The Screengrab : william wyler

The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part Two: Live Blogging TCM's Easter Sunday Line-Up--"The Green Pastures", "Salome", "Solomon and Sheba", "Ben-Hur"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

6:30 AM: The 1936 The Green Pastures is a musical adaptation of several Bible stories, based on a Broadway show that Marc Connelly adapted from Roark Bradford's book Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun; it features an all-African American cast, led by Rex Ingram as "De Lawd." I know what you're thinking, but it's actually a terrific movie, so I don't have a lot to say about it. Except that it's interesting to compare its staging of the journey out of Egypt and, especially, the Golden Calf period to the way DeMille handled them in The Ten Commandments. For one thing, in Pastures, the decadence that breaks out while De Lawd is otherwise occupied actually looks like something that a rational adult might be tempted to join in on. DeMille's looks like interpretive dance night at Burning Man, and DeMille's voice on the soundtrack explaining how awful it all is doesn't help. (For one thing, he starts out by complaining that the people started expressing their sinful nature by putting on gaudy clothes, and then he starts complaining that they began to take off their gaudy clothes. You just can't win with some people.)

8:15 A.M.: Watching the 1953 Salome soon after seeing The Ten Commandments, one of the first things you're likely to notice is that a lot of the same people tend to turn up over and over in these kinds of pictures. Clearly, if you ran a studio and discovered which actors looked more plausible than not wearing a bedsheet, you didn't want to take too many chances. Here, Cedric Hardwicke is the Roman emperor Tiberius, who fans of I, Claudius will remember as having been quite the dirty fucker, and who plants a mine by giving Pontius Pilate (Basil Sidney) a government job, and Judith Anderson is Queen Herodius, who is always giving King Herod a hard time for his reluctance to have the trash-talking prophet John the Baptist (Alan Badel). Herod is played by Charles Laughton, twenty years after first grabbing Hollywood's attention as Nero in C. B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross; in that movie, he played a powerful monster who enjoyed his work, but here he's troubled and bent out of shape because he doesn't know how to handle this John the Baptist business. Herod is plagued by father issues: he is the son of the earlier King Herod, who, in a similar situation many years earlier, ordered the murder of all male children in the city of Bethlehem, a move that was judged by most observers of the day as a gross over-reaction. Laughton's Herod, who remembers his father's piteous and agonized screams, especially when he read Maureen Dowd's latest column, is plagued by the thought that he might err in the same way his father did, and also by the suspicion that his father always thought his brother Jeb was really the smart one.

Where does Salome enter into this, you ask? It's a good question, and one that seems to have been judged by the screenwriters as not entirely within their powers to answer. Salome is played by Rita Hayworth, which sounds like a good deal at first. But Hayworth, whose production company was responsible for the movie, seems to have been going through one of those periods of a yearning for respect that sometimes befall screen goddesses, sometimes at the oddest of times. In some scenes, Hayworth tries to act seriously by slipping into a bogus British accent, so she'll fit in with her illustrious co-stars (and with her less illustrious ones, chiefly Stewart Granger as a Roman soldier she has the hots for); in others, she tries to convey heavy emotion by breathing so hard between her lines that it's as if she were trying to invent the obscene phone call centuries before some invents the telephone. In the version of this story that we all know and love, Salome dirty dances for the king in order to persuade him to have the Baptist executed for her pleasure. In this one. Rita's Salome takes to the dance floor in a gilded blue robe and modified kaiser helmet in hopes of steaming up Herod's glasses so badly that the old boy can be persuaded to spare the Baptist, but her ploy backfires: seeing her husband watching the evening's entertainment with his tongue in his lap, Herodius leans over and whispers that if he'll have the Baptist beheaded by the time Rita executes her last shimmy shake, she'll put in a good word for him with Rita about what a terrific personality he has. Things wrap up quickly and badly. Rita's reaction to the sight of John's head on a salver makes Herod realize that he'll be sleeping on the couch, and as the people outside bang on the gates, Stewart Granger lectures the royal couple: "Live! Live in torture. May the blood of the man you've murdered rise in your throats to choke you." All that remains is a quick twist ending: Herod and his queen feared John the Baptist as a threat to their power because they thought he might be the messiah, but a final shot of Rita and Stewart Granger standing in a crowd listening to some guy deliver the Sermon on the Mount makes it clear that it is in fact this guy who is the real Keyser Soze. The movie ends with the words "This is the beginning" appearing on screen.

