Thelma Ritter -- Meeting the Star of “The Mating Season”

The unstoppable Richard Orton, he of the keen eye and the passion for movie art direction, just sent me two screen-shots proving that in 1951 Paramount Studios used the same fancy set of decorative archways in two very different films. One was George Stevens’ powerful romantic tragedy, A Place in the Sun. This film starring Montgomery Clift as a young man on the make, also featured Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, and murder most foul. The other film, completely unknown to me, was a screwball romantic comedy, The Mating Season. Dick helpfully advised me that’s possible to see The Mating Season, completely free of charge, on YouTube. The film’s above-the-title stars are John Lund and the gorgeous Gene Tierney. But it was when Dick told me that The Mating Season is considered one of Thelma Ritter’s best performances that I decided to check it out.

 Thelma Ritter (1902-1969) was never anyone’s idea of a romantic lead. Diminutive, with a  gravelly voice and a strong New Yawk accent, she was born to play tart-tongued women of the working class. Making her uncredited screen debut as a frustrated shopper in 1947’s Miracle on 34^th Street, she collected her first Oscar nomination—for the supporting role of Margo Channing’s maid—in 1950’s All About Eve. The Mating Season won her a second nomination, and she went on to accumulate four more noms (for With a Song in My Heart, Pickup on South Street, Pillow Talk, and Birdman of Alcatraz): it’s a supporting-actress record that has neve been broken. Only problem: none of the nominations resulted in a gold statuette. It’s an omission I wish we could somehow rectify, because Thelma Ritter—whether appearing in wacky comedy or a tough-minded drama—was one of a kind.

 For sure, The Mating Season would be dead in the water without her. It’s the story of an eager young businessman (the blond and rather bland Lund) who falls for the sophisticated daughter of a former U.S. ambassador (Tierney). They marry, but rivals on all sides are rooting against the pairing. While Lund, trying to advance his business career, moves his bride into a swanky apartment, rivals in his firm are working against the marriage as well as his career prospects. I won’t go into all the complications that arise, but Ritter plays Lund’s salt-of-the-earth widowed mom, the good-hearted proprietor of a hamburger stand that’s in financial trouble. When she learns that her son and new daughter-in-law are trying to throw an elaborate dinner party for friends and business associates, she shows up to take over the kitchen, without ever revealing the family relationship.  Of course she triumphs, both at the stove and with the grateful new daughter-in-law who at first doesn’t realize who she is. Eventually, there evolves a showdown of sorts with a new arrival, the bitchy and self-serving snob who is Tierney’s mother. She’s played by Miriam Hopkins, once a bright Hollywood leading lady herself but by this time quite convincing as an obnoxious older woman. Remarkably, Hopkins is billed above Ritter as a supporting player, when by rights Ritter should have had star billing, in a story that clearly revolves, from beginning to end, around her funny, feisty character.   

 I’d love to convey how poignant Thelma Ritter can be, when she’s victimized in films like Sam Fuller’s noirish spy thriller, Pickup on South Street. But her acerbic wit shines through as the nurse looking after James Stewart in Rear Window, and in so many of her other roles. .Give this gal an Oscar! Too bad it’s too late for that.  

 

 

Baby Jane Grows Up

Well, none of us is getting any younger. And Hollywood actresses, who’ve always relied on youth and beauty to fuel their careers, know better than most that ageing is tantamount to career suicide. Ten years ago, Amy Schumer went so far as to join with gal pals Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette in a darkly comic video short, all of them desperate to stave off the approach of their so-called “Last F**kable Day.”    

 But things were perhaps even worse in Old Hollywood. When Audrey Hepburn, still under 30, was romantically paired with fifty-six-year-old Gary Cooper in 1957’s Love in the Afternoon, this confirmed the basic Tinseltown understanding that—for women, at least—the freshness of youth was everything. As for those talented actresses who weren’t as young as they used to be, they had to accept that they were now considered by studio honchos to be damaged goods. And so it happened that two of the Golden Age’s most revered stars suddenly had to accept lesser projects to fill up their dance cards.

