The Screengrab : tony richardson

Natasha Richardson, 1963 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Natasha Richardson, who has died, at 45, after a well-reported accident on a Canadian ski resort, was born into it. Natasha, like her sister Joely, was the daughter of the director Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (who in turn was the sister of Lynn Redgrave and the daughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson). Natasha made her movie debut at four in her father's 1968 The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which her mother played the female lead. After studying at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Richardson began her career in earnest at the Old Vic, where she played such roles as Ophelia and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1986, she appeared with her mother in a production of Chekhov's The Seagull. Although a famous name can help someone get a foot in the door in the entertainment business, it is not automatically a guarantee of a successful career, something that could be attested to by any number of people who probably owe me a dinner for not mentioning their names. But by the time Richardson made her mature movie debut, playing Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's 1986 Gothic, it was clear that she had the talent to back it up. Her first real chance to show what she could do on-screen came in 1988, when Paul Schrader cast her in the difficult title role of Patty Hearst. In her review in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that Richardson had "been handed a big unwritten role" and added, "She feels her way into it, and she fills it" and "always has something in reserve--you keep waiting for what she may show you next."

In the next few years, Richardson appeared in the movies Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and Widows' Peak (1994). She also appeared on TV in a 1987 production of Ibsen's Ghosts, and in 1993 in production of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer, the political drama Hostages, and the TV film Zelda, in which she played Zelda Fitzgerald. She also married the producer Robert Fox in 1990. In 1993, she won great acclaim in both London and New York for a production of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, in which she co-starred with Liam Neeson. The two were much praises for the intensity of the sexual chemistry their characters displayed, a chemistry that was apparently not entirely, in the words of Jon Lovitz, acting! Richardson, was was divorced from Fox in 1992, married Neeson in 1994. They appeared together that same year in the Jodie Foster movie Nell.

Although Richardson continued to appear in movies, ranging from the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap and Maid in Manhattan to the 2005 Patrick McGrath adaptation Asylum and 2007's Evening, co-starring her mother, she seemed less interested in really pursuing a career than in taking her challenges wherever they appeared. The most notable ones appeared on the stage, where she won a Tony for starring in Sam Mendes's 1998 revival of Cabaret, appeared in the 1999 Broadway production of Patrick Marber's Closer, and played Blanche DuBois in a 2005 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She also starred in the 2001 CBS miniseries Haven. She was also known as a prominent supporter of charities devoted to fighting AIDS, the disease that killed her father in 1991. She and Neeson had two sons, Micheál, 13, and Daniel, 12.

Reviews By Request: Tom Jones (1963, Tony Richardson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Due to some difficulty I had in getting my hands on Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, I was unable to post this review last week as promised. Sorry about that. As usual, to vote for the next Reviews By Request selection, see the poll at the end of this review.

In a survey of the Oscar winners for Best Picture, Tony Richardson’s 1963 film Tom Jones is one of the more intriguing titles. Sure, it’s an adaptation of the classic novel by Henry Fielding, but this is hardly the kind of reverent literary epic that usually gets the Academy to take notice. But beyond its bawdy comedy, it’s also a stylistic departure from the usual period pieces, with Richardson employing the techniques of the French New Wave to take the wind out of the wigs-and-horses period setting. On paper, Tom Jones is just the kind of movie that ought to be recognized more often by the Academy- a film that boldly tweaks cinematic convention in an attempt to entertain audiences in a unique way. But the trouble with judging a movie on paper is that sooner or later one must actually see it to get the whole story, and in the case of Tom Jones, the whole story is that it doesn’t live up to its potential.

I knew I was in for a long sit during the opening sequence, in which Richardson establishes the circumstances of Tom’s birth. Rather than portraying it in a more conventional way- say, through narration or montage- Richardson turns it into a silent movie, complete with intertitles. Now, I’m sure most of you would agree that this is an interesting and unexpected twist on the usual style of the genre. However, with the actors’ hyper-exaggerated mannerisms and John Addison’s manic harpsichord score, the scene comes off more cutesy than bold. By the time the opening titles have hit the screen, Richardson has already dug himself into a hole that he never manages to escape.

