The Screengrab : john barrymore

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

JOHN BARRYMORE AS OSCAR JAFFE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

No American actor ever made theatrical stylization work as well in movies as Barrymore, and when he played men of the theater, the impacted layers of self-parody in his performance just kept popping like strings of firecrackers. This movie was based on a play that in turn was based on an unproduced play called Napoleon of Broadway, a label that, if anything, sells the maniacal producer Jaffe short -- given enough men on horseback and a sufficiently isolated island, Napoleon could be stopped. Gorgeously over the topic from the word go, Barrymore plays him as a man who works behind the scenes in the theater because no stage would be big enough for the performance he calls his life. (PN)

MISCHA AUER AS CARLO IN MY MAN GODFREY (1936)

A Russian emigree born Mikhail Semyonovich Unskovsky, Auer was one of the supreme comic character actors of a great era for them, a man whose sometimes mournful-seeming countenance could never conceal the fact that there was helium in his shoes. His role here set the tone for much of his career: he plays a pianist who, having been adopted by rich society grand dame Alice Brady as her "protege", settles into her family's Art Deco mansion and easily adapts to being their pet. Auer was also memorable as a henpecked husband in a Western cow town in Destry Rides Again, and in Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, where, as the manager of a flea circus, he rolls up his sleeve and announces to his charges, "Soup's on!" (PN)

HARPO MARX IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

As a kid, I watched endless hours of Marx Brothers movies (courtesy of my dad). I felt the most kinship with the fast-talking bullshit artist Groucho. But it was quiet, sad Harpo who stole my heart. I didn't quite get why he wouldn’t talk. No matter, his kindly face with the rubber mouth and big sad eyes, together with that little horn, said more than an entire film's worth of yakking from Groucho. Who was he supposed to be, exactly? Dunno and don't care. In Monkey Business, someone suggests he's a "dumb Swede?." Perhaps he is a caricature of a FOB Irishman to to go along with the other ethnic stereotypes that the Brothers' characters seem to be based on. The mystery adds to his allure. No matter his origins, it would seem that Harpo's hobo owes something to Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, but where Chaplin verges on the annoying, the comic genius of Harpo is that he is always understated and soothing, even at his most burlesque. Like a good children's book, Harpo appeals to everyone precisely because he never speaks down to the audience. (SCS)

MARLON BRANDO AS GRINDL THE GURU IN CANDY (1968)

Candy is routinely derided as a godawful, amateurish mess, a barely watchable '60s relic and a travesty of the Terry Southern-Mason Hoffenberg novel. Furthermore, Brando's participation in it is often pointed to as the ultimate degradation that the great actor submitted to during the dark period between his '50s triumphs and his early '70s comeback. Let's define our terms here: this movie really is a piece of shit. But Brando is hysterical in it. Playing a fraudulent horndog of a guru whose Indian accent turns into a New York honk as he applies himself to the task of getting into the heroine's pants, and looking like a cross between a Roman senator and Alice Cooper, he dives right in and applies the broadest comic strokes, single-handedly bringing a MAD-comics tone to this crass, tinny show. As Brando became increasingly estranged from his own craft, more and more it was the opportunity to play comedy that lured him out of the fortress he'd built around himself with his own flesh, and in movies like The Freshman (1990), he showed that he could join in with the critics and gossip columnists in making fun of himself, and do it with more wit and grace than any of them could. (PN)

JACK NICHOLSON AS GEORGE HANSON IN EASY RIDER (1969)

Any good clown has a hint of tragedy. Jack Nicholson takes it to the limit as alcoholic ACLU lawyer George Hanson — the only latent liberal in a small hick town. Hanson is in the habit of poncing around Main Street in white linen suits and his starspangled football helmet, getting hammered daily and then sleeping it off in the local jail. Perhaps that is the kind of thing you can get away with in your own town if your father's a big shot. Better not try it outside city limits though. When the hippie bikers come through he seizes the opportunity to escape. This can't end well. (SCS)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

COUNSELLOR AT LAW (1933)

