Maggie Smith and Kris Kristofferson: The Lady and the Tramp

Alas, in the past week or so, we’ve lost several of my screen favorites. Dame Maggie Smith (who died September 27 at age 89) can fairly be considered movie royalty. I can’t pretend to have seen all her stage and screen work, but –starting in the late 1950s—she excelled at both comedy and drama, in both new works and well-aged classics. Circa 1970, I was lucky to catch her touring in an arch 18^th century comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem, opposite her then-husband, Robert Stephens, when it touched down at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre. But my first encounter with her talents came earlier, when she played an intelligent and sensitive Desdemona in a film version of Shakespeare’s Othello, with none other than Sir Laurence Olivier in the title role. (His blackface performance of the tragic moor was a dramatic tour de force, though today we’d naturally be uneasy seeing a white actor pretend to be a person of color.)

 Her Desdemona earned Maggie Smith her first Oscar nomination. In all she was nominated six times, winning the golden statuette for her fierce dramatic role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and for her supporting part in a Neil Simon comedy, California Suite (1978). Her two final supporting actress noms were for “corset” roles in A Room with a View (1985, as a prim chaperone) and Gosford Park (2001, as an ageing aristocrat). A whole new generation fell in love with her as the tart-tongued Violet Crawley in a period drama made for television, Downton Abbey (2010-2015). Playing an aristocrat raised in an earlier age, she was totally oblivious of more modern conventions, like weekends, and we adored her for that. But kids also fell under her spell when she played to perfection the sensible (though magical) Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films.

 Maggie Smith did not always play aristocrats and intellectuals. She was capable, as well, of portraying women of the lower classes. In 2011’s charming The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, she is a retired housekeeper worried about finances, one who only slowly adapts to the charms of India. As the title character in Alan Bennett’s semi-autobiographical The Lady in the Van, she’s an eccentric who makes her home for 15 years in Bennett’s driveway, dominating his daily life in ways both aggravating and fascinating. But whatever the roots of the characters Smith played, she always displayed a certain dignity, what you might call a ladylike manner. Yes, there was something proper and British about her, no matter the role.

 By contrast, Kris Kristofferson (who passed away on September 28 at age 88) was as American as April in Arizona. This despite the fact that his upbringing was highly out of the ordinary. An army brat, he was born in Texas, was an honor student (as well as a rugby star) at California’s Pomona College, and traveled to England as a Rhodes Scholar to study literature at Oxford.  Following a stint as a military officer, he angered his family by choosing to  move to Nashville, in search of success as a writer of country music. Eventually such songs as “Me and Bobby McGee” made him successful, and his rugged good looks helped him move into acting, in major films that cast him as outcasts, drifters, and close-to-the-earth types. (See, for instance, Martin Scorsese’s 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and John Sayles’ 1996 Texas border saga, Lone Star). His schmaltziest role was as Barbra Streisand’s rock-‘n’-roller husband in the 1976 iteration of A Star is Born.    

 Both will be sorely missed. 

 

The Pleasures of Re-Reading Pauline

This was the year I watched a stage revival of Funny Girl, listened again to the original cast recording, and then re-visited the 1968 Funny Girl film adaptation that won Barbra Streisand her Oscar. Honestly, I am not among those who adore Streisand as a singer: her choice of material is always terrific, but for me she has a tendency to work too hard at opera-worthy climaxes that would be better served by gentler treatment. Still, I find myself more and more impressed by her acting smarts. I know her original aim was to be an actress, not a singer, and in revisiting several of her old films I see a real superstar talent at work.

 Which made it fun for me to open this week’s New Yorker and discover it was an archival issue, featuring reviews and articles from years gone by. Naturally, I turned right to the Current Cinema section, and discovered that “current” applied to the year 1968, when Pauline Kael was the movie reviewer in residence. Kael was always worth reading, even when you didn’t agree with her.. A journalistic powerhouse, she loved movies so fervently that she could make you love them too. (It didn’t always work: On the strength of her lively prose, I actually went to see mediocre movies like the 1976 King Kong, in which a giant ape curiously checks out the bosom of a very young Jessica Lange.) Perhaps Kael’s greatest coup was convincing the American public that Bonnie and Clyde was a full-fledged masterpiece. Newsweek’s Joe Morgenstern, on the strength of her recommendation, watched the film a second time, then wrote a rave that fully rescinded his previous dismissal of it as a minor gangster flick. I’m sure he was not the only critic persuaded by Kael to rethink a dismissive review.

 The Kael review that sits open on my desk is from September 28, 1968, and it’s wholly devoted to the film version of Funny Girl. Like me, Kael is blown away not by Streisand’s singing but by her acting chops. She starts by assessing the whole meaning of stardom: “There’s hardly a star in American movies today, and if we’ve got so used to the absence of stars that we no longer think about it much, we’ve also lost one of the great pleasures of moviegoing: watching incandescent people up there, more intense and dazzling than people we ordinarily encounter in life, and far more charming than the extraordinary people we encounter, because the ones on the screen are objects of pure contemplation . . .”  (The thought goes on for several more lines; I don’t think anyone else can conquer the run-on sentence the way Kael can.)

