The Screengrab : paul newman

Paul Newman Biographer Regrets NY Post Columnists' Inability to Make Up Their Own Smears

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

This past weekend, we began to notice stories popping up in various places about Paul Newman, lout. The stories, which were linked to the forthcoming publication (on May 5) of Shawn Levy's Paul Newman: A Life, the first comprehensive, posthumous biography of the star, tended to leave the impression that the book is a bombshell that portrays Newman as a "functioning alcoholic" whose much-admired, fifty-year marriage to Joanne Woodward was a cover for a string of affairs, which in turn by undermined by the fact that he was too drunk to play the great lover off-screen. To be honest, we weren't quite sure what to make of these reports, not just because there had been so little in coverage of Newman's life when he was alive to defend himself, but because Levy's earlier books--on Jerry Lewis, the Rat Pack, and Porfirio Rubirosa--were not slag jobs. Now Levy, who reviews movies for the Oregonian, has posted an entry at his blog lamenting those reports, which he sees as a misrepresentation of his book, and which he has traced back to Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and its "Page Six hatchet man Richard Johnson."

According to Levy, Newman had a feud with the Post that went back to the production of the 1981 movie Fort Apache, the Bronx, a cop opera that was attracted protests at its location shoot by dimwits who, having put it together that the movie's genre and its setting would result in the on-screen presentation of persons of color who were engaged in criminal activity, which they figured meant it was racist. (The central plot turn involved a white cop, played by Danny Aiello, who throws a Puerto Rican kid off a roof.) The movie was also attacked by progressive local press outlets such as The Village Voice, but given Newman's position as a high-profile celebrity liberal, the conservative Post must have gotten a special kick out of being presented with the chance to tar him as being party to a bigoted depiction of life in the South Bronx. ""I wish I could sue the Post," Newman announced at one point, "but it's awfully hard to sue a garbage can." "A few years later," writes Levy, "Newman and the Post were fighting about -- of all things -- how tall the actor was (the Post said he was no more than 5'7", whereas Newman held he was 5' 11")." Things got so bad between the two warring forces that it "even extended to the TV listings, where Newman's name was left out of descriptions of his films (The Hustler with Jackie Gleason and George C. Scott; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Robert Redford and Katherine Ross, etc.)."

Whatever one thinks of the Post and its staff--summed up by Levy as "an amazingly angry and illiterate bunch""--one might have guessed that they had the minute amount of class and humanity necessary for them to let this shit die when the actor did. Thanks for clearing that up, I guess. In the meantime, Levy has been put in the uncomfortable position of decrying their description of his book and its contents even though he knows that that very description stands to move a few units. The fact that he's upset enough about this to protest it is to his credit. As for Murdoch, he himself happens to be the subject of a new book by Michael Wolff--The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch--for which Wolff was given a great deal of hands-on access. In a discussion of that book in last week's The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann noted that, under the influence of his current wife, "Murdoch has come to regard Fox News and some of his other right-wing associations as embarrassing." We're sure that knowing that, thanks to the current state of the Post, his original "right-wing association" in this country, he's currently paying the salaries of vultures to break into Paul Newman's coffin makes him feel a lot better.

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOCK, STOCK & TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998) & SNATCH (2000)

The Guy Ritchie formula seems deceptively easy: mix several colorfully bemonikered, slang-slinging con men, lowlifes, and petty criminals with a couple of scary sociopaths, a handful of intersecting scams and a hundred thousand bullets and beat to a pulp. And yet, as deeply uneven films like Smoking Aces (and Ritchie’s own Revolver) have demonstrated, good-natured ultra-violence can be just as tricky to pull off as the doomed get-rich-quick schemes favored by the sub-genre’s hapless anti-heroes. First, there needs to be a good Maguffin, like the antique shotguns in Lock, Stock or Snatch’s 86-carat diamond. Next comes a solid rooting interest (like the indispensable Jason Statham) and a credibly scary criminal kingpin like P.H. Moriarty’s murderous pornographer “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale or Alan Ford’s psychopathic pig enthusiast, Brick Top. From there it’s all about delaying the inevitable showdown with as many undercard bouts as possible between interesting supporting characters like Vinnie Jones’ relatively nice bad men Big Chris and Bullet Tooth Tony and various allies, enemies and enemies-turned-allies (and vice-versa) played by the likes of Goldie, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina and Brad Pitt's memorably mumbling pikey brawler, Mickey O'Neil. The real trick, though, is taking the material just seriously enough to maintain dramatic tension, while never quite taking it seriously enough to require tortured method acting from, say, Jeremy Piven. (AO)

THE STING (1973)

While The Grifters made the life of a con artist look bleak and despairing, as fit the work of a born cynic like Jim Thompson, The Sting – a smash hit when it first appeared in 1973 – made it look like quite a dreamy little profession, all natty outfits and colorful slang and snappy patter with your partner, accompanied by the rollicking ragtime strains of Scott Joplin. Of course, no one ever accused George Roy Hill of going for realism in The Sting; what he was trying to do was recapture the dynamite charisma his leads, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, had shared in their previous outing, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Amazingly, he captured lightning in a bottle twice, and even if audiences had a hard time following the big-payoff swindle that Redford and Newman had planned against the sting’s intended target, Robert Shaw, they didn’t seem to care. It all looked like such a lark, who cared about the details? (LP)

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)

Explaining his reasons for lighting out from his dishwasher's job in Texas, Joe Buck (Jon Voight) says that there's "a lot of rich women back there beggin' for it -- payin' for it, too. And the men are mostly tooty fruities!" Not long after arriving in the big city, Joe beds Sylvia Miles, which settles any doubts you might have had about how hard he's willing to dedicate himself to his craft. However, he ends up paying her, a sure sign that he may lack the management skills necessary to be successfully self-employed. Luckily, Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), the slimy, crippled greaseball with the tubercular cough takes him into his apartment in a condemned building and offers to pimp him to the best of his abilities. The film doubles as a snapshot of the Times Square New York of the pre-Giuliani cleanup era; anyone who sees it and still professes feelings of nostalgia for the good old days is seriously ill. (PN)

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)

Jean-Pierre Melville was the high priest of French noir, and Bob le Flambeur was one of his crowning achievements, a heist film so expertly orchestrated that, along with the preceding The Asphalt Jungle, it helped set a template still employed half a century later. The set-up involves aging, dapper gambler and thief Bob (Roger Deuchesne), who’s so well-liked that he’s friends with the chief of police, and who – after finding himself down on his luck – endeavors to change his fortunes by recruiting a crew for a lucrative casino score. Bob’s day-to-day existence revolves around taking chances, meaning that his eventual decision to pull off one last robbery is simply an example of a man recognizing his inherent nature. If Bob remains true to himself until the end, so too does Melville, whose expressionistic direction magnificently set the stage for the forthcoming French New Wave. Dark, sumptuous shadows, stunning iris shots, and on-location cinematography breathe melancholic life into this portrait of the romantic allure of a big score, and of the inescapable hand of fate. (NS)

CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1940)

By the standards of Preston Sturges's later, wilder films, the dreams on display here are rather modest, but they manage to inspire an impressive amount of damage anyway. Dick Powell, at his most ingratiatingly sappy, is the luckless young striver who wants to secure a solid enough place for himself that he can marry his girl, Ellen Drew. Dick decides that his best chance is to win the $25,000 top prize for the Maxford House Coffee Slogan, a shot in the dark that becomes a major point of his masculine pride when Ellen casts doubt on his submission: "If you can't sleep, it's not the coffee, it's the bunk!" (She persists in not liking it even after he's explained it to her, which he does at some length.) In perhaps the most straightforward plotline Sturges ever conceived, pranksters trick Dick into believing that he's won, Dick somehow gets his hands on the money and plays Mr. Big Spender, his boss forces a promotion on him in recognition of his previously unsuspected genius for concocting advertising slogans, the truth is revealed, Dick is chastened, and then of course it turns out that he really did win the contest because nobody sent in anything better. (PN)

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Yesterday's Hits: Rain Man (1988, Barry Levinson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Here’s the pitch: a young man, reeling from the death of his father, drives across country with the brother he never knew who, as it happens, is autistic. Cast one of Hollywood’s most respected actors as the autistic brother and its hottest leading man as the younger brother, and even today the pitch sounds like something straight out of high-concept hell. Yet despite its premise, which jazzed up the bankable but disreputable formula of the road movie with a mental-illness twist, Rain Man was not only the most popular movie of 1988 but also one of the most acclaimed Hollywood releases of the year, winning both the Oscar for Best Picture and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the only film ever to win both of these prestigious awards.

Today, Rain Man is largely remembered for its awards, for Hoffman’s performance, and the memorable lines he contributed to popular culture, including such favorites as “I’m an excellent driver.” But like many surprise hits, Rain Man was initially seen as a somewhat risky project by Hollywood. Several directors and a number of studios passed on the film before Barry Levinson and United Artists ended up making it. And while the film was in production, both of its stars had doubts about its potential. The film’s opening weekend receipts were disappointing, but soon it began to generate ecstatic word of mouth among moviegoers, eventually raking in over $170 million domestically to become the highest-grossing movie of the year.

So what was the secret to Rain Man’s success? Well, the stars didn’t hurt. By and large, major Hollywood projects were more star-driven in the eighties than they are nowadays, and Rain Man followed the popular Hollywood formula of pairing a respected veteran actor with a hot young star. And in 1988, there was no young star hotter than Tom Cruise. Still riding high from the success of Top Gun, Cruise had earlier in the year turned the cheesy bartending drama Cocktail into a sizable hit. Yet even in his younger days, he had a tendency to seek out established talent. He had followed Top Gun with The Color of Money, which paired him off with Paul Newman under the direction of Martin Scorsese, and Rain Man gave him a similar opportunity to work with Hoffman.

But while Hoffman was the one who got most of the accolades, I think that the film hinges just as much on Cruise’s performance. Don’t get me wrong- Hoffman’s certainly impressive. But due to the nature of Raymond Babbitt’s autism, Hoffman doesn’t have much of a character arc to play- he doesn’t change so much as cycle, again and again, through his daily routine. Levinson and screenwriters Ron Bass and Barry Morrow wisely avoided the temptation to soft-pedal Raymond’s autism by miraculously having him “recover”, and they’re to be commended for this. However, a movie solely about Raymond would have quickly become repetitive (think Jeanne Dielman, which actually sounds awesome so never mind), and certainly would not have been made by a Hollywood studio.

Because of this, it falls to Charlie (Cruise) to drive the story, and Cruise was more than up to the task. Charlie is a complicated character who’s often selfish and unsympathetic. Consider how greedy he can be, especially when it comes to Raymond- he steals Raymond from an institution in an attempt to procure more money from his late father’s estate, and once he discovers Raymond’s prodigious memory and gift for quickly counting large numbers of objects, Charlie decides to take Raymond to Las Vegas to score money by cheating a casino. But Cruise’s refusal to make Charlie a saint makes him all the more relatable. Sure, he can be a self-centered prick, but we also feel his pain whenever we see him dealing with Raymond. After all, keeping one’s life together (especially when the bank is breathing down your neck) is difficult enough without having to plan one’s days around someone like Raymond, for whom the need to eat one’s meals on time, watch The People’s Court, or wear the correct pair of underwear supersedes all else.

