Some Came Running, Some Stayed Away

In 1951, World War II veteran James Jones published a blockbuster novel about the lives and loves of American troops stationed in Honolulu at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. When From Here to Eternity became a film two years later, it took Hollywood by storm. Its 13 Oscar nominations resulted in eight wins, including Best Picture, Best Director, and a statuette for Frank Sinatra, bringing his own bitterness and pugnacious spirit to the role of Maggio, as the year’s Best Supporting Actor.

 It seemed the combination of James Jones’ writing and Sinatra’s acting chops was a potent one. That’s why, when in 1957 Jones published a second novel—this time dealing with a returning soldier during the post-war period—Hollywood again came calling, ready to star Sinatra as a tough-but-tender protagonist in another James Jones adaptation.  But Jones’ new novel, Some Came Running, had a few problems. The New Yorker’s critic colorfully called it “twelve hundred and sixty-six pages of flawlessly sustained tedium.”

 This was the shoot on which Sinatra, always an impatient actor, apparently ripped twenty pages out of the script in order to keep the film’s length close to the two-hour mark. Director Vincente Minnelli, looking for a change of pace from his own sparkling Gigi (also from 1958), had the challenge of corralling Sinatra and co-star Dean Martin, while also staying true to his own artistic vision. It culminated in a brilliantly florid climax, set at night amid the gaudy neon lights of a small-town carnival. The film earned five Oscar noms, mostly in acting categories, but not a single win. (Gigi and the actors from Separate Tables were the year’s big awards recipients.)

 I’ve heard film scholars praise the aesthetics of Some Came Running, as well as Minnelli’s blunt treatment of the hypocrisies of Midwest life. And I can’t deny that there are some strong performances, notably that of Shirley MacLaine (nominated for her first Oscar for this, her all-time favorite role). She plays Ginny, a slightly tawdry but good-hearted waif whose love for Dave leads at last to tragedy. (The film’s tweak of the novel’s original ending definitely increases its poignance.) There’s also good work by Sinatra and by his pal, Dean Martin, as a hard-drinking gambler who’s lovable but on a path to self-destruction.

 All this should make it clear that the film’s plot is an intensely melodramatic one, with far too many characters and lots of lurid small-town misbehavior. When Sinatra’s character, in military uniform, gets off the bus in his old hometown, it’s clear he’s a bit disgusted by the locals, but even more unimpressed with himself. Though he’s published several novels and has something of a literary reputation (like, of course, James Jones), he seems unable to move forward with his writing career. He’s also got a serious grudge against the well-heeled brother (Arthur Kennedy) who’s now one of the town’s leading citizens but chafes at his wife’s snootiness, to the point where he strays with an attractive employee.

 Oddly, it’s through his brother that Sinatra’s Dave comes to know a local professor and his schoolmarm-daughter, both of whom highly respect him as a man of letters. We’re supposed to believe that the prim schoolteacher (Martha Hyer) is Dave’s true love, though—aside from a rare moment when he literally takes her hair down—she seems incapable of passion of any sort.  Her scenes with Sinatra come across as stodgy, as she lectures him on literature and life. Under the circumstances, a gauche, umgrammatical Ginny would seem like an improvement, especially given MacLaine’s wistful charm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Close-Up of War Photographer Lee Miller

Regarding the new film, Lee, Kate Winslet can’t be accused of attaching herself to a vanity project designed to make her look good.  True, she served this biopic of World War II photojournalist Lee Miller as producer as well as star, reportedly laboring for five years to help it come to fruition. Now this sober but fascinating new work, a first directorial outing by veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras, is in theatres, giving all of us a chance to focus on Winslet’s dedication to her subject. Her Lee is attractive enough to be a former model (as well as the muse and lover of avant-garde artist Man Ray, among others), and she lives her life as a expat in Europe with a kind of wild gaiety. (At a co-ed picnic on the grass in the south of France, she’s casually topless). But following the rise of Hitler, she leaves her partner behind in London to work as a photojournalist, first in occupied Paris and then behind the front lines in Germany as the War in Europe grinds to a close. This is a woman who can’t take no for an answer, who’s determined, at all costs, to exercise her talents and exorcize her demons.

