The Screengrab : noel coward

Screengrab Review: "Easy Virtue"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The new comedy Easy Virtue opens on an English country estate in the 1920s, a repressive, pastoral setting presided over by Kristin Scott Thomas as an icy matriarch with a burnt-out war veteran husband (Colin Firth) and a pair of marriageable daughters (Kimberley Nixon and Katherine Parkinson). This creaky idyll is about to be temporarily busted open by the appearance of the prodigal son (Ben Barnes) and his new bride, a American race car driver and widow played by Jessica Biel. The movie is the first in quite a while to be based on a play but Noel Coward, a dedicated entertainer who, in the name of meeting the great mass audience halfway, was willing to work in movies, even co-directing (with David Lean) In Which We Serve, the wartime stiff-upper-lip film that he starred in, wrote, and directed. But he didn't appreciate seeing the theater pieces that he thought of as his real works fiddled with and dumbed down for movie audiences, and after Hollywood turned his operetta Bitter Sweet into a Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald vehicle, he vowed to never have anything more to do with the place.

Easy Virtue, which was directed by Stephan Elliott, from a script (by Elliott and his usual writing partner, Sheridan Jobbins), that is carefully calibrated to bring the original material into line with an eight-year-old's idea of the mature Coward's style of debonair, fashionable entertainment, is a sterling testament to the old boy's good judgment. I had started wincing at the strained broadness and the sound of feet not quite hitting the marks intended early on, but I didn't realize just how low Elliott was prepared to sink until the doodling period-jazz score began to sound eerily familiar. It took me a second to recognize the theme from Car Wash in a quaint jazz-band arrangement. That wasn't the really shocking part; that came a few seconds later, when the faint sound of a vocalist appeared on the soundtrack, crooning about how you might not get rich but that, unlike sitting through this movie, it was still more pleasurable than digging a ditch. In other words, not only does this movie include a '20s-style version of the Car Wash theme, but the filmmakers kind if want you to notice that. They're not ashamed of it.

Elliott, the Australian director best known for the drag spree The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, fills Easy Virtue out with this kind of silly shtick, which serves to advertise his presumed superiority to the material even as it exposes his low opinion of his audience. It's a movie made by people who are drawn to period material because they think the past is just the ginchiest. The sets don't look lived in, and the costumes don't look as if they've been off the rack for more than a minute; if they did, it would interfere with the museum-quality atmosphere. Except that, in keeping with Elliott's taste for in-your-face booga-booga comic effects, it's a museum that doubles as a pop-up book. People make wide-eyed leering faces while reading "scandalous" classics such as Lady Chatterly's Lover, and hand each other newspapers while mentioning that Houdini has died. Kris Marshall plays the family butler, who in the time-honored tradition of drawing room comedies is forever signaling his sardonic awareness of his masters' idiocies. Marshall has aplomb and dexterity, and he might have been very funny if the audience were allowed to notice his impertinence out of the corner of the eye. Elliott lobs him into your lap, so that you get tired of him surprisingly fast.

It's Biel who has the worst time of it, though. Strappingly tall and athletic-looking, with the camera fixated on her pert nose and perfect white choppers, she passes for a member of a superior race, and that's probably the idea: the conquering heroine from America coming to the old mother country to offer the liberating power of her starshine to anyone smart and loose enough to want to accept it, which turns out to mostly be the hired help. (The aristocrats, especially the womenfolk, just feel threatened by her.) Biel isn't dislikable--though her blonde bob makes her seem less warm and friendly than her usual long brunette tresses--but she isn't funny and she never seems relaxed. This kind of material should be a vacation for accomplished performers to breeze through, looking glamorously turned-out while making their witty lines sing; that's how Scott Thomas and Firth play it. (Firth walks off with the movie, because he has the luck to play a character whose wartime experience has left him alienated from the soft, trivial social world around him, which gives Firth the excuse to look as if he's loftily above the bad movie everyone else is sunk in.) Biel looks like she's working hard, and she has no idea how to give shape and music to her lines; she just rattles them off, while looking relieved that she'd managed to remembered them.

And Elliott, while focusing on making sure that she always looks great, still manages to fail to protect her. When the harpies around Biel sneer at her for her composed reaction to a piece of gossip about the death of her first husband, Biel huffs through a puff of cigarette smoke that she isn't about to indulge in "amateur theatrics" just to impress them. When your leading lady is giving a sophisticated-modern-woman performance that looks as if it belongs in a high school play, maybe you should just cut the line about how she doesn't go in for amateur theatrics. Easy Virtue was filmed before, by Alfred Hitchcock, as a silent movie, and a number of people have used this new version as an excuse to marvel at how wrong-headed it was to turn such a dialogue-heavy play into a silent movie. But after hearing the lines spoken by someone who doesn't know how to say them effectively, stone silence and some title cards would come as a relief.

