The Late Rob Reiner: All in the Family

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

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

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

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

 

All in the Family: “Big” and “A Few Good Men”

Years ago, when I was a camp counselor, one of the kiddies was Lucas Reiner, youngest child of comedy legend Carl. I confess I kept an eye on little Lucas, waiting for him to say something funny. Lucas has since turned to screenwriting, but it’s his older brother who has gone on to a major Hollywood career. Rob Reiner started as an actor, first in local little theatres and then as Mike Stivic (aka Meathead) on TV’s groundbreaking All in the Family (1971-1979). But it was not long before Rob tried his hand at directing. Starting with the hilarious mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap (1984), he particularly excelled at comedy, helming such classics as The Princess Bride (1987) and When Harry Met Sally . . . (1989).

 Gradually, though, Rob Reiner approached less light-hearted material, starting with a grand-guignol-style horror flick, Misery, based on Stephen King’s nightmarish novel. That was 1990; two years later Reiner garnered his only Oscar nomination, as producer (as well as director) of A Few Good Men. It’s a film I finally caught up with on a recent plane flight. Sure, I already knew the movie’s most famous exchange (“I want the truth!” “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”), but I wasn’t prepared for how riveting this courtroom thriller proved to be. A Few Good Men has a complicated, dialogue-heavy script (it was Aaron Sorkin’s first screenplay credit), and it deals with the arcane issue of a Code Red among U.S. Marines at Guantanamo Bay. But Reiner keeps things moving, and the film certainly made my hours in the friendly skies fly by.

 One of the pleasures of watching movies on a coast-to-coast flight is that you can skip from one genre (or era) to another. I started my flight with a true oldie, Grand Hotel, though in the age of COVID Greta Garbo’s “I want to be alone” certainly sounded anachronistic. Then, following A Few Good Men, I plunged into the most airy of comedies, 1988’s Big, in which a boy of 13 finds himself growing overnight into Tom Hanks. It was only in retrospect that I discovered a connection between these last two films. Big was directed by the late Penny Marshall, who for ten years (1971-1981) was married to Rob Reiner. What a wacky couple they must have made! Marshall revealed her own flair for comedy first as a TV actress (Laverne and Shirley) and then as a director of movies like A League of Their Own. Big, I feel, is her comic masterpiece, energized by her insight into the way kids look at the adult world.

 Directors who come from an acting background surely have a special flair for bringing out the best in their performers.  Big wouldn’t have worked without Hanks’ antsy, exuberant, very slightly horny performance. I laughed with delight at him trying to shimmy into a pair of much-too-small jeans, and then later (at a fancy cocktail party) having his first encounter with baby corn. The film’s romantic thread, involving a very adult co-worker, avoids being grotesque because of his spot-on childlike innocence.

 A Few Good Men too is beautifully cast, starting with Tom Cruise’s cocky but secretly sensitive young Navy attorney and Demi Moore’s conflicted Naval officer. (It’s a mark of the film’s maturity that—though there’s a smoldering subtext between these two—the script never breaks away for the obligatory romance.) Smaller roles are equally well handled, but of course the film’s secret weapon is its villain, Colonel Nathan Jessup, USMC. The cat-who-ate-the-canary part of this smug, haughty martinet fits Jack Nicholson like a glove. Good show!

 

Edith Head Doesn’t Wear Plaid

You’ve got to hand it to Steve Martin. He’s game for anything, from outrageous interracial buffoonery (The Jerk) to an update of Rostand’s 19^th century classic, Cyrano de Bergerac (Roxanne). He writes plays too, including a sophisticated meditation on the meaning of genius, as seen in a confab between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein (Picasso at the Lapin Agile). In modern art circles, he’s known as a savvy collector and enthusiast. And, of course, he’s been acclaimed for seriously championing the blue-grass banjo.

 What works for Martin on-camera (and on-stage) is the clash between his straight-arrow looks and the visual insanity he can deliver. Sporting a well-tailored suit, and with his grey locks neatly coiffed, he looks like a banker. That’s why it’s doubly funny when, as in the priceless All of Me, he goes berserk, galloping madly off in all directions. I love that film, as well as  many others in Martin’s canon, but it took COVID (and a recent steady diet of film noir) to induce me to see Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. That 1982 film, which also involved the talents of the late, great Carl Reiner, is a spoof of classic detective thrillers from the good old days when men were men, women were dames, and movies were black & white.

