Honey, I Shrunk the Hero, or Mission: Infinitesimal

Sometimes in mid-summer I have a desperate need to see a lightweight popcorn movie. Ant-Man certainly qualifies. It features, along with such likable actors as Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, and Bobby Cannavale, a goofy story about yet another threat to mankind as we know it. The trailers leading up to this film contain plenty of those: it’s clear that this autumn Fantastic Four and Superman v. Batman will have a lot of world-saving to do. But I suspect those films won’t reduce their heroes to insect size, nor will they call upon armies of helpful ants to defeat the inevitably bald-headed villain, played with a glower and a great wardrobe by Corey Stoll. (I’ve heard there are hair-challenged men out there who’re forming a new Anti-Defamation League protesting the assumption that all bald white guys are up to no good.) At any rate, if you like your derring-do tempered with deadpan humor, Ant-Man nicely fills the bill. Special kudos to Michael Peña as a lovably dim sidekick, and to Disney for its willingness to poke fun at its Marvel-ous connections. (It’s a small world, after all.)

Of course, some folks like their thrill rides to be a bit more realistically scary. I’m told that the brand-new Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation does a great job in that respect. Frankly, Tom Cruise scares me at the best of times, but (given his enormous physicality and his love for doing his own hair-raising stunts) he truly owns this particular genre. The weekend box-office numbers suggest that, despite his weird marital  history and offbeat religious affiliations, Cruise must be doing SOMETHING right.

But of course it’s hard for me to associate Tom Cruise with Mission: Impossible. You see, I’m an old-fashioned girl. And when I think about Mission: Impossible, I’m remembering a TV series that ran from 1966 to 1973. All of us college kids were rooting for the Mission: Impossible team, covert operatives who each week thwarted bad guys on behalf of the U.S. government. There was stalwart Peter Graves, as James Phelps, the grey-haired leader. There was Martin Landau as smart, tricky Rollin Hand. There was Landau’s wife, Barbara Bain, as Cinnamon Carter, Hand’s equal as a master of disguises. There was the hulking Peter Lupus, the team’s designated muscle. Finally, there was Greg Morris. In that era, when civil rights issues were on everyone’s mind, it was important to have a black man on board.  And he had to bely old stereotypes by playing a role that was intellectual rather than chiefly physical in nature. So Morris was the team electronics expert. I never knew exactly what he was doing as – under duress -- he switched wires around. But he’d always sweat beautifully, so it was clear that this was very hard work.

Of course, part of the thrill of Mission: Impossible came from Lalo Schifrin’s throbbing theme music. And the series also had a weekly opening that was ripe for memorization and parody. After an exciting montage featuring a burning fuse, Peter Graves would play a mysterious tape recording briefing him on the job at hand. It always contained the words, “Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it . . . .”  (I certainly don’t recall fearless Mr. Phelps ever turning anything down.)  Then came the best part: the tape, as promised would automatically self-destruct.

Years later, when phone machines were new and exciting gadgets, my voice recording told callers that their mission (should they choose to accept it) was to leave a message, or risk automatically self-destructing. Well, it seemed pretty clever back then.  

Speaking of threats to the world as we know it, here’s a link to a piece I just published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (yes, really!) on the very serious matter of nuclear radiation, as it pertains to Nevil Shute’s novel (which became Stanley Kramer’s film), On the Beach. 

“Fallout”— Kat Kramer Out to Change the World

On Wednesday night, much of L.A.’s “cool” contingent was at Hollywood’s Chinese Theater, watching a celebrity-studded premiere of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a highlight of the American Film Institute’s annual fest. That same evening, not far away, a handful of showbiz greats turned up to contemplate a far graver topic: nuclear proliferation. The occasion? The fifth anniversary of Kat Kramer’s Films that Change the World. Kramer was introducing to America the film Fallout. This Australia documentary charts the history of nuclear warfare, while also chronicling how Nevil Shute’s novel, On the Beach, evolved into Stanley Kramer’s hard-hitting 1959 movie.

Of Stanley Kramer’s four children, Kat (named for her godmother, Katharine Hepburn) is the one who’s come closest to following in her father’s footsteps. She told me that Stanley Kramer’s brand of socially conscious filmmaking “is in my DNA.”  He was famous for producing and directing films (like The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) that tackled the day’s leading issues through dramatic storytelling. But the films in her series tend to be documentaries, like Teach Your Children Well (which takes on homophobia and schoolyard bullying) and The Cove (it won an Oscar for exposing the secret slaughter of dolphins near a Japanese village). Kat emphasized to me that today it’s documentaries that “have their own voice.” Unlike Hollywood features, so often made by committee and beholden to major commercial interests, a documentary can be fearless about making a strong statement.

