Home is Where the Heart Is: Places in the Heart

Sadly, actor and activist Danny Glover, perhaps best known for his cop role opposite Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series, has acknowledged he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Always a straightforward guy, he’d previously been frank about his youthful struggles with epilepsy. Now, close to 80, he’s looking back at a career that has given him a wide range of character roles in both wacky comedies and somber dramas. His favorite? He acknowledges that he’s most proud of a 1984 slice of Americana called Places in the Heart.

  As a tribute to Glover, and as a salute to the growing-pains of the USA in its semiquincentennial year, I recently caught up with Places in the Heart. It’s definitely a small film worth knowing, and not just because her leading role in it won Sally Field her second Oscar, and the opportunity to gush to the Academy that "I can't deny the fact that you like me—right now, you like me!" (Personally, I can’t deny the fact that most people misquote her words as “You like me—you really like me!”)

  Places in the Heart was written and directed by the late Robert Benton, who in 1967 came out of New York to co-write (along with fellow Esquire journalist David Newman) an historically -based screenplay they called Bonnie and Clyde. Their script—about a pair of attractive young bank robbers gallivanting through the Southwest during the Great Depression—eventually led to a production deal. After some serious interest from François Truffaut, Arthur Penn ultimately shot Bonnie and Clyde, with  Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the leading roles. It became a national sensation and scored 10 Oscar noms in a highly competitive year.   

 After that triumph, Benton pursued his interest in directing as well as writing, winning Oscars in both categories for the 1979 divorce drama, Kramer vs. Kramer. But he was a native Texan, and perhaps that dry, dusty landscape continued to call to him. In 1984, he returned to his roots, crafting a Depression-era story set in Waxahachie, Texas, with nary a bank robber in sight. Life is not easy in Waxahachie: Edna Spalding (Sally Field) has been left a widow after the accidental killing of her husband, the local sheriff. Desperate to support herself and her young children, she takes in a boarder, a bitter ex-soldier (John Malkovich) who lost his sight during the Great War. She also takes pity on the African-American drifter (Glover) who shows up to do chores, even though he’s been caught trying to steal her silverware. Edna’s basic good-heartedness proves contagious, and a viable new household forms. But there are also many external challenges: the bank is eager to foreclose on Edna’s acreage; her sister’s marriage is threatened by a philandering spouse; a powerful tornado (dramatically filmed) flattens the town’s center; the Ku Klux Klan violently turns on Glover’s character. Somehow Edna holds on, leading to a remarkable final scene in which love and redemption surface in a way that can only be called mystical. 

 1985 was a year of BIG movies, led by Amadeus, A Passage to India, and a powerful drama about journalists covering the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, The Killing Fields. Folksy Americana hardly seemed like one of the film-year’s major areas of interest.  But Places in the Heart, a loving, inspiring, and yet down-to-earth portrait of small-town life, holds its own among the costume epics.

 I wish Danny Glover well, and hope he’ll be able to cling onto his memories of being a central figure in this tender film.  

 

I Still Love You, Alice B. Toklas

 

I’ve recently finished reading a colleague’s new, and award-winning, biography of Gertrude Stein. (The author is Francesca Wade, and her impressively researched book is called Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.) When I was an artsy college student in the Sixties, I’m guessing that few of my classmates had actually dipped into Stein’s artistically challenging writings. I myself certainly hadn’t. But we all knew “rose is a rose is a rose,” and that Stein—an American in Paris—had published in 1933 a faux biographical work of her longtime companion. The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. So the title of a 1968 romantic comedy, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, would have been enticing to us—especially since its cast and crew included some of the hippest people in Hollywood.

 One of the creators of the original script was Paul Mazursky, who would go on to both write and direct such comedy hits as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Harry and Tonto (1974), and Moscow on the Hudson (1984). I Love You, Alice B. Toklas was his very first produced film project, and he badly wanted to direct it.  But when Peter Sellers came aboard as the film’s star Mazursky was removed from contention. (Instead, the movie was directed by TV veteran Hy Averback.)

 Aside from Sellers, prominent cast members included Leigh Taylor-Young as a sexy Flower Child with a butterfly tattoo on her thigh. (She was barely twenty-one and making her first film.). The plot focused on Sellers as Harold Fine, a stereotypical (Jewish, natch!) buttoned-down lawyer who’s being pushed toward the chuppah by his girlfriend, played by Joyce Van Patten. Just as matrimony seems inevitable, he meets a free-spirited hippie chick, Nancy. After they’ve hopped into the sack, she whips up a batch of Alice B. Toklas brownies, and he finds himself thoroughly hooked on his new lifestyle. Soon he’s growing out his crewcut, and dressing in caftans and love beads.