Because we see Charlie struggling with Raymond, it becomes all the more heartwarming when he finally learns to love and appreciate his older brother. In many ways, Rain Man may contain Cruise’s most undervalued performance, since not only is he upstaged by Hoffman’s showier work, but he also plays the sort of role that was often associated with him, the yuppie hotshot with an overabundance of alpha-male charm. However, to call Charlie Babbitt a stereotypical “Tom Cruise role” seems reductive, since it overlooks the nuances of the character. Then as now, Cruise was a fine actor, and one who was often doomed to being underappreciated.

Rain Man isn’t a perfect movie. Occasionally, it gets a little too plot-driven, as when Charlie and Raymond make their stop in Vegas. But at its best, it’s as good now as it ever was, due to the performances of Hoffman and Cruise and the rhythm and chemistry between them. Cruise might have joked that it was “two schmucks in a car,” but I think that’s what works about the movie- it gives these two fine actors sufficient time and space to work together without pinning them down to too much plot. And while Raymond doesn’t get better in the end, at least now he has a brother to visit him in the institution.

For better or worse, in the two decades since its release Rain Man has become the dominant pop culture image most people associate with autism. A few years ago, the Onion A.V. Club critic Noel Murray- himself the father of an autistic child- posted his thoughts on the film, filtered through his own experience. In this post (which you can read in full here), he states that although the film gets many of the details of autism right, it suffers because Raymond feels less like a character than a plot device through which Charlie can find redemption, and that the subject of autism would be better served by a movie that followed him and found drama in his routines. It’s a perfectly reasonable opinion of the film considering his circumstances, and I don’t disagree with him. As a movie about autism, Rain Man doesn’t quite cut it. But taken on its own terms, I’d say it still works pretty darn well.

The Rep Report (March 20 - March 26)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: BAM starts up its second posthumous tribute to Paul Newman that kicks off with The Long Hot Summer, the project beloved by Newman fans as the one where he and Joanne hooked up, before concentrating on the late-middle end of the actor's long career. Included: Slap Shot (1977), which features the best of his many performances for director George Roy Hill; his Oscar-winning return to the role of Fast Eddie Felsen in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986); and two films he directed, Rachel, Rachel (1968) starring Joanne Woodward, and the 1971 Ken Kesey adaptation Sometimes a Great Notion, starring Newman and Henry Fonda.

BOSTON: The Boston Underground Film Festival opened last night and runs through the 23rd. The schedule includes Bad Behavior, the latest from professional midnight-slot provocateur Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker, Brain Damage), the controversial Deadgirl, and the Von Doviak-approved The Rock-afire Explosion, and a gratifying overflow of shorts.

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

THE SHADOW (1994)

There are movies I remember as terrible, and then there are movies I simply don’t remember at all...as if a mysterious vigilante with the power to cloud men’s minds had simply erased all traces of this pre-intentionally-funny Alec Baldwin snoozer from my consciousness. The plot synopsis on Wikipedia sounds far more entertaining than the actual film, what with its dirty hypnotism, 1930s Genghis Khan revivalism and Phurba, the living knife (no relation to Furby or Flowbee). But even after reviewing the plot and rewatching a few YouTube clips, there are still only three things I really remember about the film. One, it co-stars Penelope Ann Miller...almost never a good sign. Two, the villain (played by John Lone) uses mental powers to make New Yorkers think his luxury hotel is invisible...a neat trick somebody oughta teach Donald Trump. And finally (and most memorably), my old pal Radmar Jao has the best line in the movie, advising someone not to light up in the hero’s secret lair: “No smoking in the Skull Cave.” Oh...wait a minute...that was that OTHER completely unmemorable 1990s adaptation of a 1930s comic: The Phantom, starring Billy Zane and Kristy Swanson (easily winning the bland-off with Miller). But, hey...at least Radmar was good.

ROAD TO PERDITION (2002)

Based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins, Perdition takes a simple revenge tale, adds a dollop of sins-of-the-father melodrama, and inflates the flimsy result to Biblical proportions. Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, a hit man working for Paul Newman's John Rooney, mob boss of a Chicago suburb in the era of Al Capone. When his son Mike witnesses a gangland execution, Sullivan is forced to hit the road with the kid in tow, and soon father and son are bonding over a bank-robbing spree. Despite the pre-release speculation that Perdition would serve as the vehicle for Tom Hanks' first "bad guy" performance, the star delivers another of his flawed but noble saints. Sure, Michael Sullivan is a killer, but since almost everyone else in the movie is more vicious, and they're all out to get him, he comes off as a guy who's just doing what he's gotta do to protect his son. If you didn’t know Sam Mendes directed this tedious would-be epic, you'd swear it was a movie by master of bloat Frank Darabont. Nearly every scene is leaden, weighed down with portent and production designed to death. Torrents of rain are always pouring from the brims of fedoras while grim-faced men fire tommy guns into other grim-faced men who tumble to their doom in artful slow motion. It’s designed to be Oscar bait, but fortunately no one was biting.

HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)

This jaw-dropper, which was proudly emblazoned with the name of George Lucas, and which was the last movie directed by American Graffiti co-writer Willard Huyck -- he's still alive, but trust me, he's never going to direct another one -- belongs to what may well be the most select of all groups, movies that were catastrophic box-office and critical failures that nobody will now argue is actually a misunderstood work of genius. Heaven's Gate, Myra Breckinridge, At Long Last Love, Ishtar, hell, maybe Battlefield Earth -- each of them has some crackpot out there who'll keep you up all night explaining what's really so great about it. Not this thing. It's not even worth discussing its failure to in any way represent what's good, or even what sucks, about its alleged source material, an uneven but gorgeously cranky and weird Marvel series that writer Steve Gerber spun off from a supporting character he once threw into a Man-Thing comic, reportedly just to annoy his bosses. All you can do is stare at the thing and wonder what in God's sweet name they thought they were doing, until the noise becomes too much and you have to tune out. Howard was the first Marvel Comics-based movie to make it to theaters, and it is in fact harder to sit through than any number of subsequent Marvel-based projects that went straight to video. The only evidence that the people who made this had any sense at all is that, in the trailer and other publicity materials, they did their damndest to keep prospective ticket-buyers from getting a clear look at the poor bastard in the duck suit. If they'd found a way to keep people watching the movie from getting a clear look at it, they might have made some of their money back.

ELEKTRA (2005)

I’m pretty sure no one wanted Marvel Studios to resurrect Elektra, the hot ninja assassin (played by Jennifer Garner) who died in the dreadful Daredevil. But with Garner’s star on the rise, the fetching killer rose from the grave for this 2005 spin-off, a tiresome dud in which we learn that Elektra suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder but doesn’t mind tussling with (and spilling the blood of) yucky villains, is a trained murderer-for-hire who nonetheless has a pesky conscience, and likes to prance about like a runway model when not dispatching superpowered goons. Rob Bowman’s film has no energy or depth but plenty of turgid drama involving Elektra’s grief over her mother’s death and her tutelage under blind mentor Stick (Terence Stamp), unimaginative nonsense that – like the PG-13 ogling of Garner’s buff (but always clothed) body – unfortunately takes precedence over the heroine’s clashes with a group of intriguing baddies like Tattoo, a man whose body art comes to deadly life.

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)

It certainly didn’t take long for the Superman franchise to bottom out. While many superhero legacies merely drop in quality, becoming disappointments after the first few installments, the Superman movies went from first to worst in the twinkling of an eye, and by the time the fourth installment rolled around, fans were praying for a hailstorm of kryptonite to kill the damn things off for good. When Superman IV was made, a combination of factors practically ensured it would be a disaster: the non-participation of many of the supporting players, the demands by Christopher Reeve to have more creative input, and the passing of the rights to the franchise from the Salkinds to the deplorable hacks at Golan-Globus. Reeve was given his script input, and the result was a well-meaning pile of shit so rank that he eventually pretended he didn’t have anything to do with it; and while Sidney Furie gets the official blame for directing this incoherent, overlong, and utterly incompetent disaster, most people believe that the real responsibility lies with uberhack/swindler/bad movie mogul Menahem Golan, who apparently spent most of the filming screaming at anyone who bothered to stick around the set. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was made for a fraction of what the previous films had cost, and it shows; if nothing else, it serves as a potent reminder to those who were so disappointed by Superman III that things can always get worse.

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

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

CRASH (2004)

I didn’t actively hate Crash when I first saw it. Paul Haggis’ schematic, artificial examination of race relations in Los Angeles was a pleasant enough way to pass an evening: I enjoyed watching Sandra Bullock play against type as a sour yuppie, and the vignette with Michael Peña and his daughter was sweet (in a Six Feet Under subplot kind of way). But the whole storyline with Matt Dillon’s Racist Cop® was nothing more than Haggis the mainstream milquetoast trying way too hard to provoke, like a suburban teen buying a Slipknot hoodie at Hot Topic with his mom’s credit card and then wearing it to church. The really annoying thing about Crash, though, was the way it allowed Academy voters (after pretty much ignoring films like Hoop Dreams and Malcolm X) to pat themselves on the back for their willingness to confront “the race issue” by rewarding Haggis’ toothless paper tiger of a film while simultaneously snubbing the superior (and timely) “gay cowboy” movie that apparently made them feel icky and uncomfortable.

BEN-HUR (1959)

If David Lean is the best-case scenario for a filmmaker who can hit Oscar's Pavlovian reflexes with deadly aim and still produce something worthwhile, Ben-Hur is pretty much the silliest, most bloated example of "epic" filmmaking there is. As it happens, Ben-Hur is a "milestone" in "Oscar history" because it's one of only three movies to win 11 Oscars; the other two are Titanic and Lord Of The Rings: The Film That Never Ends, which pretty much proves that running way over three hours (and the usual budget) are non-negotiable prereqs. Have you watched all of Ben-Hur lately? It's leaden, endless gay camp (Gore Vidal did it on purpose, but it's still not very funny). The chariot race is great, only because William Wyler ceded directorial duties to Western cowboy-stunt specialist Yakima Canutt, who thankfully had zero interest in propriety or "good" directorial values. On the plus side, this makes Spartacus look faultless.

TOM JONES (1963)

With the tail-end exception of 1969's Midnight Cowboy and this film, the Academy did its darndest to ignore changing cinematic mores in the '60s. So: Tom Jones. Henry Fielding's comic genius is boiled down into a series of too-cute reflexive, winking gestures in a long, overcooked souffle. No surprise: Tom Jones was adapted by John Osborne — the angry young man par excellence, so humorless he was buried with a copy of Hamlet in his pocket, with everyone but Hamlet's lines crossed-out — and clunkily directed (per his usual "form") by Tony Richardson. Together, they water down Godardian gestures for farce, toying with every possible distancing device (it's a silent movie! It's an undercranked Keystone Kops moment!) without any real effect or exuberance. Rarely has jollity seemed this excruciating.

THE STING (1973)

Like Tom Jones, The Sting is another would-be light entertainment that's actually incredibly boring and way too long; the highlight is when Paul Newman says "crap." The best part is the old-school Universal logo at the start, and that's over in thirteen seconds, embedded above for your viewing pleasure. Seriously, why do people like this movie? You can listen to Scott Joplin on your own time and there are many much better Redford and Newman charm vehicles (separately, anyway). One side note: somehow, in 1973, Cries And Whispers was also nominated for Best Picture. Really?

