The Screengrab : marlon brando

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever! (Part One)

1. Double feature: THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939) & GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

2. THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...(1953)

The balance of visual beauty, depth of sophistication in terms of character psychology, high wit, and unsentimental yet warm humanity that Jean Renoir achieved in his greatest works would earn him the title of World's Greatest Filmmaker if it could be laid on anyone's shoulders without smirking. Max Ophuls' love tragedy is one of the few movies that can be mentioned in the same breath as Renoir's without embarrassing it. By an odd concidence, all these movies are, in varying degrees, about the death of the aristocratic class; all manage to satirize these people without cheap condescension or programmatic rage, and all manage to partake of the seductiveness of opulence without ever slipping into the Merchant-Ivory vice of seeming to have been made by snobs for tourists. We may never get another movie that looks on such people and their way of life with such clear eyes again; it's hard just to believe that these films were made in the same century that saw the birth of reality TV.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
4. Double feature: THE GODFATHER (1972) & LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1973)

For people who were young when Marlon Brando first burst into movies, it must have really been something getting to watch him grow up. For those of us who were born when Brando was considered washed-up, with his impossible comeback still on the horizon, the older man is the Brando we first got to know--the broken-down, wise old monster of The Godfather and Paul, the middle-aged expatriate loser who might have been a success at something if he hadn't decided to instead be extraordinary. A case can be made that The Godfather, Part II is actually a greater film than its predecessor--I may have been known to make it myself a time or too--but even though Don Vito is present, in the singular and essential form of the young Robert De Niro, Brando is absent, all because he felt the need to throw his weight around (no jokes, please) and demand an exorbitant fee instead of doing a cameo as a favor to the director who'd made him relevant again. It was not entirely uncharacteristic and very petty of him, and they should have paid the son of a bitch whatever he asked for anyway.

5. HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Speed kills.

6. UMBERTO D. (1952)

Some goddamn way, Vittorio De Sica found a way to make direct contact with the human heart without any spillover into bathos, and he did it again and again. Eager to repeat this feat, and figuring that it would help if they could label it, some folks listed some of the methods the director seemed to favor, as if they were ingredients in a recipe, and called it "Neo-realism". Many people since then have since followed the recipe, with varying degrees of success. Some of them made pretty good movies, but nobody else has done quite what De Sica did.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent

He Died, but Then He Got Younger: The Prequel Perplex

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Ryan Gilbey suggests that, now that it's barely even fun anymore to complain about sequels and remakes, we should shift gears and reserve our disgust for the concept of prequels. By some accounts, the term "prequel" was coined by George Lucas to describe the young-Don-Vito sections of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Godfather, Part II. However, the first time the term was widely used in the press to label a feature film which had no other discernible reason for being may well have been in 1979, when Tom Berenger and William Katt starred in Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Years.

This was not the first time that somebody had built a new work around a speculative history of what happened to the characters in an earlier work before they reached the point in their history where they made the audience's acquaintance in the first place. Even before The Godfather, Part II, this approach actually had a tony literary pedigree. Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea (filmed by John Duigan in 1993) filled in the pre-history to Jane Eyre, and the 1971 movie The Nightcomers, with Marlon Brando, attempted to lay the groundwork for Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. But Butch and Sundance established the basis for regarding prequels as a singularly uninspired and parasitic form. Apparently it was made because some genius noticed that the tenth anniversary of the money-making Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was approaching, and it seemed a shame to waste such a ripe excuse to try to cash in again. There was just one problem: the first movie ended, famously, with Butch and Sundance being turned into Swiss cheese by the Bolivian army. So a sequel was out of the question, but it might be possible to go backwards. And since there was this new actor in town whose major qualification for stardom seemed to be that he looked a lot like a young Robert Redford...

In the end, Butch and Sundance tanked, William Katt transitioned from starring in movies to appearing on TV each week in The Greatest American Hero and looking as if he was praying to take a bullet between line readings, and it looked as if prequels might turn out to be one of those momentary fancies of the movie industry, like disaster epics or Steven Seagal. A few more prequels did trickle out in later years, ranging from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Amityville II: The Possession. But the concept wasn't revived big time until, yes, George Lucas decided to jump-start his fantasy of actually making another Star Wars trilogy, beginning in 1999 with The Phantom Menace. Even now, though, prequels, which are much more commonly found in the ranks of the straight-to-video than among actual theatrical releases, tend to occur only when a franchise has been tapped to pitiful death (see Hannibal Rising) or when the producers are desperate for a gimmick that might help to compensate for the fact that the original stars want nothing to do with it (see Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd).

We might also want to define our terms a little. Gilbey, anticipating the day when movie prequels themselves become "respectable", cites Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming The Hobbit, as a prequel to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, but J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the book that del Toro is adapting before he wrote the Rings books; surely that matters more than the fact that the books have somehow managed to get themselves filmed in the wrong order. On the other hand, J. J. Abrams's Star Trek straddles the line between "reboot" and prequel: it means to reinvent the old franchise, but in the process of doing so, it introduces the audience to James T. Kirk and his merry band at an earlier stage of their development than Gene Roddenberry dared, or cared, to go. Ideally, this kind of thing might be done with a little humor, teasing the audience with the shared knowledge we have of what these characters are fated to become. At worst, it might give us the chance to see what it looks like when fan fiction is perpetrated with a $150 million budget.

Of the high-profile releases about to come barging through the door, Wolverine is closest to the dreaded prequel prototype. The signs are pretty much there, except in reverse: the X-Men franchise has been pronounced dead, or at least mothballed, but everybody's favorite moody mutant is indestructibly immortal, and Hugh Jackman is still at an age where he can pull off the role. So maybe the best way to try to squeeze a little more money out of the character, minus his familiar supporting cast, is to zap back to before most of them were born and fill in some of the bad boy's back story, which apparently goes back for fucking ever. Wolverine's director, Gavin Hood, who readily acknowledges that "Prequels are usually bad," adds that, since "most of the audience knows what's coming... the excitement should be not 'what?' but 'how?' It changes the emphasis. Usually a movie is about what will happen. Here it's 'How will what we know will happen, happen?'" That sounds about right. And it's true that even when you think you know exactly what's going to happen, the movies can still surprise you. For instance, I saw Gavin Hood's previous films, Tsotsi and Rendition, and now, people who may well have seen them too have hired him to direct a big-budget summer movie. Boy, am I surprised.

The Brett Ratner Book Club

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

We indulge in our share of Ratner-bashing here at the Screengrab, and why not? It’s not our fault he’s the director of Rush Hour 3. But we’ll give credit where credit is due: Brett Ratner has launched his own literary imprint, Rat Press. For the moment, try to ignore the fact that the crown jewel of the collection appears to be a collection of Scott Caan photographs. Scroll down and you’ll see a few more interesting entries, including Conversations with Marlon Brando by Lawrence Grobel and a book with the perfectly James Tobackian title Jim: The Author’s Self-Centered Memoir on the Great Jim Brown.

“For me, part of my film education was reading these types of books that talked about life experiences in Hollywood,” Ratner tells Movieline – and who knew Movieline still existed in any form? “I have the most incredible book collection; they’re just a big part of stuff I love to collect. But the Brando book is one that I’ve always loved, and when I met Lawrence Grobel, I told him: ‘I love your Capote book! I love your Brando book!’ And he said, “You know, the Brando book is available.” I said, “What? I want to publish it! Will you write a new outro for it?”

The Grobel book does sound like a find, if a little pricey at $25 a pop. “For ten truly remarkable days in July 1978, Lawrence Grobel spent every waking minute with legendary actor Marlon Brando and his family on Brando’s Tahitian island, Tetiaroa. It was the first time in twenty-five years that Brando, notorious for his reclusive, reticent lifestyle had granted an extended interview to anyone.”

Let’s hope the Rat Press series is a success and Ratner devotes as much time and energy to it as possible. Anything to keep him out of the director’s chair.

Related:
Brett Ratner Drinks Youngblood
Mike Tyson Speaks: Lend Him an Ear

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

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

JOHN BARRYMORE AS OSCAR JAFFE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

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

MISCHA AUER AS CARLO IN MY MAN GODFREY (1936)

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

HARPO MARX IN JUST ABOUT ANYTHING

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

MARLON BRANDO AS GRINDL THE GURU IN CANDY (1968)

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

JACK NICHOLSON AS GEORGE HANSON IN EASY RIDER (1969)

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

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)

I was downright horrified when Woody Allen’s brainy romantic comedy swiped the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars on the night of the Academy Awards’ golden anniversary edition. And considering the innovation and impact of George “the Neck” Lucas’ classic blockbuster (and the fact that a far inferior popcorn flick like Return of the King was considered worthy of the top prize nearly three decades later), I still have issues with the snub. But the choice is more comprehensible now in my reflective middle age dotage than it was in the midst of my pre-pubescent geekery: America in the ‘70s was far more interested in grit and neuroses than fanboy fantasy, and the wookies and Jedi philosophy must have seemed especially goofy compared to the grim realities of then-recent Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if somebody had to shoot down Luke Skywalker, then I’m glad it was Annie Hall. For one thing, it was a fair fight, since the Academy tends to hold comedy and science fiction in the same low regard. More importantly, though, for all the great jokes about dead sharks and Kafka, Annie Hall is a touching, highly relatable masterpiece of character and storytelling, in service of a romantic pairing as iconic as Bogie & Bacall: to this day, whenever the film comes on TV, my parents (a small town Yankee version of Alvy & Annie who somehow stayed together) inevitably wind up holding hands and misting up...which is just about as cute as prickly, overeducated white people get. Plus, with its twisty storytelling, animated sequences and meta sight gags, Annie Hall is far more visually and structurally interesting than most Best Picture winners in any genre. And besides, if a romantic comedy had to beat Star Wars in 1977, at least it wasn’t The Goodbye Girl.

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Billy Wilder’s knack for crafting affecting, humane comedy was close to unparalleled, and few of his films showcased that gift better than 1960’s The Apartment, an effervescent rollercoaster spiked with grown-up melancholy. Jack Lemmon spends his days as one of corporate America’s nondescript suits, and his nights loaning out his apartment to superiors so they can have a place to covertly screw their mistresses. Lemmon’s everyman pines for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator girl, who’s involved with Lemmon’s boss (Fred MacMurray), a thorny love triangle laced with workplace pecking-order tensions, and one given verve by Wilder’s deft satirical hand. Yet for all its bubbly wit, The Apartment’s lasting relevance is partially due to the muted sorrow that lurks around the busy frame’s corners – a nagging sadness wrought from its protagonists’ stubborn willingness to define themselves via their vocations, and which consequently makes Lemmon and MacLaine’s ultimate leap into love feel not fairy-tale preordained, but hard-earned.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

If Brando's dockworker Terry Malloy represented one definitive take on the '50s prole rebel hero, Montgomery Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt is the alienated '50s hero who thinks he's found a place for himself in the ultimate conformist culture, the army. Clift was on his way to being Brando's equal as a great new kind of movie actor when the car accident that shattered his face also crushed his confidence and derailed his career, and here he's as gentle and sure of the path he should be on as Brando's heroes tended to be instinctively assertive yet lost. But as much as he loves the army and welcomes the chance to be given rules to follow, some part of him can't help bucking when he's given orders that he knows are wrong. He won't box for the company because he's afraid of killing somebody in the ring, and then he kills somebody in retaliation for the murder of his best friend because he knows that the system will simply absorb the injustice. In the end, the system he turned to for a home kills him off, almost as an afterthought. If the Best Picture winners are anything to go by, the 1950s must have been an especially schizoid time in American culture: the list swings back and forth between movies like this one and On the Waterfront, which seemed to be bursting with news and awareness about the state of the country, and such spectacles as The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Ben-Hur, which seemed like kaleidoscopes imported from a different solar system.

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)

It's a well-established Hollywood joke that actors can court Oscar by playing someone with a mental or physical disability, but most of these roles still require the actor to try to fit into some kind of narrative context and connect to the other performers while replicating some carefully studied tics or mannerisms. Dustin Hoffman fought for years to get the script of Rain Man filmed, and it's easy to see why: the role of the autistic Raymond gives him an excuse to shut himself off from everything and everyone going on around him, and to be praised for how thoroughly he could ignore everything while concentrating on his little acting exercises. He must have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. As for his co-star, Tom Cruise, Rain Man dates from the beginning of that unfortunate period where, his box-office appeal being a given, he was concentrating on proving he could "act" by denying the audience his gleaming smile and acting like an obnoxious ass. (Oh, he was "acting." We're certain of it.) The movie itself is nothing but a tear-stained pedestal for two movie stars stuck in self-parody mode.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)

This rigged, underlit, depressive wallow marks the nadir of Clint Eastwood's serious, craggy old thing period. The quality of the performances, especially Morgan Freeman's and Hilary Swank's, can't disguise the thinness of the stock characters that populate Paul Haggis's screenplay; in particular, Swank's grasping white-trash relations would be judged as vile, condescending stereotypes by a Jerry Springer audience. The best thing about the movie is that it inspired a hilarious public outcry among disability rights groups and assorted loons who thought that by having Swank's character opt to die rather than live out her life as a quadriplegic, it would start a trend and that impressionable disabled people would start offing themselves in droves. But even that was compromised when Eastwood, trying to address the controversy, announced that "I've gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper thing to do." He doesn't? Dude, you've earned the right to keep making boring movies for the rest of your life, but you don't have to disillusion us too.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

CASABLANCA (1943)

For all the iconic Hollywood films from The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars that DIDN’T win Best Picture, it’s nice to know that Casablanca, at least, was properly enshrined. Whether you measure by cultural cachet, quotable lines, dorm room posters or AFI ranking, Humphrey Bogart’s finest hour is a classic among classics...and not in that “eat your broccoli” grad student dissertation way, either. The pace is crisp, the intrigue is intriguing, the writing is sharp and funny and the romance (not to mention the bromance) is swoony, even for cynics who’d normally gag on a sentiment like, “We’ll always have Paris.” In fact, Roger Ebert claims in his commentary on a special edition DVD of the film that he’s never heard a bad review of Casablanca, which he says is “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane,” a masterpiece which may be “greater,” but nowhere near as beloved. Normally, such unquestioned, universal adoration would trigger my contrarian side (I’m lookin’ at you, Hanks!) – but that friggin' “La Marseillaise” scene gets me every goddamn time. (Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have a little something in my eye...)

