All The World’s a Stage: “Hamnet”

 A fair number of high-powered film critics don’t seem to care for Hamnet. The film was wholly shut out by such august bodies as the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, both of which chose to honor more outrageous flicks, like One Battle After Another. For them, I gather, Hamnet is an old-fashioned tearjerker, without much connection to our own troubled times.

 Actors, though, clearly hold this film in high esteem. Wednesday’s nominations for the Actor Award, the newly-renamed honor from the Screen Actors Guild, include individual recognition for Jessie Buckley (up for female actor in a Leading Role) and Paul Mescal (actor in a Supporting Role). Even more impressive: the film was nominated (along with, among others, One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme), for the coveted ensemble award honoring the featured cast.

 And what do I think? As a dedicated filmgoer with a decided literary bent, I found this rendering of the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife thoroughly mesmerizing. Adapted by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao and novelist Maggie O’Farrell from Farrell’s best-selling novel, this is a story about familial love and loss. In the absence of much hard evidence, many literary types have speculated about the marriage of the brilliant English playwright and the rustic young woman he abandoned for so many months while pursuing his career in London. It’s easy to guess, as many have done, that the pair had little in common aside from the three children who stayed home in Stratford with their mother. (No wonder , they reason, that Will looked for greener pastures elsewhere! No wonder that upon his death he left his wife merely the second-best bed!)

 I think the romantics among us are delighted to find in O’Farrell’s rendering a genuine marital union, though one challenged by Will’s long absences. And, of course, further threatened by the plague-death of the couple’s only son, Hamnet, at an early age. The story,  then, becomes one in which a  couple need to find—somehow—their way out of grief. For the earthy Agnes (more usually known as Anne), there’s despair, fury at her long-absent spouse, and a deep connection with nature. For Will there are words to be written, and a play to be produced. I’ve seen other films re-creating the performance of an Elizabethan drama on the stage of the Globe Theater (see Shakespeare in Love, for example). But never before have I seen this set-up used so movingly, with Agnes—standing among the groundlings at the very edge of the stage—mesmerized by the words her husband has written, finding in them personal meaning to help soothe her agony.

 I’ve always liked Jessie Buckley’s performances in modest indies, but the role of Agnes calls forth from her whole new depths. Her radiance is impossible to ignore, and I suspect big prizes may be coming her way. Paul Mescal’s role as William Shakespeare is smaller, but also requires—and gets—real intensity. I also want to praise the child actors who are essential to this plot, particularly Jacobi Jupe as 12-year-old Hamnet, whose death tears the Shakespeare family asunder. Fittingly, young Jacobi’s 20-year-old brother, Noah, is featured in the climactic Globe Theater scenes, on stage in the role of Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous protagonist. (The film makes clear at the outset that Hamnet and Hamlet were, in sixteenth-century England, essentially the same name.)

 Huzzah for Hamnet’s production values, including glorious cinematography that captures Agnes’s closeness to the natural world. Perhaps because women created her, she’s a heroine unlike any Shakespeare ever wrote.

 A final note: it wasn’t until I belatedly talked to viewers who hadn’t read the novel that I realized not every moviegoer knows at the outset that Paul Mescal’s character, Will, is a creative portrait of the bard-to-be, William Shakepeare. The feeling among several who spoke to me is that this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers: they wanted the audience to respond to the country lad who falls for Agnes without initially recognizing the literary genius he will become. I wonder: does this strategy help or hurt the film’s success?

Not-So-Young Frankenstein

I’m afraid the Frankenstein story doesn’t really resonate with me. Circa 1990, when I worked for Roger Corman  at Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a successful Hollywood producer named Thom Mount approached Roger with an offer he couldn’t refuse. Mount had been a Corman underling years before, and felt that his mentor should set aside his production company  obligations and return to directing. So he came to Roger with a deal: a cool million dollars to write and direct a film based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, about a scientist who creates and animates a monstrous creature, only to live to regret his own folly.

 As Roger’s story editor, I was charged with overseeing the film’s script, which would ultimately be based on Frankenstein Unbound, a Brian Aldiss novel with a time-travel element: a man from our own era finds himself back in the early nineteenth century, interacting with Dr. Frankenstein, a sensuous Mary Shelley, and of course the monster. Naturally I read both the Aldiss novel and Mary Shelley’s original—and I can barely remember either one. But a few oddball things remain in my memory banks from the completed film. One is Roger’s decision to cast his fourteen-year-old daughter Catherine as a servant girl wrongly accused of murder. Young Catherine Corman played the role credibly, but it’s not every day that a film director hangs his own child on camera. (Today, Catherine, none the worse for wear, is a writer, photographer, and indie filmmaker.)

