The Screengrab : love story

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part One

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. Not the least of the many glories of the first two "Godfather" movies is that they represent one of the greatest showcases of American acting ever caught on film, six hours that can stand as a master class demonstration of why American movie acting caught the imagination of the world and inspired generations of young English and European actors to try to do their own version of the Method shuffle. The first movie served as a meeting ground for Marlon Brando, the greatest of all postwar American stars, and several up-and-coming talents--Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan--who had grown up idolizing him and were about to join him at the Big Deal table; the second one served as a coronation for Robert De Niro, whose role as the young Don Corleone called on him to deliver a performance that could both stand on its own and match up with a viewer's fantasies about the old man Brando had already made indelible. But both films are also plastered with brilliant work by countless character actors and supporting players, some of whom never had a comparable moment in the sun, some of whom were just marking one more notch in the course of a long and busy career, but all of whom will probably be best remembered for their time spent in the Corleone's territory. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

JOHN CAZALE: Probably no actor ever left behind a better batting average than Cazale. In part, this is because of his tragically short life: having made his film debut in The Godfather in 1972, when he was 36, he died six years later, of cancer, several months before the release of his final film, The Deer Hunter. Still, the record shows that he gave solid performances playing four different characters in five movies--the others were The Conversation (1974) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--each of which is regarded by trustworthy observers as a classic film from a classic period in American movies. Each also boasts a strong Godfather connection: Dog Day Afternoon paired him, again, with Pacino, The Deer Hunter finally gave him the chance to share scenes with De Niro, and The Conversation was written and directed by Coppola.

He was, bar none, the best screen partner that Pacino ever had. They had worked together in New York theater, most famously in Israel Horovitz's play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Both Pacino and Cazale were late breaking into movies, but where in Pacino's case that can be chalked up to his getting a late start becoming an actor, in Cazale's it may have had something to do with the reticent, shy, gentle nature to which everyone who knew him seems to testify. Onscreen, alongside such powerhouses as Pacino and James Caan, that gentle side could easily read as weakness, and each of Cazale's movie characters is a weakling of some kind. But it's a tribute to his deft brushwork and the nuances he could bring even to a thinly written part that each of these weaklings has his own emotional and intellectual range and distinctively wilted plumage, just as each has a different degree of acceptance regarding his own limitations. So the same man who, as Fredo, could inspire a mixture of pity, revulsion, and comic horror when he reveals that he actually thinks he might have made a credible leader of an organized crime family if he'd been given the chance can also, as Sal, the most poignantly incompetent bank robber in movie history in Dog Day Afternoon, turn your laughter to a choking sob as it begins to sink in that Sal had given himself up for dead long before the movie started and is only waiting to get the official word, in the form of a bullet between the eyes, from some reliable authority figure that it's okay for him to finally lie down and stop trying. In his last picture, The Deer Hunter, he had the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who he had met when they worked together in a Public Theater production of Measure for Measure in 1976, and to whom he was engaged at the time of his death.

ALEX ROCCO: Do you know who he is? He's Moe Green! The Jewish mobster who built Las Vegas was played by an actor with thick Boston Irish roots and, it's been reported, a distant "youthful indiscretion" connection to that city's Winter Hill criminal gang. Rocco is the kind of energetic, scene-stealing actor who can deliver some finely shaded detail work or convey some plot information in a conspiratorial whisper that makes you lean closer to the screen and then indulge in some hamming and scenery-nibbling in a way that's more likely to make you grin than turn your head away. As in his famous speech where he tells Michael Corleone off, he's able to make it seem as if it's the character he's playing who can't resist making a scene. Though he's played a vast range of characters over the course of his long career, he has a specialty that Moe Greene fits into snugly: that of the fast-talking showboat who's very smart but not quite as smart as he thinks he is--and it's that tiny difference between his egotistical self-image and cruel reality that, again and again-- as Moe Greene, or as a slick bank robber in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), or a racist police detective trying to adapt to changing times but unsure how in Detroit 9000, or a befuddled police chief in The Stunt Man (1980), or a talent agent in his Emmy-winning performance on the TV sitcom The Famous Teddy Z--causes him to get cut off at the knees. Notable among his other TV work, he supplied the voice of Roger Meyers, Jr., the vulgarian in charge of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon empire on The Simpsons. And he recently appeared in a TV commercial for Audi that parodied the horse's head scene from The Godfather.

