The Unexpected Mrs. Nixon, Superstar

Hollywood has always had a soft spot for movies about presidents. Both satiric comedies and heartfelt dramas have featured an American president in a leading role. There’s even a musical—an adaptation of the stage hit 1776—that features the song stylings of future U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

 Of all the American. presidents, it is Abraham Lincoln who has earned the most screen time. He’s been portrayed by Walter Huston in 1930; by Henry Fonda (as Young Mr. Lincoln) in 1939; by Raymond Massey in 1940’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois; and by an Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis in 2012’s Steven Spielberg Civil War-era epic, simply called Lincoln. This is not to mention a more eccentric 2012 flick, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

 Among 20^th century American presidents, the inspirational story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt contending with polio gave rise to 1960’s Sunrise at Campobello. Oliver Stone’s  JFK (1991) is less about John F. Kennedy than about the nagging questions behind his assassination. The up-and-down career of Bill Clinton was pseudonymously handled in 1998’s Primary Colors, in which John Travolta portrays a Clinton-like presidential rogue.

 Then there’s Richard Nixon, whose checkered presidency has been scrutinized in everything from a biographical drama (1995’s Nixon, starring Anthony Hopkins) to an intimate fact-based post-resignation film (2008’s Frost/Nixon) to a wacky comedy, 1999’s Dick. In all of these settings, there’s a role for First Lady Pat Nixon, but she’s always a peripheral character.

 That remains true of most First Ladies. Moviemakers are not terribly interested in their stories, except as they intersect with their husbands’ moments of high drama. (The one big exception is Jacqueline Kennedy, whose post-White House life as the tragic young widow of JFK confirmed her movie star potential. Natalie Portman portrayed her in 2016’s Jackie, earning herself an Oscar nomination.)

 I don’t think anyone is about to make a movie with Patricia Ryan Nixon at its center. In her lifetime (1912-1993), Pat was known as the spouse of Dick Nixon, as an apparently prim and proper helpmeet good at smiling and waving. But my friend and colleague, Heath Hardage Lee, has recently published a biography that turns the spotlight on someone who preferred to remain in the background. Lee’s book, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady, was recently named to the longlist for Biographers International Organization’s prestigious 2025 Plutarch Award. This well-researched biography explores Pat Nixon’s many appealing qualities—her personal grit, her great skill as a goodwill ambassador roaming the world on the nation’s behalf, her strong commitment to preserving her country’s history and institutions. There’s also, eventually, some revelations about the way her husband’s shadier aides tried—in the second Nixon term—to curb her enthusiasm for the First Lady’s traditional mandate to further her spouse’s White House goals. To read about Pat’s efforts to enhance the role of women in American government and on its courts is to be impressed by a First Lady who was in some ways well ahead of her time.

 Heath Lee’s book, which contains the fruits of interviews with many Nixon aides, friends, and family members, portrays its subject as a woman well worth knowing, even by those who were not fans of her husband’s politics. One of many surprises: Pat and Dick had a cordial and long-lasting relationship with Jack and Jackie Kennedy, both before and after the brutal 1960 presidential race that set them against one another. What I learned in reading The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon is that it’s fascinating to read about the woman who willingly stood behind the famous man.

 

 

R.I.P. Val Kilmer (and Tombstone’s Doc Holliday)

Sometimes it seems that Val Kilmer made a specialty of portraying men who die young. At least, that’s the impression I got after watching his electrifying performances as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and as a tubercular Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1992). Still, Kilmer remained very much alive as the warrior Madmartigan in George Lucas and Ron Howard’s fantasy epic Willow (1988), in which he was upstaged by tiny Warwick Davis but also chanced to meet his real-life wife-to-be, Joanne Whalley. (They fell for one another on the set, and Howard obligingly re-shot their love scenes to take advantage of the budding romance. Fairytales do tend to come to an end, however. Though they wed in 1988 and had two children together, the couple divorced in 1996.)

 Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun (1986) was also a survivor, living long enough to show up in the film’s decades-later sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Still, when the sequel was shot in 2022, Kilmer’s voice was so affected by treatments for throat cancer that it had to be digitally altered to add clarity. Sadly, Top Gun: Maverick was Kilmer’s final performance. He died on April 1, 2025: at sixty-five he was by no means a youngster, but many of us had hoped for additional cinematic brilliance from him.   

