The Screengrab : robert ryan

Yesterday's Hits: The Longest Day (1962, Andrew Marton, Ken Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki)

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Longest Day a hit?: In 1962, World War II was still fresh in the minds of the American people, most of whom were alive when it was being fought. In the intervening years, movies about the war became popular, but seventeen years after the war was over, super-producer Darryl F. Zanuck decided the time was right to make the biggest war movie of all, focusing on one of the turning points of the war- D-Day. Zanuck called upon Cornelius Ryan to adapt his exhaustive book, which approached the battle through many different perspectives, from the top brass on both sides to the men on the ground, and Zanuck even went so far as to have the French and German soldiers speak their own languages for the film rather than having everyone speak English.

In addition, Zanuck enlisted an impressive cast- one that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Roddy McDowell, Curt Jürgens, Jean-Louis Barrault, Red Buttons, and an up-and-comer named Sean Connery- to help him pay tribute to the men who fought and died to help turn the tide for the Allied forces. It worked, and The Longest Day became one of the biggest hits of 1962, grossing almost $40 million domestically, trailing only another pair of super-productions- How the West Was Won and Lawrence of Arabia- at the yearly box office.

What happened?: While the American people saw World War II as both a military and a moral victory, the country was soon to enter into a conflict that wasn’t nearly so simple- Vietnam. As our involvement in Vietnam dragged on for years with no victory in sight, both the soldiers and the people at home were souring on the idea of war, especially as images of various atrocities began showing up on television. After Vietnam, war meant something very different to many Americans than it did after World War II, and the war movies that came out of Hollywood reflected this. The morality of these movies became more complex, with less cut-and-dried heroism and more characters questioning the validity of war. This coincided with the fall of the Production Code, and consequently battle scenes became much bloodier and more chaotic. 1998 brought the most violent mainstream war movie of all, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, whose brutal take on D-Day quickly replaced The Longest Day’s comparatively tame recreation of the battle in the minds of most moviegoers.

Does The Longest Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Having been raised on violent, gritty anti-war movies, I expected a star-studded classically-styled movie about Normandy to come off as quaint. But it actually holds up pretty well. Much of this has to do with how its story is told- instead of re-creating the battle from one perspective, we see it from many angles- the Allied generals who planned it, the Germans who didn’t quite anticipate it going down like this, the paratroopers who were dropped inland, the men on the beach, the Resistance fighters, even the residents of the surrounding towns. Because of this, The Longest Day becomes less about morality than it does about tactics and strategy- hardly a contemporary approach to the war movie, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Even the star-studded cast worked better for me than I’d anticipated. Often, casting so many stars can be distracting, with the familiar faces taking the audience right out of the action. But here it’s almost necessary to keep all of the different plot strands straight. It helps that most of the big names are playing officers, so we can remember that Mitchum is leading the boys on Omaha Beach, Fonda heading the charge on Utah, Wayne commanding the paratroopers, and so on. Wayne’s presence is key here- he never fought in World War II himself, but he appeared in so many war movies both during and after the war that he fit the Hollywood mold of a soldier more than most of the stars who actually did fight.

One could make a similar claim for The Longest Day- it didn’t exactly look like war, but the classical Hollywood image of what war ought to look like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of changing times. At one point in his career, Zanuck famously quipped, “There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic.” The Longest Day fudged a number of details about D-Day (for example, a key battle takes place at an abandoned casino that hadn’t even been built yet in real life), but from a dramatic standpoint it works. And although it doesn’t correspond to our contemporary idea of what a war movie should be, it’s fascinating as an example of what was once the prevailing popular view of war, from a time when it was easier for us to feel that way.

Film Poetry: Joseph Moncure March and the Roots of "The Set-Up"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Writing in The Hudson Review (sixty years young this year, hey guys, happy birthday!), Jefferson Hunter examines the poet Joseph Moncure March and his 1928 book-length narrative poem The Set-Up, which in 1949 would become a classic minor noir of the same name, directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Ryan as a washed-up boxer with one last fight left in him. Not a lot of tense urban melodramas include the on-screen credit "based on the poem by..." But as Hunter makes clear, March was a peculiar kind of specialist, an ambitious writer who appreciated the qualities of movies and, trying to raise those qualities to literature, decided that the best way to go about it was through stories told in extended verse. He was wrong, and is now remembered only as a pop culture oddity, a relic of 1920s culture from the moment when it became self-referential, and one who tried to point writing and the movies down a path that they, not unreasonably, choose not to follow. (The writers who really had an impact on movies, and who brought the impact of the movies into writing in an influential way at that time, were Hemingway and the hard-boiled toughs who were boiling everything down to action and dialogue.)

March got so excited about his mission to wring art from the movies that, after The Set-Up landed on the best seller list and was bought by Hollywood, he actually lit out for the West Coast and took a screenwriting job. But as Robert E. Lee Pruitt used to say, just cause a man loves a thing don't mean it's got to love him back, and after jobs on James Whale's Journey's End and Howard Hawks's Hell's Angels, his career petered out in a string of justly forgotten movies. (Some of these show him trying to elevate the masses by watering down high culture, as with the 1932 Madame Butterfly, starring Sylvia Sidney and a young Cary Grant in a non-musical version of the opera, so that you can really concentrate on the soppy plot.) March was not invited to work on the movie version of The Set-Up, which didn't happen until after his career at the big studios was effectively over. By the time the movie was made (with Art Cohn credited with the script), he might have had trouble recognizing his baby anyway. The poem is a modern tragedy about an aging black boxer named Pansy, who has some problems. For starters, he's an aging black boxer, and his name is "Pansy." March intended the poem as an indictment of racism, making it clear ("Pansy had the stuff/ But his skin was brown") that, because of it, his hero would never be given the break that his talent should have earned him. (Unfortunately, March seems to have been one of those white liberal artists who are scornful of racism in others but seek to mythologize African-Americans as something other than human: trying to convey Pansy's physical dangerousness, he likens him to a "missing link", "something to catch and cage...that belonged to a Jungle Age.") The poem ends with this "savage cat" of a man fighting a gangster in a subway tunnel. Pansy goes over the edge of the platform and, March writes, "The train screeched/And struck. THE END." As Michael O'Donoghue once wrote in National Lampoon, there are no situations that the writer in search of an ending can't resolve with a variant on the sentence, "And then suddenly he was run over by a truck."