 It was quite clear, back in 1968, that an Alice B. Toklas brownie was some kind of psychedelic treat. (The comic spectacle of a middle-aged square suddenly tuning in and turning on was almost unavoidable in movie houses of the late Sixties.) But I didn’t fully grasp the implications of those brownies until I read Francesca Wade’s book. It seems that Toklas, who had no part in the writing of her famous “autobiography” (other than efficiently typing up the manuscript) ultimately chose, following Stein’s 1946 death, to fill her empty days by putting forth a cookbook. Toklas was a whiz in the kitchen, specializing in French cuisine, but she chose to fill out her book with recipes received from friends. One of them, a Morocco-based artist named Brion Gysin, contributed instructions for making a dessert item he called "Haschich Fudge," a heady combo of fruit, nuts, spices, and what he referred to as “Cannibis sativa.” Though the cookbook’s American edition, fearing legal consequences, decided to axe this particular recipe, it was included in the volume published in Britain. Once Time magazine had spilled the beans (so to speak), the rather prim and naïve Toklas discovered she’d published a best-seller.

 The Hollywood film is scored with a perky tune sung by a rock group known as Harpers Bizarre:. It begins “I love you, Alice B. Toklas/ and so does Gertrude Stein/ I love you, Alice B. Toklas/ I’m gonna change your name to mine.” The lyrics then go off on a psychedelic trip—”Green wooly golden gardens, Marvin Gardens”—of which the very avant-garde Gertrude Stein might possibly have approved.  (Though, I suspect, probably not.)

 

 

“The Bear”: What’s a Sitcom Anyway?

Having just binge-watched the fifth and final season of The Bear, I have some strong thoughts on how TV has changed over time. From 1972 to 1983 I was devoted to M*A*S*H, a sort-of sitcom set during the Korean War. Lasting eleven years, the show—about a military surgical unit a stone’s throw from the front lines—focused on the hijinks of young surgeons, nurses, and other American military personnel far from home. So this series (with Alan Alda as “Hawkeye” Pierce, its central figure) blended outrageous comedy with a deep awareness of the tragedies of war and the challenges faced by healers in times of crisis.

 My friend Elias Davis, who co-wrote the famous final episode of M*A*S*H , implies that the show’s outcome was by no means fully planned from the start. But it’s clear that The Bear—officially labeled a comedy, though much of the family backstory is dead serious—was building throughout most of its five-year run toward a very specific conclusion. In the past, American TV didn’t work that way. In long-running comic shows there would be changes over the years as key actors came and went. See, for instance, how the M*A*S*H dynamic evolved when the obtuse Major Frank Burns, as played by Larry Linville, was replaced by the know-it-all snob Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden-Stiers) as Hawkeye’s tent mate.

 Today, of  course, TV series tend to have much shorter seasons: each of the past five years has seen the arrival of only eight episodes of The Bear. (Compare M*A*S*H , which typically had more than 20.) The Bear’s  tight timetable makes it much easier for the writing team to control the show’s narrative, and to plan out in advance where it is going, with some interesting detours along the way. Curiously, although there’s a good-sized cast portraying those who work in and around the Chicago restaurant known as The Bear, not much always happens from episode to episode. Some focus almost entirely on a single character, and it’s not necessarily star Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), a talented chef who agonizes over his decision to convert his dead brother’s sandwich shop into a fine-dining establishment. Each of the central characters has a complicated backstory, and the show sometimes pulls away from the restaurant setting to explore cousin Richie working on his people skills, line cook Tina discovering her professional abilities, pastry chef Marcus coping with the loss of his mother, or Somali kitchen helper Ebraheim shyly struggling to get the restaurant on a stronger financial footing. (His mentor is played by the late Rob Reiner, and there’s a subtle, touching tribute to Reiner in Ebraheim’s last-episode final line, “As you wish.” Jamie Lee Curtis as Carmy’s addled, sometimes alcoholic, mother does not enter the restaurant until the show’s very last episode, but she’s impossible to forget.  Because we come to know these people so well, we care about what they ultimately accomplish.

