The Screengrab : victor mature

Yesterday's Hits: The Robe (1953, Henry Koster)

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Since the rise of DVD, the entertainment media has made a fuss over the declining profitability of theatrical exhibition. According to any number of articles on the subject, the increased quality of home viewing has resulted fewer people leaving the house to spend their entertainment dollar. But whether or not this is actually the case, any student of film history can tell you that this is hardly the first time Hollywood has faced this kind of crisis. After all, with the advent of television in the 1950s, Hollywood found themselves having to get creative in order to make money with their movies. In order to compete with television, the studios decided to give viewers what they couldn’t get on their televisions, and the best way to do this was to make their movies big. A number of large-format processes resulted from the period- Cinerama, VistaVision, and the like. Fox’s new format was CinemaScope, and the first film released in this process was 1953’s The Robe.

What made The Robe a hit? Well, CinemaScope certainly had a lot to do with it. The ‘Scope screen was huge, but unlike other new formats such as Cinerama, CinemaScope only required one projector, making it a good deal viable and easier to operate for most theatres. A good number of theatres upgraded to CinemaScope, but even those that didn’t were still able to play the film, as the studio took care to shoot the movie in standard spherical format as well.

But regardless of the shape of the screen, audiences took to The Robe in a big way. Biblical epics were very much in vogue during the early 1950s, not least because the biblical source material made them much easier to swallow for the Breen Office, still Hollywood’s arbiters for onscreen morality. Likewise, audiences responded not only to the lavish sets and costumes, but also to the larger-than-life heroes and villains, uncomplicated morality, and grandiose re-enactments of the stories they’d heard all their lives but hadn’t seen come alive onscreen before. The Robe had all these elements, and combined with the novelty of CinemaScope, the film became the second-biggest hit of 1953, putting millions of dollars in Fox’s coffers and CinemaScope on the map.

What happened? There are certain movie genres that remain popular over time and others who fall out of fashion, and Biblical epics fell into the latter category. No matter how ambitious the films were, they were also almost invariably marked by a tendency toward hamfisted dialogue and storytelling, as well as overripe performances. As the 1950s continued, Biblical epics became simultaneously more expensive and less profitable, and while the genre still produced the occasional hit- most notably The Ten Commandments- for the most part viewers had moved on to other genres. And unlike many other genres, the Biblical epic has yet to come back into fashion or undergo a critical resurgence, perhaps because nowadays we prefer our epics without all that pesky moralizing. But whatever the reason, The Robe is remembered today almost entirely for its status as the first CinemaScope release, rather than for its own merits as a film.

Does The Robe still work? Not really. To begin with, the film’s story isn’t especially compelling. The Robe was based on a bestselling novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, but while Douglas’ work had a great deal of appeal for readers, his storytelling was fairly prosaic. Like a number of other films of its kind, The Robe tells the story of Christ through a peripheral figure, this time the Roman centurian Marcellus Gallio (played by Richard Burton) who is present at the Crucifixion and wins Christ’s robe in a game of dice. But after Christ’s death, Marcellus begins to imagine that the Robe is cursed and soon embarks on a mission to discover the secret of the Robe, only to fall in with Christ’s followers. You can imagine where it goes from there- Marcellus begins to believe, he returns to Rome to spread the good news, and ends up becoming a martyr. Not much of a story, that’s for sure.

Of course, Burton’s presence in the lead role makes it easier to take. Long one of my favorite actors, Burton supposedly considered The Robe one of his worst films, but while this is hardly a top-notch Burton performance, it’s always a pleasure to watch him onscreen and savor his amazing voice. Most of the supporting cast can’t measure up- Victor Mature mostly counts on his beefcake physique to carry his performance, Jean Simmons is pretty but little else as Burton’s love interest, and Michael Rennie’s Peter is defined almost entirely by his rockin’ beard. The only secondary player to make much of an impression is Jay Robinson. Robinson’s take on Caligula isn’t in the same league as John Hurt’s in I, Claudius, but he’s still fun to watch, especially when he’s yelling out orders with hammy relish. It’s a campy performance, but it’s better than we get from most of his costars.