 I have two other memories of a film that most critics and most audiences have scorned. One is an awkward sex scene between Mary Shelley (played by the very young Bridget Fonda) and John Hurt as a very middle-aged visitor from the 20^th century. The other is the moment when the Frankenstein monster finally finds a mate—and the two inexplicably lapse into a romantic pas de deux. This was in the version of the movie I saw at an advance screening, but apparently the audience reaction was so negative that the moment was cut from the released film. 

 Of course there are other cinematic versions of Mary Shelley’s work. Most of us know the classic 1931 James Whale film, featuring Boris Karloff as an ungainly but oddly likable monster who accidentally drowns a little girl because he doesn’t fully understand the game they’re playing. Karloff’s monster has become iconic, inspiring generations of Halloween costumes and a delicious Mel Brooks spoof. But Spanish director Guillermo del Toro had long wanted to try his hand at creating an intelligent, sympathetic Frankenstein monster. His new approach (with Oscar Isaac as the scientist and the very tall Jacob Elordi as the monster)  is visually exciting, But it also seems endless and, frankly, more than a bit sappy, leaning heavily on ultimate recognition by man and monster that they’re in many ways father and son . . . and that it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

 There’s much philosophical meat in the Frankenstein story, and we in the 21^st century are well advised to be aware of the dangers of taking science too far. But I don’t think del Toro, for all his good intentions, has made a movie that’s philosophically worth our attention. Curiously, it was just two years ago that Yorgos Lanthimos directed a film that—while in no way based specifically on Shelley’s novel—approaches some of that book’s intellectual concerns. I’m talking about Poor Things, in which a female “monster” reminds us of the dangers of science, and what it might take to move beyond them. 

 

 

American Hustler: Timothée Chalamet as “Marty Supreme”

Back in my Roger Corman days, I was friendly with a co-worker, Rodman Flender, who had serious directorial ambitions. He came from a family bursting with artistic talent, and once happened to mention that his sister’s son was a budding actor. Of course I smiled benignly: in SoCal pretty much EVERYONE has a relative with acting aspirations . . . and most of them flame out rather quickly. But Rodman’s young nephew turned out to be the exception to the rule, one of those rare creatives whose screen appearances take on a life of their own. You’ve surely heard of Timothée Chalamet, a young man whose talent, combined with his vibrant off-screen personality, makes him a true Hollywood star.

 Chalamet’s breakout performance was in a 2017 Luca Guadagnino film, Call Me By Your Name, in which he played a teenager gobsmacked by his sexual desire for a slightly older young man. I went to see it out of curiosity, but have since concluded that Guadagnino’s work (which also includes the tennis flick, Challengers) is not for me. I find it overly swoony, with everything basically revolving around a hunger for sex. Sill, Call Me By Your Name, which gained international attention, led to Chalamet’s first Oscar nomination, and he was on his way.

 Never one to be typecast, Chalamet went on to play such diverse roles as a callous young stud in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a charming boy next door in Gerwig’s Little Women, and an outer-space messiah-type in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy. Perhaps his biggest leap was into convincingly playing (and singing) the part of the young Bob Dylan in 2024’s A Complete Unknown, a role that gave him his second Oscar nom. Now he’s back in another starring role that has required him to master a brand-new skill-set. The word is that he practiced ping-pong for seven years to take on the role of Marty Mauser (based on the real-life Marty Reisman), a bad boy of table tennis in the early 1950s.

 Marty Supreme, directed and co-written by Josh Safdie, continues the Safdie brothers’ passion for hyperkinetic filmmaking. There’s no way you can follow all the twists and turns of the plot, but it brilliantly conveys a New York state of mind: everyone is a little angry, and in a great hurry to get somewhere. For Marty, championship-level table tennis is a way to escape his salesman job at his uncle’s shoe store and move into the wider world. But there are complications: his family disapproves, he’s short on money for travel, and his casual but sometimes intense passion for the cute young thing downstairs will have its own unforeseen consequences (as is hinted by a rather remarkable credit sequence at the top of the film).