 Bette Davis, who arrived in Hollywood in 1930, had some rough years before she triumphed in the powerful role of a slatternly waitress in a screen adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage: it led to a unique write-in Oscar nomination. Thereafter she made her mark in a series of historical and romantic dramas, including Jezebel (1938); Dark Victory (1939); Now, Voyager (1942); and the wonderful All About Eve (1950): she ultimately won the Best Actress Oscar twice, and was officially nominated a record ten times.  For years she was Warner Bros.’ most bankable star, specializing in bold, uncompromising portrayals of strong women.

 Joan Crawford, started out as a Broadway dancer, then in 1925 was signed to a contract at classy MGM, where she first specialized in playing flappers and then working girls who made good. Depression audiences loved her, and she was a marvelous hussy in The Women (1939), but eventually she wore out her welcome at MGM and moved to Warners in 1943. The noirish Mildred Pierce (1945) revived her career and won her an Oscar, but sharing the Warners lot with Queen Bee Bette Davis was a challenge.

 By 1962, Davis and Crawford (both in their fifties) found their careers had essentially dried up. That’s when someone got the bright idea of pairing these two fading stars in a Grand Guignol-style horror movie, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Their fabled real-life feud made audiences run to see them play two sisters who were once stars of the silver screen and now live together in a mansion where bad things happen. Someone has said that on film Davis is the quintessential sadist and Crawford (with her tremulous expressions) the quintessential masochist. In this film, so it plays out. Davis’s character, once the golden-haired kiddie star Baby Jane, is a drunk with a skewed view of reality. Crawford plays her sister, formerly a leading lady but now confined to a wheelchair after a mysterious accident that is explained (in a way that thoroughly baffled me) at the end of the film. Both are essentially grotesque, but Baby Jane revived their popularity, and Davis (though not Crawford) thereby racked up one more Oscar nom.

 Sad, though, that two fifty-year-old actresses needed to stoop to such trashy material. Happily, at least one great actress today still has her pick of roles. Everywhere I turn, I see photos of Meryl Streep, at 77, looking devastatingly glamorous in ads for The Devil Wears Prada 2.  Yes, she plays a sort of villain, but a gorgeous one.

Dreams and Reality on “Revolutionary Road”

Revolutionary Road strikes me as a curious name for a novel, or a movie . . . or a street address. When I think of its implications, I conjure up a battlefield, with a lot of Minuteman types carrying muskets and wearing their hair in a pigtail. But Revolutionary Road is the title of the 1961 debut novel by Richard Yates that has nothing overt to do with the American Revolution of 1776. Rather, it’s a domestic drama set in the leafy suburbs of Connecticut circa 1955. The young couple who decide to start their family in a big white house on Revolutionary Road are hardly revolutionary in the military sense. Nor are they, really, American patriots. But after some thought I’ve come to see Frank and April Wheeler as yearning for their own private revolution, one that will raise them high above their earthbound suburban neighbors.

 Once the novel was in print, Hollywood came calling, and a screenplay emerged. But for many years no one came forward to produce this morose story with its grim ending. Then British actress Kate Winslet, always ripe for challenging roles, fell in love with the project and became determined to play the female lead. Fortunately for her, she had a husband, Sam Mendes, with his own Hollywood cred. Primarily a stage director, he had won an Oscar for helming his debut film, 1999’s American Beauty, which like Reluctionary Road took an intimate look at the collapse of an American marriage. Since that time he had won more acclaim, particularly for his very dark and poignant Road to Perdition (2002). When 2008 rolled around, he was releasing a movie that starred not only his wife but also her close friend and one-time on-screen love, Leonardo DiCaprio.

 Also culled from the Titanic cast was Kathy Bates, who had once played Molly Brown on that ill-fated voyage and was now asked by Mendes to play a local realtor who befriends April and Frank. The key supporting role of her truth-teller son was taken by Michael Shannon, a character actor who ended up with the Academy’s single acting nomination for Revolutionary Road. In all it was nominated for three Oscars (including Best Costumes and Best Production Design), but won none of them. Most recently the versatile Shannon has played the martyred President James Garfield in TV’s Death by Lightning and a key judge in last year’s Nuremberg.

 What is revolutionary about Revolutionary Road? It focuses in on a married couple determined to live a life of their own choosing. April, a frustrated local actress, is the one who comes up with the plan for her husband to quit his workaday job so the family can move to Paris and discover their bliss. Frank at first resists his wife’s urging but soon comes to accept the idea that in Paris he’ll intuit how to really put his undefined talents to use. They make plans and tell all their neighbors . . . but reality gets in the way. And the couple eventually discover that their thinking is not so in sync after all. The ending, when it comes, is tragic, and the final scene gives the family (and us) little solace.