Strangely, it’s this lack of campiness that may have contributed to The Robe’s loss of popularity. The Biblical epic is traditionally one of the most campiest of genres, and in particular the saints’n’sinners epics of Cecil B. DeMille can still be enjoyed for their cheeseball value. By contrast, director Henry Koster was a skilled craftsman, but lacked DeMille’s flair for shameless entertainment, and consequently The Robe is too straight and respectable to work in the same way as DeMille’s films. Aside from Robinson’s scenes and Burton’s bits of Robe-inspired madness, there’s not much fun to be had while watching the film. And since the movie doesn’t work as straight drama either, that doesn’t leave us with any other reason to watch it. All that’s left is to be thankful to the film for getting the ball rolling on widescreen filmmaking, which ended up resulting in many movies that are far better and more enduring than The Robe.

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part II

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FUGITIVE (1993)

The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Yes, really. A huge hit on its original release, Mission: Impossible was mostly dismissed by critics as a dopey Tom Cruise action movie, while being criticized by many viewers for having too much plot, not enough stuff blowing up. But a second look at the film reveals what a gripping suspense movie it really is, translating the formula of the TV series- gadgets, undercover missions, realistic masks, and the like- into the form of a summer tentpole release. Mission: Impossible contains at least three or four wonderfully tense scenes- the opening operation gone fatally wrong, the tête-à-tête at Prague’s Akvarium, that awesome Rififi-esque break-in at Langley- more than most Hollywood thrillers can claim. In addition, the film represents the most successful attempt by director Brian DePalma to fuse the silky-smooth cinema-saturated style of his most characteristic work with a big-budget blockbuster, and in the process becomes a surprisingly lean and satisfying thriller. If nothing else, Mission: Impossible deserves respect as the only film in the series to date that’s remained true to the team-centric nature of the show, with subsequent efforts becoming increasingly focused on Tom Cruise saving the world. Supporting players like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny make such a strong impression here that it’s a shame that Cruise has become so intent on hogging the spotlight in later films in the franchise.

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

Netflix, video stores and pay cable movie channels are littered with the toxic waste spew of that very special category of cinematic detritus: the SNL movie. Sure, the never-as-funny-as-it-should-be/ never-as-bad-as-its-rep Saturday Night Live has produced more than its share of legitimate comedy stars and second bananas over the years, from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. But one-dimensional SNL characters, barely tolerable in five minute doses, can be downright unbearable in full-length features (i.e., It’s Pat, A Night At the Roxbury, Coneheads, etc.). Wayne’s World is one notable exception, but to my way of thinking, The Blues Brothers is far and away the best of the SNL films (and, for the purposes of this list, one of my favorite TV-to-movie adaptations), transforming a recurring, ego-driven musical duo (whose routine and appeal I never really understood) into iconic figures in a John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Akroyd phantasmagoria that bends over backwards in its efforts to entertain: car crashes! cast-of-thousands musical numbers! more car crashes! Illinois Nazis! country and western! rhythm and blues! John Candy! Aretha Franklin! Carrie Fisher with a machine gun! (And did I mention the car crashes?) I mean, fuck! The endless, mind-boggling demolition-derby pile-up of police cars in the climactic car chase alone is worth the price of admission (take that, CGI!), but the musical numbers (by Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, et. al.) are even better, and introduced me and countless other white people to a whole bunch of talented black people we’d never fully appreciated before. And if all that weren’t enough, The Blues Brothers is endlessly quotable (“We’re on a mission from God,” “Three orange whips,” etc.) and spawned a pretty damn tasty jambalaya at the late-lamented Cambridge House of Blues...and how many movies can you say that about? True, The Blues Brothers also spawned the execrable Blues Brothers 2000...but the original, indispensable 1980 version will forever stand as the Cadillac Ranch of movies, a bizarre, fascinating, coke-fueled white elephant at the crossroads of cracked genius and howling oblivion.