 Critics have talked about Marty Supreme as an exposé of the always-hustling American personality type, and I’m sure they’re right. There’s one element, though, that I haven’t seen mentioned. The film is very specifically set just after World War II, and—in one way or another—all these characters seem shell-shocked, whether or not they came anywhere near a battlefield. Marty’s #1 ping-pong opponent, a Japanese young man with an emotionless face and manner, is said to have been deafened in childhood by the bombing of Tokyo. The immigrant teammate Marty strives to outrank has numbers tattooed on his arm, courtesy of the Nazis. The always cocky Marty announces himself—an American Jew—as Hitler’s worst nightmare. The role fits Chalamet so well, I believe, because he too is hustling for fame and fortune. 

 

Do I Buy This “Little Shop of Horrors”?

Last week I was on a transcontinental flight. Looking for an entertaining movie to watch, I came upon the 1986 musical version of Little Shop of Horrors. Yes, this was the all-star Technicolor adaptation of the 1960 horror comedy cranked out by Roger Corman and his pals when they suddenly had access to someone else’s sets for two days and two nights. The movie musical evolved out of the Off-Broadway musical adaptation that launched the stellar careers of composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman, both of whom adored the darkly funny Corman original. Conveniently, the ever-thrifty Corman had never bothered to copyright his movie, so it was cheap and easy for two novice musical comedy guys to adapt it to the stage. The cast was small, the sets were modest, and the cleverness of the concept held up beautifully both in a modest Off-Broadway space and, later on, in community theatre venues all over the world. 

 Corman’s all-purpose screenwriter, Charles B. Griffith, resented for the rest of his life how hard he had to fight to get some money out of the stage adaptation of his highly-original screenplay. Eventually the plucky little musical transformed into a big-name cinematic project featuring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin, with cameos by John Candy, Jim Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Bill Murray in the masochist-in-the-dentist-chair role that had been originated by an unknown Jack Nicholson back in the Corman days. Critics and audiences quickly decided that the new film was just too big and too lavish to capture the wacky charm of the original Corman/Griffith project. As Chuck Griffith himself told me, when I was researching for my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, “The original cost $27,000 and broke even in the first hour of release. The [movie] musical cost $33 million, and they never got it back.” (Since that megaflop, several attempts have been made to remake the movie musical—one with Roger himself involved—but all have come to nothing. I should add that when I was Roger’s story editor, circa 1990,, there was a serious attempt at a live-action TV series. That too eventually died an unheralded death,)   

 When I watched the musical film on that airplane, I realized that I’d never actually seen it before. As a fan of the stage musical, I hadn’t wanted my memories spoiled by what was purported to be an overblown spectacle. So, after all this time, what did I think? To me, some aspects of the stage musical work very well in their screen adaptation. One of the Menken/Ashman team’s additions to the movie musical was a trio of girl singers—Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon—who act as a sort of Greek chorus while adding a Motown groove to the soundtrack. In the film they’re very good, and the zany costumes they wear in various scenes (like kitschy Suzie Wong garb when Seymour buys his plant from a mysterious old Chinese man) are a delight. I also fully appreciated the hapless-looking Rick Moranis as Seymour, as well as the unforgettable Ellen Greene, a star of the Off-Broadway show, as a deliciously befuddled Audrey. In the sadistic dentist role (much expanded from the Corman original), Steve Martin is clearly having a ball. But the producers have seen fit to heighten the comedy by cramming in every comic TV star they can find, which is why John Candy, for one, makes a totally unnecessary cameo appearance. And the light-as-a-bubble story ends up, alas, like a fallen soufflé.  Horror comedy is, you might say, a delicate thing.

 Dedicated to Jackie Joseph, Corman’s Audrey, and the one original player I’m sure is still around. Also to Adam Abraham, who interviewed me for his quite enlightening 2022 homage, Attack of the Monster Musical: A Cultural History of Little Shop of Horrors.

 

 

 

 

Crowning the King of Comedy

We’re all aware, at least if we watch American television, that right now talk-show hosts are something of an endangered species. Gone are the days when a man like Johnny Carson (or Jay Leno) was a friendly face in our living rooms, poking impish fun at celebrities and politicians without fear of retribution. Now Stephen Colbert’s months at CBS are numbered. And Jimmy Kimmel seemed to have gotten the axe when the powers-that-be disapproved of one of his jokes. (Surprisingly, the backlash was such that he was quickly reinstated.)