 Lee may speak fluent French, but she’s  American-born, and she talks with a kind of raspy croak that perhaps hints at her future death from lung cancer. (She lights up so frequently during the film that I perversely feared moviegoers might have their lungs damaged by second-hand smoke wafting from the screen.) Never one to fuss with her appearance, she stalks through military camps and the streets of war-torn cities looking disheveled and ready to take on anyone who gets in her way. Curiously, she’s on assignment for the British edition of Vogue, a magazine much more associated with fashion trends than with war coverage. Yes, partly because the top military brass try hard to keep her away from the blood and guts of battle, she turns in her share of war photos from a woman’s perspective, like snaps of the intimate laundry of female personnel hanging from a military tent’s makeshift clothesline. But she also sees—and documents—what women go through in wartime, always showing sympathy to those (even on the enemy side) who have made the mistake of  trusting male lies.

 The film’s climax is Lee’s visit to the newly discovered concentration camps and railroad boxcars in which millions of Jews, dissidents, and others breathed their last. These horrific places answer for her the question of what happened to her missing French friends as well as others who were not considered acceptable by the Nazi regime. Her close-up photos of piles of rotting corpses, although at first rejected by Vogue as overly disturbing to its potential readers, are today considered invaluable documentation of what the Nazis did to hapless civilians. In the face of those atrocities, it’s hard to blame her for a slightly morbid jest: inside Hitler’s cushy former home, she cheerily photographs herself in the buff, soaking in his private bathtub.

 But all was not fun and games within Lee’s personal and professional life. We’re reminded of this in the cutaways to an aged and much-diminished Lee (still feisty, still smoking) being interviewed in her farmhouse by a dapper young reporter. The last of these interview scenes reveals several things about Lee we had not expected, contributing to our sense of her as complicated indeed. It’s worth noting that family members—determined to preserve Lee’s legacy—were deeply involved the making of this film, about a woman we should all know better.

 

 

 

 

 

Digging Deep into John Sayles’ "Matewan"

If it weren’t for Roger Corman, John Sayles may never have come to Hollywood. Back in the late seventies, Roger was looking for a bright new—and inexpensive—screenwriter for one of his low-budget genre flicks. He assigned his longtime story editor, my good friend Frances Doel, to comb through the best literary magazines, looking for a promising young master of prose fiction who could be converted into a screenwriter. In Esquire she discovered Sayles, a youthful novelist and short story writer who was eager to go west. His first screen credit was for the scripting of Piranha, a darkly comic take on the über-popular Jaws that featured, instead of one deadly giant fish, a whole lot of deadly tiny fish. He followed this with a screenplay for Julie Corman’s The Lady in Red, all the while immersing himself in the skills he’d need to succeed as a film director. 

It was not long before Sayles applied his Corman earnings to his own first film as a writer-director, 1980’s Return of the Secaucus 7. (White writing my biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, I was thrilled to speak at length to Sayles about how the lessons he’d learned from Corman contributed to his long career as a maker of truly independent films.)

 In the 1980’s, while writing increasingly impressive scripts for others, Sayles continued to pursue his own idiosyncratic career, exploring a wide range of genres. One of his greatest achievements has been 1987’s Matewan, a powerful drama about the real-life struggle of West Virginia coal miners to form a union, in the face of armed resistance from their bosses.

Walking a fine line between the realistic and the mythic, Sayles captures the downhome heroism of the striking miners as well as the stark beauty of their surroundings. (Legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who surely appreciated the script’s clear proletarian slant, was rewarded by the Academy with an Oscar nomination for this film.)

 Though Sayles’ feelings for the union cause are self-evident, the central conflict in the film is hardly just black-and-white. The striking West Virginia mine-workers (some younger than fifteen) tend to start with a bigoted attitude not only toward the African-American scabs who descend on the town of Matewan but also toward the recent Italian immigrants trying to make their home in this locale. And they’re all too willing to use violence to express their feelings. (Everyone, including the local housewives and a teenaged lay preacher, seems extremely familiar with firearms.) This is a place, it’s made clear, that was founded on God and guns. Sayles himself has fun with the small role of the local minister: he’s appeared in many of his own movies, as well as in the films of others.