 Kael emphatically places Streisand among those “wisecracking heroines, the clever funny girls” who once brightened the screen in the thirties and forties. Among them she mentions Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carol Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, Myrna Loy, “and all the others who could be counted on to be sassy and sane.” By the same token, she discovers in Streisand (during the movie’s lugubrious second act) “an aptitude for suffering” that those clever actresses lacked: “Where they became sanctimonious and noble, thereby violating everything we had loved them for, she simply drips as unself-consciously and impersonally as a true tragic muse.”

 If Kael loves Streisand, she unequivocally hates the rest of the film, especially Omar Shariff as her love interest, gambler Nicky Arnstein. As she points out, “If shady gamblers are not going to be flashy and entertaining, what good are they as musical-comedy heroes?” Good question, Pauline!  

 

“Funny Girl” Goes to the Movies

Not long ago, I watched newcomer Katerina McCrimmon make her Ahmanson Theatre debut in the road company of the Broadway revival of Funny Girl. The reviews of her performance in the leading role were ecstatic. Of course this was the 1964 stage musical that had once made an star of Barbra Streisand, who then followed it to Hollywood and never left. It’s the story of Vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, who headlined the famous Ziegfeld Follies revues in the 1920s, then eventually brought her comedy chops and her powerful singing voice into films and radio.   

 This century’s Funny Girl revival first starred Beanie Feldstein, a lively film performer (see Booksmart) who was judged to lack the singing skills needed to impersonate Brice. She was quickly replaced by TV favorite Lea Michele (Glee). Michele instantly won raves in a role for which she may have been auditioning when performing Brice’s torchy theme song, “My Man,” at a Grammy charity event. As a Southern Californian, I didn’t get to see Michele onstage, so McCrimmon would have to do. No question she’s a powerhouse singer, as well as an appealing stage presence, though actually impersonating Brice seems beyond her.  For one thing, she can’t match Brice’s distinctive physical presence: whereas Brice was relatively tall, angular, and gawky, McCrimmon is short and curvy. Some of the show’s naughtiest lyrics (“When a girl’s incidentals are no bigger than two lentils . . .”) don’t match her bosomy physique at all.

 The chance to finally see Funny Girl on stage made me curious about the show’s history. The original stage and screen versions were produced by Hollywood insider Ray Stark, who just happened to be married to Brice’s daughter, and thus had a vested interest in making the character of Fanny as lively as possible. She’s also capable, smart, self-conscious of her looks, and has lousy taste in men. That’s what I took away from the stage production: the notion that a savvy and talented woman is dumb enough to sacrifice everything for a guy who doesn’t deserve her. Nicky Arnstein was, in reality, a swindler and a cad. The stage version softens the details of his life, but giving him a big ballad about feeling threatened by his wife’s fame doesn’t make him any more appealing.

 Pondering this, I turned to the writings of Ethan Mordden, whose 2019 On Streisand: An Opinionated Guide is a deep dive into the whole of Barbra Streisand’s career on stage, disc and film. Mordden lays out the backstage challenges of the stage version (for one thing, the very green Streisand felt she was right about pretty much everything). But the film? As directed by Hollywood veteran William Wyler, it captures Streisand’s remarkable similarity to Brice, adds some terrifically goofy Ziegfeld Follies showstoppers, enhances “Don’t Rain on My Parade” with a spectacular ride on a train and a New York Harbor tugboat, and removes some songs no one will miss. The casting of the Egyptian Omar Sharif as the Jewish-American Nicky Arnstein is a misstep: he looks dashing, but his performance is pretty much one note. It’s a plus, though, that he is deprived of any plaintive ballads in the second half. Perhaps the best thing about the film is that it adds in some actual Brice material, like “Second-Hand Rose” and (as a grand finale) Streisand soulfully belting out “My Man,” as only she can.  I’ve never really been a Streisand devotee, and I’ve disliked her over-the-top style in other projects, but this is a performance for the ages.

 

 

 

 

I Left My Arts in San Francisco

Yes, it’s a not-very-good joke.  But, newly returned from the City by the Bay,  I can’t resist pointing out San Francisco’s cultural riches, which include world-class art museums, a long tradition of support for the local symphony and opera company, and such unique venues as the  Mechanics’ Institute Library. The latter is a private cultural center, founded back in 1854, that can be joined by anyone who purchases a membership. Located in San Francisco’s business district, it is particularly proud of its chess room and frequent chess tournaments. There’s also a lively interest in film. My colleague Matthew Kennedy (whose upcoming book for Oxford University Press is On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide) curates CinemaLit, a monthly array of themed film-related events housed at the institute. At the moment, he’s expanding on the intersection of chess and cinema by offering a series called “Chess in the Movies.” A chess coach will join him tonight, January 5, for a screening of 1983’s terrific Searching for Bobby Fischer. The Thomas Crown Affair, with its sexy chess game between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, shows up later in January.

