The Screengrab : david niven

Many Happy Returns, and a Couple of Not-So-Happy Ones: Vin Diesel and the Movie Brotherhood of Those Who Have Come Crawling Back

Phil Nugent — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

It actually wasn't that long ago that Vin Diesel was being touted as a potentially major, breakout star, capable of both carrying a commercial genre movie (Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious) and lending a hand to more nuanced dramatic roles (Boiler Room). It probably feels like a long enough time ago to Diesel, which presumably accounts for his presence in the new Fast & Furious. In 2003, Diesel explained his absence from the sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious by saying that he had one foot in three movies--Pitch Black, a lively little B movie that led to the far more expensive sequel The Chronicles of Riddick, and the extreme-007 movie XXX, as well as The Fast and the Furious--with serious franchise potential, and rather then spread himself too thin, he had to decide which two were likeliest to be the most successful in the long term. Five years after Riddick belly-flopped and the failure of the XXX sequel, in which Diesel wound up being replaced by Ice Cube, it's no small wonder that he wants a do-over. (In between the two Fast/Furious films co-starring Diesel and Paul Walker, there was a Diesel-free sequel starring Walker and a Walker-free third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to which Diesel contributed a cameo. The new movie basically reconstitutes the cast of the first film--reuniting Diesel with Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster--making it somewhere between a remake, a sequel, and a "reboot.") Given the dismissive, somewhat lordly attitude that the amply franchised Diesel once showed towards the role of hot-car king Dominic Toretto, it would only make sense for him to have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, given the reception that Diesel has gotten for the movies he's made since XXX and Riddick--The Pacifier, Find Me Guilty, and the disowned-by-its-own-director Babylon A.D.--he might just be happy to be somewhere he's wanted.

He can, at least, take comfort in knowing that he's not the only movie actor ever to take stock of his own career and concluded that his best move might be to hit the "reset" button. In fact, he's practically part of a long tradition:

Peter Sellers/Inspector Clouseau

Sellers was set on the path to living legend status in England by his work on The Goon Show, and his appearances in such British comedies as I'm All Right, Jack, The Smallest Show on Earth, The Wrong Arm of the Law, and Only Two Can Play and the Stanley Kubrick films Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) made him a favorite in the United States with the art-house audience. But it was his creation of the bumbling French police detective Clouseau in Blake Edwards's 1963 The Pink Panther that put him across with the mass audience. In that movie, Sellers was a supporting player to the top-billed David Niven, and he only landed the role because Peter Ustinov dropped out days before he was to begin filming. But so much of the movie's enormous success was so clearly the result of the slapstick aplomb that Sellers brought to his thinly written part that Edwards brought him back to star as Clouseau in 1964's A Shot in the Dark. Although this was the movie that introduced the actors and characters who would become the standard Clouseau supporting cast--including Herbert Lom as Clouseau's seething, tic-ridden boss Dreyfus (who would here establish a pattern of trying to kill Clouseau after the detective's incompetence had driven him to hysterical madness) and Bert Kwouk as Clouseau's houseboy Kato--the script was actually based on a Broadway play that had in turn been based on a French play by Marcel Archard, called L'Idiot. The screenwriters, Edwards and William Peter Blatty, simply inserted the Clouseau character into the comic-murder mystery set-up, and allowed Sellers to go to town with it. Not the least remarkable thing about the movie is that, by casting the delectable Elke Sommer as a ditsy heroine in need of a savior--she plays a woman who's been falsely accused of murder--Edwards actually managed to turn Clouseau into a romantic hero while intensifying his physical and mental incompetence.