10:00 AM: King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba (1959) has many points of distinction. For one thing, it stands as a lasting reminder that the birth of the state of Israel once seemed like something that Hollywood could stand to cash in on. The story involves a power struggle for the throne of Israeli between the sons of David, Solomon (Yul Brynner) and Adonijah, played by my man George Sanders, with the Queen of Sheba (Gina Lollobrigida) plotting with the Egyptians to destroy the Jewish state. As part of the production design, the Israelis' shields, home furnishings, and maybe their underwear are emblazoned with the Star of David. I'm pretty sure this is anachronistic, but it's not like I was there or have a piece of the copyright action, so what the hey. Perhaps harder to account for is what will strike many people as the central stroke of miscasting that has George Sanders playing the Sonny Corleone role of the fiery-tempered, violent brother while Yul Brynner handles the Michael role as the bookish Solomon who, somebody reminds us every three minutes, is a legend in his own time for being just as wise as shit. (There is no third brother to serve as the Fredo figure, and he is missed.) This is also one of those very special movies in which Yul has hair, perhaps because Solomon's precious brains need all the protection they can get. (Brynner was a late addition to the cast, stepping in for Tyrone Power after Power keeled over from a fatal heart attack as a consequence of doing a fight scene with George Sanders, which, for those of you who don't know, tells you just how bad George Sanders was.)

The movie, which is a long sumbitch, is padded out with some of Solomon's greatest hits scenes, such as the time he pulled the old let's-cut-the-kid-in-two-and-give-each-of-youse-half gag. This is to keep you alerted to the fact that he is, once again, wise. It might have been a nice touch if he could have indicated the depths of wisdom in some simpler fashion, such as dressing sensibly, but that ship had sailed by the time that the costume designer persuaded Yul Brynner to swan about in what looks like a Confederate army leisure suit with a big-ass Star of David medallion that looks like what Bob Guccione might break out for the high holidays. (Brynner's beard and toupee also serve to heighten a previously unsuspected resemblance to Hector Elizaondo.) He may be wise, but he's mortal, and certain things cut off the flow of blood to his brain just as fast as they do with the rest of us, so Sheba Lollobrigida goes to work on him, bewitching him with her ultry-sultry wiles, until God can't take it anymore and starts caving roofs in just to distract Solomon's attention away from his new friend's exposed midsection. After a big battle, Solomon kills George Sanders accidentally on purpose, and then carries Sheba's bruised and broken body into the temple so that God can demonstrate his own unquestioned superiority to Sam the Eagle when it comes to resurrections: he not only restores her to full health but scrubs her face and throws in some Botox. It would be easy to say that King Vidor has done better work, since most of us have. What's a little embarrassing is that one of the occasions when he did better work was Duel in the Sun.

12:30 PM: And now, it's time for the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room of Easter television: Ben-Hur, the 1959 Oscar-festooned super-epic that arguably announced the end of the era of the '50s religious epic, a genre that did not surpass itself so much as max out all its credit cards in this one last wallow. I'll confess right now that I have never fully understood this movie's qualfications as a religious epic. To my eyes, it's a "prestige" (i.e., bloated) version of a Roman sword-and-sandal action movie with brief but strategically placed cameos by a pair of feet and a hand or two that, we are to understand, are connected to the great unseeable presence that is Him. But you go trying to argue with fifty years of conventional wisdom and see where it gets you.

The plot is basically one of those Horatio Alger success stories, as contemporary culture critics understand the Alger books as tributes to the knack for picking out the right rich, powerful man to brown nose. Having had his life destroyed when he doesn't have sense enough to cross the street rather than run into his old school chum Messala--played by Stephen Boyd, an actor so habitually over-intense that I like to imagine he didn't die so much as supernova--our hero, Mr. Hur (Charlton Heston), climbs back to society's upper rungs while showing an unerring instinct for who to save from drowning when pirates attack the ship where he's manning the oars as a galley slave and whose reins to hold during the big chariot race. At the end of that race, you do get to hear the greatest line anybody ever wrote for somebody to say to Charlton Heston, when Pontius Pilate--played by Frank Thring this time--crowns him the winner and says, "Permit us to worship you."

