The Screengrab : clark gable

Fat Actor Watch at New York Times: Paper of Record Alleges That When Russell Crowe Sits Around the House, He Really Sits Around the House

Phil Nugent — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Always looking for a fresh angle on the really important movie news of the day, Michael Cieply uses his perch at Thew New York Times to ask" what's with all the male movie stars who are porkers? Who does he have in mind, exactly? Russell Crowe and Jeff Daniels, sharing a screen in State of Play ("Two men. One notebook. Four chins."); Denzel Washington, going "cheek-to-jowl with the bulky John Travolta" in the trailer for the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Hugh Grant; and "Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young heartthrob from Titanic"--Photos from the set of Shutter Island, a thriller on tap from Paramount Pictures and the director Martin Scorsese in October, show a little bit more to love." Oh, snap! Are they handing out chocolate bunnies to whoever can be the biggest bitch at the Times these days?

Cieply briefly notes that there's a gender-based double standard regarding the weight and age rules in Hollywood so far as leading players are concerned, but after dropping Kathleen Turner's name, he seems to feel that he's discharged his duty, as if the subject bored even him. He seems more taken with the idea that this is an utterly new phenomenon, but despite the historical examples he digs up, that may be a non-starter. "Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark Gable and others — show them to have remained rather gaunt at an age when many of the current crop are anything but." Good thing those photos are handy, since it's not as if movie actors left behind filmed records of their performances so we'd be able to remind themselves what they looked like. That said, it seems a little callous to drag Bogart, one of the best-known victims of cancer sticks ever to go down coughing, into a discussion of how movie stars used to keep themselves svelte. (One well-circulated story has it that, when illness had left Bogie too weak to handle the stairs in his own home, he used to navigate from one floor to another by stuffing himself in the dumb waiter.) It's also worth remembering that Gable, who died of a massive heart attack after completing his last film, The Misfits, had lost 35 pounds on a crash diet to get his weight below 200 before shooting began. If there's any less of that sort of thing going on nowadays because more stars feel comfortable about appearing in public looking something other than whisper-thin, surely it's for the better.

It's also true that, as Cieply would have known if he'd put down the "photographs" and spent a couple of days watching Turner Classic Movies, there have always been counter-examples one could offer to his role call of manly waifs. Wallace Beery never looked as if he'd had trouble locating the desert cart, Spencer Tracey rolled into his onscreen middle age looking as if he'd swallowed a tether ball, James Cagney was getting pretty squared-off by the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Robert Mitchum often had an amorphous mass surrounding his midsection that he used to abruptly suck up into his chesticological region whenever he was required to take his shirt off, Gene Hackman's weight always flunctuated, sometimes wildly, depending on just how regular his latest "regular guy" character was supposed to be, and as for Jack Nicholson, in his mid-forties when he more or less officially entered his "middle-aged" period with Terms of Endearment--please. Of course, with movies as with everything else, memory can be a great deceiver. Lawrence Turman, "a veteran film producer who is chairman of the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts", told Cieply that "“John Wayne always looked a bit portly." I find it disturbing that the Peter Stark producing program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts can do no better for its chairman than a guy who's never seen Stagecoach. It may be a tribute to the lingering effect of the image that Wayne cast from around the mid-1950s until his death in 1979 that even some professionals think he always looked like that, but I would propose that, unlikely though it may seem, that if Wayne had looked in his youth like a guy who was fated to someday look the way he did in True Grit, he never would have gotten the chance to grow into that later incarnation--at least, not on movie screens.

This still leaves the question of whether some of these stars, heavier though they may undeniably be, are as hideous to behold as Cieply seems to be implying they are. I will confess that when I saw Travolta, say, in the trailer for Pelham, I did not catch myself thinking, "Here comes Wide Load." (I did catch myself thinking, "Get a load of Weird Hairline with his Fu Manchu mustache. Each of us has his issues.) One possibility worth considering is that such stars as Travolta, Washington, and Hanks, who came up in the 1980s, when a perfect storm of society-embraced body issues and new technology in the gym led to a new species of Americans who seemed to be armor-plated in their own skin and muscle, some of whom hastened to show off their new packaging on the covers of magazines, such as that infamous shot of Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote Stayin' Alive, looking as if his abs were about to jump out of his torso and his brains had already leaked out of his ears. Maybe, having fallen for that when you had the energy and free schedule to pursue it all the way, you have to let yourself go a little later on or else you'll explode. But then, in the interests of full disclosure, I should concede that I am from The South, where we deep fry our veggie plates and the lost causes that we love to get misty-eyed about include our own arteries in their pre-clotted state. Because of my own cultural conditioning, if I had my way, every other movie made since 1984 would have starred Joe Don Baker, and the others would have been divided between Randy Quaid and the late Dub Taylor, with the result that Michael Cieply would be even more confused.

Warner Home Videos Throws Open Its Vaults: Customers Can Order Personal Favorites on DVD, On-LIne

Phil Nugent — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Hard though it may be to believe, there are still plenty of movies that have never seen the light of home video players. "Over the last 12 years," Susan King writes in the Los Angeles Times, "Warner Home Video has released about 1,200 vintage films from its vast library on DVD. But that still leaves about 3,800 feature titles that have yet to make their digital debuts. At the studio's current release rate of 100 per year, they wouldn't all be available until midcentury." Now, in a truly surprising move, WB has decided to get all Mom-and-Pop, hands-on in its efforts to stuff home editions of its back catalog into eager, waiting hands. Monday, the Warner Archive website began offering customers the chance to place on-line orders for movies that have been given the green light for "official" DVD release, because the necesary demand for them is presumed to not exist. But fans can now buy burns of any of 150 titles, with plans to add another twenty or so titles every month. Those available now range from obscure classics such as Peter Brooks's The Beggar's Opera with Laurence Olivier and the 1931 film version of Noel Coward's Private Lives to cultish oddities such as The D.I., with Jack Webb playing R. Lee Ermey and Yes, Giorgio, Luciano Pavarotti's mad fling at being a romantic movie lead, to films that plug holes in the careers of people like Clark Gable (Cain and Mable, Idiot's Delight, Honky Tonk) and Michael Curtiz (Mission to Moscow).