In the movie, the hero, who is too old and broken-down to keep his career going but too proud to take a fall, is called Stoker, and is white. This change may have cut the guts out of March's conception, but as Hunter points out, it has a major compensatory effect: it means that he gets to be played by Robert Ryan. Ryan, with his gaunt, haunted look, and the presence of a man who might have been a Roman emperor before his bookkeeper stopped returning his calls and the repo van showed up, gave a performance that ranks with one of his finest; he's the single best explanation for why the movie is so much better-remembered to day than the book. Although Hunter calls March's work "a noir poem", the movie's classification as a boxing noir may have more to do with the emotions expressed by Ryan's suffering face and body than by the grinding mechanics of the plot, which pull up short from having Stoker killed: the gangsters who maul him may have finished his career, but he still has the loving wife who is embracing him in the final shot, and who clearly regards the fact that Stoker will never get into the ring again as a happy development. Hunter reports that the film's producer, Richard Goldstone, " reasoned that if Stoker were killed, he would be 'left without any problem. Whereas if he survived, he couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything, but had vindicated his manhood, it was a triumph rather than defeat, spiritually.' ”

The same year that The Set-Up was published, March published another book-length story poem, The Wild Party, and though Hunter is kind enough not to dwell on it, that poem too has had a complicated life that includes a movie version, which came out in 1975, two years before March died. The poem is a Jazz Age blow-out describing all the seamy, sordid affairs at the titular throwdown hosted by Queenie, a sort of Jean Harlow from Hell, and his thuggish lover, Burrs. In 1994, Art Spiegelman saw to the re-publication of a new edition which featured his own illustrations and a pull quote from William S. Burroughs, who insisted that March's poem was the work that had made him want to become a writer. If you ever meet anybody who claims that the 1975 movie, which was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, made him want to become a filmmaker, do the right thing and push him off a subway platform. The film, which was made before Ivory/Merchant productions became synonymous with respectfully upholstered adaptations of classic literature, is a misguided exercise in anti-nostalgia that turns Queenie (Raquel Welch) into the petulant bedmate of a Fatty Arbuckle-like silent film star, Jolly Grimm (James Coco), who's throwing the party to grease the wheels for his comeback. (In a clip we see of his new masterpiece, Coco, wearing missionary's robes and a Moe Howard haircut, is stuffed into a cookpot by African savages despite his protesting that "You can't boil me! I'm a friar!") The movie features snippets of March's poem being read on the soundtrack by a narrator who sounds as if he's due to be shot at dawn, and there are also bits of faux-twenties songs that analyze the characters, providing such helpful insights as, "Funny man! Trying so hard to be funny! Is it because if we knew the real you, we might frown?" (Is that what it sounds like inside Jay Leno's head?) More recently, the poem actually managed to inspire two different musicals that opened near-simultaneously, one on Broadway and the other off-Broadway, in 2000. Both are said to have been better than the movie, but then the only way that they could have been any worse would have been if the chorus lines had departed the stage to repeatedly kick every single member of the audience in the crotch.

The Rep Report (April 15--21)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life. At the simplest level, music by Miles Davis or by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet can do wonders for a thriller such as Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows or Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, with Robert Ryan as a racist crook and Harry Belafonte as his unhappy partner in crime. At the other extreme, there's Arthur Penn's Mickey One, a fascinating, incoherent, art-damaged movie that seems to be trying to take its cues from Stan Getz's saxophone improvisations on the soundtrack--bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch just for the visions it gives you of the studio executive's heads melting when they first saw it--and such artifacts as Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, with music by Ornette Coleman, and Shirley Clarke's off-Broadway verite films The Cool World and The Connection, reminders that the American independent film movement once seemed to be an offshoot of the Beats' world. There are also some international obscurities that sound better than intriguing, notable Dilemma, a 1962 film made in apartheid-era Johannesburg by the Danish director Henning Carlsen (Hunger), starring Zakes Mokae and with music by Max Roach.

LOS ANGELES: Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film" at the Linwood Dunn Theater will include screenings of the two great military documentaries that Huston made during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light. Although made with the cooperation of the U. S. military and officially intended as part of the war effort, San Pietro--which is both a strikingly clear and cogent account of a battle and a nonfiction war poem composed on film--met with some grumblings from the higher-ups, and Light, a harrowing visit to a medical ward full of soldiers suffering from the psychological effects of war, was actually kept from public view until the early 1980s. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King makes the point that Huston had to deal with much more interference than some of the people now making documentaries about the Iraq war, but many of those current filmmakers could still learn a lot from his work. She also reminds us that Huston had a ready answer for the jarheads who clucked that his movies seemed "anti-war': ""Whenever I make a film that's for war, you can take me out and shoot me." The screening will be introduced by Huston's son Tony and followed by a panel discussion including Dr. Charles Wolfe, Dr. Betsy McLane, and Richard E. Robbins, the producer-director of the Oscar-nominated doceumentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.