Besson’s Fifth

Until recently, I was not aware of a Luc Besson sci-fi epic called The Fifth Element. Then, while listening to a local radio quiz program, I heard this flick enthusiastically mentioned. The premise of Go Fact Yourself is that each contestant chooses several areas of expertise, then is quizzed in detail about one of them. A recent contestant selected this film, praising it for getting her family through the stay-at-home months of the pandemic. Though science fiction is hardly my favorite genre, her passion for The Fifth Element got me interested. And I become even more so when a youngish friend admitted to having seen the film, during his growing-up years, at least six times.

 Besson, French-born, earned his spurs in the film industry via action hits like 1990’s La Femme Nikita. He released the (mostly) English-language The Fifth Element in 1997, using primarily American and British actors. Obviously it has attracted serious fans, but many critics were not impressed. In Variety, Todd McCarthy called it “a largely misfired European attempt to make an American-style sci-fi spectacular.” David Edelstein of Slate was even more emphatic: “"It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged."^[

 Well, yes. With its comic-book sensibility, The Fifth Element may be wonderful to look at, but don’t expect it to make any sense. There are deeply mysterious scenes set (à la the Indiana Jones adventures) in a remote desert cavern, as well as glimpses of 23^rd century New York City, where taxicabs fly through the air, dodging gigantic office towers. In the middle of all of this is the effortlessly macho Bruce Willis as a sadsack cab driver who used to be a major in Earth’s Special Forces. Also on hand is the always interesting Gary Oldman as the sinister industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.  Despite his very French given name, he speaks with a hushpuppies-and-magnolias accent, like that of Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out, leaving me to wonder if distinguished British actors have a thing for the Deep South. Ian Holm is around as an enigmatic priest, as is Chris Tucker as an ultra-flamboyant talk show host.

 And we can hardly forget the Ukraine-born Milla Jovovich, playing a sort of outer-space creation who speaks no earthly language and wears very few clothes. She is, I’ve got to say, exactly the sort of symbolic extraterrestrial that a teenage boy might invent. Which makes sense, because Besson apparently dreamed up this entire story at age sixteen, although he had to wait twenty-two years to put it on  the big screen. The few females who populate the film—playing mostly flight attendants and MacDonalds employees—barely speak, but they have fabulous bodies set off by suggestively revealing costumes. (There’s only one woman with any real clout, and she’s a “big bruiser” type archly named Major Iceborg.)

 The Fifth Element is a great movie to watch on a widescreen TV in the wee hours. The plot hardly matters, verbal wit is rare, and if you drift off to sleep you basically won’t miss much. Suffice it to say that in this film the world is on the brink of disaster, but it all ends as happily as you would expect, with Willis and Jovovich pairing up to lead the heroics. Just exactly what a sixteen-year-old boy would want.

.Speaking of which, this is the second film I’ve recently seen in which the director ended up canoodling with the leading lady in real life. Which perhaps tells you something about directors.

 

“ANNE HATHAWAY IS ON BROADWAY”: The Overlap of Stage and Screen

Is Anne Hathaway, the Oscar-winning star of such beloved films as The Devil Wears Prada, really appearing in a current Broadway show? Well, not exactly. But this is the eye-catching headline on the back cover of a recent Playbill. It’s a clever ad campaign for a Broadway pop musical, & Juliet, in which Shakespeare’s much-neglected wife—also named Anne Hathaway—plays a featured role. The joke works because most theatregoers are also movie enthusiasts. And there’s frequent overlap between the two industries, as screen stars try on major Broadway roles, and the stage’s most beloved performers hope to immortalize their talents on film.

 Once upon a time, hit Broadway shows quickly wended their way to Hollywood. There they became even bigger hits because—by transferring their essence from stage to screen—they could draw upon much bigger audiences. Musicals enjoyed perhaps the biggest advantage from this stage-to-screen metamorphosis, partly because they could transport the viewer visually to a spectacular new place. Just think about the difference between The Sound of Music as play and film. I happen to be genuinely sorry that the Robert Wise/Julie Andrews movie adaptation of the Rogers and Hammerstein hit cut two important satirical songs that examine the Austrian mindset under the rise of Nazi ideology. Still, no stage version can possibly live up to the breathtaking grandeur of the Austrian Alps, as seen in the 1965 film. It of course was shot on location, all the better to show off the hills that are so fully alive in the hearts of our central characters.