Although the DVDs are burned rather than pressed like official commercially released discs, Warner Home Video head George Feltenstein says that "these discs, burned with a oropietary technology, 'are as durable and playable as pressed discs. They're not like discs you burn on your home computer.' " They will also be released bare bones, without supplementary materials of any kind, except for original trailers where those are available. And, of course, they don't come in Blu-Ray. Given those limitations, the immediate response seems to have provided overnight validation of the project, which was two years in the making: Lou Lumenick of the New York Post took time out from his busy schedule of annoying the handicapped to tell his readers about a phone conversation he had before the end of the day with "a jubiliant WHV honcho George Feltenstein, who reports that within two hours of the site going live this morning, orders were placed for 140 of the initial 150 titles. 'And they might have gotten orders on those other ten by now,' he tells me. 'It's more traffic than we can handle.'" (So much so that the site was stalled for a while on Monday.) Considering that WBH is also making the titles available for downloading (at a cost of $14.95, compared to $19.95 for a disc), the rush on the DVD cart amounts to a gratifying reaffirmation of the appeal of a hard copy one can call one's own.

Public Enemies: The Many On-Screen Faces of John Dillinger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Michael Mann's Public Enemies doesn't open until July, but the appearance last week of the movie's trailer was enough to get chat rooms buzzing and fan boys clapping and speaking in strange tongues. Based on Bryan Burroughs's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34, the movie features an all-star Depression-era rogue's gallery that includes Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd, Giovanni Ribisi as Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, Stephen Dorff as Homer Van Meter, David Wenham as Harry Pierpont, Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson, and John Ortiz as Frank Nitti, along with such enforcers of the law as Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the G-man who brought John Dillinger to heel and Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, who was able to turn the headlines about rampaging criminals into a call for a national police force, the FBI. The real attraction, of course, is Johnny Depp as Dillinger, the most charismatic and legendary of the celebrity crooks and a figure who personified the image of the 1930s bank robber as dashing desperado.

Bonnie and Clyde had their doomed-love thing; Baby Face Nelson, who played super-villain team-up with Dillinger for a while, was a genuinely scary thug; Machine Gun Kelly was a hype. But Dillinger, conscious of the good it did him to keep world opinion on his side, actively courted the public with his dimples and courtly manners, so that even his hostages came out talking to reporters about what splendid company he'd been. He tried to avoid the use of violence, pulled off dazzling escapes, and stuck to robbing banks, at a time when nobody had a good word for those financial institutions. It was partly in response to Dillinger's popularity that Hollywood created the movie image of the endearing gangster, and Dillinger himself was not immune to the charms of that image: the movie he was exiting when he was shot down by Purvis's men was Manhattan Melodrama, a juicy ear of corn in which Clark Gable played a lovable rapscallion named Blackie whose best boyhood pal (William Powell) grew up to be District Attorney. When Blackie rubs out a nogoodnik who was threatening to spread some damaging slander about his buddy, who's getting ready to run for Governor, Powell is forced to prosecute Blackie for murder, while Blackie sits through the trial grinning in pleasure at his pal's sturdy principles and courtroom flair. Blackie's last act is to warn Powell, who's now Governor, not to even think about commuting his death sentence, before heading to the electric chair with a smile on his face and a swagger in his walk. Presumably Dillinger spent his last minutes in the theater feeling suitably flattered.

There have been enough wildly different screen takes on Dillinger by now that it's anyone's guess what Depp's will look like. But it seems a safe bet that Captain Jack Sparrow will find a way to clearly differentiate himself from such notable predecessors as these:

Humphrey Bogart, THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936)

Bogart's character here, "Duke Mantee", represents the playwright Robert Sherwood's theatrical conceit of Dillinger as social outlaw and voice of the blunt common man. (His gang includes a black member, who enjoys goading his opposite number, a subservient black chauffeur.) Duke takes over a roadside diner where the hostages include Leslie Howard as the hero and mouthpiece, a crestfallen intellectual who makes poetic speeches about fate and destiny and other assorted claptrap. Bogart, who has a terrific, untamed look here, had been part of the Broadway cast of the play, as had Howard. His success on stage helped turned around a career that had been stalled, but he was almost denied the chance to be in the movie because Jack Warner wanted his own house gangster, Edward G. Robinson, to play the part. But Robinson was getting tired of waving gats around, and Howard announced that he didn't want to do the movie without Bogart, and there was no way Warner could replace Howard--no one else in the business could have delivered most of his lines with a straight face. The film version did finally get Bogart's movie career properly launched, but his performance wasn't as fresh as it must have been early in the Broadway run, and it would be another five years before another gangster role, in High Sierra, officially made him a star.

Lawrence Tierney, DILLINGER (1945)

Made a decade after Dillinger's death, this was the first film that claimed to tell his story and call him by name, and it also marked the big-time starring debut of Lawrence Tierney. These two things do not compute. In his mid-twenties, Tierney still had a thick head of black hair and a handsome profile, but he already had the voice of a mudslide survivor and emitted mean vibes potent enough to turn sunflowers black and fill nearby rivers with dead fish. He was simply not ideally cast as man for whom violence was a last resort, and the screenwriters, Philip Yordan and the uncredited William Castle, having taken a quick check of which of the two men, Dillinger or Tierney, they had greater need to fear, astutely shaped the script to Tierney's personality. Shot under the working title "John Dillinger, Killer", it's a portrait of a hell-raising psycho with a chip on his shoulder. Directed by the no-name Max Nosseck, it's also an energetically slapped-together knuckle buster of a poverty row production, with a running time of an hour and ten minutes and an especially exciting bank robbery scene that Nosseck didn't shoot: the footage was lifted from Fritz Lang's 1937 Bonnie-and-Clyde movie, You Only Live Once.

