R.I.P. Val Kilmer (and Tombstone’s Doc Holliday)

Sometimes it seems that Val Kilmer made a specialty of portraying men who die young. At least, that’s the impression I got after watching his electrifying performances as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and as a tubercular Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1992). Still, Kilmer remained very much alive as the warrior Madmartigan in George Lucas and Ron Howard’s fantasy epic Willow (1988), in which he was upstaged by tiny Warwick Davis but also chanced to meet his real-life wife-to-be, Joanne Whalley. (They fell for one another on the set, and Howard obligingly re-shot their love scenes to take advantage of the budding romance. Fairytales do tend to come to an end, however. Though they wed in 1988 and had two children together, the couple divorced in 1996.)

 Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun (1986) was also a survivor, living long enough to show up in the film’s decades-later sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Still, when the sequel was shot in 2022, Kilmer’s voice was so affected by treatments for throat cancer that it had to be digitally altered to add clarity. Sadly, Top Gun: Maverick was Kilmer’s final performance. He died on April 1, 2025: at sixty-five he was by no means a youngster, but many of us had hoped for additional cinematic brilliance from him.   

 Tombstone, at its essence, is essentially the story of two gangs—a group of local Arizona lawmen (three of them brothers) versus a loosely organized cluster of cattle rustlers and horse thieves who called themselves the Cowboys. At the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, several men on both sides went down. The thirty-second shootout was followed up by later skirmishes, in which much blood was shed on both sides. Various versions of the story—which became widely known only after Earp’s death and a popular book about him—show up in a number of films, starting with 1939’s Frontier Marshal, which starred Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero. Then there was John Ford’s 1945 My Darling Clementine followed by the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which starred Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as his buddy, Doc Holliday.

 I suspect that Tombstone, directed by George P. Cosmatos, was intended to be the last word on the subject. Certainly, its cast is chockful of famous names.  It seems as though every red-blooded male in Hollywood wanted to take part in this semi-true tale of law-and-order on the American frontier. In addition to Kilmer and top-billed Kurt Russell (as reluctant lawman Wyatt Earp), the film features such established names as Powers Boothe, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Jason Priestley, Thomas Haden Church, and Billy Zane. Dana Delany of China Beach fame is the female lead in a movie that is predictably short on women’s roles. (Yes, she plays  a gal with a checkered sexual history.) Ageing Charlton Heston , not long before his 2002 retirement from acting, takes on a small but key part in the proceedings, and none other than Robert Mitchum serves as the film’s narrator.

 Though Tombstone pits lawmen against renegades, the story is such that it’s often hard to tell them apart. Earp and Holliday seem at times no less bloodthirsty than the Cowboys. This puts me in mind of the response, back in 1967, to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, decried then by many for its level of on-screen violence. As film scholar Robert Alan Kolker put it, “Penn showed the way: Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”   Now Bonnie and Clyde seems rather tame. Today, there will be blood.  

 

Getting to Know “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison”

I suppose it’s part of some divine plan that I watched Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison on Good Friday. This 1957 film certainly reflects its era: it’s a widescreen romantic drama  populated by major stars (Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr), using World War II as a backdrop for a tale of love and sacrifice. One of its two central characters is a Roman Catholic nun, and formal religion is treated with all due respect. Sentimental? Yup—but also an appealing reflection of an era when (at least in theory) men were men, and women were decidedly not.

 Adapted from a popular novel by an Australian author, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, was directed as well as co-written for the screen by the great John Huston. His filmography was long and varied, but this film most reminds me of 1951’s The African Queen, which contains a similar sense of opposites attracting under dangerous circumstances. In The African Queen, a prissy missionary (Katharine Hepburn) and a rough-and-ready ship’s captain (Humphrey Bogart) bond while on a life-or-death wartime journey down an African river.

 Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is set in a similarly dangerous time and a similarly exotic place. It takes place on a small Pacific island during the later years of World War II. We open with a desperate American Marine, the only survivor of a Japanese attack, reaching the shore in a rubber raft. Fortunately, the enemy is not present. The island’s sole inhabitant turns out to be a pretty young British nun with her own tale of woe. The only surprise about this meet-cute is that Allison has no apparent beef against the Church, and from the start treats the coiffed and veiled sister with full respect. When it comes to survival tactics (like catching a giant sea turtle for dinner), he’s endlessly capable, and she’s hardy enough to go along with his every scheme. Once a Japanese squadron has returned to the island, Mitchum’s character manages a successful raid on their well-stocked pantry. In addition to canned goods, he comes back with bottles of sake, but then—thoroughly under the influence—makes the mistake of telling Sister Angela that he’s in love with her. Since she has not yet taken her final vows, anything is possible . . . but she flees into the night in total dismay.

Much of the film’s acclaim was directed toward Kerr’s performance as Sister Angela, for which she was Oscar-nominated. (The film’s other Oscar nom went toward its concise, impactful script.) In this era, Kerr was making something of a specialty of playing outwardly prim young women who harbor deep emotions beneath a ladylike surface. (See The King and I, Tea and Sympathy, Separate Tables, and of course From Here to Eternity.) During a long career, she was nominated for six Oscars, always as a leading lady. She never won, but thankfully was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1994 as “an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance.” 

 I tend to associate Mitchum with film noir (like the classic Out of the Past). With his slightly dissolute look and manner, he could be terrifying, as in 1955’s Night of the Hunter. In Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, he’s brash and a bit crude, but there’s a gentle side to his character as well. The film’s ending certainly doesn’t leave us with any hints of  happily-ever-after. Yet this is a feel-good movie, one that seems to suggest that all things are possible. And I say Amen to that! 

 

 

 

 

Listing the Deceptions in “Adrian Messenger”

 

The List of Adrian Messenger, directed by John Huston in 1963, begins with a joke on the audience. We just don’t know, until the film is practically over, where it’s going. The film begins in classic thriller style, with a mysterious old man casing an ornate bank building that is closed for the night. Slipping inside the darkened lobby, he manipulates some levers, and an elevator comes crashing down. Someone, we gather, has just plunged to his death. Whereupon the old man slips out into the darkness and disappears.

 When the main titles come up, we’re surprised to see (against a swirling backdrop of distinctive faces) the names of some of the biggest male Hollywood stars of the mid-century: Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum,  Frank Sinatra. Then there’s another card: Starring George C. Scott. Say what? As we launch into a classic whodunit in which Scott (using an unconvincing British accent) investigates his friend’s death after a mysterious plane crash, the movie seems to be all about unearthing a revenge plot that may date back to the Burma campaign in World War II. But of course for the viewer the real mystery is this: when are those famous movie stars going to make an appearance?

 This was the era when Hollywood studios were desperately looking for ways to counteract the rising popularity of television. One idea was to dazzle potential moviegoers with spectacle; another was to give glimpses of major celebrities, the sort who wouldn’t be caught dead appearing on TV. I well remember the brouhaha surrounding the 1956 release of Around the World in Eighty Days, a blockbuster that was named Best Picture at the Oscars but is virtually unwatchable today. (I saw it at the Carthay Circle, an ornate movie palace that – alas – has long since been replaced by an office building. There were fancy theatre programs in the lobby, and even a special curtain designed to show off in comic fashion the movie’s various thrills.) This elaborate telling of the classic Jules Verne adventure tale, with David Niven in the leading role and a young Shirley MacLaine as the Indian (!) lovely he rescues, was not considered enticing enough to lure Fifties audiences. Instead, the film is crammed with 48 celebrity cameos – hey look! There’s Sinatra at the piano in that saloon!  And Marlene Dietrich at a table!