The evening began with the inevitable lineup of stars for the paparazzi to photograph. There were Lily Tomlin and Louis Gossett Jr. (both of whom would later address the group), as well as such where-are-they-nows? as Jerry Mathers, who used to be known as TV’s Beaver Cleaver. I was tickled to see the still-handsome George Chakiris, all black hair, black stubble, and jet-black clothing. In fact, black seemed to be the color of the evening, in Kat’s case accented with silver lamé and with the oversized earrings that are a personal trademark. It felt like your usual celebrity red carpet, until the program began, with Tomlin introducing her close friend, Dr. Helen Caldicott.

Caldicott, an Australian pediatrician and author, was inspired by On the Beach to become an activist against nuclear energy. She’s a true pit bull on the subject, though a pit bull who’s bubbling over with humor and charm. Her charm doesn’t blunt her basic message: “We get really close to nuclear war quite often.”  Such a war could come at any moment, and if it does, she predicts an impending ice age, in which “we’ll all freeze to death in the dark.” Before that happens, however, there’s also the danger posed by climate change, as witness recent disasters in the Philippines and Japan, where the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor is now leaking radiation into our atmosphere and our oceans.

With the present looking so grim, it was a pleasure to go back to the past through Lawrence Johnston’s documentary, Fallout. We learned that Nevil Shute, an English engineer who discovered a talent for writing, was normally relaxed about peddling his adventure novels to film companies. On the Beach, though, was a different story. In depicting Melbourne, Australia as humanity’s last stand in the face of encroaching radiation from a nuclear blast, Shute identified strongly with the nuclear engineer (Fred Astaire in the film) who blames himself and his colleagues for the destruction of mankind. Stanley Kramer’s movie is still haunting, but Shute never accepted the dramatic tweaks that an American filmmaker brought to his own singular vision of Armageddon.  

PS  A warm farewell to the fascinating Mickey Knox, actor, blacklist survivor, and buddy of Norman Mailer, who passed away this morning. More on Mickey later.

Apocalypse Now: The Mayan Calendar Brings Us to Doomsday

Hey, I guess the world didn’t end on December 21, though recent news events might lead us to think the opposite. Frankly, I’ve enjoyed the creative ways movie buffs have been dealing with the end-of-times predicted by the ancient Mayans. Bill Dever, über-fan of genre films, has posted on his B-Movie Nation site a long list of movies to help you check out whether the world will end with a bang or with a whimper. (Soylent Green, anyone?) And Cinefile, one of L.A.’s most beloved video stores, is urging customers to prepare for the coming apocalypse by way of a major sale on its Gold Card, which now offers 10 rentals for $25. (An extra bonus: if life as we know it grinds to a halt, you don’t have to worry about returning your selections!)

Cinefile, by the way, devotes a wide shelf to its collection of End of the World films. By no means have I seen them all. But, of course, in my Roger Corman days I worked on several. Typically we went the Mad Max route, creating an end-of-the-world scenario in which a ragtag collection of tough, sexy types struggles for survival against a backdrop of futuristic squalor. Such films were usually set in some kind of desert outpost. The reason was obvious: squalid desert outposts (like the ones we depicted in The Terror Within and its sequel) make for cheap sets. I vaguely recall that Cirio Santiago, Roger’s Manila-based crony, had the wild notion that for once we try a different tack, and create an apocalyptic world in which dry land has been completely submerged by ocean waves. Survivors would live aboard boats, and fight over drinking water. If this sounds like the much maligned Waterworld, I’m convinced it was an early incarnation of that same doomed project.

One End of the World film that stands out for me because it so dramatically reflects the fears of its era is Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), adapted from a blockbuster 1957 novel by Nevil Shute. In the late Fifties, the great international fear was nuclear holocaust. On the Beach is set in Australia in the year 1964. Though no one quite speaks of it, the rest of the world’s population has been wiped out by nuclear war. It will take five months for the deadly radiation to arrive Down Under, and in the meantime the citizenry braces itself for impending doom.

On The Beach relies for its power not on fancy special effects but on a script that highlights the psychological trauma of waiting for the end. For some of the characters, like Ava Gardner’s Moira, it’s a time of unabashed hedonism. The good-guy Australian naval man played by Anthony Perkins (one year before Psycho) worries over the well-being of his young wife and baby. The most dramatic scenes involve a nuclear scientist (played surprisingly well by Fred Astaire) who turns auto racer, channeling his personal sense of guilt into a reckless abandonment of basic safety precautions. Though everyone’s Aussie accent rings hollow, the film grabs us, especially when a submarine captained by Gregory Peck makes a sad voyage to San Francisco, looking for survivors who don’t exist.

Stanley Kramer, a master of publicity, played up the social relevance of On the Beach by staging simultaneous openings in various world capitals. But though it may have sparked debates over nuclear disarmament at the United Nations, nothing much changed. Five years later, another Stanley released a black comedy that suggested we’d all learned to stop worrying and begun loving the bomb. Dr. Strangelove, of course.