The Screengrab : marlene dietrich

Steven Bach, 1938 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Steven Bach, a writer, film and literature professor, and studio executive, died last week of cancer, at 70. Born in Pocatello, Idaho, Bach moved to Los Angeles in 1966 and began working in public relations and as a story editor for various production companies. In the late 1970s, he produced Mr. Billion and Butch and Sundance: The Early Years, and was made vice president and head of international production at United Artists, working under UA President Andy Albeck. Albeck and Bach were in place when UA gave the go-ahead to Michael Cimino to direct his epic Western Heaven's Gate, which was in production, on location in Montana, from April 1979 until March 1980 and finally cost upwards of $40 million. (It was originally budgeted at $11 million and scheduled for a Christmas 1979 release.) The collapse of the movie at its first premiere screening in 1980 caused the implosion of UA, which was sold off by its parent company, Transamerica, to MGM, which discontinued its production arm. Five years later, Bach published Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of "Heaven's Gate", a witty, gracefully written account of his time at the studio. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael called Bach's book "About the only good thing that has ever come from the movie"; David Thomson called it "the best book ever written about the making of a movie. It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. It’s all the more remarkable because he’s one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.”

In Final Cut, Bach covered the last couple of years of UA's existence, including his role in the making of other movies, such as Raging Bull, and other crises, such as the studio's unsuccessful efforts to maintain its relationship with Woody Allen. (A bunch of UA executives had left to form their own company, Orion, and were wooing Allen, who felt ties of loyalty to them.) The debacle in Montana figures in the narrative as a persistent, pesky irritation--Cimino was always a vainglorious pain in the neck, but after his previous epic, The Deer Hunter, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, he was considered a prestigious one--that steadily inflates into a full-blown migraine. Bach describes what happened, and he also makes it easier to understand how management let it happen--why, with so much else going on, they were slow to figure out how badly things had spun out of control and why they couldn't just fire Cimino when they realized that he was running amok. The book lives as a first-rate picture of what Hollywood moviemaking turned into during the period when studios were becoming the playthings of conglomerates, and an illustration of why this was not a happy development for the history of motion pictures.

Because Bach didn't go easy on himself in the narrative--both he and Albeck come across as considerate, intelligent, and decent men who were in over their heads practically from day one--the book also serves as a demonstration of why its author wasn't cut out for success in the movie industry. After leaving the business and writing Final Cut, Bach, who as a graduate student at the University of Southern California in the 1960's wrote his dissertation on the films of Josef von Sternberg, wrote a biography of Von Sternberg's star creation, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992), which he followed up with Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (2001) and Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (2007). He also taught at Columbia University and Bennington College.

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships in Cinema History (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Valentine’s Day! Huh! What is it good for?

Well...depends who you ask: it certainly didn’t work out too well for the poor Roman priest who got himself beaten, stoned, beheaded (and later canonized) for nuptializing Christian couples out of season, nor for any of the other Catholic martyrs named Valentine whose various grisly fates somehow led to the annual tradition of grown-ass men dropping seventy bucks a pop to have teddy bears in boxer shorts with hearts on them delivered to grown-ass women in the middle of winter.

Scholars blame Geoffrey Chaucer for ruining February 14th by linking a bunch of obscure Roman Catholic feast days with the aggravating concept of courtly love, thus stressing out singles and couples alike for centuries to come with unrealistic, unattainable expectations about all the perfect moments of romance we’re all supposed to be having (instead of weeping lonely tears into our popcorn at solo matinees of He’s Just Not That Into You or forgetting to buy a frickin’ card for our significant others and never hearing the goddamn frickin’ end of it).

It should, of course, be remembered that St. Valentine’s ol’ pagan buddy Cupid is the son of both a goddess of love AND a god of war, and thus not all the couples the little bastard shoots with his arrows wind up living happily ever after. Therefore, as a cheery reminder that things could always be worse in this infernal season of l’amour, your friends-with-benefits here at the Screengrab are proud to present BLOODY VALENTINES: THE WORST RELATIONSHIPS IN CINEMA HISTORY!

