Why It Happened One Night (at the Biltmore Hotel in 1935)

It’s rare that a comedy wins the Oscar for Best Picture. You wouldn’t think a slight romantic farce about a runaway heiress and a down-and-out newspaperman would stand a chance. Oscars usually go to intensely dramatic films, especially those linked to major historical events like the Civil War (see Gone With the Wind), World War II (see Patton, The Bridge on the River Kwai, From Here to Eternity), and Vietnam (The Deer Hunter, Platoon). Social problem movies like Gentleman’s Agreement and 12 Years a Slave also make for Oscar bait.

 But in 1935 the five top Oscar categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay) were filled by a quickly-made little picture called It Happened One Night. It wasn’t expected to be a hit. Robert Riskin’s script was turned down by many stars. Claudette Colbert, no fan of director Frank Capra, demanded that she receive twice her usual salary (that is to say $50,000) to play Ellie Andrews, and that shooting be finished in four weeks so she could go on a planned vacation. Male lead Clark Gable also had his doubts about the project. Fortunately, the film was a simple one to shoot (entirely on the Columbia lot and in the L.A. area), and interaction between Colbert and Gable turned out to be comedy gold.

 To understand the accolades for It Happened One Night, it helps to look back on the Oscar ceremony for 1935, only the seventh time that the golden statuettes were presented to Hollywood’s finest. The stars and the moguls gathered in the ballroom of L.A.’s Biltmore Hotel to fête the winners. No fewer than 13 nominees vied for best picture. I’ll name a few: Flirtation Walk (starring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in a romantic film about West Point cadets),The Gay Divorcee (an Astaire/Rogers musical), The Thin Man (first in a long series of comic  mysteries), Viva Villa1 (a much-fictionalized biography of the Mexican revolutionary starring Wallace Beery). The ultra-serious prestige picture as top vote-getter was something Hollywood had clearly not yet discovered.

 Frank Capra competed with only two other directors: Victor Schertzinger for One Night of Love and W.S. Van Dyke for The Thin Man. Clark Gable, who beautifully played a raffish reporter in It Happened One Night (and changed men’s sartorial habits overnight when he took off his shirt and revealed a bare chest), vied only with the always amusing William Powell (The Thin Man) and Frank Morgan, playing an Italian duke in The Affairs of Cellini. Colbert, as the headstrong heiress, had more competition: opera star Grace Moore for One Night of Love and Norma Shearer, playing the frail Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, along with a popular write-in candidate, Bette Davis as a slatternly waitress in Of Human Bondage. Colbert, who disliked her own film, was so sure she would lose that when the winner was announced she was boarding a train for a cross-country trip. Studio chief Harry Cohn immediately dispatched an underling to drag her off her train so she could appear at the ceremony. Though Colbert was quite cranky about the whole production experience, she’s delightful as the petulant Ellie—and it’s worth noting that she starred in three other films that same year, including two additional Best Picture nominees, the epic Cleopatra and the socially-conscious Imitation of Life. So maybe she really did need a vacation.

  Why the film’s popularity? It’s fun, it’s fresh, and it comically addresses the  inequities of the Depression era, with the common folk coming out on top. What’s not to love?

 

“Kwaidan”: Just My Cup of Tea for Halloween

My passion for things Japanese began early, with my mother’s enthusiasm for the exotic and a high school friendship that continues to this day. When I was accepted for a year’s study in Tokyo, courtesy of the University of California’s Education Abroad Program, an uncle with literary tastes gave me a volume of the writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn was a total original: born in Greece, raised in Ireland, he came to the U.S. as a journalist and spent formative years in New Orleans, happily collecting weird tales and basking in the influence of one of his own favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. In 1890 he sailed to Japan and never left, taking a Japanese name and a Japanese wife. Collecting ancient Japanese folk tales full of spectral beings and evil spirits, he carefully rendered them in English and sent them out into the world. In 1964, Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi returned the favor, assembling four Hearn tales into a film he named after one of Hearn’s anthologies, Kwaidan (implying ghost stories).

 Kobayashi, a specialist in jidaigeki (period drama) featuring samurai and epic battle scenes, was hailed by critics and audiences worldwide. Kwaidan won him a Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film. His achievement was to add to Hearn’s bizarre stories a gorgeously stylized visual element, a spine-tingling score by Toru Takemitsu, and (particularly in the third tale) a narrative voice that captures the portentous formality of classical Japanese theatre.

