Climbing The 39 Steps

 The great Alfred Hitchcock directed his first film in 1922. He started in the silent era, and most of his early efforts have been lost. By 1935, when he premiered The 39 Steps, he was no novice, but it would take several more years before he transferred his macabre vision of life from English to Hollywood soundstages.

 I first knew The 39 Steps as a remarkably silly stage production that showed up on Broadway circa 2008 after a successful British run. The hard-working cast of four played all the roles in this espionage thriller, and elaborate scenic effects (like a working railway train) were hilariously worked into the production. But Hitchcock’s original film (loosely based on a 1915 novel) takes itself a bit more seriously. This despite the fact that the mordant Hitchcock wit is very much in evidence.

 One key fact about The 39 Steps is how much it became a template for later Hitchcock masterworks like North by Northwest. It deals with matters of life and death, but for most of the film the tone is relatively light. Except, of course, when a mysterious lady to whom Richard Hannay gives shelter in his London flat ends up dead as a door-nail the next morning, with a knife sticking out of her back. Hannay, played by the dapper Robert Donat, is very much a precursor for Cary Grant and the other actors who’ve played Hitchcock’s “wrong man” roles. Everyone thinks he’s a murderer, which is why he has to flee from London to the Scottish highlands. But in fact he finds himself more and more embroiled in a scheme that’s never entirely clear, though it seems to involve the sending of super-modern aircraft plans to an enemy nation. (The threat of impending war in Europe understandably hangs over the film.) It’s been said that this aircraft can be considered an early Hitchcock McGuffin—this being a Hitchcock-named thingumajig that everyone chases after, thus providing the engine for a film’s plot.  

 Donat, as Richard Hannay, manages to keep things light, even while being chased by everyone under the sun. Eventually there’s a woman—Madeleine Carroll as perhaps the first Hitchcock blonde—who first rebuffs our hero and then, of course, succumbs to his charm, in the course of a priceless scene in which the two (handcuffed together by thugs claiming to be police officers) have to pose as runaway lovers at a Scottish country inn. There are also some wonderful train scenes (Hitchcock clearly adored trains), in which Hannay tries not to attract attention while the  two businessmen in his compartment discuss at length the latest styles in women’s undergarments.

 But it’s not all fun and games. There are additional threats of violence, of course, and also an extraordinarily poignant scene in which Hannay seeks shelter at a farmhouse in the Scottish countryside. His host for the evening is a cranky old coot who will put him up, for a fee, but certainly doesn’t trust him. When Hannay enters the rustic home, he sees an attractive young woman, who turns out to be not the coot’s daughter but his wife. Peggy Ashcroft, in this small but significant role, clearly longs for Hannay and the big-city world he represents. In the wee hours, as his adversaries close in on him, she helps him to escape, giving him her husband’s warm coat . . .  which leads to a clever plot-twist. But the result for her is her husband’s wrath, and a vicious slap we hear though we don’t see it. (Not everything in Hitchcock is a joke.)

 

 

Paradise Lost: “Lord of the Flies”

The British seem to have a special talent for creating TV miniseries. I was awed (as were most Emmy voters) by last year’s Adolescence. So when I heard that Jack Thorne, who had created that show along with Stephen Graham, was behind a new BBC adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, I had to watch.

 Like most in my age group, I read Golding’s 1954 magnum opus when I too was an adolescent. This story of young British boys stranded on a tropical island introduced all of us to the darker side of human nature. Lord of the Flies can be viewed as a canny parable of the fall of civilization. At first the pre-adolescent English boys, survivors of a plane crash that has wiped out their teachers and guardians, seem to have found themselves in a paradise: lush foliage, lots of fruit and fresh water, no obvious danger. But a crisis is brewing: while some of the boys, led by the sturdy and rational Ralph, are ready to accept a sensible form of self-government, others look to the mercurial Jack for leadership. And Jack, drunk on his own power, obliges by dividing the castaways into friends and enemies. Brutality ensues. (If any of this sounds like the current American political scene, I suspect that’s not an accident.)