Science! Solving the "Italian Job" Cliffhanger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The 1969 British caper movie The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine as the thieving brainiac Charlie Croker, with a supporting cast that included Noel Coward, Raf Vallone, and Benny Hill, is a much-loved classic in England, but its commercial failure in the U.S. at the time of its release doomed plans for a sequel. (The movie did eventually inspire a sleek Hollywood remake in 2003.) Which meant that the movie's ending--a cliffhanger designed as a set-up for a "part two"--has been hanging there for almost forty years. In the movie's last scene, Caine and his gang are heading for Switzerland with their stolen fortune in gold when the vehicle they're in goes into a skid on a winding mountain road; they wind up in a Laurel and Hardy routine, trapped in their getaway bus as it teeters on the edge of a cliff, with the robbers on one end and the gold inching towards the open doors at the other end. Is there any way our heroes can escape with their lives and the swag? "Hang on a minute lads," Caine announces, "I've got a great idea!" And there the matter stands, Or stood, until last fall, when the Royal Society of Chemistry put out a call for proposed solutions to the problem, setting only the stipulations that submissions should have "a plausible basis in science," should not require "more than thirty minutes, and not use a helicopter." (The timing was inspired, it turns out, not by the movie's fortieth anniversary but by the hundredth anniversary of the periodic table. Of the elements comprising that table, gold is Number 117. Don't you tell me this site isn't educational.)

The winning entry came in from a fellow named John Godwin, a self-professed lifelong fan of the movie, so he may have gotten a head start of a few decades on trying to work out the details of his master plan. Here's how USA Today broke it down:

•Break the windows at the back to reduce weight.

•Break two windows at the front, hold one gang member upside down out of the window to deflate the front tires and stabilize the vehicle.

•Drain the rear fuel tank through an access panel at the bottom of the bus.

•Gang members leave one by one from the front, collecting stones to replace their weight.

•Keep adding stones until someone can safely go to the rear to retrieve the gold.

Amusingly, the film's producer, Michael Deeley, who came up with the original ending after rejecting a number of other possibilities, had a vision of how the problem would be solved at the start of that sequel that never got made, and it depended on--yes, a helicopter. The whirlybird would contain Mafia soldiers, who would rescue the bus, reclaim the gold, and set up a plot that would have the robbers chasing them so they could steal it again. (It would of course be plausible that the gangsters wouldn't kill them, because even the Mafia likes Michael Caine.) A few years ago, Caine himself offered a solution, though it's not completely clear whether he was describing something that was considered for filming or even something that had been filmed and discarded, or just recounting a daydream he'd cooked up during a slow day on the set of Hannah and Her Sisters. Caine said that in his own alternate cut, his character would "crawl up, switch on the engine and stay there for four hours until all the petrol runs out... The van bounces back up so we can all get out, but then the gold goes over" into the ravine, where it is collected by the Mafia, and then the heroes have to run after them to steal it back. Of all these solutions, Godwin's has the virtue of ending with the heroes and the gold in pretty much the same place, with no spoilsport Mafiosi in sight. It remains an open question which of the gang would be deputized to walk down the mountain in search of a gas station so they could refill the fuel tank. But who am I kidding, it'd have to be Benny Hill.

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

Film Forum, in association with the BFI, commences a two-week tribute to David Lean on Friday. Yeah, Lawrence of Arabia and the other late epics are made for the big screen, but for some of us, the really choice news here is that many of Lean's finely crafted, early entertainments are brought together, many in handsome new prints. The program kicks off perfectly with the Dickens-adaptation double feature: Great Expectations, a rousing entertainment that famously inaugurated Lean's lifelong partnership with Alec Guinness (seen here in the role of Herbert Pocket), and Oliver Twist, in which Guinness actually caused the movie some problem with Jewish groups for his alarmingly faithful embodiment of Dickens's Fagin. There's also the chance to see Charles Laughton tear it up with a splendidly undomesticated performance in the domestic comedy Hobson's Choice, Noel Coward perfect the stiff upper lip in the wartime propaganda film In Which We Serve, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard take out a patent on the masochistic romantic agony of shared self-denial in Brief Encounter. A word to the wise: if it's epic you're after, take a pass on the latest drive to "re-evaluate" Lean's misbegotten 1970 waste of time Ryan's Daughter and, instead, check out his last film, the sumptuous, brilliantly acted 1984 version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

LOS ANGELES: The 12th Annual Latino International Film Festival, one of the pre-eminent opportunities for Latino filmmakers to show their work to audiences in the U.S., runs September 12 through the 19th. The 132-film program ranges from the popular and timely Colombian drama Paraiso Travel to music documentary profiles of Celia Cruz and Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

Yesterday's Hits: Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Michael Anderson)

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there’s one thing Hollywood is sorely lacking nowadays, it’s larger-than-life figures. Nowadays, most moviegoers want their industry types to be down to earth, but in the classical era of Hollywood, it was a different story. Tinseltown was ruled by grandiose, even vulgar men who flaunted their wealth, made bold statements and engaged in dangerous behavior just to fuel their taste for adventure. Today’s peekaboo paparazzi photos and pregnancy gossip pale in comparison to the stories of Errol Flynn’s legendary parties and John Huston deciding to make a movie in Africa with the notion of shooting an elephant while he was there.

