Uncovering “The Shape of Things”

Playwright and film director Neil LaBute is surely not typical of the graduates at Brigham Young University. I know, and like, a number of BYU grads. (We worked together at Osaka’s Expo 70, many moons ago.) The former Mormon missionaries with whom I hung out tended to be trustworthy, smart, and often a lot of fun. But their political and social views were on the conservative side, in keeping with the moral tenets of the church that shaped their lives.

 LaBute, who studied theatre at BYU circa 1980, is something of a different story. His plays, which he has also translated to film, lack the basic optimism that I connect with the Church of Latter Day Saints. La Bute’s style is to zero in on the worst of human behavior and follow where it leads. His first big success, which I saw and admired years ago, was In the Company of Men, a play that became an indie film and picked up several prestigious critics’ awards, It’s a cold-eyed look at misogyny in the workplace, with two corporate types joining forces to bedevil a hapless female co-worker, with grim results. (To my surprise, I’ve just learned that this corrosive work debuted at BYU in 1992, and subsequently won an award from the Association for Mormon Letters. So perhaps not all Mormons are as optimistic about mankind as my former co-workers.) 

 The film I saw last night, 2003’s The Shape of Things, also started out as a LaBute play. It debuted in London with a cast made up of Rachel Weisz, Paul Rudd, Gretchen Mol, and Fred Weller. All four also appear in the film version, which is set on and around a picturesque American  college campus, played by the California State University branch in ocean-adjacent Camarillo, CA. Though on-screen other students and faculty members come and go, only the four main actors have speaking roles: there’s no question that this is essentially a filmed play, one in which the focus is narrow and talk is all-important.

 At first it’s easy for the viewer to get restless while watching a series of mostly two-person dialogue scenes. But the mating-dance aspect of the script is intriguing, and the characters are so wildly assorted that we’re curious to see what comes next. The story’s Queen Bee, played by the always fascinating Weisz, is am art student working on a mysterious graduate thesis project. Convinced that art trumps everything (including morality), she is adamant in her choices, one of them being to bed a nebbishy young man who works—after a fashion—as a guard at the campus art museum. As played by an initially unrecognizable Paul Rudd, he’s all too willing to be molded by this beautiful and outrageous young woman, who helps him find the self-confidence he has lacked. The main cast is completed by Fred Weller, as Rudd’s domineering best friend, and his apparently meek fiancée, the perky blonde Gretchen Moll. There’s a powerful twist ending that I wouldn’t dream of divulging, but suffice it to say that there’s not a lot of happily ever after.

 LaBute, who shares with David Mamet a facility for language as well as a basic pessimism about human nature, makes vivid the cruelty of the characters toward one another. This particular piece of work also has fun satirizing the art world. LaBute takes on both the prudes of the past (a giant plaster fig-leaf covering the genitalia of an art museum statue is key to the story’s beginning) and the hip art-for-art’s-sake convictions of the present. If you like witty misanthropy, this one’s for you. 

 

“The Great Escape” -- Not Exactly Escapist

 It used to be that all I knew about The Great Escape was Steve McQueen on a motorcycle. I figured this 1963 film was basically a precursor to 1968’s Bullitt (except that it’s set in a war zone instead of in the hills of San Francisco). In other words, I assumed it was intended to be an exercise in rugged machismo, definitely tailored to the males of the species. And so, in a way, it is. I don’t believe there’s a single female in the movie who has so much as a line of dialogue. It’s a men-without-women story all the way.

 But The Great Escape is a great deal more complex, more historically-based, and more emotionally charged than Bullitt. Most of the nearly-three-hour running time is spent in a World War II prison camp designed by the Nazis to make escape impossible. It’s not, as prison camps go, a terrible place to be. But a large contingent of military prisoners (mostly British and American) are quite willing to risk their lives to plan and carry out a mass escape through  cleverly crafted underground tunnels they’ve managed to dig by hand. Part of what makes the film important is that the escape really happened, though in fact many nationalities were involved, and Americans had only a small role in the break-out plans. As in real life, the moments of triumph in the film go hand in hand with tragedy. Yes, there’s a great escape, but—as in the actual historical episode—the upshot is not a good outcome for many who are deeply involved.