 There have been films made of Golding’s novel, but I’ve never seen them. I’m also told that Yellowjackets, the recent Showtime miniseries, about a stranded girls’ soccer team, was directly influenced by Golding’s timeless work. What I can say is that the new BBC series, available now on Netflix, is well worth watching. Like Adolescence, it’s presented in four parts, with each episode focusing on one of the central boys. The first features the hapless Piggy who has accepted his lot in life as the butt of everyone’s jokes. Piggy, as his nickname implies, is short, pudgy, and slightly dazed-looking (he wears thick glasses that play an important role in the story). But despite the unfortunate nickname, Piggy is by no means stupid. He’s the most analytic of the boys, and one of the most generous, taking it as his obligation to look after the “littl’uns” who can’t fend for themselves. In subsequent episodes we focus on the increasingly maniacal Jack and on poor, addled Simon, who begins as Jack’s protector but then finds himself increasingly isolated. The final episode is dedicated to Ralph, a natural leader forced into an awkward and even dangerous position. Who eventually gets off the island? That’s not for me to say.

 This Lord of the Flies was filmed on location in Malaysia, and the beauty of the surroundings plays an important role in the drama. One of its most arresting elements—the fact that trees and other foliage sometimes take on eerie shades of red—turns out to be explained by practical considerations. Because of rules designed to protect child performers, there could be no filming after dark. So cameras were sometimes outfitted with infrared filters for day-for-night shooting. The result was a phantasmagoric color palette well suited to such a nightmarish tale, in which reality and fantasy become inevitably fused.

 A behind-the-scenes video suggests that the children in this cast—most of them new to professional filmmaking—came through their on-camera ordeal with their values intact. (Phew!) But it’s striking that the one cast member with a Wikipedia entry is Lox  Pratt, who will follow up his creepy performance as Jack by playing Draco Malfoy, boy bully, in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series. Clearly it pays to be evil. 

 

Biography at the Movies

I’ll soon be taking a bite of the Big Apple. The occasion is the annual conference of Biographers International Organization, a group that came into being to serve the needs of both active biographers and those interested in the field of biography. Since 2010 there have been (in addition to regular newsletters and Zoom events) annual BIO conferences, mostly in New York City but sometimes in outposts like Boston, DC, Richmond, and even Los Angeles. Some attendees merely want advice on telling family stories; others are experienced writers and even recipients of major awards. My BIO pal Amanda Vaill just won this year’s Pulitzer for Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution.

 I don’t know if there’s any hope of Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler showing up at the movies anytime soon. (The fact that they’re both major figures in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton might surely get producer-types interested.) But I do know there’s a long tradition of concocting films about famous historical figures. Decades ago, it was considered acceptable to wrestle the biographical facts about a celebrity —whether a composer, a scientist, or a politician—to conform to Hollywood’s idea of an inspiring life story. Now I’d like to think we’re trying harder to be true to actual reality. But in any case, actors love portraying great figures of the past. If you look at lists of Oscar-winning performances, you’ll note there’s a lot of Academy love for stars able to get under the skin of the real people who helped create our world. See, in this century alone, Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill (Darkest Hour), Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything), Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln), Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote (Capote), and Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles (Ray).

 This enthusiasm for biographical films has paid major dividends for members of BIO. And several  I know personally have been thrilled by the care with which the motion picture industry has transmitted their work to the screen. BIO stalwart Kai Bird is probably still basking in the glow of Oppenheimer, the 2023 Oscar winner based on his and Martin J. Sherwin’s deeply researched American Prometheus. Jack El-Hai was pleased with last year’s Nuremberg, which developed out of his gripping historical study, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. When a BIO honoree, Candace Millard, published a 2011 historical work called Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, I  doubt she thought Hollywood would come calling. But someone at Netflix got involved, resulting in last year’s fascinating four-part miniseries, Death by Lightning, in which we follow the tragic trajectory of a nineteenth-century U.S. president, James A. Garfield, and his soon-to-be assassin, Charles J. Guiteau. This four-part series is too new to have come up for Emmy consideration, but many other awards-giving bodies have recognized the show’s excellence, with particular attention paid to lead actors Michael Shannon (as the appealingly idealistic Garfield) and Matthew Macfadyen (as the maddening and probably mad Guiteau).

