The Screengrab : montgomery clift

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

My friends, last week in this space we paid tribute to the Top 10 films of the late, lamented Paul Newman, one of our favorite movie stars of all time...which, not surprisingly, got us thinking about the very qualities that separate the film industry’s classic, iconic Leading Men – the true gods of the silver screen – from, say, Shia LaBeouf.

My friends, I ask you: what is that special something, that ephemeral je nes sais quoi that makes for a truly great Leading Man? Is it talent? Sex appeal? Box office clout? Are we drawn more to the stars who remind us of ourselves or those who embody exactly the qualities we lack (but do our best to imitate in hopes of meeting girls)? Do the off-screen good deeds and/or drunken racist ranting and/or pro-Xenu proselytizing of the men behind the movies matter? Do we forgive the occasional bombs and missteps in a long, prolific career, or do we prefer a shorter resume packed with performances of a generally higher quality? And do foreigners count?

My friends, these difficult questions led to much consternation and debate within the hallowed halls of The Screengrab...but in the end, we all came together as a website, setting aside our individual differences to bring you this historic document, our bipartisan, multilateral picks for THE TOP 25 LEADING MEN OF ALL TIME!

25. FRANK SINATRA (1915-1998)

Sinatra's movie career had three distinct acts. In the 1940s, as a young singing heartthrob, he starred in such godawful musicals as Step Lively and The Kissing Bandit while dabbling with "acting" (as the kids call it nowadays) in such roles as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells. Some twenty years later, with his stardom set in concrete, he got paid for palling around on-screen with his buddies in such stuff as the original Ocean's Eleven and 4 for Texas, as well as for honoring his serious (or at least his self-serious) side by allowing his grumpy mid-life crisis to be recorded on camera in such downers as The Detective and The Naked Runner. But in between, starting with the famously career-reviving supporting performance as Maggio in From Here to Eternity, Sinatra had a good, solid career as a leading actor, a period which includes his political-assassination double feature of The Manchurian Candidate and the lesser-known 1954 Suddenly, in which he invades a house and plans to take out the president from a conveniently placed window. This period also included his best co-starring gig with Dean Martin in Some Came Running, his vividly sweaty impersonation of the nightclub comic Joe E. Lewis in The Joker Is Wild, and (especially) his rhythmic, convincing embodiment of a junkie poker dealer in The Man with the Golden Arm. The trick to getting work of this caliber out of Sinatra seems to have been that he felt in danger of fading away and washing out -- or at least becoming just another rich, famous entertainer -- and he had to deliver, a feeling that gave a charge to everything he did...for a while. When he felt his confidence return, he knew he wasn't going anywhere and so, in movies at least, he turned into a coaster. Maybe it's too bad that some way couldn't have been found to throw a good scare into him every ten years or so. But how the hell are you going to scare somebody after they've agreed to star in Dirty Dingus Magee, and even that check has cleared?

24. MONTGOMERY CLIFT (1920-1966)

James Dean was a tragic figure, but Montgomery Clift was a doomed one. When he finally died in 1966 (of arterial sclerosis, though his former acting teacher called it a slow-motion suicide), he was readying to play a lead role in Reflections in a Golden Eye opposite his friend Elizabeth Taylor; Marlon Brando took over the role. The two had a lot in common, including searingly handsome faces that would eventually be scarred by their self-destructive behavior and ill health, and a propensity for masterfully portraying emotionally complex working-class characters. That Brando was, at the time, considered the more stable of the two gives some indication of just how fucked up Monty Clift was. Brought up in an abusive family situation, wracked his entire life by ill health, and paralyzed by guilt over his own homosexuality and drug addiction, Clift was beloved by half of Hollywood and despised by the other half. So ruined was both his body and his career by the early ‘60s that he nearly became, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, the third Hollywood legend to make The Misfits their final film. Happily, Clift survived just long enough to turn in a riveting performance in Judgment at Nuremberg, but the cards were dealt for him almost from the time he was born. He didn’t live past 45, and for someone who had such a great reputation as an actor during his prime, he made precious few movies – only 17 total, and a dozen as the lead. But he left hardly a screen credit that didn’t make a lasting impression, and his legacy, curiously enough, can be seen in music: a number of bands have written songs about poor doomed Monty, including R.E.M. (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”), Jets to Brazil (“Conrad”), and the Clash (“The Right Profile”).