 But itl makes you wonder why anyone would risk it all to tell jokes on late-night television.  What exactly is the attraction? The money? The laughs? The opportunity to take on the status quo? The need, pure and simple, to connect with an audience?

 These thoughts flitted through my mind as I sat down to watch an unlikely 1982 film by Martin Scorsese, one that contains no gangsters and no boxers. (Yes, there’s a taxi-driver or two, but not in a role of any significance.) You could say, though, that this—like so many other Scorsese projects—is a film about an obsession. Robert De Niro, starring in his fifth film for Scorsese, plays Rupert Pupkin, an intense young man determined to make it as a stand-up comedian. None other than Jerry Lewis, then in his fifties, plays Jerry Langford, a comedian of the Carson ilk with a wide base of adoring fans. By happenstance, Pupkin protects Langford from a frenzied mob, then tries to worm his way into the great man’s home and heart as a way of launching his own career as a comedian. What does he want? To commence his own climb to fame and fortune via the opening spot on Langford’s nightly broadcast. How does he go about achieving this? With the manic determination that marks so many Scorsese protagonists. And, of course, a little touch of mayhem.

 It's fun to see De Niro, hyper-familiar in brutal parts, desperately playing at being ingratiating. And Lewis, eschewing his usual comic shtik, is convincing as a very private man forced to make nice, much against his nature, to someone who has obviously gone off the rails. For me the big surprise is comedian Sandra Bernhard, who essentially plays De Niro’s partner in crime, working her own surprisingly sexual obsession with Langford while helping clear the way for Pupkin’s leap into the big time.

 This is not, despite its title, a movie that is full of chuckles. But it does use very black humor to probe the excesses of fandom, something which continues—thanks to the Internet—to be more and more a part of our everyday world.  The King of Comedy builds to a climax and then a coda that have aroused much discussion: the movie doesn’t end in the likeliest of ways. Some moviegoers (like me) have appreciated its heavy-duty irony; others are not so sure.

 Admirers of Scorsese are apparently divided on the merits of this film. Some critics of the day embraced De Niro’s character as the flip side of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle; others (including the influential Pauline Kael) were convinced Scorsese had lost his way. If Wikipedia is to be believed, such cinema wonderworkers as Akira Kurosawa and Wim Wenders have ranked The King of Comedy among their very favorite films. Fans in today’s Hollywood include Steve Carell and Jack Black, who would like to star in a remake. I don’t suspect that this will happen anytime soon, if ever. But the nature of comedy, as a subject, never truly grows old. 

 

Down the Primrose Path with “That Hamilton Woman”

Frankly, I’m not quite sure why I decided to watch That Hamilton Woman, though I doubtless was curious about seeing Laurence Olivier playing opposite his new wife, Vivien Leigh. The 1941 film turns out to be an enjoyable account of a young woman with a checkered past first agreeing to marry an ageing British diplomat who collects lovely things, and then falling hard for a naval hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson. The implications of their liaison are spelled out in a film that looks sumptuous but is not. The Criterion Collection copy I watched is graced by the presence of an interview with the very articulate Michael Korda, who as a young boy romped amid the fake warships at the Hollywood studio (Fox, if I recall correctly) where the film was being shot. Meanwhile, his father, Vincent, created fabulous sets for the movie, which his uncle, Alexander Korda, produced and directed.

 Sir Alexander Korda and his two brothers began life in Hungary, but the political currents of the early 20^th century (and their lowly status as Jews) soon had them traveling all over Europe in search of film-related careers.  Alexander, in particular, came to consider England home, and Winston Churchill was one of his closest friends. It was in many ways thanks to Churchill that he and the family came to California early in World War II, not only to escape the privations of Britain during that perilous era but also (at Churchill’s urging) to make films that would plead Britain’s case during a period when the U.S. was still officially unaligned. It’s easy to spot that the rapacious Napoleon, determined to take over all of Europe, is intended to be, in the eyes of the audience, a stand-in for Adolf Hitler.  And part of the film’s raison d’être is to remind American of the danger of passivity in the face of real enemies.