 Which is probably why the film, well-made as it is, did not drawn in audiences. In Titanic, Jack and Rose were a couple madly in love, until an iceberg destroyed their dreams of romantic bliss. Here the same actors show romance crumbling because of their own unrealistic goals. Ironically, Winslet’s own eight-year marriage to Mendes didn’t last much beyond the film’s release.

 

 

 

Laughing It Up with George Schlatter

I was delighted to see, on the People magazine site, an article about George Schlatter. George who? It seems there’s a brand-new documentary, Sock It to Me: The Legend of George Schlatter, now coming onto the market to celebrate Schlatter’s 96^th year.  Back when I was a college kid, Schlatter was the producer of a little sketch comedy show called Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. As a one-off TV special that aired on  September 9, 1967, the show generated such buzz—especially among young audiences—that it returned as a weekly series, replacing the once-huge Man from U.N.C.L.E, at the beginning of 1968. It ran until July of 1973, when its youthful sexiness finally ran out of steam. 

 I take all this personally partly because Laugh-In was must-see TV where I lived. Its inspired brand of silliness (Goldie Hawn frugging in a bikini and a lot of flower-power tattoos; Arte Johnson as a dirty old man constantly being whacked by Ruth Buzzi’s handbag; Lily Tomlin as precocious little Edith Ann proclaiming “That’s the truth!” and blowing raspberries) will always stay with me. At a time when public life seemed increasingly fraught, it was a joy to laugh at bad  jokes and sketches performed by talented showbiz newcomers.

  Hawn and Tomlin, in particular, have certainly gone on to major Hollywood careers. But the show was also so trendy that it attracted guests with high star-wattage. When Schlatter and his writers unearthed Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham’s goofy “Here Comes the Judge” routine, Sammy Davis Jr. started showing up regularly in a judicial robe and powdered wig to increase the hilarity: I’m not exactly sure why we laughed so hard, but it was awfully funny. (Briefly there was even a car model on the market called The Judge, meant to capitalize on the show’s catch-phrase.) There were also frequent guest appearances by major social and political figures. Early on, one of the show’s recurrent gags was for a cast member to say, “Sock it to me,” and then get doused by a pail of water. Pretty soon, there were quick cuts of celebrities—including presidential candidate Richard Nixon—reciting variants on the “sock it to me” line. (Nixon was all innocence, quizzically asking, “Sock it to me?) 

 The other reason I’m delighted to learn of George Schlatter being alive and well is that, as a long-ago budding journalist, I got to do a sit-down interview with the guy.  It was late 1968, I think, and I was writing on entertainment for the UCLA Daily Bruin. With Laugh-In such a money-maker, Schlatter was launching a new and even more adventurous show. Called Turn-On, it was intended to make creative and humorous use of computer technology. But critics hated it, and audiences did too. By the time my article was published, Turn-On had been turned off by the network, after a single episode hit the airwaves. It’s still considered one of the biggest fiascos in TV history.

 As Turn-On was being readied for that fatal first airing, Schlatter was delighted to be interviewed by a young college journalist. He was cordial and funny. After the Turn-On debacle and the publication of my interview, he took time out from licking his psychic wounds to write me a thank-you note. After all these years, I’d have a really hard time digging out either the published interview or his response. But I remember I had quipped that he—then almost forty—relied in conversation on a “predictably with-it vocabulary.” He answered back, “At the risk of exhausting my predictably with-it vocabulary, your piece is a gas!” 

Keep on trucking, George!  

 

Bloody Good Show: The Godfather, Part II

It’s been a long time—easily 50 years, in fact—since I saw the second Godfather film. I know that, snob that I was, I didn’t see the first Godfather when it debuted, because I was too arty back then to be interested in crime dramas. It wasn’t until a friend with impeccable intellectual credentials told me that The Godfather was essential Americana that I discovered for myself the brilliant picture that Francis Ford Coppola had given us of the underside of the American dream. As it turned out, Godfather II would be a feather in the cap of my former boss, Roger Corman. It won six Oscars, including several for Corman alumni. Francis Ford Coppola , who got his start fresh out of film school as Roger’s assistant, took home statuettes for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, while Robert De Niro (who’d been featured in Corman’s Bloody Mama) was honored with the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the youthful Vito Corleone. Moreover, Corman graduate Talia Shire became a Best Supporting Actress nominee for her role as the godfather’s sister. 

