Beatrice Arthur, 1922 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Beatrice Arthur has the peculiar distinction of having provided a reason to watch the 1974 movie musical Mame, based on the Broadway show and starring Lucille Ball (and when I say "watch", I of course mean, "keep your finger pressed hard on that fast-forward button at all but the appropriate times). The movie, which was intended as a crowning high point to Ball's career, proved to be a source of embarrassment to the star, who at 62 couldn't (or at least didn't) dance and who gargled her songs in a voice that would have done Ernest Borgnine proud, but it did give Arthur a chance to reprise her Tony-Award-winning performance as Mame's formidable sidekick, Vera Charles, for the camera. (The movie was directed by Gene Saks, who was married to Arthur from 1950 to 1978.) Arthur's work in the movie inspired New Yorker critic Pauline Kael to one of those vivid prose poems of hers that made performing in light entertainment sound like an act of battlefield heroism that might get the subject's face included in the redesign of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Kael wrote that Arthur's Vera was "monstrously marvelous--like a coquettish tank. When she sings, the low growls that come out of her cathedral chest make Ethel Merman sound like a tinkling virgin. Beatrice Arthur can deliver a single-syllable word with enough resonance to stampede cattle three thousand miles away."

By the time she took home that Tony, Arthur had been a presence in New York theater and early television for some twenty years. Born Bernice Frankel--she later said that “I changed the Bernice almost as soon as I heard it."--her first husband was the screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur, from whom she took an improved spelling of his last name. Before her Broadway successes in Mame and in the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, in which she played Yente the matchmaker, she had built up a strong cult following with her appearances in nightclubs and off Broadway, most notably with her performance as Lucy Brown in the 1954 production of The Threepenny Opera. She appeared often on Studio One and Kraft Television Theater, was a regular on Caesar's Hour (the variety show that Sid Caesar starred in after Your Show of Shows), and made her movie debut in 1970 in Lovers and Other Strangers. But of course, she made her biggest splash as the star of the series Maude, which premiered in 1972 and ran until 1978. A liberal-loudmouth spin-off of All in the Family, the show was powered by the old pros in the cast (which also included Bill Macy and Rue McClanahan) and quickly established a reputation as a place where touchy issues such as abortion and menopause went to get aired. In 1985, Arthur and McClanahan teamed with Betty White for another long-running sitcom, The Golden Girls. (It was created by Susan Harris, who wrote "Maude's Dilemma", the famous first-season two-parter in which the 47-year-old Maude had that abortion.) She won Emmys for both Maude and Golden Girls.

In between her two TV hits, Arthur starred in the short-lived Amanda's, a misconceived 1983 Americanization of Fawlty Towers in which Arthur was badly miscast in the role created by John Cleese to showcase his own gift for comic apoplexy. (A master of the slow burn, Arthur could raise her voice, but she was too regally self-contained to do conniption fits.) She also appeared in Mel Brooks's History of the World--Part One (1981) and the 2000 Enemies of Laughter, which was directed by John Travolta, as well as contributing memorable guest spots to Malcolm in the Middle, Futurams, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Between 2000 and 2006, she toured the country, as well as London, Australia, and Canada, in her one-woman show, which earned her a Tony nomination when she did a version of it on Broadway in 2002. (She lost to Elaine Stritch for her one-woman show.) In 2005, she turned up on basic cable at Comedy Central's roast of Pamela Anderson, where she was introduced by emcee Jimmy Kimmel as "a national treasure" who "should be treated as such," a gesture that inspired me to personally remove his name from my fatwa list. At the roast, she gave a reading from selections of Anderson's novel Star: A Novel. Some would probably judge the resulting clip below to be workplace-inappropriate, but my feeling is always that the best way to find out such things is to jack the volume up as loud as it'll go and let 'er rip.

Tribeca Film Festival review: "The Secret of the Grain"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Some twenty years ago, Matt Groening produced a parody of a typical film festival brochure that was full of such titles as "Land of Ice, Land of Sighs." The title The Secret of the Grain is almost as perfect in conjuring up exactly what people who don't see many foreign films dread they must be like. ("Grain! Why will you not grow so that I can feed my family!? What is your secret!?") It turns out that the movie isn't set on a barren plain ravaged by drought but in contemporary France, and the plot is something of a traditional family farce, though it's debatable whether the writer-director, Abdellatif Kechiche (Games of Love and Chance) understands just how traditional and just how farcical. His hero is Beiji (Habib Boufares), a sixty-year-old manual laborer with a sprawling Franco-Arab family of friends and kinfolk. When his already meager work opportunities go-getting stepdaughter, and when the screen is filled with people with resentments and competing agendas--as in the opening-night sequence that takes up most of the last hour, with Beiji's daughters from his first marriage hissing bitchy remarks about their mother's replacement behind her back-- things even spark a little, thought they never quite catch fire. At its best, it's a pretty fair example of what Quentin Tarantino calls a "hang-out movie." But its digressionary charms and lulling rhythms work against it both as a piece of storytelling and as a comedy. They don't always work to the performers' advantage, either. There are awful lot of scenes where the characters have one point to make, and they make it, and then the scene just keeps rolling along while they make it again and again in as many different words as Kechiche can think up. (And The Secret of the Grain runs two and a half hours.) There's a not untypical scene towards the end, where Beiji, who is in desperate trouble and looking for his son, barges in on his daughter-in-law, who is in tears over her husband's infidelities. She gets to deliver a very long (and very repetitive) monologue, with much sniffling and weeping in tight close-up, while Beiji, who is in the rush of his life, just stands there and listens to her. At least when this sort of thing happens in a Hollywood movie. you know why: the director is imagining hearing the title of his movie be read aloud and preceded by the words, "The award for Best Supporting Actress goes to..." But here, the director's Altmanesque belief in bestowing equal time on his minor characters has gone a little haywire.

Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, the pacing is still overdeliberate and "novelistic", but the action is being dredged up from classic episodes of Fawlty Towers. (But this movie by itself is almost half as long as the entire run of that series.) And whoever did the subtitles for the English language edition didn't have to work quite so hard. I don't speak French, but having seen a few movies in my time, I didn't really need the subtitles to know that, as things started going wrong, the extras were saying things like, "Two hours waiting for a cous-cous dish!" and "His new business is getting off to a bad start!" and "I'll never come here again, that's for sure!" and "Sock her blue! Never before have I been asked to accept so long a hiatus between meals while awaiting an albeit delicious fish delicacy! De Gaulle would not have stood for it, nor would Depardieu if he were peckish, I wager!" (Screengrab Quiz: I made one of those lines up. Guess which one and win a dream date with Leonard Pierce!) The movie ends with a final stroke that is intended as black comedy, playful slapstick, or a sudden leap in tragedy, but damned if I know for sure which, and I don't think that counts as deliberate artistic ambiguity.

The Screengrab : fawlty towers

Beatrice Arthur, 1922 - 2009

Tribeca Film Festival review: "The Secret of the Grain"