Richardson drops the silent-movie pastiche after the opening credits, thankfully, but he still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve- jump cuts, cheeky narration, and more. In one of the more glaringly out-of-place bits, there’s a scene in which the adult Tom (Albert Finney) evades a jealous husband in which Richardson speeds up the film like an old slapstick comedy (think the Keystone Kops). There’s also a handful of moments in which Finney breaks the fourth wall, as when he asks the audience for support when a female innkeeper accuses him of trying to weasel his way out of paying his bill. It takes an inspired film to pull off moments like these, and Tom Jones is not that movie.

It’s a shame, because Finney cuts a fine figure as Tom. At its heart, this is the story about a man who’s torn between his good nature and his base impulses, which lead him into trouble. Tom’s loyalty invites others to take advantage of him, and his dashing good looks bring him the kind of female attention he would be wise to avoid. Despite the film’s period trappings, Tom bears more than a passing resemblance to Arthur Seaton, Finney’s breakthrough role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, who was unable to reconcile his desires to have fun with his need to do right by his single-mother girlfriend. With these two films, Finney announced to the world that he was a major actor, and he effortlessly holds his own here opposite an impressive cast, including Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Edith Evans, Joyce Redman (with whom he shares the film’s most famous scene), and the great Joan Greenwood, who had one of the great voices in cinema.

One key directorial decision that I appreciated was Richardson’s unwillingness to lend the usual glamour to his period setting. Most historical and literary films tend to be showcases for the art directors and costume designers, who spare no expense in re-creating the trappings of period luxury. By contrast, Richardson’s portrayal of country gentility in the early 1700s is hardly luxurious. Meals consist of copious amounts of wine and freshly-killed meat eaten with the hands, and interiors are dusty and dark, lit only by a handful of candles. Practically the only form of entertainment was the hunt, which Richardson portrays as scores of dogs and men on horseback pursuing a stag- hardly very sporting. To accentuate the less charming aspects of this world, Richardson and cinematographer Walter Lassally shoot the film in anemic-looking tones and with a mostly handheld camera. When it comes to epic splendor, Gone With the Wind this isn’t.

Richardson’s de-glamorization of his period setting is such a refreshing change of pace from what one normally expects from a movie of this kind that it seems a shame that he feels the need to goose it with his arsenal of New Wave tricks. Unlike most Oscar-winning films, which seem to have little on their minds besides taking home rafts filled with awards, Tom Jones is rather more ambitious- in the end, too ambitious to be successful. In the end, the film must be labeled a noble failure, and although one can’t help but admire Richardson’s desire to step outside the well-trod path for literary adaptations, that doesn’t mean I look forward to seeing Tom Jones again anytime in the near future.

Now that Oscar season is over, we can get back to some more diverse and, uh, interesting choices for Reviews By Request. As promised, we’ll kick off things with a poll devoted to reader requests. So, which of these will it be? A seventies SF thriller from the director of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three? A documentary about two children who were switched at birth? An infamous horror film about evil children? A thriller starring Alain Delon? Or will it be the long-shelved seventies exploitation title that was immortalized by Patton Oswalt? It’s your call, folks:

Which should I review for my next Reviews By Request? | BuzzDash polls

As usual, the comments section is open, particularly for those who would like to suggest future titles for consideration. See you in two weeks!