PROF. IMMANUEL RATH & LOLA LOLA, THE BLUE ANGEL (1930)

A sort of preemptive riposte to the 20th century's literary canon of professors effectively leveraging their intellectual heft for the purpose of seducing their students, The Blue Angel has stuffy Rath (Emil Jannings) falling for cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) when he goes down to waggle his finger in her face and tell her to stop distracting his students. Instead, she captivates and reduces him to a pathetic spectacle, as pathetic in the public's eyes as he is in hers. If Rath had at least a little touch of submissiveness in him, maybe he'd enjoy being constantly humiliated in a sub-dom 24/7 way; as it is, Lola reduces him to a man with no free will. Dietrich's star was made in this first collaboration with Josef von Sternberg; meanwhile, Jannings' performance is frequently looked down upon as an anachronistic acting style from another age. Which actually makes perfect sense for the character he's playing. As a depiction of a May-December, intellectual-emptyheaded, pompous-earthy, and every other kind of mismatch possible relationship, The Blue Angel isn't painful only because it's more conducive to distanced contemplation and sarcastic laughter than visceral empathy. Should you have extra time at work (should you still be employed, in fact), some kind soul has uploaded the whole German version to YouTube, but the embedding has been disabled, so enjoy the trailer above, then click here to watch the whole thing.

GEORGE & MARTHA, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

There may be bloodier couples in the history of cinema, but there are none whose hatred burned brighter. George and Martha – a small-time failure of a college professor and his crude harpy of a wife, played by real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – may not want to kill each other, but it’s only because dead they would be past inflicting pain, which is all that keeps them going. Considering that Martha speaks of their marriage in terms of total warfare, and George’s idea of whimsical banter is to point a rifle at his wife’s head during a cocktail party, it’s no surprise that this movie has become shorthand for violently feuding couples. This is a couple that’s beyond mere feuding, but whose initial passion has never soured: it’s been transformed into something just as fiery, a loathing built on complete knowledge of, and complete dependence upon, one another. The film shocks us right out of the box by presenting us with a couple whose fury and loathing for each other is deeper than the love in an any big-screen romance; it then shocks us even further by showing how deeply, albeit bizarrely, they care for each other, and how much more profound their relationship is than the seemingly happy couple that contrasts them.

MICHAEL & KAY CORLEONE, THE GODFATHER (1972) and THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

There's a lesson here that a lot of you girls would do well to heed: when your boyfriend runs off to Sicily without a word, gets married to a perfect stranger he met over there about ten minutes after he got off the boat, and then, after somebody sticks dynamite under the hood of the car and blows her sky high, he shows up where you work, again without a word, and announces that, lucky you, he's looking to fill the position of second wife and he's prepared to consider your qualifications -- honey, take a breath. If you feel swayed by his liquid brown eyes and passionate words, try and think about how you're going to feel waking up next to him in a few years, when the face is set off by a toupee like an earth-tone fireworks display and that insinuating voice keeps erupting "HOO-hah!" Then you tell Casanova that as much as you appreciate the offer, you feel that you might be overqualified on account of your ability to count above ten without taking off your shoes. Unless you've got some kind of fetish for having doors slammed in your face.

JACK & WENDY TORRANCE, THE SHINING (1980)

If you've seen The Shining as many times as I have – and there's very little chance of that – you've probably spent some time speculating about the marriage of Jack and Wendy Torrance. How did they meet? What was the attraction? When did they decide to get married, and didn't they have any friends or family to talk them out of it? Some would point to the obvious incompatibility of the brooding, hot-tempered Jack (Jack Nicholson) and the frail, skittish Wendy (Shelly Duvall) as a flaw in the movie, but to those people I would pose this query: Do you know any married people? Because if you do, surely you are aware that for every couple that seems inevitable and perfect for each other, there are at least three that make no sense whatsoever on any rational level. It's easy to blame Jack for the eventual dissolution of the relationship. He is the guy who starts talking to ghosts and running around with an axe, after all. But let's not let Wendy entirely off the hook. She did go along with a plan that entailed living in total isolation with a man who has a history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence (no matter how much she may have tried to downplay it), and she brought her young son Danny into it. At the very least, she's guilty of poor judgment, but at least it all works out in the end.

FRANK BOOTH & DOROTHY VALLENS, BLUE VELVET (1986)

Frank Booth and Dorothy Vallens, the two emblems of maniacal deviance and defiled virtue (respectively) in David Lynch’s surrealistic neo-noir Blue Velvet, may share things...but love isn’t one of them. Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) is a nightclub singer with a daughter and an air of mystery, which – as Kyle MacLachlan’s amateur sleuth Jeffrey peeps after being shoved, post-blowjob, into a closet – is due to her association with Frank (Dennis Hopper). Frank is a sociopath holding Dorothy’s husband hostage so she might sexually gratify him, and the twisted sadomasochistic tryst (replete with helium inhalations and erotic asphyxiation) that Jeffrey witnesses while hiding in that closet may stand as some of the most disturbingly unsettling material ever shot by the peerlessly out-there Lynch. The couple’s relationship ultimately ends when Jeffrey shoots Frank dead, but this being Lynch, the ensuing happy ending is laced with perversion, due in part to the earlier suggestion that Dorothy, conditioned to Frank’s beatings, has been warped into associating pleasure with pain.

