The Play’s the Thing: Arsenic and Old Lace

Once upon a time, hit movies got their start as Broadway plays. This was long true of blockbuster musicals, of course: think of the stage-to-screen metamorphosis of (for example) Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Fiddler on the Roof. (Today, though musical theatre is a much harder sell than it once was, the current box-office success of the screen’s Wicked reminds us how a beloved stage play can translate into a motion picture bonanza.)  But stage comedies without musical underpinnings have also been the source of screen success. Think back to 1936, and the Kaufman and Hart screwball stage hit, You Can’t Take It With You, about a family of lovable eccentrics whose daughter falls in love with the son of a stodgy banker.  Two years later, the play was filmed with an all-star cast led by Jean Arthur, James Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore, winning Oscars for Best Picture and for Frank Capra’s direction.  

The awards racked up by You Can’t Take It With You may have been somewhat unique (it’s rare for light comedies to take home top prizes), but there was a time when many a Broadway comedy enjoyed additional kudos for its screen iteration. Clearly loads of people who lived far from Broadway were eager to see shows they’d only heard about, especially if their favorite Hollywood stars appeared in the movie version. Here’s one example: a little farce called The Solid Gold Cadillac, a big Broadway hit of the 1954-55 season, was filmed in 1956. The little old lady of the stage version—someone who upends the business world with her unexpected financial savvy—became in the film the much-younger, much-cuter Judy Holliday, who won critical praise and a Golden Globe nomination. 

Which leads me to mention that the little-old-lady star of the original stage version of The Solid Gold Cadillac was Josephine Hull, who was almost 80 when she created the role. Though she lost that part to the thirty-something Holliday, she did appear on screen in several classic stage-to-screen transfers, including Harvey (that’s the one with the invisible rabbit) and Arsenic and Old Lace. For the latter, released on screen in 1944, Frank Capra was again involved. This time the laughs came from a macabre set-up involving a Brooklyn theatre critic whose two sweet elderly aunts have a surprising habit of bumping off lonely old men with glasses of elderberry wine, delicately laced with arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide. In the film version, Mortimer Brewster (a newlywed after a lifetime of disparaging marriage) is played by none other than Cary Grant. I’ve enjoyed Grant’s appearances in many film comedies (from Bringing Up Baby to Charade), but this may be his most physical role of all. His job is chiefly to react with astonishment to all the zany, grisly doings occurring around him, and Grant is definitely up to the challenge: watching him drop his jaw, bug out his eyes, and do elaborate double-takes is a masterclass in comedic acting. But there are lots of other talented farceurs involved. Chief among them are Jack Carson as a cop with dramatic ambitions, Edward Everett Horton as the proprietor of a lunatic asylum, Jean Adair as Josephine Hull’s lovably addled sister, and the inimitable Peter Lorre as a surgeon with a serious drinking problem. The stage version had featured Boris Karloff as Mortimer’s disfigured (and very scary) brother. As the biggest name in the cast (as well as the play’s chief investor), Karloff couldn’t leave the play to perform in the film version, so Raymond Massey (in Frankenstein-adjacent Karloff makeup) does the honors. 

 

Recalling Stardust Memories

The recent passing of Marshall Brickman made me curious about his collaborations with Woody Allen.  The two shared writing credit on such Allen hits as Sleeper, Manhattan, and particularly Annie Hall, which earned the duo an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1977. At my local library I checked out a volume of Woody Allen screenplays from perhaps his most fertile period, the late 1970s.. Two of them—Annie Hall and Manhattan—were written with Brickman’s participation. The other two—Interiors and Stardust Memories—were solo outings by Allen. My not-very-scientific conclusion: when collaborating with Brickman, Woody Allen was more grounded in the here-and-now. I think Brickman brought the hypertalented Allen down to earth,  negotiating with him an effective balance of comedy and genuine emotion.

Of the two screenplays Woody Allen wrote solo, Interiors is considered by most critics and audiences a flop, a lugubrious story of failed romances, lacking the impish humor that has always been Allen’s trademark. Then there’s Stardust Memories (1980), something of a hodgepodge, but a fascinating one. This is Allen (or at least an Allen-like character) confronting his own celebrity as both director and performer, dealing with the fact that both studio execs and film fans strongly prefer his “early funny ones” to his own ambitious goal of capturing human suffering through cinema. 