 That Hamilton Woman is, of course, a juicy period romance, anchored by a pretty woman who’s no better than she should be and a legendary hero revered for taking on Napoleon in battle. There’s no one better than Leigh at portraying girlish charm, and she gets a few heroic moments too. (Let’s not forget her triumph 2 years earlier in Gone With the Wind.) As Nelson, Olivier is cast in the less showy part, one that requires him mostly to be impressive and unflinching, even as his physical self crumbles. Of course his wife of many years (Gladys Cooper) is depicted as cold and tough-minded, and it’s made clear when first he meets Emma Hamilton that, because of his wartime role keeping Napoleon’s France in check, he has not seen his spouse in seven years, which would certainly had helped their ardor (if there was any) to cool off.  But since Hollywood’s Production Code was still very much in effect, the love affair between Nelson and Emma is not allowed to reveal its own steam. (That baby daughter who’s officially registered by Emma under an assumed last name must have come from somewhere, but there’s precious little canoodling in this movie.) And, of course, Emma eventually has to suffer for her moral transgression: the film is bookended by doubtless apocryphal scenes of her as a haggard and penniless alcoholic. The wages of sin . . .  et cetera et cetera.

 I was astonished to learn That Hamilton Woman was shot in a mere five weeks. It looks lovely, and makes for a nice anti-fascist history lesson, one that it would not hurt all of us to remember.

 

 

 

 

In Praise of Women of a Certain Age: “Shirley Valentine” and “Something’s Gotta Give”

No spring chicken myself, I understand the appeal of those films in which ageing women go to extraordinary lengths to retain their youthful beauty. Way back in 1936, the opening scene of The Women was a fancy-schmancy health spa in which society matrons valiantly fought off wrinkles and turkey necks, at enormous expense.  In 1959, under the tutelage of Roger Corman, director Jack Hill went the horror route, using a Leo Gordon script. Their focus was on a female cosmetics executive so worried about preserving her beauty that she broke into a scientist’s lab and stole an experimental serum, made from the royal jelly of queen wasps, that promised to reverse the ageing process. (Naturally, it didn’t end well.) 

Just last year, a female writer/director, Coralie Fargeat, created a contemporary film in the same genre. The Substance. It featured a still-ravishing  Demi Moore so determined to look younger that she went through a horrific metamorphosis that ultimately destroyed her life. Age (and its ominous implications in Hollywood) is also at the center of Sunset Boulevard, once a cinematic classic starring Gloria Swanson and now a Broadway hit musical with the gorgeous but not exactly teen-aged Nicole Scherzinger (she’s 47) in the leading role.

 Given all this, it’s a pleasure to come across films in which a mature woman is hailed as a romantic figure, an actual love object. The only sad thing about these heroines is that they’re played by women who’ve recently left us. But oh, what a lovely light they shed on mature romance. Shirley Valentine is a delightful 1989 British film in which a middle-aged Liverpool housewife (the late Pauline Collins) is so taken for granted by her working-class husband and grown kids that she talks to the walls of her house—and directly to the film’s audience—about the good old days when she was filled to the brim with impish fun. By chance she’s invited by a friend who’s won a contest to join her for two weeks in Greece, and to Shirley’s own surprise she decides to go. On a sun-swept shore she revels in a new sense of freedom . . . even to the point of agreeing to a romantic sail with a handsome local who praises her spunk and her beauty The tryst turns out to have its disappointing side, but the upshot is that she discovers in herself a willingness to change the course of her life. Maybe she’ll resurrect her stale marriage, but on her own terms.

 Then there’s Something’s Gotta Give, a lively Nancy Meyers comedy from 2003, in which a sixty-plus-year-old Jack Nicholson plays Harry, a wealthy music exec who thrives on courting pretty women half his age. Through a series of complications involving his latest flame, Marin (Amanda Peet), he ends up having a mild heart attack at the beach cottage of her divorced mother, Erica (the late Diane Keaton), who’s an ultra-successful playwright. The upshot is that, when Marin returns to work in the city, Erica is stuck babysitting the recuperating Harry. At first they are constantly getting on each other’s nerves. But then, to their mutual surprise, they fall hard for one another, reveling in their mutual smarts and maturity.  And yes, their mutual sex drive. Still, Harry’s commitment-phobic, and the adorable Erica finds she has another admirer, the handsome and very young doctor played by Keanu Reeves. Not bad for a fifty-something-year-old who even carries off a very embarrassed but extremely funny nude scene. Nice indeed to think that a woman of Keaton’s years could be so desirable.