Warren Oates, DILLINGER (1973)

This film marked the directing debut of screenwriter John Milius, whose nostalgia for old movies and the era they were made in almost matches his enthusiasm for flamboyantly choreographed displays of bloody mayhem. Warren Oates, in one of his rare flings as a leading man, is Big John, while Ben Johnson, who played Oates's brother in The Wild Bunch, is supposed to be Melvin Purvis. (Twenty years older than Purvis was at the time and radiating a confident, bearlike serenity, Johnson might have been more convincing as Hoover than as the junior agent who, a title card at the end of the movie informs us, ultimately committed suicide, but Milius must have just loved the idea of the two time-tested character actors battling it out in the field.) The movie is full of people like Harry Dean Stanton (who goes out in a blaze of shotgun fire, wearing a fur coat he's taken off a carjacked college student, soon after delivering the line that ought to be on his family crest: "Things ain't workin' out for me today."), Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Dreyfuss (as a surly, punk-ass Baby Face Nelson), Frank McRae, and Cloris Leachman as the Lady in Red, and Milius seems to be having a good time staging many of the actual highlights of Dillinger's and the other gangsters' careers--in scrambled order, so that he can close with the killing of Dillinger, which actually predated some of the other events he wants to include. Weightless, never as dangerous as it wants to be, but kind of lovable, seeing this picture is like watching a bunch of people in period dress play cops and robbers on a movie studio's dime.

Robert Conrad, THE LADY IN RED (1979)

Of all the actors who've been cast as Dillinger, Conrad strikes me as perhaps the most unlikely, though all votes for Mark Harmon (who played the role in a 1991 TV movie that somehow never came across my radar screen) will be counted. Dillinger is actually a supporting character in this film, which was one of the first produced screenplays by John Sayles. Sayles told the story of how a poor farm girl (Pamela Sue Martin) who traveled to Chicago and had to use whatever means came to hand to survive life in the cold, hard city during the Depression came to be on Dillinger's arm the night he was gunned down faster than you can say, "Boy, that Clark Gable's a pisser, ain't he?" Tapping into his trademark liberal concern, Sayles tried to use the Pamela Sue Martin character to show how people are driven to desperate measures by an unfeeling capitalist society, and just to make sure that audiences wouldn't miss that she was meant to be sympathetic, he revealed that she had gotten a bad rap as the woman who set Dillinger up; both she and her new boyfriend (who tells her that he works for "the Board of Trade") were the victims of her Linda Tripp-doppelganger "friend" Anna Sage (Louise Fletcher), who deduced the boyfriend's identity and sold them out to the Feds. This protective screenwriting device has the downside of making the Martin character seem more stupid than necessary, and Conrad gives his usual convincing impersonation of a self-satisfied macho dickweed so full of himself that it's easier to see why people would want to gun him down on the sidewalk than it is to understand how he got a date to the movies. The Lady in Red, which was later re-issued under the title Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, was directed by Lewis Teague, who would team up again with Sayles a year later for Alligator, a probing, class-conscious exploration of the worst that can happen if you flush your pets.

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

In 1939 dollars, Gone With The Wind is still the highest-grossing picture of all time, and it's certainly epic and iconic, what with the burning of Atlanta and Vivien Leigh’s mother of all Oscar clip lines, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” (not to mention Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler not giving a damn and Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy not knowin’ nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies). But lawzy me, what a stupid movie. For one thing, Scarlett O’Hara is easily one of the most annoying characters in cinema history – hardly the sort of person you’d want to spend 222 minutes with (or 238 minutes with overture, entr’act and exit music...thanks, Wikipedia)! Gable’s a hoot, of course...but there are plenty of other, better Gable movies that don’t require the audience to giggle at date rape and cheer the Confederacy. Even setting aside the fact that, as a Yankee (and a heterosexual male), I may not exactly be the film’s target audience, there’s still the issue of the production’s relentless over-the-top Cheez Whiz melodrama. Sure, acting styles have changed over the years, but Of Mice & Men, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Stagecoach were all nominated the same year, so it’s not as if Leigh’s proto-drag queen scenery chewing only looks goofy from a modern perspective: I’m pretty sure the movie was stupid in 1939, too.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952)

Widely cited as the worst movie ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, the circus-corn epic The Greatest Show On Earth may have benefited from the political tenor of the times. Its main competition was High Noon, a vastly superior film that nonetheless made AMPAS voters nervous because of its barely disguised anti-McCarthyite message and blacklisted screenwriter. Whatever the reason for its win, there’s no denying that The Greatest Show On Earth is a big load of elephant shit. Even if Cecil B. DeMille hadn’t made it a good 25 years past his own personal expiration date as a filmmaker, it was leagues out of his comfort zone: used to coaching actors in sweeping Biblical and historical epics, he didn’t take to the tawdry, small love triangle under the big top, and no wonder. The dialogue is pure hokum, and the performances range from overblown (Cornel Wilde as an acrobat) to comatose (Charlton Heston as the circus manager). The central romance has as much heat as a paper safely match, and every subplot – and there’s plenty of them in its bloated two and a half hours – is as predictable as it is uninteresting. Even the presence of Jimmy Stewart does nothing to salvage the movie, since his role, as a clown with a dark secret, is telegraphed from the first frame. There’s lots of phony reaction shots of local yokels gasping at the wondrous sights and sounds of the circus, but it’s often unclear what they’re watching; it sure ain’t this movie.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)

The fact that this musical trip to the deep freeze that is Julie Andrews' soul was the biggest box-office sensation of the mid-1960s and held onto the title of Number One Hit of All Time for seven years until it was dislodged by, of all things, The Godfather, just goes to prove that you never know. Critics like to imagine that movies tell us something about the times in which they were made, but when you consider what was going on in the world between 1965 and 1972, all you can surmise from this movie's success is that people must have been desperate to escape reality as thoroughly as they could without barricading themselves inside an isolation tank. If you look at the reviews it received at the time, you see that even polite mainstream critics saw it as a potential menace that would lay waste to the culture like some species of plague, but looking at it with forty years of hindsight, the funniest thing about the movie is that it seems to have come and gone without leaving any progeny. It did inspired the studios to plow millions upon millions of dollars into "family musicals" (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Doctor Dolittle, Paint Your Wagon, etc.), all of which are now best remembered for providing an education in just how little return it is possible to get on a major investment. Subsequent attempts to squeeze another nickel out of Andrews' screen image proved largely unsuccessful. (The 1968 musical Star! -- her reunion with The Sound of Music director Robert Wise -- was one of the great financial disasters of the era.) The closest the movie has come to being positively re-evaluated came in the 1990s, when it attracted a cult that attended screenings in fancy dress and talked back to the screen, Rocky Horror-style. For the first time ever, Christopher Plummer's Dracula-like performance as Baron Von Trapp actually made sense.

ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980)

Had anyone else been behind the cameras for Ordinary People, it would have come and gone with no great comment -- and perhaps even a modest amount of praise, for the quiet family drama isn’t terrible by any stretch -- but certainly without much hoopla, and definitely without a Best Picture nomination, let alone a win. But because Robert Redford was its director, and Hollywood has always been dismayingly overimpressed with actors who don’t completely embarrass themselves in the director’s chair, it ended up being praised far beyond its virtues. It’s hard to pick out any element about it that’s rotten; the performances are generally adept, the story is competent enough, and the direction is inoffensive. It’s a lot like a small literary novel that comes and goes without much comment. But just as there’s nothing much to damn it with, there’s also nothing much to recommend it. The Best Picture victory of the movie a lot of wise-asses immediately dubbed Ordinary Movie wouldn’t be such a sore thumb if it wasn’t for the competition it bested; not only did it triumph over Coal Miner’s Daughter, which covered much of the same ground only better, but it also beat out The Elephant Man and, shockingly, Raging Bull, both of which, unlike Redford’s directorial debut, went on to be numbered with the greatest films of the decade. Once it became clear what kind of filmmaker Redford really was, the Academy stopped embarrassing themselves by nominating him for big awards; if only they’d figured it out sooner.

FORREST GUMP (1994)

Of all the problems with our culture, what is the single most destructive and indefensible? Gosh, there's so many to choose from, but I'm gonna have to go with the enduringly popular notion that mental retardation and moral goodness are closely linked, to such a degree that one may not be fully possible without the other. Even in politics, the candidate who does the worst job of concealing the breadth of his intelligence is likely to be tagged as a know-it-all elitist and silver-tongued devil, and the one least ashamed of coming across as a dumbass is touted as being a tribune of the people who has the moral certitude that comes from being too dumb to know internal conflict. Forrest Gump isn't a movie about a hero who makes the right choices but the story of someone who does the right thing because he's such a dope that he doesn't know he has any other options. (Forrest's smarter friends, his lifelong love Jenny and his commanding officer in Vietnam, go down self-destructive paths that Forrest is too good to even know are there.) I think that a movie like this must have a special sick appeal in Hollywood, which is full of cynical, morally compromised people who find such nonsense comforting because it can be taken as a reassuring message to slimeballs everywhere: only the stupid can be truly good, so if you're not as good as you might like, it's not your fault: you just had the mixed fortune of being smart. The director, Robert Zemeckis, knows a lot about cynicism and moral compromise; he used to satirize it in movies like his great 1980 comedy Used Cars, and he found out that satire doesn't pay the bills. But even he may have been surprised to discover just how profitable sentimentalizing stupidity can be. Compared to this thing, Pulp Fiction, which it beat out for Best Picture, is as innocent as a newly born kitten on Christmas morning.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

New Film Books: Michael Sragow on Victor Fleming, Glenn Lovell on John Sturges

Phil Nugent — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

There have been a number of interesting movie books published this season, and two new volumes, both of them singled out for praise by Michael Fox, flesh out the careers of Hollywood directors who had important careers with major films to their credit but whose names generally don't make it onto the established lists of great filmmakers. Victor Fleming, the subject of Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, has the distinction of being the credited director what might be seen as the most iconic American movie classics of the early color era, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz--both of which were released in 1939, and both of which were huge productions that Fleming was brought in to complete after other hands had started filming. (Fleming's was still working on Oz when Clark Gable decreed that he would only continue in the role of Rhett Butler if Fleming was brought in to replace George Cukor, who had also done some labors on Oz. King Vidor wrapped up Oz while Fleming made his way to the GWTW set. Sam Wood also worked on GWTW for a few weeks while Fleming was recovering from exhaustion.) Fleming, whose other credits include Red Dust, Bombshell, Treasure Island, and Captains Courageous, broke into movies as a camera assistant, much valued for his mechanical prowess, before moving up to directing silent action films. Fox writes that "Sragow’s great accomplishment... is effortlessly weaving together the various film-book genres. His digressions to illuminate the careers and characters of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are meaty and delicious, while the making-of chapters...brim with well-chosen behind-the-scenes details that illuminate the bigger picture of Fleming as a fearless pro. Sragow also gives a strong sense of the dynamics of the studio system, while dropping in any number of contemporary references and critical assessments without slowing the narrative a whit." Fleming combined a sensitive side with the man's man aura that made someone like Gable so comfortable about putting his career in his hands. And whatever one thinks of Sragow's efforts to sell him as an artist on the level of, say, Howard Hawks, he certainly got a lot done with the time given to him. He died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of 59; his last film was Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, the last of a long string of leading ladies with whom he'd been enjoying an affair during their off-hours.

