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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fighting Off Sleep During “Wake Up Dead Man”

A word of warning: don’t watch Rian Johnson’s new mystery (now screening on Netflix) if you’re feeling the least bit groggy. I aired this film, following a long day and a good dinner, at a time when I hadn’t managed to have a good night’s sleep for quite a while. Sure enough, I got drowsy—which meant that some of the film’s many twists and turns eluded me completely, and I was forced to consult Wikipedia for a complete run-down on who did what to whom.

 Rian Johnson’s trademark, as writer and director, is crafting murder mysteries in which an innocent seems to be responsible for a brutal murder, until magnolia-scented sleuth Benoit Blanc (an always amusing Daniel Craig) shows up and unmasks the real killers. There’s a canvas crowded with famous faces, and we can be sure that most of them are up to no good. (You just know that Glenn Close—as an apparently sweet but also quite shrill church lady with her hair in a bun—is not as innocent as she seems . . . and I suspect that this much-admired thespian is having a ball playing such a prim role.) 

 Johnson always features a touch of social commentary, and in this film (the third and most complex in the Knives Out series) he takes on formal religion with a vengeance. He himself comes from an evangelical background, but as a filmmaker he can’t resist the baroque trappings beloved by the Roman Catholic Church. At the center of this drama are a good priest and a bad one, though both are certainly flawed individuals. Josh O’Connor (whom I last saw as a veddy British Prince Charles in The Crown) stars as a former teen boxer who once killed a man in the ring, and is still desperately trying (despite his genuine love of Christ’s teachings) to keep a raging temper in check. For a recent transgression, he’s been sent to an upstate New York town where a veteran priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, presides over an ever-smaller congregation. Msgr. Wicks (Josh Brolin) is a fierce defender of his own power over the souls of the locals: in short, he’s not very nice. But this doesn’t stop him from being surrounded by a small circle of apparently hyper-loyal congregants, who all share his anger at the world outside the church’s walls.

 Following a sudden and dramatic murder in the cathedral, the young priest played by O’Connor seems the obvious suspect. But, needless to say, matters get quite twisty from there, involving all sorts of mistaken identities, not to mention something of a divine resurrection. (As you might expect, there WILL be blood.) Thank heavens for Benoit Blanc, whose sleuthing sorts out the guilty from the innocent, even as he makes quite clear his own discomfort with organized religion. And thank heavens for the Wikipedia plot summary that fills in the cracks of my own understanding. I recall having had something of the same problem with the first two Knives Out mysteries, even after watching the first one twice. It’s always clear who’s Naughty and who’s Nice, but the interplay between them is generally so tricky that viewers need all the help they can get.

 So, is this new edition of the Knives Out series worth seeing? It is if you like celebrity-driven mysteries and the chance to untangle an elaborate puzzle. No need to look for much depth in the film’s characterizations. But if you can stay alert—and if blood is your thing—the film’s many conundrums will give you much to ponder.

 

 

The Late Rob Reiner: All in the Family

Not exactly a festive start to the holiday season. First the horrific first-night-of-Hanukkah shootings on Bondi Beach in Sydney, and then the news of the murder of actor/director Rob Reiner and wife Michele in Brentwood, California. Frankly, I can’t wait for 2025 to be over. 

 All I can do (and it certainly isn’t much) is to remember Reiner and the joy he’s given me over the decades. I never met him, though we had some extremely remote connections, like the fact that (in the course of my very first summer  job) I presided over the bus on which his little brother rode to day camp back in the 1960s. In about that same era, as a theatre writer for the UCLA Daily Bruin, I was sent to a local theatre to review a short play called The Howie Rubin Story. This one-person playlet, written by Reiner and his longtime creative partner, featured Rob as a naïve high school kid who dreams of Hollywood stardom. At that point I’d never heard of Rob Reiner, though I certainly knew about the career of his talented father Carl. The younger Reiner’s on-stage charm and always-helpful family connections seemed to promise that he was on the brink of a great career. And so it went.

 Most fans associate Rob Reiner with the role of Archie Bunker’s left-leaning son-in-law, not so affectionately nicknamed Meathead, om All in the Family (1971-1979). Somewhere in that era, Reiner participated in a prank I still remember with great amusement. At the time he was married to the late Penny Marshall, who was featured on a sitcom version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple as Myrna, a particularly hangdog secretary with bad posture and an excruciatingly nasal voice. She’s pining for her lost beau. Naturally, Tony Randall’s character (the fastidious Felix Unger) tries to remake her into a more suitable love object for the fickle Sheldn (whose name was misspelled on his birth certificate). When Sheldn finally shows up to encounter the remade Myrna, it’s Rob Reiner in a really bad wig. Clearly Penny Marshall was not expecting to see her hubby in this scene: the studio audience laughed in delight at her desperate attempts to keep a straight face, and at home I laughed too. For me this was one of the most delightful live TV moments of all time.

 Everyone who loves movies knows the great films that Reiner so lovingly directed: romcoms like When Harry Met Sally and The American President, dramas like Misery and A Few Good Men. His debut film as a director, This is Spinal Tap (1984) was such a memorable mockumentary of a British rock group that lines like “up to eleven” have entered our daily lingo, and a sequel was released just this past year. I think a lot of us have a special affection for The Princess Bride, a blend of fairytale romance and adventure fable that is also a tribute to the bonds of familial love. In the original film a modern kid (Fred Savage) is read the story of the Princess Bride by his grandpa (Peter Falk) when he’s sick in bed. At the end, the film becomes a sweet tribute to their intergenerational affection. In the dark days of the pandemic, Hollywood performers amused themselves by re-enacting scenes from The Princess Bride and posting on YouTube. Ultimately Rob Reiner himself played the kid and his father Carl had the grandpa role. The on-camera tenderness between them was deeply touching, and I’d like to remember Reiner like that, not for family relationships that apparently went horribly wrong.  

 

Elvis Goes to Oz: “Wild at Heart”

 I watched Wild at Heart in memory of the late Diane Ladd: it was one of three films for which she received a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, though she never won the statuette. In 1974, she first earned a chance at Oscar glory for her supporting role as a feisty diner waitress (“Kiss my grits”) in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She was nominated a second time in 1990 for Wild at Heart, and then a third time a year later for Rambling Rose. Remarkably, in the latter two films she played opposite her real-life daughter, the very talented Laura Dern. (There’s a Roger Corman connection too—Laura, born in 1967, was apparently conceived while her parents were location, shooting Corman’s biker classic, The Wild Angels.)

 Wild at Heart was written and directed by David Lynch, who had burst into the public consciousness in 1986 with Blue Velvet. In that provocative film, which explored the perverse underbelly of an apparently wholesome mid-western town, young Laura Dern (about 17 at the time) played a schoolgirl whose sunny naïveté is in marked contrast to the perverse doings going on all around her. She was again to star for Lynch four years later, but in a highly different role. In Wild at Heart, Dern plays Lula Pace Fortune, a North Carolina cutie simply oozing with sexuality. Her man is Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), a ne’er-do-well Elvis Presley enthusiast who treasures Lula even more than he does his genuine snakeskin jacket. Soon after the film begins, he’s carted off to prison, but when he returns it’s Lula he wants most. And the bulk of the film becomes their odyssey through the American South, heading for the distant dream of California.

 I hardly anticipated that this film is an unlikely nod to Dorothy and her friends easing down the Yellow Brick Road. (Instead of walking, the lovers cruise in a gaudy convertible, but the far-off Emerald City shines brightly in their eyes.) Of course an Oz story needs a Wicked Witch, and that’s where Diane Ladd comes in. As shrill socialite Marietta Fortune, she’s determined to separate daughter Lula from her lover, and it’s only gradually that we fully understand why. A widow, Marietta has several useful local men at her beck and call, and her intentions are hardly honorable.

 Though the film’s Oz references do not overwhelm the story, they give it a fanciful quality that sets it apart from darker Lynch projects. Nor does it fit tonally into the familiar “lovers on the lam” film genre, which encompasses grim dramas like Badlands and Natural Born Killers, as well as such older classics as They Live by Night (1948) and Gun Crazy (1950). It’s fun to spot the Ozian allusions, which include ruby slippers, a big pink bubble, and a real-life oversized Munchkin. True, Wild at Heart is not without its moments of graphic Lynchian mayhem. But its violence is of the comic book variety. And the ending is one that Lynch himself considered happily ever after, with true love conquering all, even wicked witches. (This was a marked change from the conclusion of the novel on which the film is based.)

 To the surprise of many (including critic Roger Ebert), Wild at Heart was cheered at the Cannes Film Festival, and received the prestigious Palme d’Or. Back at home, though,  Lynch learned his flick would be X-rated if cuts were not made. What I saw on DVD was still pretty wild. It may be perverse, but I liked encountering a “Dorothy” who could emphatically declare, “You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.”  

 

Animal Attraction: Dog Day Afternoon

We’re fast approaching the time of year when the Library of Congress announces the new inductees for its National Film Registry, honoring movies with cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. I’ve just watched a 1975 film that made the list back in 2009. Dog Day Afternoon can be said to have historical significance, because it’s based on an actual true-crime incident that was covered in Life magazine in 1972. But with the great Sidney Lumet at the helm, it’s also an aesthetic marvel.

 Lumet’s long film career began in 1957, with the tightly focused, highly suspenseful jury room drama, Twelve Angry Men. Lunet directed several films based on classic American plays, including A View from the Bridge and Long Day’s Journey into Night (a powerful version of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical stage production). There were lighter works too (he put on screen The Wiz, the “ghetto” version of The Wizard of Oz that had been a huge Broadway hit), but he was perhaps best known for crime thrillers, like Serpico and his very last project (in 2007), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  He was four times nominated for Best Director Oscars, but could never quite eke out a personal win. (He did receive a richly deserved honorary Oscar in 2004, seven years before his death at age 86.) His most honored film was probably Network, a cutting satire of the TV industry that was nominated for major 9 Oscars and won four, though Rocky took home the top prize. I personally have a special love for his late career film, Running on Empty (1988), the poignant story of a counterculture couple whose son (the late River Phoenix) tries to opt out of their nomadic lives as fugitives from the FBI. On that film, as often happened for Lumet, his writer and lead actor got nominated for Oscars even though he himself didn’t.

 Dog Day Afternoon is surely one of Lumet’s mid-career best, made just after Murder on the Orient Express and before Network. It’s the story of a bank robbery, but with a significant difference. In most bank heist films, going back to the very early days of cinema, there’s a lot of money at stake: the bad guys either get it or don’t. If they succeed in robbing the bank, they either get away or (more often) are foiled at the very last minute, thus proving that crime doesn’t pay. But Dog Day Afternoon is much more of a character study: at its center is a loser who’s desperately trying to untangle a messy domestic situation by funding his male lover’s sex change operation. His solution is to rob a Brooklyn bank, one that turns out to have virtually no cash on hand. As the tension and the temperature rise, Sonny tries to achieve his goals by taking a clutch of bank-tellers hostage: their emotions range from fear to anger to perverse amusement. There’s also another gunman on the scene, the eerily silent Sal (John Cazale), who seems violent enough to commit mayhem.

 The Brooklyn neighborhood re-created on film by Lumet becomes part of the action, as counterculture crowds sympathetic to the hapless Sonny gather in the street to heckle the swarming NYPD cops and straight-arrow FBI guys. Though movies are, of necessity, filmed out of sequence, the mood of this one is so well-sustained that we feel we are on the spot, watching it all unfold in real time as the weather gets hotter, Sonny gets sweatier (inside the bank, the air conditioning has been dismantled), and the possibility of bloodshed becomes more and more likely. 

 

The Play’s the Thing: Why Tom Stoppard Lost It At the Movies

 The deaths, alas, just keep on coming. (In today's news, it's the great Frank Gehry, an architect blessed with rare skill and imagination.) Over Thanksgiving weekend, I read of the passing of one of our greatest playwrights, the Czech-born English man of letters, Tom Stoppard. A fascinating individual as well as an extraordinarily talented wordsmith, Stoppard had premiered his last play (at the age of 83) in 2020. Fittingly, Leopoldstadt was both a brilliant dramatic achievement and a belated exploration of his own Nazi-era Jewish roots. Like most of his plays, it is very much a work tailored to the stage, and will not be coming to local cinemas anytime soon. Which doesn’t mean Stoppard is adverse to film, as I discuss in a 2021 Beverly in Movieland post that I’m repeating here as a Stoppard tribute.  

“Inside any stage play there is cinema wildly signalling to be let out.” This Tom Stoppard quote, from the impressive (and weighty) new biography by Hermione Lee, hints at the famous playwright’s complex attitude toward the movies. From his youth onward, Stoppard was a fan of movies, starting with Disney’s Pinocchio, which he saw at the ripe old age of four. As an adult he loved everything. from Marx Brothers laff-fests to European art films to such popular Hollywood fare as The Graduate. (He and its director, Mike Nichols, turned out to have much in common – including early lives disrupted by Nazis – and later became close friends.)

  But Lee’s biography makes crystal-clear the gulf between writing for the stage and writing for movies. As the successful playwright of such works as The Real Thing and Arcadia, Stoppard revels in prestige and power. It’s not simply a matter of custom: the legalities of the theatre world stipulate that the text of a play cannot be changed for the purposes of stage production without the author’s consent. Some playwrights are probably shy about exerting their will, but Stoppard is not among them. Although unfailingly polite and collaborative, he insists that any changes to the text of a play be made by him. He also demands consultation on production matters, which means that he’s present not only at rehearsals but also at auditions and meetings of the technical staff. The performance of a Tom Stoppard play is, first and foremost, a Tom Stoppard production.

  At the movies, though, it’s the director, not the writer, who is king. (Or, I guess, queen, though female directors continue to be rare indeed.) A major director can hire and fire screenwriters at will, and can even have two writers toiling on the same project without being aware of one another’s existence. Other members of the production team often chime in with their own ideas, and stars have been known to contribute (and sometimes insist on) their own rewrites. This should not be a world in which Stoppard would want to operate, except for the fact that movie gigs are so very lucrative, and Stoppard’s lifestyle is so very lavish.