The first time I ever visited San Francisco, as a young teen from L.A., my family and I happened upon a film crew shooting a dramatic night scene outside a San Francisco walk-up. We were amused that we’d left SoCal, only to find that Hollywood had come to us. The movie was Experiment in Terror, and I know little about it, other than that it starred Lee Remick and Glenn Ford. As the title says, it was a thriller—and I’m sure the steep streets and dark alleys of the city added to what scares there were in the script. Steve McQueen of course starred far more memorably in another San Francisco movie. Bullitt (1968), playing a tough but non-conformist cop, took full advantage of the city’s topography, staging a breath-taking car chase up into the hills.

 The Sixties, of course, was an era marked by youthful rebellion against the status quo, and San Francisco was ground zero for stories of young runaways who came to the city’s Summer of Love to get their groove on. There’s only a tiny glimpse of San Francisco in on of 1967’s hugest hits, The Graduate: SoCal’s Benjamin Braddock—who finds only monkey mockery at the San Francisco Zoo—will pursue love and liberation from parental expectations mostly across the Bay Bridge, in collegiate Berkeley. But more typical of the era’s youth movies is a genre flick called Psych-Out (1968), from Dick Clark Productions (!) and the low-budget mavens at American International Pictures. There’s this deaf girl played by Susan Strasberg who comes to Haight-Ashbury in search of her brother. Of course she encounters lots of hippies (Dean Stockwell, Jack Nicholson), as well as a mysterious stoner (Bruce Dern in a really bad wig) whose delusions lead to disaster for all.

 As the Sixties gave way to the Seventies, some filmmakers thought of San Francisco as the perfect place to set a madcap romp. Peter Bogdanovich, riding high after The Last Picture Show, teamed big stars Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in a Bringing Up Baby-type story about a kook and a stuffy professor who are galvanized by the mix-up of four identical pieces of luggage with wildly differing contents. The  high-speed chase involving a stolen grocery store delivery bicycle and a plunge into the bay was intended, I’ve discovered, as a wacky homage to Bullitt. (The film ends with a cheeky reference to O’Neal’s recent mega-hit, Love  Story.)

 Adieu, Ryan O’Neal! More San Francisco movies yet to come, along with a salute to the late Glynis Johns!  (Thanks to Stan Berkowitz for prompting me to correct an egregious error in this post.) 

 

The Way We Were – and Weren’t

The death of Norman Lear—writer, producer, social crusader—has set us all to thinking about the ways that mass media can influence public opinion. Lear’s creation in 1971 of a lovable bigot, Archie Bunker on TV’s All in the Family, launched household conversations that are still going on. It was the start of the era in which the so-called “boob tube” was used for something other than benign entertainment, in which the tough issues of the day were explored, in a humorous but pointed context.

 After nine seasons of All in the Family, Lear created many other TV series, most of them exploring how people of different backgrounds come together, and are pulled apart. Not content to weave his own views about tolerance and progressive politics into teleplays, Lear in 1980 introduced People for the American Way, an important advocacy group meant to combat the right-wing views of the so-called Moral Majority. He was hardly one to keep silent in the face of injustice.

 I have no idea what Norman Lear thought of Sydney Pollack’s 1973 film, The Way We Were. This bittersweet romance between a politically left-wing Jewish gal (Barbra Streisand) and a hunky college athlete with writing skills and WASP self-importance (Robert Redford) was beloved by many for its mating of two top stars of the era as well as for a title ballad that has never gone out of style. The Way We Were, adapted by playwright Arthur Laurents from his own novel, was nominated for six major Oscars, winning for both its song and its musical score. It also made major waves at the box office. I suspect Lear might have responded to the film’s central idea of opposites attracting, but would have liked it better if Pollack hadn’t been forced by his studio to cut heavily the section dealing with McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist.

 As for me, seeing The Way We Were again after so many years, I find I am not a fan. Still, though I have always resisted the charms of Barbra Streisand, I can’t help but praise her for a funny and heartfelt performance. Her Katie Morosky is someone worth paying attention to, both when she’s weak and when she’s strong. On the other hand, I have no great love for Robert Redford’s performance as the feckless Hubbell Gardiner. We’re supposed to believe he’s a sensitive and immensely gifted writer, one who can achieve the upper echelons of his craft based on his skill alone. But all I saw on screen was a blandly handsome guy with a Malibu beach house and a poor taste in friends. He seems shallow, and Katie’s long-term infatuation with him makes her a bit shallow as well. With all her smarts, it’s a shame she can’t make a better choice of soulmates. And the political/social context that is supposed to add to the film’s meaning is skipped over so lightly that it might as well not be there at all.

 My colleague Julia L. Mickenberg, who specializes in women’s history at the University of Texas at Austin, has a unique perspective on this film. Her recent online piece for Ms. relates to the once-celebrated Jewish author and activist Eve Merriam, about whom she is currently writing a biography. Merriam, it seems, was a close college friend of Arthur Laurents, and served as his model for the Katie Morosky character (created by Laurents with Streisand in mind). She was also an important public figure in her own right. A big thank-you to Julia for adding to my understanding of a forgotten but fascinating figure.