Glenn Lovell's Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges makes the case for a director of some of the best-loved action epics of the latter half of the twentieth century, especially The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. Those pictures, and such smaller genre classics as Escape from Fort Bravo, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Bad Day at Black Rock--probably the most critically respected of Sturges's films, because it doubles as a socially conscious expose about the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II--lack the depth and explosiveness of the work of someone like Sam Peckinpah or the flamboyant showmanship of Hawks, but they stand out among the run of routine action movies for the craftsmanlike precision that Sturges learned during his studio apprenticeship as an editor, and as a director working on training films during the war. Sturges might be better remembered today if he hadn't lasted as long; he ran out of gas after The Great Escape yet continued to plow on, grinding out sadly lifeless shoot-'em-ups such as The Satan Bug, Ice Station Zebra, Marooned, and the dreaded McQ, in which John Wayne, making a mad, eleventh-hour stab at playing his version of Dirty Harry, looked as if he might collapse during the chase scenes and attempt to lasso the villains with his varicose veins. And Sturges, like Fleming, might have done his work for the studios a little too well: Rhett and Scarlet and Dorothy and the Wicked Witch now seem always to have been with us, to such a degree that it seems weird to imagine that somebody directed them. Just as Sturges's two biggest hits helped to create so many action stars--Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, James Garner, just to skim the cream off the top-- that the fellow behind the camera got lost in the crowd.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Men of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:00:00 GMT

PETER O’TOOLE (1932 - )

The standard line on Peter O’Toole is that he’s the greatest actor to never win an Academy Award. He should have won it for Lawrence of Arabia, of course: selected by David Lean based on his stage work (like most great British leading men, who come from a culture where theatre is not synonymous with frothy mass-market musicals, O’Toole carried on a very successful stage career contemporaneous to his film acting), he became an instant superstar. Perhaps the Academy simply assumed, around the time he appeared in My Favorite Year, that if drinking hadn’t killed him by age forty, he’d be around forever and they could award him at their leisure. Though raised in Leeds and soaked in London theatrical tradition, O’Toole is the most Irish of actors: not only for his name and his reputation as a hard drinker, but also for his whimsy, his sly charm, his often self-deprecating humor, his reputation as a raconteur without peer (his autobiographical series Loitering with Intent are some of the most enjoyable books ever penned by a movie star, and show that he shares more in common with Flann O’Brien and Brendan Behan than nationality), and, when a role calls for it, fiery intensity. His roles have run the gamut from savage countercultural tour de forces (The Ruling Class) to respectable grand-old-man performances (The Last Emperor), and he’s got a third installment of his autobiography coming out, as well as a performance alongside John Malkovich in a big-screen adaptation of “The Song of Roland”. Hurry up, AMPAS; no one lives forever.

NICK NOLTE (1941 - )

In recent years, Nolte's off-screen reputation as the drunken old caveman from Mars has gone a long way in blotting out his on-screen legacy, which is a great pity -- for us, since he continues to give a very convincing simulation of a man who really doesn't give a shit, except about the quality of his work. He spent most of the first thirty years of his life dicking around accumulating "experience" before he began turning up in bit parts in movies and guest shots on TV series -- he was in many a Quinn Martin production -- before making his movie debut alongside a giggly penis named Don Johnson in the drive-in sequel Return to Macon County (1975). It was a return to TV, in the form of his role in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man that got the studios to thinking that there might be money in them thar pecs. In Nolte's first big-budget movie, The Deep (in which he got to go scuba-diving while modeling the latest in '70s porn star 'staches), he looked wooden with embarrassment, a good sign that his package included a healthy brain. Luckily, he was able to quiet talk that he was an overhyped dullard with fiery performances in North Dallas Forty and Who'll Stop the Rain?, an adaptaton of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers that gave him the chance to play a character based on Neal Cassidy. (A couple of years later, he played Cassady for real in the misbegotten Heart Beat.) Through the 1980s and into the '90s, in such movies as 48 Hrs., Under Fire, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Weeds, Q & A, Lorenzo's Oil, The Prince of Tides, and "Life Lessons", the Martin Scorsese-Richard Price segment of the anthology feature New York Stories, Nolte's hulking yet graceful physique and his ability to invest it with emotional power and suggestions of experience made him a highly welcome presence in a movie culture dominated by dimpled young'uns fresh from the Nautilus room. He was still doing a lot of bad movies for the money, though, and after the 1996 Mulholland Falls, he snapped, announcing to the press that he was taking his star off the door and was now a character actor, pitching his services to the indie film scene and anyone else who had an interesting script that was in no danger of being rewritten on a whim by the studio CEO's niece. A lot of highly paid talent have had days where they wanted to make a similar announcement, but Nolte actually kept to it: he starred in Keith Allen's version of Vonnegut's Mother Night, co-starred with Julie Christie as aging sex bombs in Alan Rudolph's Afterglow, signed on to play Lt. Col. Tree in the strongest section of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, ran the gauntlet for Paul Schrader in Affliction, played Adam Verver in the Merchant-Ivory production of Henry James' The Golden Bowl, made his best case that an American could still look cool to the French even in the age of Bush in Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, and cast a worried, sage eye at Maggie Cheung in Olivier Assayas's Clean. In between, he did a lot of well-intentioned weird shit, ranging from trying on ladies' underwear in Rudolph's misguided Vonnegut blowout Breakfast of Champions to Ang Lee's Hulk, where he did at least manage to prove that he could look weirder and act scarier before his character went CGI. More recently, he parodied his own gruff-psycho image in Tropic Thunder. It may not make for a smooth-looking resume, but no one can accuse him of going gentle into that good night.

CLARK GABLE (1901-1960)

Perhaps more than anyone on this list, Clark Gable deserves to be considered one of the greatest leading men of all time not because he was a great actor, but because he was a great movie star. He practically taught the world what the phrase "movie star" meant during his tenure as the “King of Hollywood” in the Golden Age of motion pictures: the hyper-inflated salaries, the relentless womanizing, the backstage battles over contracts and perks, the feuds with directors and producers, the endless high living. Gable embodied it all, from the time he made the transition into talking pictures to the time he died, going out alongside Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits. So much of his career was good timing: he had become (largely by virtue of his girl-grabbing good looks; the papers called him “young, vigorous and brutally masculine”) the biggest star in the business in time to do a lot of things that no one had ever done before. He broke taboos left and right, and every one of them made him a bigger and bigger star: appearing shirtless, going without shaving, slapping a woman in the face, uttering the word “damn”. So what if he couldn’t bring himself to cry when he played Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind? Let all the guys who were better actors collect their accolades: the roguish, cruelly handsome Gable went about his business of being the biggest movie star of all time.