CHICAGO (2002)

Chicago isn't the worst musical of the decade (Moulin Rouge! is hard to beat), but it is kind of magnificently dull. Hollywood always loves a good circle-jerk, and this thinly-veiled "condemnation" (read: winking celebration) of celebrity and the glamor of wrong-doing obliges. Criminal justice is like showbiz, because obviously everything is like showbiz, because everything is like Hollywood. The single most memorable moment in the entire movie isn't any of the murder/juicy stuff; it's Richard Gere dancing in his underwear. Rob Marshall's direction is impressively unimaginative — something most people finally caught onto with Memoirs of a Geisha — and let's not even get into what a disservice this does to the memory of the late, great Bob Fosse: he of the original choreography, he who didn't wait for someone to call him a bastard but interrogated himself for real with All That Jazz. Fosse played for keeps, for better or worse; Chicago plays for winks.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

DVD Digest for February 17, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, if you’re lucky enough to be getting some stimulus money, read this column to figure how to use some of it to help build up your collection of movies on DVD and Blu-Ray. And if you’re not getting any money, you can at least see what you’ll be missing.

This week’s highest-profile recent release coming to DVD is the teen sensation High School Musical 3, available in a new “Extended Edition” from Disney on standard-definition and Blu-Ray. Other big-ticket releases this week include Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (Warner, also Blu-Ray), Angelina Jolie in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (Universal, also Blu-Ray), and the horror double feature Quarantine (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and The Midnight Meat Train (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Sam Rockwell in Choke (Fox); Greg Kinnear in Flash of Genius (Universal); Bill Maher pulling a Morgan Spurlock in Religulous (Lionsgate); Simon Pegg in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (MGM); and Jiri Menzel’s I Served the King of England (Sony).

In classics, this week brings Warner’s “The Paul Newman Series”, which includes five first-time DVD appearances of five Newman films- his directorial debut Rachel, Rachel, plus The Silver Chalice, The Helen Morgan Story, The Outrage, and When Time Ran Out…. Also this week, Criterion is releasing David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice, and single-film re-pressings of two more John Cassavetes films, Faces and Shadows. And let’s not forget the High School Musical Remix Edition (Disney), for those kids who can’t get enough High School Musical.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include a pair of basic cable rerun favorites, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Eighth Year (Universal), and Murder, She Wrote Season 9 (Universal).

Finally, this week’s Blu-Ray only releases include a trio from Sony of Oscar favorites: the Best Picture winning Gandhi and Kramer vs. Kramer, and a package deal that includes both Capote and In Cold Blood. Also this week, just in time for Lent- The Passion of the Christ Definitive Edition (Fox).

Jailhouse Rock: The Greatest Prison Films Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Until Jack Nicholson’s kooky Colonel Nathan Jessep made fun of Tom Cruise’s faggoty white uniform over lunch in A Few Good Men, I’d never heard of America’s Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Oh, for those carefree days of yesteryore.

Today, of course, most of us are sick-to-death of (and mostly just sickened by) references to all the terrible, terrible shit that’s gone down at Gitmo since America went torture-happy in 2002 and turned the base into a slightly less awful Abu Ghraib, where (according to our terrible, terrible 43rd president) the Geneva Conventions, legality, common sense and human decency no longer applied.

As of this writing, our hopefully much, much better 44th president has, according to Reuters, ordered a 120-day halt to all pending Guantánamo Bay prosecutions “to give the new administration time to evaluate the cases and decide what forum best suits any future prosecution.”

In the meantime, your pals here at the Screengrab would like to commemorate President Obama’s pledge to shut down one of the worst prisons in our nation's history with a salute to THE BEST PRISON MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

THE ROAD TO GUANTÁNAMO (2006)

Time will tell if Barack Obama truly represents the hope and change upon which he campaigned, but it was a good sign when his first act upon assuming office was to begin the process of shutting down the prison camp maintained during the Bush administration at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Meant to detain enemy combatants and terror suspects captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Guantánamo did almost nothing to fight al-Q’aeda, instead becoming a symbol of the degraded state of civil rights during the War on Terror. Michael Winterbottom’s powerfully effective documentary The Road to Guantánamo tells, through a clever mixture of documentary interviews and dramatic reenactments, the story of young British Muslims who visited Pakistan for a friend’s wedding; through foolhardiness or naivety, they ended up taking a detour into Afghanistan, and before they knew what was happening, they were captured, turned over to U.S. forces, and ended up in the world’s most infamous prison camp. Eventually released without charge two years later, their story is especially harrowing not only because a true prison tale is always scarier than an invented one, but also because it’s illustrative of how little it takes to destroy someone’s life in an atmosphere of paranoia and political fear.

COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

Given the timing of its release, Cool Hand Luke will probably always have the aura of a counterculture artifact, although in many ways it's your basic meat-and-potatoes prison flick. The conflict between our anti-hero Luke and the establishment – that is, the Bosses who keep him and his fellow prisoners in line – is certainly emblematic of the cultural divide of the Sixties, but it's also a well-worn standby of the genre. What makes Luke memorable, in addition to Newman's iconic performance, is the sweat-soaked Southern atmosphere and the rogues gallery of rugged character actors lined up on the chain gang, including George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Ralph Waite, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker and Wayne Rogers. Sure, they may seem a little too comfortable playing grabass in their underwear, but prison does strange things to a man. The horrors of the work farm, from the backbreaking labor to solitary confinement in "the hole," are so far out of proportion to Luke's crime of cutting the heads off parking meters out of boredom, we'd root for him even if he wasn't a lovable rogue who settles the great question once and for all: can a man eat 50 eggs?

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

Pigeonholing the Coen Brothers' perpetually underrated Americana romp as a prison movie would be just as ludicrous as studying The Big Lebowski for bowling tips, but the plot is indeed set into motion by a good old fashioned escape from a chain gang, and those big bold prison stripes really bring out the best in George Clooney. Although the Coens draw some of their imagery from classic prison flicks like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (their sunglasses-wearing pursuer appears to have stepped straight out of the latter picture), none of these influences have ever delved so deeply into the importance of the proper hair care product. Indeed, O Brother was the first prison movie that dared to depict the potential danger of the escaped fugitive being transformed into a toad by bewitching sirens. For speaking such hard truths, O Brother deserves a better reputation than it currently enjoys.

GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Jean Renoir’s WWI opus about French and English pilots captured by the Germans is a film of startling depth and grace, a testament to the power of movies to reveal elusive truths about humanity, and a hell of a good time, to boot. I realize that critical opinion of this movie is such that the last statement is akin to affirming the wetness of water, but sometimes we have to acknowledge the waters in which we swim before we dive. It is hard to describe The Grand Illusion as a prison flick, even though most of the action takes place in various prisons. The movie is about class and prejudice and war and love and honor and this list could seriously go on for a while. At the height of his powers, Renoir was an artist of amazing scope, and his little prison flick manages to illuminate the contradictions at the heart of human psychology while judging no character for behaving as they have been taught to behave. The movie is a veritable who's-who of great European (and even American) cinema. It stars Jean Gabin, one of Renoir's favorite leading men, as Lieutenant Maréchal, the central figure of the movie. Renoir himself was an aviator during WWI, and the uniform Gabin wears was Renoir's during the first World War. Pierre Fresnay plays Captain de Boeldieu, the aristocratic aviator shot down alongside Maréchal. The director Erich von Stroheim plays Captain von Rauffenstein, the aristocratic German officer who shot them down and later acts as their warden. Marcel Dalio, credited at IMDB with 177 film appearances, plays Lieutenant Rosenthal, a Jewish French officer. The gorgeous Dita Parlo also appears, along with her L'Atalante co-star Jean Dasté. But the cast is only a component of the greatness; far more important is Renoir's sweeping vision of humanity, both in confinement and in freedom.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs

21 Stars We Hate (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Three weeks ago, we paid tribute to Paul Newman, a fantastically decent and charitable movie star possessed of great taste, artistic integrity and that elusive hat-trick of looks, talent and charisma that elevated him to the status of beloved international icon and left the world a sadder place when he left it.

Newman’s passing (and, to some extent, his dressing) got us thinking about other Leading Men and Leading Ladies we loved, or at least admired, or who at the very least satisfied most of the basic requirements of stardom: unforgettable performances in memorable films, a uniquely fascinating persona and maybe even some crazy knee-wobbling sex appeal for good measure.

But in the midst of all our recent celebrity praising, we couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of past and present “stars” who could more accurately be described as black holes: a whole lotta nothing endowed with tremendous powers of suck...false matinee idols who never really earned their overpraised, overpaid stations in the pop culture firmament, or genuine icons who long ago squandered whatever legitimacy they once had, and now just bug the shit out of us.

Given the fleeting, fickle nature of fame and the contrarian curmudgeonliness of your friends here at the Screengrab, you may notice a few of the names we praised less than a fortnight hence are back this week as figures of scorn and ridicule...

...but hey, that’s show biz, kid, so let’s get ready to RUUUUUUMMBLE!!!!!!

SHIA LABEOUF

Like Sarah Palin (but far less scary and secessionist), “The Boof” was plucked from relative obscurity and forced down America’s collective throat despite a staggering lack of qualifications for a job that any number of people could do better. Unlike Palin, whose ascendancy was engineered for cynical political advantage, I have no idea why Hollywood in general (and Steven Spielberg in particular) picked LaBeouf as their Gen-Y A-List representative...but for now I guess we’re stuck with him (and since I already posted a longer rant on the subject back in April, I’ll leave it at that...at least until Stockholm decides he’s ready for his Nobel Peace Prize for, y’know, bein’all peaceful an’ shit).

ROBIN WILLIAMS

I'll grant you that this one is like shooting fish in a barrel – but if you're going to set a barrel of fish in front of me and hand me a gun, what am I supposed to do? Anyway, it's not as if I'm a lifelong Williams hater. I was there when he debuted as Mork from Ork on a 1978 episode of Happy Days; I even remember taping the show (on audio cassette – this was pre-VCR) and listening to it over and over. (This was perhaps the 374th dorkiest thing I did in 1978. Number 212 was dressing up as Mork for Halloween, although my mother did a fabulous job with the costume.) I had his comedy album, Reality, What a Concept, some of which I even understood. He was a fine Popeye, and although it's been many years since I've seen either The Survivors or Moscow on the Hudson, I remember liking them at the time. So when did it all go awry? Some would point to Dead Poets Society, and certainly the seeds of sentiment and sanctimony were planted there, but I would argue in favor of Awakenings, in which those seeds sprouted into the Sensitive Man Beard. Into the early '90s, Williams could still garner critical acclaim by hacking through the same eight voices he always uses in Aladdin, but after a sickly stretch including Jumanji, Jack, Father's Day, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man, defenders were harder to come by. (Somewhere in there he won an Oscar by breaking out the SMB again for Good Will Hunting, but I'd like to think a re-vote today would send it to Burt Reynolds for Boogie Nights instead.) After a brief but failed flirtation with a "dark phase" (including One Hour Photo and Insomnia), Williams has returned to serving up his patented cocktail of shtick and schmaltz. By 2007's License to Wed, even he seemed to be tired of his own act.