 There is one honor that Death by Lightning has already won. Each spring, since 1988, the scholars behind the USC Scripter Awards have chosen the year’s best film adaptation of a work in print. Uniquely, at an awards ceremony held not long before Oscar night, both the screenwriter and the author of the original published work gain recognition  In 2016, USC added an award for episodic television series, and so Millard was in the winner’s circle when the TV Scripter went to her as well as to screenwriter Mike Makowsky. Bravo to them both.   

 

The joys and the sadness of youth: “Stand by Me”

These days I suspect Stand By Me is best known as a song, one of those ageless ballads with which almost everyone can connect. It’s a paean to loyalty and friendship, which of course makes it perfect for campfire singalongs. It was recorded in 1961 by Ben E. King, who co-wrote it along with the invaluable popsters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. When I hear “Stand by Me,” it puts me in a mellow mood, remembering back to memories—both happy and sad—of my own past.

 Today it also revives in me bittersweet memories of the late director Rob Reiner, for whom this was an early film project, just after This is Spinal Tap (1984) and just before The Princess Bride (1987). Based on a novella by horrormeister Stephen King, Stand by Me recounts the story of four young small-town pals who set out on a trek to see a dead body. (Their town, Castle Rock, would become the name of Reiner's own production company.

 The four leads were played by talented young actors just coming into their own. In the story, they are pals largely because all of them suffer from various forms of trauma. Sensitive Gordie (Wil Wheaton) is mourning the loss of his older brother, his parents’ favorite, in an accident. Chris (River Phoenix) is used to having his natural intelligence and leadership qualities overlooked because he comes from a family of scofflaws and ne’er-do-wells. Teddy (Corey Feldman) is the oddball son of an Army vet with serious mental issues. Vern (Jerry O’Connell) is a good kid, but the doofus of the group. Most of the film details their overnight trek to locate the body of a missing classmate who apparently was hit by a train. They figure that if they announce to the world where the body can be found, they will be accepted as heroes.

 What they aren’t counting on is the gang of roving teens, led by the always scary Kiefer Sutherland, who have their own dibs on the body. Sutherland and his cronies are just one of the jeopardies the four pals need to face down. There are leeches in the local stream, and very real danger from an oncoming locomotive. The four are also grappling with impending maturity and their own challenging pasts. What happens to them in the long run is established by the film’s narrator (Richard Dreyfuss) who opens and closes Stand by Me. Once one of the four, he’s now an established writer retelling his own story.  

 One of the things that makes Stand by Me fascinating to today’s viewers is the real-life fate of those involved. Kiefer Stuherland, of course, has had a rich acting career that rivals the success once enjoyed by his late father, Donald. Richard Dreyfuss has starred in blockbusters (yes, Jaws!) and won an Oscar for The Goodbye Girl. John Cusack, who plays Gordie’s older brother in some brief flashbacks, became beloved for his romantic turn in Say Anything.

 For the film’s four main boys, career success has been a sometime thing. Jerry O’Connell has had a long career but few standout roles. Wil Wheaton now mostly limits himself to voiceover work. The irrepressible Corey Feldman still performs, at 54, but has struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. River Phoenix, a 1988 Oscar nominee for Running on Empty, died of a drug overdose in 1993, at age 23. 

 And of course Rob Reiner himself died on December 14, 2025 when he and wife Michele were allegedly stabbed to death by their son Nick. Life can sometimes be very, very sad.

 

 

 

Fame—I’m Gonna Live Forever (“The Assassination of Jesse James . . . “)

The Western has never been my favorite film genre. Personally speaking, I‘m not much enthralled by horses and guns. But when one of my screenwriting students (someone whose tastes run from science-fiction to Pixar) called The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford his number-one film of all time, my curiosity was roused.

 What I discovered is that this 2007 film, written and directed by an Aussie named Andrew Dominik, has not had an easy history. After first, things seemed to be going well.  Based on a 1973 novel,  the project attracted the attention of Brad Pitt, who served as a producer along with Ridley Scott and others, while also taking on the Jesse James part.. Casey Affleck was cast in the essential role of Robert Ford, known to history as James’ killer. Others in the cast included the noted character actors Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, and Jeremy Renner, along with Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel.  (Fun fact: political maven James Carville is briefly visible as the Governor of Missouri.)  The great Roger Deakins worked his magic as the film’s cinematographer, making the wintery Old West (played in the movie by the Canadian outback) look gorgeous indeed, while evoking a grim sense of foreboding. 