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

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

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

ROBERT DOWNEY, JR. in IRON MAN & TROPIC THUNDER (2008)

Like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, the seemingly indestructible Robert Downey, Jr. has pretty much been coming back from the dead again and again (sometimes literally) since the beginning of his career...and, frankly, I got tired of rooting for him sometime around the first Bush administration. For one thing, I never really thought he was all that talented: in movies from Less Than Zero to Natural Born Killers, he just seemed to keep recycling the same fast-talking hipster schtick that John Cusack did at least as well, if not better (and with far less off-screen drama). To my way of thinking, if an actor’s extracurricular lunacy eclipses their onscreen work, they either belong on Celebrity Rehab with Gary Busey and Corey Haim, or their performances had better reach Klaus Kinski levels of riveting, can’t-look-away intensity, but Downey seemed to be forever slumming, demanding endless sympathy for his problems and respect for his craft while never bothering to really try all that hard (except for the occasions, like Chaplin, when he tried too hard). And yet, for all that, whenever Downey managed to connect with a well-written part in his range (like the legal clerk in True Believer, the editor in Wonder Boys or the crime reporter in Zodiac), he’d generally knock it out of the park and make me like him again, pretty much against my will. Thus, in spite of everything, I was happy for Downey’s latest one-two punch career revival in a pair of films that knew precisely how to use (and reward) the actor’s self-deprecating, hard-won personal and professional maturity (while gently goosing all those skeletons in his closet): two redemption songs, one about an aging party boy who finally grows up and takes responsibility for his life and another about a talented but pretentious actor who learns the difference between real life and movies. Perfect. Now, seriously, Bob...don’t fuck it up again, ‘cuz you’ve been on borrowed time for way too long already.

MARLENE DIETRICH in DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (1939)

In her seven collaborations with Josef von Sternberg from 1930-35, Marlene Dietrich embodied illicit foreign sexuality, allowing von Sternberg to go crazy visually in ways that probably wouldn't have been popularly acceptable with a less magnetic presence to anchor his increasingly baroque and unpopular ideas. Having gone too far, finally, Paramount fired von Sternberg, and both he and Dietrich went into professional tailspins. 1937's Knight Without Armour flopped, even with the British spelling tweaked for American release. It was 1939's seemingly low-rent Destry Rides Again that rehabilitated Dietrich. Now a small Western town's bar wench, Dietrich still embodies palpable, illicit allure: "You know that he would rather be cheated by me than married to you" she tells a staid biddy in the clip above. Shanghai Lily could've said that and had it taken at face value. The new, earthier Dietrich has to get in a cat-fight over it, though. Her new persona proved liberating, and Dietrich went on to more eclectic (if less iconic) turns in films like 1948's A Foreign Affair.

KATHARINE HEPBURN in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

Katharine Hepburn also got the "box office poison" tag, but she was fighting a harder battle — her no-nonsense, non-traditionally-feminine persona raised hackles from the beginning. A series of (now beloved) flops like Bringing Up Baby led to rehabilitation starting on the stage; conquering Broadway with The Philadelphia Story, she (along with ex-lover Howard Hughes!) purchased the rights and brought them back to MGM. A hit was born, but Hepburn begins the film with an almost painful forced apology, getting shoved in the face onto the ground by Cary Grant in an opening almost unthinkable in a modern comedy.

JOHN HOWARD DAVIES from OLIVER TWIST (1948) to MONTY PYTHON, FAWLTY TOWERS & MR. BEAN (PRODUCER)

One of the legions of children plucked out of obscurity, then promptly plunked back in, Davies appeared in a few more unremarkable films after Oliver Twist (in which, ironically, he had less memorable screen time than anyone else), but later found himself a TV director and producer for some of the most beloved staples of British TV comedy: Monthy Python, Fawlty Towers and (touchier) Mr. Bean all wound up on his resume. (He also fired Benny Hill, which might have earned him some people's eternal gratitude.) No idea if the clip above is one of his episodes, but it's especially timely in light of Frost/Nixon warping people's memories about what, exactly, David Frost has accomplished with his life and exactly how seriously he should (or should not) be taken.