 I returned to The Godfather Part II in part to savor the work of the late Robert Duvall, who plays it close to the vest as Tom Hagen, the godfather’s indefatigable fixer and adopted son. But I was also curious to see how a film could be both sequel and prequel to what had gone before. Honestly, I don’t think Godfather II (the first sequel ever to win a Best Picture Oscar) is quite as strong as its predecessor; by cutting between two stories set in two very different eras Coppola sometimes weakens the film’s throughline, and the ultimate conclusion doesn’t pack the wallop of the earlier film. Still, there’s much to admire. I was strongly impressed by De Niro’s work in the Sicily scenes, and the Lower East Side sections of the film allowed us to see his evolution from eager immigrant to godfather-in-the-making. And Coppola clearly had a marvelous time filming massive period crowd scenes, letting us in on the local color of New York’s Little Italy in all its tawdry splendor.

 By contrast, there’s the rustic but tony compound of Michael Corleone and family at Nevada’s Lake Tahoe, where they hole up while he’s busy deal-making with Las Vegas honchos. And we also get glimpses of both Miami and pre-Castro Havana. It is striking watching Al Pacino’s Michael becoming, in this film, more and more his father’s imperious son, the master of all he surveys. Pacino never won an Oscar for playing Michael in three Godfather films Though he earned Oscar nominations for the first two, it took him until 1993 (and the semi-interesting Scent of a Woman) to take home the golden statuette. But when I checked out the dates, I was struck by the fact that less than a year after Godfather II hit the screen, Pacino gave another masterful Oscar-worthy performance in a favorite film of mine, Dog Day Afternoon. That heist film, based on a true story, had Pacino as Sonny, a hapless young man determined to knock over a Brooklyn bank to finance his lover’s sex-change operation. If you see Dog Day Afternoon not long after Godfather II, I suspect you’ll be surprised that Pacino suddenly seems much younger, much shorter, and much more inept than in the previous film. That, of course, is what acting is all about.

 I should also mention that both Godfather II and Dog Day Afternoon also feature the gifted John Cazale, an ominous-lookng character actor who died much too young. 

 

Hailing Mary (and Wes Anderson)

Over the past weekend, I watched two movies that made a strong visual impression on me. At a massive local cineplex, I saw Hollywood’s very welcome new Netflix blockbuster, Project Hail Mary. At home on my couch, I enjoyed re-watching what is probably Wes Anderson’s most significant film, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 Project Hail Mary was of great interest to me both because there are several engineers (and an engineer-to-be) in my life and because many of my current screenwriting students—a group with a wide range of aesthetic tastes—are enthusiastic about this film. I have not read the novel on which the film is based, and I admit that the scientific (and pseudo-scientific) aspects of the plot leave me completely boggled. But it boasts a bravura solo performance by Ryan Gosling as a reluctant astronaut stuck in space, as well as an eclectic score I often found enchanting. Beyond this, Project Hail Mary enjoys the advantage of a wonderful visual sense. Even when I had no idea what was going on, I enjoyed basking in the glow of the film’s otherworldly cinematography.

 Project Hail Mary is, of course, very much about the future: about a possible grave danger to our solar system, about the exotic inter-terrestrial discoveries that may save us all, and about the non-human being with whom our hero allies in the course of his eventful mission. By contrast, The Grand Budapest Hotel devotes itself to the past. In a story that is probably Anderson’s most ambitious ever, we move between several different twentieth-century eras. The film starts in 1985, with the visit of a  young woman to a snowy European cemetery. There, holding a thick book titled The Grand Budapest Hotel, she pauses at the shrine of the book’s once-famous author. We then flash back to the author’s 1968 visit to the sadly-faded hotel, where he hears the story of its origins from its now-aged current proprietor. This whisks us back to 1932, the heyday of this majestic structure set among Alpine crags and reached by a charming funicular. The 1932 version of the hotel—with its celebrity guests and suave omnipresent concierge (a delightfully debonair  Ralph Fiennes)—looks like a huge pink wedding cake, complete with Roman baths and every other amenity man can devise.