 These days, though, a curious reversal is taking place. Original Broadway musicals are largely being supplanted by shows that have already proven their box-office potential by being based on hit films. (The idea, I suppose, is to add music, then stir.)  One of this year’s four Tony nominees for Best Original Musical was The Lost Boys, a musicalization of a kinky little 1987 film about young vampires on the prowl in Santa Cruz, California. On my recent trip to the Big Apple, I could not afford a pricey ticket for that apparent extravaganza. But I did manage to drop in on Death Becomes Her, now moving toward the end of a two-year run. The original Hollywood black comedy, about a magic potion that keeps vain women forever young and beautiful, was directed by Robert Zemeckis and headlined by Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Bruce Willis, and Isabella Rossellini, It was a macabre triumph, thanks to its star power and some colorful special effects. And how was the stage musical? My fellow audience members seemed to love it, and it landed seven Tony nominations, including two for stars Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard. To be sure, it took home only one statuette, richly deserved, for its wildly imaginative costumes. But I found the music forgettable and the cast mostly trying much too hard to amuse us with their audacity. It seemed, in short, something of a spoof of a spoof. My advice: stick to the movie.

 One curious sidenote: Flower Drum Song, one of Rogers and Hammerstein’s lesser hits, opened on Broadway in 1958, and was filmed three years later. Boasting an all-Asian cast, it is set in San Francisco’s Chinatown where different generations struggle to reconcile their ancient traditions and modern American ways. Long regarded as potentially offensive, the show’s book has always seemed in need of a rewrite. Now it has one, by Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang, and it was a joy for me to see this charming musical (staged by L.A.’s East West Players) on stage once again. 

 

“Life Without Reservations”: Carlyn Frank Benjamin and the Ambassador Hotel

Yes, I remember the Ambassador Hotel, the noble L.A. edifice that dominated 24 acres just off Wilshire Boulevard from 1921 to 1989. I was there at least twice. When I graduated from junior high school, some of the more adventurous fourteen-year-olds took their dates to watch Louie Prima and Keely Smith sing and swing at the world-famous Cocoanut Grove supper-club. Then, in June of 1968, my parents and I thought it would be fun to drop in on Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign headquarters, just after he’d won big in the California presidential primary. The world knows what happened that night. RFK’s assassination has tainted our memories of the Ambassador ever since. It doubtless contributed to the hotel’s demise, and its ultimate replacement by a large public community school dedicated to Kennedy’s memory.

 A young girl named Carlyn Frank was hardly a casual visitor to the hotel. During perhaps its most glorious era, from 1921 to 1938, she lived on the premises while first her grandfather and then her father served as general manager. Her home from babyhood to age 17 was an idyllic bungalow, dubbed Rincon, that stood on the hotel grounds. (Doting hotel staff constructed a child-sized playhouse, so she and her sister could make cocoa in a tiny kitchen.) For 17 years young Carlyn explored every nook and cranny of the glamorous hotel, much as the legendary Eloise roved New York’s Plaza Hotel in the picture books of Kay Thompson.

 Carlyn’s Ambassador years marked the era when Los Angeles came into its own as the home of the American film industry.  The Ambassador was adjacent, after all, to the original Brown Derby restaurant, and located not far from major studios like Paramount. And so the hotel cultivated a glamorous image, one that attracted both Hollywood legends and wannabes. Carlyn’s father, Ben Frank, brought to the Ambassador such innovations as a zoo, a pitch-and-putt golf course, and an actual sand beach next to the swimming pool. Both he and her grandfather, Abe Frank, also loved staging special events that attracted the starstruck. One of Abe’s innovation at the Cocoanut Grove was the weekly Star Night, for which an onsite artisan crafted wax dolls closely modeled on the features of the female celebrity being honored. The beautifully dressed and coiffed dolls adorned every table, and each went home at evening’s end with a lucky guest.

 I know all this because, as an adult, Carlyn Frank Benjamin began writing a memoir, Life Without Reservations, that covered (along with her own growing-up years) the Ambassador and its legendary guests. These included in the early days Marion Davies, who rode a horse through the lobby, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who set her wardrobe on fire after a jealous row with Scott. Carlyn was too young to remember such antics, but did meet Charles Lindbergh, watched Olympic champions train in the hotel pool, and frequently (while eating her own lunch) glimpsed a hungover Bing Crosby munching a turkey sandwich in the hotel coffee shop. The memoir was left behind when Benjamin passed away in 2017; she considered it incomplete, but it also chronicled her adult life as the wife of a famous Hollywood talent agent who brought celebrities like Laurence Olivier into their Brentwood home for casual fun and games. Daughter Lisa Benjamin Gilmour has fulfilled a promise to finish the book, adding scores of vintage photos and her own memories of her vibrant and civic-minded mom. Life Without Reservations: Growing Up at the Famed Ambassador Hotel 1921-1938 is a fascinating record of a time and place that now seem far, far away.