  Stoppard has been credited on several major movies, including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. He has also directed an ambitious though modestly budgeted 1990 screen version of his own earliest hit, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, reasoning that only he would have the audacity to ruthlessly re-focus his own much-admired play. He quickly discovered that he was fundamentally NOT a filmmaker: his instinct was always to focus on dialogue, at the expense of camera movement. Afterwards he acknowledged that a filmmaker, though not a playwright, can change the frame. “In the theatre you’ve got this medium shot, fairly wide angle, for two and a half hours. And that’s it folks.”

 Aside from his several screenplay credits, Stoppard has become invaluable to such major directors as Steven Spielberg, because they trust him for smart, honest assessments of their pending projects. For Spielberg, he tried to tamp down the soppy elements that ended the romantic 1989 film, Always, but he also was insistent that Steven Zaillian’s final draft of Schindler’s List not be ”improved” upon. Sometimes Stoppard beefed up dialogue scenes, without screen credit but for serious sums of money. See, for instance, his sparkling work on the key father/son scene between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in Spielberg’s third Indiana Jones film, which ends with Connery’s Henry Jones telling his long-neglected son that “you left just when you were becoming interesting.”

 

  

The Unsung Stuntman: Carl Ciarfalio Takes His Last Bow

  I don't normally re-post old Beverly in Movieland entries.  But I was so saddened to read about the death of ace stuntman (and very good guy) Carl Ciarfalio in November of this year that I decided to honor his memory by  repeating this profile from January 10, 2013. (You might remember Carl for pummeling Tom Cruise in a bare-knuckles boxing scene in Ron Howard's Far and Away--the rare on-screen fight that Cruise ever lost.)  

Now that the list of Oscar nominees is out, I’m pausing to acknowledge Hollywood’s forgotten men (and women). Stunt performers have been around since the movies began. But they rarely get the recognition they deserve. Take Harvey Parry, who used to stunt-double the great silent film star, Harold Lloyd. Parry’s contracts specified he could not admit to doubling for Lloyd until after Lloyd’s death. But wasn’t Lloyd -- an extremely athletic fellow -- capable of doing his own stuntwork? Modern-day stunt actor Carl Ciarfalio admits this was true, mostly. Lloyd in his prime was “much like today’s Tom Cruise. Tom does almost everything, but not everything.”

Carl Ciarfalio knows a great deal about stuntwork. He should, after 38 years in the business. You’ve seen him on-screen in major films like Fight Club, Mission Impossible III, and The Amazing Spider-Man. He’s got a Roger Corman connection too, having worn the “Thing” suit in Concorde’s underground hit, The Fantastic Four. It all began when he and a wrestling-team buddy auditioned for a stunt show at Knott’s Berry Farm. Knott’s was looking for big guys who could fall down and be funny. Carl, then digging ditches for a plumber, figured the Knott’s gig would make a great summer job, before he entered Cal State Fullerton. But “within a couple of months I had a cowboy hat and a gun and I was on stage and people were applauding and laughing, and I told my parents, ‘I’ll go back to school one day.’” Instead, of course, he ended up in the school of hard knocks.

A stuntman’s career requires training, as well as a serious approach to one’s craft. I told Carl I’d been on the set of New World’s Big Bad Mama when stuntmen performed a dangerous car flip. They walked away unhurt, then headed for the nearest bar. Carl agrees this often happens, especially on location, but “at the end of the day . . . I like to go home and take a shower and take a deep breath and think about what the day was about. Because you’re only as good as your last gag.”

In his off-hours, does he do crazy things for fun and recreation? “No, ma’am, I’m exactly the opposite of that. There’s a huge difference between thrillseekers and daredevils and professional stunt people. Professional stunt people need to have that A-type personality to be able to step off the cliff or light themselves on fire, but they also need to be able to do it in front of the camera -- hit their marks and then do it a second, third, fourth, and fifth time. So that makes it different than a daredevil who is trying to beat the odds. Scripted stunts, scripted action is much different than jumpin’ off the roof and hopin’ you make the pool.”

Now that he’s an elder statesman of sorts, Carl increasingly works as a stunt coordinator, facing the pressure of keeping his entire team safe from harm. One big challenge: “Low-budget films want it all, and have no money for anything.” In which case, he’ll demand script changes, because “no piece of film is worth an injury or a death.”

As one of the first governors representing stunt performers at the Television Academy, Carl has helped make sure stunt coordinators now receive Emmy recognition. Oscar, though, has yet to catch up. Given the current popularity of action films, he hopes this will soon change. After all, “a James Bond movie would be nothin’ if it was just walkin’ and talkin.’”

Hail and farewell, Carl!