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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.