 But nothing can outlast the onward rush of history, and we see for ourselves how manners and mores change over time. World War II of course takes its toll, as do other more personal tragedies, and the glamour of the 1930s gives way to Soviet-style utilitarianism and even further indignities. (We gather that as of 1985 this grand hotel is gone for good.) What makes the film so fascinating is Wes Anderson’s unforgettable flair for non-realistic visuals. The exterior of the hotel as we see it looks very much like an elaborate dollhouse, and the staging of the film’s actors  (many of them celebrated Anderson veterans) emphasizes their unreality too. While  Project Hail Mary makes the far corners of Outer Space look thrillingly real, The Grand Budapest Hotel ensures that all of its people and all of its places look like artifice. Which has a certain undeniable logic. When we think of the past—even just one or two generations back—it often turns into a candy-coated fantasyland. And Wes Anderson is just the writer-director to convert Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Saiorse Ronan, Jeff Goldblum, and Bill Murray (among others) into living paper dolls. Which leaves me wondering: how would Anderson, with his acute visual sense, handle a movie set in outer space?

 

 

Gobbling Up the Ham in “Spamalot”

Lovers of outrageously silly comedy all know about Monty Python. This zany troupe was founded in 1969 by six talented Brits who were all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. The British taste for low humor had previously given birth to The Goon Show (a 1951-1960 radio broadcast that launched the career of Peter Sellers, among others) and Beyond the Fringe (a slightly more satirical revue that gave the world Dudley Moore and three other talented chaps).  The Pythons were formed in 1969, first starring in a BBC sketch comedy that lasted until 1974. Their first movie, And Now For Something Completely Different, was a compilation of comic sketches that hit the big screen in 1971. Next they decided to try on a film that had something of an actual plot. The much-loved English legends of King Arthur seemed ripe for spoofing, and so Monty Python and the Holy Grail was launched (to the sound of coconut shells being clapped together) in 1975.

 The movie was a true Python affair, with members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Erric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin all playing multiple roles. The two Terrys directed a script in which all the Pythons had a hand. The major thread was Arthur and his knights on a grail quest, but there were frequent digressions into silliness of many kinds: a Trojan rabbit that fails spectacularly to transport the knights into a castle; a Black Knight who is determined to keep fighting after all his limbs have been cut off; a Las Vegas-style Camelot; a nonsensical encounter with a band of Knights Who Say "Ni,” and an appearance by God. The film was shot in Scotland (so cheaply that the clapping together of coconut shells was used to replace the on-screen appearance  of actual horse hooves). Despite its low-rent style, The Holy Grail was a huge hit, first in Britain and then among comedy lovers everywhere.

 I bring this up because, back in 1975, the movie gave rise to a stage musical wittily dubbed Spamalot. Python’s Eric Idle had a lot to do with the show’s songs and book, and Mike Nichols was the original Broadway director. Over some 1575 Broadway performances, the show was cheered by more than two million theatregoers and raked in many millions. I saw it years ago, and now it’s back at L.A.’s fabulously art deco Hollywood Pantages Theatre, updated a bit by Idle (there’s quite a funny George Soros joke).

 The fun of the musical is that it combines some of the old familiar moments (like that cranky French sentry) with some satirical exploitation of musical-theatre tropes. The Lady of the Lake belts out sexy songs in a wide range of keys, and the overlong second act has a great deal of fun gently mocking the convention that musical theatre attracts performers who are either Jewish or gay—or maybe both. The song “You Won't Succeed on Broadway” (Without Jews) was a highlight with the Pantages audience, especially when that George Soros gag was worked in. Shortly afterward, attention turned to a gay bridegroom-to-be who successfully outed Sir Lancelot the Brave (as well, I gather, as Sir Robin, the-not-quite-so-brave-as-Sir-Lancelot).

 The show ends with audience participation, including a singalong of a Python classic (from the Jesus satire, The Life of Brian) : “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” At the Pantages, over two thousand playgoers joined in. Given the state of today’s world, looking on the bright side is about the best we can do. A big thank-you to Eric Idle and the Pythons for making it possible.