If you're curious to see what an A-list straight Broadway play looked like circa the 1930s, preserved faithfully but with enough cinematic flair that it's not quite as if they'd just propped a camera in front of the stage (which is what a lot of filmed stage plays from that era look like now), you could scarcely do better than William Wellman's film of Elmer Rice's top-class, socially conscious potboiler, from a script adapted by Rice himself. The cherry on top is John Barrymore, starring as the heroically high-strung lawyer, in a role that he never played on the stage, for the very good reason that it might have seemed the height of insanity to hire him to play a guy who'd fought his way up from a ghetto-born background; in the movie, this has the virtue of letting him show how thoroughly he could power a star vehicle from the starting gun to the finish line even when he seemed miscast, not that you were likely to be troubled by that while you were watching him.

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA (1953)

Peter Brook's movie of John Gay's satirical ballad opera (first peformed in 1728) is a high-spirited anomaly: a production of what ought to be a dead form that is powered by the director's delight at exploring the possibilities offered to him by a new medium. Laurence Olivier was cast as the dashing brigand Macheath and, after it had been confirmed that the sound of his voice, when raised in song, would not panic the horses or stop viewers' hearts, was permitted to do his own singing. Among its other distinctions, the movie would be Olivier's only musical, and the only evidence ever recorded on film that Peter Brook was once in a good mood.

HENRY V (1944)

When Kenneth Branagh's 1989 version opened, one New York critic referred to director-star Laurence Olivier's earlier version as "quaint." As if, as Elizabeth I once told the King of Spain. The play -- celebrating the English monarch's ability to rally his countrymen and fill them with the spirit needed to whup enemies who have them outnumbered and outarmored (or so it seems, until the shiny bastards discover that, once knocked down, they can't get up out of the mud) -- was a jingoistic work of propaganda, and Olivier's movie, unlike Branagh's "antiwar" edition, is a jingoistic propaganda movie, designed to give comfort and warmth to British audiences looking forward to seeing Hitler's head disconnected from his body. The wonder of the play is that it raises jingo propaganda to the level of art, and the wonder of the movie is that, from its candy-colored photography, Book of Days production design, and the star's triumphant, roaring performance, it does full justice to the text. It's a sophisticated, literate entertainment that makes you feel about twelve years old, in a good way.

KING LEAR (1971)

This final film by the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev (who died two years later, and whose 1964 Hamlet is nothing to sneeze at either) was released the same year as the film version of Peter Brook's freeze-dried Lear, which tried to make the material seem modern and relevant by flattening out its emotional peaks, and that approach could scarcely seem like more of a folly than when laid alongside this picture. It builds to an awesome concluding section of transcendent apocalyptic imagery; the battles and burning buildings and senseless carnage do full, horrifically beautiful justice to Shakespeare's conception of a world turned upside down. Kurosawa aimed to touch the hem of its garment with the most flamboyant imagery in his own take on Lear (the 1985 Ran)...and he came this close.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962)

One of the great things about filmed theater is that it may provide the opportunity to see a classic work performed by a dream cast that would be unlikely to gather for a theatrical run, and this may be the ultimate fulfillment of that possibility made good on: Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell making magic out of Eugene O'Neill's long, grinding, mesmerizing masterpiece of an American family play. Sidney Lumet, who made his name directing plays for TV (including the famous 1960 production of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh starring Robards as Hickey), made this five years into his still-ongoing movie career, and he hasn't topped it yet.

SECRET HONOR (1984)

Working with a text that amounts to a monologue performed by one man -- Richard Nixon, played by Philip Baker Hall -- in one room, the director, Robert Altman, uses the handsomely designed set (which features banks of computer monitors) and Hall's sweating, cursing whirlwind of a performance to create such a stream of fireworks that the movie seems amazingly alive visually. As political mind trips go, it covers more ground with more smarts and to greater effect than any of Oliver Stone's presidential portraits, at half the length and God knows what fraction of the cost.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributor: Phil Nugent

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

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Remembering Claudette Colbert: "Easy Living" and "Midnight" on DVD