My favorite of the stories may be the very first, “The Black Hair.” It involves a classic folktale situation: a man who abandons his sweet, loyal wife to make a more prosperous marriage elsewhere. While the spurned wife remains behind in their isolated home, he ventures into the world and soon weds a wealthy heiress who turns out to be selfish and cold. Once several years have passed, he realizes that, despite his new affluence, he sorely misses his gentle first wife. That’s when he returns home, to be joyfully greeted by wife #1, who refuses to rebuke him in any way. They spend a tender night together . . . but there’s a dark surprise awaiting him in the morning.

 There are also eerie visual delights in “The Woman of the Snow,” in which a bone-chilling blizzard plays a key role. The strong Japanese connection with the natural world plays out in all the tales, even though we’re keenly aware of the artifice involved in the filming process. “Hoichi the Earless” is perhaps the strangest story of all; Kobayashi chooses to precede this tale of a blind monk who’s a musical master on the biwa by dramatizing the historic sea battle of the Genji and Heike clans in almost Kabuki fashion: I’ll long remember the noble ladies of the defeated side ending their lives by plunging into the sea, their heavy garments billowing around them.

 The final segment, “In a Cup of Tea,” evolved from a fragment Hearn found embedded in another story. It begins with an author of the Meiji Period (basically 19^th century) writing about a an attendant to a local lord in some earlier era. When the attendant pours himself some tea, he sees in the liquid the face of an unknown man. Ultimately he drinks the tea—and all hell breaks loose. The story, which contains a fierce battle between the attendant and some mysterious assailants representing the teacup-man, ends abruptly. The author doesn’t know how to finish it.  But Kobayashi does, and the film ends with one final, very creepy, frisson. 

 

The Dating-Game Killer: “Woman of the Hour”

Sometimes I just don’t get it. I watch a clunky made-for-TV movie on Netflix, then discover that critics have liked it (it was rated 91% “fresh” on aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes), and audiences do too. Maybe the point is that everyone thinks Anna Kendrick is awfully cute. And I agree. I was won over by her headstrong career gal role in 2009’s Up in the Air, for which she nabbed a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. I liked her roles in other films too, and was impressed by her vocal work as Cinderella in the screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods (2014). More recently she brought her girl-next-door charm to a mystery-thriller, A Simple Favor

She’s done well for herself in Hollywood. Which is why I guess she wanted to take the next step and simultaneously become both a star and a director.  

The project she chose was Woman of the Hour, a real-life crime story distributed by Netflix in 2023. The poster for the movie certainly makes its point: it features Kendrick in a pretty 1970s- era floral frock, demurely seated on a big comfy swivel chair. Behind her looms a shadowy male figure. We can’t see his face, but he’s clearly up to no good.  Kendrick stars as Sheryl, a pert graduate of a New York drama school, who’s having a hard time making it in Hollywood. Early on we see her flunk an audition, partly because she refuses to do nudity. Her agent, whose logic doesn’t make much sense to me, persuades her that an appearance on a popular TV show of the era, The Dating Game, may move her career forward.

 The show’s premise is that Sheryl must choose one of three unseen young men to accompany her on a romantic weekend. Ignoring the suggestions of the smarmy host, she asks questions that are smart and sassy. Bachelor #1 is basically tongue-tied. Bachelor #2 is trying so hard to be sexy that he comes off as obnoxious. Bachelor #3’s responses are clever, but also show a sensitivity to female needs. Unfortunately, no one has figured out that he’s Rodney Alcala, a serial killer who lures his victims with sweet talk, then rapes and murders them. (When a young woman in the studio audience recognizes him as the slayer of her best friend, no one takes her seriously.)

 Because this is a true story, Kendrick and company feel the need to stick to the basic facts. And an important fact is that Sheryl has absolutely nothing to do with the story’s outcome. In the course of a post-taping drink with her chosen bachelor, she becomes uneasy, hands him a fake phone number, and leaves the film. When he’s later apprehended it’s because a gutsy teenage runaway he’s raped in the desert finds a way to escape his clutches and call the cops.

 As a longtime teacher of screenwriting, I know the importance of understanding your project. If Kendrick’s Sheryl is the leading character, we’d like to see her somehow trip up the bad guy. If the end of the story belongs to Autumn Best’s plucky teen, shouldn’t she get more screentime? And what about Daniel Zovatto’s scary Rodney? We know from the start that he’s guilty—shouldn’t we have a better sense of what makes him tick?

 The idea of a serial killer as a contestant on a dating show certainly has potential. Kendrick’s film looks good, and has its colorful moments. But if we’re supposed to care about a movie’s outcome, it’s urgent that we understand whom we’re dealing with, and why. 

 

 

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!