The Screengrab : lillian gish

Horton Foote (1916 - 2008)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Horton Foote, who died yesterday at 92, was a prolific playwright who became Hollywood's go-to guy for rustic rural drama. Foote, who had had his work produced on Broadway since 1940, began writing scripts for TV with 1953's The Trip to Bountiful, which starred Lillian Gish, and broke into movies with the 1955 Storm Fear, directed by Cornel Wilde and based on a novel by Clinton Seeley. His real big break in movies came with his second job, also an adaptation: he won an Academy Award for turning Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird into a screenplay for the 1962 movie directed by Robert Mulligan. Foote and Mulligan would work together again on the 1965 Baby, the Rain Must Fall, which marked the first time Foote would get to adapt his own work for the movies. (It was based on his play The Traveling Saleslady.) Perhaps more importantly, Mockingbird began Foote's movie partnership with Robert Duvall; he would personally recommend the actor, who Foote knew from the New York theater scene, for the role of Boo Radley. It was Duvall's movie debut. Ten years later, Duvall would take the lead role in Tomorrow, a small movie written by Foote, based on a story by William Faulkner; seventeen years later, Duvall would tell an interviewer that it was his "favorite role, ever." The two would work together again on 1983's Tender Mercies, directed by Bruce Beresford from Foote's original screenplay. It won Foote his second Oscar, as well a Best Actor Academy Award for Duvall.

Foote's other movie credits include 1918 (1985) On Valentine's Day (1986), Courtship (1987), and Convicts (1991), which he adapted from his plays; the 1992 Of Mice and Men with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, which he adapted from the John Steinbeck novel; and the 1985 big-screen version of his TV play The Trip to Bountiful, which won Geraldine Page an Academy Award for Best Actress. For TV, he turned out scripts adapted from Faulkner (1987's Old Man, 1980's Barn Burning), Flannery O'Connor (1977's The Displaced Person), and his own plays (1996's Lily Dale, 1992's The Habitation of Dragons). Throughout all this time, he maintained a presence on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in regional theater; he was working on a production in Hartford, Connecticut at the the time of his death. He won a Pulitzer in 1995 for his play The Man from Atlanta. His last Broadway opening was Dividing the Estate, which played from November of 2008 through last January. Foote is survived by the four children he had with his late wife Lillian Vallish Foote: Horton, Jr. and Hallie, actors who both appeared in their father's film projects; Daisy, a playwright; and Walter, a director. He and Lillian were married from 1945 until her death in 1992.

Yesterday's Hits: Duel in the Sun (1946, King Vidor)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Duel in the Sun a hit?: David O. Selznick was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1930s, a decade that concluded with his production of Hollywood’s biggest hit of all time, Gone With the Wind. After that film’s runaway success, Selznick could pretty much write his own ticket, and he used his clout to make his dream project, a mega-budgeted adaptation of Niven Busch’s novel Duel in the Sun. Selznick spared no expense- the budget topped out at a then-unprecedented $6 million- to bring this Wild West melodrama to the screen in “Glorious Technicolor”, going through more than half a dozen directors (including Josef von Sternberg) before handing the directorial reins over to Hollywood veteran King Vidor.

In the film’s principal roles, Selznick cast a pair of hot young stars- Gregory Peck, fresh off his breakout role in the Selznick production of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and Jennifer Jones, a recent Oscar-winner for The Song of Bernadette, who took over the role for the pregnant Teresa Wright. He then backed them with a stellar supporting cast, including Joseph Cotten, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Herbert Marshall, and Lillian Gish. But perhaps the biggest factor in the film’s success was its unabashedly lurid story about a “half-breed” woman who was irresistibly drawn to a bad-boy rancher. Combining a horse opera with a soap opera and filling the atmosphere with liberal amounts of (implied) sex, Duel in the Sun stirred up no small amounts of controversy. Yet the hubbub surrounding the film (quickly nicknamed “Lust in the Dust”) ended up helping its box-office performance, and Duel became one of the biggest hits of 1946, bringing in more than $11 million.