EWAN McGREGOR

McGregor first attracted attention for his work in the films of director Danny Boyle, with whom he was supposed to have some Scottish, post-MTV Scorsese-and-De Niro thing going on. In Boyle's debut feature, Shallow Grave, McGregor had the most prominent and sympathetic of the three main roles, alongside Kerry Fox, who made him her bitch, and Christopher Eccleston, who out-acted him into the next county. They followed that up with the much bigger hit Trainspotting, where Robert Carlyle swabbed the screen with him. The Boyle-McGregor partnership finally came to an acrimonious end when Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead in The Beach, thus sparing McGregor the chance to have his clock cleaned by Tilda Swinton. (They also worked together on A Life Less Ordinary, another movie full of actors who might have easily stolen it from Ewan, except who would have wanted it?) On his own, McGregor has provided evidence of an adventurous spirit by agreeing to star in several of the most unpleasantly misconceived big projects of the last dozen years, including Peter Greenaway's pervy art exhibit The Pillow Book, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, and David Mackenzie's lyrical ode to post-coital depression, Young Adam. McGregor also acted and sang in Todd Haynes' glitter rock movie Velvet Goldmine, where his famous and often-exposed physique, while certainly hunky enough as the physiques of pampered, hard-drinking young Scottish actors go, looked a little marshmallowy for someone who was meant to be Iggy Pop; however, we like the suggestion brunted by some admiring reviewers that this made it easier to accept that he was really meant to be Iggy and Lou Reed. His most high-profile role since Trainspotting was, of course, that of the young Ob-wan Kenobi in George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Better actors than Ewan had trouble making their presence felt in those pictures, so it would be wrong to be too hard on him for that chapter of his career, though it does seem amazing that anyone could picture this guy someday turning into Alec Guinness. One hates to be too hard on McGregor for anything, really: unlike some names on this list, not to mention a whole lot of more talented people, he seems like a nice guy, and he's generally not painful to watch. It's just that, seeing him acting in a movie, you often find yourself staring at him and wondering where the rest of the donut went.

CLINT EASTWOOD

Sergio Leone, the director who made Eastwood a star with the Italian Western A Fistful of Dollars, once told an interviewer that, "When Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in the one particular block of marble which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses," adding that he cast Clint after experiencing the same epiphany, except in reverse: watching Eastwood in action, "What I saw, simply, was a block of marble." The canny Leone would make some terrific pictures with that block of marble, and once the marble was established as the biggest international movie star in the world, he would go on to make a lot of other, shittier movies with a lot of lesser directors, a roll call that includes himself. During his peak years as a movie star, Eastwood established himself as the king of his thing: monolithic, inexpressive, yet implicitly self-righteous in his need to dish out retributive (and pre-emptive) violence to anyone who had it coming to him, which in most of those movies is anyone who's on-screen who he isn't fucking or who isn't played by an orangutan. Back in those days, the conventional wisdom on Eastwood was that it might be fun to watch him pistol whip people on screen, but that you wouldn't want to admit to being a fan if you were applying for a government job. But whatever you think of his earlier action hits, for the last couple of decades we've been sharing the planet with Clint the Auteur, the increasingly hard-to-listen-to, sinewy old guy with the glare of an Old Testament prophet and the voice of a rattlesnake's death rasp who keeps sliding behind the camera to direct a long string of ever more obvious movies with creaking joints that are invariably hailed as masterpieces by people who must need to get their eyeballs oiled. It's easy to think of other cases where it took the critics a while to catch up with an American original, but sometimes they do get it right the first time. John Huston -- who Clint impersonated in White Hunter, Black Heart, something he had as much business attempting as Huston himself would have had playing Shirley Temple -- said in Chinatown that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough, and there's a little of all three in Eastwood.

NICOLE KIDMAN

Between Dead Calm, the 1989 Australian thriller that was her first film released in the U.S., and her Hollywood debut the next year in Days of Thunder, Kidman's onscreen image seemed to lose ten years and at least that many brain cells. Her '90s screen partnership with her then-husband Tom Cruise, which also resulted in Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut, was like some post-modern parody of the public marriage and tie-in movie career of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, itself no great moment in the history of human dignity. By the time it was over, any personality or expressive qualities that Kidman ever had were smothered in "glamour." If she's really a star, then she's a star of a very strange kind, with an odd, limited sort of appeal: she's had her greatest successes playing characters who the audience is meant to want to strangle (as in To Die For and Malice) or in movies where somebody already beat us to it: her best performance, by miles, was in the ghost story The Others, where she was completely convincing as a woman so tightly buttoned up and horribly repressed that she didn't even know she was dead. Since the divorce from Tom Cruise, in which she seemed to win official custody of the media and the industry's solicitous respect, she's picked her roles like a politician with a desire to cover as much ground as possible without offending anyone, and they've been a testament to the awfulness of her taste: jumping at the chance to miscast herself in Oscar-bait literary adaptations like The Hours, The Human Stain, and Cold Mountain while courting the groundlings in terribly misconceived remakes of The Stepford Wives, Invasion (as in "of the Body Snatchers"), and the TV series Bewitched. Having some arch, boring glamourpuss making movies for them seems to give studio heads a kick, at least for a while: in 2006, Kidman was the most highly paid actress in movies, even though a look at the returns on her films made it seem that she couldn't draw crows to a cornfield at sundown.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil 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

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

Thursday Morning Poll for October 9, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Last week, in honor of Paul Newman, we run a poll to determine which of Newman’s performances was your favorite. Based on our findings, it appears that the resounding favorite of Screengrab’s readership was Newman’s work as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler. Newman’s iconic turn in Robert Rossen’s classic low-key poolroom drama was chosen by 40% of readers, followed by his autumnal performance as Sully in Nobody’s Fool (27%) and his work as the first of the two titles characters in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (20%). Bringing up the rear was a tie between the world-class SOB title role in Hud and the “wild, beautiful” protagonist of Cool Hand Luke. But can you really go wrong with any of these performances?

This week marks the release of Body of Lies, the fourth collaboration between filmmaker Ridley Scott and his star of choice, Russell Crowe. Since directing Crowe to an Oscar in Gladiator, the two have worked together three more times. So which of the films they’ve made together is your favorite?

Favorite Scott/Crowe collaboration? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Set Your DVR!: October 6 - October 12, 2008

Hayden Childs — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hi, Screengrab readers! For my first post, I thought I’d kick off a series in which I suggest various movies worth recording off of cable TV in the upcoming week. See, I know that since you read the Screengrab, you have a fairly solid grasp on the movies and movie history, but there’s always some that slip through the cracks. The movies I’ll mention here will give you a chance to catch up on those that you might have overlooked. If I miss something, please post it in the comments!

Here’s the skinny: I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve gone to the trouble of getting a DVR (or have a VCR you know how to set, at the very least) to go along with the cable you pay for month after month, but you don’t always keep an eye on upcoming movies. Since you’re reading the Screengrab, I’m not going to recommend movies that everyone recommends, such as Singin’ In The Rain (which, incidentally, I record just about every time it’s on, because I always have time to watch one of the dance numbers). I’m not going to be too esoteric, either. I’ll use an in-law test: I’ll stick with movies that I doubt my mother-in-law has seen, and that way will try to catch some of the great movies that are more likely to slip through the cracks. One more thing: no premium channels, mainly because I can’t afford them.

Mon, Oct. 6:
Nothing here. Good thing, too, since I’m not posting this until Tuesday Morning

Tues, Oct. 7:
9:00 am: Ace In The Hole on TCM. I don’t think this is a very good movie. But plenty of reviewers disagree with me, so I’m going to mention it. Actually, by the time this goes live, it'll probably be too late.

8:00 pm: Don’t Look Back on VH1CL (repeating at 11:30 pm). Maybe you’ve seen this, and maybe not. But it’s one of the great rock documentaries and, if you watch it, you’ll enjoy I’m Not There that much more.

Wed, Oct. 8:
11:45 pm: The Gay Divorcee on TCM. I mentioned I like dancing, right? This is Fred and Ginger at their best.

Th, Oct. 9:
1:45 am: Top Hat on TCM. I take those last comments back. This one is Fred and Ginger at their best.

7:00 pm: Four Jacques Tati films (Jour de Fete, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Play Time) on TCM. Ah, the whimsy! Can you stand it? Honestly, I’ve only seen the last of these, and I wasn’t much taken with it at the time. But attitudes change. I intend to record ‘em all.

Fri, Oct. 10:
12:15 am: Play Time on TCM. Already mentioned this.

2:30 am: The General on TCM. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone should have seen this by now. But not everyone has, so I hereby recommend that you record and watch it if you fall into that camp.

3:45 am: The Navigator on TCM. Same deal as above.

5:00 am: Macbeth on TCM. This is Orson Welles’ 1948 version where everyone affects a crappy Scottish accent, even the actual Scots in the film. Welles’ accent in particular is so horrid and depressing that it may cause you to think less of Citizen Kane. However! This is one of those movies that has enough greatness and interest elsewhere - in this case, in the visual language of the film and the minor plot changes - that it’s worth a viewing despite its deficiencies.

7:00 am: Gerry on IFC. I love the hell out of Van Sant’s death trilogy (is that a spoiler? I’m not sure). Some viewers find them long and pointless, but I think all three have a transcendent beauty to them that gives meaning to the pointless death in each and begs the question: what’s the point of anyone’s death? In this one, two guys get lost in the desert. There’s a ten-minute tracking shot near the end where they walk from the dark into the morning sun without changing their positions to each other that I think is one of the prettiest scenes in all cinema. It’s almost Abstract Expressionism. Don’t watch it if you don’t like Rothko, but if you do, snap this one up.

8:00 pm: Dick on Oxygen (again at 10:00 pm). This movie looked stupid and fluffy in the previews, and I didn’t watch it until a friend forced it on me. It’s hilarious. Best as the second half of a double feature with All The President’s Men.

Sat, Oct. 11:
6:30 am: Journey Into Fear on TCM. Entertaining little spy thriller with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

7:00 am: Samurai 2 on IFC. The second part of the epic trilogy. Even if you haven’t seen the first part, the plot is fairly self-explanatory and thoroughly enjoyable.

10:15 am: Primer on IFC (repeat at 3:00 pm). Smart, smart no-budget sci-fi thriller. I had to watch it a couple of times (and finally consult a website) to untangle the central mystery, but that’s part of the fun.

11:00 am: After The Thin Man on TCM. The second Thin Man movie. That’s all I need to say, right?

3:00 pm: The Haunting on TCM. This is the 1963 Robert Wise movie, not the awful remake. I recommended it to a friend last Halloween, and she told me it was the worst movie she’d ever seen. I think she’s very, very wrong. It still creeps me the hell out.

Sun, Oct. 12:
5:00 am: 24 hours of Paul Newman movies (The Rack, Until They Sail, Torn Curtain, Exodus, Sweet Bird Of Youth, Hud, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cool Hand Luke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Rachel, Rachel, and The Outrage) on TCM. Have you seen all of these? I haven’t. Go on, catch up on the guy’s work.