In Stardust Memories, Allen is Sandy Bates, a well-known comic filmmaker who apparently aspires to be the next Fellini. He’s got a new movie in the can, but the studio honchos are not thrilled by an ending involving two old-fashioned passenger trains. One train car contains Sandy’s character and a clutch of riders who are clearly living lives of quiet desperation. The other, which Sandy stares at longingly through the train window, transports jolly revelers wearing furs and holding up awards statuettes for all to see. They’re having a great time . . . . but suddenly this lively crowd is off the train and picking its way through a garbage heap. Talk about blatant symbolism!

At a Florida hotel where Sandy’s the honored guest for a tribute weekend, he’s constantly surrounded by a swarm of fans, most of them slightly grotesque. Some want to kiss him; some want to kill him. Everyone wants something: a souvenir photo; an opportunity; a contribution to a worthy cause; a roll in the hay. As he struggles to avoid their clutches, as well as the pedantic clichés of some film-scholar types in attendance, he’s simultaneously wrestling (as Woody Allen heroes generally are) with romantic angst. There’s the gorgeous but emotionally fragile Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), as well as the pretty mother of two cute French-speaking tykes (Marie-Christine Barrault) and a young violinist who considers herself bad news (Jessica Harper). Then Sandy is confronted by a clutch of visitors from Outer Space (they too prefer “the early funny ones”) and is faced with an unexpected life-or-death moment (don’t ask). 

In watching Stardust Memories (which, by the way, is scored with some wonderful Dixieland tunes, including a Louis Armstrong rendition of “Stardust”), I couldn’t help thinking about a movie classic, Sullivan’s Travels  This 1941 film, written and directed by Preston Sturges, concerns a successful director of Hollywood comedies who yearns to work on a serious project about the plight of the downtrodden. Having gone on the road to soak up true Americana, he ultimately comes to realize the value of comedy in soothing people’s harsh daily lives. Ia this what Woody Allen is trying to convey to us in Stardust Memories? Honestly, it’s hard to say. But he’s certainly given us a lot to chew on.  

 

Art, Angst, and Almodóvar

I’ve long been fascinated by the brilliant Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar. And I’m hardly alone. The new Academy Museum has, until recently, devoted one large gallery to provocative (and hardly child-friendly) clips from Almodóvar’s best work. And on April 28, he’ll be honored by Film at Lincoln Center with its 50th Chaplin Award. But I can’t pretend I know all there is to know about the man behind such international hits as Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, and Talk to Her. That’s why I dove into a slim but tightly packed new book from Columbia University Press, titled The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films.

Author James Miller is not your usual film scholar. A professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, he has turned a COVID-era movie-watching project into a serious exploration of Almodóvar’s entire life and career. Clearly a methodical thinker, he lays out at the beginning of his book his conviction—following a close viewing of every Almodóvar film—that his subject “was essentially a man of the sixties, forged in Spain’s belated version of that decade’s global counterculture and seriously pursuing his own quest for philosophical insight and personal liberation.” He sees in Almodóvar’s films a passion for self-examination, one deeply rooted in European philosophical tradition. Miller’s preface ends with the assertion that “Almodóvar has long been fascinated by the blurry line between fiction and reality, between cultural memory and personal memory, between autofiction and autobiography.” The author  announces here his plan to analyze the master’s creative process “in a way that allows Almodóvar to emerge both as a real person as well as a fictional character represented in multiple alter egos in various films.”

To this end, Miller selects seven of Almodóvar’s films to discuss in depth. Each reflects, though hardly in a conventional way, some aspect of Almodóvar’s private life. Instead of arranging the movies chronologically in terms of their release dates, Miller chooses to match them with key periods of Almodóvar’s own personal chronology. That’s why he begins, following a biographical sketch of the artist’s life trajectory, with the 2006 release Volver, viewing it as Almodóvar’s return to the rural La Mancha of his boyhood and to the hard-scrabble working class section of Madrid in which he spent his youth. 