 The book’s photo-rich website is www.lifewithoutreservations.net, and of course it’s available through Amazon.

 

 

“No People Like Show People”: The 2026 Tony Awards

Like most people with Hollywood ties, I love theatre. Since I’ve been old enough to sit through a full-length play, I’ve always adored that moment with the stage curtain opens and the magic begins, right before my eyes. That’s why I’ve always had mixed emotions about the televised Antoinette Perry Awards, which for 79 years have been saluting the best that Broadway has to offer. It fascinates me that this elaborate broadcast, traditionally staged at the legendary Radio City Music Hall, takes pains to invite hosts and presenters whose credentials are more screen than stage. This year’s host, the pop singer Pink, was hardly an exception. She candidly admitted that she herself has never trod the Broadway boards, although one of her songs does show up in the jukebox musical & Juliet. Pink’s hosting skills during the Tonys were certainly acceptable—she modeled elaborate costumes and performed a fancy high-wire stunt emulating the famous Mary Martin version of Peter Pan—but she brought to the evening nothing truly special.  

 It wasn’t just presenters (like Billy Crystal and Paul Rudd) who seemed to need Hollywood cred to be noticed. TV cameras consistently picked out such audience members as Annette Bening for close-ups. But of greatest concern is the fact that the majority of the nominees for Best New Musical were derived from screen hits. Musicals used to be the lifeblood of Broadway theatre, drawing in visitors eager to tap their toes to original showtunes. These days, though, most musicals make it to Broadway because they have had a previous incarnation as a cinematic hit. That’s the case with the much-nominated The Lost Boys, the present-day vampire story that ended up with four Tonys, notably for a spectacular set design. The winner in this year’s Best New Musical category turned out to be Schmigadoon!, a wacky parody of traditional musicals that owes much of its plotting to (of course) Lerner & Loewe’s  Brigadoon, in which two modern travelers stumble upon a village that time forgot. (From what I could see of the featured number on the Tony broadcast, Schmigadoon! can also claim Meredith Willson’s beloved The Music Man as an important musical inspiration.) Claiming her statuette, one of Schmigmadoon’s Broadway producers explicitly thanked Apple TV+, which had introduced the parody-musical as a wacky series back in 2021. It played on Apple TV+ for two years, accruing many fans. But a potential third season was cancelled, allowing the show’s creators to head for Broadway and the evening’s most hyped award.

 In the Best New Musical category, a third candidate was Titanique, not a stage version of James Cameron’s megahit film, Titanic, but rather an outrageous spoof of it, in which the familiar songs of Celine Dion are featured and Dion herself becomes a participant in the action. In the course of a peripatetic history, Titanique first surfaced in Los Angeles, then crossed the country for a successful Off-Broadway run before sailing on to the West End and finally Broadway. But it sank, alas, at the Tonys. The fourth and final Best New Musical contender was a modest original—thank goodness!—with the intriguing title Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York).  It features a mere two actors and (for a change) brand-new music by a British writing team.

 I should also mention that the current Broadway season is big on outrageously kinky role-playing: see the revival of The Rocky Horror Show (best known for its midnight-movie version) and a drag-friendly updating of Cats subtitled The Jellicle Ball. To me, all this makes the folksy Schmigadoon! sound better and better.

 

Shooting Off My Mouth About “Young Guns”

Recently I’ve been catching up on classic films about young men in trouble. Perhaps I’ve been inspired by the spectacular new TV production of Lord of the Flies. In any case, I’ve now seen  Stand by Me (1985), River’s Edge (1986), and The Lost Boys (1987), the last of which has just become a Broadway musical hit.  Each of these flicks features young and mostly white males who are still children—or barely out of childhood—cut off from the adults in their lives and learning to cope with their world on the most violent terms.

  In 1988 along came Young Guns, which is often rather sneeringly referred to as a Brat Pack western. The designation of course refers mostly to a cluster of young actors (among them Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, and Demi Moore) who starred in the teen angst movies written and directed by John Hughes in this era. The young actors reportedly hated the “brat pack” designation, which came out of David Blum’s 1985 story in New York magazine in the wake of Hughes’ St. Elmo’s Fire. Emilio Estevez, who had figured prominently in the Blum piece, is the central figure in Young Guns, playing an embellished version of the Old West’s William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.