23. JAMES CAGNEY (1899-1986)

Cagney was originally cast as the sidekick to the hero in his first big picture, The Public Enemy, but after the director, William Wellman, saw the rushes from the first day's shoot, he had a rude shock when he discovered that nobody could take their eyes off the runty smartass guy who wasn't supposed to be the star. It is a tribute to the common-sensical, whatever-works spirit of the early talkies that Wellman, rather than agonize over this perturbing situation, marched onto the set the next day and simply informed the two actors that they'd be swapping parts. Anybody who wanted to establish, with as little effort as possible, that the movies are probably the work of the devil could do worse than to screen a few of Cagney's choicest gangster movies -- say, The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, and his middle-aged kiss-off to the genre, White Heat. In these films, Cagney emanates danger and energy as naturally as an electrified fence, and his satisfaction in being able to discharge his anger in ways that are unpleasant for the people he's discharging it all over is deeply unwholesome, but no actor in history has ever been more dependably watchable. A veteran of the vaudeville stage, he used a dancer's physicality, as well as his natural likability and an unpredictable streak ot dark wit, to keep his tough guys from ever seeming like mere brutes or bullies. He had range, and he tore it up in his hoofers' musicals, including the movie he was proudest of, the George M. Cohan musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy. But he remains chiefly identified as old Hollywood's favorite unromantic urban tough guy. (Bogart, who he shot full of lead in a couple of movies, has the romantic division sewn up.)

22. BURT LANCASTER (1913-1994)

Lancaster established his stardom as a big manly hunk of action star, but he's endured better than many of the trigger-happy lunks who starred in Hollywood action pictures, because he was both a throwback to the days of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and a predecessor to the gravity-defying stars of Hong Kong martial arts movies. A former gymnast, Lancaster had turned to acting after an injury cut short his career as a circus acrobat, and in such movies as The Crimson Pirate (co-starring his former circus partner, Nick Cravat, who appeared in nine of Lancaster's movies, and who died the same year Burt did) and Carol Reed's Trapeze, he demonstrated that it was possible for a big man to spin and pirouette through the air in ways that were not dreamt of in John Wayne's philosophy. At first, other aspects of the actor's art, such as speaking dialogue and making it through a whole scene without yawning, came less naturally to him than dancing in mid-air, but Lancaster, a long-range-plan kind of guy, became interested in developing the skills that would enable him to keep his career going when he could somersault no more. He also seemed to think that it would be a useful thing to make a few movies that would be good enough that he could stand to look at himself in the mirror the day after the premiere. In some of the "serious" pictures he made (The Devil's Disciples, The Rose Tattoo, Come Back, Little Sheba, Birdman of Alcatraz) when he was still in his beefcake prime, Lancaster seemed to be sponsoring his own on-the-job-training acting course. The training paid off when Luchino Visconti offered him the role of the prince in the 1963 epic masterpiece The Leopard, arguably the finest work of his career and one more film that likely wouldn't have been made at all without Lancaster's participation. Infuriatingly, The Leopard would not be seen in its full, uncut majesty in the United States until 1983. However, there was something fitting about that, because by the time it did arrive here, Lancaster's work in Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1981) and Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), to name two, had established him as one of the great old men of the movies, a weathered but still-beautiful oak of a man whose courtly bearing seemed to mark him as an emissary from a better time.

GARY COOPER (1901-1961)

Gary Cooper is one of the greatest stars in Hollywood history, and yet he never strayed very far from one very basic role. That was both the upside and the downside of the old star system; it may have prevented more versatile actors from taking on roles that would have let them break out of their public personality, but it also kept stars of somewhat limited talents thriving by letting them play to their strengths. Cooper the actor wasn’t hard to define: he was the straight-shooting, simple fella who might not have been too bright, but damn it, he knew what was right, and he was going to do what was best no matter what. He essentially filled that narrow role again and again throughout his career, mostly in the Westerns that made him famous; it was a limitation he recognized, but probably never fully accepted. When the roles within that archetype were good enough, when they were handled by capable directors and backed up with good supporting casts, you could see why Gary Cooper became a legend: as Alvin York in Sergeant York, as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, and most especially, and unforgettably, as Will Kane in High Noon, he didn’t so much transcend his limitations as an actor as he did fill out the outlines of his role with complete perfection, with nothing left out. In life, Cooper was a much more complex and contradictory character than any of the roles he played on screen, but the biggest contradiction of all is that the actor, with all his shortcomings, will be remembered long after the man is forgotten.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)

Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

19. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)