The next film he discusses is 2004’s Bad Education (its original Spanish title,  La mala educación can also mean “bad manners”). This often startling work contains a cinematic version of a key moment in Almodóvar’s own childhood. As a boy with a keen mind and an angelic singing voice, he was a prized pupil at a boarding school run by Catholic priests. He suffered sexual abuse at the hands of one of them. Bad Education contains this horrendous moment, but also jumps ahead in time to a film being made about the incident and its aftermath, with the victim himself apparently playing one of the lead characters. In the unique way with which, in Miller’s terms, Almodóvar “nests” various story elements inside one another, Bad Education then turns into a kind of film noir, with eerie mistaken identities pointing toward a latter-day crime that becomes downright Ripley-esque. 

The later films on Miller’s list explore the period of Almodóvar’s young manhood in the gaudy so-called La Movida movement of the 1960s as well as (in 2019’s Pain and Glory) the mature filmmaker’s acknowledgment of his own homosexuality. As always, the latter film’s director character is and is not the master himself. But he’s certainly worth our attention. 

 

Achieving the Best of Everything: The Katharine Gibbs School

It’s a long-time movie staple: an attractive young lady comes to the big city (generally Manhattan) with stars in her eyes. She gets a low-level job and struggles to move forward, while at the same time fending off the advances of cads and hoping to find True Love. It’s a plotline exemplified by the all-star 1959 film, The Best of Everything (based on a steamy Rona Jaffe best-seller). But the same basic story thread shows up elsewhere too, as in 2006’s well-loved The Devil Wears Prada, in which—for a change—the all-controlling boss is a woman. In most films of this sort, the ending for the central character is basically (despite some missteps along the way) happily ever after. 

The notion of smart, well-trained young women finding their place in the world of work was central to a once-powerful American institution, the Katharine Gibbs School.  Far more than a secretarial college, Gibbs (which in its heyday had several east coast campuses) was a place where bright young women could pave their way to future success. While working hard to master demanding courses in typing and shorthand, Gibbs students also were schooled in literature, psychology, finance, and other fields, all the better to  make them ideal employees. Some laughed at the dress code: when in public, Gibbs “girls” were required to be elegantly turned out, in neat suits, face-framing hats, and white gloves. But Gibbs alumna were models of professionalism, with the skills and the confidence to move beyond entry-level positions and attain the highest ranks in fields like government, banking, publishing, and even aviation. Several, in fact, made their mark in the entertainment industry, not only as actors (Loretta Swit of M*A*S*H fame was a graduate) but also as behind-the-scenes executives, writers, and publicists  

I know all of this because of a fascinating new book by a colleague, Vanda Krefft. Her Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women traces the institution from its founding through the war years, exploring the lives of highly-successful Gibbs graduates, many of whom managed to combine career success with happy family lives. She parses the triumphs of the Fifties, then reveals how, in the turbulent late Sixties, the whole Gibbs philosophy fell by the wayside as second-wave feminism and the general iconoclasm of the era made the old rules seem out-moded. 

Though I was captivated by many of women featured in Krefft’s well-researched and nicely written pages, what sticks in my mind is the story of the school’s founder. She was born in 1863 in Galena, Illinois, one of eight children of a businessman who, despite immigrant roots, worked his way into a position of wealth and power in his local community. In an age when upper-class women were meant to be merely decorative, Katharine lived comfortably,  but never went beyond a high school education. Her father’s sudden death changed everything; since he left no will, her older brothers took charge, and managed to squander the estate.. Ultimately she married and had two children, but, when she was forty-six, her well-meaning husband died in a freak boating accident. Again there was no will, and she had to fight even to be the decision-maker for her own sons. Left with nothing but mouths to feed, she decided to start a school teaching other woman how to think for themselves, and how—in times of crisis—not to be beholden to men for their livelihood. Somehow it worked. I can well imagine Gibbs’ story on the big screen, maybe with a plucky Claudette Colbert or Joan Crawford in the leading role. 

Searching for . . . (“The Searchers”)

I admit it: westerns aren’t my favorite genre. And it’s taken me quite a while to like one of John Ford’s most admired westerns, The Searchers. But I could always see why the film was popular. Shot in 1956, it takes full advantage of color cinematography in showing off Ford’s all-time favorite locale, Monument Valley, with its stark red buttes pointing toward the bright blue sky. 