 Tombstone, at its essence, is essentially the story of two gangs—a group of local Arizona lawmen (three of them brothers) versus a loosely organized cluster of cattle rustlers and horse thieves who called themselves the Cowboys. At the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, several men on both sides went down. The thirty-second shootout was followed up by later skirmishes, in which much blood was shed on both sides. Various versions of the story—which became widely known only after Earp’s death and a popular book about him—show up in a number of films, starting with 1939’s Frontier Marshal, which starred Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero. Then there was John Ford’s 1945 My Darling Clementine followed by the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which starred Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as his buddy, Doc Holliday.

 I suspect that Tombstone, directed by George P. Cosmatos, was intended to be the last word on the subject. Certainly, its cast is chockful of famous names.  It seems as though every red-blooded male in Hollywood wanted to take part in this semi-true tale of law-and-order on the American frontier. In addition to Kilmer and top-billed Kurt Russell (as reluctant lawman Wyatt Earp), the film features such established names as Powers Boothe, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Jason Priestley, Thomas Haden Church, and Billy Zane. Dana Delany of China Beach fame is the female lead in a movie that is predictably short on women’s roles. (Yes, she plays  a gal with a checkered sexual history.) Ageing Charlton Heston , not long before his 2002 retirement from acting, takes on a small but key part in the proceedings, and none other than Robert Mitchum serves as the film’s narrator.

 Though Tombstone pits lawmen against renegades, the story is such that it’s often hard to tell them apart. Earp and Holliday seem at times no less bloodthirsty than the Cowboys. This puts me in mind of the response, back in 1967, to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, decried then by many for its level of on-screen violence. As film scholar Robert Alan Kolker put it, “Penn showed the way: Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”   Now Bonnie and Clyde seems rather tame. Today, there will be blood.  

 

Feeling “A Real Pain” on Holocaust Remembrance Day

April 23, which falls just after the joyous Passover season, is the date of this year’s Yom HaShoah, also known Holocaust Remembrance Day. It commemorates, especially in Israel, the approximately six million Jews senselessly slaughtered by the Nazi regime before and during  World War II.  Among local U.S. commemorations, I’ve just read about one planned for the very Catholic Loyola-Marymount University. But I was particularly struck by the upcoming event at UCLA Hillel, which plans to feature the screening of Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-honored 2024 film, A Real Pain.

What makes this choice so interesting is the fact that A Real Pain is not your average Holocaust movie. It’s not set during or immediately after what’s known as the Shoah. No one is in hiding, and we see no atrocities. (See, by contrast, such fine international films as Schindler’s List;, Au revoir les enfants; Europa Europa; Life is Beautiful; The Pianist; and Ida.)  A Real Pain, set in the present day, focuses on two American cousins whose distant Holocaust connection is their recently deceased Grandma Dori. In her will, she left the two young men the money for a brief heritage trip to Poland, where they could visit her former home and soak up the culture that made her the lifeforce she was. (No, she was not herself a Holocaust survivor, but any trip to Poland cries out for an acknowledgment of what happened on its soil.) 

In the course of their brief trip, we get to know their small group of fellow travelers: a mature married couple, an anxious divorcee, a deeply spiritual convert to Judaism who is a survivor of genocide in his native Rwanda. But the focus is on the two cousins: the tense, deeply-focused David (played by Eisenberg) and the free-spirited Benjy (Kieran Culkin), who mails a stash of weed to their first hotel and insists that David share it with him on the off-limits hotel roof. Part of the pleasure of the early going is seeing Benjy interact with his tightly-wound cousin, charming the other travelers with his ready sense of fun. Benjy also shows himself to be sensitive to their personal anxieties, but his manic insistence—as a Jew in Poland—on refusing to accept comfy first-class train accommodations leads to a worrisome outcome for all concerned. Gradually Benjy’s deeply troubled psyche comes into focus, along with David’s personal difficulty in accepting his cousin’s underlying sadness.