 To be honest, this is not a story that can easily be tracked. But it apparently takes off from actual historic events: a young Englishman named John Tunstall came to Santa Fe in 1876 to get into the cattle business. His success as a rancher and store-owner put him at odds with local interests, and he was eventually murdered. In the film Tunstall (played by the always interesting Terence Stamp) is an older man, serving as a father figure to a number of wayward teenagers who work for him and are tutored by him in reading and social graces. After his sudden death, they dub themselves The Regulators, and are briefly deputized to take down his killers. But corrupt forces in the vicinity soon have them on the run.

 Estevez’s film role as Billy the Kid is the most interesting: he’s smart, brash, and always itching for a fight. Also memorable is Kiefer Sutherland, who—though scary indeed in Stand by Me and The Lost Boys—here plays a character with a sentimental side. (As “Doc,” he’s a gunslinger who’s also a would-be poet. Eventually he rescues a pretty Chinese concubine who’s being kept in thrall by the evil Jack Palance. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.) Smaller roles are filled by Estevez’s real-life brother Charlie Sheen, by Lou Diamond Phillips (as the all-purpose Native American in the gang), by Dermot Mulroney as the slob of the group, and by Casey Siemaszko as a love-sick gang member who makes some unfortunate choices. Some veteran actors, including Brian Keith, Terry O’Quinn, and Patrick Wayne (yes, he’s John’s son), also have key roles in the proceedings.

 As action movies go, this one has much to recommend it. There are a lot of horses, a lot of bad guys, and a lot of blood to be shed in picturesque outdoor surroundings. The climactic siege of a house to which Billy and the gang have been lured contains some dramatic moments, though it doesn’t fully match up with the actual historical episode. I was rather taken, in fact, by the filming of this episode: the up-close and slo-mo camera work here serves, I’m convinced, to glamorize violence, and to make us eager for more. Which is why there was a lucrative 1990 sequel, and talk of other sequels to come.  

 

 

Skirting the River’s Edge

At first I had River’s Edge confused with The Lost Boys, which came out a year later, in 1987. Both are set in California towns with a great deal of wild scenic beauty. (River’s Edge was shot in the Sacramento area, while The Lost Boys famously takes place in Santa Cruz, renamed Santa Carla for filming purposes.) Both involve packs of wild young men (and a few young women) who decisively turn their backs on conventional middle-class morality.  Both showcase fractured family units, and give juicy oldster roles to Hollywood veterans (Dennis Hopper, Barnard Hughes) while also featuring attractive young newcomers (Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland). Both contain material that can surely be considered disturbing. Both were shot on low budgets, but made a fair amount of money at the box office.

 One big difference, though: The Lost Boys (now a musical hit on Broadway) is about vampires. The film’s supernatural element, along with some particularly eccentric characters—like the vampire-hunting Frog brothers—ensure that audiences will chuckle as well as shiver.  In River’s Edge, though, there’s no such release from the film’s built-up tension. It opens with an androgynous looking pre-teen flinging a doll into a river. (It turns out he’s figured out a great way to torment his little sister.) From there we move to another spot at the river’s edge, where a young man stands shell-shocked over the naked corpse of the co-ed he’s just strangled to death, because (as he later explained) she was talking shit.  

Though the film’s main characters are mostly male, their treatment of girls and women is central to the story. Some, like the hyperkinetic Layne (Glover) seem to have no use at all for the female of the species. Layne is overtly excited by the killing, and takes it as his mission to protect the killer. The physically and mentally wounded druggie played by Hopper cherishes a life-sized sex doll who eerily resembles the dead girl. Reeves’ character, Matt, is the only central male figure who makes a choice to do the right thing, though this leads to him being harassed—and accused of participating in the crime—by a particularly nasty local cop.

 Authority figures in River’s Edge don’t come off much better than the young. There’s that malicious cop, first of all, who is clearly a bully and a sadist. A youngish high school social studies teacher thinks he’s reaching his young charges by romanticizing the political activism of the Sixties, but he doesn’t have a clue as to what they’re thinking.  Most of the film’s young men don’t seem to have intact families, or any families at all. Matt’s mother, Madeleine, is an attractive nurse who does show some concern about the welfare of her brood, but she’s also shacking up with an idler who clearly thinks the kids are a nuisance. Madeleine, like the other parents we see, can merely helplessly shrug her shoulders when her youngsters stay out till all hours, or fail to come home at all.

 Reeves’ Matt, as the one young man with something of a conscience, is rewarded by the opportunity to hook up with the prettiest of the gang’s gal pals, played by Ione Skye. (This was her first film, and—as the daughter of the singer Donovan—she was still using her surname, Leitch, in her billing. It would be two years before she became everyone’s dream girl in Say Anything.) But even the nicest of the young people in this film are not so very nice. If you like your films dark, this one’s for you!

 

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.)