 But the money men in Hollywood wanted a film with less brooding and more action; they were not about to accept a director’s cut that lasted more than three hours. When the film finally surfaced, critics were impressed, but audiences were largely not. Though there were Oscar nominations for Affleck’s performance and Deakins’ camera work, the movie was a bomb at the box office.

 I’m not sure how the DVD I watched compares to the theatrical version. Yes, the film is long (160 minutes) and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all the complex relationships within Jesse James’ criminal band, but I was never in the least bored. One of the film’s glories is its complex characterizations, exploring men who are both violent and gentle, cocky and self-loathing, greedy and generous. The focus is on the period in which James is a national figure known for daring exploits that include train robbery and lots of killings. At times he seems a happy man, enjoying a loving family and the adulation of young admirers. Elsewhere, he appears to be restless and almost suicidal. As for the nineteen-year-old Robert (“Bob”) Ford, he is awed by James’ exploits and thrilled by the opportunity to be part of the gang surrounding his hero. That is, until he decides, for several complex reasons, to kill the great man. (Ford’s emotional state can’t help reminding me of Mark David Chapman, whose hero-worship of John Lennon led to Lennon’s shocking 1980 murder.) 

 In the film, the killing of Jesse James itself sparked all sort of questions in me. Ford’s actions are ambiguous enough that it’s not even entirely clear that he’s the successful shooter. (I watched that scene twice, and I’m still not sure exactly what happened.)  What is definitely clear is that even in death Jesse James had far more power than Robert Ford. His dead body was photographed, and copies sold to eager purchasers all over the country. After which, on a bed of ice, his corpse was shipped out for public display to a fascinated (and ticket-buying) public. Meanwhile, looking for their own slice of the pie, Bob Ford and older brother Charles (Rockwell) booked themselves into theatres where they clumsily re-enacted the shooting, in front of audiences that refused to be impressed. Both brothers ultimately reached bad ends, drawing no attention whatever from the fickle public.  

 

The Philadelphia (and Newport, Rhode Island) Story

High Society (1956) promises fun at the movies. And it delivers. This spritely screwball musical stars Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, both of whose characters are at least somewhat in love with an elegant heiress, Tracy Lord, played by the blonde and beautiful Grace Kelly. This was to be Kelly’s very last movie role before she married a real-life Prince Charming and became Princess Grace of Monaco. Rounding out the cast are the acerbic Celeste Holm and the delightfully ebullient Louis Armstrong. The setting is ritzy Newport, Rhode Island, where the central characters live in posh mansions, surrounded by fawning retainers.  

 Armstrong’s presence is explained by the fact that there’s a jazz festival in the vicinity. He acts as a kind of narrator to open and close the film; he also memorably duets with Crosby on the up-tempo "Now You Has Jazz.” In this story, Crosby plays  C. K. Dexter Haven, a well-heeled singer/composer who is Tracy Lord’s neighbor, as well as her former husband. Though they were once deeply attached, and shared a romantic honeymoon aboard a yacht called the “True Love,” affection has turned to loathing (on Tracy’s part, at least), followed by an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy is on the brink of marrying a staid businessman, and Dex wanders over to observe the hubbub. You see, C. K. Dexter Haven has (in his relaxed way) never quite gotten over Tracy, and he’s hanging around to check on what his former wife is up to.

 Also in residence on the wedding weekend are a magazine journalist (Sinatra) and his photographer sidekick (Holm), determined to get a scoop on this big society event. Everything goes haywire on the night before the nuptials, when Tracy gets drunk and Sinatra’s character gallantly comes to her rescue.