That’s when the little group pays a visit to the Nazi concentration camp known as Majdanek. (The film was shot almost entirely in Poland, with the full cooperation of the Polish government, which eventually made Eisenberg—a descendant of Polish Jews—an honorary citizen.) It’s a quiet and eerie segment, capturing the reverent silence with which the travelers absorb what little was left behind by their slain Jewish ancestors. No jokes here; Benjy is, for once, in full control of his behavior.

What follows, for the cousins is the long-awaited brief stop at the apartment complex where their grandmother once lived. It’s somewhat gratifying, somewhat not, to find themselves walking in her footsteps. In any case, the film ends as it ought to, with some smiles, some hugs, and some big questions. Benjy’s and David’s complicated inner worlds can’t be entirely blamed on the Holocaust, from which they are two generations removed and a continent away. But, over the years, I’ve known the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. They’ve been spared the agonies we know about, but their lives are still stamped with the aftereffects of what happened back then . . . what shouldn’t happen to anyone.

 

Leaps of Faith: “Lady Bird”

Wasting time on the Internet, I spotted a recent run-down of the 25 all-time best religious movies. I expected the list would contain a lot of Bible epics as well as faith-based old clunkers like The Nun’s Story and Going My Way. (Yes, both have their charm, but they seem awfully far away from life as we know it in the 21st century.) Instead, what I saw was an intelligent cluster of films in which religious faith and religious affiliations of multiple sorts take center stage, even if the central characters are grappling with religion rather than simply believing.  

The list contains some oldies, like Black Narcissus (1947) as well as Ingmar Bergman’s astonishing duo from 1957, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. Some of the choices reflect religious traditions other than our familiar ones: see Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, a 2001 prize-winner from Canada that meticulously reflects Inuit culture and language. The luminous Ida, a 2013 Polish film about a nun-to-be who uncovers her Nazi-era past, is a natural for this list, but I hadn’t expected to find Minari or 12 Years a Slave or There Will Be Blood, all of which do in fact have something to say about faith. Of course I was gratified to see the great Schindler’s List in a place of honor. But the inclusion that surprised and pleased me most was that of a film I recently watched for the second time, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017).

Lady Bird, which apparently hews closely to writer/director Gerwig’s own early life, is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl finishing up high school in Sacramento, California. (She’s played with conviction by Saiorse Ronan, who was 23 at the time.)  Lady Bird is a proudly independent thinker who has given herself a new jazzy name in place of the much more predictable one with which her parents gifted her at birth. But despite the fact that she yearns to boldly enter the adult world, she’s got to finish out her classes at a benign but deeply conventional Catholic high school, where her teachers are priests and nuns. She auditions for the school play, struggles with math, and occasionally butts heads with visiting anti-abortion speakers, while also hanging out with her best pal, falling in and out of love, (with both Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet) and pretending that she lives in a mansion-like local residence instead of a slightly shabby tract home.

As Lady Bird sees it, the biggest cross she has to bear is her mother, a kind-hearted but outspoken nurse who struggles to do what’s best for her headstrong daughter. Mom (Laurie Metcalf) is the practical member of the family, unlike Dad (Tracy Letts), an out-of-work dreamer who would deny his child nothing. Lady Bird has her heart set on an east-coast college (in “a city with culture”) and Dad somehow scrapes together the financials. But it’s only when she’s far from home, and dealing with an acute physical and emotional crisis of her own making, that Lady Bird comes to recognize how much she relies on both an actual home and a spiritual one. For the first time, she reverts to her birth name (Christine) and enters a church of her own volition.

It’s a simple but wholly convincing story, anchored by strong performances and Gerwig’s sure hand on the helm. Ultimately it was nominated for 5 Oscars, two for Ronan’s and Metcalf’s work and three for Gerwig in her various functions. Alas, it won none of them. Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and the ill-faced La La Land were the big winners. 

 

Cinema and the City: New York, New York

I’m newly back from New York City, a place where you’d think the locals would look down on Hollywood. New Yorkers, after all, have Broadway, as well as some of the world’s best museums and attractions. Yet Hollywood loves making movies about New York City, even giving them evocative titles like Manhattan and New York, New York. In films, New York City seems made for romance—see everything from Splash (where a mermaid comes ashore in front of the Statue of Liberty) to Moonstruck to You’ve Got Mail. And of course there are celebrated TV series like Sex and  the City, in which every central character is hot, funny, and out looking for Mr. (or Ms.) Right. 