A Shot in the Dark, the only Clouseau film that doesn't have the character's name or a reference to the Pink Panther in the title, was probably the funniest of all the Edwards-Sellers collaborations(including the non-Clouseau The Party), and perhaps they should have folded Clouseau up and filed him away after that. So far as Sellers was concerned at the time, that's just what they were going to do, and when United Artists wanted to bring the character back in 1968, they had to make do with Alan Arkin for the ill-fated Inspector Clouseau. But by 1975, Sellers had suffered through an unrelenting string of flops that he later described as "my bad patch", and Edwards had gone down in flames with the big-budget disaster Darling Lili (1970) and a string of smaller but no more successful films. They paddled back to safe land with the 1975 The Return of the Pink Panther, in which Sellers adopted the costume style that Arkin had used in his one turn as the character and introduced the rubbery, incomprehensible accent that some French critics would never forgive him for. Sellers would dutifuly report for work on The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and then The Curse of the Pink Panther (1978), only those with calloused eyeballs could fail to see that this accomplished actor wasn't exactly thrilled to be going through the same old paces again and again. The prodigiously imaginative Sellers was trapped in a role that had gotten smaller over time; no longer a layered if farcical character, the Clousesu of the later films is simply a dolt who is consistently wrong about everything and keeps falling over things yet somehow manages to end in triumph. Yet Sellers was also a famously insecure man who seems to have decided that only as Clouseau could he still star in hit movies. When Sellers died in the summer of 1980, just months after racking up an Academy Award nomination and a Time magazine cover story for his starring role in Being There, he was preparing to reprise the role yet again for The Romance of the Pink Panther. Edwards, who seemed ready to sap the tree until the whole forest was gone, managed to squeeze out one last Sellers-as-Clouseau film--Trail of the Pink Panther, released two years after Sellers's death--using old clips and previously unseen footage, before moving on to such dubious replacements as Ted Wass and Robert Benigni.

Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates

The role of Norman Bates, motel manager, taxidermist, and mother's boy, took Perkins's movie career to another level, but it also got him typecast playing villains and loonies, which became more of a problem as the gifted, intelligent actor's style became more mannered and self-consciously neurosthenic over the years. His leading man days seemed to be over for good when Universal Pictures declared its interest in making a sequel to Psycho with Perkins reprising his role. Directed by the late Richard Franklin (Road Games, Cloak & Dagger), the movie had no input from Robert Bloch, who created the character or Norman in his original novel (and who cashed in on the publicity by writing his own Psycho II novel), nor from Joseph Stefano, who adapted it for the screenplay, and Alfred Hitchcock had been dead for two years. Perkins himself turned down the offer when it was first presented to him, but then, after it became clear that the studio intended to go ahead with or without him, but with another actor playing Norman, he began to feel proprietorial about his best-known role. When you consider that the movie was always going to be something of a travesty, the finished product isn't that awful. In the most effective moments, Franklin had the grace to play the violent set pieces--which include a climactic scene involving a woman who identifies herself as Norman's real mother and a well-timed blow to the head with a shovel--as black slapstick comedy, treating what everyone in the audience knows about Norman's past and his proclivities as a shared dirty joke.

The movie was given a handsome promotional campaign that aimed to tap into nostalgic fans of the original while also reaching out to younger moviegoers who were advised that Norman Bates was the granddaddy of such slasher-movie icons as the boogeymen of the Halloween and Friday the 13th series. In the end, Psycho II, the movie whose title suggested a Saturday Night Live spoof, was a big enough hit that the studio wanted more. And once Perkins had played Norman again, he couldn't seem to get him out of his system. He not only agreed to return for Psycho III (1986), but he also signed on to use it as his movie directing debut. Pyscho III, which began with a sequence that almost could have passed as the opening of Vertigo II and ended with Norman once again headed for the nutbin, was in turn followed by Psycho IV: The Beginning, a 1990 cable TV film, written by Joseph Stefano, in which Perkins co-starred with E.T.'s playmate, Henry Thomas, as the young Norman, and Olivia Hussey, twenty-two yeara after she'd starred in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, as Norman's mother. The film ended with the birth of Norman's son, who may or may not carry the hereditary psycho-killer gene, setting up the potential for a "Norman, Jr." franchise that has yet to be realized. Perkins died in 1992, six years before Gus Van Sant's official (and infamous) "shot-by-shot" remake starring a glassy-eyed and miscast Vince Vaughan as Norman.

Sean Connery/James Bond

Connery renounced and returned to the role that made him a star on two separate occasions. After Connery sat out On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), the sixth film in the official Bond franchise, United artists lured him back for the 1971 Diamonds Are Forever with a deal that included a wheelbarrow full of money and the studio's agreeing to finance The Offense, a movie Connery wanted to make with director Sidney Lumet. Connery's performance in Diamonds is probably the best-acted Bond of his career, but so much of what surrounded him in the movie was tacky and played-out that he must have left the set feeling confirmed in his decision to leave the role of Bond to whoever wanted him. So it was a shock when it as announced, thirteen years later, that the now 53-year-old Connery had agreed to return the role. Hitting the interview circuit, Connery coyly insisted that he'd always said that he'd be happy to do another Bond film if he was presented with a wow of a script, and he also hinted that the new movie would make great, subversive use of his advanced age.