Over the years, Sayles has developed a small stock company of actors who return to his projects time and again. Several of them, including Gordon Clapp and David Strathairn, have been with him since campus days at Williams College. Matewan also has a key role for Mary McDonnell: this was only her second film, three years before she found fame and an Oscar nomination for her supporting part in Dances With Wolves. (In 1992, Sayles put her at the center of his Passion Fish, which brought her a Best Actress Oscar nom.) Late great James Earl Jones also plays a essential part in the Matewan action. But the most heroic character is the union organizer, a deeply committed pacifist, played by Chris Cooper, at the very start of his movie career. 

 

 

“Field of Dreams”: If You Shoot It, Will They Come?

It’s hard to imagine how many truly idiotic projects have been launched, over the years, based on a hit movie’s promise that “if you build it, they will come.” To be honest, 1989’s Field of Dreams doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Just exactly WHY do the 1919 Chicago White Sox, in perennial disgrace for their role in throwing that year’s World Series, emerge from an Iowa cornfield because a young farmer who misses the Sixties has constructed a baseball field on his back forty?  Why does this farmer idolize baseball, and long-ago White Sox batting champ Shoeless Shoe Jackson in particular, to the point that he’ll jeopardize his family’s economic future by taking direction from a mysterious voice? (And, come to think of it, why does his feisty wife put up with her husband’s fiscal craziness even though they might well find themselves homeless in future?)  

 But logic is not what Field of Dreams is all about. It’s about dreams, and in particular about the American male’s dream of a father/son bond symbolized by the idea of tossing around a baseball with your dad on a warm summer’s day. The give-and-take implicit in a simple game of catch seems to be craved by many men. At least, it is this element of the film’s climax that apparently turned many male moviegoers into emotional puddles when Field of Dreams screened in cineplexes across America in 1989. The movie attracted critics as well as audiences. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay; in 2017 it was welcomed onto the National Film Registry.

 Before I rewatched Field of Dreams this past week, I of course remembered primarily Kevin Costner as the dreamy farmer with father issues and a great abiding love for America’s game. And I fleetingly remembered Amy Madigan as Costner’s supportive wife as well as Ray Liotta (always a distinctive actor) as the shadowy incarnation of Shoeless Joe. I did not recall Burt Lancaster in a small but key role as Archie “Moonlight” Graham, an actual long-ago outfielder who played only a single game in the major leagues before attending medical school and embarking on a long, distinguished stint as a smalltown doctor. Lancaster’s role, the last of his stellar career, allows him to hint that there are other kinds of glory than those found on a baseball diamond.

 I also didn’t remember that Field of Dreams contains a major supporting role for James Earl Jones, the legendary actor with the basso profundo voice who left us just a few weeks ago at the age of 93. Jones played Terence Mann, a successful novelist who found fame in the Sixties, but now contends with small-minded readers who seek to ban his books. In the course of the film, Mann’s character is discovered to have a secret passion for baseball. Eventually he delivers a long, wonderful speech about baseball and its connection with America past and present. In the up-and-down history of our nation, says he, “the one constant through all the years has been baseball.”  It is baseball that signifies “all that once was good, and could be again.”

 The extras that accompany the DVD of Field of Dreams contain many clips of the film’s actors, producers, and writer/director Phil Alden Robinson. Almost all of them talk about their personal passion for baseball, and share memories of ballgames played with their dads. Jones is the exception: he never played catch with his absentee father. Still, he considered baseball a key part of his DNA, and his joyous performance here proves it. 

 

When You’re Strange: “The Lost Boys”

I recently spent five days in Santa Cruz, California, visiting members of my extended family. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the classic boardwalk and the nearby redwoods, I didn’t spot a single vampire. And now I’m just a wee bit disappointed. Perhaps I should explain: last night I watched a cult classic shot largely in Santa Cruz, though in the film the town goes by the name of Santa Carla. The Lost Boys, directed by Joel Schumacher in 1987, is a horror film of a rather whimsical sort. It posits that each evening the venerable beachside fun zone is overrun with scruffy young biker types who sleep all day, hanging upside down from the ceiling of a convenient seaside cave, and choose to drink something that looks an awful lot like blood.

