A Star Has Died: Carmen de Lavallade (1931-2025)

 To my surprise, there’s been no mention of the passing of dancer Carmen de Lavallade in my hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times. Carmen died, in the waning days of 2025, in a New Jersey hospital, and east coast news outlets paid her glowing tributes. But I’m still shocked that her death, at age 94, was apparently ignored in L.A. After all, Carmen was born in Los Angeles, and—as a teenager—began her serious dance training after winning a scholarship to Lester Horton’s landmark Dance Theater in West Hollywood. Quickly becoming a star of the Horton troupe, she took on such fiercely dramatic roles as Salomé, while also teaching small kids like me the basics of modern dance.

                                                     Me at age 4, with my beloved teacher  

 Still in her early twenties, Carmen set out for the Big Apple, along with her close friend, future choreographer Alvin Ailey. Both soon found work in a 1954 Broadway production of House of Flowers, a fanciful Haiti-set musical that was an unlikely collaboration between Truman Capote and Harold Arlen. It was there that Carmen met and married Trinidad-born Geoffrey Holder, who later triumphed on Broadway with The Wiz: he would win Tonys both for directing the show and for contributing its lively costume design.     

 Now based in New York, Carmen continued on as a dancer, featured in Ailey’s American Dance Theater productions and guesting with other companies. Eventually she began teaching stage movement at the celebrated Yale School of Drama, where a young Meryl Streep was one of her students. When Carmen and I met for lunch in New York ten years ago (see photo above from that memorable afternoon) she reminisced about appearing in the premiere production of Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs, imaginatively staged in the Yale swimming pool.

 Blessed with a beautiful face and a long slim body, Carmen was undeniably well-suited to movies too. This began back in her Lester Horton days, when she was cast in the 1954 screen adaptation of Carmen Jones, the Broadway hit that adapted Bizet’s Carmen to an African-American cast. If  you watch one of the big musical numbers, set in a local bar during World War II,  you’ll see a young Carmen, her long pony-tail swinging as she dances exuberantly to “Beat Out the Rhythm of the Drum.”  In 1959, she revealed her acting chops in a tense scene from a crime drama, Odds Against Tomorrow, wherein she played the tough-minded girlfriend of star Harry Belafonte. Almost forty years later, she was featured in John Sayles’ Texas drama, Lone Star.

 In the course of a long career, Carmen received many accolades, including a Kennedy Center honor in 2017. But I can’t help remembering a story my parents told me when I was a kid. In the 1950s, Carmem was appearing with two male dancers as an opening act for Pearl Bailey at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and my folks drove from L.A. to see her perform. Carmen’s name blazed forth on the marquee, and she danced nightly in an opulent show room for appreciative crowds. But Carmen was not allowed to lodge at the Flamingo. Her café au lait coloring meant she was stuck all day in a stuffy motel room, without access to the swimming pool and other amenities that made the Flamingo a world-class resort. So my parents gave up fun in the sun to spend their weekend keeping her company. When they got home, they told me all about it. It made no sense to me then . . .  and it still doesn’t. But I learned once more that the world outside of Lester Horton’s Dance Theater was not always a graceful place.

 

Facing Up to “No Other Choice”

Korean auteurs seem to have a special talent for black comedy. Frankly, I have no idea why. My weeklong visit to Seoul in 1967 revealed to me a country on the move, but one that (unlike Japan) had not yet adapted to modern technology. (I stayed in a middle-class household where the kitchen was dominated not by a refrigerator but by a huge jar of kimchee.)  

 That, of course, was long ago, and South Korea has now caught up with technology in a big way. In fact, I’ve heard that the Seoul’s international airport is one of the marvels of today. Maybe it’s the rapid evolution of Korean society from third-world to first-world, as well as the current Korean domination of pop culture (see, for instance, the global fortunes of KPop Demon Hunters) that has caused thoughtful Korean filmmakers to look askance at what their world has become. Hence the success of such landmark Korean films as Bong Jun Ho’s darkly funny Okja and Parasite, the latter of which was, in 2020, the first-ever foreign language film to take home the Oscar for Best Picture.

 Bong Jun Ho is not the only South Korean writer/director to enjoy an international reputation. His countryman Park Chan-wook has also had major arthouse hits. These include the very violent, very twisty Oldboy, as well as The Handmaiden, an erotic thriller that won a standing ovation at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.  Bong’s latest, which was in the mix for several film festival awards, is No Other Choice, based on Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel, The Ax. This has now become a Seoul-set black comedy about a world in which social and technological change are happening much too fast. (Sounds familiar, no?)