JOHN MARLEY: In that commercial, Rocco serves as a stand-in for John Marley, who played the rancid studio head Jack Woltz in The Godfather, and who died in 1984 at the age of 77. Before he refused to give Johnny Fontaine that part in his new war picture, Marley was probably best known for his work with John Cassavettes, who used him in the compromised Hollywood picture A Child Is Waiting and in the more purely Cassvettian agony-fest Faces, as well as for having played Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. (Inexplicably, it was for that movie, and not The Godfather, that he ratcheted up his sole Academy Award nomination. He lost to John Mills for his work as a lovelorn hunchback in Ryan's Daughter, and for that, "inexplicable" can not begin to cut it.) Marley's most notable movie role after The Godfather may have been in Bob Clark's anti-Vietnam War horror movie Deathdream (1974), which in recent years has taken on cult classic status. (The screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, has said that the role--that of a jingoistic American father whose twisted values have contributed to the death of his son--was written with someone like John Wayne in mind, but that once Clark and Ormsby took a reality check and accepted that, of course, they were never going to get John Wayne or a star of comparable stature, they might as well go to the opposite end of the spectrum and get someone who looked like Marley--a short, wizened-looking old man whose unimpressive appearance served as an ironic counterpart to his overscaled bluster.) Towards the end of his life, Marley--a man whose stony glower and harsh rasp were clearly the mark of someone who was always up for a good chuckle--turned up on a very special episode of SCTV where he got to parody his Godfather role. There, playing Leonard Bernstein, he made the mistake of showing off his new horse while bragging that he would never give Johnny Pavarotti (John Candy) the part he wanted in his new war opera.

Yesterday's Hits: Summer of '42 (1971, Robert Mulligan)

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One of the many cool regular columns that we’re running right now on Screengrab is Leonard Pierce’s weekly feature Summerfest 2008. All summer long, Leonard has tasked himself to write about one movie a week with the word “summer” in the title. Personally, I’m hoping he gets around to one of Eric Rohmer’s seasonal classics- either Summer/The Green Ray or A Summer’s Tale- but I realize that at one movie a week, the series will be far from comprehensive. Happily, Leonard has given me permission to help him out on that front, to write up a Yesterday’s Hits that neatly dovetailed with his goal. So to that end, I’ve decided to review a summer-y hit of yesteryear, Robert Mulligan’s 1971 film Summer of ‘42.

What made Summer of ‘42 a hit? After the fall of the Production Code, the newfound permissiveness changed the face of Hollywood filmmaking. But while many filmmakers tried to push the envelope of what was acceptable, Summer of ‘42 took a different approach, injecting sexuality into the framework of what was essentially a nostalgia piece for a more innocent time- the 1940s. It was this period setting- and the tastefulness of the storytelling- that appealed to older audience members who otherwise might not have been interested in an R-rated movie about the sexual stirrings of teenagers. At the same time, it was this same nostalgia which appealed to the children of a more permissive era, who marveled at how naïve the children of the period were, learning about sex from books and hemming and hawing at the idea of buying birth control at the local pharmacy.

But one also shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of the film’s most prominent storyline, the deflowering of the film’s teenaged protagonist “Hermie” (Gary Grimes) by the recent war widow Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill). The older-woman fantasy has long been a popular one among young men, and Summer of ‘42 was one of the first Hollywood films to portray it in any detail. Unlike The Graduate, which pretty much turned its older woman into a predator all the better to hammer home its youth-friendly message, Summer of ‘42 told its older-woman/younger-man story with a tenderness befitting those fantasies held by generations of teenagers. Combine all of these factors with a fresh-faced cast of unknowns and the film became a surprise hit, one of the top grossers of 1971 and an Academy Award winner for Michel Legrand’s bittersweet score.

What happened? Compared to most hits of the day, Summer of ‘42 was fairly small-scale and unassuming, so it didn’t linger in the zeitgeist in quite the same way as, say, contemporaneous fellow Yesterday’s Hits selections The Way We Were and Love Story. For one thing, the nostalgia Mulligan’s film offered paled in comparison to the melodramatic pull of Love Story, and its low-wattage cast couldn’t compare with the pairing of Streisand and Redford. Finally, while the sincerity of the film’s portrayal of 1940s sexual innocence originally appealed the audiences, it became less relatable as the years passed, to the point where the famous condom-buying scene was parodied in an English television commercial. Like so many films, both in the past and today, Summer of ‘42 just wasn’t made to withstand the passage of time.

Does Summer of ‘42 still work? Kind of. One of the most charming aspects of the movie is its time-capsule quality, both of the 1940s and the 1970s’ concept of 1940s life. In our more sexually-frank age, it’s hard to remember a time when sex wasn’t just a mouse-click away, but Mulligan and writer Herman Rauscher portray this time with warmth. At the same time, the movie gets a lot of more universal details right, especially the way young men always try just a little too hard to impress women, to say nothing of those tentative grope session in the back row of the local movie house- a detail that rings just as true when the movie is Now, Voyager as when it’s Iron Man.