GREGG ARAKI AND JOSEPH-GORDON LEVITT, MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004)

Two recent abortive comebacks can be traced to the exemplary Mysterious Skin. After a decade+ of callow provocations, Araki's series of increasingly-obscurely-distributed landmarks of New Queer Cinema (or whatever they were supposed to be) came to a halt with the freakishly mature Skin. Along for the ride was Joseph-Gordon Levitt, who hardly needed to prove himself (his comic timing on 3rd Rock From The Sun was as exemplary as the show was mediocre and he was well-received in little-seen films like Manic), but nevertheless delivered a knock-out performance as a small-town gay hustler turned big-city witness to AIDS' '90s arrival. In the scene agove, he and his BFFs course through a small town, blasting Araki's favorite alt-rockin' tunes; unlike a similar scene in the dreadful The Doom Generation, though, they don't just sit there and talk about what The Smiths meant to them, but live out the synthesis of memory and music on-screen. And since then? Araki made the underseen Smiley Face; Gordon-Levitt made the excellent Brick and then disappeared into crap like Shadowboxer. And something tells me his turn in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie isn't going to help anything.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Cinema’s Greatest Comebacks & Comebacks We’d Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:30:00 GMT

JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until (in the kind of wet dream moment that never really happens) A-list director Steven Zaillian just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and, of course, the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end: i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)

John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, Huston was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)

While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)

Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

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

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.

Keira Knightley Wants to Be an Actress When She Grows Up

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

You want to talk about life experiences? Keira Knightley is twenty-three years old and has already starred in three very long movies based on a Disney theme park ride. "I mean, it was really fucking embarrassing and we all thought it was going to be total shit anyway," she told Matthew Rhys. "But then suddenly I was kissing Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and bang, there you go, instant bloody stardom. I'd always wanted to be an actress, always dreamt of it, but I don't think you're ever quite prepared for being a movie star." Maybe not, but it's probably a good sign that she recognizes that the two positions are not the same, though they sometimes overlap. "I know that when Bend it like Beckham came out and it was quickly followed by Pirates, suddenly people were looking at me and thinking, 'Well she's not very good, she's just a pretty face, don't know what all the fuss is about'. But I wasn't really ready to be scrutinised. I wasn't any good at my job yet. But with Pride and Prejudice, yes, I was at least trying to say: look, see, I can learn, and I can do this, or at least give me the right director and I'll give it my best shot. So since those first films, I've always been looking to be stretched - it doesn't always mean I'm going to be good, but I'm trying to become a good actress, really I am."

Knightley, whose acting in the Jane Austen picture and for that matter in Bend It Like Beckham the Pirates movies was actually pretty good, really it was, is growing up, and she'll soon be seen playing the "childhood sweetheart" of Dylan Thomas (Cillian Murphy) in "a very sexy piece", The Edge of Love. (Sienna Miller co-stars as Thomas's wife, who is presumably the edge of the title.) The role called for her to do a little singing, and to help psych herself up for it, she turned to Marlene Dietrich, "She couldn't really sing, not properly, but she had such a ballsy, fuck-off quality to her voice that it didn't matter if she hit the right notes, so I thought well I'll try that approach." Dude, Keira Knightley just said "ballsy, fuck-off quality." Can youn imagine what she's going to sound like after she's had a couple of husbands and stints in rehab behind her? Honestly, if more Hollywoos starlets woulf talk this way in interviews instead of saving it for the hired help, it would make it so much easier to forgive so much.

The Anna May Wong Express

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Born in Los Angeles in 1905, in movies since she was a teenager, Anna May Wong was the first Chinese-American actress to make a name for herself in Hollywood. With her shiny black bob and imperious hauteur, which had a suggestion of something trembling, vulnerable and lonely beneath it, Wong established herself as an icon of '30s style, effortlessly holding her own alongside Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's 1932 Shanghai Express. At the same time, she was habitually paid far less than her caucasian co-stars and stereotyped in ways that she herself found increasingly insulting. At one point, she made her complaints heard on a film set with a film-magazine writer present: "Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain? And so crude a villain. Murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How should we be, with a civilisation that is so many times older than that of the west?" When MGM filmed Pearl S. Buck's China-set potboiler The Good Earth in 1937, Wong lobbied for the role of the female lead, was turned down in favor of Luise Rainer, and then angrily turned down the part she was offered, that of a troublemaking seductress named Lotus. If she had taken the role, she would have been playing the movie's villain, surrounded by white actors playing the sympathetic Chinese characters in heavy make-up.