 Part of what makes the film fascinating is the way it shows how individuals of various stripes can come together to pursue a common goal. The prisoners hail from a variety of backgrounds, and can boast a variety of useful skills. The McQueen character—the ruggedest individual of the bunch—was in civilian life a student of structural engineering. At first determined to go on the lam solely on his own, he becomes an important cog in the bigger plan. Others have vastly different skills. Richard Attenborough plays a natural leader with foreign language abilities; James Garner is an expert scrounger; James Coburn is featured as an Aussie who is terrific at inventing useful contraptions. Some experienced tailors in the group craft civilian clothing for the guys to wear on the outside; some prisoners with forgery skills turn out counterfeit travel documents that look like the real thing. Of course there are individual crises as the escape plans are finalized. Charles Bronson, using an Eastern European accent like the one he grew up with, plays a former miner, an expert tunnel-digger who happens to be severely claustrophobic. Another of the would-be escapees can’t deny that he is going blind. The film follows many of these men as they taste freedom for the first time in many months. What’s particularly moving is that several of the men put themselves in mortal danger by volunteering to buddy up with more vulnerable prisoners who’ll never survive on their own.

 Making all of this activity coherent is one of Hollywood’s greatest action directors, John Sturges. Starting as an editor, Sturges moved into the director’s chair, always showing a special talent for portraying groups of men in action settings. Prior to The Great Escape, he helmed Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), and The Magnificent Seven (1960). Lots of his films feature tough guys and the serious jeopardy they face, but he liked to end with a modest but genuine sense of triumph.

 

 

 

Mary and the Bear

It was the long, dark days of the pandemic that introduced me to the pleasures of watching television. Desperate for entertainment, I turned to cable-tv for long-running recent series I’d missed, like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, but also for sitcoms that took me back to my early years.

 After giving some love to I Love Lucy, I settled on the pleasures of The Mary Tyler Moore show, which ruled the airwaves from 1970 until 1977. The show may look dated today, with its multi-camera style and laugh-happy studio audience. But back in the 1970s it was known for tackling social issues that were very much in the air. Its star, as Mary Richards, was an unmarried career gal who had the occasional romance but was much more involved with her job as the producer of a local Minneapolis TV news show. In the early seasons, she had colorful interactions with her landlady (Cloris Leachman) and her best buddy (Valerie Harper). But most episodes featured her interactions with the newsroom gang, the curmudgeonly Lou Grant (Edward  Asner), the acerbic Murray Slaughter (Gavin McLeod), and the irresistibly pompous newscaster Ted Baxter (Ted Knight). The cherry on top in later years was the frequent presence of Betty White as a man-hungry TV personality known as the Happy Homemaker.

 Though the series was played for laughs, at times it  ventured boldly onto serious topics, like infidelity, divorce, erectile dysfunction, and even death. (The “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode is a comedy classic, in which Mary struggles to avoid laughing at a death that occurs under bizarre circumstances..) 

 Network television seasons were long back then: 24 episodes of this show aired per year. There was occasional follow-through: in season 4, Lou’s wife walks out on him to find herself. Several seasons later, she’s remarrying, and Lou and Mary reluctantly attend the nuptials. But basically the episodes are self-contained: the contents of one show generally do not carry over to the next. This ends up being particularly weird at the end of the next-to-last season, when Ted and new wife Georgette, despairing of having a baby, adopt a polite seven-year-old boy who charms everyone in the news room. The kicker is that Georgette then discovers that, against all odds, she’s pregnant. When the show resumes the following season, Georgette is in the throes of giving birth during a party at Mary’s apartment. But that cute little adoptee is never mentioned. Did he run away? Did they return him to the agency?

 All this comes to mind because we’ve just finished watching the first season of Hulu’s The Bear. Like The Mary Tyler Moore Show it’s an Emmy winner in the field of comedy, though it lacks anything you might call a joke. Inside of being performed in front of a live audience, this story about the running of a Chicago neighborhood restaurant is shot in cinéma vérité style, with the overlapping dialogue coming thick and fast, and home audience struggling to understand everything that’s said. (The show also consistently relies on expletives that Mary Richards has doubtless never used, or even heard.)

 If The Mary Tyler Moore Show occasionally edges into darker territory, The Bear lives there fulltime. Its characters cope with the aftermath of addiction and a brother’s suicide, and shady hangers-on are always lurking around. Funny? I’m not so sure. (Neither are the Emmy voters who chose a different winner in this category for The Bear’s second season.) But the ongoing story—which doesn’t fully come together until the last episode of season 1--is fascinating, and well worth watching. 