7:00 am: Cleo From 5 to 7 on IFC. Many classics of the French New Wave spend so much time and effort trying to unlock the mysterious, riddle-like conundrum of the enigmatic, baffling desires of oh-so-fickle womanhood that no one will forget they were made by men. This one was actually made by a women, and you can tell.

6:45 pm: Last Days on IFC (showing again Monday at 3:35 am). The third in Van Sant’s death trilogy. I suspect it plays much better if you don’t really care about Kurt Cobain. I don’t, and I loved it.

7:00 pm: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party on MTV2 (repeat on Monday at 5:00 pm). Aw yeah! Somehow Michel Gondry and Dave Chappelle combined forces to make a concert film that is good-natured, loose-limbed, and funny in ways that most concert films could not even conceive.

Mon, Oct. 13:
In case I’m late getting the next installment up on Monday, I just want to mention the following:

11:00 am: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 4:15 pm). Slow and thoughtful take on African-American youths in a go-nowhere Southern town directed by the guy who made Pineapple Express. Obvious influences: Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett.

2:00 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC. The lesser of the two great existential car movies of 1971 (Two-Lane Blacktop is the other). This one’s still a pop culture point-of-reference, especially for Tarantino movies. Definitely worth a viewing.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Sept. 27-Oct. 3, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Look, we know lots of movie blogs out there on the webbing paid tribute to Paul Newman this week, and rightly so. But you’re never going to have closure until you’ve read Phil Nugent’s obituary, our Paul Newman Top 10 (Parts One, Two and Three) and Paul Clark’s look back at Exodus. That’s simply a fact. And while you’re at it, you might as well check out these other highlights from the week that was:

Reviews galore: Religulous, Ballast, Choke, Let the Right One In and Wild Man of the Navidad

Movies you may have missed: Getting to Know You, War of the Gargantuas, Jail Bait

People we love: Kat Dennings, The Angry Police Captain

People we can probably do without: Sharon Stone, David Spade, Lee Atwater

Worse idea: Kenneth Branagh’s Thor or Blade Runner 2?

Why, there’s so much good stuff here, I don’t know whether to shit or go blind.

Yesterday's Hits: Exodus (1960, Otto Preminger)

Paul Clark — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, we paid tribute to the life and career of Paul Newman with a list of our picks for his greatest performances. And looking back, it’s easy to see the Newman made quite a few movies that were not only very good, but eventually became acknowledged as classics. But for this week’s installment of Yesterday’s Hits, I’d like to explore one of Newman’s films that was incredibly popular in its day but hasn’t endured quite like his best films- 1960’s Exodus.

What made Exodus a hit?: It seems strange now, but there was a time when the majority of box office hits were based on bestselling novels. People would read the latest literary blockbuster, then flock to the movies to see the cinematic version of the story. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, historical fiction was in vogue, and one of the most popular books of the time was Leon Uris’ 1956 novel Exodus. A dramatization of the 1948 founding of the state of Israel, Exodus captivated readers who enjoyed the way Uris interspersed a recent historical event with invented and composited characters. By the time Exodus became America’s biggest bestseller since Gone With the Wind, it was inevitable that it would be headed for the big screen.

Knowing the value of the property (Uris sold the rights even before the book hit bookstore shelves) MGM pulled out all the stops to make Exodus a major, A-list production. Tapped to direct was Otto Preminger, one of Hollywood’s best-known and boldest filmmakers, and himself of Jewish descent. In turn, Preminger hired the previously blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to handle screenwriting duties, which along with Trumbo’s work on Spartacus effectively ended the blacklist. The film was to be shot entirely on location in Cyprus and Israel, where the book had also been set. And the casting befitted a production of this scale. The cast was led by Newman, one of Hollywood’s hottest leading men, and also included Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint, Oscar nominees Lee J. Cobb, Ralph Richardson, and Sal Mineo, and up-and-comer Peter Lawford. As expected, the film was a big hit, bringing in more than $8 million domestically to become one of the top grossers of 1960.

What happened?: As with anything else, tastes change. To begin with, readers are a fickle bunch, and the popular taste for historical fiction was supplanted by other genres. Moviegoing audiences soon followed suit, and the historical epics that loomed large over the box office in the early 1960 soon gave way to hits that were more visceral or fanciful. Today, in a time when the only three-hour blockbusters are fantasy stories, Exodus would most likely be relegated to the Oscar-bait pile, given a limited release in late December before going wider in mid-January.

Does Exodus still work?: Almost, but not quite. It begins very well, with the famous incident in which hundreds of Jewish refugees attempted to escape their captivity on the island of Cyprus and sail to Palestine. In this section of the film, Preminger does a very good job at capturing the event in a way that does justice to those who lived it and while also being narratively compelling. These scenes aren’t particularly complex from a moral standpoint- the British are trying to block the Jews from their freedom, so they rebel by staging a hunger strike- but they have a clarity of purpose that gets the movie off on the right foot.

However, once the story gets to Palestine, much of the focus is lost, and despite a stirring score by Ernest Gold, the film begins to seriously drag. The cast of characters, previously united by the escape attempt, splinters the story into a number of different plot strands that are meant to encompass the difficult birthing process for the state of Israel. For example, Newman’s Ari Ben Canaan works with his father (Cobb) to establish the nation in a peaceful manner, whereas Dov Landau (Mineo) joins up with a group of resistance fighters. These stories are only as effective as the characters who inhabit them, and unfortunately, the quality of character development varies greatly.

Given particularly short shrift are the women. The American nurse Kitty Fremont (Saint) is clearly meant to function as the audience surrogate in the drama, gradually coming to an understanding of the ongoing plight- and enduring humanity- of the Jewish people. But as a character, she’s kind of a non-starter, carried along by the demands of the plot instead of by her own strongly defined nature. Even more sketchy is the character of Karen, played by newcomer Jill Haworth. In the course of the film, Karen reveals herself as a symbol of the fortunes of the Jewish people in Palestine. At the beginning of the story, she’s full of hope and promise, only to grow increasingly disillusioned once she arrives. By the time the film turns her into an innocent martyr in the final reel- buried alongside a sympathetic Arab, no less- the symbol has become far too belabored for its own good.

Faring much better is Mineo, who was never one of the breakout stars of the Method generation but who was one of its most interesting actors. Dov’s storyline is somewhat awkwardly integrated into the rest of the film, but they work pretty nicely on their own, due in large part to Mineo’s performance. It helps that the Dov Landau storyline contains some of the film’s edgiest material, as when he admits to working as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and more. Preminger, never one to shy away from controversy, changed Dov’s back story from the original novel, so whereas he survived as a forger in Uris’ book, Preminger and Trumbo made his method of survival somewhat more unpleasant. I admit that I was a little shocked that the line, “they used me… like a woman!” passed muster under the Production Code.

As for Newman, it’s not one of his great performances, but he’s fine in a role that makes effective use of his star charisma. And when he’s called on to make an impassioned speech in the film’s final scene, he pulls it off without coming off as sanctimonious. There are a number of elements to the film that just don’t work, or which have dated poorly. However, the sentiments Newman expresses in his final eulogy are as relevant today as ever. The situation between the Jews and Arabs is as uneasy as it ever was, and we’re no closer to a solution than we were half a century ago. And while Exodus doesn’t quite stand the test of time, these lines still hit home:

”The dead always share the Earth in peace- and that’s not enough. It’s time for the living to have a turn. The day will come when Arab and Jew will share in a peaceful life this land that they have always shared in death.”

Thursday Morning Poll for October 2, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s intrepid writing staff unveiled its list of the greatest war movies ever made, and topping our list was Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. But when we asked the readers to pick their favorite, they settled upon something a little more American. So cue up the Wagner and break out your surfboard, because according to our readership, the greatest war movie of all is none other than Francis Ford Coppola’s incendiary Apocalypse Now, which outpaced Renoir’s film 33% to 25%. Tying for #3 were Robert Altman’s MASH and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory with 17% apiece, and bringing up the rear was Casablanca, a fine movie but undoubtedly the least war movie-ish of the bunch.

This week, we remember the late Paul Newman. Earlier today, we ran our picks of Newman’s greatest performances, and now we’ll let you choose your favorites from our top five choices. Which of these films represented Newman’s finest hours?

Favorite Paul Newman performance? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

4. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

Straddling the line between the revolutionary filmmaking of the 1970s and the tail end of classic Hollywood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of those movies that isn’t legendary because it’s important, or because it’s meaningful, or because it broke some rich new ground in the language of filmmaking. It’s legendary because it’s funny, fun, and incredibly entertaining. It’s also one of those films where everyone seems to be firing on all cylinders; the sly buddy-western could easily be counted as a career high for Robert Redford, director George Roy Hill and his cameraman Connie Hall, screenwriter William Goldman, and even composer Burt Bacharach. But Paul Newman is the glue that holds everything together: taking on Goldman’s witty dialogue, he gives it just enough of a human, weary edge that it doesn’t seem as over-the-top as it might coming from some actors. Some performers go their whole lives without snaring a part like Butch Cassidy, and others get one, but handle it all wrong. You sometimes hear actors referred to as intelligent, but rarely movie stars; it’s a testament to how bright Paul Newman was that he was handed a role as rich as this one and figured it out immediately, playing it on screen as perfectly as it could be played. This is a real movie star role, and Newman handles it like a real movie star.

3. NOBODY’S FOOL (1994) & THE VERDICT (1982)

I’ll admit I'm cheating here, attempting to squeeze an eleventh film into this Top Ten list, but I simply couldn’t decide which late-period Newman film I liked best, so I figured I’d call it a tie. Two sides of the same rumpled coin, The Verdict’s beaten-down Boston lawyer Frank Galvin, fighting an impossible battle against the Catholic Church, and Sully, the beaten-down small town ne’er-do-well Newman plays in Nobody’s Fool are both men with no expectations of success or happiness in their lonely lives who nevertheless find redemption despite and because of their own stubborn tenacity. One of the hallmarks of Newman’s career was the Mercedes caliber acting, writing and directing he seemed to attract to most of his star vehicles, and these two films more than hold their own with regard to above-the-line talent. Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, James Mason and helmer Sidney Lumet provide typically stellar support in The Verdict, but one of the pleasures of Nobody’s Fool is watching Newman (and acclaimed co-stars like Jessica Tandy and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) bring out the best in frequently wasted and underestimated actors like Bruce Willis (in a supporting role as a big fish businessman in a small upstate New York pond) and Melanie Griffith (happily erasing memories of their previous on-screen pairing in Bonfire of the Vanities as Willis’ dissatisfied trophy wife). Yet despite all the impressive talent surrounding him, Newman is the heart and soul of both films, dominating them with master class, world-weary performances that just make you want to punch the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences right in the face for awarding him his only Best Actor Oscar for The Color of freakin’ Money.