 One of my favorite things about The Bear is how it rewards viewers paying close attention. Early in season 4 there’s an episode in which maître d’ Richie, aiming to heighten the celebration of  a family whose daughter has just been declared cancer-free, mesmerizes them all by creating a magical summer snowfall. In passing, some attention is paid to the solo diner at the next table who sees and delights in the family’s joy. Who is this man? We don’t find out until the very last show of season 5, when his appreciation for his dining experience bears important fruit. It’s yet another tasty surprise for a very special show. 

 

Where Have All the Corpse Flowers Gone? Remembering "The Little Shop of Horrors"

I’m not convinced that Roger Corman ever saw (or even heard of) a Corpse Flower. But I have. This past Sunday I was lucky enough to catch the rare blooming of Amorphophallus titanium at the Huntington, that being a marvelous rare book library and botanical garden in San Marino, California. In case you’re interested, the so-called Corpse Flower is actually the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence. Its bloom can grow over twelve feet in height and can open to a width of four feet across. It’s a tropical plant that comes originally from Sumatra; its gruesome name refers to the stench it gives off when in flower, similar (it is said) to the smell of a rotting corpse. In the wild, insects attracted to this pungent scent arrive in time to pollinate the flower during its short blooming period, which may last a mere 24 hours. Lucky me, that I arrived just in time to see (and smell) this stinky marvel of the natural world.

 The one I saw blooming in the Huntington’s Conservatory has been nicknamed Odorysseus, not Audrey Junior. And I’m happy to report that no one was swallowed up by the gaping purple petals while I was around. Still, I couldn’t help thinking about the giant carnivorous plant immortalized by director Roger Corman and his inimitable screenwriter, Charles B. Griffith, back in 1960, when they discovered that they could have a full weekend to make use of a standing set that was about to be torn down. Their horror comedy, The Little Shop of Horrors, soon attracted millions of fans (most of them young and ready for anything) to drive-ins and low-rent movie houses, and soon became a late-night staple on the brand-new medium of television. Not all the actors in Little Shop went on to fame and fortune, but the name Jack Nicholson should ring a bell. (No, despite what I sometimes see in print, Nicholson did NOT have the leading role of hapless flower-shop underling Seymour Krelboined, but his tiny part as a masochist in a dentist’s chair is hard to forget.)

 Two young fans of Corman’s 72-minute film turned out to have real musical talent. In 1982, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman launched an off-Broadway musical adaptation so infectious that it soon moved to Broadway and London’s West End. (It also became hugely popular in high schools and community theatres throughout the world; I’d be surprised to hear that there’s no production of it going on somewhere at this very moment.) In 1986, Hollywood got into the act, with Frank Oz of Muppet fame directing an elaborate big-budget version boasting Rick Moranis in the leading role, Steve Martin, John Candy, and Bill Murray in featured parts, and an ending that softened the grotesque outcome of the original.

 In my years as Roger Corman’s story editor, I had no immediate connection with the Little Shop film. Nor with the child-friendly 1991 animated TV series whose gore was toned down for the younger set. But in the early 1990s Roger toyed with the idea of launching a Little Shop sitcom: writers were hired and I remember some meetings at Fox studios with rather thick-headed young execs before we all gave up. I also remember the frustration of Chuck Griffith and others regarding the debut of the stage musical: because Roger had assured the producers that all the members of the original cast and crew were dead, none of them was invited to the show’s world premiere. Roger’s baseless assertion, I can’t help thinking, was an act as ghoulish as anything a Corpse Flower could claim.

 

                                          Odorysseus at the Huntington, 7/12/26

DC is for (Movie) Lovers

 

Washington DC can fairly be called a city of museums. Thanks to the long-ago generosity of a wealthy Brit who never made it onto American soil, the capital city of the new United States  built a castle-like museum on its national mall. From these beginnings back in 1846, the Smithsonian has evolved into a massive umbrella organization for some twenty-one museums, as well as libraries, research centers, and even a zoo. Most, though not all, of the Smithsonian’s treasures are located in the heart of the District of Columbia, where they can be visited sevcn days a week, free of charge. DC is also the home of many other remarkable educational sites (some public, some private)  designed for the public’s education and enjoyment. As someone obsessed with movies, I was surprised by the many creative ways in which film and video have been  put to use for visitors’ education and enjoyment.