 Buoyed by the film’s success, other movies reached for the same gimmick. I remember something called Pepe, starring the Mexican comic Cantinflas, who’d been introduced to the English-speaking world as Phileas Fogg’s sidekick in Around the World in Eighty Days. In Pepe (1960) he journeys to Hollywood to retrieve a beloved horse, giving him the opportunity to hobnob humorously with legendary movie stars. And How the West Was Won (1962) used three directors, heaps of stars, and wide-screen technology to tell a vast frontier tale.  But The List of Adrian Messenger is different in that its famous faces are hidden behind elaborate makeup, only to be unmasked just before the final fadeout. Major kudos to Bud Westmore of the long-lived  Hollywood family for his false-face designs.

 To my disappointment, I’ve learned that the disguised cameos—much touted in the media upon the film’s release—were in some cases total fakes. Yes, we see the celebrities remove their phony faces at the end, but that’s not really Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster fooling the audience with facial prosthetics and exotic accents. Actor Jan Merlin, a latter-day Roger Corman alumnus, apparently stood in for Kirk Douglas in some of his disguises.

 Yes, the laugh’s on us.

 

Laughing (and Shivering) with Charles Laughton

 “Hobson’s Choice” is a British expression dating back to Shakespeare’s day. An apparent tribute to a Cambridge livery stable owner named Thomas Hobson (1544–1631)), it implies a choice that turns out to be no choice at all, as in “take it or leave it.” Circa 1916, Hobson’s Choice was a popular British play about a shoe shop owner with three unmarried daughters, The play was ultimately made into several films, in 1920, 1931, and (memorably) in 1954, when the great David Lean—not yet the director of epics like Lawrence of Arabia—turned it into a small, delightful comedy.

In Lean’s film, the role of the demanding, though often drunk, Hobson is played by Charles Laughton,  who had already made his mark as King Henry (winning an Oscar for 1933’s The Private Life of Henry VIII), Captain Bligh (in 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty), and Quasimodo (in 1939’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Laughton was a big man with a complicated inner life. (He was married until his death to British actress Elsa Lanchester, but his sexuality remains an open question.) As Henry Horatio Hobson, a shopkeeper in a small Victorian town, he is both charming and dictatorial. He permits his two younger daughters to flirt with their admirers, but tries hard to prevent his eldest from having her own life because—through her efficient running of the shop while he’s off on yet another bender—she’s much too valuable to lose.

 But that daughter, Maggie, turns the tables. Tired out from doing all the work and receiving none of the credit, she persuades her father’s #1 cobbler to marry her. Played by John Mills as a talented but self-effacing fellow who’s content to make shoes for a pittance in the basement of Hobson’s shop, he’s a wonderful example of a mouse who ends up roaring. Therein lies most of the comedy, with Mills and his new wife finally making Laughton an offer he can hardly refuse.

 Laughton’s deftness at comedy is not called upon in the sole film he’s credited with directing. It was made just one year after Hobson’s Choice, and I chose to see it last Sunday, because it offers spine-tingling Halloween entertainment. The Night of the Hunter, a novel adapted for the screen by James Agee, features Robert Mitchum in one of his creepiest performances. Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a phony preacher who uses his sermonizing and a mellow baritone voice to prey on credulous locals in Depression-era West Virginia. His game is to marry widows, gain access to their nest eggs, murder them with a switchblade in the name of doing the Lord’s work, and go on his way. (He’s based on an actual serial killer hanged in 1932.)

 In the film, Mitchum’s character is defined by the tattoos on his fists, one proclaiming LOVE and the other HATE. There’s a recently bereaved young mother (Shelley Winters), and her two small children who know where their dead father hid a cache of money. It’s easy work for Powell to worm his way into the family, marrying the naïve widow and then disposing of her. Now he’s after the kids. There’s also a key role for a member of moviedom’s royalty, Lillian Gish, who had been making movies since 1912. Here her character’s genuine piety makes a vivid contrast with Powell’s phony religious pronouncements.

 Laughton chose to shoot the black & white movie in a powerfully expressionistic style, using visual devices from silent film. But he also relies on period music: Mitchum’s warbling of  “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” can’t possibly sound more sinister.