About the only thing else I can think of to say about the movie is that, if you watch it after you've been gorging on films like Salome and Solomon and Sheba, it's impossible not to respect, even with one eye at half-mast and half your brain switched to autopilot, just what a tremendous professional job the director William Wyler did. You might think that someone gainfully employed by a major studio and entrusted with the job of bringing a big epic in on schedule would be able, at a bare minimum of competence, to direct the extras in a crowd scene so that they looked like human beings with some independent life, and to make the sets look as if somebody had lived in them for more than five minutes and as if they were still going to be standing five minutes after the director yelled "Cut!" But whether or not this stuff was worth doing at all, to see if done completely badly is to give you a fresh appreciation for how hard Wyler has to have worked to get it done half-right.

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

Yesterday's Hits, Veteran's Day Edition: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

World War II was the first major war that was extensively documented by Hollywood. Even as it was in progress, hundreds of newsreels and documentaries helped to increase awareness of how and why we were fighting, including works by major filmmakers like Frank Capra, John Ford and Howard Hawks. But after the war was over, no one was really telling the stories of the men who were coming home and trying to resume their lives again. Sensing the need for this story to be told, producer Samuel Goldwyn commissioned Robert E. Sherwood, who had served as the head of the Office of War Information, to write a screenplay based on the novel Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor, which tackled this subject.

As befitting the importance of the subject matter, Goldwyn then proceeded to assemble an A-list cast and crew for the project. To direct, Goldwyn chose William Wyler, one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers. He then hand-picked an A-list cast, led by Oscar-winning actor Frederic March and popular leading man Dana Andrews as two of the returning soldiers, and Hollywood’s top female box-office draw Myrna Loy as March’s loving wife. In perhaps his biggest gamble, Goldwyn cast in the key role of the disabled Navy veteran Homer Parrish a non-actor named Harold Russell, an actual vet who’d lost both of his hands in battle.

Like all of the risks Goldwyn took in bringing The Best Years of Our Lives to the screen, this one paid off magnificently. Prior to the film’s release, he famously stated, "I don't care if the film doesn't make a nickel. I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it." And while there were at least a handful of people who didn’t see the film, it nonetheless became a massive hit, reportedly the biggest to coming out of Hollywood since Gone With the Wind. On top of that, it also took home seven competitive Academy Awards including Best Picture, best director for Wyler, acting Oscars for March and Russell, and a second honorary award for Russell, “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.”

For years, The Best Years of Our Lives was one of the most acclaimed and beloved of all Hollywood movies. But while the patriotic sentiment that was stirred up by the memory of World War II had helped to make the film one of the biggest blockbusters of its time, subsequent conflicts made war- and the movies based on it- more controversial in the minds of the public. For most movies about war and its consequences, it was no longer enough to matter-of-factly tell the stories of the people who fought and those they left behind. Especially in the wake of Vietnam, war became a political issue, and most directors of war movies wore their own politics (whether they were for it or against) on their sleeves.

By contrast, it’s hard to tell how the makers of The Best Years of Our Lives felt about World War II just by watching the film. But then, it doesn’t really matter. The Best Years of Our Lives is not a pro-war or anti-war story, but one that accepts the war as a fact of like. Al (March), Fred (Andrews), and Homer (Russell) fought in World War II, and now that it’s over they have to deal with what happened while they re-acclimatize themselves to life at home. The film is about how the war affected them and those who love them- no more, no less.

One of the most significant decisions made by Wyler and Goldwyn was that the film would be a character study. Key to this effect is the film’s running time, ten minutes shy of three hours, which affords the audience plenty of time to get to know the three returning men and observe their lives. This extra time makes a difference- rather than trying to pare down the characters’ trajectories in order to make a tight two-hour movie, Wyler and Goldwyn let the stories play out at an unhurried pace. Instead of feeling like a handful of vignettes, the characters in The Best Years of Our Lives are given time to think and change, to make mistakes and learn from them, and ultimately to grow into their new lives.