 Schumacher’s contribution to vampire lore is a fascinating one. I believe he and his writers fudged, just a bit, the classic rules of vampire evolution: I haven’t run into other vampire stories in which you can remain in a half-vampire state until your first kill, with the possibility that you can return straightaway to being fully human if the head of the pack is somehow bumped off. This is part of the optimistic streak that makes The Lost Boys actually endearing. The project began with a smart writer cogitating on the gang of “lost boys” surrounding J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Living in the wild without conventional families, these youngsters formed themselves into a tribe that was ready for anything. And they proved to be desperate to find themselves a mother.

 All of this subtly finds its way into a contemporary story that takes advantage of Santa Cruz’s reputation for a laid-back post-Sixties vibe. Set against the creepy biker guys, led by a spiky-haired young Kiefer Sutherland, is a wholesome family group. Mom Dianne Wiest, trying to recover from a painful divorce, has brought her two sons to live with their curmudgeonly grandfather (Barnard Hughes, who has one of the film’s funniest lines). Hunky Michael (Jason Patric) is clearly restless, looking for a way out of the tight-knit family unit. When a gorgeous young hippie-type in a filmy outfit (Jamie Gertz) wafts by on the boardwalk, he’s a goner. Younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) loves his brother and his dog, and just wants to live out the summer at Grandpa’s in a comfortable way. He doesn’t know what he’s in for when two intense young comic-book mavens named Edgar and Alan Frog (the indispensable Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) decide to educate him about vampire lore. Suddenly, when he sees his big brother start to wear dark glasses indoors, Sam realizes there’s a problem afoot. Set against all of this is Wiest’s amiable Lucy, trying to keep her family in line while pursuing an oft-thwarted romance with a buttoned-down boardwalk shopkeeper played by Edward Herrmann.

 Schumacher himself has credited the film’s long-term success to the casting of brilliant young actors who were just starting their careers. Though Kiefer Sutherland had already shot Stand by Me, it had not yet been released when he went before the cameras in The Lost Boys. Jason Patric had previously made only one film, something called Solarbabies, before The Lost Boys turned him into a heartthrob. Teenagers Corey Haim and Corey Feldman became household names because of this movie, as well as best friends. They later appeared together several times on screen; an A&E reality series titled The Two Coreys (2007-2008) sadly chronicles how their lives went downhill over the years. (Haim died at age 38.) Fame, it seems, is even more dangerous than vampires.

 

 

 

Gena Rowlands Under the Influence

The death of Gena Rowlands last month, at age 94, gave me pause. I had always admired her devotion to her husband, the actor and writer/director John Cassavetes. Married from 1954 until his death in 1989, she was an important part of his work as an indie auteur. Together they collaborated on ten films, two of which (1974’s A Woman Under the Influence and 1980’s Gloria) brought her Oscar nominations for Best Actress. They also raised three children, all of whom now have acting and directing careers of their own. In 2004 she was featured in the popular weepie, The Notebook, as the older version of Rachel McAdams’ character, under the direction of son Nick Cassavetes. But she also performed admirably in the films of others, like Woody Allen’s somber Another Woman and Lasse Hallström’s comedic Something to Talk About. In 2007 her voice elevated the role of the wise Iranian grandmother in the English-language version of Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous animated Persepolis.

 It was heartbreaking to learn that Rowlands lived with Alzheimer’s disease for five years before she died. This news reinforced my vivid memories of Rowlands coping with another mental disorder in A Woman under the Influence. At first it’s not clear that there’s anything wrong with Mabel Longhetti, other than stone-cold fury against her husband Nick (Cassavetes regular Peter Falk). She seems entitled to be aggravated: though a loyal husband and father, Nick  appears (like so many men) to be devoted above all to his work and his work buddies. The well-liked boss of a construction crew, he perhaps can’t help it when the city demands he and his guys labor all night to solve an emergency leak problem, thus forcing him to cancel on a long-planned “date night” with his pretty wife. Still, it’s particularly oblivious of him to show up the next day with his entire crew, expecting that Mabel will host an impromptu lunch party.

 The anger that’s inside Mabel can show up in some surprising ways. When Nick is gone on that overnight emergency, she heads for a local bar, drinks much too much, and picks up a willing stranger. Then, after Nick arrives home with his work gang, she goes overboard as a charming hostess, obsessively flattering and flirting with the guys. But it’s at a children’s backyard party that she seems to come totally unglued, leading to a manic insistence that all the kids exercise their creativity by shedding clothes and manners. This precipitates a chaotic homecoming by Nick, who slaps her, gets into a physical altercation with another parent, and eventually summons a doctor with a large syringe.