In No Other Choice, the nebbishy Man-su (Lee Byung-Hun) is a middle-aged husband and father devoted to his middle-management career in the paper industry. (Why does any mention of paper remind me of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in the Steve Carell sitcom, The Office?)  At the outset, he clearly knows he has everything he could wish for: a beautiful wife, a fabulous hillside home, talented (though psychologically troubled) kids, a sense of real personal satisfaction. But then his company, Solar Paper, is sold, and the Americans move in, replacing veteran workers with hyper-efficient machines. While his family continues to live as if nothing has changed, Man-su struggles to find work. I suspect that in today’s economy we can all identify, but Man-su’s solution is not for everyone. Methodically studying the top candidates for the industry job for which he is best qualified, he decides to bump them off, one by one. But while he might be a highly capable mid-level guy in the paper industry, he makes a terrible assassin. The film’s comedy, such as it is, involves Man-su desperately trying to get rid of the competition by any means necessary. He generally succeeds—the film definitely has its gruesome moments—but his best-laid plans often go awry in ways that not everyone might find funny.

It’s all very frenetic, with occasional detours into sex comedy involving (among others) Man-su’s pretty wife and the dentist who is her boss, and to me something seemed off about the film’s pacing. A black comedy is at its best when it all happens so quickly that we don’t have time to ask questions, but No Other Choice is 139 minutes long. Of course there’s an ironic ending. This was a film I wanted to like more than I did. By the end, I was mostly waiting to be put—like Man-su’s victims—out of my misery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All The World’s a Stage: “Hamnet”

 A fair number of high-powered film critics don’t seem to care for Hamnet. The film was wholly shut out by such august bodies as the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, both of which chose to honor more outrageous flicks, like One Battle After Another. For them, I gather, Hamnet is an old-fashioned tearjerker, without much connection to our own troubled times.

 Actors, though, clearly hold this film in high esteem. Wednesday’s nominations for the Actor Award, the newly-renamed honor from the Screen Actors Guild, include individual recognition for Jessie Buckley (up for female actor in a Leading Role) and Paul Mescal (actor in a Supporting Role). Even more impressive: the film was nominated (along with, among others, One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme), for the coveted ensemble award honoring the featured cast.

 And what do I think? As a dedicated filmgoer with a decided literary bent, I found this rendering of the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife thoroughly mesmerizing. Adapted by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao and novelist Maggie O’Farrell from Farrell’s best-selling novel, this is a story about familial love and loss. In the absence of much hard evidence, many literary types have speculated about the marriage of the brilliant English playwright and the rustic young woman he abandoned for so many months while pursuing his career in London. It’s easy to guess, as many have done, that the pair had little in common aside from the three children who stayed home in Stratford with their mother. (No wonder , they reason, that Will looked for greener pastures elsewhere! No wonder that upon his death he left his wife merely the second-best bed!)

 I think the romantics among us are delighted to find in O’Farrell’s rendering a genuine marital union, though one challenged by Will’s long absences. And, of course, further threatened by the plague-death of the couple’s only son, Hamnet, at an early age. The story,  then, becomes one in which a  couple need to find—somehow—their way out of grief. For the earthy Agnes (more usually known as Anne), there’s despair, fury at her long-absent spouse, and a deep connection with nature. For Will there are words to be written, and a play to be produced. I’ve seen other films re-creating the performance of an Elizabethan drama on the stage of the Globe Theater (see Shakespeare in Love, for example). But never before have I seen this set-up used so movingly, with Agnes—standing among the groundlings at the very edge of the stage—mesmerized by the words her husband has written, finding in them personal meaning to help soothe her agony.

 I’ve always liked Jessie Buckley’s performances in modest indies, but the role of Agnes calls forth from her whole new depths. Her radiance is impossible to ignore, and I suspect big prizes may be coming her way. Paul Mescal’s role as William Shakespeare is smaller, but also requires—and gets—real intensity. I also want to praise the child actors who are essential to this plot, particularly Jacobi Jupe as 12-year-old Hamnet, whose death tears the Shakespeare family asunder. Fittingly, young Jacobi’s 20-year-old brother, Noah, is featured in the climactic Globe Theater scenes, on stage in the role of Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous protagonist. (The film makes clear at the outset that Hamnet and Hamlet were, in sixteenth-century England, essentially the same name.)

 Huzzah for Hamnet’s production values, including glorious cinematography that captures Agnes’s closeness to the natural world. Perhaps because women created her, she’s a heroine unlike any Shakespeare ever wrote.

 A final note: it wasn’t until I belatedly talked to viewers who hadn’t read the novel that I realized not every moviegoer knows at the outset that Paul Mescal’s character, Will, is a creative portrait of the bard-to-be, William Shakepeare. The feeling among several who spoke to me is that this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers: they wanted the audience to respond to the country lad who falls for Agnes without initially recognizing the literary genius he will become. I wonder: does this strategy help or hurt the film’s success?