JOHN BARRYMORE (1882-1942)

In its early years, Hollywood studios would sometimes make a big deal about having signed famous stage actors to appear in movies, but few of the actors who had legendary theatrical careers made a very strong, lasting mark in movies. Being able to act on a stage wasn't necessarily a detriment to someone hoping to be a movie star, but the two forms rewarded different qualities to a different degree, and movie and theatrical history is full of names, from Barrymore's sister Ethel to Helen Hayes and Tallulah Bankhead, who tended to lose something in the transition. With the possible exception of Marlon Brando, whose stage performances were said to have had an in-the-moment naturalistic intensity that marked him as made for the movies, and who, once he made it in Hollywood never looked back, John Barrymore probably did a more thorough job than any other big American Broadway star of making the same kind of splash in the movies. The fact that he was such a supernaturally handsome son of a bitch helped, especially in movies like Grand Hotel (co-starring his brother Lionel), where he coasted on romantic glamour. But his most enduring movie roles were in comedies such as Twentieth Century, True Confession, and Midnight, where the verbally intricate demands of high-energy screwball comedy made it possible for him to tap into his full theatrical style, which might have proved deadly if he'd tried doing it on camera in a drama. He also played the washed-up actor Larry Renault in Dinner at Eight (1933), a role that gave him the chance to mock his off-screen reputation yet also milk it for pathos, and in one grand moment, to do both at once: having worn out his last string, Renaut opts for suicide by turning on the gas and then lying back to wait for death, after having carefully arranged that his famous profile will be discovered to its best advantage.

NICOLAS CAGE (1964 - )

Here's the thing about Nicolas Cage: he has humor, imagination, daring, passion, and is clearly not in it to be bored. Because of these things, and because, like many actors who enjoy their jobs, he works a lot, he often appears in material that he can't salvage, and because the spectacle of someone who's not inclined to phone it in even when trying to keep a movie like Ghost Rider or The Wicker Man remake on life support can provide plenty of material for a laugh riot of a YouTube montage, Cage's reputation has dropped like the stock market in the last several years. This same thing happened to Brando and John Barrymore in their day, and it might yet happen to Johnny Depp if by some unlikely misfortune he ever gets ugly enough. But from the pure sweetness of his first unlikely heartthrob roles (Valley Girl, Birdy) to the way he twisted himself into pretzel knots in such surreal-slapstick turns as his dashing hillbilly goofball Hi in Raising Arizona and his corporate high rise bloodsucker wannabe in Vampire's Kiss to his poleaxed romantic lead in Moonstruck, he earned his place at the head of the line. As a member of the Coppola family, he has evidence for his theory that there's a point to being perceived as bankable in Hollywood, and while he's been making embarrassing box office hits since at least Con Air, he's also poured everything he had into difficult roles in major pictures (such as his hell-bent-on-dissolution hero in Leaving Las Vegas) that would be difficult for any other actor to bring off. It's been awhile since he did anything as great as that, but he reaffirms his stature as an honest, hard-working man every time he takes a break from going "Whoa!" in response to fireball explosions long enough to do something as unembarrassing as The Weather Man or Adaptation. And even though his list of projects in the pipeline include not just the hinky-sounding Bad Lieutenant follow-up but Ghost Rider 2, we're not ready to count him out yet.

JEFF BRIDGES (1949 - )

Son of Lloyd and brother of Beau, Jeff Bridges made his movie debut in 1970 and got his first Academy Award nomination a year later for playing cute but not so astute in The Last Picture Show. Although he never threatened to become a culture hero or knock De Niro or Pacino or Redford or Nicholson off the newsmagazine covers in the '70s, he spent his first decade starring in a string of pictures -- Fat City, The Last American Hero, Hearts of the West, Winter Kills, and even the 1976 King Kong remake -- that established him as a solid performer who could be counted on to work hard and seriously at his art while bestowing his own immense likability on any movie halfway deserving of it. Those qualities have kept him in steady demand, even as his lust to keep working and his taste for novelty have sometimes dropped him into flops like TRON (the one that proved that computer games were not going to put the movies out of business) and Somebody Killed Her Husband (the one that proved that Farrah Fawcett was not going to be putting actual movie actresses out of business). But he's kept getting better and plunging deeper for his emotional effects as he's grown older. At his best, he can lift a movie like The Fisher King to near-greatness, or a movie like American Heart (where, as an ex-con, his affability had to fight its way through the hard shell of someone who still felt like a caged animal) above mediocrity, or even give the audience a rooting stake in something as trumped-up as The Door in the Floor. In the final analysis, he probably remains more of a consummate actor than a star, but he's such a consummate actor that when a role absolutely demands to be played by a star -- whether it's the tortured romanticism of his small-time piano player in The Fabulous Baker Boys or The Big Lebowski's stoned Zen master hero or even the baldly villainous flash of his role in Iron Man -- coming across as a star turns out to be comfortably within his range.

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

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

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.

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Anita Page, 1910-2008

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:45:00 GMT

One of the last living links to the silent film era, and one of that period's brightest stars, passed away in her Los Angeles home earlier this week at the age of 98. In addition to being one of the silent era's most beautiful and popular stars, Anita Page was also one of its most fascinating stories, both for her meteoric rise to the top and her abrupt -- and self-driven -- decision to quit the business.

Born in Flushing in 1910, she left Queens to make it big in pictures when she was still a high school student, landing her first role (as an extra) at age 15. Her big break came in 1928, when she co-starred with Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters. Although her character died at the end of the picture, audiences immediately took to her saucy grin, easy blonde good looks, and petite frame, and the movie -- as well as two sequel-cum-remakes, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides (also starring Crawford) -- made her a huge star. She became one of the biggest stars of the era, daily receiving hundreds of fan letters, including multiple proposals of marriage -- at least according to Page herself -- from Benito Mussolini.

Her fame only increased, and she got the chance to appear with some of the era's hugest stars (including Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton, Clark Gable, and Ramon Navarro). While many silent film stars faced a difficult transition to the sound era, Anita Page thrived; her first speaking (and singing) role was in 1929's The Broadway Melody, which became the first talkie to win an Oscar and gave her a signature hit song in "You Were Meant for Me". (The song's composer, Nacio Herb Brown, later became Page's husband.) In 1933, her contract with MGM expired, and, at the peak of her success, she became embroiled with the studio over a pay raise. When MGM wouldn't budge, Page simply walked away from show business; with the exception of a few joke appearances in low-budget horror movies in the late 1990s, she would never appear in another film, by her own choice. She was twenty-three years old.

