The Family That Gays Together . . . “The Birdcage”

  

The strange, sad death of Gene Hackman somehow led me to re-watch a movie that is joyous and full of life. The Birdcage, which pokes genial fun at intolerance of all kinds, seemed a good antidote for an era in which being different is often considered a crime. How ironic that a man who died alone, cut off by circumstance from his loving helpmeet and his pets, is one of the stars of a film whose theme song is Sister Sledge’s exuberant “We Are Family.”

 La Cage aux Folles started out in 1973 as a popular French stage farce. Five years later it became a French-language film, sometimes billed internationally as Birds of a Feather, that racked up international fans and awards (including three Oscar nominations) and later gave rise to two sequels. By 1983 it had been transformed into an English-language stage musical with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly!) and a book by the always madcap Harvey Fierstein. It took until 1996 for an English-language film to surface. The Birdcage, as it was called, marked the reunion of one-time comedy duo Mike Nichols and Elaine May. He directed and she wrote the saucy screenplay for an adaptation that changed the film’s setting from Saint-Tropez to Miami’s South Beach but maintained its lively, lovable spirit.

 Hackman plays a U.S. Senator with impeccable Conservative credentials. A co-founder of something called The Coalition for Moral Order, he’s a big believer in mom, apple pie, and conventional sexuality. What he doesn’t know is that his daughter’s intended was raised in a household headed by two gay men. To make matters worse, when he and his agreeable wife (Dianne Wiest) head down to Florida for a meet-the-parents visit, the press is in hot pursuit, because his close political crony has just been caught in a deeply humiliating scandal. (Sex with an underage prostitute? Check. And does she happen to be African-American? Check.)

 With all this going on, long-time partners Armand (Robin Williams) and Albert (Nathan Lane) are redoing their home décor to suggest to their visitors that the family couldn’t be more conventional, and that they have nothing at all to do with the drag club on the ground floor. Armand, who dresses well and has a neat little mustache, feels he can certainly carry off a masquerade as a straight man. Albert, though, is a bit of a problem. Flamboyant and emotional, he wants to be present for the young lad he considers his son, but there’s no good way to conceal his sexuality. This is the rare film in which the always-vivid Robin Williams steps aside and lets someone else take center stage. Broadway darling Nathan Lane returns the favor by presenting a master class in role-playing. As the glamorous Starina, he headlines the shows at the Birdcage, but remaking himself for the approval of Hackman’s U.S. Senator turns out to be a lot more of a challenge. There’s a priceless scene in which Armand coaches him to ramp up his machismo, à la John Wayne, but of course this proves impossible. After a lot of chaos, some of it involving young Val’s long-absent birth mother (Christine Baranski) and a grotesquely swishy houseboy (Hank Azaria), Albert saves the day by suddenly appearing—in a powder-pink suit and pearls—as Val’s actual mother, a genteel and sensible sort who quickly wins over Hackman’s politician, since they seem to share similar values.

 It's then that the press descends, for a slam-bang conclusion in which the now-united couples work to save Hackman’s reputation as a leader of the moral majority. Fun! 

 

Good and Evil in the Films of Gene Hackman

Once upon a time, I felt the big mystery involving Gene Hackman was exactly why he got fired in 1967 from the plum role of Mr. Robinson, spouse of the notorious middle-aged housewife who beds young Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. When I  researched the film for my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, I put this question to producer Larry Turman. He had no good answer for me, saying only that this was a choice made by director Mike Nichols. The firing hardly hurt the finished film: Murray Hamilton was unforgettable in the role. And Hackman recouped by playing Buck Barrow in the same year’s Bonnie and Clyde, landing himself an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

Today, of course, there’s a much sadder mystery to ponder:  what killed the 96-year-old retired actor, his decades-younger wife, and one of their three dogs inside their Santa Fe home? A report last Friday concludes Hackman died from a combination of Alzheimer’s and heart disease, following his wife’s very sudden death from Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome. (No word yet about what killed the dog.) All we fans can do now is remember Hackman in his prime, as an actor’s actor. Though he was never a handsome leading-man type, he carried his films with an artistry and power few can match.  

I’ve hardly watched all of Hackman’s 70-plus screen roles, but I’ve deeply admired his performances in films like The French Connection (for which he won his first Oscar) and The Conversation. Though he was most recognized for his work in dramas, I enjoyed seeing his comedic side emerge in projects like The Birdcage (in which he played a conservative U.S. Senator who discovers his daughter’s about to marry the son of a flamboyant gay couple). The sight of the straitlaced Senator Keeley dodging the press by dressing in drag and dancing to “We are Family” is matched in hilarity only by Hackman’s goofy scene as the cheery blind man in Young Frankenstein. 