But there’s always something that has stuck in my craw about the older-woman fantasy, both in the film and in general. Namely, what does the older woman think? In Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien- currently the benchmark for onscreen portrayals of this premise- the question was answered by making the older woman the central player in the story. By contrast, in Summer of ‘42, Dorothy exists almost entirely to be admired by Hermie- first from a distance, then up close, then closer still. After Dorothy’s husband ships off to war, she befriends the kid, and the same day she finds out her husband has been killed, she responds by sleeping with him. After that, she disappears forever. To quote the Church Lady, “how conveeeeeeeeeenient!”

In the end, Summer of ‘42’s nostalgia is too rose-colored by half. The film was based on the real-life experiences of screenwriter Herman Rauscher (note the protagonist’s name), whose memories of the actual events were surely smoothed out from almost three decades’ distance. But the reality of one’s teenaged sexual awakening- not only Rauscher’s but practically everyone’s- is almost never this tidy. Most of the time, it’s fraught with anxiety and more than a little shame, two factors that can’t be dealt with simply by staring meaningfully into the distance as Hermie does in the film. By downplaying this emotional prickliness, Summer of ‘42 became a favorite date movie for 1971 audiences, but had the film kept more of this, it could very well have become a true-blue classic.

Yesterday's Hits: The Way We Were (1973, Sydney Pollack)

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Since the recent passing of director Sydney Pollack, there has been a great outpouring of respect and admiration for his work as both an actor and filmmaker. Because Pollack’s films weren’t as innovative or flashy as those by contemporaries such as Martin Scorsese, there was sometimes a tendency to dismiss him as a first-rate craftsman, whose lack of a distinctive directorial voice made him well-suited to glossy middlebrow fare. Yet this rep was both reductive and sort of unfair- yes, his films were popular entertainments, but he was one of the best at making this sort of film, and what his work lacked in stylistic panache it almost always made up for in intelligence and first-rate acting. In memory of Pollack, I’ll be re-examining one of his biggest hits, his 1973 film The Way We Were.

What made The Way We Were a hit?: The runaway success of 1970’s Love Story proved that the market for old-fashioned, star-driven romantic melodramas was as strong as it ever was. It helped that The Way We Were boasted two of the era’s biggest stars- popular golden boy Robert Redford and actress/singer phenom Barbra Streisand. At the time of the film’s release, both of them were at the height of their stardom, and audiences clamored to see this unlikely duo together on the big screen.

But adding to the interest level was the film’s timeline, from the couple’s college days in the late 1930s through World War II, the Hollywood blacklists, and finishing squarely in the middle of the Cold War. Like Forrest Gump two decades later, the protagonists of The Way We Were were riding on the tides of recent history, participating directly or indirectly in events that many audience members had lived through or heard about from their elders. Audience responded strongly to the film, making it one of the biggest hits of 1973 and carrying its Streisand-sung title tune to the #1 spot on the charts.

What happened?: After the seventies drew to a close, the decade in Hollywood was remembered primarily as a time of maverick cinema, of brash young tyro filmmakers who hijacked the system and changed the face of American filmmaking. Of course, this was an oversimplification of the decade that also gave us the Airport movies, but in an era that was celebrated for gritty, groundbreaking cinema, there was little room for an old-school romance like The Way We Were. Likewise, the film’s stars began to act less and less frequently onscreen- Streisand’s appeared in precisely one film in the past decade, and Redford’s arguably as well-known as a filmmaker and Sundance figurehead as he is as a movie star. The Way We Were is in many ways a quintessential Yesterday’s Hit- the kind of movie people tend to remember fondly without going out of their way to watch it again.

Does The Way We Were still work?: Sure does, thanks in no small part to Barbra Streisand. In the ensuing years, Streisand’s diva-like behavior and control-freak tendencies have overshadowed her talent, but to watch The Way We Were is to remember what made her a star in the first place. Prior to making this film, Streisand’s best roles were in musicals and comedies, but Katie Morosky gave her a meaty dramatic part, and she made the character sing. Passionate, headstrong, and unmistakably Jewish, Katie is unimaginable without Streisand playing her. Even in quieter moments such as Hubbell’s (Redford) drunken seduction scene, Streisand excels, as the conflicting emotions of the moment play across her one-of-a-kind face.