2. HUD (1963)

Newman never took his anti-hero routine farther into "anti-" territory than in this family drama, set in a dusty, unromantic modern Texas. He plays the title role, which turns out not to be that of the Department of Housing and Urban Development but rather a selfish but dashing heel who, in the context of a small rural town situated on the wrong end of the 1960s, qualifies as about as hot as hot shit gets. Hud roughly fits the mold but finally breaks the tradition of such earlier Hollywood characters as the Bogart heroes, who were always talking about how they stuck their neck out for nobody and only cared about keeping their own hides safe and comfortable because Hud really means it; he remains defiantly unredeemed to the movie's end. Seen as daring in its day, the movie actually risks being too morally clear-cut. What keeps it alive and spiky after all these years is that, thanks to Newman, it's hard not to feel closer to this bastard than to his pure and upright antagonists, the boringly earnest young man (Brandon De Wilde) who has to learn to see through him, and the crotchety father (Melvyn Douglas) who seems to have been judging him as harshly as possible for every minute of their shared lives, and who finally seems to die of impacted self-righteousness...especially since Newman and the director, Martin Ritt, seemed to understand something real about the sensual attractiveness of evil: in this, the least sympathetic role of the first half of his career, Newman was probably sexier than he'd ever been before, which is saying something.

1. THE HUSTLER (1961)

Newman entered his second decade as a movie star, and established himself as a man with staying power, as Fast Eddie Felsen, the cocky pool shark who's set on proving himself a winner -- which he does, though at the loss of his innocence, a girl (Piper Laurie), and the game that's the only thing he's ever been able to claim to be the best at. In addition to the tart dialogue and the opportunity to go head-to-head with George C. Scott (at the peak of his powers as a sly stealer of scenes) and Jackie Gleason (in the most pleasingly assured dramatic performance of his life), the role gave Newman the chance to grow up on camera. In the final battle of the billiard balls, he trades in the self-infatuated, head-jiggling grins and showy flare-ups of the early scenes for a quiet gravity, with suggestions of violent emotions kept under powerful control beneath the surface. It was a good indicator of just how well the actor himself would be able to weather the aging process in the years to come, steadily improving with time while the careers of so many of his contemporaries receded to the background or turned brown at the edges.

Click Here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

7. CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958)

Newman's first on-screen brush with Tennessee Williams. (Four years later, he'd star in a hysterical version of Sweet Bird of Youth, and in 1987 he directed Joanne Woodward in a movie of The Glass Menagerie.) It suffers from the requirement that the play be bowdlerized for Hollywood: unless you know the original's big revelation about the exact nature of the relationship between Newman's Brick and his faithful football buddy Skip, you could run this movie backwards and forwards and still end up a little hazy on just what it is that's got the rich boy with the hot wife so pouty. But it gives Newman the chance to show off his Actors Studio chops and make with the heavy Broadway dramatics, especially in the famous showdown about "mendacity" with the doomed, cantankerous father figure, Big Daddy (Burl Ives, looking like a redneck cave troll). And seeing the Adonis-like Newman demonstrate his manly self-control by refusing the increasingly desperate advances of an in-her-prime Elizabeth Taylor must have inspired a compelling mixture of bewilderment and admiration in theaters from coast to coast.

6. THE STING (1973)

Shortly after Newman’s death, Larry King replayed a series of recent interviews with the flinty, taciturn actor, who came across as guarded and frankly embarrassed to be the center of attention under the glaring spotlights. The only times the star’s famous blue eyes really lit up with the kind of playful, mischievous glee familiar from so many of his film roles came when he spoke about a prank war between himself and his old running partner, Robert Redford. To say The Sting was only his second best on-screen pairing with Redford is hardly damning the seminal caper flick with faint praise, considering the American Film Institute named their best buddy flick (1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) one of the best westerns of all time, and both their paired collaborations racked up a total of 12 Academy Awards between them (with The Sting earning Oscars for Best Picture as well as Best Director for lucky charm helmer George Roy Hill, who would later direct Newman in Slap Shot). When asked why he and Redford never did another film together despite their palpable onscreen chemistry, Newman explained they wanted to, but simply never found a suitable project...understandable, considering the standard they’d set for themselves with films of a quality Hollywood barely even bothers to attempt anymore. Screenwriter David S. Ward’s twisty Depression-era tale of a grifter dream team seeking revenge on the Scottish gangster who killed one of their own makes Ocean’s Eleven (either version) seem like a simple snatch-and-grab job, and Hill’s direction elevates the impressive game of his two leads by surrounding them with a memorable ragtime score, gorgeous production design and an all-star character actor Who’s Who including Robert Shaw, Charles Durning and Eileen Brennan as a formidable floozy whose lived-in chemistry with Newman gives Redford a run for his money.

5. COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

What must have seemed like a stunner back in 1967 – Paul Newman, one of the most beloved actors in America, playing what essentially boiled down to a counterculture icon – has lost a bit of its punch. Stuart Rosenberg’s direction isn’t the most sure-handed in the world, and the screenplay (by Donn Pearce, based on his own novel) lays on the Jesus metaphor a bit thick. But even surrounded by a terrific supporting cast, including George Kennedy and Strother Martin, it’s Newman’s iconic performance that makes the irrepressible, defiant prisoner Luke into perhaps the most famous anti-hero in ‘60s cinema and keeps the movie’s reputation from falling in with a lot of other forgotten rebel-without-a-cause films of the day. Newman’s strength, as in so many of his best-known performances, is that he completely owns the role, in all its contradictions and confusions, and doesn’t slow down for a second. When we’re asked to laugh with him, we can’t help but do so; when we’re asked for feel for his suffering, we do it without a thought. A lot of actors wouldn’t be able to reconcile the swings of the character from grinning smart-ass to inspiring martyr, but Newman throws himself into the part with such conviction that while we may not always believe the script, we always believe him.

Click Here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Notable individuals die all the time, and we react with varying degrees of sadness or indifference when their names appear in the weekly obituary sections of magazines like, say, Entertainment Weekly or Time.

But every now and then, a celebrity death truly shocks us, because we really, truly thought the individual in question had already died sometime in the late ‘80s.

Occasionally, though, we react to celebrity death with the heartfelt regret usually reserved for people we actually knew. I moped around for days after heart failure claimed Glenn “Divine” Milstead in 1988, and the 2006 loss of Robert Altman felt like the passing of a beloved, crotchety grandfather.

Paul Newman outlived them both, surviving to the ripe old age of 83. In fact, by a strange coincidence, Wikipedia just informed me that Newman and Altman were both somehow born in 1925, which simply doesn’t compute in my perceptual reckoning of things. How could Newman be older than Robert Altman, or my father, or...or Robert Redford, ferchrissakes? Intellectually, of course, I knew he was old: his film career started way back in 1954 with The Silver Chalice, though I always (erroneously) associated him more with the Baby Boomer class of Nicholson and Beatty, thanks to ‘60s and ‘70s classics like The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Yet, even as Newman aged before our eyes into one of cinema’s grumpy old men in films like Twilight and Road to Perdition, it somehow never registered that he was actually old old. I mean, the man drove freakin’ race cars! How can he be gone while Cheney continues relentlessly on?

Alas...and yet, my Screengrab colleague Phil Nugent has already written a fine memorial tribute to this impressive humanitarian, salad dressing mogul and celebrated paragon of “the Hollywood Elite,” and so we come not to bury Paul Newman but to praise him, and the Top Ten films we’ll always remember him by.

10. THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958)

This Dixie-fried melodrama, directed by Martin Ritt (who later re-teamed with Newman for Hud), is supposed to be based on the writings of William Faulkner. As a treatment of a great American author it's a soap opera, but as a soap opera it's one hell of an overripe Southern-Gothic sudser, with Newman (modeling the latest in sweat-stained wifebeaters) and a cast that includes Orson Welles, Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, and Anthony Franciosa making with the wild-eyed ravings in cracker accents that might have been delivered to the set in ten-gallon drums. In addition to its shameless entertainment value, it has a special sentimental place in Newman's oeuvre for marking the on-screen meeting of our hero and his offscreen heroine, Joanne Woodward. The plot revolves around a deal that Newman's hungry drifter, Ben Quick, makes with Welles' bloated paterfamilias, Will Varner, to win the hand of Varner's daughter, played by Woodward, who Will fears will otherwise marry poorly to a girly man played by Richard Anderson, AKA TV's Oscar Goldman. In the movie, Woodward remains stoically resistant to Newman's hard-bodied charms. In real life, not so much, and the two of them, who had met two years earlier while understudying the leads in Picnic (at a time when Newman was still inconveniently married to his first wife) reportedly spent much of the shoot making up for lost time. They would work together another dozen or so times, in co-starring gigs and in movies where Newman directed Woodward, but this is the movie that preserves the priceless and unforgettable sight of two very hot people first fully celebrating how hot they were for each other.

9. THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

One of the most amazing things about Paul Newman’s career was how long he was able to get away with working as a leading man. Well into his sixties and seventies, when most actors -- even A-list stars -- tend to be cast in father or mentor roles to nursemaid younger talent, Newman was still flashing those famous cobalt blues, attracting the women, and carrying movies on his ever-capable shoulders. Best of all, he made it work. Yet in his last two decades, Newman also took on several interesting supporting roles. He received an Oscar nomination for his work in Road to Perdition, and in his final theatrical film, he voiced Doc Hudson, the gruff paterfamilias of the town of Radiator Springs, in Pixar’s Cars (let’s forget Message in a Bottle, shall we?). But best of all was his work in the Coen brothers’ sadly under-appreciated The Hudsucker Proxy. In this Art Deco take on a Preston Sturges-style comedy, Newman might seem an ill fit for the role of Hudsucker Industries vice-president Sidney J. Mussburger, the sort of corporate fat cat that might once have been played by Akim Tamiroff. But damn if Newman isn’t a treat to watch. Having built a fruitful career on his ability to make acting look easy, here he takes the opposite tack, giving a performance as stylized as any he’s ever given. In lesser hands, it might have felt like overacting -- look no further than Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance in the same film for proof. But Newman pulls it off magnificently by somehow under-playing the role, never turning the character into an excuse to twist his (invisible) mustache. Instead, he simply turns the patented Newman charm back on itself, showing it used to an entirely different end. Who could ever forget the way he punctuates seemingly half his lines with a grunted “sure-sure”? In The Hudsucker Proxy, Newman gives us a tantalizing hint of what an irresistible character actor he might’ve been even if he hadn’t been so genetically blessed.

8. SLAP SHOT (1977)

It was asking way too much of Slap Shot for lightning to strike a third time. Hell, it was asking too much of The Sting for lightning to strike twice – and yet the second pairing of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill, following the hugely successful Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid proved to be a giant hit as well, satisfying critics and audiences alike. But Hill’s third go-round with Newman in the lead role didn’t have a William Goldman writing the screenplay, and Robert Redford probably wouldn’t have played particularly well as one of the Hanson Brothers, so the two of them went it alone. The story of the final days of a fading, brawling, largely out-of-control minor league hockey team wasn’t as successful as the previous two films, and it certainly didn’t garner the same level of critical praise. But though some great supporting performances and a funny, filthy script by Nancy Dowd played their part, it’s undeniably a testament to Paul Newman’s undying charisma and likeability as an actor that a lot of people would name Slap Shot as their favorite of all his movies. Newman (who featured as one of his most lasting traits the appearance that he genuinely enjoyed what he did for a living) is clearly having a ball as the foul-mouthed, dysfunctional player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs (a character partly modeled on the notorious John Brophy). The role even spilled over into his real life: he complained to Time, seven years after the movie premiered, that since playing Reg Dunlop, his language had been “straight out of the locker room”.