HEAD (1968)

It was 1968 and the studio chiefs were very confused. There was something called “youth culture” or “the counterculture” or whatever – you know, dirty smelly hippies who wanted to see weird shit at the movies! Hopelessly out of touch, these suits had to turn to the scruffy people for help. The kids seemed to like that TV show The Monkees, so Columbia Pictures hired the show’s producer Bob Rafelson, and he teamed with that really weird Jack Nicholson dude from the Corman pictures, and they smoked a bunch of weed and they came up with Head. Surreal, satirical, self-referential, psychedelic and pretty much plotless, the movie bore little resemblance to the kiddie show that spawned it and failed at the box office. In retrospect, it never had a chance; the heads wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Monkees movie and the young fans of the show wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But there’s enough inspired weirdness, bizarre cameos (Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Victor Mature and Sonny Liston) and good music (notably the Michael Nesmith-composed “Circle Sky”) to make it a worthy cult object, if not a great movie.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988)

The Naked Gun has very little competition as the least likely TV-to-movie transition of all time. It’s derived from a series that only yours truly and four other people watched, one that lasted six episodes and went off the air six years before the movie reached theaters. But Police Squad! had a pedigree; the Airplane! team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker created it, star Leslie Nielsen was nominated for an Emmy for his deadpan turn as Lt. Frank Drebin, and the show became a cult favorite through reruns and home video. Even so, The Naked Gun was an unexpected smash hit, spawning two lousy sequels and an entire craptacular genre of Leslie Nielsen parodies. Don’t hold those sins against it, though. The Naked Gun is a well-oiled laugh machine – from the slapstick stylings of the always hilarious O.J. Simpson to the climactic baseball game honored in an earlier Screengrab list, it’s like a MAD magazine come to life, complete with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marginalia crammed into every corner of the screen. It’s really the last time Nielsen was ever funny, and that goes triple for the ZAZ triumvirate, who have separately and together foisted the likes of Brain Donors, Rat Race and Scary Movie 4 on their once loyal fans.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

The second and final season of Twin Peaks ended in a flurry of bizarre cliffhangers, so when rumors of a movie began to circulate, those few of us who were still watching shared a brief moment of hope that at least some resolution would be forthcoming. Then we heard that Fire Walk with Me would be a prequel covering the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life and, well, so much for that idea. Presumably the reasoning was that a reboot of the story would draw in a larger audience than a continuation, or at least that’s how we imagine David Lynch explained it to the suits at New Line. It’s a safe bet that 99% of any potential new audience fled the theater within the movie’s first 30 minutes, set in a deliberately alienating bizarro Twin Peaks called Deer Meadow, where the cops are unfriendly, the waitresses are hags and the FBI is represented by Chris Isaak as a pale echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper. (MacLachlan makes only fleeting appearances in the movie, unaware that his career is Showgirls-bound.) But those who left early missed out on one of Lynch’s most intense and emotionally charged fever dreams. Stripped of the quirky humor that had soured into tiresome shtick long before the series ended, Fire Walk with Me unwraps Laura Palmer from her plastic for a one-of-a-kind descent into hell. Sheryl Lee burns through the screen in a shoulda-been star-making performance and Lynch cooks up some of his most indelible set pieces, most notably the subtitled “Pink Room” sequence set in what appears to be Satan’s roadhouse. Just don’t ask us about the David Bowie cameo.

- Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak

READ PART I

Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Richard Widmark has died at the age of 93. Widmark made a splash with his movie debut in the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which he played a sniggering young gangster named Tommy Udo. Widmark shaved his eyebrows off for the role and cultivated a skin-crawling giggle that was all the creepier for the times he employed it: among the things that amused Tommy in the course of the movie were the chance to shove an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs and his own delivery of the line, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over." It was a supporting role, designed as a contrast to the movie's hero--a remorseful, older, family-man hood, played by Victor Mature in what was probably his best performance. Yet Widmark took the picture straight away from him, and Tommy Udo and his giggle entered permanent crime-movie folklore, referenced in the Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and the Kaleidoscope song "The Ballad of Tommy Udo", and reportedly serving as a role model for the New York mobster Joey Gallo. Widmark received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe for the new male star of the year. In later years, he would express mixed feelings about the attention the performance got: "It’s a bit rough, priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”

