The Screengrab : ryan's daughter

Maurice Jarre, 1924 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

In the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Maurice Jarre, who died Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 84, composed some of the best-known music ever to grace a film soundtrack. Jarre, who had studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, began his film career with the score for George Franju's 1952 documentary Hôtel des Invalides. In the next ten years, he would work on some thirty pictures in his native France, including Franju's horror classic Eyes without a Face (1960), his celebrated version of Thérèse Desqueyroux,, and, later, his 1963 Judex, as well as The Olive Trees of Justice (1962), made in Algeria by the American independent filmmaker James Blue. Jarre's real big break came when producer Sam Spiegel hired him to apply the appropriate symphonic sweep to David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The Lawrence score won Jarre an Academy Award, and Jarre became one of Lean's regular collaborators, writing the music for Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984), both of which also won him Academy Awards, and Ryan's Daughter (1970). His success with Lawrence also inspired other Hollywood producers to swing open their doors, and he was soon working on movies by such directors as Fred Zinneman (Behold a Pale Horse, 1964), John Frankenheimer (The Train, 1964; Grand Prix, 1966; The Fixer, 1968), William Wyler (The Collector, 1965), Richard Brooks (The Professionals, 1966), and Alfred Hitchcock (Topaz, 1969).

Jarre continued to work steadily through the '70s, '80s, and '90s, doing especially memorable work for John Huston on The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Peter Weir on The Year of Living Dangerously (1975), and racking up Oscar nominations for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Witness (1985), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Ghost (1990), and the controverisal The Message (1976). He also won ASCAP Awards for Ghost, Fatal Attraction (1987), and Dead Poets Society (1989); in 1993, the society bestowed upon him its Lifetime Achievement Award, though his lifetime achievement in film scoring still had a ways to go: he would continue to work into the new millennium with his final movie score, I Dreamed of Africa (2000), followed by the score for the 2001 TV film Uprising. The father of the production designer Stéfanie Jarre, the screenwriter Kevin Jarre (Tombstone, Glory), and the popular electronic musician Jean Michel Jarre. Already famous for his tendency to incorporate exotic and native instruments into his scores, Jarre himself began to favor electronic scores over full symphonic music in the '80s, a development that he assured anyone who would listen had nothing to do with his finding the process any easier. He is survived by his fourth wife, Fong F. Khong, who he married in 1984.

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

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

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

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

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

Forgotten Films: "Mad Dog Time" (1996)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Having had a versatile, many-sided career does have its down side: when Isaac Hayes died last Sunday, it quickly became a hipster punch line that mainstream obituaries often referred to him as "perhaps best known" for his role as Chef on South Park. Hayes was well-known for a great many very different things, and Chef happened to have been the most recent of these. Then there are people like Larry Bishop, who are not especially well-known at all for anything, but have a number of things for which they may be sort of semi-recognizable: add them all up, and it kind of equals minor celebrity. For example, you might trigger a faint recognition in people who are well-versed in Rat Pack mythology by noting that Bishop is the son of the late comedian Joey Bishop. Experts in Hollywood dynasties may care for all of two seconds that he once performed comedy with Rob Reiner at a time when the director of Misery was himself best known as Carl's kid. And bad-movie junkies of a certain stripe may find it in themselves to think it worth knowing that, in the late '60s and early '70s, he appeared in such pictures as The Savage Seven, The Devil's 8, Angel Unchained, and Chrome and Hot Leather. It was these credits that helped convince Quentin Tarantino (who cast Bishop as Michael Madsen's grouchy boss at the strip club in Kill Bill, Vol. 2) that, as a writer-director-star, he had a great motorcycle movie in him. Tarantino served as executive producer on the years-in-the-making Hell Ride, which reunites Bishop with Madsen, and which Tarantino believes it was Bishop's "destiny" to make. Anyone who's seen Tarantino's performance in Destiny Turns on the Radio, which established that our boy QT should be prevented, by federal law if necessary, from throwing around the "D" word, can guess at how well that's turned out.

If Bishop and Tarantino are soul mates of a sort, it's because they share a knack for throwing together ready made slogans and catch phrases and parts of old movies and kinky twists on the same, and getting an incredible number of cool people to come together to act out their fantasies. In his best work, QT has been able to shape these raw materials in such a way that the kick he gets out of them is transferred directly to the audience. In Bishop's only work as a director--Hell Ride and its predecessor, the 1996 gangster fantasia Mad Dog Time--the results tend to be an inert mess, interesting chiefly for the challenging aesthetic questions it raises, such as What was he thinking? and How hid he get this cast? The best answer to the second question probably has something to do with how many favors a man can get owed in the course of a thirty-year career in which he's done everything from episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and Love, American Style to such oddities as the William Castle-Marcel Marceau collaboration Shanks.

Mad Dog Time is set in some weird gangland society where everybody is a mobster or a moll and all the characters spend their time entertaining each other with weird acting exercises and showy turns--it's as they were trapped at an improv comedy club in Hell--while plotting their next bloody move up the ladder. (There's a palpable '50s-Vegas vibe to the decor, which may be an in-joke on Bishop's lineage.) Richard Dreyfuss, whose 1978 starring vehicle and pet project The Big Fix featured Bishop in a supporting role, is the nominal head of the mob, Vic, who, making his entrance wearing a bathrobe over his PJs, has just returned from a stint in the nut house, where it was probably quieter. The other people who appear here doing things that they probably would have thought twice about if they'd known that Larry was going to be able to get the film developed include Jeff Goldblum, Kyle MacLachlan, Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Diane Lane, Burt Reynolds, Billy Idol, Michael J. Pollard, Henry Silva, Gregory Hines, Billy Drago, Angie Everhart, Paul Anka, and a sick, callously exploited Richard Pryor. For hardcore devotees of movie character actors, the prize catch was Christopher Jones, whose work in such movies as the 1968 Wild in the Streets (in which Bishop played a bassist with a hook for a hand) and Three in the Attic earned him a reputation as a James Dean a the new age. But Jones, high-strung and drug-damaged, quit acting after finishing his work as the romantic lead in the troubled David Lean production Ryan's Daughter (1970). Tarantino, who offered him a role in Pulp Fiction, was unable to lure him out of the shadows, but Bishop was able to get him to drop by the set just long enough to play a sneering supposedly fearsome assassin whose bite turns out to be worse than his bark. As Tarantino himself pointed out, Jones "really doesn't have a character to play", but he still had the old charisma to go with his creepy, walking-death's-head look, and in this, his only movie appearance in the past twenty-eight years, he makes enough of an impression to make you wish that Bishop had used whatever line it took to get him to come out and play to persuade him to work for someone who might have been able to construct a real movie around him. Larry Bishop isn't the most obnoxious hustler who's ever rolled down Santa Monica Boulevard with show business in his DNA and a pile of I.O.U.s in his glove compartment, but I suspect that if it were his really his destiny to make the kinds of movies he's been trying to make--if he really knew how and it were in his blood--he'd have tried making them before Tarantino showed up and took out a patent on them. It may be that Tarantino's patronage of Bishop is really based on Tarantino feeling touched that one of the people he grew up watching in all kinds of trash is actually now trying to imitate him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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