Anyone wanting to know more about The Searchers should seek out my colleague Glenn Frankel’s 2014 book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. Suffice it to say here that this film has had a huge influence on other major filmmakers, including David Lean, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, and George Lucas, who applied some of Ford’s shooting techniques to his Star Wars films. As for me, I returned to The Searchers after many years because it was referenced in a new biography of the actress Vera Miles. Who knew she was credited as the film’s third lead, after John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter?  All I remembered was Natalie Wood as Debbie, the young white woman who’d spent nine long years as a Comanche captive: after all, she was what the search of the title was all about.

Vera Miles, I should explain, plays a major role in what Roger Ebert once called the film’s “silly romantic subplot.” The feisty daughter of settlers, Miles’ Laurie Jorgensen is in love with Martin Pawley, the earnest young man whom Wayne’s Ethan Edwards reluctantly allows to accompany him on his quest for the missing girl. What stands out about Wayne’s character is how thoroughly he detests anything to do with Native American life. His intrinsic racism extends particularly to captive women whom he views as defiled by Indian “bucks.” Given that Wayne is generally seen on film –by Ford and others—in a heroic light, it’s uncomfortable accepting him as a bigot who goes out of his way to be cruel. But there’s a tiny moment at film’s end that shows us a sliver of good will in his character, before he leaves the reunited family to enjoy some happy domesticity and heads out solo into the unknown.

Watching The Searchers again reminded me of how many films are structured around a quest for a missing person, usually a family member. Some examples include Missing (1982), Searching (2018) and what seem like a raft of Liam Neeson flicks, including Taken (2008). But  I was reminded of a very different search in an extremely arty 1999 movie called Three Seasons, the first film shot in Vietnam after President Clinton lifted a longtime embargo. Set in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), it contains several plot lines that explore the changes in Vietnam since the infamous war of the Sixties and Seventies. In one  key subplot, Harvey Keitel plays a former American G.I.  who has returned to the country to find a daughter he’s never seen. 

I saw this film for a funny reason. At a favorite L.A. restaurant I got to know a waitress who was friendly and capable, with a faintly exotic look. It turns out she was Amerasian, and had just been cast as Keitel’s elusive daughter. I watched the film with excitement, waiting for Lola to come on screen. And at long last she did. At the very end of the film, we saw—through a window—the two sitting in a cafe, deep in conversation. What did father and daughter talk about? I have no idea. The movie ended there, leaving the viewer outside looking in. 

David Lynch Sings the Blues

I’d never say that the films of David Lynch are favorites of mine. They’re rather too puzzling and too macabre to make me want to watch them more than once. Still, Lynch’s recent death seent me back to the film that cemented his reputation in the film world. So I sat down and watched Blue Velvet, which I hadn’t seen since its release in 1986. 

Lynch shot Blue Velvet after he’d already made a truly bizarre body horror indie (Eraserhead), a screen adaptation of a Broadway costume-drama (The Elephant Man), and a big-budget space opera (Dune). Following the latter serious but doomed effort to crank out a film version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, Lynch leapt at the chance to do something more intimate. As his acclaimed TV series, Twin Peaks, would later show, Lynch was fascinated by the hidden corners of small-town America, the dark secrets behind the sunny facades. Blue Velvet begins (to the syrupy tune of the Bobby Vinton pop hit) with glimpses of happy Americana: cheery flowers blooming, an off-duty fireman waving at the locals from his truck, a neat row of clean-cut school kids crossing a street, a middle-aged man watering his lawn. Then suddenly the man collapses to the ground, and we realize that Middle America isn’t all sunbeams and rosebuds. (Ironically, at this early point we’ve already caught a glimpse of the fallen man’s wife, curled up on a comfy couch to watch a TV episode in which somebody is pointing a gun.) 

The hero of the story turns out to be Jeffrey, the son of the injured man. As played by Kyle MacLaughlin (who’d starred as Paul Atreides in Lynch’s version of Dune), Jeffrey’s a handsome and well-meaning fellow, home from college because of his father’s accident. Taking a walk in his neighborhood, he comes across a startling sight: a severed human ear. That’s when he can’t resist doing some sleuthing of his own. It quickly includes his neighbor, a pretty blonde high schooler named Sandy (Laura Dern), who jumps at the chance of playing Nancy Drew. 