 We never see Mabel’s hospitalization, but stick with Nick trying to hold the family (including his own judgmental mother) in check. The film’s final act involves Mabel’s shaky return home, after Nick is finally dissuaded from throwing her a large surprise party. As some critics griped at the time, the movie is long (2 ½ hours) and ultimately bleak. But it takes advantage of Cassavetes’ penchant for keeping the camera locked in place. This makes for extended takes that give us an unflinching view of Mabel’s disintegration, as witnessed by those around her. She’s a woman whose talent for role-playing masks the fact that she doesn’t know who she is. It’s a bold, spontaneous-seeming performance.

 Cassavetes and Rowlands largely financed and distributed this film themselves, shooting on the cheap with faculty and students from the new American Film Institute. That’s why I was gratified to see the names of several of my eventual Roger Corman pals in the crew credits. (Hi, Mike Ferris!) 

  

Spending a Good Evening at Black Rock

Bad Day at Black Rock is by no means a small movie. This 1955 MGM western, shot in color and Cinemascope, features three past Academy Award winners: Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger, and star Spencer Tracy. Also prominent in the film are Oscar nominee Robert Ryan and two rising talents who would win future Oscars, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. Director John Sturges, a former editor, would go on from Bad Day at Black Rock to helm The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. The film’s wide-screen cinematography beautifully emphasizes the wide open spaces of the Lone Pine locales, and the mood is enhanced by André Previn’s haunting score.

  So this is hardly a modest indie. And yet it contains many of the elements I’ve learned to admire in B-movies. For one thing, it’s short and tight, coming in at a mere 81 minutes. Locations are limited; dialogue is clipped and to the point; tension is strong; bursts of action are prized. A mystery bubbles beneath the surface. There’s also, along with moments of dark humor, a subtle strand of meaningful social commentary. (I’m certain my former boss, Roger Corman, deeply admired this film, which captures many of his own aesthetic and social values.)

 Set in the California outback, circa 1945, the film begins with a passenger train arriving unexpectedly at a rural outpost. It disgorges a stocky man in a black suit and fedora, carrying a briefcase. The lounging locals are suspicious, especially when they notice the new arrival has only one arm. As played by Spencer Tracy, he is taciturn and unflappable, even when faced with a decided lack of hospitality. He’s hard-pressed to get a room at the one hotel, even though it clearly lacks for paying guests. When he introduces himself as John J. Macreedy of Los Angeles, and explains that he’s looking for a homesteader named Komoko, everyone becomes icier still. The cowpokes and ranchers hanging around the hotel lobby all seem to be sharing a secret. Down the town’s one main street, the sheriff (Jagger) appears to be drinking himself into oblivion. The veterinarian/undertaker (Brennan) lets slip that Komoko is no more.

 Managing with some difficulty to rent a Jeep, Macreedy heads over the hills toward the burnt-out mess that was once Komoko’s homestead. But the town’s unofficial boss, Reno Smith (Ryan) is not about to leave this intruder to his own devices. He sends the sadistic Coley Trimble (Borgnine) in pursuit, leading to a taut action sequence.

 It would be unfair of me to spell out precisely what happens next. Suffice it to say that eventually we learn what happened to Macreedy’s arm, why he’s so eager to find Komoko, and who among the townfolk eventually come to his aid. I’ll say also that this is covertly a story about the effects of racism and xenophobia, in the wake of World War II. And that, after all the anger and mistrust, the film ends in a moment of modest but genuine hope for a better future.

 The year 1955 was a great one for American dramas, many drawn from the Broadway stage, including Mr. Roberts, Picnic, and The Rose Tattoo. Two of James Dean’s three starring films, Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, were also released. Ironically, Borgnine’s supporting turn in Black Rock was eclipsed by his Oscar-winning good-guy role in Marty, which was also named Best Picture. Though Black Rock was nominated for its script, its direction, and Tracy’s performance, it went home empty-handed. Still, it will live on, in my memory banks and (since 2018) on the National Film Registry.