Click Here for Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Paul Newman, 1925--2008

Phil Nugent — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The death of Paul Newman cuts our movie culture's last ties to a generation of 1950s leading men. Newman himself had long since transcended his film debut, The Silver Chalice (1954), a terrible performance in a terrible movie that he, typically, loved to make fun of. A paragon of classical handsomeness and unostentatiously fit-looking, with eyes that people wrote songs about, Newman arrived on the scene at the same time as Method firebrands such as Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, though at first he looked to have more in common with such male mannequins as Rock Hudson and Robert Wagner. He wound up casting a shadow as long as any of them, and better sustaining a career than any of them, by taking his work seriously and endeavoring make it mean something. As Richard Corliss writes, ""Instead of leading his talent in weird and wayward directions, like Brando, or smashing it to pieces on a California highway at 24, like Dean, he just kept getting better, more comfortable in his movie skin, more proficient at suggesting worlds of flinty pleasure or sour disillusion with a smile or a squint." At the same time, he never seemed to be in danger of letting a little thing like being the best-known movie star and sexiest man in the world go to his head.

Newman has to have been one of the most famous movie stars for whom there is no automatically recognizable caricature version; he gave nightclub impressions few outsized mannerisms to latch onto. Newman was someone who moviegoers probably felt they knew better from his offscreen image than from any carefully maintained screen image. His image was that of a superior being who laughed at the idea that he was anything but a regular guy who'd been very, very lucky; a supreme sex symbol who, if given the chance, would probably bore you blind telling you how crazy he was about his wife of fifty years, Joanne Woodward, and his family life (""I have steak at home," Newman once famously told a Playboy interviewer who had the balls to ask him what he had on the side, "why go out for hamburger?"); a celebrity liberal who put his money where his mouth was and became a leading philanthropist, plowing hundred of millions of dollars into charitable causes, much of it generated by Newman's Own, the fantastically profitable food line that Newman and writer A. E. Hotchner began in 1982 as a joke. (Dalhlia Lithwick has a great piece about Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, the summer getaway he established for seriously ill children.) Because he was Paul Newman, and because he chose his causes so well and didn't seem to possess whatever gene creates the appearance of smugness, Newman could indulge his political urges and never seem like a polarizing figure to anyone outside the ranks of the bitterly deranged, and though the news that Richard Nixon had been so thoughtful as to have included him on his White House enemies list He is sometimes said to have embodied the "anti-hero" in such movies as Hud, and that willingness and ability to play morally ambiguous and even downright rotten characters no doubt helped him keep him seem "relevant" as the 1950s crashed into the '60s and '70s, but the truth is that Newman was a logical choice for dislikable characters because, even as he gave meticulous, honest performances in those roles, his own likability took the box-office curse off them. After Newman appeared in the William Faulkner adaptation The Long, Hot Summer as Ben Quick, the sexy lout who is ostracized after being falsely accused of being a barn burner, Pauline Kael wrote that Hollywood had figured out that a hero could burn barns all day and night and audiences would love him anyway, so long as he was played by Paul Newman.

The Long Hot Summer, notable as the first of ten features in which he and Woodward acted together, was also one of three films from 1958, along with Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun, in which he played Billy the Kid in the big-screen version of a Gore Vidal TV play and the movie version of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that pinpointed his transition from sincere juvenile to assurec leading man. He achieved classic status in 1961 playing the pool hustler Fast Eddie Felsen in Robert Rossen's The Hustler, a lowlife melodrama whose smoky atmosphere and acting duels between Newman and George C. Scott and Jackie Gleason retain their chewy zest more than forty-five years later. Of the aforementioned Hud, Manohla Dargis writes in yesterday's New York Times: "His lean, hard-muscled body seems to slash against the wide-screen landscape, evoking the oil derricks to come, and the black-and-white cinematography turns his famous baby blues an eerie shade of gray. The character would be a heartbreaker if he were interested in breaking hearts instead of making time with the bodies that come with them. That’s supposed to make Hud a mean man, but mostly he seems self-interested. No one is tearing him apart and Mr. Newman doesn’t try to plumb the depths with the role, which makes the character and the performance feel more contemporary than many of the head cases of the previous decade. He finds depths in these shallows." Hollywood legend has it that it was because of his success in those two movies that, in 1966, when Newman played Ross Macdonald's private eye Lew Archer, the character was re-christianed Harper so that the studio could cash in on what was apparently the sure-fire good-luck charm of releasing a Paul Newman movie whose title began with the letter "H." (Though not one of Newman's best--as in, way not--the movie was a hit, which may be why, a year later, he was rounded up to star in a Western, based on an Elmore Leonard novel, called Hombre.)

Newman's major contributions to the rebel strain of the counterculture were Cool Hand Luke (1967), in which he played a nonconformist on a chain hang who becomes a martyr figure--Christ in a sweat box--and the 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where his performance, engaging though it is, now looks like part of a charitable enterprise aimed at making a star of his buddy, Robert Redford. He would prove devoted not just to Redford--leading to a partnership that would be dipped in gold and garlanded with Oscars in the 1973 The Sting--but to the directors of those movies: respectively, Stuart Rosenberg, with whom he would re-team for WUSA, Pocket Money, and The Drowning Pool, in which he would reprise the role of Lew Archer, I mean, Harper; and George Roy Hill, who went on to direct The Sting and Slap Shot. For some of us, these hold up less well than many of his other hits; they feel self-satisfied and smirky, with the adolescent wisecracks piling up like foam rubber peanuts. In general, a complacency seemed to settle in for Newman in this period, if not so much in his acting as in his choice of roles. There's plenty of evidence that he had grown tired of presenting himself for the camera's delectation. He had a high-profile side career as a race car driver, but he had also turned to directing. He directed six films in all, four of them--Rachel, Rachel (1968), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1973), the TV film The Shadow Box (1980), and The Glass Menagerie (1987)-- starring Joanne Woodward, and two, the Ken Kesey adaptation Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and Harry and Son (1984) starring himself. (Both he and Woodward won Golden Globes and New York Critics Cricle Awards for Rachel, Rachel.)

There were signs that he had begun to stir again when he signed on to star in two pictures directed by Robert Altman, but Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) and Quintet (1979) did not mark the finest hour for either of them. But by now Newman was in his mid-fifties and wide awake, and he seemed to enter the 1980s with a renewed commitment to his craft. Unlike some other make stars who became public embarrassments by their determination to prove that aging hadn't slowed them down or cost them a drop of testosterone, Newman seemed genuinely, and even playfully, curious about seeing just what he could do with this new state of affairs and how long he could keep it going. His performances in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), Absence of Malice (1981), and The Verdict (1982) were as forceful and finely shaded as anything he had ever done, maybe as good as anything any star at his age had done, and the Academy Award that he received for revisiting the role of Fast Eddie twenty-five years down the line in Martin Scorsese's The Hustler sequel The Color of Money (1986) may have been even more well-deserved as it was unneeded as a confirmation of his stature.

After that benchmark, he seemed to settle in doing whatever it pleased him to do. He had what looked like a terrific time being miscast as tomcatting Louisiana governor (and secret desegregationist) Earl K. Long in Ron Shelton's Blaze, reunited onscreen once more with his wife in the Merchant-Ivory Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, indulged his taste for screwball nonsense as the capitalist villain of the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), kept a firm grip on his sex appeal even as he approached and passed his seventieth birthday in two movies directed by Robert Benton, the underappreciated 1994 charmer Nobody's Fool and the grim memento-mori detective story Twilight (1998). Some fifty years after playing George Gibbs in Our Town on TV, he returned to the play, this time playing the Stage Manager in a Broadway revival that was also recorded for television. He made his last on-camera movie appearance as Tom Hanks's gangster boss in Road to Perdition but continued to do voice work, including a role in the Pixar animated feature Cars. He also played Ed Harris's father in the 2005 HBO miniseries Empire Falls, whose cast also included Joanne Woodward. In May of 2007, he publicly announced his retirement from acting, a decision that was cause for considerable sadness among his fans. The news of his death might best be seen as cause for gratitude, both for the pleasure he gave and the example he set, and for gobstruck admiration at just how much one man was able to get right in the conduct of his life. Presumably Newman would begin any list of his achievements with the names of his children: Susan Kendall and Stephanie, from his early marriage to Jackie Witte, and, from his marriage to Woodward, Elinor "Nell" Teresa, Melissa "Lissy" Stewart, and Claire "Clea" Olivia. (Elinor appeared in both Rachel, Rachel and The Effect of Gamma Rays under the name "Nell Potts".) Newman and Jackie Witte also had a son, Scott, an actor who made his movie debut opposite his father in The Towering Inferno (1974), who died in 1978 from an accidental drug overdose. The Scott Newman Center, which seeks to prevent substance abuse through education, was established in memory.

Yesterday's Hits: The Towering Inferno (1974, John Guillermin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For most movie lovers today, the idea of 1970s Hollywood conjures up an image of maverick filmmakers being given the keys to the castle. It was the era memorialized in histories like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when young turks like Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg did some of their greatest and most famous work. But the truth was more complicated than that. Certainly, movies like The Godfather and Jaws were huge hits, but films of that caliber striking gold at the box office were the exception rather than the rule. Then as now, Hollywood has always been first and foremost in the business of churning out big, mindless spectacles, and the blockbuster of choice for many studios in the early 1970s was the disaster film. The biggest of them all was the highest-grossing film of 1974, The Towering Inferno.

What made The Towering Inferno a hit?: In the 1950s, a journalist named Irwin Allen decided to turn his lifelong love for movies into a career. After producing several documentaries and modest features, he turned his attentions to television throughout most of the 1960s, producing hit series like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Following the success of 1970’s Airport, Allen jumped on the disaster movie bandwagon by making the 1972 smash The Poseidon Adventure. Poseidon Adventure didn’t invent its genre, but it stood in contrast to other films of its kind by moving its central disaster closer to the beginning of the story and focusing instead on how its characters reacted to the disaster.

Allen rarely directed movies himself- The Towering Inferno was credited to John Guillermin, with Allen credited as the director of action sequences- but there was little doubt who was running the show. With The Towering Inferno, Allen more or less perfected the disaster movie formula- impressive effects, gigantic sets, and a sappy romantic ballad often performed by cheeseball chanteuse Maureen McGovern. Likewise, as with all of the most successful disaster movies, Allen gave The Towering Inferno the most stellar cast he could manage, top-lined by three of the era’s biggest stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway. In addition, he cast the key older characters in the film with old-guard Hollywood stars like William Holden, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones. And what would a big-budget film of the period without such quintessentially seventies names as Richard Chamberlain, Robert Wagner, Susan Blakely, and Robert Vaughn? The formula worked- The Towering Inferno was produced for a then-outrageous sum of $14 million dollars, but it ended up grossing more than eight times that amount in America alone, and much more than that overseas.

What happened?: If history teaches us anything about genre moviemaking, it’s that moviegoers are a fickle bunch. The disaster movie was at its peak at the time of The Towering Inferno’s release, but that was about to change. Within the next few years, movies like Jaws and Star Wars gave audiences a new kind of thrill ride at the movies. In light of the lean, efficient nature of these movies, suddenly old-school disaster movies were a thing of the past, and The Towering Inferno, with its galaxy of stars and nearly three-hour run time, seemed stately by comparison. Allen himself couldn’t even resurrect the genre, closing out the decade with three consecutive flops (The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and When Time Ran Out) that pretty much closed the book on disaster movies for years.