What I learned on my most recent trip to the Big Apple is that New Yorkers too are secretly infatuated by the lure of Hollywood. They support funky little neighborhood cinemas, and gather in local eateries for Oscar watch parties. They’re proud of landmark locations like the exterior of Carrie Bradshaw’s Sex and the City apartment on Perry Street in the West Village. If you visit the museum near the top of the Empire State Building, you’ll find yourself surrounded by reminders of how many films include the famous skyscraper in pivotal moments. There are tearjerkers like An Affair to Remember, in which an attempted meeting at the top of the building leads to near tragedy. (The famous Cary Grant/ Deborah Kerr scene was to be mirrored, decades later, by the romantic climax of Sleepless in Seattle.) There’s also a joyous dance number in the World War II classic, On the Town, that takes place on a soundstage re-creation of the building’s observation deck.

But of course the most famous use of the Empire State Building (or a Hollywood facsimile thereof) occurred back in 1933 when a giant ape climbed the skyscraper with Fay Wray in its arms, only to be shot down by a passel of buzzing biplanes. Today the building’s museum can’t get enough of King Kong: there are posters and models, and you can pose looking horrified while in the grip of the ape’s enormous fist. (I admit that I couldn’t resist trying it out.)  

Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where generations of immigrants have crowded into tenements while trying to pursue their own American dreams, also has movie and showbiz connections that go back generations. This slightly squalid but picturesque area is home to a cramped little shop called Orchard Corset. It’s been around since 1949, and in the same family since 1968, but these days it doesn’t cater solely to buxom mamas from the neighborhood. This is the place from which none other than Madonna orders her sexy custom bustiers. And Orchard Corset is also beloved by theatrical costume designers, who count on the shop to supply period-appropriate undergarments. Remember the 1950s-era torpedo bosoms featured in the TV series, Mad Men? Where do you think those imposing bras were found? (Improbably, Orchard Corset also does a lively mail-order business from a site in Wenatchee, Washington.)   

Visitors to the Lower East Side would be well advised to check out the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where you can book tours of what once were the cramped little quarters of Jewish and Italian immigrants. What’s special is that these tiny apartments reflect the actual daily lives of specific well-researched families. In one flat, circa 1935, the children’s bedroom reflects a fascination with Hollywood glamour. On the wall over a young girl’s bed you can see vintage images of her movieland favorites: a very young Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford.  

                                                                                    

Get Him To the Greek: Harry Belafonte and Other Al Fresco Stars

Last weekend I toured Griffith Park’s venerable Greek Theatre, courtesy of the good folks at the L.A. Conservancy. Opened in 1931, with a mandate to bring culture to Angelenos, this outdoor venue now boasts 5780 seats. This makes it a small cousin to the colossal Hollywood Bowl, which seats some 17,500 music-lovers. We toured the stage, much changed from its early days, as well as the hallways where some famous acts of recent years have left their mark. And, in the distance, we spotted the hills where so-called “tree people” used to enjoy free access to the entertainment.  

These days, the Greek is primarily a pop music venue. It has also been featured in movies, like 2010’s Get Him to the Greek, a goofy Judd Apatow-produced comedy featuring Russell Brand as a free-spirited rock star and Jonah Hill as the recorder exec pressed into service as his chaperone. For the 2018 version of A Star is Born, the Greek was the stage on which Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper performed the Oscar-winning “Shallow.”   

But I remember the Greek in a different mood. No, I don’t date back to the time when troops of ersatz classical nymphs frolicked on stage for the delight of theatregoers. But in the era (1952-1975) when impresario James A. Doolittle booked acts, I was taken by my parents to see some very classy entertainments from far-flung places. Here’s what I remember: Britain’s venerable D’Oyly Carte company performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. The Grand Kabuki from Japan. The National Theatre of Britain staging an Elizabethan-style all-male production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The Comédie Française presenting Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in French, which was a very nice pay-off for my years of high school français. (My mother pointed out Maurice Chevalier in the audience.)