 Reiner, Martin, and company cleverly built their plot around interpolated footage from old thrillers, finding a way to have Martin’s character converse (in tough-guy detective-eze) with everyone from Bette Davis to Jimmy Cagney, from a panicky Barbara Stanwyck (in a clip from Sorry, Wrong Number) to a woozy Ray Milland (The Lost Weekend) to a stoic Burt Lancaster (The Killers). Walter Neff, the leading character played by Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, turns out to play a key role in Martin’s case, which involves the murder of a prominent scientist and cheese-maker. And when Martin’s detective character needs extra hands on the job, he calls in Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), who provides him with tips over the telephone.

  It’s a triumph of film editing, as well as a project that calls on the talents of art directors and others who can bring off the look of 1940s noir. In the case of costume design, the artistic team hit the jackpot by hiring Edith Head, in what was to be her very last film. The eight-time Oscar winner, who had become famous in 1937 for designing Dorothy Lamour’s sarong, knew just how to outfit Martin and his femme-fatale client (Rachel Ward) in clothes of the era, including a snappy fedora for him and a wow of a picture-hat for her. After all, the 433 films on which Head is credited include such Forties classics as The Lost Weekend, Sorry, Wrong Number, and Double Indemnity.

 I remember once, as a UCLA grad student in the Young Library stacks, putting aside my research to speed-read Head’s fascinating 1959 memoir, The Dress Doctor. It describes her life in Hollywood, designing costumes for glamorous stars with shaky egos. To make clear she was NOT competing with her famous clients, Head smartly decided to play down her own appearance. That’s why she settled on a distinctive but drab look: huge owlish glasses, prim suits, heavy bangs. Her schoolmarmish choices for herself instantly made it clear: this lady meant business. (I also learned from the book something it’s nice to keep in mind: no celebrity, however gorgeous, is without figure flaws that must be camouflaged by clever design.)

 Today Edith Head is gone but not forgotten. See Pixar’s The Incredibles, where pint-sized designer Edna Mode is made in her image.  

 

 

As You Wish Upon a Star (The Princess Bride Returns)

Over the weekend, when I sat down to watch The Princess Bride, I didn't realize I was part of a trend. Maybe it's a general desire for escapism at a time of national crisis. With the COVID-19 pandemic breathing down our necks and a crucial election  roiling public emotions, we can all appreciate a quick trip to long-ago and faraway, especially when we're guaranteed an ending in which all of the good guys live happily ever after.

When The Princess Bride -- directed by Rob Reiner and adapted by the great William Goldman from his own novel -- was released in 1987, it was no great shakes at the box-office. It took the new phenomenon of home video to vault the film into the ranks of classic cinema. Generations of children, watching The Princess Bride in their living rooms, took Westley, Buttercup, and all the rest into their hearts. This seems entirely apt, since the heroic tale is framed by the tender relationship between a grandfather (Peter Falk) and his young grandson (Fred Savage), and takes on the aspect of a story passed between the generations. The kid is sick in bed, and Grandpa tries to entertain him by sharing a favorite storybook. It's full of pirates and duels and betrayals and escapes (and not overmuch in the way of kissing scenes): what more could any boy want?

The film's beauty lies partly in the perfection of its casting choices: Cary Elwes as a dashing hero, Robin Wright as an ethereal but spunky leading lady, Chris Sarandon as the thoroughly rotten Prince Humperdinck, Christopher Guest as his evil (and digitally challenged) sidekick. Fan favorites include the oddball trio of shrewd little Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), hulking Fezzik (André the Giant), and the soulful swordsman Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), always on the track of his father's killer. Even screwier are Billy Crystal and Carol Kane, unrecognizable under heavy makeup as Miracle Max and his wife.

As befits a classic, The Princess Bride has become a part of our daily vocabulary. It's inconceivable (tee hee!) that a fan of the film wouldn't react to Inigo's oft-repeated "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father; prepare to die!" And "As you wish," as a secret way of saying "I love you" has its charm. Today's Hollywood adores The Princess Bride so much that when actors had been stuck in quarantine for months, they all leapt at the idea of shooting, bit by bit, a "home movie" version, produced by Ivan Reitman to benefit the World Central Kitchen charity. It is notably for zany casting, for home-grown props (like Diego Luna fencing with an umbrella against Jack Black wielding a plastic Jedi sword), and for the final appearance of Carl Reiner as the Grandfather, saying "As you wish" to his son Rob (playing the Fred Savage role) just a few days before Carl's passing at the age of 98. Everyone from Tiffany Haddish to Hugh Jackman to Shaquille O'Neal gets into the act, sometimes switching roles in mid-scene.

And on September 12, members of the original cast reunited online for a reading of Goldman's original script. This too was a fundraiser, in which at least 100,000 fans tuned in to contribute toward the Biden campaign in the swing state of Wisconsin. Once the reading was done, a Q&A revealed lively political sentiments from those involved. Billy Crystal, for one, joked that his character, Miracle Max, had lost his place in the castle – despite his ability to raise the dead — because he wrote a book revealing that Prince Humperdinck “didn’t care about the plague.”

 

Here's a clip from Jason Reitman's "home-movie" version of the film  

Exit Laughing: A Farewell Tribute to Carl Reiner

I never met Carl Reiner, but I’ve been near-by. After a big-deal screening at the Motion Picture Academy, I sat in a restaurant booth adjoining the booth occupied by Reiner, his wife Estelle (famous for “I’ll have what she’s having”), his pal Mel Brooks, and Brooks’ wife Anne Bancroft. The hearty merriment at that table spilled over to where I sat, to the point where I wanted to tell the waiter, “I’ll have what they’re having!” (So sad that now, in the wake of Reiner’s recent death, Mel Brooks is --at 94–the last survivor of that jolly foursome.)

Reiner did it all: he was a comic actor, a writer, a director, a producer, a husband, a father, an all-around mensch. In his honor, I’ve just watched three films he directed, starting with the earliest, Enter Laughing. This 1967 flick, based on a Reiner novel that became a Broadway play, features the sweetness, the goofiness, and the Borscht Belt yucks that have marked Reiner’s work ever since. Young Reni Santoni’s role (played by Alan Arkin in the stage version) is that of a nice Bronx kid who pines to be an actor, like his idol Ronald Colman. Though his parents have decreed he should go to pharmacy school, he sneaks away from his machine-shop job to meet a shyster thespian (Jose Ferrer, dripping with pomposity). There’s an hilarious audition scene (see below) in which he triumphs over two other loser-candidates (the young Rob Reiner is one) simply because the impresario’s actress-daughter (Elaine May) finds him cute. The film’s working-class Jewish elements, including the memorable appearance of old vaudevillian Jack Gilford and a lot of schtik about a prayer shawl, seem to tie in to Reiner’s own Bronx upbringing. His debut as a movie director is hardly a polished one, but there’s a real sense of personal investment in this light-hearted trifle. 

 Reiner’s directorial career was undeniably lifted by his collaboration on four films with Steve Martin. Martin’s comic stock-in-trade has always been his WASP roots. He pokes fun at himself in The Jerk (1979) as Navin, the son of poor but lovable Black sharecroppers. Though too dense to figure out he’s adopted, he’s the one family member with no sense of rhythm, and his favorite birthday treat is a bologna sandwich on white bread with a cellophane-wrapped Twinkie for dessert. Remarkably, when he goes out into the world, his innocent invention of a device for glasses-wearers called Opti-Grab, earns him a fortune. But it all goes down the tubes when his invention turns out to make users crossed-eyed. Carl Reiner has an hilarious cameo as a cross-eyed version of himself, hauling Navin into court as part of a class-action lawsuit.

The Jerk ends with Martin’s character happily dancing up a storm with his down-home family. A ballroom pas de deux also ends perhaps my favorite Martin/Reiner collaboration, the hilarious All of Me. The inspired 1984 pairing of Martin with Lily Tomlin posits that he is a lawyer who’d rather be a musician and she is a dying heiress who plans to come back from the dead via a mystic transmigration of her soul, as arranged by a charming but pixilated Tibetan guru (Richard Libertini). Somehow, Tomlin’s spirit ends up in Martin’s body, with hilarious results. I suspect if these two Steve Martin films were released today, the political-correctness police might come down hard on them, accusing them of cultural appropriation as well as racial insensitivity. But they’re good-natured fun, something we truly need now. Thank you, Carl Reiner, for making me laugh.