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in THE MISFITS (1961)

The onscreen drama in John Huston’s film of Arthur Miller’s vehicle for wife Marilyn Monroe about horse wranglers and broken relationships in Reno, Nevada runs only a close second to the offscreen drama surrounding the film. Huston drank so much during the production he sometimes fell asleep on set, Monroe wound up in detox at one point during the shoot and died less than two years after delivering her final complete film performance as troubled divorcée, Roslyn Taber. The Misfits also marked the final performance of her equally iconic co-star, Clark Gable, who probably hastened his own death by a macho insistence on performing his own stunts, including (according to our old friend Wikipedia) “being dragged about 400 feet across [a] dry lakebed at more than 30 miles per hour” by a horse. Yet despite the tragedy surrounding the film, Gable and Monroe at least ended their careers (and too-short lives) with a worthy (and timeless) cinematic milestone.

Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1983)

After his first collaboration with Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars, made it possible for him to do what he liked as a director, Sergio Leone basically made nothing but epics, and they kept getting bigger and bigger. He had hoped to make a gangster movie back in the late 1960s but was persuaded to stick with the Italian Western form he had helped create for two more films, Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) and Duck, You Sucker! (1971), both of which were first released to the English-speaking markets in butchered cuts that helped to temporarily kill off his reputation in America. His Prohibition-set crime epic Once Upon a Time in America, which finally arrived in 1983, helped to inspire a re-evaluation of his passionate feel for action, story and romance, his large-scale compositional sense and the hallucinatory romanticism of every shot. Unfortunately, that was only after a 229-minute version of the movie began to get some play in theaters and on cable TV around 1985; originally, Warner Brothers, bowing to what had by then become tradition with Leone movies, sent it out to theaters in the summer of 1984 in an incoherent two-hour-twenty-minute cut that exposed Leone to ridicule and mockery on what should have been a triumphant occasion, which seems to have been a key part in this most movie-intoxicated of major director's decision that he had done enough for the art of film. He spent the rest of his life essentially retired. He died in 1989, by which point the good name of his last work had been pretty much restored.

Richard Farnsworth in THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)

David Lynch's G-rated tribute to the diversity and rich unpredictability of the American heartland draws much of its strength from the man at its center: Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight, an actual World War II veteran who, at 73, drove a riding lawn mower 240 miles to reconcile with his dying older brother. (It was the only motor vehicle Straight was still fit to drive; the trip took him six weeks.) Farnsworth had gotten into movies as an extra and stuntman back in 1936. The movies in which he made uncredited nonspeaking appearances include Gone with the Wind, Gunga Din, Red River, The Ten Commandments, The Wild One, and Blazing Saddles. He began to get small speaking parts after three decades in the business, and then in 1978, he got an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as an aging ranch hand in Comes a Horseman. His first big chance to carry a movie came with the 1982 Canadian Western The Grey Fox, in which, in his ealry sixties, he showed that he had learned how to present himself as a romantic, gentlemanly icon. He continued to play character parts through the 1980s and into the 1990s, but by the time David Lynch came calling, Farnsworth was pushing eighty and had been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Fearing that it might cost him the job, he kept that as his little secret and somehow managed to give the performance of his life, imbuing his now well-rehearsed iconic American character with a new vulnerability and humanity, while doing his best to conceal that he was in terrific physical pain most of the time. Farnsworth died in the fall of 2000, several months after his last performance won him another Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actor.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Two

Home Video Rep Report: "Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As Paul Clark recently pointed out, this is the week that No Country for Old Men came out on DVD. Which is all well and good, but I just saw it a few months ago. So did you, probably, but when's the last time you saw Clark Gable, in a mondo-bondage chauffeur outfit, punch out Barbara Stanwyck for interfering with his plans to keep their employer drunk so he can starve her children to death, or Humphrey Bogart taking one look at wide-eyed Ann Dvorak and miming sniffing something powdery while flashing his dirtiest grin and snickering, "Uh-oh!" These charming relics of Hollywood's early wildcat period can be found in the new three-disc set Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2, assembled from the vaults of Turner Classic Movies. (Volume One, which came out last year, included the long-lost Stanwyck vehicle Angel Face and the giddily scandalous Jean Harlow movie Red Headed Woman.) The discs provide a handy sampler of what Hollywood comedies and melodramas got into in the Pre-Code days before censors roused the rabble and threw a corset around Mae West. For sheer entertainment value, the new set is worth picking up just for 1931's Night Nurse, the hard-headed, hard-boiled nifty starring Stanwyck, Gable, and the platinum wisecrack dispenser Joan Blondell, and the 1932 Three on a Match, in which Blondell is the smart good girl who gets the guy, Ann Dvorak is the good-time girl who doesn't appreciate the guy, and Bette Davis is the one who makes contemporary audiences go, "Jesus Christ, Ann Dvorak makes Bette Davis look like a whipped mouse!" Match makes the case that the cult icon Dvorak, best remembered now as Paul Muni's sister in the original Scarface, deserves to be remembered as the quivering embodiment of the Pre-Code spirit. In the inevitable TCM documentary that's included in the DVD set, she's likened to a sputtering live wire, and she seems to be having a more exciting time than anyone else onscreen whether she's resisting temptation (which was something she never did for long), giving in to temptation (diving in with both feet), or paying for her sins by diving out a window with instructions to the police written on her nightie with lipstick.