In fact, the new film Never Say Never Again, had its roots not in a brilliant screenplay with a daring new take on the character but in the conclusion of a legal battle between the producer Kevin McClory and the producers of the Bond franchise, which left McClory with the remake rights to Thunderball. The resulting film is mostly a tired action flick that looks as if the director, Irvin Kershner (whose 1966 A Fine Madness boasts one of the best of Connery's early performances), hadn't recharged since his previous job, The Empire Strikes Back. Connery moves through it gamely, despite being subjected to such indignities as an ill-fitting hairpiece and a glaring edit where you can see him disappear from the frame and a stunt double reappear in his place. Under the circumstances, he seems understandably happy to leave the film to be stolen by the actors playing the villains, Klaus Maria Brandaeur and Barbara Carrera. Originally, plans were announced to release the movie in the summer so that it could go head to head against the latest "real" Bond movie starring Roger Moore, Octopussy. In the end, the studio blinked, and Never Say Never Again opened later in the fall. Despite its lack of sparkle, it was a huge hit. At this stage in his career, four years away from his Oscar-winning turn in The Untouchables, Connery was pretty much bulletproof, and his decision to break his vow, and his having so little to show for it, did his reputation no real harm. Presumably he walked away feeling that the project was worth doing so long as it had succeeded in its real mission--i.e., to give the Bond franchise owners who he felt had underpaid him throughout the '60s a little agita.

Not all unexpected reunions in movies are between actors and characters. Some are between actors and directors, such as the infamously difficult relationship between Henry Hathaway and Dennis Hopper. Early in Hopper's career, Hathaway cast him in his 1958 Western From Hell to Texas. Then in 1966, he used him again in the John Wayne picture The Sons of Katie Elder. In a story that became legendary after Hopper repeated it again to interviewers during his post-Blue Velvet comeback, Hopper was reluctant to give a particular line reading that the director was insistent on, so Hathaway had Hopper do take after take until the broken actor finally did just as he was told--after which Hathaway declared his intention to have the already shaky actor driven out of the business. Three years later, Hathaway hired Hopper for a small but memorable part in True Grit, the movie that would win Wayne an Academy Award for Best Actor. Hopper has speculated that Hathaway decided to make this magnanimous gesture because Hopper had married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Margaret Sullavan and the producer Leland Hayward, and thought that the young man deserved to be given the chance to support his new family. If anything like that did go through Hathaway's mind, the joke was on him: Hopper had been using his time off from banging on casting office doors to get his own directorial debut made. The movie, Easy Rider, which made it clear that there was a wide audience for a "youth cinema" that identified itself as part of the counterculture, was released in the summer of 1969, the same time that True Grit was playing to audiences who saw it as an antidote to new-fangled ideas and strobe-happy trip sequences. Both movies established themselves as zeitgeist hits and cleaned up, but Hopper and Hayward's marriage wouldn't survive to the end of that year.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Forget Christmas: for movie geeks, the period from New Year’s Eve to the third week in February is truly the most wonderful time of the year, from the endless Best of Lists and Golden Globes straight through the Saggies and Spirit Awards to the reddest carpet of all...Mama Oscar.

As per recently made-up tradition, the Screengrab will be live-blogging the Academy Awards this coming Sunday...and while we’re on the subject, can we please call a moratorium on bitching about the length of the show? Do sports fans cry every year about the length of the Super Bowl? Do they squeeze all the punt returns into a 65-second medley to streamline the running time? NO! If you’re a sports fan, you want the Super Bowl to last all day. And if you’re NOT a sports fan, then why the hell are you even watching? Just check out the highlights on the news and leave the rest of us in peace, ferchrissakes!

Sorry...just had to vent. And, if you think about it, strong opinions about trivial nonsense is pretty much the lifeblood of Oscar season. Arguments about who deserved to win and who got robbed have livened up the annual ceremony ever since Sunrise totally stole Best Unique and Artistic Production from Chang in 1928.

Sadly, our recent calls to reinstate the Best Unique and Artistic Production category have fallen on deaf ears (sorry, Synechdoche, New York), but there’s plenty more Oscar opining ahead as we here at the Screengrab salute (and condemn) THE BEST (AND WORST) BEST PICTURES OF ALL TIME!