Each of the three returning men does so in a unique way. Ever since losing his hands, Homer has had trouble with how others treat him, although it's a credit to the film that don't treat him poorly, just... differently. Homer’s story is the simplest, and the most poignant, due in no small part to the directness and un-faked sincerity of Russell’s acting. Al’s storyline is the subtlest of the three, in large part because he’s the one who seems to have his act together. He comes back from the war to a loving family and a successful job in a bank. However, his war experiences begin to manifest themselves in small but recognizable ways. When he gives a loan to a returning serviceman, his boss tells him he should pay more attention to the applicant’s collateral than to his character. He hardly recognizes his kids, who’ve grown up in his absence. And he begins display an increased eagerness to drink, which doesn’t go unnoticed by his wife Millie. Loy is just right as a woman who loves her man enough to forgive him his misdeeds, but would like some way to understand what’s making him do them.

Yet in many ways, it’s Frank who is at the center of the film. Frank, who came from wrong side of the tracks, went to war and became a hero, winning a number of medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross. But his accomplishments mean nothing in the civilian world without the work experience to back them up, and he finds himself working at his old job in a drugstore. And having wooed his wife Marie (Virginia Mayo) with his slick looks in a uniform and his generous Army salary, she’s naturally not too happy to have to live off a soda jerk’s salary. Meanwhile, Frank finds himself falling for Al’s daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright), much to Al’s dismay.

The biggest reason why The Best Years of Our Lives has endured as a classic is because its characters are completely human-sized. While the cast is filled with popular stars of the day, they’re always convincing as complicated everyday people instead of the fantasy archetypes who normally inhabit high-profile Hollywood films. In making the film, Goldwyn, Wyler, and the rest of the cast and crew showed a real respect for the bankers, the soda jerks, the disabled, the nurses, the housewives, the children, and everyone else who’s been affected by war. The title refers to “our lives,” and the filmmakers understand this. And that, more than anything, is why it still works.

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DESERT HEARTS (1985)

Unlike the much-heralded 1982 Olympic-athletes-in-love drama Personal Best, 1985’s lower-profile lesbian romance Desert Hearts (based on a novel by Jane Rule) was (A) actually directed by a woman (Donna Deitch) and (B) depicted a love story where neither participant ultimately winds up going back to a man after a tentative Sapphic fling. Like Marilyn Monroe’s character years before in The Misfits, Helen Shaver’s restrained English professor Vivian Bell finds herself in Reno, Nevada, sweating out the state’s six-week residency requirement in order to obtain a quick divorce from her husband. While killing time in a no-boys-allowed guest house (run by Jack Tripper’s old landlady, Audra Lindley), Vivian meets a free spirit named Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and, much to her own surprise, discovers an intense spiritual and sexual connection she never experienced with the XY chromosome set. Given the don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists mindset of the story’s 1959 setting, Vivian isn’t even entirely aware that she’s been living in a closet, but once she’s out, her feelings trump her fears of a life less ordinary, and she invites Cay to follow her back to New York, and Cay admits that Vivian “reached in and put a string of lights” around her heart, one of the great swoony lines in the annals of romantic cinema.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)

A funny, real-life detective yarn, a brief history of film and a timely exposé of American cultural hypocrisy...all that AND a compendium of notorious, uncensored sex scenes? What's not to like? This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a gotcha! documentary in the Super Size Me tradition, where the filmmaker explores a larger topic by subjecting himself to a series of misadventures. In this case, the subject is the shadowy, puritanical Motion Picture Association of America, an unelected, unimpeachable board which subtly shapes our national cultural agenda by determining which films (and values) are "family-friendly" and which are marginalized by means of the current G-PG-PG13-R-NC17 ratings system. Combining movie clips and filmmaker interviews, director Kirby Dick demonstrates how the MPAA habitually demonizes sex in movies (particularly the homo- variety) while letting violence slide...but the real fun of the movie is watching the ironically-named Dick track down the secretive MPAA board members together with a spunky private detective (who, coincidentally but with obvious thematic irony, also happens to be a lesbian mother) before submitting the very film you're watching to the very group it's about for a rating in a great meta moment of "Fuck You" brio.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

