble comedy. Directed by a still-fresh Harold Ramis, written by John Hughes (who adapted his own story, with surprisingly few changes, from the old NatLamp magazine), and starring Chevy Chase when "starring Chevy Chase" was a preferable alternative to suicide, Vacation has held up surprisingly well, both on its own merits and as, essentially, the blueprint for every road comedy since.

BROKEN FLOWERS (2005)

Even for fans of Jim Jarmusch -- a group of which I am a proud member -- there was a lot not to like about Broken Flowers. Though the music, by Ethiopian jazzman Mulatu Astaque, was fantastic, it felt like it was driving the aimless plot, and the hip-music-plays-as-America-flashes-on-the-windshield device was getting a bit tired. Bill Murray's aging sad sack character was becoming less of a revelation and more of a routine. The incomprehensible ethnic as source of boundless wisdom device was wearing thin. All in all, parts of Broken Flowers played like a pardoy of Jarmusch rather than the real thing. But the parts that worked, including some stunning acting by the movie's female leads and the whole road-trip-to-nowhere angle which Jarmusch has done so well before, remind you why you put up with the parts that don't.

Related Posts:

Take Five: Taxi!

Take Five: Ride Hard

Yesterday's Hits: The Bells of St. Mary's (1945, Leo McCarey)

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

After last week’s review of Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du Péché, I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a nun-themed post every week. I’ve since reconsidered, but the truth is that there are quite a few memorable nun movies. Just think- a When Good Directors Go Bad on Neil Jordan’s We’re No Angels, a Movie Moment column on the rose-scourging scene in the Japanese nunsploitation classic School of the Holy Beast, a comparison piece on the wimple-worthiness of Anna Karina and Audrey Hepburn- the list goes on, even before the nuns go on the run. It’s hard to talk about nun movies without The Bells of St. Mary’s quickly coming up, so with the Easter season upon us I decided to revisit Leo McCarey’s 1945 film.

What made The Bells of St. Mary’s a hit?: 1944 saw the release of Going My Way, which introduced audiences to Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley character. Audiences quickly fell in love with Father O’Malley, a young priest who kindly ministers to the poor with a smile and a song. Crosby- and O’Malley- won over both audiences and Oscar voters, with Going My Way proving to be both the biggest hit of 1944 and the year’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Actor (Crosby), and Best Supporting Actor (Barry Fitzgerald), among others. Based on this success, it was almost inevitable that a sequel would be a hit.

But what really put The Bells of St. Mary’s over the top was the presence of Ingrid Bergman. Bergman, who was already a popular and Oscar-winning leading lady, was best known at the time as a serious actress, playing dramatic roles in Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Gaslight. The Bells of St. Mary’s gave her the opportunity to play a somewhat more lighthearted role, as the devout Sister Benedict. Even audiences who hadn’t seen Going My Way turned out for the unlikely yet intriguing Crosby-and-Bergman matchup, and The Bells of St. Mary’s is widely believed to be the first sequel ever to outgross the original film.

What happened?: The Bells of St. Mary’s had few pretensions other than to make war-weary audiences feel good for a couple of hours. A movie this featherweight was practically fated to see a fade in its popularity, especially compared to the more lavish color musicals and spectacles of the fifties. In addition, both of the film’s stars saw their box-office heat wane. Bergman’s slide came first, following the controversy over her affair with Roberto Rossellini, hardly the best way to endear yourself to Bells’ core audience. Bing held out longer, drawing in crowds well into the fifties, but his appeal to younger audiences was shrinking as they embraced younger performers like Frank Sinatra. By the time rock’n’roll hit the scene, Bing felt like a relic to them.

Does The Bells of St. Mary’s still work?: Not really. Watching the film again, the two words that kept springing to mind were “quaint” and “cornball.” The Bells of St. Mary’s is so committed to making the audience feel good- whether it’s through gentle laughter or easy tears- that the film never has any edge to it. At the beginning of the film, O’Malley is warned about the strong-willed nuns, but aside from a few heated discussions over how the school is run, little becomes of this. Likewise, the episodic nature of the story isn’t a problem, except that all of the subplots are resolved in the easiest and most predictable way possible.

Consider the story of Horace P. Bogardus (Henry Travers), the rich man and city bigwig who is erecting an office building next to St. Mary’s. Bogardus, like so many other rich men in movies, only seems to think about money, while the nuns pray in the hope that he’ll turn over the building to them to use as their new school. So O’Malley does a little scheming, and after Bogardus falls ill, the nuns’ prayers are answered, with Bogardus requiring surprisingly little convincing to make a gift of his not-inexpensive new property. This wouldn’t be so bad except that every subplot in the film is resolved in much the same way.

In addition, the film’s characterizations are almost distractingly thin. O’Malley doesn’t play any notes that he hadn’t already played in Going My Way, and none of the supporting characters show any real depth. Most disappointing is Sister Benedict- the film sets her up as a formidable rival to O’Malley, but none of this pans out. Instead, she becomes practically saintly, as she sticks to her principles, has Job-like patience with her students, and prays for Mr. Bogardus. Even when she does something questionable, such as teaching a picked-on boy how to box, she does so for all of the right reasons. It’s a shame, since as Bergman plays the character it’s easy to imagine how, with only a few script changes, Sister Benedict might have been interesting and multi-dimensional, rather than the sanctimonious cipher we see in The Bells of St. Mary’s.