 The Cole Porter ditties (including the romantic hit, “True Love” and a nifty Crosby/Sinatra duet) are appealing, and there are no false notes among the performers. Still, seeing High Society again after many years, I became convinced that there was a better version of this tale to be found. And so, of course, there is. Back in 1940, the great George Cukor directed The Philadelphia Story, based on a Philip Barry stage hit that starred Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn’s Hollywood career had recently been foundering, and so she bought the play’s film rights in order to reintroduce herself to the moviegoing public. It worked magnificently well, especially since Cukor invited two of the era’s brightest male stars, Cary Grant and James Stewart, to play the main men in her life., If Hoboken’s rough-and-tumble Frank Sinatra is amusing when he romances the soignée Grace Kelly in and around her estate’s swimming pool, imagine how much funnier it is when aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart pitches woo to the imperious Hepburn. And of course Cary Grant is Cary Grant, effortlessly suave and just the fellow to tame this particular shrew. What we love about Katharine Hepburn is how wonderfully she plays a woman who is absolutely wrong about pretty much everything. Seeing her get her comeuppance is a delight for those of us who admire strong women but also place great stock in happily-ever-after.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, insisted that the very rich “are different from you and me.” To which his pal Ernest Hemingway wryly reposted, “Yes, they have more money.” Movie fans, particularly in the years coming out of the Great Depression, preferred to think that—despite all their riches—the wealthy could be as foolish as those of us with emptier pockets. The Philadelphia Story certainly proves this is so.   

 

Carlos Castaneda: Tricking the Reader and the Filmmaker

When I attended college, Carlos Castaneda was a very big deal indeed. As a student of anthropology at my very own school, UCLA, Castaneda had published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. This 1968 book, which earned a tidy fortune for the University of California Press, was billed as a work of non-fiction, in which a budding anthropologist travels to Mexico and encounters a shaman who instructs him in how to unlock the secrets of the universe. Anyone with a mystical bent (and there were lots of those people around in the Sixties) quickly climbed onto the Castenada bandwagon. Before leaving this mortal sphere in 1998—apparently from cancer, though this was not publicly acknowledged—he published abut ten books and accumulated a large and very loyal group of followers. Some of them disappeared at the time of his demise and were never seen again.

 From the beginning, some scholars doubted the veracity of Castaneda’s claims, though the power of his storytelling was never disputed. As time passed, there was an increasing sense that his works were pure fiction—and that some of his most dramatic anecdotes were plagiarized from a variety of sources. For decades, novelist Ru Marshall has been working on a Castaneda biography with a goal of sorting out the truth of Castaneda’s eventful life. One of my favorite groups, Biographers International Organization, granted Marshall the Hazel Rowley Prize for this ambitious biography-in-progress. It’s out now, under the title American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. Early reviews have been stellar: Publishers Weekly has praised Marshall for combining “a colorful account of Castaneda’s sly triumphs with shrewd analysis of the toxic psychodramas by which he overawed his followers. . . . In the portrait that emerges, Castaneda appears as captivating as Don Juan himself—a principal architect, for all his chicanery, of modern pop spirituality. This enthralls."

 Marshall was kind enough to send me an advance copy of American Trickster, partly because we’d both had a regrettable history with the University of California Press and partly because of my film background. It seems Castaneda had a lifelong passion for movies, particularly vampire and sci-fi flicks like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Quite surprisingly, he chose Rosemary’s Baby as the first film he ever screened for his five-year-old adopted son. He also relished chop-socky epics, with Jackie Chan and the films of John Woo being particular favorites. Hollywood, in turn, combed his writings for inspiration. George Lucas, for one, borrowed for Star Wars some of the father/son and mentor/acolyte dynamic revealed in Castaneda’s books  

 One of the most striking chapters in American Trickster involves the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, whose most celebrated works (like La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and 81/2) appeared before 1970. By the 1980s, Fellini became obsessed with the idea of filming Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan. He finally made contact with the author in 1984, and there evolved a plan to meet in the Sonoran desert for a close encounter with the shaman himself. But after elaborate preparation, a series of mysterious warning messages scared off Fellini and his growing entourage. The film was never made.

 Regarding Fellini, whom he calls “the master fantasist,” Marshall admits “some have speculated that he was the one behind the mysterious calls, the strange messages. But all the evidence points toward Carlos.”  Marshall’s conviction is that the warnings and weird demands received by Fellini and company were dreamed up by Carlos the trickster, who had no intention of allowing his most famous book to be filmed by anyone at all.