Long before the "Don't ask, don't tell" era, a Southern army post was probably the least healthy environment for a deeply closeted homosexual imaginable. That's certainly the case in John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which pretty much every character has a psychosexual hang-up of some sort. Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, whose pride is entirely tied up in being something he's not: a portrait of courage, a leader of men. Elizabeth Taylor is his wife Leonora, one of the all-time ballbusters, and she's definitely got his number. "Firebird is a horse," he grumbles one morning, annoyed at his wife's devotion to the animal. "Firebird is a stallion," she hisses, and though it may have taken the 1967 audience a while to catch on (the words "gay" or "homosexual" are never mentioned – probably couldn't be mentioned), Penderton could hardly feel more emasculated if she horsewhipped him across the face in front of his colleagues – which she later does. A pent-up bottle of rage and self-loathing (he rides a horse like he's got the post's flagpole up his ass), Penderton finally pops his cork when he catches the object of his obsession, a hunky but dim young soldier played by Robert Forster in his movie debut, in his wife's bedroom sniffing through her undies. The movie's ending is a bit overheated, but Brando is brilliantly bizarre as a gay man who is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975)

He certainly wasn’t the first gay filmmaker, but a legitimate argument can be made that the brilliant German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder was the first gay filmmaker of importance. Fassbinder himself was openly gay, and homosexuality often played a part in his films, whether obviously or subtly, but Fox and His Friends was the first movie he made where a homosexual romance was the centerpiece of the plot. More importantly, though, as the director stressed in interviews, the gayness of the characters is not “a problem, or a comic term”. Fassbinder wanted nothing more – and nothing less – than to bring us a moving, tragic soap opera romance in which the main characters were not heterosexual. To accomplish this, he had to make the movie extremely personal (he filmed many of its scenes in the gay Berlin demimonde he frequented in his private life, and he chose to play the character of naïve working-class lottery winner Fox Biberkopf himself), but he also had to ensure that the movie would neither humiliate nor glorify its gay characters. In order for it to work, he had to show that gays were just as noble, as innocent, and as decent as other people, but he also had to show that they were just as base, as manipulative and as cruel as other people. The result is a masterpiece that contains everything that is great about Fassbinder as a director, and one of the most sad and human stories in the history of film drama: what Fox gives up for love, and the way his need for acceptance and affection leads him to ruin, resonates universally. That’s what good movies – be they ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – are supposed to do.

BEN-HUR (1959)

One of the most iconic gay performances in cinema history came from a man who not only wasn’t gay, but apparently had no idea he was supposed to be playing a gay character, and when he found out, vehemently denied it for decades. The story goes that director William Wyler and screenwriter Gore Vidal found the notion that Messala and Judah Ben-Hur would have been so close, only to come to a position of extreme hatred over a fairly arcane dispute over politics, a tad hard to believe. Vidal, whose reputation as a bit of a troublemaker has never been a secret, came up with the notion that the two men had been lovers when they were young, and their split was not over politics, but over Ben-Hur’s eventual rejection of Messala. Wyler thought it was worth a shot, and while the two men discussed it with Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, they dared not bring the subject up with Heston, who was none too fond of gays. Naturally, the script never directly mentioned the situation either, but given the way Heston’s adult Ben-Hur interacts with Messala (the result, according to both Vidal and Boyd, of precise wording in the script and careful direction from Wyler), it’s a bit hard to believe that Heston couldn’t figure out that something was going on. Still, for reasons of his own, Heston spent the next forty years as the sole representative of the “I did not play a homo in Ben-Hur” position, going so far as to deny Gore Vidal had anything to do with the finished script of the film – a claim Vidal handily disproved, using, among other things, passages in Heston’s own autobiography as a source.

Click here to read Part One, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Video of the Day: Audrey Hepburn, Hero of the Underground

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Screen tests can be interesting just on their own merits, especially when they show us a future superstar before they're famous. Other times, though, especially when they're generally perfunctory formalities for big stars who are generally assured of getting the part, they serve as what we now think of as DVD bonus material fodder: chances for the actors to let their hair down and chat with directors or producers in a format not unlike a talk show.