When Truffaut delivered his famed advice about the impossibility of anti-war film, he might as well have been talking about movies like The Great Escape. Not that it’s anything even remotely like an anti-war film: though its final moments contain some of the futility and brutality of war, they’re aimed squarely at the enemy, and the movie itself is a pure, unvarnished celebration of movie-style heroism and the fighting man at his best. But when Truffaut noted that action argues only for itself, this is the sort of thing he meant: even the ultimate futility of the real-life escape attempt fictionalized by John Sturges in this WWII classic is swept away on the back of all the thrilling set pieces, cunning scenes of calculation, defiant acts of heroism, and sheer thrilling action. Even if you know what’s going to happen to the individual escapees in the end, you can’t help but get caught up in the excitement of it all again and again, borne along by Elmer Bernstein’s unforgettable score and some larger-than-life performances by the likes of Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve “Hey, Guys, Let’s Throw a Motorcycle Chase Scene in Here, Why Not?” McQueen. Even the poster knew what it was selling, tagging the movie as “THE GREAT ENTERTAINMENT,” putting a good-times spin on the 30-years-later words of a rapper who issued his grim tales of ghetto warfare under the telling title Your Entertainment, My Reality. The Great Escape even spawned a genre of epic war pictures that clung to its formal elements: the dangerous-secret-mission plot, the all-star cast arrayed on boxes on the poster, all given colorful nicknames, the overblown heist-movie action elements. But the lousy quality of most of its imitators shouldn’t be held against it: its ‘reality’ may have been pure fantasy, but you can’t watch despairing anti-war pictures all the time.

18. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

This awesomely well-executed slab of 1950s melodrama is based on the first novel by soldier turned writer James Jones, and it isn't actually set in wartime: it chronicles the frustrations and tensions that are building among the men killing time at a military base in Hawaii in 1941, which will explode when the Japanese attack on December 7. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's scene on the beach deserves an automatic inclusion in any montage of legendary screen make-out scenes, and Frank Sinatra's supporting performance as the uncontainable Maggio more than justified both his career comeback and the gangsters-got-him-that-job rumors that were set in stone in the early scenes of The Godfather. (Even though, sadly, the rumors probably weren't true; it's more likely that Ava Gardner got him that job.) But the movie belongs to Montgomery Clift's beautiful performance as the doomed bugler Robert E. Lee Pruitt, who loves the army and can only say, when it's pointed out that the army is making his life miserable, "A man loves a thing, that don't mean it's gotta love him back." Which is pretty good advice no matter what you love, especially if it's the movies.

17. BEFORE THE RAIN (1994)

This Macedonian film, written and directed by Milčo Mančevski, shows how the passions that war thrives on spill over uncontainably into the lives of people who want no part of them. The Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija plays a burned out war photographer who, after being affected by a violent ourburst in supposedly civilized London, goes home to retire in the Macedonian countryside and finds that the remote village that represents peace and tranquility to him has been split by civil war and the woman he left behind lives in fear for her daughter's life. The powerful-looking, bearded Šerbedžija does about as good a job as any actor ever has at suggesting an intelligently troubled man's desire for a peaceful life, and his feeling that no alternative could be worth living.

16. ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)

(See #11)

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

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Summerfest '08: "Suddenly Last Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Last week on Summerfest '08, we brought you a ripe slice of faux-Tennessee Williams by way of William Faulkner, with the overheated 1958 steamer The Long Hot Summer. This week, we're cutting out the middleman and bringing you actual Tennessee Williams -- or as actual as Tennessee Williams could get given the restrictive studio censorship of the 1950s -- with Suddenly Last Summer. As if reacting to a thrown-down gauntlet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a year after The Long Hot Summer debuted, said "Oh yeah? We'll just see about that!", and brought in an even more dysfunctional cast to film an even more flowery tale of sexual repression with an even more transparently, and yet never explicitly, gay subtext than Hollywood was previously willing to put up with. If you think all this sublimated gayness, sweaty sexuality, and boiled-over Freudianism is pretty heavy water for a frivolous feature about movies with the word 'summer' in the title to carry, well, blame Hollywood, not us -- apparently there's something about the months from May to September that gets producers and directors all moist and lascivious. If someone out there has access to a university press, there's probably a good thesis floating around about why, exactly, "summer blockbuster" has transitioned in meaning these last few decades from "steamy romance about forbidden love" to "movie with lots of CGI where stuff gets blown all to shit". It probably says something profound about our culture, unless it doesn't.