What happened?: While Duel in the Sun was a hit with moviegoers, reviews were decidedly mixed, praising the film’s production values while criticizing its script (credited to Selznick himself) and performances. And in spite of the fact that the film eventually made money, Selznick found it increasingly difficult to make films in light of the movie’s runaway budget and extravagant (upwards of $2 million) advertising campaign. Selznick continued to work in Hollywood, but his once-prodigious output slowed considerably in the years after Duel in the Sun. On the positive side, the movie continued Gregory Peck’s steady ascent to leading-man stardom, and three years after the film’s release, Selznick married Jones, a marriage that continued until his death in 1965.

Does Duel in the Sun still work?: Not really. For such a popular genre, melodrama is difficult to pull off on film, especially in a way that ages well. Part of the problem is that melodramas were sometimes the only way to deal with risqué material under the Production Code. But while there was no shortage of controversy surrounding Duel in the Sun, most of the elements of the film that were once controversial edgy- particularly the “half-breed” background of heroine Pearl Chavez (played by Jones) and the “bad girl” urges she feels toward Peck- are dealt with in a hamfisted and uninspired manner.

It doesn’t help that Jones is all wrong for the part. Setting aside the now-politically incorrect use of “brown-face” that was utilized to make the lily-white Jones look the part, she’s simply too prim and polished to be convincing. Jones’ idea of speaking like a half-Mexican, half-Native American woman is to lower her vocal register while droppin’ the occasional “g” from the ends of words. And when even Pearl turns into a lusty, unbridled “bad girl” after falling for Peck’s Lewt McCanlies, Jones’ performance becomes almost laughable, consisting mainly of striking sultry poses and making goo-goo eyes at Peck. Jones never seems comfortable in the role she’s given, and this discomfort comes through in her performance.

Another factor was, to put it bluntly, that there were simply too many cooks. It takes a firm hand on the directorial wheel to pull off a lurid story like this one, but after going through more than half a dozen directors, Vidor was little more than a hired gun, lorded over by Selznick. But rather than allowing the story to dictate the style, Selznick overwhelmed it with production values, in a clear attempt to turn it into Gone With the Wind Goes West. Admittedly, Duel in the Sun is gorgeous, with plenty of sweeping vistas and deep orange sunsets to please the eye. However, the story becomes bogged down by the weight of the production, and many of the more emotional moments get lost in the scenery. The result is a movie that’s tamer and more bloated than any good melodrama should be. Compared to another popular melodrama of the period, John M. Stahl’s still-effective Leave Her to Heaven, Duel in the Sun is little more than an overstuffed curiosity.

That said, the one element of the movie that still works is Gregory Peck’s performance as the strapping Lewt. Later in his career, Peck became associated with playing heroes- not least in his iconic turn in To Kill a Mockingbird- so it’s fascinating to see the traits that made him such a perfect good guy used in service of an unsavory character. It helps that Peck was convincingly tall in the saddle to play a cowboy, all the better to turn the cowboy archetype- morally uncomplicated, decisive, solving problems through action- on its ear. Peck treads a thin line here, giving a performance that’s just dark enough to make the character work in this context, while simultaneously suggesting that Lewt might’ve been the hero under different circumstances. If nothing else, Duel in the Sun showed moviegoers just how commanding a performer Peck could be, even if the movie itself ultimately let him down.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. LILLIAN GISH (1893-1993)

One should resist the temptation to guess that Gish's name is better-remembered than most of the actresses who did their most noteworthy work during the silent era because she was such a favorite of D. W. Griffith, a director who has received (and deserved) so much of the credit for the development of the movies as an art form. In her performances for Griffith -- the titles include Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, and, of course, The Birth of a Nation -- she embodied fragile, beautiful girlhood, and had to carry out all the cliches of Victorian melodrama that make so many dramatic silent movies look ridiculous today. Yet she did it with an unearthly technique that poeticized the material and made her eternally threatened characters seem not so much frail and dainty but rather not of this world; it's as if they'd become their own ghosts without taking the customary step of first abandoning their bodies. She also made two great silents with director Victor Sjostrom, The Scarlet Letter and The Wind; the latter was a box-office failure that led to the cancellation of her MGM contract. Although she was never to enjoy anywhere near the same degree of success in talkies, she had a few notable roles spread far apart over the course of her remarkably long life and career, the most impressive being the stern, Christian spinster who holds her own against the devil, in the form of Robert Mitchum, in The Night of the Hunter. Her last film appearance was in 1987's The Whales of August. She reacted to news that people were appalled she didn't get an Oscar nomination for it by saying that she really didn't mind not being put in the position of losing to Cher.