Not-So-Young Frankenstein

I’m afraid the Frankenstein story doesn’t really resonate with me. Circa 1990, when I worked for Roger Corman  at Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a successful Hollywood producer named Thom Mount approached Roger with an offer he couldn’t refuse. Mount had been a Corman underling years before, and felt that his mentor should set aside his production company  obligations and return to directing. So he came to Roger with a deal: a cool million dollars to write and direct a film based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, about a scientist who creates and animates a monstrous creature, only to live to regret his own folly.

 As Roger’s story editor, I was charged with overseeing the film’s script, which would ultimately be based on Frankenstein Unbound, a Brian Aldiss novel with a time-travel element: a man from our own era finds himself back in the early nineteenth century, interacting with Dr. Frankenstein, a sensuous Mary Shelley, and of course the monster. Naturally I read both the Aldiss novel and Mary Shelley’s original—and I can barely remember either one. But a few oddball things remain in my memory banks from the completed film. One is Roger’s decision to cast his fourteen-year-old daughter Catherine as a servant girl wrongly accused of murder. Young Catherine Corman played the role credibly, but it’s not every day that a film director hangs his own child on camera. (Today, Catherine, none the worse for wear, is a writer, photographer, and indie filmmaker.)

 I have two other memories of a film that most critics and most audiences have scorned. One is an awkward sex scene between Mary Shelley (played by the very young Bridget Fonda) and John Hurt as a very middle-aged visitor from the 20^th century. The other is the moment when the Frankenstein monster finally finds a mate—and the two inexplicably lapse into a romantic pas de deux. This was in the version of the movie I saw at an advance screening, but apparently the audience reaction was so negative that the moment was cut from the released film. 

 Of course there are other cinematic versions of Mary Shelley’s work. Most of us know the classic 1931 James Whale film, featuring Boris Karloff as an ungainly but oddly likable monster who accidentally drowns a little girl because he doesn’t fully understand the game they’re playing. Karloff’s monster has become iconic, inspiring generations of Halloween costumes and a delicious Mel Brooks spoof. But Spanish director Guillermo del Toro had long wanted to try his hand at creating an intelligent, sympathetic Frankenstein monster. His new approach (with Oscar Isaac as the scientist and the very tall Jacob Elordi as the monster)  is visually exciting, But it also seems endless and, frankly, more than a bit sappy, leaning heavily on ultimate recognition by man and monster that they’re in many ways father and son . . . and that it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

 There’s much philosophical meat in the Frankenstein story, and we in the 21^st century are well advised to be aware of the dangers of taking science too far. But I don’t think del Toro, for all his good intentions, has made a movie that’s philosophically worth our attention. Curiously, it was just two years ago that Yorgos Lanthimos directed a film that—while in no way based specifically on Shelley’s novel—approaches some of that book’s intellectual concerns. I’m talking about Poor Things, in which a female “monster” reminds us of the dangers of science, and what it might take to move beyond them. 

 

 

American Hustler: Timothée Chalamet as “Marty Supreme”

Back in my Roger Corman days, I was friendly with a co-worker, Rodman Flender, who had serious directorial ambitions. He came from a family bursting with artistic talent, and once happened to mention that his sister’s son was a budding actor. Of course I smiled benignly: in SoCal pretty much EVERYONE has a relative with acting aspirations . . . and most of them flame out rather quickly. But Rodman’s young nephew turned out to be the exception to the rule, one of those rare creatives whose screen appearances take on a life of their own. You’ve surely heard of Timothée Chalamet, a young man whose talent, combined with his vibrant off-screen personality, makes him a true Hollywood star.

 Chalamet’s breakout performance was in a 2017 Luca Guadagnino film, Call Me By Your Name, in which he played a teenager gobsmacked by his sexual desire for a slightly older young man. I went to see it out of curiosity, but have since concluded that Guadagnino’s work (which also includes the tennis flick, Challengers) is not for me. I find it overly swoony, with everything basically revolving around a hunger for sex. Sill, Call Me By Your Name, which gained international attention, led to Chalamet’s first Oscar nomination, and he was on his way.

 Never one to be typecast, Chalamet went on to play such diverse roles as a callous young stud in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a charming boy next door in Gerwig’s Little Women, and an outer-space messiah-type in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy. Perhaps his biggest leap was into convincingly playing (and singing) the part of the young Bob Dylan in 2024’s A Complete Unknown, a role that gave him his second Oscar nom. Now he’s back in another starring role that has required him to master a brand-new skill-set. The word is that he practiced ping-pong for seven years to take on the role of Marty Mauser (based on the real-life Marty Reisman), a bad boy of table tennis in the early 1950s.