THE BEST:

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

This wasn't supposed to happen. While they might win the occasional token screenplay award (as they did for Fargo), the Coen Brothers were never going to be respectable and mainstream enough to take home the top Oscar honors. Perhaps emboldened by their belated coronation of Martin Scorsese, however, the Academy saw fit to award this dark, ultra-violent neo-noir with the coveted Best Picture prize. Maybe the literary pedigree helped – after all, even Oprah had given her seal of approval to Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel No Country for Old Men. The film is certainly the most faithful adaptation of the book imaginable, and yet it couldn't be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. Much of McCarthy's story unfolds through the sort of sardonic, deadpan dialogue that's always been right in the Coens' wheelhouse, and the more action-oriented scenes are rendered with such an uncanny grasp of McCarthy's evocative and precise geography, readers of the book may experience severe déjà vu. Javier Bardem, himself an Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor, is a uniquely malevolent presence as the killing machine Chigurh. While there are several suspense sequences destined for the Coens greatest hits reel (notably an attack dog's pursuit of Josh Brolin's doomed Marlboro Man into the Rio Grande, and a deadly game of 'musical rooms' at a rundown motel), in its final lyrical moments, No Country for Old Men transcends genre and lays waste to any notion of the Coens as the sniggering egghead pranksters of cinema.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987)

In truth, The Last Emperor is kind of a silly movie: its take on China's 20th century political landscape is kind of vacuous and unenlightening, and it centers around an appropriately blank protagonist played by a totally undistinguished actor who seems to have been cast only because his last name, almost too conveniently, was "Lone." But it's also an apex of Bernardo Bertolucci's unhinged formalism (or, more accurately, of Vittorio Storaro's insane but effective color schemes), and as a lush, consistently gorgeous aesthetic exercise, it's pretty untoppable. If the Academy wanted pretty and inoffensively political, at least they got one out of two.

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)

Michael Cimino’s reputation was so tarnished by the epic financial and critical failure of 1980’s (unjustly vilified) Heaven’s Gate that it’s almost impossible to watch his preceding film, 1978’s The Deer Hunter, without thinking about the once-promising director’s impending fall from grace. Purely on its own merits, however, Cimino’s Best Picture winner holds up remarkably well as a marriage of New Hollywood authenticity and Old Hollywood scope, and as a portrait of not only the Vietnam War’s toll on those who fought it, but of war’s careless misuse of human life, the latter point epitomized by the iconic Russian Roulette finale involving Christopher Walken’s battle-scarred vet. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond with a haunting, melancholic loveliness that’s at odds with much of the material’s harrowing grimness, Cimino’s film (partially indebted to the work of Visconti) plays like a messy, sprawling novel, intimately evoking its characters’ Russian heritage and Pennsylvania steel town roots, poignantly utilizing rituals and ceremonies to express their bonds of love and friendship, and ably casting its tale as emblematic of America’s post-Vietnam moral and emotional disarray.

OLIVER! (1968)

This adaptation of Lionel Bart's stage musical version of Oliver Twist is one of those Oscar winners that isn't especially well-remembered these days and may be regarded as a fluky choice at best, which is unfair. It represents a late show of mastery by the great British director Carol Reed, who had suffered through a lousy decade since his last successful production, the 1959 Our Man in Havana. Working with a first-rate cast that includes Ron Moody as Fagin, Shani Wallis as Nancy, and non-singing (thank God) Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, Carol Reed managed to use the rather undistinguished musical as a way to create a stylized version of the Dickens story, utilizing the energy and wit of the performers and his own cinematic brio to compensate for the limitations of Bart's songs. The movie also has its place in history for marking the last moment when Hollywood felt comfortable declaring that an all-ages movie was the best of the year; the next year, the Best Picture award would go to the adults-only Midnight Cowboy.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)

There’s a case to be made that David Lean’s early, more modestly sized efforts were superior to his later epics, though if the legendary auteur ultimately sacrificed emotional and dramatic tautness in favor of marathon distension, it occurred at some point after 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, a peerless example of larger-than-life filmmaking. As the British military commander who, in a Japanese POW camp during WWII, spearheads the construction of a bridge that his British compatriots plan on destroying, Alec Guinness brilliantly personifies the destructive folly of pride. His army officer, determined to complete the bridge as a means of proving British cultural/political supremacy, is opposed by Sessue Hayakawa’s Japanese colonel, driven to break his Western prisoners’ spirits and terrified that the British will humiliate his own men (and nation) by successfully completing their bridge-building task. Their one-on-one conflict is enlivened, rather than dwarfed, by Lean’s grand direction, culminating in a finale that’s memorable not just for its scale, but for the unforgettable look of sudden awareness, and regret, on Guinness’ face.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