Anyway, let's get on with the latest forbidden fruit in our cinematic basket: crack open some cognac, find yourself a nice Mediterranean beach on which to lounge, and join us for a viewing of Suddenly Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Catherine Holley (played by a luscious-looking Liz Taylor) has just returned from Europe, where she has gone all wiggy. Apparently, while she was visiting, her cousin Sebastian, played by nobody because we never see him, was killed under mysterious circumstances, and the whole thing was just too, too unpleasant and caused Catherine to have a nervous breakdown. Once she starts to recover, she makes cryptic but extremely disturbing comments about Sebastian's demise, which rubs his mom (played by Katherine Hepburn as the wonderfully named Mrs. Violet Venable) the wrong way. Violet insists that Sebastian was a very nice young man and a deeply sensitive artist and that's all there is to that, and when Catherine insists that there was something peculiar about the lad, she is instructed to shut her yapper or have it shut for her, in the person of professional psychiatrist and lobotomy practitioner Montgomery Clift. Eventually the truth comes out, or as much of the truth as the producers were allowed to show at the time: Sebastian was murdered by his neighbors for his predatory sexual practices, and Catherine -- like Violet before her -- was being used by the nefarious fellow as his procurer. (In fact, what is only hinted at in the movie is made explicit in the play: Sebastian was a pederast at worst and a seducer of young men at best, who was not only killed by his neighbors, but eaten by them as well. Creepy!)

THE PLAYERS: As if the plot of the movie, with its pedophilia, murder, pimping, lobotomies and cannibalism wasn't a big enough bummer, apparently the behind-the-scenes action was soaked in bad vibes as well. Pretty much everyone involved in the production of Suddenly Last Summer hated each other with a capital H: Katherine Hepburn hated Elizabeth Taylor for stealing her spotlight. Elizabeth Taylor hated Joseph L. Manckiewicz for mistreating her friend Monty Clift. Manckiewicz hated Clift for his alcoholism, bad behavior and unprofessional demeanor. Producer Sam Spiegel hated Montgomery Clift because he was gay. And the screenplay was co-written by Gore Vidal, who basically hates everyone on general principles. Clift had been in a horrible car accident on his way to Taylor's home before filming began, and the treatment he received (and dished out) on the set helped send him into a downward spiral from which he would never recover; and Taylor, on the end of a prolonged stretch as America's sweetheart, gained a reputation for difficulty during the filming of Suddenly Last Summer that would dog her throughout the 1960s and beyond.

SUMMER FUN: There's less fun going on here than in any film we've yet reviewed as part of Summerfest '08. Even Ingmar Bergman comes across as a good-time party happenin' kind of dude compared to the dour demeanours and permanent trauma expressed on screen in this bummer in the summer. Between Sebastian getting eaten by his neighbor and Liz and Kate being posthumously unmasked as gay pimps, no one is particularly enjoying themselves in this movie, not even the normally impish Gore Vidal. The one guy who has something to do in the movie other than feel sorry for himself is the psychiatrist played by Montgomery Clift, who if nothing else has the golden opportunity to run a couple of million volts through Liz Taylor's thinkbox, but even that doesn't seem to get him very excited.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Folks, this movie stars Montgomery Clift as a brain specialist. He ain't wearing no Hawaiian shirts. We never get to see Sebastian, but it's a pretty fair bet he would prefer to have been killed and eaten to wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Albert "Dr. Cyclops" Dekker, who in perfect keeping with the tone of the film was a closeted homosexual who died of autoerotic asphyxiation with hypodermic needles jutting out of his arms and curse words written on his body, appears in Suddenly Last Summer, and while he might conceivably owned a Hawaiian shirt, he's certainly not wearing one here. Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams likely never touched a Hawaiian shirt in their entire lives. This is possibly the least Hawaiian-shirt-friendly summer movie ever made.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Although the film is set in the 1930s, the fashions are all contemporary to when it was made, in 1959. And that's good, if for no other reason than it allows us to take a gander at the lovely Liz Taylor bedecked in a white bikini when seeing Liz Taylor in a bikini was still a very desirable thing. Of course, there isn't much of it -- the movie was made from a stage play, and almost all of the action still takes place indoors -- and she isn't exactly having a party in her bikini as she is sitting around feeling suicidal and blathering on and on about how her gay cousin was killed and eaten by teenagers. Still, in a movie as relentlessly bleak as Suddenly Last Summer, you take what you can get. Party on!

Summerfest '08: "Summer School"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's critics who look at the world through rose-colored glasses. The minute I hear someone gassing on about how movies used to be better back in the old days (always, coincidentally, when they were young), my eyes glaze over and my ears cotton up. Of course, the bitch of it all is that I do this myself. Everyone does. In fact, I'm about to do it right now, with the latest installment of Summerfest '08 -- the exciting new Screengrab feature where we randomly select movies from the past with the word 'summer' in the title and review them in order to let you know if it's worth watching for a couple of hours while you're waiting for the guy to show up and fix your margarita machine. Objectively, there's really nothing better about the crap movies they put out when I was a teenager in the 1980s and the crap movies they put out now; the new stuff may be a tad coarser, in keeping with the tenor of the times, but it sure ain't any stupider. And, of course, the fact that I must have watched the 1987 Mark Harmon vehicle Summer School a couple of dozen times in my misspent post-high-school doldrums doesn't mean it's actually any kind of a good movie. But I have good memories of it, and if you're looking for a near-perfect exemplar of a very particular type of feel-good comedy produced in that neon-colored decade, you could do a lot worse.

So let's hand-press our surfer shirts, bleach our teeth, and check out the latest entry into Summerfest '08: Summer School!

THE ACTION: Freddy Shoop, a proto-slacker gym teacher who was once a quarterback at UCLA and managed to avoid getting all his perfect teeth knocked out, is looking forward to taking summer off at Ocean Front High School and spending the next three months gaping slack-jawed at surfer girls. Unfortunately, he is assigned to take control of a remedial English class, made up of a wide selection of teen-movie stereotypes (the loser, the slut, the nerd, the foreign exchange student, the pregnant girl, and so on). If he doesn't succeed in getting them to pass, the Earth will be hit with a meteorite and all life will be forever extinguished, or something. Will he be able to somehow inspire this ragtag group of misfits to apply themselves to their studies? Will they manage to serve a healthy dose of comeuppance to the stuffed-shirt principal? Will the disdainful, straight-laced lady teacher somehow overcome her disdain for Freddy and fall in love? Will hilarity ensue? The answer to these questions depends on whether or not you have ever seen a movie before.

THE PLAYERS: The man behind the camera here is veteran TV funnyman Carl Reiner, which is probably why the whole thing plays more like a good-natured sitcom that's been stretched out to triple length than it does a movie. Mark Harmon plays the male lead; he was actually a big TV star in 1987, for reasons that are lost to the mists of time. Kirstie Alley, looking lovely in her pre-Fat Actress days, plays his love interest as the two gleefully cavort around on screen just as if their careers aren't about to completely vanish. One of the teen stereotypes (that would be the slut) is played by a nubile young Courtney Thorne-Smith, whose TV career had not yet begun; it's sort of entertaining to watch her goof around in that period when she had no TV career thanks to not yet having had a big break rather than thanks to her career having dried up. Dean Cameron is the real standout here, stealing the show as Chainsaw, as much as this is a show capable of being stolen.

SUMMER FUN: One thing you cannot fault this movie for is a lack of summer fun. This movie is all about summer fun. It is virtually a primer in summer fun as interpreted by Hollywood screenwriters of the 1980s. Wearing sunglasses, playing cheeseball rock music (including a handful of choice tracks from the likes of Blondie, Rick James, and Oingo Boingo), driving around in fast cars, going to beach, getting a tan, making fun of one-dimensional authority figures, and re-enacting scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: it's all here. There's even some extremely mild sex and a dog wearing a lei. Someday, when our civilization has crumbled to dust, aliens will land on our dead world, and they will use this movie as Exhibit A in an outer space museum of history exhibit about Calfornia.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: In previous installments of Summerfest '08, Hawaiian shirt action has been, I am sad to say, sorely lacking. No so with Summer School, my friends. Mark Harmon is not big and fat, but he certainly is a party animal, and his Freddy Shoop is almost always clad in a Hawaiian shirt. But not just any Hawaiian shirt, oh goodness no! This is a genuine Duke Kahanamoku model he's sporting, of the exact same sort worn by Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity. Harmon liked it so much he added it to his personal collection, and can be seen on his somewhat more haggard frame in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fifteen years later.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: One of the subplots of the movie involves Courtney Thorne-Smith becoming homeless and shacking up with Harmon's character. Of course, she is forever trying to lure him into the sack, and of course, he is a noble fellow who would never dream of taking advantage of his innocent young charge, but for those of us in the audience who aren't quite so noble, we are treated to a number of shots of the ripe Ms. Thorne-Smith bikinied like there's no tomorrow. Additionally, goofball losers Chainsaw and Dave hatch a school project that involves going to the beach for the express purpose of seeing foreign exchange student Anna-Maria Mazarelli (played by former Miss Teen Italy Fabiana Udenio) in the latest swimwear. Hey, folks, it ain't Shakespeare, but as a sort of Platonic ideal of '80s summer-fun movies, Summer School is as good as it gets.