Wong was fifty-six years old when she died of a heart attack in 1961. (She was also suffering from cirrhosis of the liver.) By then, both her life and career had been blighted by the paradox of a career built on catering to racist fantasies about the slinky, cunning daughters of Fu Manchu. But, as has turned out to be the case with many black actors from Hollywood's past, Wong's talent and style have ended up casting a longer shadow than the insults she was handed to perform. In recent years, her reputation has enjoyed a bit of resurgence thanks to a couple of biographies, the rediscovery of the 1929 picture Piccadilly, and now a new, British film documentary, whose title, Frosted Yellow Willows, is a literal translation of Wong's Cantonese name. The documentary may not be perfect, but it does feature the best argument for Wong as a film artist of enduring value and the best tool for creating new Anna May Wong fans--namely, film clips of Anna May Wong. Writing in the Guardian, Matthew Sweet nails it: "We disapprove of the stereotypes she fleshed out — the treacherous, tragic daughters of the dragon — but her performances still seduce, for the same reason they did in the 1920s and '30s. . . You'll see how much the camera loved her, and how impossible it is not to feel the same."

The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.

Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

Steve Martin's Nose in ROXANNE (1987)

This modern version of Cyrano de Bergerac is a comedy, so Martin's "C.D." doesn't have to die at the end or fail to get the girl. But he does have to go through the whole movie with a nose like a foot-long breadstick jutting out from the center of his face. As befits the non-tragic tone of the movie, the nose is too openly silly-looking to make Martin look ugly, though it does look unwieldy, especially in a shot where a bird perches on it and in a scene where Darryl Hannah slaps his face. (Instead of reacting to the slap by touching his cheek, his places his fingers on the bridge of his nose, as if afraid that it might come flying off.) The nose also adds an unacknowledged layer of comedy to the happy ending: so this Cyrano gets his Roxanne, but how is he going to kiss her?

Alec Guinness's Teeth in THE LADYKILLERS (1955)

Leading a gang of blackguards who rent a room from a sweet old lady so they can use it as a gathering place to work on plans for their armored car heist, Guinness needs a physical quality to set him apart and clearly define him as team leader. He finds it in his enormous choppers, which serve as an unspoken reminder to the younger and stronger men in the room that if they give him any guff, he can always bite their heads off. Trying to follow in Guinness's footsteps in the 2004 remake, Tom Hanks affected a Colonel Sanders-from-Hell look, an oil-slick hairdo, and a laugh that seemed to be coming out of his ears, none of which served him half as well as Guinness's malignant bear-trap grin.

Mark Wahlberg's Penis, in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry saga Boogie Nights is many things to many people: an epic, a comedy, a drama, a tragedy, a period piece. But for a good part of its running time, we were a bit worried that the film was also going to be a Beckett-ian exercise in dislocation: Waiting for Godot, except this time Godot is a giant dong. Luckily, director Anderson knew the delicate balance he was striking here: a movie in which we constantly saw rising porn star Dirk Diggler's allegedly massive dick would have been exploitative and unreleasable; but to not show it would feel exploitative in a wholly different way. So, understanding the value of a good money shot, Anderson waited until the last moment of the film to reveal its ostensible protagonist. The result was dramatically sound, curiously poetic, and also broke new ground in male onscreen nudity. Of course, it was also a fake. A damn good fake. There are still people out there who think that grand revelation was Marky Mark's actual member. Some of them are probably hanging out in his rec room as we speak.

Orson Welles's Face in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Had he played the role of the brilliant but hopelessly corrupt border cop Hank Quinlan ten years later, Orson Welles wouldn't have needed any help from his makeup department. In 1958, though, the director still had yet to be completely ruined by rich food and high living, so he relied on padded clothing and tricky camera angles to make him look fat and shambolic, and layers and layers of prosthetics to give his face the appearance of an aging, gin-blossomed alcoholic. Quinlan's addiction to dandy candy and quicker liquor accounts for his puffy cheeks, bloated nose, and crooked teeth, and he looks like such a fright that even a long-in-the-tooth Marlene Dietrich is shocked at his appearance. Accompanied by a memorable fat-man gait, an out-of-breath voice and a tremendously ravaged performance, the prosthetics turned the director into a hulking parody of the man he would later become. Welles himself told this story: since filming often ran quite late (he did much of the principal photography at night to avoid the prying eyes of studio spies dispatched to keep him in line), one evening he found himself on the way to a dinner party while still wearing the bulbous nose and flappy cheeks of Hank Quinlan. Arriving home to greet his guests, one actress sized him up — having not seen him for several months — and said, through a terribly forced grin, "Oh, Orson! You look wonderful!"

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov