High Anxiety: Mid-Level Mel Brooks

What would we do without Mel Brooks? He’s been the comic genius behind TV (Get Smart) and recordings (2000 Year Old Man), but I associate him mostly with movies, as a writer, a director, and sometimes a star. His first directorial outing was in 1967, as writer/director of The Producers, which introduced the world to the outrageous combination of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, as well as to the most hilariously tasteless production number of all times, “Springtime for Hitler.” I suspect that if you watch the film you’ll agree it runs out of steam midway though, but Brooks would later enlarge it into a Broadway musical blockbuster.

 I’m fond of The Twelve Chairs, Brooks’ off-the-wall 1970 look at Tsarist Russia. (I’ve adopted its original song, “Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst,” as my own personal philosophy of life.) But Brooks’ greatest year was arguably 1974, when he introduced not one but two comedic masterworks, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Both showcase Brooks’ talent for parody, his success at spoofing familiar genres like the Western and the classic monster flick. Next came the considerably more effortful Silent Movie, featuring Brooks favorites Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise, along with a cast of Hollywood stars in cameo roles. In 1977 it was back to a genre spoof: Brooks’ High Anxiety (despite its title’s witty nod to High Society) is dedicated to poking fun at the suspense classics of shockmeister Alfred Hitchcock. Many critics have noted that Hitchcock’s films are themselves frequently tongue-in-cheek, and don’t need to be parodied. Still, there’s fun to be had in seeing how many Hitchcock references you can spot.

 First of all, the jaundiced look at the whole field of psychiatry reminds us of Hitchcock’s 1945 Spellbound. Here Brooks himself plays an eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Thorndyke, who has flown out to California to lead the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous,  a place that is clearly not as salubrious as it seems. (Thorndyke’s name is an immediate reminder of Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in  North by Northwest.) Despite his sterling reputation, Thorndyke is suffering from a Brooksian psychological ailment called “high anxiety,” which seems a cross between vertigo and acrophobia. He is not helped by the institute’s location, high above the rocky shoals of the Pacific, and his troubles are compounded when he’s victimized by a flock of pooping pigeons, à la Hitchcock’s The Birds.

 Things go from bad to worse when Thorndyke attends a conference in San Francisco, where he’s housed on the 14^th floor of the brand-new Hyatt Regency. This real locale was famous in its day for being built around an enormous atrium that would make almost anyone dizzy if she were on the top floor looking down. Of course there’s a beautiful, mysterious Hitchcock blonde (Madeline Kahn) who needs his help, leading to the film’s single most hilarious scene: when they sneak a gun past airport security by posing as the world’s most annoying traveling couple. Predictably the film’s climax is staged as an homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with Dr. Thorndyke forced to pursue the bad guys up the high twisted staircase of the institute’s bell tower. Of course villains like Cloris Leachman and Harvey Korman get their comeuppance, and everyone else lives happily ever after.  Kudos to the 1940s-style black & white cinematography and the surreal elements borrowed from Salvador Dali’s Spellbound dream sequence.

 I’m told Hitchcock himself was mightily amused. He reportedly sent Brooks a case of six magnums of fine wine with a note that read, "A small token of my pleasure, have no anxiety about this."

 A very happy 98th birthday to the 2,000-Year-Old Man! 

 

 

 

An Ode to the Elastic, Electric Donald Sutherland

I first knowingly encountered the late Donald Sutherland in 1968, in an odd little British film called Joanna. Then and now, I’ve been unsure if Joanna was intended as an ode to Swinging London (the miniskirts! the casual sex!) or a morality tale or a spoof. It did have a very pretty leading lady, a score by Sixties fave Rod McKuen, and several hunky young men. It also had Sutherland as the wealthy but terminally ill Lord Peter Sanderson, who hosts Joanna and her groovy friends at his sumptuous home in Morocco. When he came on screen, I thought I had never seen such a weird-looking person. There was a fey quality to him that had me completely baffled: was there some sort of comment being made about his sexuality? I didn’t know, but I didn’t much care. Joanna was a movie that didn’t invite hard thinking.

 It took a while to realize I’d seen Sutherland a year earlier in a vastly different role, that of a not-too-bright Southerner named Vernon Pinkley who hilariously steps in to impersonate a general in a World War II action drama, The Dirty Dozen. That was the thing about Sutherland: you couldn’t pin him down. Even his nationality seemed flexible: the Canada-born Sutherland played British and American roles with equal conviction.

 It was in 1970 that Sutherland had his big Hollywood breakthrough. Though for fans of the long-running TV series, Alan Alda will always be the REAL star of M*A*S*H, Robert Altman’s original film starred Sutherland as Hawkeye Pierce. He and Elliott Gould as best buddy Trapper John McIntyre found stardom as two young battlefield surgeons who cope with the horrors of the Korean War by way of outrageous antics. One year later he played the title role in Klute, a neo-noir thriller best remembered for Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning role as a prostitute being stalked by a killer. Sutherland’s role is that of a detective who becomes Fonda’s protector and then her lover. The powerful connection between Fonda and Sutherland,  which allegedly spilled over into their personal lives, led to Sutherland’s deep involvement in Fonda’s crusade against the Vietnam War.

 Another intensely dramatic role for Sutherland was opposite Julie Christie in 1973’s psychological thriller, Don’t Look Now. The eerie Venice-set drama, brilliantly directed by Nicolas Roeg, focuses on young parents trying to get past the accidental death of their young daughter. In the midst of their all-consuming grief,  there’s a sex scene that raised many eyebrows for its convincing eroticism, leaving some viewers certain that the intimacy on screen was genuine.  (Sutherland has staunchly denied this.) He was also a grieving father in Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People (1980), though most of the film’s accolades went to Mary Tyler Moore and young Timothy Hutton, who played his wife and his surviving son. But none of this should imply that Sutherland only took on somber roles. He played everyone from heroes to goofballs, like the pot-smoking professor in National Lampoon’s Animal House. He was even a stuffy British patriarch (and Keira Knightley’s father) in Joe Wright’s 2005 version of the Jane Austen classic, Pride and Prejudice, as well as the chief villain in The Hunger Games. Though Oscar nominations eluded him, the Academy in 2017 granted him an honorary Oscar “for a lifetime of indelible characters, rendered with unwavering truthfulness."

Today son Kiefer (named after Donald Sutherland’s very first director) carries on the family commitment to screen acting. But it’s unlikely he’ll ever top his father’s long and varied list of achievements. 

 

Good Housekeeping: “The Remains of the Day”

The lineage of The Remains of the Day is unusual. It began as a 1989 novel by Kazuo Ishigoro, a native Japanese who was raised in England. Though Ishigoro’s first two novels deal with the nation he had left at age 5, The Remains of the Day marked his turn toward strictly British subject matter. Following the massive success of this novel, he has explored science-fiction material (Never Let Me Go), dabbled in screenwriting (for the Oscar-nominated Living) and won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, among other major honors.

 The screen version of The Remains of the Day, released in 1993, started out (to my surprise) as a Mike Nichols project with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. When the film passed into the hands of the Merchant-Ivory team, Pinter severed ties, though apparently some of his work was used, while Nichols stayed involved as a producer. The resulting film benefits from Ismail Merchant’s, James Ivory’s and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s comfort with literary adaptations, as well as their impressive visual sense. A film about a head butler and a housekeeper numbering their days in service to Lord Darlington requires a functioning manor house as its setting. The Merchant-Ivory reputation was such (after the artistic success of films like A Room with a View and Howard’s End)  that the filmmakers were able to persuade previously reluctant property owners to open their doors to cast and crew. Clearly, the resulting film is a triumph of logistics. Several country homes were used in combination, including Dyrham Park for the house’s exterior and driveway; Powderham Castle for some gracious public rooms and a spectacular turquoise stairway; Badminton House for servants’ quarters and a conservatory. On screen it all looks like one impressive stately mansion.

 Though Ishigoro wrote his novel in the first person, from the perspective of a starchy and deeply traditional butler, the screenplay’s basically third-person point of view hardly detracts. In Anthony Hopkins’ performance we well understand how much Mr. Stevens is bound by his own past, as well as by an unrelenting sense of duty to those he sees as his betters. Playing opposite him is the always convincing Emma Thompson, as a housekeeper who would like to be braver than she is. These two would make for a natural pairing, except that their basic timidity holds them back. This is best acknowledged in what the filmmakers call “the book scene,” in which Miss Kenyon briefly sets aside her usual decorum to playfully wrestle away from Stevens the mysterious book he is reading in his rare off-hours. The fact that he rebuffs her, for no very good reason, is a wonderful indicator of his habitual strait-laced outlook (is he deeply repressed, or just shy?).

 I first saw this film when it was in theatres, and best remembered it for that very English sense of stiff-upper-lip self-denial. What I’d forgotten completely is how much the film has to say about the politics of the pre-World War II era. Lord Darlington, it appears, has a sentimental affection for German culture. Though at base he’s a well-meaning man, his money and social position help him prop up the reputation of the Nazi party within his own country. What’s deeply disturbing is that Stevens, as his loyal retainer, will not permit himself to think independently of the master of the house, even when the lives of others (like two Jewish immigrant girls in his kitchen) are at stake. So he loses not only a chance at love but also, ultimately, his self-respect. A sad ending for one who puts duty before all else.

 

Weird -- The Daniel Radcliffe Story

With the Tony Awards ceremony, dedicated to honoring the best of Broadway, coming closer—it’s scheduled for 8 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, June 16—I’m looking forward, as always, to catching glimpses of stage magic. One huge difference between movies and live theatre is that anyone can watch a hit movie, whether in a cineplex or (increasingly) over cable. To see a theatrical hit with its opening night cast intact, you generally need to travel to New York City and pay hundreds of dollars for your seat. Since I can’t often do that, I’m forced to live vicariously through theatre reviews and through the snippets performed on primetime TV in the course of the Tony show.

 Invariably, some of the top nominated plays are headlined by stars best known for their work in Hollywood films. This year’s nominees include such lead performers as Liev Schreiber, Michael Stulberg, Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Rachel McAdams, and Eddie Redmayne, hailed for his performance as the eerie emcee in a revival of Cabaret. But I was especially tickled by the inclusion of Daniel Radcliffe for his supporting turn in the revival of one of my favorite Sondheim musicals, Merrily We Roll Along.

 Radcliffe, now 34 (can it be?) is of course best known as the title character in all 8 Harry Potter films, bringing to convincing life the bespectacled young hero in J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular series of fantasy novels. In 2001, when not yet in his teens, he became an international superstar as the plucky and magical Harry. For many actors, being identified with an iconic character ultimately leads to career death: no one is willing to see them try on other roles. But after a full decade of playing Harry, Radcliffe has managed to move beyond his most famous characterization, both on the screen and on stage. In film and on television, the diminutive Radcliffe seems to have headed straight for the oddball roles, like that of a talkative corpse in the surrealistic Swiss Army Man (2016), the first film by the two Daniels who went on to win Oscars for Everything Everywhere All At Once. I managed to miss that, but can enthusiastically recommend Radcliffe’s Emmy-nominated performance as Weird Al Yankovic in 2022’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a curly ‘fro out to there, Radcliffe is hilarious as the writer of goofy parody songs who plays the accordion, romances Madonna, and foils the schemes of a South American drug lord.

 Starting in 2007, on stage in London, Radcliffe shook off his Harry Potter image by appearing as the deeply troubled Alan Strang in Equus, a play that required of him a strange and graphic nude scene. For Broadway, he remained covered up as the leading man in the satiric musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, playing the song-and-dance role once made famous by Robert Morse and then revived by Matthew Broderick. His current Broadway gig, Merrily We Roll Along, casts him as the writing partner of a hotshot composer who squanders his musical talent on his way to fame and fortune. There’s a marvelous Sondheim score, of course, featuring a vicious rant for the much put-upon character played by Radcliffe (and, not so long ago, by Lin-Manuel Miranda). Now he’s up for a Tony, as are the other two members of the show’s central trio. No, I haven’t seen this staging of a play that was once a big Sondheim flop but is now a really hot ticket. But I can’t help rooting for Daniel Radcliffe: there’s something magic about him.

 Update from 6/17: An emotional Daniel Radcliffe took home the Tony last night. 

 

 

Taking a Stab at “Hit Man”

As a teacher of screenwriting through UCLA Extension’s The Writers’ Program, I’m always interested in what genres aspiring writers choose to concentrate on. I love the variety: romantic comedies, action adventure, heartfelt dramas, police procedurals, family fare. For a while, a good proportion of my advanced screenwriting students seemed to want to focus on the physical and moral perils of being a hit man. To each his (or her) own, I guess. But the key maxim for writers has always been Write What You Know. I suspect (phew!) that none of my students has put in time as a murderer for hire. That’s why these scripts, exciting though they may be, never seem to have the ring of reality.

 Which made me doubly curious about a new film, released through Netflix but currently in theatres, that’s been getting rave reviews. Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater from a script he co-wrote with the film’s star, Glen Powell, is based on a Texas Monthly article about a certain Gary Johnson. The  late Johnson was a mild-mannered college instructor, specializing in psychology and philosophy, who took on a part-time job posing as a hit man. His employer was the local police department: his goal was to ferret out citizens angry enough to pay a stranger to commit murder, after which they’d quickly be arrested and sent off to prison. Like his real-life counterpart, the film’s Gary Johnson discovers he thrives on donning disguises and dancing around the edges of actual mayhem. But, as the closing credits make clear, the actual Gary Johnson never broke the law. His screen counterpart, though, is a more complicated creature.

  It all starts when he meets Maddy (the gorgeous Adria Arjona) who wants to get rid of her abusive ex by any means necessary. She accepts the killer-for-hire she meets at face value:  he’s sexy tough-guy Ron. He knows, though, that underneath it all he’s meek and mild Gary, who’s quite capable of falling for Maddy, and doesn’t want to see her under arrest. When this irresistible force and this immovable object get together, sparks fly . . . and the audience thoroughly enjoys seeing where they go from here. No, of course I have no plans to give away the ending.

 I knew Richard Linklater’s work from back in the Nineties, when he introduced Matthew McConaughey to the world in Dazed and Confused.  In this century, he’s made successful studio films like School of Rock and Bad News Bears, while also experimenting with a romantic indie trilogy about two young people in Paris that started with Before Sunrise. To date, his bravest experiment has been with 2014’s Boyhood, an Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama that was filmed between 2002 and 2013, allowing the main actors to grow and change over time. (Patricia Arquette won the statuette for Best Supporting Actress.) Now, however, he’s committed to filming Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, a musical theatre piece which covers a two-decade period in reverse chronology: he started filming in 2019 (with Ben Platt and Beany Feldstein in central roles) and—despite some key cast changes that have required major reshoots—plans to devote twenty years to the project. Good luck with that!

 Prior to Hit Man, I had never heard of Glen Powell. Now I know he has a long track record in TV, as well as recent successes in screen romantic comedies like Anyone But You. His breakout film role was as Lt. Jake "Hangman" Seresin in Top Gun: Maverick. Don’t blame me if all the flyboys in that film blur together in my mind.

 

 

Murder, She Watched

Though I’ve always been a fan of the late, great Angela Lansbury, until recently I had never seen a single episode of the famous crime series in which she starred for twelve seasons, Murder, She Wrote. This CBS series, which ran from 1984 through 1996, starred Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, a novelist and amateur detective. She’s a retired English teacher comfortably ensconced in the quaint (and fictional) Maine town of Cabot Cove. A widow, she has taken up the writing of mystery novels in retirement, acquiring both fame and fortune. It’s all a bit of an echo of Agatha Christie’s celebrated spinster sleuth, Miss Jane Marple, a shrewd amateur keen on solving mysterious deaths in and around her English village of St. Mary Mead. I’ve heard that Jessica Fletcher’s sleuthing and that of Miss Marple fit into a sub-genre of crime fiction called “the cozies,” in which sex and violence are played down, the guilty have a tendency to eventually confess their misdeeds, and average citizens often turn out to be much smarter than the local constabulary. One wit has noted that in a cozy series, the main character becomes embroiled in so many high-profile murders, often by accident, that the public may tend to get suspicious. Citron Christian quips, in something called The Blot, that Jessica Fletcher had to be the actual murderer in every case, because "No matter where she goes, somebody dies!"

 I got first-hand experience of Murder, She Wrote over the past weekend, while spending the night in a resort town. Some obscure cable channel was having a marathon, and so I watched three episodes in a row. As it happened, they all aired in late 1985 or early 1986, when star Lansbury was a spry sixty-year-old. (She is seen cruising around Cabot Cove on a bicycle in the opening credits.) The episode called “Murder Digs Deep” has her investigating a mysterious death while on an archaeological jaunt in Mexico. “Murder by Appointment Only” takes her to NYC, where  a lost lipstick becomes a key clue in a story set in the beauty industry. Frankly, they didn’t do much for me. (To be honest, it had been a long day and I kept dozing off.) But “Trial by Error” delighted me, because it puts the unflappable Jessica in a jury room, where assembled jurors must decide whether a man is guilty of involving his wife in a near-fatal auto accident.

 I gather that part of the fun of Murder, She Wrote is the appearance of guest stars with long histories in the entertainment industry. In this episode, among the members of the jury are amiable Virginia Capers (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air),  cranky Tom Ewell (who starred opposite Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch), ageing cutie-pie Arlene Golonka (The Andy Griffith Show), the glowering Brock Peters (To Kill a Mockingbird), and the fawning Vicki Lawrence (Carol Burnett’s perennial sidekick). Naturally, in an obvious echo of the great jury-room drama, Twelve Angry Men, they disagree from the start, with some jurors feeling the driver is obviously innocent and others convinced that he’s obviously guilty. They agree on only one thing: that they want to finish up quickly and go home. But the sensible Jessica, who of course is selected as jury foreman, insists on examining each bit of testimony, leading to a surprising set of conclusions. You see, it turns out that there’s not just one murderer around: there are two. Though in Twelve Angry Men a careful look at the evidence finds an “obviously guilty” man innocent, in Jessica Fletcher’s world there are murderers galore.