                     

Katharine Hepburn is (and is not) Sylvia Scarlett

I just finished watching an early cinematic romp starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Bringing Up Baby? Nope. The Philadelphia Story? Still nope.  While reading an advance copy of Joseph McBride’s fascinating George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director, I became curious about a vintage film I had only barely heard of. Its name: Sylvia Scarlett. This 1935 flop was Cukor and Hepburn’s quixotic attempt to circumvent the Hollywood standards of the day. It’s the story of a young woman trying to protect her petty-criminal father by disguising herself as a young male as the two go on the lam, Hepburn’s transformation from female to male and back again was not taken well by the audiences of the day, nor by Hepburn’s studio, RKO, which demanded an inept explanatory prologue in which she appears in long braids and speaks in a meek girlish voice.

 The questions about gender and sexuality just beneath the film’s surface have belatedly made Sylvia Scarlett a favorite of feminists and some branches of the gay community. Personally, I consider it something of a mess, though a fascinating one. Various aspects of the plot are inconsistent, or just don’t make sense. Hepburn, though, is a marvel to watch. After that silly prologue, Hepburn in cropped hair and boys’ clothing is wonderfully convincing. The film makes full use of her natural athleticism (we see her jump over fences and climb through windows, and there’s a key instance when she plunges into a turbulent ocean to save someone from drowning). There are also those magical moments when she seems trapped by her disguise, trembling on the brink of declaring that she/he is in love. But when she decides to give in to her undeniable female self, dressing in a filmy frock and picture hat, we don’t believe her at all. Though Hepburn as pretty ingenue seems to enthrall the eligible men around her, it strikes the audience as a grotesque betrayal of her genuine personality.

 It was especially this film that caused Hollywood to label Hepburn “box office poison.” When she regained popularity, it was through roles that allowed her to be spirited and spunky, but also much more conventionally female, and ultimately content to accept a bit of male domination.  See, of course, her later outings with the hyper-male Spencer Tracy, and also her role opposite Cary Grant in Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, wherein machismo ultimately wins the day. But the Sylvia Scarlett project hints that Hepburn, like the not-so-closeted Cukor, was shaped by a form of sexuality that was out of the ordinary, what we might call a complex mixture of yin and yang.

 The DVD version I watched, part of the Warner Brothers archive collection, has as an extra a short vintage travelogue that should delight every Angeleno. Advertised as A FitzPatrick Travel Talk, this Technicolor short is titled “Los Angeles, Wonder City of the West.” The L.A. about which the narrator enthuses (consistently calling my hometown “Las Angle-Us”) was then the country’s fifth largest city, boasting a population of 2 ¼ million souls. The travelogue begins with the lovely “Spanish” senoritas of Olvera Street, then coasts down “modern” thoroughfares, waxing lyrical about wacky features like the long-gone Brown Derby. Of course there’s a visit to several movie studios, complete with a sighting of Walt Disney himself, bouncing out of his modest headquarters to smile amiably for the camera, as “Whistle While You Work” plays on the soundtrack. We end up at the Hollywood Bowl, as some cuties and muscle-men rehearse a “cultural” dance performance that looks like pure kitsch. Those were the days!   

 

Baseball in Durham is No Bull

Last Wednesday, while my L.A. Dodgers were thrashing the San Diego Padres, trying to inch toward a major league title (fingers crossed!),  I decided to rewatch my all-time favorite baseball movie, 1988’s Bull Durham. To my surprise, it was released the year before Kevin Costner starred as a dreamy Iowa farmer who wills a vintage baseball team into being as a way of reconciling with his dead father in Field of Dreams. The Costner of Field of Dreams was young, fresh-faced, idealistic, and basically innocent. In Bull Durham, though, he seems perhaps a decade older, much smarter and more cynical, someone who has tried and failed to fulfill his early promise.

 Part of Bull Durham’s success comes from the fact that it was written and directed by someone who really knows the sport, knows what happens on the field—and off. Ron Shelton, a former minor league infielder, brings to the film a gritty understanding of how baseball is played, and what games are played in the shadow of America’s National Pastime. This was his first film as a director, and it has led him to score with other sports-related projects, like White Men Can’t Jump (1992, about the world of playground basketball hustlers), and Tin Cup (1996, about professional golf,  once again starring Costner). Wikipedia notes that “in 2022, Shelton's book The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit was published by Vintage Books. It sounds worth reading.