Roman Holiday, in 1953, was the movie that made Audrey Hepburn a huge international film star, and it was her screen test that caused William Wyler to cast her in the romantic comedy. The camera was left running after she finished her audition, and she began candidly speaking about her childhood — including, as seen here, her experience dancing at secret performances to raise money for the Dutch underground during the Second World War. Look at the expression of wicked, playful joy on her face when she describes why the Germans didn't shut them down, and you'll know why so many people were charmed by her in the film.

Chicago Film Roundup, End-of-Year Edition

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:20:00 GMT

Every month or so, the Screengrab bigwigs indulge me by allowing me to take a look at what's happening on the film scene in my beloved hometown of Chicago. Here's what's up in the City of Big Shoulders: in the Tribune, film critic Michael Phillips winds up the "2007 Chicagoans of the Year" feature in an interview with Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, who, like many others, made what she calls "the mass exodus from cow college to Chicago" in order to spend a hipster sojourn in the big town before moving on to Minneapolis and, eventually, Los Angeles. Cody discusses how living in Chicago shaped her writing and turned her into a raging cynic, an attitude that persisted through the early stages of Juno ("Oh, won't I be the little edgy-pants, writing a dark movie about a pregnant teenager") until its outlook was leavened into something more hopeful during the collaboration with director Jason Reitman. In the Sun-Times, grand old man of Chicago film writing (and outspoken Iraq War critic) Roger Ebert takes a look back at William Wyler's celebrated 1946 naturalist post-war drama, The Best Years of Our Lives. Calling for a more comprehensive DVD package of the film, Ebert claims that "as long as we have wars and returning veterans", the movie will not be dated. He also discusses the film's down-to-earth approach, reflected in its visual storytelling: "The film makes no effort to paint these men as extraordinary," he says of the wounded and psychologically damaged WWII vets who are its central characters. "Their lives, their characters, their prospects are all more or less average, and Wyler doesn't pump in superfluous drama. That's why the movie is so effective...Wyler employed remarkable visuals to make some of his points. He was working with the great cinematographer Gregg Toland, known for his deep-focus photography on such films as Citizen Kane, and often Wyler uses deep-focus instead of cutting, so that the meaning of a scene can reveal itself to us, instead of being pounded down with close-ups." Finally, over at the Chicago Reader, the big news surrounds the announcement that lead film writer/national treasure Jonathan Rosenbaum will be retiring from the weekly in February. Devotees eagerly await the official word, which will come next week in his best-of-2007 column (which is also expected to be his last regular column for the paper). Although he will continue writing sporadically, the Reader's "On Film" section is already sparse, tissue-thin and infrequently updated; without Rosenbaum's sometimes frustrating but always intelligent criticism, it may lose a lot of readers it'll never get back.

The Rep Report (November 8 - 17)

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: For Veterans' Day weekend, Pacific Film Archives has unearthed a cache of little-seen films produced during World War II. 'Keep ’em Flying!': Films of the U.S. Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit (November 9- 11) showcases instructional and documentary films made by top Hollywood talent under the watchful eye of "Lieutenant Colonel" Jack Warner. The program includes William Wyler's The Memphis Belle: Story of a Flying Fortress; Robert Florey's profile of Colonel Robert Scott, God Is My Co-Pilot; as well as shorts, cartoons, and a panel discussion about "issues of masculinity and identity in the films of the FMPU."

LOS ANGELES: As part of its Salvador Dali exhibit, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art begins its film series European Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde Cinema (November 9-24). The schedule includes tributes not just to Dali himself but to such artists as Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell and Kenneth Anger, as well as examples of the overripe mainstream work that Surrealists claimed as sources of inspiration: The Red Shoes, Portrait of Jennie, and the immortal Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

NEW YORK: On November 8, the Film Society of Lincoln Center sponsors a special one-night event, a rare screening of Cinda Firestone's 1974 documentary Attica, an impassioned, valuable record of and investigation into the 1971 prison riot and its bloody aftermath. The screening is co-hosted by New York Women in Film & Television.

PORTLAND: From November 9-17, the NW Film Center hosts the 34th Annual Northwest Film & Video Festival, dedicated to honoring "the heroic feats of strength, tenaciousness and passion" of the independent filmmakers of the region that Gus Van Sant calls home. A working class hero with a camera is something to be.

— Phil Nugent