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

Take Five: Gotta Get A Guru

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Mike Myers' not-so-glorious return to the big screen, The Love Guru -- also known as Austin Powers IV and Verne Troyer's Pleading E-Mails Finally Pay Off -- opens everywhere today, and critics couldn't be more disappointed. Not only is it reported to be low on laughs, it's also being criticized as being high on stereotypes; despite his alleged friend and idol Deepak Chopra coming to his aid, Myers has been attacked for his stereotyping of Asian Indians and his portrayal of a cartoonish, caricatured guru. But let's face it: Hollywood has always loved its gurus, spiritual masters, and wise old mystics from the subcontinent. Hardly had the Beatles falled under the influence of the Maharishi than Hollywood followed suit; here's a look at some of the more memorable wise men of the East that the movie business has given us.

THE LOVED ONE (1965)

One of the few countercultural satires from the 1960s to hold up in the modern era, Tony Richardson's The Loved One holds up for two reasons: first, it was based on an Evelyn Waugh novel from nearly two decades prior and isn't quite as tarred, as a result, by the hippie-dippie vibe of its time; and second, it's got an impeccable crew behind the camera, from Richardson to cinematographer Haskell Wexler to skilled, hip screenwriters Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern. This satire of capitalism run amok in the funereal industry crams so many jokes into its two-hour running time that it's almost impossible to keep up with them all, but make sure you don't miss gravel-throated character actor Lionel Stander as the Guru Brahmin, one of the first-ever big-screen gurus -- and one of the first to be portrayed as a bumbling fraud.

CANDY (1968)

This big-screen adaptation of the Mason Hoffenberg novel (actually the infamous Terry Southern writing under a pseudonym) is generally regarded as a major failure. It's not that there weren't talented people involved -- besides Southern himself, and his co-writer Buck Henry, the cast is crammed with fine actors -- but the entire film seems to go off the rails from the very start. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't plenty of bizarre treats for those with the energy to sit through it. This updating of Voltaire's Candide is purely Southern in the sense that authority figures are always portrayed as phony, venal, and couching some grotesque habits or appetites. In this instance, we're treated to the the sight of the monstrour Grindl -- a sex-crazed Hindu guru played by an overheated Marlon Brando -- putting the poor, put-upon Candy in yet another compromising position.

THE PARTY (1968)

All right, so technically, Peter Sellers' Hrundi V. Bakshi ("That is what my name is called") in the Blake Edwards farce The Party isn't a guru. (That title more rightly belongs to Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Sellers in 1979's Being There.) But he is Indian, sort of, and he does speak in Hindi platitudes that those around him mistake for pearls of inscrutable eastern wisdom. For example, when asked who he thinks he is, he responds, "In India, we do not think who we are. We know who we are." Whoa, heavy. The rest of the movie is pretty much straight-up Blake Edwards comic fare, and it falls flat on the stereotypes at times, but a few scenes are still paralytically funny forty years later, especially when a stoned Bakshi comes across a parakeet cage and solemnly intones the name of the birdseed: "Birdy Num Num."

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973)

In this stunning, surreal, and nearly incomprehensible masterpiece by ultimate provocatuer Alejandro Jodorowsky, the guru is Horacio Salinas, a Christlike thief who is half savior and half mountebank. Under the tutelage of the Alchemist, a mysterious figure played by Jodorowsky himself, he and his gang of mystical banditos -- each named for a different celestial body -- plan nothing less than an assault on Heaven, where they will depose the reigning gods and take their places. Visually, this is exactly the sort of film people talk about when they talk about crazy European art films: it's bewildering, deliberately offensive, totally impenetrable, and weird for the sake of being weird. It's also absolutely brilliant, and Jodorowsky -- who's the real guru here -- shows us what it might be like inside the mind of the truly enlightened -- and it alternately makes us gasp at its beauty and scares the hell out of us.

HOLY SMOKE (1999)

Jane Campion's weirdest movie -- which, if you think about it, is really saying something -- features the always-engaging Kate Winslet in the role of a young woman who decides to embark on a quest for spiritual self-discovery in the Indian subcontinent. Along the way, she encounters the guru Chiddaatman Baba (played by Dhritiman Chatterjee) and falls under his sway -- and that's just where the movie begins. From there, she is confronted by Harvey Keitel as a deprogrammer -- sorry, "cult exiter" -- hired by her family to get her back, and discovers that he's not without his own guru-like tendencies. A battle of wills, intellects and bodies ensue over the terrain of feminism, spirituality and sexuality, and the movie degenerates into a bit of a chaotic mess, but it's at least a glorious mess with two terrific actors like Keitel and Winslet at the fore.