 Although Bull Durham deals with the exploits of a minor-league baseball club, the Durham (North Carolina) Bulls, it is less about a team and more about three individuals who are very much in the team’s orbit. The film’s opening line belongs to Susan Sarandon, who as Annie Savoy starts us out, in voiceover, with her philosophy of life. It begins with “I believe in the church of baseball,” then goes on to philosophize about the game as a sort of earthy substitute for formal religion. The provocative Annie, who during the year teaches literature, dedicates her summers to education of a different sort. Settling on a young, attractive player, she enjoys hot sex while also building his confidence and throwing in some lessons in basic baseball skills. For this particular summer, she chooses the naïve but mega-talented Ebby Calvin Latoosh (Tim Robbins), a pitcher who is as of yet too erratic and too cocky for stardom.

 The third member of this very dynamic triangle is “Crash” Davis (Costner), a worldly-wise catcher who once spent 21 days in the major leagues, doing nothing very spectacular before being sent back down to the minors. With his playing days numbered, he’s been added to the Durham roster to keep Latoosh under control and try to clue him in to the secrets of big league success. Smart but prickly (even though he’s a romantic at heart), Crash captures Annie’s interest when he strongly rejects the idea of auditioning for a role in her menage. Naturally, the sense that he’s his own man, and not one of the adoring “boys” who surround her, piques her curiosity.

 In a sense this is a film about the clash of innocence and experience, as well as about the push-and-pull between talent and wisdom. At the film’s end, Latoosh is headed for the majors (having learned a few life lessons along the way) but who’s to say that Crash won’t be happier in the long run? The irony is that in real life Sarandon and the much younger Robbins ended up together for more than two decades.

 

 

Maggie Smith and Kris Kristofferson: The Lady and the Tramp

Alas, in the past week or so, we’ve lost several of my screen favorites. Dame Maggie Smith (who died September 27 at age 89) can fairly be considered movie royalty. I can’t pretend to have seen all her stage and screen work, but –starting in the late 1950s—she excelled at both comedy and drama, in both new works and well-aged classics. Circa 1970, I was lucky to catch her touring in an arch 18^th century comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem, opposite her then-husband, Robert Stephens, when it touched down at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre. But my first encounter with her talents came earlier, when she played an intelligent and sensitive Desdemona in a film version of Shakespeare’s Othello, with none other than Sir Laurence Olivier in the title role. (His blackface performance of the tragic moor was a dramatic tour de force, though today we’d naturally be uneasy seeing a white actor pretend to be a person of color.)

 Her Desdemona earned Maggie Smith her first Oscar nomination. In all she was nominated six times, winning the golden statuette for her fierce dramatic role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and for her supporting part in a Neil Simon comedy, California Suite (1978). Her two final supporting actress noms were for “corset” roles in A Room with a View (1985, as a prim chaperone) and Gosford Park (2001, as an ageing aristocrat). A whole new generation fell in love with her as the tart-tongued Violet Crawley in a period drama made for television, Downton Abbey (2010-2015). Playing an aristocrat raised in an earlier age, she was totally oblivious of more modern conventions, like weekends, and we adored her for that. But kids also fell under her spell when she played to perfection the sensible (though magical) Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films.

 Maggie Smith did not always play aristocrats and intellectuals. She was capable, as well, of portraying women of the lower classes. In 2011’s charming The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, she is a retired housekeeper worried about finances, one who only slowly adapts to the charms of India. As the title character in Alan Bennett’s semi-autobiographical The Lady in the Van, she’s an eccentric who makes her home for 15 years in Bennett’s driveway, dominating his daily life in ways both aggravating and fascinating. But whatever the roots of the characters Smith played, she always displayed a certain dignity, what you might call a ladylike manner. Yes, there was something proper and British about her, no matter the role.

 By contrast, Kris Kristofferson (who passed away on September 28 at age 88) was as American as April in Arizona. This despite the fact that his upbringing was highly out of the ordinary. An army brat, he was born in Texas, was an honor student (as well as a rugby star) at California’s Pomona College, and traveled to England as a Rhodes Scholar to study literature at Oxford.  Following a stint as a military officer, he angered his family by choosing to  move to Nashville, in search of success as a writer of country music. Eventually such songs as “Me and Bobby McGee” made him successful, and his rugged good looks helped him move into acting, in major films that cast him as outcasts, drifters, and close-to-the-earth types. (See, for instance, Martin Scorsese’s 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and John Sayles’ 1996 Texas border saga, Lone Star). His schmaltziest role was as Barbra Streisand’s rock-‘n’-roller husband in the 1976 iteration of A Star is Born.    

 Both will be sorely missed. 

 

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.