The set also includes two Norma Shearer pictures, The Divorcee, which won the boring old thing an Academy Award for Best Actress of 1930, and A Free Soul, which came out the next year and won a Best Actor Award for Lionel Barrymore, who played her father. As that data may suggest, these were A-pictures in their day, but they don't hold up as well as the B's do. But they do have some historical interest, in part because they reveal what people who thought they were looking for something wild and steamy but who couldn't deal with the sight of Ann Dvorak in full writhe were prepared to settle for. Coiffed and dressed to the nines, Shearer could pass for a pretty hot number, though she could never act for shit, and the whole point of her pictures was to let her get just enough of a whiff of liberated hedonism to get her to run back to hubby and daddy. Like Night Nurse, A Free Soul is notable for bottling the dirty essence of Pre-Code Clark Gable, who is once again cast as a magnetic crook who keeps a highborn gal, Shearer, in sexual thrall, to the point that her fiancee. Leslie Howard, is obliged to shoot the blighter. (After that, Barrymore, a lawyer, is obliged to defend Howard in court by telling the jury that none of this would have happened if he'd just had the foresight to lock his daughter in the bedroom until her hormones settled down.) Also included is Female (1932), which stars Ruth Chatterton as a rich car company owner whose casual affair with George Brent turns all serious and shit. It falls between the two stools set by Dvorak and Shearer; Chatterton gets to have some fun early on treating her employee pool as her own personal stud stable, but by the end she's imploring Brent not just to marry her but to take charge of her company so she'll be free to stay at home and turn out enough kids that they can start their own baseball team.

The Ten Best Cussing Scenes in Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Back in 1970, Pauline Kael, reviewing Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, praised it for its "blessed profanity" and wrote, "I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty." (Altman's father reportedly put it another way, warning members of the family to stay away from the theaters because "Bob made a dirty movie!") There's been a lot of cusswords under the bridge since then, so much that when a playwright-turned-moviemaker such as Martin McDonagh gives his actors some floridly profane lines to speak, it isn't even worth a concerned piece in the Arts & Lesiure section from the kind of writer who'd pitch a fit if language half as dirty turned up on one of his kid's rap CDs. So when somebody has managed to distinguish himself by cussing in a movie in a way that stays with you, a salute is in order. Andrew Dice Clay, watch and learn.

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

It may not seem like such a big deal now, but seen in context, at the end of a big old-style Hollywood movie, spoken by Clark Gable in response to a tearful lover's plea, it's easy to imagine what a shocker it must have been at the time. God knows that, sixty years later, my own grandmother was just starting to recover from the shock. You can just see the fabric of civilization starting to come apart.

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

Kids love to swear. I'm sorry, parents, but it's true. Your little angel is/has been/will someday soon be a potty-mouth. The first phase of cussing is the most innocent one: you know the words are taboo, but have no idea what most of them mean. You never really think through the implications of calling your best friend a "pussy-eating cocksucker" – you simply don't have all the information you need to understand how wrong it is. The thrill comes from learning and then repeating the words, and for us kids who came of age in the 70s, The Bad News Bears was an invaluable resource. Hearing obnoxious little Tanner describe his teammates as "a bunch of Jews, spicks, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron" was liberating not because we were a bunch of racists, Nazis and boogerphobes, but because we knew we'd just learned some new words our parents would kill us for saying. And there's still no more triumphant sentiment in the history of sports movies than Tanner's final kiss-off: "Hey Yankees – you can take your apology and your trophy and shove 'em straight up your ass!"

FULL METAL JACKET (1997)

The training sequences at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket are so famously vulgar, intense and energetic that once they’re over, the air sort of gets let out of the movie for the entire middle passage and doesn’t pick back up until the end. For this reason, it’s often considered a lesser Stanley Kubrick film, which is somewhat unfair; there’s a lot to like about the movie even once Private Leonard Lawrence and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman exit the stage. But oh, that opening sequence! As Hartman, character actor (and actual Marine Corps sergeant) R. Lee Ermey works in obscenity the way that Picasso worked in paint; so staggeringly awful (and hilariously funny) are his vulgar degradations of his raw recruits that by the time he has his final confrontation with Private Pyle, no one in the audience has any trouble believing that someone would want to shoot him. Although Ermey has tried to claim credit for many of Hartman’s lines, what he really brings to the role is the pitch-perfect delivery; most of the lines are taken directly from Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers, on which the movie is based. There’s a telling moment early in Hartman’s tirade where he singles out Pyle for abuse, after he has committed the crime of laughing at his obscene explosions, but it cuts directly to the heart of the matter: as violent, hateful and repulsive as the sarge’s speeches are, they’re also incredibly amusing. His recruits don’t have the luxury of laughter, but we do.

NETWORK (1976)

In the first on-air flip-out scene by Peter Finch's Howard Beale, the newly fired newsman gazes serenely into the camera and promises to shoot himself on the air because he just can't take "the bullshit" anymore. The real punch line came a couple of years after the movie premiered in theaters, when it was first shown on network TV. CBS, eager to show that they were in on the joke, allowed Beale's supposedly unbroadcastable "bullshits" to go throw uncensored. Bravo! But the scene was followed by one in which the movie's executives gather to discuss what just happened, and they are a foul-mouthed crew. And the soundtrack, on TV, turns into a veritable conga line of bleep!s.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

"You never had no pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can come on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, come on her face, man. She get your cock so hard she'll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right?"

On one level, it's the world's filthiest sales pitch, a street-corner pimp's patter for the passing johns who want to buy what he's selling. But consider the line that precedes these:

"Man, she's twelve and a half years old."

With those eight simple words, Sport's routine becomes something totally different, and altogether more chilling, thanks in no small part to Harvey Keitel's performance. Screenwriter Paul Schrader originally wrote Sport as African-American, but with Keitel standing in that doorway instead of, say, one of the gentlemen Travis sees at the Belmore Cafeteria, the scene takes on a different tone altogether. What might have been written as a scary, foreboding conversation now comes off as almost genial, with Keitel joking around with Travis' squareness before launching into his prepared monologue. It's an inspired touch by Scorsese and his actors, and one that ultimately makes the scene even creepier. It's not simply that Sport is selling wayyyyyyyyy underage girls to passersby, but that it's no big deal to him. In his mind, he's just catering to demand – after all, if nobody paid for twelve-and-a-half-year old prostitutes (it's the "and a half" that makes the line extra-creepy) he wouldn't need to sell them, right?

– Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 2.