Michael Todd was one of these men. Todd began his career in Hollywood by running a construction company that specialized in soundproofing studio stages, but after he was bankrupted by the Depression, his colorful life really began. He began producing stage shows, often of ill repute. He romanced Gypsy Rose Lee, star of one of his productions. He married Joan Blondell, after his first wife died under suspicious circumstances. He gambled and spent money like a decadent prince, causing Blondell to divorce him and leading to his second bankruptcy. He staged a nudie musical written by the future king of Thailand. And if that’s not enough drama for one lifetime, he later married Liz Taylor. Todd also had a hand in the development of the three-screen Cinerama process before pioneering a technological breakthrough of his own, the Todd-AO process, which Todd envisioned as being “Cinerama coming from one hole.” And the crown jewel of Todd-AO was 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days.

What made Around the World in 80 Days a hit?: In addition to its wide screen and greater clarity (Todd-AO cameras shot at 30 frames per second instead of the usual 24), Todd-AO also employed the widest-angle lens of the era, approximately 150 degrees. These factors made the format ideal for filming grand epics and panoramic vistas. The first Todd-AO release was 1955’s Oklahoma!, but the maximum potential of the format was realized the following year with Around the World in 80 Days. A long in-development project that had yet to come to fruition, Todd used his newly-regained resources- much of which had been earned by his stake in 1952’s This Is Cinerama- to film his adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel on location all around the world, showing off what Todd-AO was truly capable of doing.

For such an ambitious production, it was only fitting that Todd would fill it to the brim with international stars, all the better to draw in moviegoing audiences worldwide. After pairing up-and-coming Hollywood leading man David Niven with popular Mexican entertainer Cantinflas (as Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, respectively), Todd then surrounded them with a galaxy of stars in cameo roles. It seemed like wherever the travelers went, another handful of familiar faces would drop in to greet them, with bit roles for the likes of Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, Charles Coburn, Peter Lorre, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, and Edward R. Murrow as the narrator of the film’s introduction. The combination of globetrotting adventure and big stars worked like gangbusters, with the Around the World in 80 Days pulling in $23.1 million dollars- the second-highest gross of 1956 behind The Ten Commandments- and taking home five Oscars including Best Picture.

What happened?: Jules Verne’s novel, written in 1872, was meant to inspire a sense of wonder in its readers. But as is often the case with gee-whiz science fiction, much of the wonder evaporated once the fantasy became reality. By 1956, humanity had long since “conquered the air,” and the notion of circumnavigating the globe in four score days didn’t hold too much magic. So while Around the World in 80 Days offered audiences the irresistible combination of big stars and widescreen vistas, the story was little more than an excuse for a series of misadventures involving Phileas and/or Passepartout rather than the wondrous futuristic spectacle Verne had intended.

In addition, while Michael Anderson was credited as the director, this was without a doubt Mike Todd’s film, something that was discovered early on by the film’s original director, John Farrow. But Todd wouldn’t be around much longer to enjoy his success. In 1958, while flying his unfortunately-monikered plane “The Lucky Liz,” Todd suffered a fatal crash. This negated the possibility of any more ambitious Todd-produced epics, as well as beginning the slow decline of the Todd-AO process, which continued in a more conventional 24fps format through the sixties before dying out altogether.

Does Around the World in 80 Days still work?: Not really. If the film was charming in 1956, it’s merely quaint today. For one thing, the much-ballyhooed international shoot comes across mostly as hype nowadays. To modern audiences’ more sophisticated eyes, the seams in the production really show, as when the film cuts from a sweeping foreign vista to a shot of the stars gazing at it in wonder. Much of the action that actually involves the actors looks like it was filmed on soundstages. This isn’t categorically a problem, but when a movie’s primary selling point is that it was filmed on locations around the world, it feels like something of a cheat when the international shots appear to be second-unit work.