19. JODIE FOSTER (1962 - )

I’m pretty sure there’s only one actress on this list I’ve had a crush on since first grade, a crush even more doomed than my usual movie star fantasies (if all the rumors about Foster’s famously off-limits private life are true). Starting with her appearance as Becky Thatcher in the 1973 screen version of Tom Sawyer (though her career actually started at seven with a 1969 cameo on The Doris Day Show), Foster always seemed like the smart, cute, preternaturally mature older girl next door who clued you in to the grown-up world and made you feel cooler just for knowing her. Then one day, as cool, older girls tend to do, Foster leapfrogged straight from child’s play to adulthood with her amazing Oscar-nominated role as the not-as-smart-as-she-thinks-she-is jailbait streetwalker in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), inspiring the insane, obsessive infatuation of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley, Jr. Most child and teen stars fade away with far less provocation, but after putting the Hinckley incident behind her with a stint at Yale and transitional roles in a string of box office disappointments (including the cult classic, Foxes), Foster’s adult career finally caught fire with a pair of Best Actress Oscars for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Since then, Foster’s had the clout to largely follow the whims of her own smarty-pants muse, like a real-life version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s aging prodigy in The Royal Tennenbaums, flitting from brainy mainstream fare like her driven SETI researcher in Contact (1997) and offbeat fandangos like Nell (1994) to interesting supporting roles, most notably her fantastically amoral fixer in Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Thanks to her evident mental toughness (and probably the collective unconscious memory of her signature role as the serial killer- slaying Clarice Starling), Foster has also become an unlikely action star in movies like Panic Room and The Brave One...and while some of her paycheck jobs (like the terrible, terrible Flightplan) are miles beneath her, they can also be seen as forgivable means to her directorial ends, financing humble passion projects like Flora Plum and Little Man Tate. Given the range and breadth of her career, the usual rules and restrictions of female stardom in Hollywood just never seem to apply to Foster, and hopefully they never will: smart people rule!!!

18. GONG LI (1965 - )

First off, just look at that face. Gong Li was blessed with a timeless beauty, coupled with a regal movie-star bearing. However, the road to big-screen immortality is littered with the nipped and tucked bodies of gorgeous women. Luckily for Gong, then, that she got her start as an actress during China’s fabled Fifth Generation of filmmakers, an era that had little use for empty glamour. As the muse of leading Fifth Generation directors Chen Kaige and longtime lover Zhang Yimou, Gong quickly began to specialize in playing women who were systematically ground down by the oppressive forces of Chinese patriarchy. In movies like Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and Farewell My Concubine, Gong suited the filmmaking style perfectly, her soulfulness grounding the often-tragic stories while her beauty complemented the eye-popping imagery. Yet there was more to her than suffering and anguish, as evidenced by her tenacious turn in The Story of Qiu Ju and the bitchy moll she portrayed in Shanghai Triad. Around the turn of the millennium, Gong’s roles became increasingly ornamental for a time -- honestly, there’s no compelling reason to see Zhou Yu’s Train other than to stare at her -- but in recent years she’s finally begun working outside of her native land on a regular basis. And although her Hollywood roles have been inconsistent at best -- thumbs up for Miami Vice, thumbs down for Memoirs of a Geisha and (ugh) Young Hannibal -- she gave one her best performances yet in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046. As the female equivalent of Tony Leung’s seedy writer Mr. Chow, Gong excels at the kind of morally compromised character that can only be played convincingly by an actress who’s grown into the role. It’s a tantalizing hint of the treasures that should be in store for us as Gong approaches middle age, and frankly, we can’t wait.

17. SHELLEY DUVALL (1949 - )

She’s gawky and weird, with stringy hair and an awkward way about her. And she’s mesmerizing. And beautiful. And one of the most amazing actresses of her generation. It took an eye like Robert Altman’s to see the gorgeous leading lady behind her not-so-Hollywood looks. She’s at her best in Altman’s Thieves Like Us, where a love scene transforms her from a funny-looking teenager into a Modigliani beauty. But she’s great in all of the Altman films she made, even Popeye. She popped up in Annie Hall, Time Bandits, and Underneath, but the general public probably knows her best as Wendy from The Shining. Let’s look at that list of directors again: Altman, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick, and Stephen Soderbergh. And yet, what has she done worth watching since 1995? In fact, she’s been mostly MIA since 1980. What gives?