5. CASINO ROYALE (1967)

By 1967, the James Bond franchise was so fully entrenched as an iconic series that it was begging for a smart, funny satire to deflate its growing gasbaggery. Unfortunately, Casino Royale wasn’t it. The best Bond spoof of the era was on television, in the form of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s terrific Get Smart series, while Casino Royale – a one-off production of dubious legal status – proved to be a sprawling, unfunny mess. It’s too bad, too; it wasted one of the best 007 novels (the first, in fact), with a great villain and some excellent set-pieces, and worse than that, it wasted a fantastic cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, William Holden, Deborah Kerr and John Huston. What’s the problem? The direction is a total mess which tries to cram far too much plot (and far too many jokes that don’t work) into far too small a space. The script, likewise, just isn’t funny enough – the rapid pace of the gags can’t conceal the fact that they mostly don’t work, and none of the great actors are given much of a role to chew on. It’s fortunate that the Daniel Craig era of 007 did so much to rehabilitate the Casino Royale name; for nearly forty years, it had been associated with one of the crummiest Bond films ever made.

4. GOLDENEYE (1985)

Here was a (pardon the pun) golden opportunity to re-invent the James Bond series: a new leading man (Pierce Brosnan, succeeding the poorly received Timothy Dalton) and a new era (following the collapse of the Soviet Union) should have added up to a new 007 ready to take on the 21st century. It was not to be. GoldenEye is about as rote as the series gets, plodding joylessly through all the usual Stations of the Cross. If not for the presence of Famke Janssen at maximum hottitude as femme fatale Xenia Onatopp, it would easily be the dullest of all Bonds. Certainly Sean Bean, as a fellow MI6 agent turned traitor, is the most boring Bond villain ever. The only real innovation is the casting of Judi Dench as M, but aside from one throwaway line about Bond being a misogynist and a Cold War relic, the potential sparks never fly. The movie's highlight is the obligatory Q scene, which plays like a Get Smart outtake. Not a good sign.

3. LIVE & LET DIE (1974)

In a series that has spanned more than three decades, a big part of the trick of keeping the Bond franchise alive has been finding the right balance between stubbornly maintaining its own identity and incorporating enough elements from a changing world to keep Bond from seeming like an anachronism. Never did the series lose its footing more disastrously than in the first installment starring Roger Moore. For a start, it was the first Bond movie to feature a theme song by an out-and-out rock band instead of a jazz singer or lounge crooner -- and make no mistake, if the song itself is no great highlight of Paul McCartney's career, better him than Duran Duran or A-Ha. But at a deeper level, it's the "blacksploitation" Bond movie, a real historical artifact and a pretty embarrassing one. First-time viewers who had barely begun to start adjusting to the new, male-mannequin Bond of the Roger Moore era were subjected to the sight of this smarmy British cracker sauntering into a Harlem restaurant called "Fillet of Soul" and mixing it up with the confused-looking brothers inside, who might have thought they were waiting for John Shaft. Yaphet Kotto, as great an actor as ever got assigned the job of trying to think up an amusing death for 007, got stuck with the lamest super-villain role in the series to date: his name ("Mr. Big"), his mission (to dominate...not the world, but the heroin trade), and his death scene, which is reminiscent of the time that the Pink Panther balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade ran amok, all are pitifully unworthy of him. The movie, which is set in a world where every black person in North America (including Gloria Hendry as the first black Bond girl) seems to be in on Mr. Big's conspiracy to blanket the cities with horse, and in which these wretched lost souls are kept in line by their primitive susceptibility to voodoo, tries to balance things out by including a stereotypical big-bellied Loozianna sheriff (Clifton James) who co-stars in an endless back country car chase that would have been beneath the dignity of Hal Needham.

2. MOONRAKER (1979)

This post-Star Wars meld of Bond with sci-fi space opera finds the series sunk deep in its decadent phase. The film cost a reported $34 million, twenty million more than its predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, and while the investment paid off at the box office, the strain shows. No other Bond film surpasses it in terms of the number of exotic locations, huge sets, and beautiful women for Bond to beat off, but it's short on energy and wit, which were once the defining qualities of the series -- and which the producers, and maybe audiences hooked on the formula, now judged to be superfluous. Most of the cast, including Moore, Lois Chiles as the heroine, and Michel Lonsdale as the supervillain Drax, look ready to join a crowd scene in a George Romero zombie movie; the movie's only charm comes from Richard Kiel, reprising his role as a lovesick Jaws before being consigned to join Sheriff J. W. Pepper in Recurring Character Limbo.