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

There were so many inventive, witty, sparklingly funny romantic comedies produced by Hollywood in the 1930s that the only logical reason that some of them aren't famous classics is that there were already too many famous classics in this genre and the Westerns were getting jealous. as noted already in our regular DVD roundup, today marks the first appearance on shiny steel discs for two winners, Easy Living (1937), which is not to be confused with a 1949 Jacques Tourneur film of the same title starring Victor Mature and Lucille Ball, and Midnight (1939), which is not to be confused with any of the fifty or sixty other movies with that same title, many of which center around a heavyset person who attempts to work out some childhood trauma that had been nagging at him by dismembering a co-ed. If you are unfamiliar with these films and the trend in fast-paced, fast-talking, sexy entertainment from which they arose, you might wonder how they compare with the modern sex comedies you can enjoy in today's theaters. There is no question that, when compared to a movie like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, they are in some ways deficient. For instance, you will search through these DVDs in vain for a single moment in which the penis of the third-string male lead of How I Met Your Mother is comically, and graphically, deployed. You won't be seeing Don Ameche unzip either. But they do have other things going for them.

For one thing, both hit the ground running, almost as if their makers knew that they'd someday be released into a mass-information age where they'd be competing for the attention of people who had a new video game to tackle. In Easy Living, which is set in New York when that was still way cool, Jean Arthur is on her way to work when she's hit by a fur coat that an enraged millionaire (Edward Arnold) has thrown out a window and makes the mistake of wearing it. (She loses her job because everybody thinks that she must be a gold-digging creature of loose morals and winds up without enough pocket change to afford dinner at the automat, which is staffed by the millionaire's son--Ray Milland--who's just stormed out of the mansion determined to make his own way.) In the continental-flavored Midnight, Claudette Colbert gets off a train in Paris in the middle of the night with nothing but the evening dress on her back and sets out to snare a rich husband--like, now, before she starves. (She meets a millionaire--John Barrymore, exultantly pop-eyed--who ropes her into his marriage problems by hiring her to bewitch the gigolo who's got his own wife, played by Mary Astor, fatally distracted.) You might have noticed that, unlike today's comedies, which depend for their plots and much of their humor on the emotional blocks of a bunch of Peter Pans (or "lovable slackers") and the overgrown cheerleaders (who are supposed to be "career women") who are doomed to sort of love them, the thirties films, which were made for audiences for whom the Depression was a still-fresh memory and the Second World War a looming reality, are full of more-or-less grown-ups who see their options being closed off by financial hardship. They have to resort to absurd, madcap strategies and improvisational stabs at reinvention to keep from falling into an economic pit that makes it seem that much more unlikely that they'll find true love at the end; Colbert's character in Midnight is not untypical of screwball romantic heroines in that she sees true love as a threat, a distraction that might wreck her plans by taking her eye off the ball. If I had gotten that job as DVD columnist for The Daily Worker, I could really go to town with this.

Easy Living and Midnight have a couple of big things in common behind the scenes. One is that both were directed by the insufficiently remembered Mitchell Leisen, a former art director who brought a shimmery, Art Deco look to the material that resulted in a near-perfect souffle, airily stylish but with enough earthly gravity to support slapstick pratfalls and such gags as Barrymore indulging in a funny voice when he makes a well-timed prank phone call. Another thing the two films have in common is that both were written by professional wisecrackers--Preston Sturges, who did the original script for Easy Living, and Billy Wilder, who wrote Midnight with his partner Charles Brackett--who hated Mitchell Leisen's guts. The news that Sturges, in particular, was unhappy was with Leisen did with his script for Easy Living (and also with Remember the Night, a cruelly little-known, Christmasey romance that Leisen and Sturges collaborated on the next year) remains puzzling, but maybe something in both Sturges and Wilder was pushing them to be dissatisfied with the director's work because both of them knew it was time to take charge of how their material was filmed; Sturges would move behind the camera in 1940, and Wilder would follow suit in 1942 (with The Major and the Minor, which also comes out on DVD today as part of the same TCM-approved series). So, in an indirect way, Leisen helped to launch a couple of directing careers that would soon eclipse his own. But the man who made Easy Living and Midnight need not be laden down with backhanded compliments. He's got the real thing coming to him.