 Marty Supreme, directed and co-written by Josh Safdie, continues the Safdie brothers’ passion for hyperkinetic filmmaking. There’s no way you can follow all the twists and turns of the plot, but it brilliantly conveys a New York state of mind: everyone is a little angry, and in a great hurry to get somewhere. For Marty, championship-level table tennis is a way to escape his salesman job at his uncle’s shoe store and move into the wider world. But there are complications: his family disapproves, he’s short on money for travel, and his casual but sometimes intense passion for the cute young thing downstairs will have its own unforeseen consequences (as is hinted by a rather remarkable credit sequence at the top of the film).

 Critics have talked about Marty Supreme as an exposé of the always-hustling American personality type, and I’m sure they’re right. There’s one element, though, that I haven’t seen mentioned. The film is very specifically set just after World War II, and—in one way or another—all these characters seem shell-shocked, whether or not they came anywhere near a battlefield. Marty’s #1 ping-pong opponent, a Japanese young man with an emotionless face and manner, is said to have been deafened in childhood by the bombing of Tokyo. The immigrant teammate Marty strives to outrank has numbers tattooed on his arm, courtesy of the Nazis. The always cocky Marty announces himself—an American Jew—as Hitler’s worst nightmare. The role fits Chalamet so well, I believe, because he too is hustling for fame and fortune. 

 

Do I Buy This “Little Shop of Horrors”?

Last week I was on a transcontinental flight. Looking for an entertaining movie to watch, I came upon the 1986 musical version of Little Shop of Horrors. Yes, this was the all-star Technicolor adaptation of the 1960 horror comedy cranked out by Roger Corman and his pals when they suddenly had access to someone else’s sets for two days and two nights. The movie musical evolved out of the Off-Broadway musical adaptation that launched the stellar careers of composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman, both of whom adored the darkly funny Corman original. Conveniently, the ever-thrifty Corman had never bothered to copyright his movie, so it was cheap and easy for two novice musical comedy guys to adapt it to the stage. The cast was small, the sets were modest, and the cleverness of the concept held up beautifully both in a modest Off-Broadway space and, later on, in community theatre venues all over the world. 

 Corman’s all-purpose screenwriter, Charles B. Griffith, resented for the rest of his life how hard he had to fight to get some money out of the stage adaptation of his highly-original screenplay. Eventually the plucky little musical transformed into a big-name cinematic project featuring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin, with cameos by John Candy, Jim Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Bill Murray in the masochist-in-the-dentist-chair role that had been originated by an unknown Jack Nicholson back in the Corman days. Critics and audiences quickly decided that the new film was just too big and too lavish to capture the wacky charm of the original Corman/Griffith project. As Chuck Griffith himself told me, when I was researching for my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, “The original cost $27,000 and broke even in the first hour of release. The [movie] musical cost $33 million, and they never got it back.” (Since that megaflop, several attempts have been made to remake the movie musical—one with Roger himself involved—but all have come to nothing. I should add that when I was Roger’s story editor, circa 1990,, there was a serious attempt at a live-action TV series. That too eventually died an unheralded death,)   

 When I watched the musical film on that airplane, I realized that I’d never actually seen it before. As a fan of the stage musical, I hadn’t wanted my memories spoiled by what was purported to be an overblown spectacle. So, after all this time, what did I think? To me, some aspects of the stage musical work very well in their screen adaptation. One of the Menken/Ashman team’s additions to the movie musical was a trio of girl singers—Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon—who act as a sort of Greek chorus while adding a Motown groove to the soundtrack. In the film they’re very good, and the zany costumes they wear in various scenes (like kitschy Suzie Wong garb when Seymour buys his plant from a mysterious old Chinese man) are a delight. I also fully appreciated the hapless-looking Rick Moranis as Seymour, as well as the unforgettable Ellen Greene, a star of the Off-Broadway show, as a deliciously befuddled Audrey. In the sadistic dentist role (much expanded from the Corman original), Steve Martin is clearly having a ball. But the producers have seen fit to heighten the comedy by cramming in every comic TV star they can find, which is why John Candy, for one, makes a totally unnecessary cameo appearance. And the light-as-a-bubble story ends up, alas, like a fallen soufflé.  Horror comedy is, you might say, a delicate thing.

 Dedicated to Jackie Joseph, Corman’s Audrey, and the one original player I’m sure is still around. Also to Adam Abraham, who interviewed me for his quite enlightening 2022 homage, Attack of the Monster Musical: A Cultural History of Little Shop of Horrors.