Still, it was in serious dramas that Hackman found his permanent niche.  In his memory, I’ve just (re)watched two of them, 1988’s Mississippi Burning and 1992’s Unforgiven, the Oscar Best Picture recipient that won Hackman his second Oscar. Seeing them back to back, and remembering Hackman’s other celebrated roles, I came to an interesting conclusion. In Mississippi Burning, which chronicles the 1964 search for three missing civil rights activists in the American South, Hackman is on the side of the good guys. Though a former Mississippi sheriff, he now works for the FBI, assisting the by-the-book agent played by Willem Dafoe in tracking down the killers of the three young men. Certainly we can admire his values (as well as his gentleness toward the young woman married to a local deputy with clear Klan connections), but he can also be infuriating. He’s first seen cheerfully belting out a KKK theme song, and he’s prone to telling jokes that might certainly be offensive in this context. Moreover, his strategies for catching the perps are not entirely ethical (though they do work). In other words, he’s a good guy we’re not sure we like very much.

In Unforgiven, he’s again a lawman, this time in a small Texas town, circa 1880. He claims to have banned firearms, but Big Whiskey is rife with crime and violence, and he’s ultimately taken down (by star Clint Eastwood) late in the game. Still, he’s a fascinatingly genial guy, and we almost agree with his final insistence that he doesn’t deserve what he gets. Gene Hackman’s good bad-guys and bad good-guys will long stay with me. Hail and farewell. 

 

Chasing After “The French Connection”

Some years ago, backstage at the West Hollywood Festival of Books, I chanced to chat with William Friedkin. It wasn’t much of a conversation: I was hardly a fan of The Exorcist, and didn’t have much in the way of insider questions to pose to the famous director. Nor did he seem to really welcome my interest in his career. Still, he was an Oscar winner, and a leading light among the New Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s. So the news of his passing sent me to re-watch his most acclaimed thriller, 1971’s The French Connection.

 Despite its title, most of this down-and-dirty film is set in the mean streets of New York City. In early scenes I was pleased to see a few genuine glimpses of the Vieux-Port of Marseille, where some European baddies are planning a major drug deal, sending $32 million worth of heroin to the Big Apple in the trunk of a car being shipped across the Atlantic. By the time they and the dope arrive, two scruffy NYPD detectives (played by Roy Scheider and the Oscar-winning Gene Hackman) are on their trail, and most of the film becomes a cat and mouse game, with the cops pursuing the “frogs” through dingy alleyways and traffic-heavy streets. The mid-film chase involving a hijacked commuter train pursued by Hackman (as “Popeye” Doyle) in a commandeered sedan is what stood out in my mind from my long-ago first viewing of this film, and it’s just as exciting now, some fifty years after the initial release. (Wow! – the woman with the baby carriage really sets the heart athumping.) But there are lots of other great action sequences as well.  I’ve read that in directing this film, Friedkin took his inspiration from the French thriller Z, in which director Costa-Gavras filmed a fictional story about a political assassination in documentary fashion, thus heightening its drama. As Friedkin was to put it, “It was a fiction film but it was made like it was actually happening. Like the camera didn't know what was gonna happen next.” With Z as a  model, he shot The French Connection similarly, using a sense of rawness and uncertainty to pump up the adrenaline of audiences.

 I was surprised to learn that the budget was a modest $1.5 million, though the filmmakers went $300,000 over. But because of what was, even in the Seventies, modest budgeting, Friedkin couldn’t hire a glamorous star like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen. Tough guys Lee Marvin, Peter Boyle, James Caan, and Robert Mitchum turned down the Popeye role, which eventually went to Hackman. He had Hollywood cred, including a Supporting Oscar nomination for Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, but The French Connection is what truly put him on the map.

 Though Popeye and his partner are based on specific New York cops, I was surprised this time around to recognize that the film makes little effort to characterize them outside of their on-the-job behavior, Popeye’s pork-pie hat, and his leering way of challenging others: “Do you pick your feet?” Frankly, they seem to have no life beyond their profession. Their language is raw and their behavior is often beyond the pale. In fact we learn that a former partner of Popeye’s died when one of his hunches backfired. Even when Popeye and Cloudy ultimately triumph, there’s a painful irony: the final crawl makes clear that none of the drug-runners they’ve brought down ever really faces serious punishment, and the kingpin of the whole operation gets away scot-free. Just another day in the life of New York’s Finest.