What they discover is a side of Lumberton, their cozy home town, that they hadn’t anticipated. There’s a lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) with a masochistic streak, a psychopathic drug dealer (Dennis Hopper) with rape on his mind, and a weirdly effeminate creep (Dean Stockwell) who’s into karaoke. And, of course, a guy with a missing ear. The clean-cut Jeffrey can’t resist getting mixed up in all of this, acknowledging with fascination that “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.”

The curious thing about Blue Velvet is that, despite a good deal of grotesque violence, the movie ends on an upbeat note. Jeffrey and Sandy are a happy couple, Dad is well again, flowers are blooming against a bright blue sky. It’s as though none of the ugliness we’ve just seen has ever happened. Still: those flowers look suspiciously phony, as does the chirping bird (a callback to Sandy’s earlier romantic dream of happiness) that perches outside the window of the family kitchen. And look! Isn’t that a worm in its beak? 

Blue Velvet will never be in my personal pantheon of truly great movies. I’ve liked other Lynch films better because I’ve found their characters more appealing: see, particularly, Wild at Heart (which stars Dern again, with Nicolas Cage). And the conundrums in later Lynch films like Mulholland Drive seem more worth figuring out. Still, Blue Velvet paved the way for the rest of Lynch’s important career. And it’s fun to see Isabella Rossellini wearing something other than a nun’s habit. 

 

Good and Evil in the Films of Gene Hackman

Once upon a time, I felt the big mystery involving Gene Hackman was exactly why he got fired in 1967 from the plum role of Mr. Robinson, spouse of the notorious middle-aged housewife who beds young Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. When I  researched the film for my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, I put this question to producer Larry Turman. He had no good answer for me, saying only that this was a choice made by director Mike Nichols. The firing hardly hurt the finished film: Murray Hamilton was unforgettable in the role. And Hackman recouped by playing Buck Barrow in the same year’s Bonnie and Clyde, landing himself an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

Today, of course, there’s a much sadder mystery to ponder:  what killed the 96-year-old retired actor, his decades-younger wife, and one of their three dogs inside their Santa Fe home? A report last Friday concludes Hackman died from a combination of Alzheimer’s and heart disease, following his wife’s very sudden death from Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome. (No word yet about what killed the dog.) All we fans can do now is remember Hackman in his prime, as an actor’s actor. Though he was never a handsome leading-man type, he carried his films with an artistry and power few can match.  

I’ve hardly watched all of Hackman’s 70-plus screen roles, but I’ve deeply admired his performances in films like The French Connection (for which he won his first Oscar) and The Conversation. Though he was most recognized for his work in dramas, I enjoyed seeing his comedic side emerge in projects like The Birdcage (in which he played a conservative U.S. Senator who discovers his daughter’s about to marry the son of a flamboyant gay couple). The sight of the straitlaced Senator Keeley dodging the press by dressing in drag and dancing to “We are Family” is matched in hilarity only by Hackman’s goofy scene as the cheery blind man in Young Frankenstein. 

Still, it was in serious dramas that Hackman found his permanent niche.  In his memory, I’ve just (re)watched two of them, 1988’s Mississippi Burning and 1992’s Unforgiven, the Oscar Best Picture recipient that won Hackman his second Oscar. Seeing them back to back, and remembering Hackman’s other celebrated roles, I came to an interesting conclusion. In Mississippi Burning, which chronicles the 1964 search for three missing civil rights activists in the American South, Hackman is on the side of the good guys. Though a former Mississippi sheriff, he now works for the FBI, assisting the by-the-book agent played by Willem Dafoe in tracking down the killers of the three young men. Certainly we can admire his values (as well as his gentleness toward the young woman married to a local deputy with clear Klan connections), but he can also be infuriating. He’s first seen cheerfully belting out a KKK theme song, and he’s prone to telling jokes that might certainly be offensive in this context. Moreover, his strategies for catching the perps are not entirely ethical (though they do work). In other words, he’s a good guy we’re not sure we like very much.

In Unforgiven, he’s again a lawman, this time in a small Texas town, circa 1880. He claims to have banned firearms, but Big Whiskey is rife with crime and violence, and he’s ultimately taken down (by star Clint Eastwood) late in the game. Still, he’s a fascinatingly genial guy, and we almost agree with his final insistence that he doesn’t deserve what he gets. Gene Hackman’s good bad-guys and bad good-guys will long stay with me. Hail and farewell.