Remembering Free Cinema

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:30:00 GMT

WIth a BBC Radio documentary on the movement set to debut this weekend, the Guardian's Simon Hoggart spends some time remembering the Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s. Now largely forgotten, the movement was nonetheless hugely influential at the time, popular with the working class whose lives it reflected on screen an instrumental in creating a new narrative focus in both British film and television. (For Hoggart, there's a personal touch as well: his father, Richard Hoggart, wrote a book in 1957 called The Uses of Literacy that reflected many of the same values and ideals as that of the Free Cinema movement.)

Looking at the movement from the perspective of 50 years later, it seems to represent a revolution so basic it's staggering that it ever seemed necessary: Free Cinema (so named by its founder, the pioneering director Lindsay Anderson, because it was free of both the patriotic demands of wartime production and the commercial demands of mainstream cinema) wanted to do no more and no less than tell the stories of working-class Britons from all over the country, rather than simply focus on the stories of southern England's middle class and the aristocracy. And yet the movies were so radical in their production methods (they were made with the cheapest available Bolex cameras, on budgets little more than a few hundred dollars) and so unique in their means (a number of them were funded as part of a community arts grant from a then-socially conscious Ford Motor Company, something that's almost unthinkable now) that the whole movement seems like something from a fantasy world.

Only a handful of Free Cinema movies were produced, and fewer still are remembered today outside of critical and academic circles. While several of the members of Free Cinema inner circle went on to have meaningful careers in film (in addition to Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson got their starts in the movement), others were forgotten, and the best of the movement's projects, including Momma Don't Allow and We Are the Lambeth Boys, are hard to track down today. But Hoggart concludes that among the films' lasting influences is having shaped a new appreciation in the arts for working-class stories, which led to the creation of Coronation Street and a host of other British soap operas that focus on the lives of the working class, in contrast to American soaps which tend to dwell on the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

David Watkin, 1925-2008

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

Cinematographer David Watkin has died of cancer at the age of 82, at his home in Brighton, England. Watkin developed his skills after joining the Southern Railway Film Unit as an assistant in 1948. He branched into work on TV commercials in the early 1960s, where he met the director Richard Lester. Lester hired him to shoot his 1965 film The Knack and subsequently worked with him on Help!, How I Won the War, The Bed Sitting Room and Cuba. In those movies Watkins demonstrated a mastery of a wide range of styles, ranging from the cinema-verite vaudeville of Lester's Beatles films to the Godardisms of How I Won the War, but their best work together may well have been in The Three Musketeers (1973) and its companion piece The Four Musketeers (shot at the same time as the first film but released separately a year later) and the 1976 Robin and Marian, with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the middle-aged Robin Hood and Maid Marian. In those movies, Watkin, famous for his mastery of soft light, somehow achieved a romantic period look while incorporating his director's love of slapstick and visual clutter.

Watkin, who wrote two books of autobiography, Why Is There Only One Word for Thesaurus, which came out in 1998, and Was Clara Schumann a Fag Hag?, which was published only recently. Watkin always strove to give the impression that he was just a guy who knew how to work a camera who made his living shooting movies and who had a whole other compartment of his life devoted to the things he really cared about. But if he saw himself as a mere technician, he was deeply committed to his craft, and was constantly experimenting and extending the reach of the technology he worked with. (He invented a system of lights that made it easier for cinematographers to get better, soft effects during night shoots. Watkin, who was aparently a bit of a camp, was known to friends and co-workers by the nickname "Wendy", and the lighting system he devised became known as "the Wendy Light.") Besides his work with Lester, Watkins's proudest professional moments included Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Chariots of Fire (1981), Yentl (1983), and Out of Africa (1985), for which he won an Academy Award. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Society of Cinematographers in 2004.