 Of course some of the Smithsonian’s most popular museums use film to show us glimpses of a nation’s preoccupations over time. The African American Museum contains film clips from the bad old days when people of color were automatically assumed to be either brutal defilers of white women (see Birth of a Nation) or lovable mammies (see Gone With the Wind). The Museum of American History, one of my very favorites, boasts a pop culture exhibit that shows how films can help raise discussions about complex issues, like What is Justice? Or What is Family? Or What is Love? (In this day and age, I was impressed to see clips from such still-controversial films as Brokeback Mountain.) But this same museum also shows off footage and memorabilia from well-loved classics, like The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars, that underscore the romantic idealism of the American people. Dorothy’s ruby slippers –which have long been on view in this museum—seem to be a special favorite of visitors. In the museum’s gift shop, you can even buy a T-shirt bearing a sketch of the slippers, still on the feet of the now-expired Wicked With of the East, along with these words: SHOES TO DIE FOR.  

 What surprised me was how many museums now use sophisticated video applications to connect the individual viewer with the exhibit. At the Museum of American History you can virtually try on clothing from the museum’s historic collection by using your cellphone and following posted instructions. At the International Spy Museum (a pricey but fascinating attraction that’s not under Smithsonian auspices), you can establish your own spy identity, and even (via video) be outfitted in a nifty disguise of your own choosing. (I’ve supplied a photo, below, of my adventures in spycraft.)  

 The huge stately building dubbed the National Archives is best known for housing our nation’s essential documents, like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. But the lower floor of the building on Constitution Avenue also features serious exhibits pertaining to social issues,, with showcases devoted to such-hot button topics as immigration, civil rights, and the struggle of women to attain the vote. Naturally, newsreel footage of protest marches is prominently featured.

 One floor up, before you get to exhibits celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, there’s a surprising opportunity to be interactive.  On a large screen you see these words: “THE AMERICAN STORY. The film collection of the National Archives contains motion pictures made by the U.S. government to engage and inform  Americans.”  If you’re tech savvy, you can sign in to a favorite topic, then watch appropriate films to your heart’s content.

                                                    Shhh! Beverly in disguise
 

                                

 

 

 

 

Listing All-American Movies

In the wake of this historic (and very unusual) 4^th of July holiday weekend, news outlets have been vying with one another to publish articles that are relevant to the story of the United States. This past Sunday, film critics at the Los Angeles Times joined together to produce a feature titled “10 Must-Watch Movies That Capture America in Times of Profound Change.” Here are their topic choices: (In every category there are also a few alternate suggestions.)

(1)   THE GREAT DEPRESSION: The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

(    (2)   POSTWAR OPTIMISM: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

(    (3)   CAPITALISM, UNCHECKED: There Will Be Blood (2007)

((  (4)   POST-VIETNAM/WATERGATE CYNICISM: Nashville (1975)

((   (5)  MEDIA DOMINATION: Network (1976)

(6  (6)  GENTRIFICATION AND RACIAL TENSIIONS: Do the Right Thing (1989)

(7  (7) RISE OF THE YUPPIES: They Live (1988)

( ) (8) ‘80s WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE: Working Girl (1988)

(9 (9)  DIGITAL ALIENATION: The Social Network (2010)

(1 (10) POST-9/11 ANXIETIES: Team America: World Police (2004)

 To me this is, for the most part, an excellent list. I would certainly put The Grapes of Wrath, The Best Years of Our Lives, Network, and Do The Right Thing on any best-film list I was compiling. By the same token, I wonder about the criteria at work here. Why is the 19^th century (especially the Civil War) so completely ignored? Why does this list contain not a single work made in the turbulent 1960s? I am particularly passionate about a seminal film year, 1967, which captured for a mass audience the tensions both between races and between generations. (Here are four of the five Oscar Best Picture Nominees for that year in film: Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to  Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, The Graduate). Every one of these very distinctive films, screened in a turbulent year, has something vitally important to say about the differences that keep Americans apart.

 I also don’t see on the critics’ list any representation of films shot in the 1990s. That was a period  that balanced social optimism with the belated acknowledgment of the scourge of HIV, especially as it applied to the nation’s gay community. Remarkably, it was America’s favorite Everyman, Tom Hanks, who starred in a mainstream Hollywood movie that  finally looked with compassion on the plight of a gay man dying of AIDS. Hanks’ willingness to take on this role, especially after other leading men had turned it down, marked a new era for audiences and for the motion picture community, which honored Hanks with his first Oscar for this acting challenge. (Just one year later, he won again, for the very different Forrest Gump, which contained—in many people’s eyes—its own much more subtle AIDS reference.)

 Another film I think should be noted was also made in the Nineties, and also starred Tom Hanks, who seems to have a special talent for representing what’s on the minds of his fellow Americans. The 1995 film Apollo 13 (perhaps the seminal achievement of director Ron Howard) is a celebration both of American technological excellence and of the brave astronauts who are vaulting us into the world of the future. Apollo 13 was made, with the full cooperation of NASA, to showcase the story of a near outer-space disaster that, happily, turned into a human triumph. It’s surprising indeed to me that the L.A. Times critics seem to have nothing to say about American technological mastery. Social media (as shown in such listed films as The Social Network) has certainly changed all of our lives, but our relationship to our planet has also certainly evolved, right? 

 

They Could Have Been Contenders: The Hollywood Blacklist

I’m just back from a week in Washington, DC. To my surprise, the nation’s capital currently seems a lot more bipartisan than I would have guessed. Yes, there were giant Trump portraits hanging from some prominent government buildings. But I also saw a major Washington boulevard shut down on behalf of a wild and crazy Gay Pride festival. And overt dissent was on display nearby: outside a tent manned by some dedicated anti-Trumpers, I spotted a large placard that gave MAGA a new definition: Make Algae Great Again.

 Washington’s wonderful Smithsonian museums (open daily and free to all comers) seemed as welcoming and as even-handed as ever, pointing up our nation’s failings but also its glories.  Some of the city’s private museums, though, were clearly interested in viewing today’s deep political divide in the context of past eras that were equally contentious. That certainly seemed part of the reason the Capital Jewish Museum is now hosting an exhibit called “Blacklisted: An American Story.” Its focus is on the era—starting in 1947 and lasting until the early Sixties—when the House Un-American Activities Committee was terrorizing Hollywood, forcing the major studios to remove from their ranks anyone (Jewish or otherwise) who had ever been sympathetic to the Communist party. (The only way to return to the film industry’s good graces in that era was to dish up the names of others whose politics were—or had ever been—suspect.)

 As part of this exhibit, the museum showed a series of film clips relevant to the blacklist period. Two of the films were directed by Elia Kazan. Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) makes a brave argument against the built-in anti-Semitism of that era; the clip from On the Waterfront (1954) shows Marlon Brando as a longshoreman and would-be boxer climatically choosing to risk everything by bringing a mob boss to justice. Because Kazan was infamously known as one of those who “named names” to save his own career, many in Hollywood never forgave him. Orson Welles, for one, disparaged the latter film as “a celebration of the informant.”

 Three films written by Dalton Trumbo are also included in this montage. Two are from 1960, when the once-disgraced Trumbo was finally able to resume getting on-screen credit for his work. After writing Spartacus, he was championed by star Kirk Douglas, to whom he said, “Thanks, Kirk, for giving me back my name.” On earlier Trumbo films that appeared during the blacklist era, Trumbo had had to submit each of his scripts under a fictive monicker, or that of another writer. The screenwriting Oscar he won in 1954 for crafting under an assumed name the delightful (and totally apolitical) Roman Holiday was not awarded to him until 1993, almost three decades after his death.

 The exhibit also focuses on the sad example of John Garfield, one of many actors whose careers (and lives) were destroyed during the blacklist years. Garfield (born Jacob Garfinkle on New York’s Lower East Side) was a longtime supporter of liberal causes. He began appearing in major Hollywood films in 1938, usually in blue-collar roles, and was twice nominated for Oscars, notably for his lead role in the 1947 boxing film, Body and Soul. But his refusal to speak against his wife (once a member of the Communist Party) as well as his unwillingness to provide the House committee with the names of other Hollywood “Reds” ultimately destroyed him. He died of a heart attack in 1932 at the age of 39, just after a dream project in which he was to star was abruptly cancelled.

Despite it all, Happy 4^th of July!

John Garfield, with quote from his daughter

                            

 

Very Hush-Hush: ”L.A. Confidential”

Los Angeles is a movie town, and so it’s not a surprise that the L.A. Conservancy, which since 1978 has been working to preserve the city’s architecture landmarks, has a special affection for old movie theatres. The Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats celebration, held every year, allows Angelenos to enjoy a wide variety of classic films in vintage movie palaces. This spring you could see Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Hitchcock’s thrilling North by Northwest, or a Mary Poppins family singalong, all in historic showplaces along Downtown L.A.’s Broadway. I recently trekked to 1931’s 2000-seat Los Angeles Theatre—where the French Baroque décor may be a bit shabby but still dazzles—to watch a very L.A. movie, 1997’s L.A. Confidential.

 The Conservancy has always spiced up its screenings with treats like brief stage performances, fashion shows featuring period-appropriate wardrobe, and special guests. For L.A. Confidential, the Conservancy brought in James Ellroy, author of the novel on which the film is based. Ellroy, born in L.A. in 1948, became famous as a writer of hard-boiled crime fiction. His focus on brutal crime is perhaps not surprising, because when he was ten years old his mother was raped and murdered. Her death gave him an obsessive interest in the Black Dahlia murder case, and his works of fiction, like The L.A. Quartet, cast a dark light on the city of his birth.

 The film version, effectively directed by Roger Corman alum Curtis Hanson, is perhaps less wild and crazy than Ellroy’s original, but Ellroy calls it “a proficient movie,” one that successfully taps into his own fascination with “bad men in love with strong women.” It also visually captures the L.A. of the 1950s, a time when dreams of happy families enjoying backyard barbecues are undercut by a city—and a police force—rife with crime. At the center of the film are three LAPD cops. “Hollywood Jack” Vincennes (a slick Kevin Spacey) lives to hobnob with celebrities on the set of a Dragnet-like TV crime show. Curiously, Hanson found two other key actors Down Under. Guy Pearce (coming off his role as a drag queen in Australia’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) plays Edmund Exley, a straight-arrow police sergeant who gradually succumbs to the moral ambiguity of those around him. By contrast, Russell Crowe’s Officer Bud White first seems to be a thug in cop’s clothing, but reveals a gentler side when he falls in love with a call girl who’s a Veronica Lake lookalike, played by a memorable Kim Basinger. (This was the film that essentially marked the start of Crowe’s distinguished American movie career.)  Danny Da Vito, David Straithairn, and James Cromwell also have key roles. If, back in 1997. you had just become aware of Cromwell as the kindly Farmer Arthur Hoggett in Babe, you would surely be surprised to see his turnabout here.

 L.A. Confidential is frank in its depiction of a town essentially run by racists, pimps, and drug dealers. So it’s no surprise that there will be blood—lots of it. No one we see on screen is entirely good, but there’s a sort of moral justice at work, and we come to care about those who manage to leave the City of the Angels for a better life elsewhere. That’s exactly what James Ellroy himself did. He now makes his home in Colorado.

 The film was nominated for 9 Oscars, including Best Picture, but won only two—for Basinger’s performance and the film’s adapted screenplay. After all, this was the year of Titanic.

                               French Baroque Ladies' Room 

                                Los Angeles Theatre (1931) 

 

Touched by a Blue Angel

The fame of The Blue Angel and Marlene Dietrich’s seductive Lola Lola are so intertwined that it’s surprising to see that the 1930 film put only one name—that of male star Emil Jannings—above its title. I was also bemused to discover that this film, made in Germany by German director Josef von Sternberg, was simultaneously shot both in German and in English, to appeal to international audiences. It seems von Sternberg, by this time under contract to Paramount, was asked to return to Paramount’s German sister-studio, UFA, to direct Jannings in his first sound film. The then-unknown Dietrich was not the original choice to play a sexy nightclub performer, but was discovered by von Sternberg when he saw her singing in a cabaret revue. He quickly hired her, determined to groom her into the woman he knew she could become. It clearly worked: in an eerie parallel to the action within the film, Dietrich became an overnight star, while Jannings faded into oblivion.

 It’s also worth noting that von Sternberg ultimately became sexually involved with Dietrich, resulting in a nasty scandal involving his then-wife, Riza Royce. Following their contentious divorce, he and Dietrich would end up making six Hollywood films together between 1930 and 1935. (Blonde Venus and The Devil is a Woman were some of the titles.) But none of them garnered as much international acclaim as The Blue Angel, the archetypal story of a proud man brought to his knees by an ill-considered love.