In addition, the principal actors in the film are consistently underwhelming. Watching his work as Phileas Fogg, it’s clear why David Niven never became a superstar- not only does he lack the necessary star presence, but his screen persona isn’t very interesting. Phileas Fogg is clearly meant to be an upper-class eccentric- independently wealthy, time-obsessed yet impulsive. Yet with Niven in the role, we have to take the movie’s word for it as regards his eccentricity, since all he brings to the table is a vague air of urbane sophistication. Perhaps a leading man who was more adept at comedy- Cary Grant, perhaps, or Alec Guinness- could have made the role enjoyable, but with Niven it just sort of sits there.

Similarly, despite his celebrity status south of the border, Cantinflas wasn’t cut out for stardom stateside. He looks fairly uncomfortable acting in English, and his physical schtick isn’t very funny, although Anderson and Todd’s insistence on extreme long shots doesn’t help any. Shirley MacLaine, in one of her first films, is sorely miscast as the Indian maiden Aouda, in keeping with classic Hollywood’s highly uncool tradition of “browning-up” white actors for ethnic parts. And while Around the World in 80 Days popularized the practice of “cameo” roles, they’re almost always distracting. Is that brief flash of recognition that comes over audience members when the piano player turns out to be Frank Sinatra really worth the tedious setup? I would argue that it’s not.

In the end, Around the World in 80 Days hardly seems to warrant the “epic” label that many ascribe to it. Far from justifying the largesse of the production, the film feels like an amusing trifle with some picturesque scenes interspersed in order to make the film feel like an event. With comedy that isn’t especially funny and lead actors who get outshone by both the scenery and the stars in the bit roles, Around the World in 80 Days amounts to little more than a widescreen travelogue- diverting in spots with some pleasant company, but not very interesting cinematically, and not really worth revisiting.

David Lean's Centennial

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week marks the one hundredth birthday of the late director David Lean. As Anthony Lane notes in The New Yorker, Lean is best remembered now as Mr. Spectacle for the epics he turned out in the last decades of his career (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, A Passage to India), but the onetime editor had earlier made his mark with a string of tight, emotionally compressed entertainments, including his terrific Dickens adaptations (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist) and a number of works derived from the writings of Noel Coward, who actually served as co-director of Lean's first job behind the camera, the 1942 In Which We Serve. They made for an intriguing team, with Coward's stylish reserve — the glorifying embodiment of the cliche of the "British stiff upper lip" — sometimes pressing against Lean's own show of restraint, which could seem prudish but which also sometimes felt as if it were barely keeping a lid on the rush of feelings that his work had flowing through it. As Lane points out, the definitive expression of this tension is their final collaboration, the 1945 Brief Encounter: "Its main event is what never happens: Laura (Celia Johnson), a married woman, does not have an affair with Alec (Trevor Howard), a married man, despite their being ardently in love. The film has been a favorite, almost a fetish, among British audiences ever since. This year, on Valentine’s Day, it was screened outside the National Theatre, in London, so that young lovers could sit in the cold, huddle together, and learn just how incredibly miserable the business of love can be. What other country would subscribe to this? The saga of thwartings is played out in the pleasure domes of suburbia: railway stations, luncheon tables, and boating lakes. For Lean, the humdrum was drenched in emotion... The couple first meet at a station and, unbearably, part there for the last time, with Alec’s hand resting briefly on Laura’s shoulder in the refreshment room. They have measured out their love in coffee spoons."

The station where the key romantic moments of Brief Encounter were shot is still there, and Kathryn Flett reports that she "took the opportunity to celebrate... with a visit to Carnforth railway station's refreshment room, ideally for a nice cup of tea and a Banbury, but not ruling out the possibility of getting some grit in my eye and having it removed by a kindly doctor who might just be the love of my life." She discovered that "There is now something of a Brief Encounter mini-industry at Carnforth, what with the famous clock, the visitors' centre and the delightful refreshment room — a replica of the set, which was itself a copy of the original." The tea room is managed by Andrew Coates and Helen Dytham, who didn't know about it place in film history when they first made the site's acquaintance; Coates hadn't even heard of the movie before. "They are up to speed now," writes Flett, reassuringly.

Morning Deal Report: Amy Ryan on a Hot Streak

Peter Smith — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Amy Ryan is doing well these days, with parts in Dan in Real Life and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and a highly acclaimed performance in Gone Baby Gone. (I just finished watching her fine work in Season 2 of The Wire, to boot.) Now she and Greg Kinnear are joining Matt Damon in a Paul-Greengrass-directed thriller based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction Iraq chronicle, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. This also marks a reunion of Damon and Greengrass, which any Bourne fan knows is a good thing.

Jessica Biel costars with Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas in the Noel Coward adaptation Easy Virtue.

Boys Don't Cry and Stop Loss director Kimberly Pierce wants to adapt Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. It's always interesting when a serious, realism-minded director steps into sci-fi. Let's hope this happens.