1. A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)

Considering how easy it is to get fans to start arguing about most aspects of the Bond series, the general consensus that this is without a doubt the sorriest Bond movie of all time is so solidly formed that it's almost uncanny. Aside from the fact that, at 57, Roger Moore looked readier than ever to be put out to pasture, it didn't necessarily look doomed on paper. The title theme by Duran Duran is so howlingly, garishly wrong that it's kind of right, it was sweet of them to give John Steed, i.e. Patrick McNee, a role as one of Bond's doomed helpmates, and whose ears didn't perk up at the suggestion of Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? Walken, his hair artificially lemon-flavored, plays a psychopathic ex-KGB agent who was created by a Nazi mad scientist; now rich as the owner of a microchip-manufacturing company, he is meant to be such a cool killer as to be devoid of human emotions -- which turns out to be not such a hot idea, because when Walken applies all his considerable Method intensity to being devoid of emotion, he's da void, all right. Also not helping out are Grace Jones, who packs surprisingly little personality inside her outre exterior but whose bedroom clinches with either Moore or Walken can still give you nightmares, and, as the heroine, Tanya Roberts, who actually does less for this movie than she did for her starring gig the year before as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

OST: "The Pink Panther"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film. In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come. Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants: a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers. While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed. It's not Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch. Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration. He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention. Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound. If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese. He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

While the soundtrack to The Pink Panther is a mighty fine listen on its own -- cue it up at your next swingin' bachelor pad party and offer everone a round of pink squirrels, you wannabe -- it works best in the context of the film, where, as a unified whole, the combination of music and visual creates an absolutely perfect evocation of Europe at the tail end of the Swingin' Sixties. Listening to it in full, as the immediately remembered but somehow never overworn main theme swings its way into your soul, lets you forget about what comes next and remember the days when Peter Sellers was young, alive and full of prome, Henry Mancini wasn't a shadow of his former self grinding out TV hackwork for the paychekc, and Blake Edwards actually knew how to direct funny movies. Doesn't seem that long ago now, does it?

BEST TRACKS: Of course, "The Pink Panther Theme" -- signifying on screen the appearance not of Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, but of David Niven's infamous jewel thief, the Phantom -- is one of the certified classics of cinema soundtracks. Its slow, sinister build into a rip-roaring lounge jazz number is unforgettable from the first time you hear it, and seems to lose not an ounce from repetition. But there's more here than just that famous number: take a listen for "Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight)", a swinging vocal number with a Continental feel written for young starlet Fran Jeffries, which went on to be a big hit for crooner (and frequent Mancini collaborator) Johnny Mercer. There's also the oddly named "Shades of Sennett", a rollicking piano number used in the movie's final chase number, that conjures British comedies and American honky-tonk blues -- but rarely the silent movie era it seems to predict in the title!

Related Posts:

OST: Fight Club

OST: Blade Runner

Yesterday's Hits: Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Michael Anderson)

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there’s one thing Hollywood is sorely lacking nowadays, it’s larger-than-life figures. Nowadays, most moviegoers want their industry types to be down to earth, but in the classical era of Hollywood, it was a different story. Tinseltown was ruled by grandiose, even vulgar men who flaunted their wealth, made bold statements and engaged in dangerous behavior just to fuel their taste for adventure. Today’s peekaboo paparazzi photos and pregnancy gossip pale in comparison to the stories of Errol Flynn’s legendary parties and John Huston deciding to make a movie in Africa with the notion of shooting an elephant while he was there.

Michael Todd was one of these men. Todd began his career in Hollywood by running a construction company that specialized in soundproofing studio stages, but after he was bankrupted by the Depression, his colorful life really began. He began producing stage shows, often of ill repute. He romanced Gypsy Rose Lee, star of one of his productions. He married Joan Blondell, after his first wife died under suspicious circumstances. He gambled and spent money like a decadent prince, causing Blondell to divorce him and leading to his second bankruptcy. He staged a nudie musical written by the future king of Thailand. And if that’s not enough drama for one lifetime, he later married Liz Taylor. Todd also had a hand in the development of the three-screen Cinerama process before pioneering a technological breakthrough of his own, the Todd-AO process, which Todd envisioned as being “Cinerama coming from one hole.” And the crown jewel of Todd-AO was 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days.