Take Five: The Classics

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

"Read the classics, sir," advises Jason Miller's Lieutenant Reno in The Ninth Configuration. "It improves the entire respiratory system." Sure, but who has time for that? When it comes to the great works of western literature, it's all well and good for academics to slog through the thousands of pages of their Penguin Classics editions, but we're busy people. We have screenings of Saw V: Saw Harder to get to. We need our classics simple, direct, stripped of poetry and obscurity, and preferably less than two hours long and starring someone who can sport a decent six-pack. Robert Zemeckis' all-star adaptation of Beowulf, opening wide this weekend, is much more our speed; if we have to sit through a bunch of crazy Old English dialogue, even brought up to speed by comics legend Neil Gaiman, it better be accompanied by some naked Angelina Jolie. Here's a handful of other cinema-clarified classics.

FRANKENSTEIN (1931)

America's middle school students have one thing to look forward to in the long slog through English classes: Frankenstein. It's part of the holy triumvirate of bona fide classics (along with Dracula and Beowulf) that spice up the prose with a good solid monster. Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his "Adam" have become such iconic figures in our culture that it's hard to imagine a time when he was perceived as anything other than Boris Karloff's shambling, neck-bolded patchwork man; and James Whale's confident direction here, remarkably sophisticated for a film that was made over seventy-five years ago, is still electric today.

TOM JONES (1963)

As school-assigned, instructive Classics of Western Literature go, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is a relative favorite, containing as it does lots of screwing and fart jokes. Tony Richardson's big blow-out adaptation, like the novel a compelling combination of arch and earthy, tries to bring the same tastes-good-and-good-for-you sensibility to the big screen and largely succeeds, despite having been made in the early 1960s when a few of the book's raunchier moments had to be implied rather than depicted. Aided by some gorgeous photography, the film boasts a terrific cast led by young and studly Albert Finney and Susannah York, who's never looked better.

MADAME BOVARY (1991)

Though a number of adaptations of Gustave Flaubert's essential novel have been attempted over the years, perhaps the definitive version comes from the talented and prolific Claude Chabrol. In many ways, he's the perfect director to take on the project: quintessentially French, like Flaubert, but also like Flaubert, just alienated enough from his society and times to view them with a properly jaundiced eye. Given his history of making compelling films about unsatisfied women who come to a bloody end because of their frustration and lack of options, Chabrol was almost born to make Madame Bovary, and he couldn't have made a better choice to play Emma than his Violette Noziere star, the phenomenal Isabelle Huppert.

RICHARD III (1995)

When discussing the classics and their transition to film, there's no avoiding ol' Will Shakespeare. But if you're trying to get the kids on your side, forget glitzy romance and postmodernist flash; forsake the pomposities of a Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and go straight for Richard Loncraine's inventive, delightful Richard III. Nothing animates a Shakespeare play like a good villain, and Ian McKellen — who wrote the adaptation — plays the twisted, perverse, gleefully murderous Richard to the hilt. The setting is likewise outstanding, and the conceit of setting the story in an alternate England of the 1930s, overcome by fascist nationalism, works like a charm, particularly in a dynamite opening sequence.

TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY (2005)

If someone tells you often enough that a great novel is unfilmable, you might just start to believe it. For the first hundred years or so of the motion picture industry, no one would tough Laurence Sterne's brilliant, hilarious, rambling Tristram Shandy — a work of postmodernist genius written at least a hundred years before there was even modernism — with a ten-foot lens. It took the arrival of Michael Winterbottom, a man who has made a career out of not listening to people when they tell him what kind of movie he should make next, for anything remotely resembling a big-screen adaptation to be made, and even then, it was more of an impression than it was a reproduction.

— Leonard Pierce