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

This inside-show-business comic melodrama isn't the greatest movie ever to be garlanded with Oscars. It probably isn't even as great as Sunset Boulevard, another inside-show-business movie that happened to be nominated for Best Picture the very same year. But it's the choicest possible example of a certain kind of entertainment that looks especially fetching come awards season, the glittering self-hating bitch-fest, with actors jumping at the chance to show what overgrown, treacherous babies actors -- other actors -- really are behind the scenes, and also with the writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, preserving some of the pearls of wit that he'd been test-screening at all the best Hollywood dinner parties for the preceding couple of years. Mankiewicz was lucky to get to assign his dialogue to a couple of the greatest bitches ever to stalk a soundstage: Bette Davis, in her archetypal role as the actress and force of nature Margot Channing, and George Sanders, who picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his purring critic, Addison DeWitt. The movie even opens with an awards ceremony, which Sanders can be heard snarking at in voiceover. With that opening, Mankiewicz was making it clear to the Academy that he was setting up a joke that only they could satisfyingly complete by giving his movie the prize, and the voters were happy to comply.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)

On its surface, this movie about labor racketeering on the New York docks could easily be mistaken for the kind of torn-from-the-headlines melodrama that Warner Bros. used to whip up into flavorful, punchy stories in the '30s and which by the 1950s was often served up in bloated and sanctimonious form. (Directed by Elia Kazan from an original script by Budd Schulberg, the movie is also widely taken as its creators' attempt to rationalize their friendly witness status before the House Un-American Activities Committee by showing the informer as a beleaguered hero.) But the actual New York locations, the strong work by such actors as Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger, and the best-observed moments in Schulberg's script transcend the movie's built-in limitations. And Brando himself embodies transcendence. Working quietly at first and slowly building to a full boil, he makes Terry Malloy into a real human being even as he's defining the image of the alienated '50s hero, a working-class outsider whose anger and confusion -- the instinctive, untutored emotions of a trapped animal -- make him seem more alive than the society he can't fit into, a society that no one guessed at the time was rotting from deep inside. In addition to marking the end of Brando's professional collaboration with Kazan, it also turned out to mark the end of Brando's first phase as a culture hero: his next movie, representing the start of a long stint in the wilderness, was Desirée, in which he played Napoleon. But it was enough to live on for awhile.

THE GODFATHER (1972) & THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The early seventies were such a wild time for American movies that a bloody, historically sophisticated use of a criminal family as a metaphor for the capitalist system and the corruption of the American dream served as the era's answer to Gone with the Wind. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, as intelligent and emotionally complicated as any epic ever to come out of Hollywood, would stand as a high point both in the history of film and the Academy's fluctuating record of shows of good sense all by itself. It's to the Academy's considerable credit that it did the right thing when it was presented with Part II, which was not the automatic commercial blockbuster that the first film had been. It must have been an especially sweet moment for Coppola, considering that the other Best Picture nominees included not only his own The Conversation but Chinatown, which was the first film independently produced by Robert Evans after Evans left Paramount Pictures, where he and Coppola had a difficult time working together on the first Godfather. Plus he beat The Towering Inferno!

THE DEPARTED (2006)

Yes, we can all agree that it's a sham of a mockery of a travesty that Martin Scorsese never won an Oscar until 2007, and it makes no sense at all that The Departed is the only movie he directed to ever win Best Picture. Let's get past that, can we? Consider the competition this spectacularly entertaining Boston crime epic faced in the category: Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. Not really a group with a lot of staying power. If I came across any of them while channel surfing tonight, I doubt I'd pause, but The Departed sucks me in every time. William Monahan's underrated script is an endlessly quotable encyclopedia of pungent tough-guy banter. Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in particular make the most of it, and although Jack Nicholson doesn't make the most convincing Boston mob boss, even he has his inspired moments. Scorsese isn't reinventing the wheel here, he's just showing all his imitators who have been trying to recreate Goodfellas for the past two decades how to really put on a show. There's an exhilarating pace and crackling energy to his relentless storytelling here, no matter that we've seen the story before (in Infernal Affairs, the Japanese thriller upon which The Departed is based) and that it may not actually make a lick of sense. I may be an apologist for late-period Scorsese (I think I love Gangs of New York even more), but even if you're not a Departed fan, who could begrudge one of our greatest living filmmakers (and one of the world's most enthusiastic movie fans) his moment in the Oscar spotlight?

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent & Scott Von Doviak

If It's Tueday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Every time Carmine Caridi turns on the TV and sees James Caan kicking the shit out of his brother-in-law or getting gunned down at the toll booth in The Godfather, something inside him dies a little. In his account of the making of that movie in the new Vanity Fair, Mark Seal report that Caridi was cast, as in told that he had the role, as Sonny Corlone, and managed to hold onto it for a few days. "Caridi", Seal writes, "was a Sonny straight out of [Mario] Puzo’s book: a six-foot-four, black-haired Italian-American bull who came from a tough section of New York. Told that he had the part, Caridi quit the play he was appearing in and got fitted for wardrobe. When he walked down the block he had grown up on, people hanging out of windows screamed, 'One of the boys made it!' 'Women were coming up to me with their babies to kiss for good luck,' Caridi says. Caan recalls, 'He was running around with some friends of mine, celebrating. And I said, "Hey, don’t do this. They’re very shaky up there, and I know what Francis wants—no disgrace to you." … He was going to this club and that club,' meaning clubs frequented by the boys from Caan’s old neighborhood. 'They said, "What do you want to hang around us for?" And he says, "Well, I want to get the feeling." They said, "We’ll give you the feeling. We’ll throw you out of the fucking car at 90."'”

Caridi may have been the very image of Sonny Corleone down to his toes, but he didn't have the inside view of the casting process that Caan had by then. Caan was part of the core group of four--along with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall--who Francis Coppola wanted from the very start. He met with active resistance to both Brando and Pacino from the studio, and though Caan seemed to have the best chance of all them of getting into the movie, the studio wanted Coppola to consider him for Michael, Pacino's part. "That was the last thing Francis wanted," Caan says now, "because he had it in his mind that Michael was the Sicilian-looking one and Sonny was the Americanized version." (It may be some kind of proof of the genius of this casting idea that, after the movie came out, Caan says that he "won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.") While Caridi was out spending his salary, Coppola made one last hard press for Pacino as Michael, a move that would practically demand that Caan, then officially cast as Michael, be shifted to the role of Sonny because of the difference in height between Pacino and Caridi. Finally, the Paramount chieftain Robert Evans--who looked much more like a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star than Pacino, and who thought that the role demanded a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star type because it was the role he'd have coveted if he were still an actor, relented. "“I don’t think I’ve gotten over it, still,” says Caridi, who at 74 is still a working actor. Coppola must have felt just godawful about all this, because he cast Caridi in small roles in both The Godfather, Part II and, many years later, The Godfather III. Caridi did strike other casting directors as sufficiently mobish that he got to play Frank Costello in Bugsy (1991) and Sam Giancana in Ruby (1992). Whatever happened to all those babies he kissed for luck has not yet been determined.

We've read a lot of articles about the making of The Godfather by now, and if you follow these links the way we tell you to, so have you. The special fascination of Seal's account is the emphasis it places in the actual (ahem) Mafia's role in almost preventing the movie from getting made, in its getting made, and the enthusiasm for it that overtook them once it was finished. Although neither Puzo nor Coppola ever met a real gangster--Coppola recalls that “Mario told me to never meet them, never agree to, because they respected that and would stay away from you if they knew you didn’t want contact.”--many people tried to get into the movie by boasting of their real-life organized crime bona fides. Alec Rocco, A.K.A. Moe Greene, wanted everyone to know that he had a past as a bookie and had the butt-ugly mugshot to prove it. Al Martino, the singer who played Johnny Fontaine, let it be known that he had the role coming to him because he was Johnny Fontaine, mob connections and all, which must have given Frank Sinatra, who reportedly wanted the production shut down because he thought everyone in the world thought that he was supposed to be Johnny Fontaine, mixed feelings. In the end, Martino got the role, despite Coppola's reported preference for Vic Damone, despite the fact that he was so inexperienced an actor that Brando had to resort to throwing an unscripted slap to the face into their big scene together in an effort to startle him enough to get him to come out and play. Bettye McCartt, assistant to producer Al Ruddy, broke her watch on the set one day and was approached by Lenny Montana, the mountainous former wrestler who played the Corleone family emforcer Luca Brasi. McCartt recalls that “He said, ‘What kind of watch would you like?,’ and I said, ‘I’d like an antique watch with diamonds on it, but I’ll get another $15 one.’ A week passes, and Lenny comes and he’s got a Kleenex in his hand wadded up, and he’s looking over his shoulder every step of the way.” He placed the wad of Kleenex on her desk. She opened it, and there was an antique diamond watch inside. “And he says, ‘The boys sent you this. But don’t wear it in Florida.’”

Meanwhile, Joe Colombo, the most "media-savvy" of the leaders of the Five Families, was battling the production through his "civil rights" organization, the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which had "a membership of 45,000 and a $1 million war chest." Looking to make peace, Al Ruddy invited Colombo to come to his office and examine the screenplay. “So next day Joe shows up with two other guys. Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window.” Ruddy pulled out the 155-page script and gave it to the Mob boss. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it for about two minutes. ‘What does this mean—fade in?’ he asked. And I realized there was no way Joe was going to turn to page two.” Luckily, Colombo decided to cut to the chase: his only demand was that the word "Mafia" be deleted from the script and never appear in the movie. This, it turned out, was not the most difficult thing he could have asked for: the word appeared in the script exactly once, when the movie studio boss played by John Marley read Duvall's Tom Hagen the riot act, telling him in the most offensive way possible that he has no fear of Italian crime lords. Considering that Marley's diatribe also contained the words "dago", "wop", "greaseball", and "goombahs", the general feeling was that even with the "M"-word removed, the speech would still retain the necessary flavor. In the end, the movie would become a beloved totem among Italian Americans, law-abiding and otherwise, but Colombo himself would not live to see it. He was executed by a gunman, presumed to have been hired by rival gangster Joey Gallo, while appearing at an Italian-American Civil Rights League Unity Day celebration in New York in June 1971, at the same time that part the movie was being filmed a few blocks away. Al Ruddy had declined an offer to sit beside Colombo on the dais.

The Three Catastrophes of Terry Gilliam

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Terry Gilliam is set to receive the Bafta Fellowship, the most prestigious award bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television, during the “British Oscars” ceremony this Sunday night. Presumably this is a lifetime achievement award for his unique body of work, although in an interview with The Guardian, Gilliam himself speculates otherwise. “Voters must, he assumes, have felt sorry for him because his latest film, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, has been hit by three catastrophes.”

That seems about par for the course for Gilliam, who should be able to knock off three catastrophes over lunch break, but these circumstances have been particularly trying. First, of course, was the death of the movie’s star Heath Ledger. “"It just isn't possible that he's dead," he says. "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense."

The film’s producer, Bill Vince, also died, leaving Gilliam’s daughter Amy to take the reigns. And this past fall, Gilliam was hit by a car, breaking his back. (He got better.) Gilliam came up with a unique solution to the problem of losing his lead actor, adding three additional actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to play the same character following various trips through a “magic mirror.”

Dr. Parnassus is due this fall, assuming no further catastrophes befall it. Read the rest of The Guardian piece here.

Related:
Heath Ledger Through the Looking Glass
When Good Directors Go Bad: The Brothers Grimm

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

A sad, funny ode to those fragile bubbles of joy, romance and deeper meaning in life's otherwise bitter cocktail of boredom, loneliness and disappointment, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation captures a certain mood of isolated intimacy so well that I only wish I could've stumbled across it in a deserted movie theater and kept the experience all to myself. Then again, one of the points of the film is the importance of shared experience: disconnected from her goofus husband (Gionvanni Ribisi), familiar surroundings and a sense of forward momentum in her life, Scarlett Johansson's young American abroad drifts through Japan like a lonely camera, recording her isolated perceptions for no one until she herself is perceived by fellow traveler Bill Murray, kicking off a sweet "like" affair through the streets and karaoke bars of late-night Tokyo. "I'm looking for, like, an accomplice," Murray's Bob Harris says to Johansson's Charlotte during one of their early encounters...and sometimes that's all a stranger needs to make a strange land into a momentary home.

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

At first, Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) isn't clear that he's in a strange land at all. He's arrived in Judgment City, a place that "should seem pleasing and very familiar," assuming you spend a lot of time at golf course resorts in the Phoenix suburbs. The billboards, sterile hotel rooms and crappy stand-up comics do indeed seem familiar, if just a bit off-kilter. That's because Daniel has been killed in a car crash and is no longer on earth at all; rather, he is in a sort of way station between our world and the afterlife, waiting to be judged on his human existence. It's a potentially stressful situation, but there are some pleasant distractions: for instance, the food is delicious and you can eat all you want without gaining any weight. (The full-time residents of Judgment City, on the other hand, enjoy food that tastes a little like horseshit to "little brains" like us.) Indeed, Daniel finds life in Judgment City quite enjoyable once he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), the compatible soul mate he never managed to find in life. It's not so enjoyable once he's put on trial and forced to defend embarrassing episodes from his earthly existence – and Daniel should probably avoid unflattering visits to the Past Lives Pavilion – but no place is perfect.

MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

We're talking about the first third of Mystery Train, to be more specific. The film follows a young Japanese couple riding a train into Memphis to visit the birthplace of rock & roll. The girl, Mitsuko, is obsessed with Elvis Presley. Her boyfriend Jun, dour and aloof, is a Carl Perkins man. They've come to visit Graceland and Sun Studios, but it's clear from the beginning that their ways -- hiking through the hot and empty streets with their suitcase suspended between them on a bamboo pole, giving their bellhop a plum, fetishizing their cigarette lighter -- are not the ways of Memphis or Americans. And yet, somehow by the end of their story, it's Memphis that seems alien. The sweetness underneath their oddity has normalized them, but the American South seems to be bursting with weirdness. Jarmusch, of course, has stacked the deck. His version of Memphis is filled with strangeness, and his cast includes Screaming Jay Hawkins as the desk clerk at their hotel and Rufus Thomas as a colorful local they meet. The Memphis I know is quite different.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It's hard to tell which is the stranger country in Apocalypse Now: the Vietnam that Willard barely sees, the military that tries to pretend that the situation is normal (rather than all fucked up), or the Kingdom of Death in Col. Kurtz's heart of darkness. Martin Sheen's Willard has not just fallen off the turnip truck; indeed, when the movie opens, he's drunk and bitter about being stuck again in Saigon. But the drunken ennui of Saigon seems more like the height of civilization as he travels further upriver after Kurtz. Even the Apocalypse Now Redux, which adds an odd layover at a French plantation, only increases Willard's alienation from his surroundings. The world is mad. It is madness to make war on people for their own good. It is madness to attempt to carve a jungle into a Western utopia. It is madness to pretend that there is any return when you have raised the ghosts of primordial horror.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

An important reminder for the would-be Kurtzes and (in the case of this movie) Danny Dravots of this world: gods don't bleed and die. If you ever try to pass yourself off as a god, be sure not to bleed or be ritually assassinated. A better policy is to avoid attempts at passing as a god altogether. The Man Who Would Be King is a deliberately old-fashioned story in which director John Huston demonstrates the lie at the heart of original author Rudyard Kipling's overt imperialist attitudes towards Asia. Two British adventurers (played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both at the top of their games), set out for an unknown area of Afghanistan to pursue unknown riches. Upon arriving, the locals decide that Danny (that's Connery's character) is a god when an arrow that has become lodged in his clothing fails to kill him. Danny, sadly, comes to believe his own press. I hope I am spoiling little when I reveal that hubris is an unforgiving mistress.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

This may be the consummate British colonialist fantasy of knowing a strange land so well that the natives respect you as one of their own. You spend years studying the language and culture at Oxford, only to go overboard completely and become a barefoot, djellabia-wearing, stallion-riding master of the desert. David Lean's film is based on T. E. Lawrence's memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a nutshell it's the story of Lawrence mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, surreptitiously helping the British as their Empire crumbles all around. Real events aside, this is also a fantastic film in and of itself. It is one of those brilliant character studies of a half-mad, half-genius hero, obsessed with an impossible goal. Serpico, The French Connection, and Vanishing Point come to mind. Instead of the inner workings of a nineteen-seventies cop, we get the psyche of Lawrence and the stoic facial expressions of Peter O’Toole galloping up and down the Hejaz. Never mind that Lawrence’s vision — and promise to King Faisal — of a large pan-Arab state based on tribal patterns (including present-day Iraq) went down the toilet in ways we are still experiencing right at this very moment.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Meryl Streep Don't Take Nun of Your Crap in "Doubt"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer. But the mysterious dialect that sometimes slips through when Sister Aloysius can't think of a word in what she would call "Earth language" to convey what she means might be Oz-speech, or it could just as easily be something spoken on the Moons of Tralfamadore. In one key scene, Sister Aloysius goes on a desk-raiding expedition while her helpless Earth slave--played by Amy Adams, her fair face a trembling mask of horror--stands by. Pulling a bag out of the desk, Streep cries triumphantly, "Khye! Yandi!" Adams, taking her life in her hands, fearfully points out that the bag only contains cough drops. "Khye! Yandi!..by another name!" Streep retorts. The audience thus learns that in Sister Aloysius's home world, "Khye! Yandi!" is a ritual exclanation made whenever someone detects the presence of something sweet, or what we Earthlings call "candy". The movie, which never shows Sister Aloysius greeting a spaceship to take her home or chugging live frogs or doing whatever it is that those of her kind do to take nourishment, is almost grudging in the slivers of information it offers about Sister Aloysius, so much so that, if you watched it after being up for forty-eight hours straight while messed up on cough syrup and with a hat pulled low over your eyes and listening to the ball game on the radio with headphones, you might just think that it was about the weirdest nun in the world and not fully grasp that there's no way in hell that a serious, trained professional like Streep could have ever intended the good sister to be taken for a member of the human race. The movie's reticence on the point of Streep's inhuman freakishness ultimately makes it a much more disturbing experience than if she has ever actually pulled off a rubber mask to reveal the lizard face beneath.

Having consulted David Thomson, I am forced to conclude that there is no term for a performance that single-handedly upends a movie by completely changing the context of the movie lucky enough to contain it, and any discussion of Christopher Walken's career is surely poorer for that. But Streep's performance in Doubt is not wholly without precedent. Perhaps the most famous example in recent years was Tim Robbins's Night Gallery-style performance in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Playing a character who was abducted as a child, Robbins, pop-eyed and trembling throughout, created suspense by transforming the key mystery of the film into just what had been returned to his family in place of the boy who had been taken away. Did the two even share the same body? It might have been less horrifying to speculate that what had grown into Robbins was cobbled together from scratch by his kidnappers before they returned to their mold-encrusted tomb or faraway planet. The movie provided only the most nightmare-inducing, tantalizing hint of what it could be like to live with this thing, in the person of his nerve-racked wife, played by Marcia Gay Hardin, who looked ready to jump out of her skin at the slightest sound and spoke as she supported herself dubbing lines for Tweety Bird. Frustratingly, the film kept waving the mystery of Robbins's zoological classification--was he vampire, zombie, local chief organizer for Nader in 2004--while actually focusing on the far less intriguing question of whether he not he had killed Sean Penn's daughter in the course of his ghoulish nightly rounds. Several years earlier, Eastwood had directed, and starred himself in, White Hunter, Black Heart, playing a role modeled on John Huston. This central piece of casting transformed what should have been a movie about a charming scared monster of a worldy movie director into a movie about the fleeting wish of a guy who became rich and world famous for the casual ease with which he dropped extras into their coffins to appear dashing and debonair, and also to talk as if cacti were blooming in his larynx. He couldn't bring off the former, but the latter as come to him quite naturally in the years since.

William Hurt's ninth-inning appearance in A History of Violence did a nice job of turning a mostly sober-sided movie into The Three Stooges Meet John Gotti. John Turturro's comic relief performance in Transformers, complete with whimsically deployed underwear, occupies its own realm with natural laws all its own. Then there is the matter of late Brando. Actually, many of the movies in which late Brando was permitted to run amok had so little identity without him that it would be silly to make too much of the way that his presence turned, say, The Missouri Breaks into Late Brando Kills Cowboys. Then there's the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here the chief mischief maker is actually Val Kilmer, playing the dope-addled chief assistant to the title character, played by Brando in the fey, epicene manner that he had deployed more than thirty years earlier in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, complete with sorta-English accent. In Moreau, after Brando's character is killed, Kilmer tries to mollify the doctor's murderous, ravening creations by dressing up as the Doc and imitating him over the loudspeaker system. However, Kilmer doesn't imitate Brando's character in the movie but instead does his best after-hours impersonation of the Brando of Stanley Kowalksi, Terry Malloy, etc. What sense the critters onscreen could be expected to make of this we cannot know, but for the people in the theater, it turns the movie into a Val Kilmer production entitled Late Brando, Early Brando, and Whichever Brando Cut Ahead of Me at the Catering Table Can All Kiss My Ass.

For me, the all-time king of these kinds of performances will always be, not Brando or Kilmer or Streep or even Walken, but Wings Hauser, the high-spirite musician and soap opera veteran who menaced half the hookers in L.A. in Vice Squad, turned Richard Pryor onto cocaine in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, and abused his position as the police chief of Provincetown more than one might have thought possible in the Norman Mailer-directed spree Tough Guys Don't Dance. Unless handled carefully, say with large animal tranquilizers, Hauser always approaches his roles as if he had been employed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Godzilla while the people of Tokyo gaze on amazement. His profile in movies has receded in recent years, and the film scene is saner but poorer for that.

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

RIP TORN in DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

A director I know who once worked with Rip Torn described him as a man filled with rage at all times, which may or may not be true. Yes, the actor famously smacked Norman Mailer on the noggin with a hammer in a bizarre fight somehow related to the production of the 1970 film Maidstone (an altercation that may or may not have been staged, but definitely seemed to draw actual blood). And, yes, there was that time he passed on the Jack Nicholson role in Easy Rider (specifically written for him by Terry Southern) after Dennis Hopper pulled a knife on him during a fight in a New York restaurant. So maybe he’s not the mellowest cat in the pet shop (and, sure, the man has been known to have a drink on occasion), but Torn nevertheless managed to maintain a fairly steady career, mostly as a character actor, from the time of his first screen appearance in the 1956 Baby Doll and his Broadway debut a few years later in the original cast of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth through subsequent decades of TV and movie appearances. Yet, despite the occasional high class gig (like Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter in 1984 and a 1989 Nicolas Roeg adaptation of Sweet Bird starring Elizabeth Taylor), Torn’s later career had a distinct whiff of has-beenery (Jinxed, The Beastmaster)...until, that is, Albert Brooks cast him as the bombastic afterlife attorney Bob Diamond in Defending Your Life, thus unleashing the full, hitherto untapped comic brilliance of Torn (and, to a lesser extent, Meryl Streep), launching a late-period renaissance in the actor’s career as the go-to guy for directors and showrunners looking to capture that “Rip Torn” feeling, including Garry Shandling (who assured Torn’s place in comedy heaven by casting him as uber-producer Artie in The Larry Sanders Show), Barry Sonnenfeld (who assured mainstream theatrical heat via Men In Black) and, lately, America’s sweetheart Tina Fey and the gang over at 30 Rock. Who knew an angry guy could be so frickin’ lovable?

BURT REYNOLDS, BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Burt Reynolds probably thought Rent-a-Cop would be his big comeback vehicle. Or Switching Channels. Or how about Cop and ½ ? That's why Boogie Nights almost has to be considered an accidental comeback; there's no evidence to suggest that Reynolds felt it had any more merit than, say, Striptease or Mad Dog Time – quite the opposite, in fact, as the one-time Bandit fired his agent after seeing the rough cut of Paul Thomas Anderson's opus. Hey, if you throw enough shit at the wall, something's bound to stick, and few have flung as much feces as our man Burt. Indeed, it is perhaps this very quality that makes Reynolds so convincing as porno patriarch Jack Horner, a kindred aging show-biz vet who mistakes his life's work for great art. Reynolds won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for this performance, then parlayed the resulting goodwill into a string of firecracker roles that launched him back onto the Hollywood A-list. What, you missed Crazy Six, Waterproof, Pups, Grilled, Universal Soldier II and III and Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale? Your loss.

BILL MURRAY in RUSHMORE (1998)

Let's maintain a little perspective here. Chevy Chase would probably love a big, spangled comeback, though he turned down the Kevin Spacey role in American Beauty, apparently because he was concerned that it was dirty and would sully his image so that he would be less likely to be invited to do such family fare as Snow Day. Murray, who hasn't always seemed that interested in being a movie star, has never really gone as far away as Chase, who was all but driven from the A-list by a torch-carrying mob. But Murray spent most of the '90s veering between lightly promoted character roles (in such movies as Ed Wood and Wild Things) and star vehicles that he often seemed a little embarrassed about. (In the TV commercials for his 1997 The Man Who Knew Too Little, he offered to personally recompense any dissatisfied viewers for the price of their ticket, vowing, "I will put money in your hand with no anger in my heart.") If his melancholy, graying performance in this Wes Anderson picture feels like a breakthrough and a comeback, one that lifted him to a different level in movies, it may be because it never feels like a gag, or a stunt; you never pick him out in the frame and think, "Hey, there's Bill Murray!" Fourteen years after his weird attempt to stretch himself in The Razor's Edge, Murray, always good company in a movie, had quietly evolved into an actor.

FRANK SINATRA in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

Some revisionists (such as David Thomson) have questioned just how desperately Sinatra needed the role of Maggio to salvage his career, or even how badly the career needed salvaging; it's true that the singer was under fire from newspaper columnists and self-righteous "morals" groups for his divorce and his (then liberal) politics, but it's not as if it were dog-food-for-dinner time. But everyone who was there agrees that Sinatra felt as if his world had collapsed; he may still have been rich and famous, but he didn't feel like Frank Sinatra anymore, which is to say that it had been a while since a mob of screaming teenage girls had threatened to lick his clothes off. And anyway, of all the great movie-star comebacks, this may be the only one to have inspired a major subplot in a great movie, and to be based on a rumor so widely circulated that the people who saw The Godfather were assumed to know damn well who "Johnny Fontaine" was and the title of the "new war picture" that he so badly wanted to be in. Though it does seem to be untrue that the Mafia got Frank the job. If it were some piddly-ass thing, Sinatra might have turned to his shadier friends, but for this, he felt he needed to use his big guns. So Ava Gardner got him the job.

MARLON BRANDO in THE GODFATHER & LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972)

In last year's TCM documentary Brando, Michael Winner, who directed Brando in the 1971 film The Nightcomers, described how he was able to sell the American rights to Universal Pictures as part of the studio's scheme to get rid of its connection to the star. Universal had a multi-picture deal with Brando, and the bosses jumped at the chance to use Winner's film to burn off its contract with the actor whose recent track record -- Morituri, The Appaloosa, Candy, The Night of the Following Day, et al -- seemed to be that of a spent force. Francis Ford Coppola famously had to fight the Paramount brass just to get permission to have Brando do a screen test, even though demanding a screen test of Brando was considered such an insult that many expected that once the request had been made, Paramount would have the relief of never hearing from him again. By all accounts, Brando was always helpful and considerate during the filming, though he later made it clear that he felt that he'd been screwed financially on the deal. The movie was still chugging along happily at the box office when Tango, the adults-only character drama that Brando had done for Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, was shown at that year's New York Film Festival and set off the first shock waves caused by both the power and sexual directness of Brando's performance. As an actor, he would never dive as deep again, and as a co-worker, he would never be so well-behaved again -- certainly not for Coppola, who he tortured for every perceived Godfather-related slight he'd shrugged off, first by refusing to do a cameo in The Godfather, Part II, then by keeping one eye firmly on the clock while making Apocalypse Now. But the one-two punch of these two masterpieces left him with a mystique that he would carry to the end of his days, and though his post-1972 resume is strange and spotty, no one doubts that he was doing whatever it was he wanted to do.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

And now, the not so good...

A CHORUS LINE (1985)

I’m a theater geek from way back, and so I’ve always had a special place in my heart for A Chorus Line, that old warhorse musical tribute to the nameless show biz gypsies who sing and dance their hearts out not for money or fame but (to paraphrase the show’s unabashedly sincere lump-in-the-throat anthem) simply for the love of their art. And, really, what better way to pay tribute to that altruistic, egalitarian spirit than...um...a cynical vehicle for a non-singing, non-dancing movie star which pretty much banishes the musical’s main characters to, well, the chorus. Michael Douglas hogs the spotlight in a role played by an offstage voice in the stage version, while Sir Richard Attenborough (a director hardly known for intimate chamber dramas) eschews the original's claustrophobic stage door setting in favor of “opening up” the action, restlessly tracking Douglas around Manhattan while the songs and stories of the rest of the characters -- the people the show's about -- somehow keep winding up offscreen and ignored.

OLEANNA (1994)

I've had some disastrous first dates in my day, but it's hard to know what I was thinking when I chose the May 1992 premiere of David Mamet's incendiary exploration of sexual politics Oleanna at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. as a means of wooing the cute blonde of my affections. In my defense, I hadn't heard much about the play when I bought the tickets; I think I was under the mistaken impression that it was about pirates. In fact, it's a calculated but highly effective outrage about a smug college professor who is stunned to be accused of sexual improprieties by a young female student he claims he was only trying to help with her studies. The play is designed to start arguments – it's either about sexual harassment or political correctness run wild, depending on your point of view – so it's not exactly primo first date fodder. (As it happens, it wasn't even my least successful date with this young lady, but let's not even go there.) It was undeniably riveting as a theatrical experience, however – William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, certainly the Mamet-est pairing imaginable, tore the house down. Two years later Mamet turned Oleanna into a movie, in the process giving no indication that he had any idea how or why it had worked in the first place. Pidgeon was gone, replaced by some nonentity named Debra Eisenstadt. Macy was still aboard, but given such a dull, flat adversary, his professor character now tilted too far to the monstrous side. Everything elliptical and ambiguous in the play had become blunt and obvious; there was no longer anything to argue about. Incidentally, Doubt shares these same problems, but at least it has a striking Meryl Streep performance. That's not to say I'm recommending it as a date movie.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT... (1986)

David Mamet's first big stage success, the 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago -- a hilariously cold-eyed and profane take on the mating rituals of young urban types in the age of singles bars, porno chic, and "serial monogamy" -- was a one-act that needed to be expanded on (i.e., padded out) to make its weight as a feature film, and by the time it was green-lighted, America was in the post-sexual revolution "age of AIDS" and newspapers, nervous about legal reprisals from the Reagan-Meese Department of Justice, were reluctant to even run ads with the original title. All of which would have presented a problem for filmmakers with a little integrity, as opposed to the makers of this Rob Lowe-Demi Moore vehicle, which bears less resemblance to any Mamet ever produced than a scaled-down, MTV-friendly St. Elmo's Fire II. The only one of the four main characters who retains some detectable link to his stage version is Lowe's male-chauvinist sidekick Bernie, who, as regrettably incarnated by Jim Belushi, is reduced to bellowing in the background of what's now a conventional young-spuds-in-love movie.

EQUUS (1977)

The British playwright Peter Schaffer is the Maxwell Anderson of our day, a mediocre dramatist who dresses up fancy, fraudulent conceits in fake-poetic language and palms it off as high theatrical art by invoking historical giants and Greek deities. The success of the current Broadway revival of his horse-god bullshit play Equus (starring Harry Potter and his naked pudder) is sad evidence that people can still be suckers for this stuff, though the work fared less well in its movie incarnation, which had the misfortune to be directed by a man -- that famous tough customer Sidney Lumet -- who actually seemed to think it was the literary masterpiece that it keeps screaming that it is. If Lumet had seen through this hunk of junk, he might have been so disrespectful as to try to turn it into a movie, the way John Huston did with Key Largo, the only film based on an Anderson text that remains watchable today. Instead, he was content to stick Richard Burton, fresh from his career-crowning performance in Exorcist II: The Heretic, facing the camera from within a sea of black, and have him hurtle through his monologues as if daring us not to be awed. The ideas he has come to set before us, poor Burton declaims, are "less than worthless; they are in fact subversive." Got it right the first time.

FOOL FOR LOVE (1985)

Burned out on Hollywood, Robert Altman spent most of the 1980s working on filmed plays. Some of these worked out a lot less well than others, but this mounting of what, at the time, was widely held as Sam Shepard's masterpiece as a playwright stands out partly for how perfect it sounds in theory and how thoroughly it goes splat in the execution. Altman employed Shepard to both do the screenplay and star as Eddie, the cowpoke who's meant to have an untamed, fiery, yet sporadic relationship with May (Kim Basinger), who may be his half-sister. But in altering the text of his play (which takes place entirely in a motel room) so that the action rolls all around the motel complex and adjoining highway, Shepard inadvertently revealed how silly the material could be made to seem without the tension produced by two actors going head to head in a tight, enclosed space. And by casting Shepard in the difficult leading role, Altman inadvertently revealed his limitations as a film actor: the poor guy wrote his own part, yet he has trouble keeping up with Kim Basinger.

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1959)

After A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams was understandably eager to write another role for Marlon Brando, and he was also keen to see Brando paired with Anna Magnani, the Italian powerhouse who had enjoyed a great success in the movie version of Williams' play The Rose Tattoo. Sadly, the only time that Brando and Williams did team up again was for this version of Williams' play Orpheus Descending, which all too perfectly captures the playwright's florid, self-parodic side. The opening, with Brando, as Val Xavier (Williams' notion of a modern Orpheus as a tortured blues-playing Adonis with a guitar and a snakeskin jacket) seen alone on screen as he faces the bar of justice hits the wall as soon as it opens out into a grotesque and unbelievable world -- and as Brando has his first scenes with Magnani: not until Godzilla met Megalon would the screen see such chemistry in action. Also doing their reputations no favors are Joanne Woodward in a misguided attempt by a likably grounded, naturalistic actress to enter the pantheon of the movies' all-time great weirdos, and Victor Jory as a rich cracker so rotten that Cape Fear's Max Cady would report him to the Neighborhood Watch Program.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1985)

It’s probably not a great sign that two of my heroes wound up killing themselves once old age began to creep in. After famously inserting himself into the gonzo dispatches he filed from the trenches of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson infamously inserted a ball of hot lead into his cranium as a permanent cure for depression and the nagging pain of various medical conditions. Likewise, the late, great monologist Spalding Gray jumped off a ferry in 2004 after years spent battling his own depression (stemming partly from his mother’s 1967 suicide) and pain (from a 2001 car accident) while also chronicling his own misadventures and neuroses in a series of seriocomic one-man shows for New York’s experimental Wooster Group theater company. Several of Gray’s monologues were filmed over the years (by directors including Steven Soderbergh and Nick Broomfield), but the first and best screen adaptation of his stage work was Jonathan Demme's Swimming To Cambodia, a rambling, fascinating (and extremely quotable) collage of national and personal history encompassing the Thai sex trade, the weird insanity of Richard Nixon, the horrific reign of the Khmer Rouge and Gray’s own search for a perfect moment while employed as a character actor on the set of Roland Joffe’s 1984 biopic The Killing Fields.

BILOXI BLUES (1988)

I understand my wife’s disdain for Neil Simon. His schticky, schmaltzy brand of lowbrow theater ain’t for everyone (and he extended the career of Marsha Mason way past its natural expiration date). Yet there’s a lot to recommend Biloxi Blues, the charming middle installment of the playwright’s alliterative autobiographical trilogy (bookended by Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound). For one thing, Matthew Broderick is at his Ferris Beuller best as a World War II-era army recruit forced outside his blue state comfort zone during basic training in a deep red Mississippi boot camp. The film, which never feels the least bit stagy, is two parts nostalgic coming-of-age comedy and one part “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture war drama, but the true highlight is Christopher Walken in a memorable supporting role as a deceptively affable, quietly menacing drill sergeant just as scary in his way as the more traditional expletive-spewing Full Metal Jacket variety.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (1993)

John Guare's finest play, a steadily escalating comedy of modern manners, was given the instant-classic treatment by director Fred Schepisi and a cast headed by first lady of the theater Stockard Channing, grizzled counterculture figure turned acting eminence Donald Sutherland, and Will Smith, then best known as the Fresh Prince. A movie whose wit and sophistication can make your head swim, it looks easy enough to make you wonder why all deserving plays haven't gotten as deft a movie treatment. Your first clue to the answer to that question may be that not even any other play of Guare's has made it to the Hollywood starting gate.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)

Working with Tennessee Williams' great play and the director Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando created thunder and lightning onstage during the Broadway run. Then he and Kazan packaged it in film cans and sent it out across the country to poison the minds of lucky youths everywhere. (Though there have always been people who expressed their regrets that Brando's performance hadn't been filmed early in the run -- you know, when it was really good.) Most of the rest of the Broadway cast came along for the ride, but the one key exception, Vivien Leigh as Blanche, turned out to be one of those uncanny marriages of a great, difficult role to a performer with an unsteady career who had something of her own that the character had always needed. The movie lives as a record of one of the most startling and sublime acting duets ever performed.

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE (2002)

Clare Peploe, a gifted director probably best known as the wife of Bernardo Bertolucci, had a small, too-little-seen triumph with this joyous and charming version of a romantic comedy written by the French Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux in 1732. The plot, which involves Mira Sorvino as a seductive royal and Ben Kingsley as a crackpot philosopher who has taught the object of Sorvino's romantic designs (Jay Rodan) to regard love with disdain, is a roundelay of schemes, masks, and mind fucks that Peploe weaves into a comic celebration of theatrical artifice itself.

LES PARENTS TERRIBLES (1948)

Jean Cocteau had already enjoyed a scandalous triumph with his play, an explosion of the form of the "boulevard comedy" likened to "Noel Coward on opium." He dove in head first when he decided to film it, resisting the urge to open up a text that has the small, overheated cast waging familial warfare in the confines of their cramped Paris apartment. The masterful handling of the farcical complications within the claustrophobic setting can make a viewer happily delirious.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Video of the Day: John Belushi's Screen Test

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:45:00 GMT

Closing in on what would have been John Belushi's 60th birthday, debates rage about whether he was really a brilliant comic whose career was cut tragically short before he had time to become great, or just a talented comedian who died before he had a chance to embarrass himself. We lean towards the former argument, and this clip gives you an idea why.

By the time this brief clip for what was then being called The Saturday Night Show was recorded, the then 26-year-old Belushi didn't have to try out for anything -- he was already a lock to make the cast. But it still captures him at the pinnacle of his clowning, mocking the whole idea of screen tests: he starts out doing a few absurd "warm-up" exercises, then goes on to riff a gross improvisation on live television, and heads into a goofy parody of Marlon Brandon's own screen test for The Godfather -- a movie that was then only a few years old.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

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

This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

25. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

What is it with zombies? Why do we love them so? We’ve got at least a half dozen killer corpse movies on this list...but personally, I’ve always had a special place in my braaaaiiiiiinnnssss for Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock tribute to the genre, starring the venerable, indispensable B-movie staple Clu Gulager as the boss of two medical warehouse employees who accidentally unleash a zombie apocalypse. According to the film’s clever, way-better-than-it-has-to-be script (also by O’Bannon), Night of the Living Dead was a true story, but the government covered the whole thing up...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a mishap involving a missing barrel of deadly zombie toxin and the aforementioned bumbling warehouse employees: Freddy (whose friends are rockin’ out to the Damned and the Flesh Eaters -- and, for some reason, getting naked -- in a nearby graveyard) and Frank, whose eventual fate is actually kinda touching thanks to a horror movie hall-of-fame performance by character actor James Karen. One of my all-time favorites in the “disappearing characters” genre, Return is frightening, funny and exciting by turns, and pioneered “fast zombie” technology long before Danny Boyle hogged all the credit in 28 Days Later. Plus, the soundtrack totally kicks ass...and, of course, BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!!!!!

24. THE INNOCENTS (1961)

One of the most effective ghost story movies ever made is also perhaps the finest of all the attempts to adapt Henry James to the screen. (John Mortimer and a pre-In Cold Blood Truman Capote worked on the screenplay, which is based on a theatrical adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw.) Deborah Kerr is a fascinating jangle of authoritative command and nervous anxiety as the new governess who thinks she's seen the apparitions of her predecessor and that woman's lover, the valet Quint, who both came to mysterious ends. Ten years later, Michael Winner's The Nightcomers would offer a speculative version of what happened before, with Marlon Brando as Quint. That movie is best remembered as a cautionary tale involving how it came to be distributed in this country: Universal agreed to pick it up as part of a deal to cancel its contract with Brando, who they assumed would never have another hit in his life. Of course, his next picture was The Godfather. Hollywood: it's a scary place.

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987)

A wholly unexpected high point for the slash/fill-in-the-blank-from-Hell genre, with an original script by the matchless crime novelist Donald Newlove which achieves just the right balance of wit and nastiness. Terry O'Quinn makes anonymity terrifying as the title character, a serial murderer of the type known as a "family annihilator" -- unable to deal with cracks in his fantasy ideal of a perfect family, he keeps wiping out one domestic unit and moving on to another. The movie was inspired by Newlove's meditating on the case of the infamously colorless John List, who butchered his family in 1971, and who was still unapprehended when the movie came out; he was arrested in 1989, after being the subject of an episode of America's Most Wanted, and died in prison last March. A TV movie about List was made in 1993. He was played by Robert Blake.

22. NEAR DARK (1987)

Kathryn Biglow's artspolitation movie about a "family" of white trash vampires traveling the back roads in a van with the windows blacked out has an unusually potent mix of striking visual beauty and cutthroat action. Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson have never looked closer to shitkicker heaven than in the movie's bloody set piece in a roadhouse; the wonderful, and much-missed Jenny Wright is hard to resist as the teen-sister figure, who winsomely infects the country-boy hero (Adrian Pasdar) with vampirism so that she'll have someone nice to talk to between massacres. And where have you gone, Jenette Goldstein? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

21. THE MUMMY (1932)

The legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, whose credits ranged from Metropolis and The Last Laugh to 149 episodes of I Love Lucy, worked as a director of English-language films for only three years in the early-to-mid '30s. This was his Hollywood directorial debut; the last film he directed was the 1935 horror movie Mad Love, and that title would have been a neat fit for this one, too. It stars Boris Karloff as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian who was entombed alive for trying to restore his dead beloved to life; resurrected, he gets right back on the case, having identified the heroine, Zita Johann, as the woman's reincarnation. Slow and dreamily poetic, this is very different from later mummy movies -- Karloff is unbandaged for most of the picture -- and also very different from most of the other classic Universal monster movies. It's the rare film about eternal love than makes you appreciate the fact that most loves have a natural shelf life.

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

Contributors: The Zombie Andrew Osborne, Kill Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

5. PAUL NEWMAN (1925-2008)

As the man who inspired this list, it's entirely fitting that Mr. Newman wound up in our Top 5...and we recently posted 10 good reasons why (in addition to the official Screengrab obituary by Phil Nugent) so, uh...moving on to number 4...

CARY GRANT (1904-1986)

In his single funniest movie, His Girl Friday, Grant responds to a threat by crowing, "The last man to say that to me was Archie Leach, just a week before he cut his throat." The line is an in-joke meant for mass consumption, since it was fairly common knowledge that Grant's real name was Archie Leach. But Grant really did cut "Archie Leach's" throat; the product of a Dickensian childhood -- as a rich, internationally famous movie star, he was unexpectedly reunited with his mother, who he had believed was long dead -- he created a romantic image of perfection and lived in it on screen and off. What makes the image so supremely, universally attractive is that it is perfect in its imperfection: unlike the countless male models and juveniles who tried their best to never put a foot wrong, Grant was a trained acrobat and natural farceur who had the solid instincts to know that the best way to win the audience's heart was to send his strapping, handsome frame falling all over itself in slapstick pratfalls, as if none of his physical assets were enough to keep him from being rendered powerless by what the sight of a female co-star was doing to his center of gravity. By the time the cycle of screwball romances that made him a star was gearing up, Grant was not juvenile, and he was never a shrinking violet: he was a brash scene-stealer who enjoyed getting a verbal rhythm going with the other people in a scene. Since he and his romantic partners couldn't actually get it on in the movies of their day, they exchanged wisecracks as a metaphor for foreplay; in this context, the moment when he gets Irene Dunne to reluctantly laugh when he's collapsing in on himself at a society recital is one of the sexiest stand-ins for an orgasm in movie history. Grant had other sides to his talent: his buddy-buddy-buddy act with Victor MacLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. helped to make Gunga Din one of the most joyous action comedies ever to come out of Hollywood, and he gave an honorable, committed performance in Clifford Odets' None but the Lonely Heart, a box-office failure and labor of love. But in more than sixty years, nobody has come close to displacing him as the most iconic romantic comedian in movies; the best anyone can do is to say, as they say of George Clooney now, that he's the closest we're likely to get these days to Cary Grant.

3. JACK NICHOLSON (1937 - )

Yes, his talent long ago calcified into an all-too-familiar repertoire of raised eyebrows and half-hearted devilish grins, but the case could be made that Jack Nicholson was the American leading man for nearly two decades, ranging roughly from 1970's Five Easy Pieces to 1989's Batman. (And yes, technically Michael Keaton was the leading man in Batman, but it was Jack who raked in a record $50 million thanks to all those lucrative Joker products.) Easy Rider made him an "overnight success" after spending the bulk of the '60s on Roger Corman's work farm, but Five Easy Pieces established Nicholson as the anti-hero for America's counterculture hangover – quick to anger, with little use for authority, but magnetic and funny nonetheless. He got on a hot streak that encompassed some of the most revered films of the era, from The Last Detail to Chinatown to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Soon he was an Academy Awards fixture, as both attendant (always in the front row, all shades and wolfish grin) and recipient (12 nominations, including wins for Cuckoo's Nest, Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets), and then he was a caricature, albeit one still capable of firing up the jets on occasion (A Few Good Men, a few scenes in The Departed). Through it all, he's always been Jack – one name, four letters, and just about everyone on earth knows who you mean.

2. MARLON BRANDO (1924-2004)

There’s little that can be said about Brando that hasn’t been said before, and better besides. After all, he’s obviously a genius, with a style that revolutionized movie acting. But although much is made of how well he plays brutish characters onscreen, what helped Brando transcend the trap of playing “tough guys” was the tenderness with which he approached them. Look no further than the famous scene in On the Waterfront where he’s chatting with Eva Marie Saint and he suddenly starts to fiddle with her glove. There’s a gentle, almost feminine quality to this blue-collar palooka, one that manifests itself in his bashful-boy approach to the girl on whom he’s got a crush. Granted, in his later years, Brando became essentially a monologist, noodling in the corner while everyone else tried to make a movie around his whims. But when he was actually in a collaborative mood, no movie star engaged so completely with those around him. In his last great role in 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, Brando took what was essentially a two-character drama and shot it full of electric intensity, locking on to costar Maria Schneider so completely that we begin to see him anew through her eyes -- middle-aged and hulking, but undeniably erotic.

1. HUMPHREY BOGART (1899-1957)

So, what makes a classic leading man? If it’s staying power, then Bogie’s got it: he was a star for decades during his own lifetime, then enjoyed a posthumous resurgence of popularity during the 1960s, and remains a household name today, his timeless mug even now adorning the wall of a dorm room near you. Though some may argue his range was limited (despite two Oscar nominations and a win for The African Queen), it’s hard to imagine the history of modern cinema without his influential wised-up, world-weary, cynical/romantic tough-guy persona and his indelible performances in all-time classics like The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, etc., etc., etc. He was a box office badass, and despite a famously hangdog physiognomy that could charitably be described as “unconventional,” he somehow managed to seduce the insanely hot 19-year-old Lauren Bacall (or was it the other way around?) during production of To Have and Have Not and hold onto her for thirteen years until his death by cancer in 1957. And despite the 26 year age difference between them, Bacall was certainly no giggly schoolgirl...Bogart was just that cool, I guess. Cooler than Nicholson, cooler than Clooney...and certainly cooler than Sinatra, who many still believe was the original head of the Rat Pack, when in fact it was Bogie who was and remains the indisputable king of the ultimate fraternity of cinematic cool.

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Five

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 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. 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.

TALIA SHIRE: The world of the Corleones is one that shuts out its women. Their job is to produce and raise the children, and they are basically treated as children, to remain innocent and untainted by knowledge of what their family's prosperity is based on--as if they could really not know, or as if there could be absolution in ignorance. The big exception is Michael's sister Connie, played by Francis Ford Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. (One advantage of this side of the casting is that Coppola instinctively understood how to get guys to act like brothers to a little sister. James Caan says that Coppola would engineer situations on the set, asking Caan to shoo away some bastard who was "bothering" Talia; it was only later that Caan realized that Coppola was psyching him up for the big scene where Caan's Sonny, after seeing bruises on his sister's face, performs a little marriage counseling by tracking down his brother-in-law and stomping a mudhole in his ass.) Maybe because he didn't want to seem to be playing favorites, Coppola treated Shire's character a little negligently in the first film; she doesn't really threaten to rise above the level of a victim and a plot function until her big explosion at the end, screaming that Michael has had her husband killed. But in Part II, she enters the movie like a house on fire, a fabulously turned out slightly-older woman who's going to do whatever it takes to embarrass the family she blames for wrecking her life, even if that means she has to hang out with Troy Donahue. Eventually she wears herself out with her own acting out and returns to the nest, and by the time of Part III, she's more active plotter than Michael. She has her ideas about how things ought to be done and takes full advantage of all the perks she figures she has coming to her as blood relation. And nobody is going to take her out in a rowboat and put one in her head while it's bowed in prayer.

The Godfather is one of two big movie franchises that dominate Shire's filmography. The other is the Rocky series, where she played Adrian, the ugly duckling who became the hero's loyal wife, hanging in there from the 1976 original through to Rocky V in 1990. (Her absence from the 2006 Rocky Balboa is explained by her character's death from, in the tasteful words of her widower, "da woman cancer.") Although she was perfectly charming in the first Rocky movie, the role called for her to return to the likable-mouse range of the first Godfather movie, and in invited audiences to like her for being so drably unimaginative and for being faithfully devoted to America's Lug. The success of Rocky did lead to her having, for a few months from 1979 to early 1980, a brief fling as a leading lady, but the movies she starred in--the uneven and off-putting Old Boyfriends and the terrible horror pictures Prophecy and Windows (which is the only film directed by Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, and which cast Shire as the target of a dangerous lesbian stalker played Elizabeth Ashley)--were such bombs that they left Shire open to public ridicule. The whole experience may have let her a little gun-shy; for the next ten years or so, she didn't stray far from Rocky's apron strings, and though she has continued working pretty steadily in recent years, she seems to have a pretty good sense for picking scripts whose finished films will scarcely see the light of day. I suspect that Shire may still have some surprises in her, but it remains to be seen whether anyone will arrange for them to be turned loose.

G. D. SPRADLIN: A big believer in the value of a varied CV, the Oklahoma-born Spradlin was an attorney, an independent oil man, and a politician before turning professional actor in his mid-forties. He had already built up an impressive roll call of intimidating but not always trustworthy authority figures--cops, doctors, politicians, military officers--before Coppola brought him on board to play Senator Pat Geary, a man who the Senate doorkeeper can't introduce with the words "the honorable..." without dissolving in giggles. Having earned his place in movie history, Spradlin continued to play admirals, sports coaches (including, in the 1979 North Dallas Forty, a character said to be modeled on Tom Landry), and even, in his last job before his official retirement in 1999, Ben Bradlee in the cross-eyed Watergate spoof Dick. All of these roles now seem informed by the fact that the man onscreen once set his nastiest sneer in place to go head to head with Michael Corleone, and that it took a bloody bed full of dead girl to make him blink, and shudder. Especially worthy of mention is his other job for Coppola, in Apocalypse Now, where he plays the general who gives Martin Sheen his assignment up river, and where his sad, weary face--the face of a man who by God will do the job he signed on to do, but at the time he signed on he sure didn't know he was going to be doing this shit--is like a red flag to the star, and maybe to the audience. Whatever happens next, you can't look into those eyes and say that you weren't given fair warning.

LENNY MONTANA: Six feet six inches tall and not whisper-thin, Montana (nee' Lenny Passofaro) worked as a bouncer and is rumored to have had some kind of mob connections before he entered show business as a professional wrestler, where he worked under the names Lenny the Bull, Zebra Man, and Chief Chickawicki. Lenny was 45 when he made his movie debut in The Godfather playing Luca Brasi, the old family enforcer who didn't expect to be invited to his boss's daughter's wedding. If the scene in which Luca thanks Don Corleone for having been so honored had been played and shot as written, it might have been less memorable. As it turned out, Lenny the Bull was so starstruck by Marlon Brando that he couldn't be in Brando's presence for two seconds without looking as if he were going to shit his pants and maybe bleed from the eyes a little, so after all attempts to calm him down failed, Coppola reconceived the scene: in the finished product, Luca is so overwhelmed by the Don's willingness to let him enter his home through the front door in broad daylight, and so unused to social interaction that doesn't involve threatening to leave someone with fewer body parts than he had when he showered that morning, that he has laboriously prepared a written speech for the occasion, which he has trouble getting out even in the sealed labratory conditions of the Don's office. In Lenny's other big scene, he gets to have a drink with some fellows who pin his hand to the bar with a knife and then garrote him, and Lenny played it as if getting throttled with piano wire came much more naturally to him than wedding-day small talk. Given the massive international success of The Godfather and Lenny's easily recognizable face and physique, is it any wonder that his acting debut did lead to other offers? He appeared in James Toback's Fingers, a TV film starring Frank Sinatra called Contract on Cherry Street, the Jackie Chan vehicle The Big Brawl, the Steve Martin hit The Jerk, and Robert Aldrich's ...All the Marbles, as well as in such trivia as the Italian spoof The Funny Face of the Godfather. He even took a co-writing credit on one of his last films, Blood Song, a horror flick that co-starred Richard Jaeckel and Frankie Avalon. His artistic vision more or less fulfilled, Lenny retired from the screen that year and died in Italy in 1992.

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 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. 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.

RICHARD CASTELLANO: Squat, fat, and fleshy, Castellano casts a broad shadow as the loyal Corleone lieutenant Clemenza. Castellano, who is said to have ad-libbed his best-remembered line--the sage advice, "Leave the gun, take the cannoli."-- makes such a strong impression in The Godfather, and is so memorable because of his work in it, that it's kind of dumbfounding to realize how little else he left behind on film. After almost a decade or so of small parts in movies, TV, and the theater, his big break came with a role in the Joseph Bologna-Renee Taylor play Lovers and Others Strangers; he was nominated for a Tony Award for it, then won an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor when he recreated his performance for the movie version in 1970. His breakout success as Clemenza led to a string of starring roles in failed TV sitcoms (The Super, Joe and Sons) and supporting roles in Godfather knockoffs, such as the TV movies Incident on a Dark Street and Honor Thy Father (based on Gay Talese's nonfiction bestseller) and the short-lived dramatic series The Gangster Chronicles. Castellano maneuvered himself out of what should have been his one sure shot at a triumphant follow-up, in The Godfather, Part II: Francis Ford Coppola wrote him out of the screenplay after being confronted with what he felt were unreasonable demands involving salary, script approval, and other perks. It's easy to understand how Castellano, after slogging away in the business for so long, would find it hard not to pass up a chance to demand a little star treatment when he felt he could get away with it; it's just as easy to understand how Coppola, who already had his plate full with the million other details to the enormous production that demanded his production, would feel inclined to tell this ego-tripping fat load to take a walk. Castellano made his last film appearance in 1982 and died six years later.

MICHAEL V. GAZZO: In The Godfather, Part II, Michael Corleone has a moment where he tells the aging gangster Frankie "Five Angels" Pentageli how glad he is that his old family house "never went to strangers. First Clemenza took it over, and then you." Thus with one speck of throwaway dialogue did Francis Ford Coppola make his one gesture to filling in whatever happened to Clemenza after Michael's ascension to the throne. After things didn't work out with Richard Castellano, Coppola was obliged to create a new character and assign to him the function in the sequel that he had planned for Clemenza: that of the leftover representative of the old ways turned alienated betrayer. It put Gazzo, the man brought in to play the part, in a tough situation: he couldn't very well do an impression of Castellano, but he had to build from scratch someone who the audience could respond to with the same kind of affection that they would someone they remembered fondly from the first movie. Gazzo, with his walrus mustache, friendly gravelly croak, and effusive but elegaic manner, actually managed to pull this off, helped by a wonderful entrance scene where he begs for a drink of water from a garden hose and then reveals that he's not too big a man to put up with Fredo's company for a few minutes. Although Gazzo, a graduate of the Actors Studio who went on to form a West Coast theater workshop in his own name, had done some acting going back to the 1950s--he's an uncredited bit player in On the Waterfront-- before he played Pentageli, he was best known for writing the "I-was-a-Method-dope fiend" play A Hatful of Rain. (He would eventually get to adapt that text for the movies, and also worked on the script for the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole.) Godfather II effectively made him America's favorite aging goombah; it left him all but guaranteed of steady work, especially on TV, where he usually played characters whose last name ended in a vowel and who could be counted on to at some point deliver a variation on the line, "I want this Kojak/Baretta/B.J. and the Bear problem taken care of!" His second most notable movie role was in James Toback's 1978 directorial debut, Fingers, where he was funny and poignant as a whipped, washed-up loan shark who is treated protectively by his violently unhinged son, played by Harvey Keitel. He died in 1995.

BRUNO KIRBY: The son of the actor Bruce Kirby, Bruno Kirby was the epitome of the potato-faced, fast-talking, New York-honking character guy whose specialty was amusing audiences while appearing to drive everybody who has to share a screen with him right up the wall. At his most high-profile, he was the kind of actor who gets to play sidekick to the kind of actor--such as Billy Crystal in City Slickers or Albert Brooks in Modern Romance--who had to produce or direct the movie in order to star in it. Perhaps his best, most weirdly typical role was in "The Gas Man", an episode of the TV series Homicide, in which he played an embittered ex-con who was twisted and ambitious enough to plot a baroque plan for the detective (Andre Braugher) who'd put him away but not quite mad enough to carry through on it when he had the chance. In The Godfather, Part II, the most handsome item on his resume, he's thoroughly un-typical: cast as the young Clemenza, and billed as "B. Kirby, Jr.", he's not immediately recognizable in his padded suits and with his Italian accent, which inhibits him from doing his customary high-pitched jabbering. But many years later, he'd get to bring his customary type into the Corleone's world through the side door when he was cast as helpmate to Marlon Brando in his mock-Don Vito role in the 1990 comedy The Freshman. Kirby died from complications from leukemia in 2006.

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.

Screengrab's Back To School Round-Up: The Top 15 College Movies (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FRESHMAN (1990)

For the recent high school graduate, going to college can feel like entering a strange new world, so it makes perfect metaphorical sense that this comedy, written and directed by the prankish Andrew Bergman, is about a film student (Matthew Broderick) who goes to a different school, in a different city, and finds himself entering a different movie: his new employer and mentor, played by Marlon Brando, is a heavyset, gray-haired Italian gentleman who talks in a gravelly near-whisper and is highly reminiscent of a certain classic American movie from the early 1970s in which a business negotiation involved a decapitated horse. No such atrocities occur here, but you do get to see longtime Miss America pageant host Bert Parks serenade a Komodo dragon.

THE GRADUATE (1967)

Watching Animal House in high school may have given me a somewhat warped idea about what to expect from my undergraduate years, but The Graduate turned out to be an unnervingly accurate depiction of the terrifying unstructured malaise waiting to devour the unwary in those first uncertain years after college graduation. True, my parents didn’t have a sunny Southern California pool for me to float around in while I tried to figure out my life, but their friends and they offered plenty of well-meaning but fantastically unhelpful advice of the “Plastics” variety, while embodying exactly the type of suburban sameness I was so desperate to avoid. And, no, I didn’t have an older Mrs. Robinson to school me in sex and cynicism, but Simon & Garfunkle soothed my weary, alienated soul on numerous occasions. Career highlight efforts by stars Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, director Mike Nichols, writer/cameo artiste Buck Henry and even wax effigy Katharine Ross make this film a best-of-show masterpiece of any genre, and the movie’s final shot of young lovers Ben & Elaine riding off into an unknowable future on a crosstown bus is an image of hope and terror for the ages...specifically, the ages 21-25.

GOOD NEWS (1947)

This candy-colored MGM musical is probably the best example of a lost genre, that of the collegiate musical that centers on football and builds to the big game. It had been enough of a mainstay of American entertainment for the Marx Brothers to have parodied it fifteen years earlier in Horse Feathers; in fact, this movie has its roots in a 1927 stage musical that was first filmed in 1930. By the time this remake was hatched, both the stage original and the first movie version were regarded as too dirty, by post-World War II standards, for Production Code-era Hollywood. So the script was laundered, and the most sexless, blandest leads in movie history, Peter Lawford and June Allyson, were brought into play as, respectively, the gridiron hero (no, seriously, that was Peter Lawford's role) and the brainy librarian who has to tutor him so that he doesn't do so badly in his courses that he's not allowed to remain on the football team. (Truly the American musical is a pure fantasy realm.) Part of what makes this bowdlerized production charming is that it represents nostalgia for the 1920s as seen from the vantage point of the late 1940s, which seen today gives it an odd, unearthly appeal. It also helps that the people hired to plug the holes left by the editing actually added some good songs and found people livelier than Lawford and Allyson to perform them. The movie's real star is the vivacious and weird Joan McCracken, a Broadway dancer-singer who died young without ever having built much of a movie career: she triumphs in the movie's opening and in her showcase number, the possibly-insulting-to-Native-Americans novelty piece "Pass That Peace Pipe."

DRUMLINE (2002)

This go-for-it movie, starring Nick Cannon as an unpolished bullet of raw talent who upsets the equilibrium of the marching band at a prestigious all-black university, has the kind of silly plot mechanics one expects from the genre, but it also has a lot of freshness and energy and a surprisingly impressive performance by Orlando Jones as the upright professor in charge of the band. As staged by director Charles Stone III, the precisely choreographed final battle of the bands at the big championship competition is a winner-take-all moment undreamt of in Sylvester Stallone's philosophy.

WONDER BOYS (2000)

Michael Douglas gives one of his most winning performances in this adaptation of Michael Chabon's terrific novel about Grady Tripp, a stalled novelist and aging pothead whose gig teaching creative writing at a Pittsburgh university has turned into a not unpleasant form of limbo. This is one of the few movies that features a halfway believable facsimile of some form of the writer's life, a virtue that extends to Tobey Maguire's amazing turn as the most talented and mercurial of Tripp's students, and also for a characteristically high-wire performance by Robert Downey, Jr. as the great man's literary agent. The studio had enough faith in the movie's entertainment value that, after it bombed in its initial run, they rolled it out again a few months later with a new ad campaign, whereupon it bombed all over again. It still hasn't developed the cult following on DVD that one might have hoped for, and Tobey Maguire remains much better known as Peter Parker than as James Leek, but the movie did win Bob Dylan an Academy Award for his original theme song, "Things Have Changed."

Click Here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

Coppola’s Apocalypse Forever

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As you know, spiffy new restored versions of the Godfather movies are playing in selected theaters and just out on DVD. Meanwhile in England, the latest special edition of Apocalypse Now (released domestically as “The Complete Dossier” and containing both the original and Redux cuts of the movie) is making its way to home video. It must be kind of a drag for Francis Ford Coppola that the only movies anyone wants to talk to him about were made in the ‘70s, but to his credit, he’s still a good sport about it.

“The thing with cinema is that you always feel as if you’re just beginning to understand it, and that makes each day very fresh and exciting,” Coppola said recently in an interview with The Times of London. “When I was younger, I decided I would make each film as an experiment, trying to do something that was appropriate to its theme, so Apocalypse Now was quite different from The Godfather or The Conversation. So I made it in a style I felt appropriate to the war itself: high amperage, big production, almost out of control.”

The logistical challenges of making Apocalypse are well-documented (notably in the terrific Hearts of Darkness), but one that often gets overlooked is that of Marlon Brando’s girth. “He admitted we had a problem in that this ‘Green Beret colonel’ would not be as overweight as he was, which presented issues of what sort of costume should he wear, as there wouldn’t be uniforms in his size. He didn’t want to be depicted as a man who had let his appetites and passions go wild, which was the other solution. Marlon, like all fat people, was shy and embarrased by his weight, which of course I understood, having something of the same problem, as did Orson Welles. I decided to dress him in black and portray his fatness as great size, meaning that you usually see just his shoulders and arms. So his large scale could be interpreted as that of a giant man. I used a very tall, husky double for the scenes where you see all of him.”

When asked whether he’d prefer to remembered for the Godfather movies or for Apocalypse, Coppola responds, “I’d actually like to be remembered for my present film Tetro, which is the most personal film I’ve made…I don’t want to be remembered for a film, but for the fact that I loved so much and was enchanted by little children.” Er...okay. Good luck with that.

Related:
Eleanor Coppola: Still "Notes" Worthy
Francis Ford Coppola's Sex Change Operation

Unwatchable #75: “The Last Sign”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

We are now one-quarter of the way through our mind-and-butt-numbing journey up the IMDb’s Bottom 100 list, a quest every bit as fraught with peril as the one Martin Sheen endured in Apocalypse Now. (It remains to be seen whether Marlon Brando is waiting at the end.) According to my rough calculations, this means we still have three quarters of the list to get through – a prospect that would bring many a cinephile to his knees, sobbing and begging for mercy. As always, I must simply remind myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and I can only play the game on the schedule in front of me. In this case, that game is The Last Sign, a 2005 supernatural thriller starring Andie MacDowell.

I’m immediately suspicious of any movie that opens with a shitload of logos for companies I’ve never heard of. This makes me think what I’m about to watch is more of a tax shelter than a motion picture. The Last Sign is evidently some sort of international co-production; in any case, there are a bunch of guys named Claude in the opening credits. Perhaps it’s irrational to develop a bad impression on such flimsy evidence, but there are no rules to Unwatchable. For instance, I could also point out that the title The Last Sign is as meaningless as it is forgettable. Or I could mention that Andie MacDowell plays some sort of scientist in this film, a scenario that requires more suspension of disbelief than I am usually willing to suspend. Still, a good movie could overcome these objections. This one does not.

MacDowell is Kathy Macfarlane, a widow and single parent struggling to remain financially solvent after the death of her abusive husband Jeremy (Tim Roth), a doctor who developed a drinking problem while on a mission in Africa. To that end, she reluctantly takes in a guest house tenant, ze zhexy Frenchman Marc (Samuel Le Bihan). But is there more to this boarder than his wooden personality and tendency to walk around shirtless? MacDowell is receiving mysterious phone calls every night at 12:15 a.m. At first she suspects Marc, but then she encounters a former patient of Jeremy’s who insists that her late husband is trying to get in touch with her. A creepy co-worker of McDowell’s, Endora (an expertly cast Margot Kidder), agrees. And when MacDowell starts seeing ghostly visions of Jeremy all around town, it appears we’re in for an M. Night Shyamalan knockoff – particular given the stilted dialogue and delivery that has become as much a Night signature as the big plot twist. (It’s not clear whether director Douglas Law has instructed his actors to speak in a lobotomized monotone for a purpose, or if it’s just because English isn’t his first language.)

Just as I was preparing myself for a dopey twist, it became apparent that The Last Sign had more in common with a Lifetime movie of the week than The Sixth Sense. It seems that Jeremy is only seeking forgiveness for his drunken crapulence from beyond the grave, and once he’s received that, McDowell is free to boff the hunky Frenchman in the guest house. At this point, I realized I was actually disappointed that The Last Sign had deprived me of the preposterous and insulting twist ending that would have propelled it into the ranks of the truly rank. The movie certainly earns its status as forgettable straight-to-video fodder, but it falls well short of a deserving spot on the Bottom 100.

Previously on Unwatchable:
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War
77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance
78. The Quick and the Undead
79. Anus Magillicutty
80. The Smokers

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

Sean Connery's Life an Open Book

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

William Langley reports that "The huge print run of what is being optimistically described as Sir Sean Connery's autobiography is sitting in a warehouse awaiting release on the actor's 78th birthday next month." From his coronation as James Bond in the 1962 Dr. No to his possible swan song as Alan Quartermain in the 2003 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Connery was able to develop from a stud bodybuilder into a respected actor of rare power and daring, while maintaining his status as a leading international star (and sex symbol) for a remarkable four decades. His memoir is probably the most eagerly anticipated actor's autobiography since Marlon Brando's 1995 Songs My Mother Taught Me--and anyone who braved the gassy depths of the Brando book will recognize that as a shaky reference point at best. Since making good on his threat to stay retired from acting after the Extraordinary Gentlemen debacle (a project that Connery reportedly took on after deciding that he didn't understand it, and remembering that he'd turned down roles in The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings because he hadn't understood them), Connery has had plenty of time to strip-mine his memories, but what no one knows yet is whether or not he's had the inclination to do any serious digging. Langley notes that "In 2003 he pulled out of a project with author Meg Henderson, a personal friend, for a co-written book of memoirs. Two years later he withdrew from a seven-figure deal with the biographer Hunter Davies. A subsequent project with Canongate, a prominent Edinburgh publishing house, collapsed when the two parties 'failed to see eye-to-eye' on the book's content...The head of Canongate, Jamie Byng, said: 'Sean has got a great storytelling instinct. There was some beautiful Angela's Ashes-type stuff about growing up in Edinburgh, but ultimately we couldn't agree on what the book should be, and how we could move it on.'"

Connery's publisher says that the forthcoming time, Being a Scot, "fuses Connery's own experiences, including his acting career, with his efforts to track down what Scots have given to the world in art, science, and sport." This loose, baggy description really does make it sound like Songs My Mother Taught Me with a burr. Connery once said that he wasn't inclined to discuss his life "because I realized I was going to be spending the rest of my life trying to correct the inaccuracies, and I can't be bothered." With his book completed and ready for market, he may only now be realizing that the "inaccuracies", or at least other people's side of things, will be bobbing to the surface whether he declines comment or not. Just last week, he had to suffer the indignity of responding to claims by Diane Cilento--once a fine, fiery actress (Hombre, The Wicker Man) before her own retirement in the 1980s, and Connery's first wife, from 1962 to 1973--that he had verbally abused and financially deprived their son, Jason. "Sean has a problem about relationships," said Cilento, "as everyone around him knows." For his part, Connery responded by calling his ex-wife "insane" and adding, "“I haven’t seen the woman in 37 years and she knows nothing about me or my life now. Diane can’t move on from the break up of our marriage and I have already had to contend with her accusations about me being violent towards her. Now the lies seem to be getting even more vicious, and, what is worse, she is dragging our son into it." For more juicy stuff, you can wait another month and read the book. Maybe.

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s last completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we examined the final performances and films of actors and directors that served as fitting capstones to their careers. This week, in a Top Ten list suggested by YOU (in the general sense, and "Other Matt" specifically), we present ten ignominious exits: the cinematic equivalent of dying on the toilet, suffered by artists who really deserved better.

Charles Chaplin's A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (1967)

Chaplin's previous film, A King in New York, had been made ten years earlier and was the last film in which he starred; it was a stillborn disaster, and would have qualified as a notably sad ending to his career in its own right if he hadn't managed to follow it up with this thing. But Countess, which he also wrote and produced, as well as having written the music and contributed a cameo appearance, is especially embarrassing for its timeless, packed-in-mothballs quality. It was, after all, made the same year as Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, yet you wouldn't guess from watching it that anything had happened in either filmmaking or the world at large since about 1949. The film's leading man is Marlon Brando, and you couldn't guess from his work here that he'd ever known livelier days, either. Brando was used to directors who welcomed his attempts to fuse elements of his personality with his characters, but Chaplin was an old-fashioned sort who had no truck with that kind of Method foolishness; anything the actors tried to bring in interfered with the clickety-clack of the script that he'd been running inside his head for years. Some people regard some of Brando's later performances as being synonymous with the term "self-indulgent": he stands accused of having undercut his own movies and made his colleagues' lives difficult by abandoning coherence and logic and doing whatever he felt like doing in the name of letting his freak flag fly. But even in something like The Island of Dr. Moreau, he's at least inventive and amusing, stuck in a hopeless project but trying to entertain the audience while he entertains himself. Chaplin's movie gives you the chance to see what Brando looked like when he'd abandoned all hope: chained to a stupid script (and the character name "Ogden Mears"), he slogs through his blocking and reels off his dialogue syllable by syllable, plainly just wanting it all to be over. It's a sign of how thoroughly Chaplin had lost touch with his creative instincts that, once he'd broken the actor of his early attempts to bring some of his own collaborative instincts and energy to the role, he claimed to find Brando's work delightful. A Countess from Hong Kong went over like a fart at a funeral with critics and audiences, but damned if Petula Clark didn't have a number one hit with a reworked version of the movie's theme song. The Beatles, having displaced Charlie as England's most popular international import, must have had a rueful chuckle over that.

Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)

Stanley Kubrick spent more than the last two years of his life working on this, his only film after 1987's Full Metal Jacket. He didn't just work at his accustomed glacial pace; he shot the film once, then recast two important supporting roles with different actors (with Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson stepping in for, respectively, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and shot much of it again. One fringe benefit of the production was that it unexpectedly took its star, Tom Cruise, out of circulation for a couple of movie seasons. Kubrick died a few days after a screening of what may or may not have been his ideal final version of the film for Cruise, his co-star and then-wife Nicole Kidman, and Warner Brothers executives. By then, the media, for lack of other Cruise-related news in the two and a half years since his Oscar-nominated turn in Jerry Maguire, had been flogging the picture so hard that they had at least as much invested in its success as the studio. The news of Kubrick's death ratcheted up the odds considerably: the thought that he had died while putting the finishing touches on something that might be less than his masterpiece was generally considered too morbid a thought to bear. Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999 amid a tsunami of hype, but since the movie itself was hard to stay awake through, the hype itself had a distinctive, abstract quality, given that it was easier to make the movie sound interesting if you sort of reviewed another, imaginary version of the actual picture. The most popular gambit was to devote great seas of ink to discussing whether the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole were the sexiest ever filmed or just the sexiest ever performed by an actual husband and wife; the topic was covered to such a degree that it inspired a backlash, which took the form not of people arguing that the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole weren't really all that sexy but instead, of people arguing that it actually made them uncomfortable to see two married actors going at it on screen, since for all the viewer knew, that might be what they really look like when they're going at it at home, thus raising all kinds of "T.M.I."-related issues. In order to understand just how desperate the hype merchants were to avoid discussing the actual movie, it helps to know that in all of Eyes Wide Shut's two hours and forty minutes, there is not a single sex scene between Tom and Nicole, unless you count a couple of minutes of pre-coital necking which takes place, appropriately enough given the personalities involved, while Tom and Nicole are staring at themselves in a mirror. Bolstered by this kind of Barnum-esque coverage, Eyes Wide Shut did respectable business until word of mouth overcame it and theater owners needed the space for extra screenings of The Blair Witch Project. The question of what Kubrick himself thought of his final film remains controversial, and when Full Metal Jacket star R. Lee Ermey dared to tell an interviewer that his old buddy Stan had told him shortly before his death that he had helmed "a piece of shit", many were quick to come down on the drill sergeant as if he had convened a meeting of all the children of the world to inform them that there is no Santa Claus.

Bette Davis in WICKED STEPMOTHER (1989)

No Hollywood star of the classic era worked harder than Bette Davis for good roles and sustained career longevity. In the 1930s, she breached her contract with Warner Bros. to take roles in English films and then unsuccessfully sued her studio, claiming that they were killing her career by forcing her to appear in "mediocre" films. When her career cooled as she entered middle age, she prankishly took out a classified newspaper ad reminding the industry of her availability. And as she grew elderly, she embraced a new movie image as a hag horror queen and became a not-infrequent guest star on series TV. Whether you admire this side of Davis as an undying devotion to the practice of her craft or see it as the egomania of a Madonna prototype whose life only seemed to be real so long as millions of people were paying attention to her -- and it was probably a little from column A and a little from column B -- it was almost fated to ultimately bite her in the ass, and the last big bite was Wicked Stepmother, a godforsaken "supernatural comedy" written and directed by Larry Cohen. Davis, who was 80 at the time of shooting, plays a witch who marries Lionel Stander and proceeds to turn his family topsy-turvy. Or at least that was the idea: Davis rankled the set after a week of shooting, putting out a statement saying that the script that she had agreed to perform was so bad it was unplayable and that Cohen was deliberately shooting her to look grotesque. For his part, Cohen announced to the press that his star had been too sick to work but was afraid that if her condition became common knowledge, no one would ever hire her again. A look at the movie provides solid evidence for both claims. Davis, frail and with her head topped by a gruesome-looking red wig, does look pretty bad, but even the healthy members of the cast seem on the verge of pitching over from the effects of having to deliver Cohen's dialogue. Whatever really happened, it's kind of amazing that the woman who once went toe-to-toe with Jack Warner might have thought that Larry Cohen would chivalrously watch her back after she'd walked out on him. (Instead of burning the precious footage he had of his famous star, Cohen rewrote the script to explain that Davis's character was now inhabiting the body of a cat and assigned her lines and business to a new character, her "daughter", played by Barbara Carrera.) Davis died a few months after Cohen's reupholstered version of the movie briefly surfaced, like pond scum, in theaters. The finished version includes a nasty in-joke involving Davis' old nemesis, Joan Crawford (whose own final film was the 1970 British scare picture Trog, in which Mommie Dearest co-starred with a dude in a frozen-faced monkey suit). That was pretty embarrassing, but given that Crawford had enough sense and self-restraint to retire after that and spend the last seven years of her life in virtual seclusion, we'd have to judge that Crawford wins that round on points.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ryan's Daughter (1970, David Lean)

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

By the late 1960s, old-fashioned epics had fallen on hard times. With the counterculture movement in full swing, fewer young moviegoers were interested in large-scale entertainments, with sweeping vistas and larger-than-life filmmaking. However, Hollywood has always been a little slow to catch up with popular tastes, and this led to a string of big-budget flops, as the roadshow musicals and bloated period pictures failed to rope in audiences who went wild for The Graduate and Easy Rider. But if anyone could still make an old-school epic under these circumstances, it was David Lean, coming off the award-winning blockbusters Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter wasn’t remotely up to the standard of the director’s best work.

From the beginning, Ryan’s Daughter had problems. The filmmakers took a suspiciously long time to cast the film, with name actors like Marlon Brando and Peter O’Toole turning down the role of the British Maj. Doryan before up-and-comer Christopher Jones was cast. But things got far worse once production began. Lean was a notorious perfectionist, often taking hours to set up a single shot, which angered several of the film’s stars, with Leo McKern commenting, “I don’t like to be paid 500 pounds a week for sitting down and playing Scrabble.” And Jones’ acting talent- or, more appropriately, the lack thereof- caused friction between him and both Lean and leading lady Sarah Miles.

Of course, stories like this are nothing new in show business. Moreover, had the movie turned out well none of this would have mattered. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter was a flop with critics and audiences, to the point that Lean didn’t direct another film for more than a decade. The film is a lumbering bore, without so much as an interesting character to hold the audience’s interest. Naturally, this being a Lean movie, Ryan’s Daughter is often gorgeous to look at, but that’s hardly enough to tide the audience over for upwards of three hours.

In fact, I’d say the visuals are part of the problem, or more accurately, that Lean cares more for the pictoral beauty of the film than he does for the people who inhabit it. Now, I realize that this criticism has also been levied at several films of another notorious perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick. The difference is that if you look at films such as 2001 and Barry Lyndon, you’ll see that Kubrick’s style demands a degree of distance from the characters, and the visuals are a large part of this. By contrast, Lean means to tell a human story in Ryan’s Daughter, and this distance only hinders his ability to do so.

Consider the early scene in which Rosy Ryan (played by Miles) sees her former teacher Charles Shaughnessy (Mitchum) after he comes home from a conference in Britain. As Rosy has long felt love for Charles- the man she will eventually marry, mind you- you’d think it might be good to see her reaction to his arrival. However, Lean’s staging of the event is so clumsy that he forgets to show us. One minute, Rosy is alone at the shoreline, then suddenly Lean cuts to an extreme long shot as Charles walks into the frame, so that they’re hardly more than specks on the beach moving toward each other. It’s only after they come together and begin talking that he cuts to their conversation. I wish I could say this was atypical of Lean’s style in Ryan’s Daughter, but this isn’t the case. Time and again, Lean’s characters are upstaged by the landscapes that surround them.

Then again, perhaps extreme long shots would’ve been the best way to deal with Christopher Jones, so that the audience couldn’t have seen how untalented and inexpressive an actor he was. Of course, this was hardly the first time a director was faced with the challenge of a difficult leading man, but Lean never figures out how to successfully work around this. Initially, the film gives most of Jones’ dialogue to a subordinate, but once he embarks on his affair with Rosy this becomes impossible, so Lean resorts to swelling music, longing glances from Miles, and cutaways to nature. But worst of all are the scenes in which Maj. Doryan flashes back to the battlefield- Jones screws up his face and flails around, but never convinces us that there’s anything underneath the surface. Jones’ performance is so inept that our antipathy toward him extends to the character itself, and by extension to Rosy, who by forsaking Robert Mitchum for this clown looks less like an impetuous youth than a horny little fool.

Speaking of fools, if Christopher Jones’ performance is inept, John Mills’ is downright embarrassing. Mills plays Michael, a local oaf who sadly has nobody to grapple with, in what surely has to be one of the most ignominious performances ever to net an Oscar. But even if Mills’ hammy turn isn’t completely Lean’s fault, the way the character is used has to be, as Michael functions as a comic mirror to the events of the story, eavesdropping on the lovers and following them around at pivotal moments. It’s a cheesy touch on the part of Lean and frequent screenwriter Robert Bolt, one that they should have known better than to include.

All of this isn’t to say that Ryan’s Daughter doesn’t have good points. For one thing, Miles’s and Mitchum’s performances would distinguish a film that told this story on a more intimate level (especially Mitchum’s). However, Lean’s style here is so unnecessarily grandiose that we lose sight of any reason why we should care about them or anything else we see onscreen. By the time the film actually justifies the magnitude of its scope, it’s far too late. There’s a spectacular sequence in which the townspeople aid a band of IRA fighters in bringing weapons ashore in the middle of a storm. But impressive though it is, all I could think of was how difficult it must have been to film. And that’s just about the last thing one should be thinking about during a scene like this.

Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

From somewhere near the intersection of Hype and Necrophilia comes this AP report assessing a dead guy’s Oscar chances for a performance none of us regular folk have seen yet. I realize it’s rare to find anything crass or tasteless about the Academy Awards, but even by the usual standards this piece sticks in my craw. (And I really like to keep my craw free of offending blockages.)

In case you’ve been doing missionary work with that recently discovered tribe in the Amazon, it seems that Heath Ledger, who died in January, plays the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight. Within minutes of his death there were murmurs about a possible posthumous Oscar nomination, but that was before anyone had seen his performance. Now that a few insiders have seen it, the murmurs have become a dull roar that promises to become much, much duller but totally inescapable over the next six months or so.

“Jack Nicholson's Joker was a blast,” writes David Germain. “Heath Ledger's Joker is as dark and anarchic a figure as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the role that brought Nicholson his first Academy Award. Ledger's performance in the Batman tale The Dark Knight is so remarkable that next Jan. 22, the one-year anniversary of his death, he could become just the seventh actor in Oscar history to earn a posthumous nomination.”

Germain goes on to quote an assortment of luminaries, all of whom agree that Ledger is Brando, Olivier, Nicholson and Cesar Romero all rolled into one. I hope it’s true, and I am looking forward to the movie and the performance, although the hype is beginning to make my left eye twitch uncontrollably. Is there not something a little unseemly about the need to turn Ledger into another James Dean? Germain writes, “The aura surrounding Ledger since his death is a sign that, like Dean, he could endure as a mythic figure of talent silenced before his time…That will not necessarily improve his Oscar chances. Dean had two shots after his death and lost both.” Gee, he must have been all broken up about that.

Related:
The Joker's Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?
Batman: The Lost Years

Take Five: Gotta Get A Guru

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Mike Myers' not-so-glorious return to the big screen, The Love Guru -- also known as Austin Powers IV and Verne Troyer's Pleading E-Mails Finally Pay Off -- opens everywhere today, and critics couldn't be more disappointed. Not only is it reported to be low on laughs, it's also being criticized as being high on stereotypes; despite his alleged friend and idol Deepak Chopra coming to his aid, Myers has been attacked for his stereotyping of Asian Indians and his portrayal of a cartoonish, caricatured guru. But let's face it: Hollywood has always loved its gurus, spiritual masters, and wise old mystics from the subcontinent. Hardly had the Beatles falled under the influence of the Maharishi than Hollywood followed suit; here's a look at some of the more memorable wise men of the East that the movie business has given us.

THE LOVED ONE (1965)

One of the few countercultural satires from the 1960s to hold up in the modern era, Tony Richardson's The Loved One holds up for two reasons: first, it was based on an Evelyn Waugh novel from nearly two decades prior and isn't quite as tarred, as a result, by the hippie-dippie vibe of its time; and second, it's got an impeccable crew behind the camera, from Richardson to cinematographer Haskell Wexler to skilled, hip screenwriters Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern. This satire of capitalism run amok in the funereal industry crams so many jokes into its two-hour running time that it's almost impossible to keep up with them all, but make sure you don't miss gravel-throated character actor Lionel Stander as the Guru Brahmin, one of the first-ever big-screen gurus -- and one of the first to be portrayed as a bumbling fraud.

CANDY (1968)

This big-screen adaptation of the Mason Hoffenberg novel (actually the infamous Terry Southern writing under a pseudonym) is generally regarded as a major failure. It's not that there weren't talented people involved -- besides Southern himself, and his co-writer Buck Henry, the cast is crammed with fine actors -- but the entire film seems to go off the rails from the very start. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't plenty of bizarre treats for those with the energy to sit through it. This updating of Voltaire's Candide is purely Southern in the sense that authority figures are always portrayed as phony, venal, and couching some grotesque habits or appetites. In this instance, we're treated to the the sight of the monstrour Grindl -- a sex-crazed Hindu guru played by an overheated Marlon Brando -- putting the poor, put-upon Candy in yet another compromising position.

THE PARTY (1968)

All right, so technically, Peter Sellers' Hrundi V. Bakshi ("That is what my name is called") in the Blake Edwards farce The Party isn't a guru. (That title more rightly belongs to Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Sellers in 1979's Being There.) But he is Indian, sort of, and he does speak in Hindi platitudes that those around him mistake for pearls of inscrutable eastern wisdom. For example, when asked who he thinks he is, he responds, "In India, we do not think who we are. We know who we are." Whoa, heavy. The rest of the movie is pretty much straight-up Blake Edwards comic fare, and it falls flat on the stereotypes at times, but a few scenes are still paralytically funny forty years later, especially when a stoned Bakshi comes across a parakeet cage and solemnly intones the name of the birdseed: "Birdy Num Num."

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)

In this stunning, surreal, and nearly incomprehensible masterpiece by ultimate provocatuer Alejandro Jodorowsky, the guru is Horacio Salinas, a Christlike thief who is half savior and half mountebank. Under the tutelage of the Alchemist, a mysterious figure played by Jodorowsky himself, he and his gang of mystical banditos -- each named for a different celestial body -- plan nothing less than an assault on Heaven, where they will depose the reigning gods and take their places. Visually, this is exactly the sort of film people talk about when they talk about crazy European art films: it's bewildering, deliberately offensive, totally impenetrable, and weird for the sake of being weird. It's also absolutely brilliant, and Jodorowsky -- who's the real guru here -- shows us what it might be like inside the mind of the truly enlightened -- and it alternately makes us gasp at its beauty and scares the hell out of us.

HOLY SMOKE (1999)

Jane Campion's weirdest movie -- which, if you think about it, is really saying something -- features the always-engaging Kate Winslet in the role of a young woman who decides to embark on a quest for spiritual self-discovery in the Indian subcontinent. Along the way, she encounters the guru Chiddaatman Baba (played by Dhritiman Chatterjee) and falls under his sway -- and that's just where the movie begins. From there, she is confronted by Harvey Keitel as a deprogrammer -- sorry, "cult exiter" -- hired by her family to get her back, and discovers that he's not without his own guru-like tendencies. A battle of wills, intellects and bodies ensue over the terrain of feminism, spirituality and sexuality, and the movie degenerates into a bit of a chaotic mess, but it's at least a glorious mess with two terrific actors like Keitel and Winslet at the fore.

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DESERT HEARTS (1985)

Unlike the much-heralded 1982 Olympic-athletes-in-love drama Personal Best, 1985’s lower-profile lesbian romance Desert Hearts (based on a novel by Jane Rule) was (A) actually directed by a woman (Donna Deitch) and (B) depicted a love story where neither participant ultimately winds up going back to a man after a tentative Sapphic fling. Like Marilyn Monroe’s character years before in The Misfits, Helen Shaver’s restrained English professor Vivian Bell finds herself in Reno, Nevada, sweating out the state’s six-week residency requirement in order to obtain a quick divorce from her husband. While killing time in a no-boys-allowed guest house (run by Jack Tripper’s old landlady, Audra Lindley), Vivian meets a free spirit named Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and, much to her own surprise, discovers an intense spiritual and sexual connection she never experienced with the XY chromosome set. Given the don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists mindset of the story’s 1959 setting, Vivian isn’t even entirely aware that she’s been living in a closet, but once she’s out, her feelings trump her fears of a life less ordinary, and she invites Cay to follow her back to New York, and Cay admits that Vivian “reached in and put a string of lights” around her heart, one of the great swoony lines in the annals of romantic cinema.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)

A funny, real-life detective yarn, a brief history of film and a timely exposé of American cultural hypocrisy...all that AND a compendium of notorious, uncensored sex scenes? What's not to like? This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a gotcha! documentary in the Super Size Me tradition, where the filmmaker explores a larger topic by subjecting himself to a series of misadventures. In this case, the subject is the shadowy, puritanical Motion Picture Association of America, an unelected, unimpeachable board which subtly shapes our national cultural agenda by determining which films (and values) are "family-friendly" and which are marginalized by means of the current G-PG-PG13-R-NC17 ratings system. Combining movie clips and filmmaker interviews, director Kirby Dick demonstrates how the MPAA habitually demonizes sex in movies (particularly the homo- variety) while letting violence slide...but the real fun of the movie is watching the ironically-named Dick track down the secretive MPAA board members together with a spunky private detective (who, coincidentally but with obvious thematic irony, also happens to be a lesbian mother) before submitting the very film you're watching to the very group it's about for a rating in a great meta moment of "Fuck You" brio.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

Long before the "Don't ask, don't tell" era, a Southern army post was probably the least healthy environment for a deeply closeted homosexual imaginable. That's certainly the case in John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which pretty much every character has a psychosexual hang-up of some sort. Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, whose pride is entirely tied up in being something he's not: a portrait of courage, a leader of men. Elizabeth Taylor is his wife Leonora, one of the all-time ballbusters, and she's definitely got his number. "Firebird is a horse," he grumbles one morning, annoyed at his wife's devotion to the animal. "Firebird is a stallion," she hisses, and though it may have taken the 1967 audience a while to catch on (the words "gay" or "homosexual" are never mentioned – probably couldn't be mentioned), Penderton could hardly feel more emasculated if she horsewhipped him across the face in front of his colleagues – which she later does. A pent-up bottle of rage and self-loathing (he rides a horse like he's got the post's flagpole up his ass), Penderton finally pops his cork when he catches the object of his obsession, a hunky but dim young soldier played by Robert Forster in his movie debut, in his wife's bedroom sniffing through her undies. The movie's ending is a bit overheated, but Brando is brilliantly bizarre as a gay man who is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975)

He certainly wasn’t the first gay filmmaker, but a legitimate argument can be made that the brilliant German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder was the first gay filmmaker of importance. Fassbinder himself was openly gay, and homosexuality often played a part in his films, whether obviously or subtly, but Fox and His Friends was the first movie he made where a homosexual romance was the centerpiece of the plot. More importantly, though, as the director stressed in interviews, the gayness of the characters is not “a problem, or a comic term”. Fassbinder wanted nothing more – and nothing less – than to bring us a moving, tragic soap opera romance in which the main characters were not heterosexual. To accomplish this, he had to make the movie extremely personal (he filmed many of its scenes in the gay Berlin demimonde he frequented in his private life, and he chose to play the character of naïve working-class lottery winner Fox Biberkopf himself), but he also had to ensure that the movie would neither humiliate nor glorify its gay characters. In order for it to work, he had to show that gays were just as noble, as innocent, and as decent as other people, but he also had to show that they were just as base, as manipulative and as cruel as other people. The result is a masterpiece that contains everything that is great about Fassbinder as a director, and one of the most sad and human stories in the history of film drama: what Fox gives up for love, and the way his need for acceptance and affection leads him to ruin, resonates universally. That’s what good movies – be they ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – are supposed to do.

BEN-HUR (1959)

One of the most iconic gay performances in cinema history came from a man who not only wasn’t gay, but apparently had no idea he was supposed to be playing a gay character, and when he found out, vehemently denied it for decades. The story goes that director William Wyler and screenwriter Gore Vidal found the notion that Messala and Judah Ben-Hur would have been so close, only to come to a position of extreme hatred over a fairly arcane dispute over politics, a tad hard to believe. Vidal, whose reputation as a bit of a troublemaker has never been a secret, came up with the notion that the two men had been lovers when they were young, and their split was not over politics, but over Ben-Hur’s eventual rejection of Messala. Wyler thought it was worth a shot, and while the two men discussed it with Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, they dared not bring the subject up with Heston, who was none too fond of gays. Naturally, the script never directly mentioned the situation either, but given the way Heston’s adult Ben-Hur interacts with Messala (the result, according to both Vidal and Boyd, of precise wording in the script and careful direction from Wyler), it’s a bit hard to believe that Heston couldn’t figure out that something was going on. Still, for reasons of his own, Heston spent the next forty years as the sole representative of the “I did not play a homo in Ben-Hur” position, going so far as to deny Gore Vidal had anything to do with the finished script of the film – a claim Vidal handily disproved, using, among other things, passages in Heston’s own autobiography as a source.

Click here to read Part One, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Screengrab Movie Vacations #2: Pagsanjan, Philippines

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Back in 1994, I spent five weeks in the Philippines working on a video game adaptation of a pretty bad D-list Michael Dudikoff action movie called Soldier Boyz (along with future directors Darren Aronofsky and Jed Weintrob).

At one point during my sojourn, the cast and crew of the game and movie lodged at the Pagsanjan Rapids Hotel, where (I was excited to learn) Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper and Francis Ford Coppola had all stayed during some of the endless production phase of Apocalypse Now. Later, of course, I learned that just about every hotel in the Philippines claims Brando, Hopper and Coppola slept there, but there’s no doubt the Pagsanjan River was one of the key locations in the film, and a darn fine destination for the cinematically-inclined adventure travelers amongst you.

If you wind up taking this particular Screengrab Movie Vacation, you could do worse than the Pagsanjan Rapids Hotel. The open air lobby features a bar stocked with San Miguel beer and looks out on a majestic, exotic tableau like the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, just before the napalm explosions: palm trees, a raging river, water buffalo grazing in the distance and, if you’re lucky, a rainbow.

You can book a boat ride on the Pagsanjan River and leave straight from the hotel, drifting downstream like Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard past dramatic, vegetation-choked steps (the only remains of Colonel Kurtz’s Temple of Doom), surrounded on all sides at all times by hucksters in canoes trying to sell you trinkets (like the carved tiki-head ashtray I purchased that blows smoke out its mouth when there’s a cigarette in the dish).

The river ride ends at Pagsanjan Falls, where your friendly, hard-working boatmen will probably expect you to buy them lunch...and trust me, several miles downriver from your hotel in a foreign country isn't the best time to suddenly turn cheapskate...then its back upriver for garlic adobo rice (mmm!!!!) and more San Miguels. For more information on Pagsanjan, check out backpackingphilippines.com, and stay tuned for our next exciting Screengrab Movie Vacation destination: Devil’s Tower, Wyoming!