16. MARLENE DIETRICH (1901-1992)

Josef von Sternberg brought her from Germany to the US and made her the ur-femme fatale before WWII. Later she became Hollywood’s go-to girl when they needed a faded flower of decadent old-world Europe. The Nazis tried to lure her back to Germany, but she hated Nazis. And she loved Orson Welles. After she broke with von Sternberg, she made some okay westerns (and one with Fritz Lang that sounds extraordinary, but has not been released on DVD), a second-tier Hitchcock film, a couple of Billy Wilder movies, and Touch Of Evil, one of the greatest movies ever made. She was some kind of a woman. What does it matter what you say about people?

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs

Summer of '78: "A Wedding"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

All summer long we’ve been flipping back the calendar to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse thirty years ago. Today is Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, and the official grand finale of…The Summer of ’78!

A Wedding

Release Date: August 29, 1978

Cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr., Carol Burnett, Geraldine Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mia Farrow

The Buzz: If your only problem with Nashville was that you thought there just weren’t enough characters – have we got a movie for you!

Keywords: Wedding, Dancing, Dental Braces, Unplanned Pregnancy, Frog, Greenhouse

The Plot: This is about as plotless as it gets, even by Robert Altman standards. The title is no lie – it’s a wedding. The ceremony takes up the first 15 minutes or so, as feckless Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr.) is married to braces-wearing daughter of privilege Muffin Brenner by near-senile Bishop Martin (John Cromwell). The matriarch of the groom’s family (Lillian Gish) dies while awaiting the reception guests at the family manse, but her demise is concealed by the family doctor. As at any wedding reception, numerous subplots unfold as the alcohol flows. Mother of the bride Tulip (Carol Burnett) is wooed by guest Mac Goddard (Pat McCormick). Dino is accused of impregnating the bride’s sister Buffy (Mia Farrow), much to the dismay of her overly attentive father Snooks (Paul Dooley). Exes of both bride and groom turn up to complicate matters, as does a tornado. Events take a seemingly tragic turn as it appears the happy couple is killed in a car accident en route to their honeymoon, but it turns out it was just their exes leaving together in the car meant as a wedding present – so who cares?

The Test of Time: During the production of 3 Women, a reporter asked a badly hungover Altman what his next project would be. “We’re shooting a wedding,” he snapped. It figures that a project based on an offhand sarcastic comment would end up being one of the director’s lesser efforts. In a DVD commentary (and in several interviews), Altman lays out his basic plan for the film: first, he wanted to double the number of characters from his most ambitious effort, Nashville. And he wanted the near real-time film to catalogue the follies of the typical wedding, when two families and sets of friends are thrust into an artificial union. It could have worked, but the delicate Altman alchemy fizzled this time around. All the usual tics are present – zoom-ins and –outs, overlapping dialogue, actor improvisation – but the magic just isn’t happening. Part of the blame goes to the cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr. and company aren’t exactly the Nashville A-list. But blame Altman for crowding so many of them into such a confined space and time. We spend too much time trying tell the bridesmaids and distant relatives apart, and by the time we’ve figured it out, few of the storylines are compelling enough – or developed enough – to command our attention. There is the odd worthy moment – a handful of wedding workers and guests passing a joint around outside the greenhouse as the dusky mist descends – but the disproportionately dark denouement is a downer that sums up the cynicism of the whole endeavor. Robert Altman made at least a half-dozen of my all-time favorite movies, so it’s pretty easy for me to shrug off his missteps. Still, the summer of ’78 sure ended with a bummer of A Wedding.

Quotable Quote: “You mean you don’t drink? In other words, when you get up in the morning, that’s as good as you’re gonna feel all day.”

2008 Equivalent: There will never be another Altman.

Thanks for joining us for the Summer of ’78! If we’re all still alive a year from now, tune in for the Summer of ’89!

Previously on Summer of '78: The Driver