 Jannings’ Professor Immanuel Rath is a rather prissy middle-aged Shakespeare scholar who looks down on the rowdy high school boys he teaches. Shocked when his students all seem obsessed with a certain visiting nightclub performer (they pass around suggestive postcard images of a scantily clad Dietrich), he heads for the club called The Blue Angel to see for himself what the fuss is about. When he hears her sing “Falling in Love Again,” he is thoroughly smitten. Somehow, after imbibing heavily, he ends up spending the night in Lola’s bed, and by morning he’s out of a job. Undaunted, he proposes marriage, and Lola—clearly a gal who can’t say no—first bursts into peals of laughter and then graciously accepts. Both at first seem delighted with their new marital state, but their life together hinges on traveling with the nightclub act. Lola remains the star, while the once-dignified Rath is transformed into a clownish sidekick to the show’s resident magician. When the troupe returns to the town where Rath once terrorized his students, audiences are eagerly awaiting them. To make matters worse, Lola now seems attracted to another swain. After all, in the words of her theme song, she “can’t help it.”

 Aside from the vivid performances, von Sternberg uses some of the tricks of German Expressionism to keep the audience enthralled. Sets depicting quaint German towns are stylized, and small plot details—like the early death of Professor Rath’s pet canary—are used with maximum symbolic effect. A sad clown seen backstage as part of Lola’s performing troupe foreshadows the professor’s own diminution into a clownish figure, a butt of jokes, when the magician cracks eggs over his head as spectators burst into gales of raucous laughter. Lola’s signature “Falling in Love Again” is heard twice in the film. Early on, it sounds wistful and girlish; near the film’s end the same song is delivered in a way that comes across as thoroughly heartless. In all, The Blue Angel is a bravura achievement, and one that von Sternberg (who later famously taught Jim Morrison at UCLA) sadly never equaled. 

 

The Shadow of a Doubt

I have no doubt that Harvey Weinstein deserves his long prison term for multiple sexual offenses  It’s shocking to me that a man with such a strong creative vision could behave so badly toward women over whom he had professional power. I would never ever dream of campaigning for his early release. Still, I look back fondly on the glory years of Miramax, the production and distribution company named after his and brother Bob’s parents, Max and Miriam. Miramax (which was founded in 1979 as an independent company but later became part of the Disney empire) took artistic chances on films that were thoughtful and sometimes bold. Like, in the early days, Pulp Fiction; sex, lies, and videotape; The Crying Game; Heavenly Creatures; and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. Today I miss the richness of popular English-language films like these.

 A later Miramax hit was Doubt (2008), based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by John Patrick Shanley. The 2004 stage play, set almost entirely within the walls of a Catholic church and parish school, featured only four actors. As the film’s director, Shanley opened up the story to include the down-to-earth Bronx neighborhood in which St. Nicholas is located. And he enlisted four of Hollywood’s finest actors: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, all of whom were subsequently recognized with Oscar nominations for their roles. Shanley was nominated for his adapted screenplay too, but the Doubt won not a single statuette. (It was the year of Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button, The Reader, and Milk. And Doubt, for all its artistic merit, was perhaps not a film that generated love.)

 Doubt (the stage version is titled Doubt: A Parable) is at base a clash between two powerful opposing figures. Father Brendan Flynn (Hoffman) is a youngish and liberal-minded cleric who’s respected within the church community. His take-no-prisoners adversary is the school’s principal, Sister Aloysius (Streep), who is zealous in enforcing her version of the truth. Prim and grim, she is a far cry from Streep’s glamorous Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), though in both films she wields power with an iron fist. (Miranda Priestly would not be caught dead wearing that terrible Sisters of Charity bonnet.) The clash between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn evolves out of the priest’s apparently unorthodox friendship with the school’s single Black student, a young boy named Donald Miller. Aloysius sees nothing but evil in this boy-and-priest connection, and passes her suspicions on to the innocent but eager young nun played by Amy Adams. The highlight of the drama on both stage and screen is a confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Donald’s mother (Davis), who turns out to have her own unexpected reasons for accepting her son’s connection with the priest, whether or not it violates social and religious taboos.

 In some ways, Doubt is a story of the dangers of zealotry. Sister Aloysius herself admits that “in the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God." This view is reinforced by a late-in-the-film revelation that makes us further question Aloysius’s dominant role in this community. That being said, this is a work that (appropriately enough) ends with questions, not answers. I’ve read that the original 90-minute stage version generated an informal “second act” in which exiting theatregoers argued with one another about their interpretation of the events they’d seen play out on stage. The ending of the film is equally ambiguous—and well worth discussing.

 Too bad I can’t feel ambiguous about the guilt of Harvey Weinstein. But he surely knew how to produce a damn good movie.

 

 

 

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.)

 

 

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.