What made Around the World in 80 Days a hit?: In addition to its wide screen and greater clarity (Todd-AO cameras shot at 30 frames per second instead of the usual 24), Todd-AO also employed the widest-angle lens of the era, approximately 150 degrees. These factors made the format ideal for filming grand epics and panoramic vistas. The first Todd-AO release was 1955’s Oklahoma!, but the maximum potential of the format was realized the following year with Around the World in 80 Days. A long in-development project that had yet to come to fruition, Todd used his newly-regained resources- much of which had been earned by his stake in 1952’s This Is Cinerama- to film his adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel on location all around the world, showing off what Todd-AO was truly capable of doing.

For such an ambitious production, it was only fitting that Todd would fill it to the brim with international stars, all the better to draw in moviegoing audiences worldwide. After pairing up-and-coming Hollywood leading man David Niven with popular Mexican entertainer Cantinflas (as Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, respectively), Todd then surrounded them with a galaxy of stars in cameo roles. It seemed like wherever the travelers went, another handful of familiar faces would drop in to greet them, with bit roles for the likes of Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, Charles Coburn, Peter Lorre, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, and Edward R. Murrow as the narrator of the film’s introduction. The combination of globetrotting adventure and big stars worked like gangbusters, with the Around the World in 80 Days pulling in $23.1 million dollars- the second-highest gross of 1956 behind The Ten Commandments- and taking home five Oscars including Best Picture.

What happened?: Jules Verne’s novel, written in 1872, was meant to inspire a sense of wonder in its readers. But as is often the case with gee-whiz science fiction, much of the wonder evaporated once the fantasy became reality. By 1956, humanity had long since “conquered the air,” and the notion of circumnavigating the globe in four score days didn’t hold too much magic. So while Around the World in 80 Days offered audiences the irresistible combination of big stars and widescreen vistas, the story was little more than an excuse for a series of misadventures involving Phileas and/or Passepartout rather than the wondrous futuristic spectacle Verne had intended.

In addition, while Michael Anderson was credited as the director, this was without a doubt Mike Todd’s film, something that was discovered early on by the film’s original director, John Farrow. But Todd wouldn’t be around much longer to enjoy his success. In 1958, while flying his unfortunately-monikered plane “The Lucky Liz,” Todd suffered a fatal crash. This negated the possibility of any more ambitious Todd-produced epics, as well as beginning the slow decline of the Todd-AO process, which continued in a more conventional 24fps format through the sixties before dying out altogether.

Does Around the World in 80 Days still work?: Not really. If the film was charming in 1956, it’s merely quaint today. For one thing, the much-ballyhooed international shoot comes across mostly as hype nowadays. To modern audiences’ more sophisticated eyes, the seams in the production really show, as when the film cuts from a sweeping foreign vista to a shot of the stars gazing at it in wonder. Much of the action that actually involves the actors looks like it was filmed on soundstages. This isn’t categorically a problem, but when a movie’s primary selling point is that it was filmed on locations around the world, it feels like something of a cheat when the international shots appear to be second-unit work.

In addition, the principal actors in the film are consistently underwhelming. Watching his work as Phileas Fogg, it’s clear why David Niven never became a superstar- not only does he lack the necessary star presence, but his screen persona isn’t very interesting. Phileas Fogg is clearly meant to be an upper-class eccentric- independently wealthy, time-obsessed yet impulsive. Yet with Niven in the role, we have to take the movie’s word for it as regards his eccentricity, since all he brings to the table is a vague air of urbane sophistication. Perhaps a leading man who was more adept at comedy- Cary Grant, perhaps, or Alec Guinness- could have made the role enjoyable, but with Niven it just sort of sits there.

Similarly, despite his celebrity status south of the border, Cantinflas wasn’t cut out for stardom stateside. He looks fairly uncomfortable acting in English, and his physical schtick isn’t very funny, although Anderson and Todd’s insistence on extreme long shots doesn’t help any. Shirley MacLaine, in one of her first films, is sorely miscast as the Indian maiden Aouda, in keeping with classic Hollywood’s highly uncool tradition of “browning-up” white actors for ethnic parts. And while Around the World in 80 Days popularized the practice of “cameo” roles, they’re almost always distracting. Is that brief flash of recognition that comes over audience members when the piano player turns out to be Frank Sinatra really worth the tedious setup? I would argue that it’s not.