Does The Towering Inferno still work?: Not really. If the movie was quaint in comparison to blockbusters made only a few years later, it’s practically a fossil by today’s standards. One of the most distracting elements of the movie is Allen’s tendency to focus on small and fairly cliché bits of character business. At the time, the sight of one or two big-name stars dying onscreen was something of a shock, but from the beginning it’s pretty clear which ones are destined not to survive until the end. Allen pretty clearly divides his principal cast into three groups- the good, the bad, and the doomed. While some people are resourceful enough to survive the tragedy, others clearly exist to be victims or to get their comeuppance in the end. So not only does the story feel safe and comfortable, but it also takes on an element of kitsch as we wait to see how certain characters will meet their ends.

Another problem with the film was its bloated 165-minute running time. You’d think that a movie about people escaping from a fire would be fairly simple narratively-speaking, but there’s so much incident in The Towering Inferno that it overwhelms everything else. The film had its origins in two similar skyscraper-on-fire novels, The Tower and The Glass Inferno, and rather than judiciously cherry-picking elements from both books, Allen had Sterling Silliphant combine the stories of the two books and take the seven principal characters from each. As a result, the movie feels needlessly busy, forever cross-cutting between groups of characters as they attempt to escape the blaze. Some of the actors make an impression- Newman has an effortless authority in his scenes, and Fred Astaire gets a few nice moments- but most of them are lost in the shuffle.

And then there’s Steve McQueen. Arguably the biggest action star of the day, McQueen was cast early in the production and then proceeded to throw his weight around. After being cast as the heroic architect Doug, he decided that he preferred to play fire chief O’Hallorhan. Then, after Newman was cast as Doug, McQueen insisted his role be given equal weight as Newman’s. McQueen was to have exactly the same number of lines as Newman, and their roughly equal star stature necessitated the pioneering use of what was called “diagonal billing.” All of these headaches might have been worth it if McQueen was on top of his game, but he’s mostly on autopilot throughout the film, giving one of his laziest performances. The point of casting a star of McQueen’s caliber is for the audience to care about his character, but whenever he’s onscreen, I was mostly just anxious for Newman and Dunaway (then at the peak of her gorgeousness) to show up again.

Ever since Allen’s reign as the “Master of Disaster”, Hollywood has made several attempts to resurrect the disaster genre. But despite the best efforts of filmmakers like Roland Emmerich, the genre hasn’t caught on. CGI has made effects cheaper and easier to create than ever before, but just as key to The Towering Inferno’s popularity was its all-star cast, and the cost of such a cast today would be astronomical, and a huge gamble at a time when the importance of movie stars seems particularly questionable. The heyday for movies like The Towering Inferno has long since passed, and it looks like audiences will never love a movie like this again.

Famous Last Words: Round 1, Week 7

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Like John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, and Sidney Lumet, director Martin Ritt got his start in the early days of television. And while he's never gotten the critical love of his former colleagues, he had a diverse and successful career in Hollywood, with such films to his name as The Front, Norma Rae, and my favorite of the bunch, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Last week's quote was taken from perhaps his most beloved film, 1963's Hud. Based on an early novel by Larry McMurtry and starring Paul Newman and Oscar-winners Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas, Hud also boasts cinematography by the great James Wong Howe, and is one of the best example of black-and-white 'Scope photography to come out of Hollywood. Congrats to those who identified the quote.

Halfway through the round, and there are still quite a few people contending for the top prize. I guess I'm going to have to make the questions a little tougher from now on. Try this one on for size:

“To the memory of that great man who will never cease to exist, I offer my apologies, and wish you all- true and false- a very pleasant good evening.”

Who would possibly end a movie with such a flowery sign-off? E-Mail your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com. If you need to brush up on the rules of the game, click right here. And remember, all submissions must be received by 11:59 PM Wednesday. Good luck!

Video of the Day: Newman & Dean

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

This brief clip, taken before the filming of East of Eden, shows James Dean (who would get the role of Cal Trask) horsing around with Paul Newman (who would lose the role of Cal's brother, Aron, to Richard Davalos).

It's an amusing enough clip just on its own, with the two future superstars goofing for the camera, but it's also inadvertantly revealing, not only for the pulsating homosexual vibe coming out of Dean, but for the illuminating moment when the casting director tells Dean and Newman to "switch places" — as indeed they would, with Newman getting a lot of roles that, if it weren't for his death, likely would have gone to Dean.

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.

Take Five: Filmic Youth

Peter Smith — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Many years ago, a friend of mine coined the term "The Coppola Line". An artistic equivalent of baseball's Mendoza Line (the .200 batting average below which a hitter is considered detrimental to his team despite any defensive abilities he might possess), the Coppola Line was the point at which someone's bad work outweighed the value of his good work. If you made six good movies and five bad ones, you were above the Coppola Line; if you recorded three good albums and four bad ones, you were below it. It was named, of course, for Francis Ford Coppola, the man who best epitomized this dreadful ratio, who made some of the finest films in American cinema in the 1970s before cranking out dud after dud in the 1980s and 1990s. With his eagerly anticipated movie, Youth Without Youth — releasing this Friday — he hopes to become the first filmmaker named Coppola to rise back above the Coppola Line after sinking below it. The motion picture business, only slightly less a youth-centered industry than the music biz, has always been obsessed with youth, so if Youth Without Youth turns out to be another stinker, here are some 'youth movies' that will help make up for it.

ASSASSIN OF YOUTH (1937)

Lest you think that anti-drug hysteria is a relatively recent development in American culture, look back to this grade-Z production from the Depression, when apparently people didn't have anything to worry about other than the notion that smoking the devil weed might turn their children into murderous zombies. Starring a cast of no-names in roles so flat they can't even be called caricature, Assassin of Youth can still be enjoyed on an ironic level, preferably while stoned: it's the kind of raving, no-budget hackwork that makes Reefer Madness look like an even-handed documentary.

SPIRIT OF YOUTH (1938)

Widely considered one of the greatest boxers of all time, Joe "The Brown Bomber" Louis only appeared in one film, which should clue you in that he wasn't quite as gifted as an actor. Still, there're a few reasons to recommend this film, which was meant to be a loose parallel of his fighting career and was released during his second year as reigning heavyweight champion. Louis has no chops talking in front of the camera, but he's grace in motion when he gets the chance to fight, and the movie is one of the few where Mantan Moreland is given the opportunity to show some actual acting skills and not just behave as a comic stereotype. The DVD release of Spirit of Youth can be seen all over America, unlike the movie's theatrical release — it was not shown in many Southern theaters for fear that the audience would become enraged at the sight of a black fighter defeating white opponents.

NO REGRETS FOR MY YOUTH (1946)

An early film from Akira Kurosawa, this one is known as Waga seishun ni kuinashi at home, but in any language, it's a prime building block in what would become one of the greatest careers in cinema. The story of a college professor who is removed from his post for opposing the war against China, No Regrets for My Youth is one of the first Japanese films to speak out openly against the fascist regime that took power in the 1930s — and that's not the only taboo it breaks, as it deals, as openly as possible given the time and place of its making, with homosexuality. As if all that's not enough to tempt you to hunt down the DVD, it also features a character nicknamed "The Poisoned Strawberry".

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)

Hollywood generally didn't know how to handle Tennessee Williams. Much of the sexuality (especially homosexuality) in his plays had to be removed or toned down to placate the censors of the time, and unless handled just right, his florid dialogue, so powerful on stage, could come off as campy on screen. Writer/director Richard Brooks did a pretty decent job in this adaptation, abetted by a great cast that included a young, handsome Paul Newman as a zooted-out drifter, Geraldine Page (light-years removed from her later dowdy-matron roles) as a sex kitten, and Ed Begley and Rip Torn gnawing on the scenery as a powerful southern lawman and his jealous son.

YOUTH OF THE BEAST (1963)

Seijun Suzuki's Yaju no seishun (usually translated as Youth of the Beast) is one of his finest slices of deranged yakuza action — and as such, it's one of the movies that helped get him blackballed from the industry for decades. Like most of his films, it's a demented ball of non-stop energy, filled with fantastic eye candy, crazily giddy performances (especially an all-time classic role from Jo Shishido as the relentless young gangster of the title), and stylistically sexualized violence. Recently released in a jam-packed Criterion Collection edition, Youth of the Beast is living proof of why the Japanese film industry couldn't figure out what do do with Suzuki for the longest time.

— Leonard Pierce

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Hudsucker Proxy

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The setup: After making a name for themselves with a series of unique and relatively small-scale crime stories (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing), Joel Coen and his producer-cowriter brother Ethan won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with their Hollywood-themed comedy Barton Fink. Their next film saw them collaborating with super-producer Joel Silver and working with a budget of upwards of $25 million back when that still meant something in Hollywood.

What went wrong: The popular rap against the Coens is that their films are stylish but soulless, which is definitely applicable to Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance. Leigh comes off as affected even in realistic roles, and playing girl reporter Amy Archer, she doesn't so much play a role as ape Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. The mannerisms overwhelm the role, which makes sense when she's putting on a tough front for the boys, but once that front begins to fall, the character is meant to be the film's emotional center, and I wasn't feeling it. Compare Cate Blanchett's Hepburn to what Leigh's doing here and you'll see the difference between a fully-realized character and an explosion at the tic factory.

Fortunately, Leigh's misguided performance is hardly fatal, as there's a whole lot of other elements to love about The Hudsucker Proxy. Leigh aside, the performances are spot-on, beginning with Tim Robbins in the title role. As the naïve sap turned into Hudsucker Industries' puppet president, Robbins gives a comic performance that would have fight right into a Preston Sturges film, and his gangly physical presence and good-natured cluelessness recall Sturges' favorite leading man Eddie Bracken. Even Robbins' character name — Norville Barnes — could have been a Bracken character.

As usual in a Coen film, the film's supporting cast is dynamite, especially Paul Newman as the calculating vice president, forever answering questions with a gruff "sure-sure," and Jim True as the chatty, duplicitous elevator operator Buzz. Plus there's the famous stylized Coen dialogue, which might get distracting if it weren't so damned clever.

But the most notable aspect of The Hudsucker Proxy is the world the world the Coens have lovingly created, an Art Deco nightmare version of fifties New York. Norville's experiences in the mailroom wouldn't be out of place in Brazil, while the top-level offices and boardrooms owe a debt to Ayn Rand. Dennis Gassner's visionary production design, coupled with cinematography by the great Roger Deakins and a score by Coen stalwart Carter Burwell that makes liberal use of Aram Khachaturyan's "Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia," make The Hudsucker Proxy the most visually stunning of the Coen brothers' films. It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun.

The fallout: Clueless how to market the film, Warner Brothers dumped Hudsucker into a handful of theatres to middling reviews, although the film has its share of defenders today. The Coens left Hollywood to make the more modestly-budgeted Fargo, which won back their previous critical supporters and then some. Their latest film, No Country for Old Men, opened earlier this month to ecstatic reviews. — Paul Clark