His career had its ups and downs, but he is remembered for a bit more than that. Predictably, he came out of Kiss of Death typecast as a hood, but he began to get to play good guys after Elia Kazan cast him in the 1950 thriller Panic in the Streets. And his edgy appeal proved ideal for the good-bad heroes of more offbeat noirs such as Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, in which he played a career pickpocket named Skip who reaches inside the wrong purse and finds himself in possession of some stolen microfilm coveted by foreign agents, and Jules Dassin's London-set Night and the City (later ineptly made as a vehicle for Robert De Niro); his performance there, as the doomed con man Harry Fabian, is probably the best of his career. As noir died out by the end of the 1950s, Widmark spent more and more time in Westerns; he was cast as Jim Bowie in The Alamo by his ideological arch enemy, John Wayne, whose battles with the actor over both politics and their shared profession were the stuff of Hollywood legend. He also turned producer in order to set up a few projects, including the submarine melodrama The Bedford Incident, in which the studios had little interest. His last big, attention-getting starring role was as the title character of Don Siegel's police drama Madigan (1968), which he later resurrected for a short-lived TV series. In the later stages of his career, he specialized in character turns as authority figures: presidents, politicians, millionaire string-pullers, etc. He retired from acting on- screen after playing a United States Senator in the 1992 True Colors. “The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he once said, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”

Forgotten Films: "Caveman" (1981)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The new release 10,000 B.C. revives a genre that some of us thought was long past reviving, the dawn-of-man cave people melodrama. The new movie's director, Roland Emmerich, is a technophile size freak who probably thinks that the latest developments in computer animation and other special effects make it a great time to visualize a chaotic, untamed planet overrun with strange forms of wildlife threatening actors who are modeling proposed hair styles for Rob Zombie — though my recollection is that, in the past, the whole point of these movies was to showcase a rising performer (such as Victor Mature, star of the 1940 One Million B.C., or Raquel Welch, star of its 1966 remake) who seems made to be photographed wearing a loincloth. Anyway, this genre received its knockout blow more than twenty-five years ago, in Caveman, filmed in Mexico by the director Carl Gottlieb, who also co-wrote the script with Rudy DeLuca. Gottlieb is a well-travelled show business jack-of-all-trades whose career includes a stint with the '60s improv-comedy troupe the Committee, various acting gigs, and partial authorship of the script of Jaws (as well as full authorship of its making-of book). Gottlieb made his film directing debut with the 1977 Steve Martin short The Absent-Minded Waiter, but Caveman was his first time behind the camera on a feature film. It remains his only feature, maybe because he's yet to find a project that might count as a worthy follow-up to directing a cast, all speaking "prehistoric" gibberish, that included Ringo Starr, John Matuszak, and a stoned Tyrannosaurus rex.

Ringo plays Atouk, the sad-sack misfit of a tribe of cave folk led by — or, rather, bullied and pushed around by — Tonda, played by the towering, fiercely bearded Matuszak. Atouk graduates from loser to outcast when he enrages Tonda by lusting after the big guy's lady, Barbara Bach. (This was the movie where Ringo and Bach met. They were married before it was released to theaters, and in a month they'll be celebrating their twenty-seventh anniversary. Tip your hats, people.) The resourceful Ringo takes advantage of his new freedom to assemble his own rival tribe, which includes Dennis Quaid, Carl Lumbly, the great Jack Gilford and, as Gilford's daughter and Ringo's eventual love interest, a very charming, pre-Cheers Shelley Long. He also discovers fire, music, advanced weaponry, and the pleasures of standing upright. (He proceeds to convert his friends, grabbing them from behind as if administering the Heimlich maneuver and yanking their spines straight to the accompaniment of a terrific cracking noise.) The whole thing has a playful, friendly quality, and the good guys are pretty close to irresistable. The bad guys are no slouches themselves; the late Matuszak gets to demonstrate an all-out slapstick aplomb that Hollywood seldom bothered to tap during his acting career, and Bach, strutting about in her fur bikini, was accurately described by one reviewer, Michael Sragow, as looking like a Frank Frazetta illustration come to life. Mixed in among the people are a quartet of stop-motion dinosaurs, including the aforementioned T-rex, who are very ready for their close-ups. Will 10,000 B.C. reveal that its makers have learned anything from Ringo and company? It remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that if Roland Emmerich understood anything about the appeal of stop-motion dinosaurs, he never would have made Godzilla.