But then, when you’ve got a valuable property, why rock the boat? Even the film’s most potentially divisive element- its setting in a Roman Catholic Church and school- is portrayed in the most sanitized way imaginable. This is understandable, as in the year before Vatican II and President Kennedy there was some suspicion among non-Catholics about Catholic tradition. However, aside from a few throwaway lines (like the bit about a kid named Luther- “how’d he get in here?”) and the presence of priests and nuns, there’s little actual Catholicism on display here. Heck, many of the ads for the film didn’t even show its stars in their clerical garb, so clearly the religious issue wasn’t a very big one for the film and its studio.

In many ways, The Bells of St. Mary’s is an ideal example of a movie that is a hit in its day but hasn’t stood the test of time. While there’s nothing edgy or controversial that would have incurred the ire of 1945 audiences, it always offers nothing that’s especially interesting to moviewatchers in 2008. But then, how many of today’s hits will we be able to say the same about sixty years from now?

That Gal!: Celeste Holm

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

This week's That Gal! accomplishes something that we get to do all too infrequently in this feature: profile a character actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood that we're lucky enough to still have with us. Celeste Holm was born in New Jersey at the height of the First World War, but didn't attain fame on the motion picture screen until after the Second: the daughter of a painter and a Norwegian insurance salesman (whose sharp Nordic features were reflected in his daughter's own face) worked on Broadway for over a decade, including a long and celebrated stint as the lead in the original run of Oklahoma!, before she was signed to an exclusive contract with 20th Century Fox in 1946.

She made an immediate impact in a number of supporting roles, establishing herself as one of the few women attractive enough to carry a lead performance but strong enough as an actress to inhabit challenging character parts. The majority of her dozens of films, however, were made in the 1950s, before Holm realized that the acting she loved first was the acting she loved best: despite a star-studded and highly decorated career on the silver screen, she far preferred stage acting, and returned to it almost exclusively in the 1960s and 1970s, occasionally doing television work to pay the bills before heading back to the footlights.&

The 1980s saw a mini-career renaissance for the tony, aristocratic actress, and age had diminished her acting chops not a whit: younger viewers got their first glimpse of her when she appeared in the wildly popular domestic comedy Three Men and a Baby in 1987. She hasn't made a movie in several years, but she's hardly stood idle; she's touring with a one-woman theatrical show, she's won a lawsuit against Pedro Almodovar for unauthorized use of her image, and, in grand Hollywood tradition, she's moved on to her fifth husband, an opera singer almost 50 years her junior. Now that's showbiz!

Where to see Celeste Holm at her best:

GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT (1947)

In only her third motion picture, Celeste Holm comes through with a career-making performance in this prestige Gregory Peck vehicle where a reporter goes undercover to expose hidden anti-Semitism. Message films such as this have lost a lot of their highbrow factor, but Holm's performance as the working-class woman with whom Peck has a brief affair before abandoning her for the charmless Dorothy McGuire still packs a wallop; viewers at the time agreed, rewarding her with an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

Holm's second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress came when she played opposite of Bette Davis in this film about a woman's rise to the top of the Hollywood ladder, and terrifying fall back down. It also provided her with a classic anecdote: when she first met the elemental Davis on set, she greeted her with a police "Good morning", to which Davis responded with the last words she'd ever exchange with Holm: "Aw, shit! Manners!"

HIGH SOCIETY (1956)

A celebrated musical adaptation of the already successful play and film The Philadelphia Story, High Society had tons of great songs and a great singer to deliver them in the person of Bing Crosby. Playing C.K. Dexter-Haven's lady love and comic foil, Liz Imbrie, Celeste Holm delivers a terrific comedic and musical role, really showing off the talents she developed during a decade on Broadway -- and, not coincidentally, gets off some of the movie's cleverest and slickest lines.

Johnny Grant, 1923 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Johnny Grant died last week, at the age of 84. A living reminder of Old Hollywood, Grant, who in his later years resembled Mickey Rooney's good twin, achieved fame in the 1940s as a radio newscaster and disc jockey. In 1952, when he was at station WINS in New York City, Grant, with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, co-hosted the first ever nationally broadcast telethon, for which the country forgives him. (The goal was to raise money to send American athletes to the Olympics.) Grant also served an U.S.O. ambassador, joining Hope on many of his tours to entertain G.I.s in various war zones. And he appeared in several movies, including White Christmas, The Girl Can't Help It, and Beau James (starring Hope as New York's party-hearty Mayor Jimmy Walker), usually as an anonymous announcer, reporter, or master of ceremonies. But his defining moment came in 1980 when he was made Honorary Mayor of Hollywood. In that capacity, he was on hand to induct more than 500 worthies into the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Grant, who didn't want a funeral, reportedly left behind the request that his ashes be scattered beneath the Hollywood sign.