But I mainly associate the Greek Theater with the bi-annual summer visits by Harry Belafonte in his prime. His show, featuring singers, dancers, and a small group of musicians, was always a fabulous spectacle. He even followed up his best-selling Belafonte at Carnegie Hall live album with Belafonte at the Greek. My mother was such a fan that she saw each of his shows twice, once with my father and once with my younger sister and me. One year, when we arrived early, she’d scouted out the underground lot where headliners parked their cars. She stationed us near the exit, just in time to see the great man himself emerge. We chatted briefly, and he complimented me on the party dress I was wearing. Proudly I told him, “My mother bought it on sale.” (Behind me, Mom turned beet red.) 

Belafonte, as I was to learn over the years, had many talents. In early films like Carmen Jones, which didn’t always require him to sing, he was a handsome leading man, engaged in thwarted romances and dangerous doings. Later, teaming with longtime pal Sidney Poitier who also directed, he did a nifty Brando-as-the-Godfather imitation in a ghetto crime comedy called Uptown Saturday Night (1974). In his last film, 2018’s Blackkklansman, he performed for Spike Lee as an ageing activist, a role that meshed nicely with the passions that animated his private life. To my surprise, he gets little recognition at Washington’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Though, in the section of the museum dedicated to entertainers, the cover of his Calypso album can be found, there’s no display case dedicated to his career. But a  fiery Belafonte quote is on display at the museum connected with the Statue of Liberty: “Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.” 

 

When We Were Young: “Baby, It’s You” and “The Big Chill”

A funny thing about the year 1983: filmmakers who were not so young as they used to be were now looking back on their coming-of-age years, the tender and turbulent Sixties. John Sayles,  recently graduated from making horror flicks for Roger Corman, shot in 1983 his first studio movie, a coming-of-age romantic comedy called Baby, It’s You. Based on a memoir of sorts by Hollywood honcho Amy Robinson, it begins in 1966 in true Sayles territory: Trenton, New Jersey. Jill Rosen (an adorable Rosanna Arquette) is a smart and sassy high school senior who gets good grades and nabs the lead in the school play. Into her life comes Sheik (Vincent Spano), an Italian kid from the other side of the tracks who can’t exactly be called a greaser because he idolizes Frank Sinatra and dresses like a suave man about town. Opposites attract, but though Jill tempts fate by secretly dating this high school drop-out, she manages to move on when she gains admission to her dream school, the tony Sarah Lawrence.

Cut to the following year: Jill has traded in her short skirts and knee socks for hippie garb, discovered pot and the pill, and otherwise explored life beyond the purview of her solidly upper-middle-class parents. On a spring-break trip to Miami she rediscovers Sheik, now dreaming of a showbiz future but basically washing dishes in a hotel kitchen. The attraction is still there, though in other ways she’s evolved. We suspect there’s no future for their relationship, but a sweet ending (one that makes use of Sheik’s favorite song, “Strangers in the Night”) shows how much they continue to mean to one another, come what may.

It's an appealing film, though hardly a deep one, with its nostalgia element heightened by a soundtrack crammed with oldies like “Wooly Bully.” (I can’t resist mentioning that it was The Graduate that in 1967  began the trend of using pop music to establish the mood of an era.) 

After he left the Roger Corman fold, Sayles’ very first film was Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), a small but influential indie about a reunion of Sixties activists, all just turning thirty, a decade or so after their graduation from college. This low-budget gem (which Sayles himself described to me as using the low-budget Corman trick of making do with what you have on hand) was critically acclaimed for capturing the spirit of an era. It seemed to kick off a host of reunion movies, the most potent of which was Lawrence Kasdan’s hugely popular The Big Chill. Like Baby, It’s You, this film looks back on the politics and culture of the Sixties, but from the perspective of campus friends who are now older, but not necessarily wiser, than they were when they linked up at the University of Michigan. Within the framework of a weekend spent in a large house following the suicide of a close friend, The Big Chill examines successes, dreams, and particularly regrets, in a way that is sometimes poignant and sometimes funny. 

The cast of The Big Chill is part of its strength. Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, coming off the huge success of his 1981 thriller Body Heat, had access to some of Hollywood’s brightest young talents. Among the film’s stars are William Hurt (who’d scored in Body Heat), Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close, in only her second film. The DVD version I watched includes a years-later interview with cast and crew, highlighting how the ensemble cast, isolated in a South Carolina town, found ways to strengthen their sense of longstanding camaraderie.