In the end, Around the World in 80 Days hardly seems to warrant the “epic” label that many ascribe to it. Far from justifying the largesse of the production, the film feels like an amusing trifle with some picturesque scenes interspersed in order to make the film feel like an event. With comedy that isn’t especially funny and lead actors who get outshone by both the scenery and the stars in the bit roles, Around the World in 80 Days amounts to little more than a widescreen travelogue- diverting in spots with some pleasant company, but not very interesting cinematically, and not really worth revisiting.

Batman: The Lost Years

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

You kids today, with your sequels and remakes and instantaneous re-boots, you’re spoiled! Between The Dark Knight and Gotham Knight and umpteen animated Bat-shows on the tube, you’re up to your pointy ears in Batman. It wasn’t like this back in my day, let me tell you. Growing up as a Batman fan in the 70s and early 80s, I would have killed for just one Batman movie, any Batman movie, even one directed by Joel Schumacher. But between the end of the ABC television series in 1968 and the first Tim Burton movie in 1989, there was a long Bat-drought, broken up only by the occasional rumor and ill-conceived attempt at resurrection.

As far as the comic books were concerned, mind you, we had it pretty good. My childhood coincided with two of the most acclaimed eras of the Dark Knight’s career. The Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams reign of the ’70s is rightly credited with restoring some mystery and moodiness to the character after several decades worth of goofy gimmickry. Those issues weren’t “dark” in the Frank Miller psycho-Batman sense – they were still kid-friendly, but just gritty and grimy enough to open the doorway to the adult world a crack for a young reader like myself. In one of my earliest childhood memories, I am practically grinding the 1973 issue “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” into dust with repeated re-readings. (There are rumors that The Dark Knight draws heavily on that particular story.) Later that decade, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers collaborated on a brief but memorable run of Detective Comics; their noirish, atmospheric take on Batman was later collected in the trade paperback Strange Apparitions.

Those of us who wanted to see our hero come to life on the screen, however, were basically shit out of luck. There was the occasional rerun of the ’60s TV series, which was fun for a kid with no conception of the word “campy,” and there was a Saturday morning cartoon, but that was about it until an ad for an NBC show called Legends of the Superheroes appeared in the TV Guide one week in 1979. This seemed to come out of nowhere, and I couldn’t have been more excited; not only did it promise live-action Batman and Robin, but a bunch of my other Justice League favorites like the Flash and Green Lantern, as well as a passel of great supervillains. Then the thing actually aired and my heart sank. There were two episodes total, a “Challenge” and an Ed McMahon-hosted superhero roast, both shot on videotape and featuring a laugh track. This was not what I’d had in mind:

These things made the Star Wars Holiday Special look like The Sopranos by comparison, and were quickly, mercifully forgotten. Not long afterward, however, rumors began to surface of an impending big-screen version of Batman. Back then we didn’t have the Ain’t-It-Cools and Dark Horizons tracking every blip and fart out of Hollywood; no, we were reliant mainly on Starlog magazine to keep us abreast of such happenings. In 1980, a small blurb indicated that a Batman movie would be in theaters by Christmas of 1981, with rights-holder Michael Uslan announcing, “This film will be done straight.” An update in October 1981 indicated that the original timeline may have been a little ambitious. Despite continued claims by the producers that the movie would be truer to the dark origins of the character, Adam West was now angling to reprise the role. When asked if he would be willing to take on a smaller role – say, that of Bruce Wayne’s father – the man who was then starring in the likes of The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood huffed, “If the character was important enough and handled well…I might consider it.” Even then, this made me laugh. Nonetheless, a whole “Put the Man Back in Batman” movement was launched, dedicated to restoring West to his rightful place under the cowl. There were ads, petitions and even a song, which fell on deaf ears.

A 1983 profile of Tom Mankiewicz revealed that longtime James Bond screenwriter was working on a script then titled The Batman. “We’re trying to return to the original concept – Batman as a dark avenger of the night,” said Mankiewicz. “The villains, while being outrageous, will be very cruel people.” While he wanted an unknown in the title role, his wish list for the supporting cast included Peter O’Toole as The Penguin, David Niven as Alfred, and…Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Of course, only the latter came to pass, and by the time it did I was past my Bat-prime. But it’s still possible to get a glimpse of the movie that might have been; the Mankiewicz script can be found here.