For his part, Redford was somewhat less spectacular than Streisand- how could he not be?- but if nothing else he was perfect for the role of Hubbell, the college golden boy whose unexpected reserves of feeling can’t quite compensate for lack of idealism. Romantic films usually sink or swim based on two factors- casting and chemistry- and The Way We Were gets both exactly right. Not only are Streisand and Redford perfect for their characters, but they also work together beautifully onscreen. Watching them together, it’s easy to see what draws their characters to each other, even when the film doesn’t make it explicit.

But what distinguishes The Way We Were from other romances of the day, including the aforementioned Love Story, is that its characters are actually interesting, complex people. Not only are Katie and Hubbell carried along by history, but they actively engage with it, especially the political firebrand Katie. Coming at the heels of Vietnam and the resulting protests, many audience members no doubt responded to the way they actually discussed politics and ideals instead of simply gazing into each other’s eyes and professing their love. A key exchange comes late in the film, when Katie and Hubbell are arguing about the Communist witch hunts:

Hubbell: “People are more important than their principles.”
Katie: “People are their principles.”

Even today, it’s refreshing to hear characters talk like this. Love isn’t easy in The Way We Were, precisely because there’s more driving these characters than the desire to be loved. Perhaps this was what audience members responded to most strongly at the time- the idea that there were too many bigger things going on in the world to worry about a tidy happy ending. The Way We Were has some problems- the film’s elliptical structure leads to a certain sketchiness of story, as well as glossing over some of the more unpleasant details. However, it’s definitely worthy of a re-evaluation, and in light of Pollack’s recent passing, I’d say there’s no time like the present.

Yesterday's Hits: Love Story (1970)

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

What made Love Story a hit?: It takes some balls to title a romantic drama Love Story. In doing so, writer Erich Segal essentially threw down the gauntlet, proclaiming this to be the definitive romance for a generation. And for audiences of the early 1970s, it was embraced as an old-school romance they could call their own, both as a best-selling novel, then as a film. Love Story appealed to a wide audience- its anti-establishment message resounded with youth of the era, while attractive, clean-cut leads Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw were likable to “square” audiences. Moviegoers responded to the tune of more than $100 million, a huge figure in the pre-blockbuster era.

What happened to its popularity?: There’s a school of thought that says that cold, ironic movies tend to age better than warm, sincere ones, and while that’s not always the case, it’s pretty true of Love Story. Like Titanic (spotlighted in my last column), Love Story’s cornball tendencies became more glaring with the passage of time, making the film easy to deride. Supposedly there’s a tradition at Harvard- the setting of the film- of incoming freshman getting together to heckle Love Story. But more than that, Love Story had the misfortune of coming at the beginning of a decade that saw an unprecedented amount of adventurousness in Hollywood. Compared to subsequent hits like MASH, The Godfather, and Jaws, Love Story got lost in the shuffle.

As for its stars, McGraw quickly became more famous for her relationships- Robert Evans, Steve McQueen- than for her later work. O’Neal’s career fared better in the long run, finding him working with filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Peter Bogdanovich, but by 1978, when he starred in the film’s sequel, Oliver’s Story, his popularity had waned as well.

Does Love Story still work?: Much as I’d like to defend the film against its hecklers, the truth is that Love Story hasn’t aged well. One particularly grating element of the film is its dialogue. Great dialogue is rarely a hallmark of romantic films, but Love Story’s so overwritten that there’s hardly a point when the characters sound like they’re speaking naturally.

This is especially true of Ali McGraw’s Jenny, who begins the story by verbally strong-arming O’Neal (as Oliver) into a first date and never really lets up. Even after Oliver tells Jenny, “verbal volleyball is not my idea of a relationship,” Jenny’s dialogue still mostly comes off as self-impressed. This is a big problem when the film is largely predicated on the idea that Jenny is an irresistible life force, and McGraw just wasn’t actress enough to make it work.

But a bigger issue is how rushed it feels. The biggest casualty of the film’s abbreviated running time (just over 90 minutes) is characterization, in particular the parents of Jenny and Oliver. We know that Oliver’s relationship with his father (Ray Milland) is strained because he calls his father “sir” and his father casually says “that’s an order” when speaking to his son. Conversely, we know that Jenny and her father (John Marley) have a loving relationship because she calls him “Phil” and talks to him like a friend. This is typical of Segal and director Arthur Hiller’s approach, too often resorting to comfortable cliché to avoid dealing with the story’s thornier issues.

With its narrative arc- rich boy falls in love with and marries poor girl, gets disowned by family, but works his way back to a well-to-do lifestyle, after which she contracts fatal disease that for some reason never changes her appearance- Love Story might have made an effective melodrama. However, the film is in such a hurry that very little makes an impression. It’s like listening to a concert pianist play a concerto in double-time- sure, he hits all the right notes, but where’s the soul?

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent