In Jeopardy

As the 2026 Winter Olympics played out, I was an up-close-and-personal observer of a competition of another kind. While figure-skaters Ilia Malinin and Amber Glenn graphically showed us what performance anxiety is all about, I was watching perfectly nice mental athletes trying to best the reigning champ on that old TV standby, Jeopardy! The show, around since 1964, rewards arcane knowledge that contestants must offer by way of a question. Categories are obscure; clues are designed to be tricky. If you do well, you can win major money and pride yourself on being a designated brainiac. But, even though host and staff go out of their way to be welcoming to all participants, the assumption is that two out of the three contestants will eventually go home with empty pockets and dashed dreams of glory. For some of the losers it’s fun, despite it all. Others will take longer to get past the disappointment they feel about their less-than-stellar performance.

 What is it about quiz shows that we Americans love? I’m old enough to remember early game shows like The $64,000 Question, in which questions were more factual than tricky, and we in the home audience found ourselves rooting for contestants with particularly moving backstories. Our enthusiasm for these shows was of course tempered by the eventual disclosure of massive behind-the-scenes cheating, contrived by the networks to increase fan excitement. The secret coaching of contestant Charles Van Doren on the show called Twenty-One led eventually to a fascinating 1994 film, Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford. (Ralph Fiennes played Van Doren, and John Turturro starred as Herb Stempel, a less aristocratic contestant who was forced to lose to Van Doren, scion of an impressive literary family.)

 There’s been no cheating scandal connected with Jeopardy!  One thing is clear: people really want to be in the studio audience. Jeopardy! is taped at Sony Studios, which of course used to be the fabled MGM lot. So just getting past the guard gate is a bit of a thrill, and the parking structure décor—with its towering photos of host Ken Jennings right next to the metal detector—is designed to make you feel part of something special. After some waiting around, and receiving the all-important wrist band, you are escorted . . .  not to the soundstage but to a gift shop where all manner of branded game-show merch (T-shirts, pajamas, water bottles) is on sale. After making your purchases you assemble in a large hallway where videos of excited contestants play in a constant loop.

 Finally you are escorted to Jeopardy! central, where a veteran greeter explains the code of conduct. Yes, laugh and cheer, especially when the applause sign is lit, but don’t mutter the correct answer, even under your breath, because a sensitive microphone might pick it up. The crew on hand all seem part of a very large family: the greeter makes sure to let us know how many decades he’s been with the show, how much he adored late host Alex Trebek, and how Ken Jennings (a 74-game Jeopardy! winner before snagging the host’s job) is perfect as Trebek’s amiable successor.   

 The Jeopardy! set is a marvel of exotic swirls and dramatic lighting. But perhaps even more exciting is the lobby, which guests can visit between taping sessions. There’s a huge case filled with Emmy statuettes won by the show. And you can pose for photos behind a mock-up of a real contestant’s desk. Alex Trebek’s very own desk is posed in a niche like a treasured relic, complete with futuristic lighting. I’ll take nostalgia for $800.

 

 

 

Proclaiming Eleanor the Great

When you’re successful as an actor, suddenly you start wanting to direct.  Even the fabled silent star Lillian Gish tried it, in a film now lost. Warren Beatty won a 1982 Oscar for directing (as well as starring in) Reds, a tale about the Russian Revolution that also featured Jack Nicholson and the late—and very much lamented—Diane Keaton. Robert Redford, who like Beatty was perhaps eager to escape pretty-boy roles, made an impressive directorial debut in 1980’s Ordinary People. He had no acting role in this taut family drama that went on to be a huge financial and critical success. Ordinary People racked up six Oscar nominations and four wins, including Best Picture and Best Director. Buoyed by this success, Redford directed ten films in all, winning kudos particularly for Quiz Show, a mordant examination of the headline-making TV scandal of the 1950s, with John Turturro heading the cast.

 Ron Howard became a TV and movie star at the ripe old age of 5, thanks to regular appearances on The Andy Griffith Show and in such movies as The Music Man. But, as I discovered when researching Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond. Howard had always wanted to direct. For one thing, he liked being in charge, as he was at age sixteen when he directed his father, his brother, and his future wife in a “A Deed of Daring-Do,” a short that marked his entry into a Kodak contest for youthful filmmakers. (He won second prize.) And, as he admitted after shooting scenes for Willow atop the snowfields of New Zealand, another advantage of directing is that you can dress for the weather and never worry about how you look.

 Recently Scarlett Johansson became the latest Hollywood megastar to try her hand at directing. Her vehicle is Eleanor the Great, a script by Tory Kamen about an elderly woman who finds herself in a highly awkward situation. At a time of great emotional distress, she has “admitted” to a support group of Holocaust survivors that she is one of them. Calling upon the horrific memories shared with her by her closest friend, now deceased, Eleanor spins a long, moving saga of her brother’s death at the hands of the Nazis. To her consternation, her story attracts the attention of an eager NYU journalism student who has suffered her own grievous loss, and Eleanor suddenly finds herself on the brink of being a media sensation. 

 Of course truth will out. There’s a hectic climax in which it looks as if everyone in Eleanor’s life has turned against her—and on the long-awaited day of her bat mitzvah yet! But Eleanor (marvelously inhabited by 94-year old June Squibb) is such a vivid presence that we instinctively hope she’ll come through the scandal with flying colors. And so she does, by way of a series of plot twists and turns involving a respected news anchor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who puts her transgression into perspective and helps everyone understand the role of grief in encouraging bad behavior. It’s both heartening and a little too tidy to make for a good ending.

The actors are all fine, and June Squibb (who after a long career in supporting roles became a genuine star in last year’s Thelma) is a national treasure. I’m sorry that none of the reviews I’ve seen have mentioned the very moving Rita Zohar, a genuine Holocaust survivor playing a genuine Holocaust survivor. Director Johansson, herself descended from Holocaust victims,, has chosen a thought-provoking story as her directorial debut.  I wonder what she’ll try next.

 

 

 

Robert Redford Goes Downhill

There are those who will tell you that Robert Redford was the original choice to play Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 romantic classic, The Graduate. He was certainly in the running, and wanted the role badly. And, as my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson clarifies, he had just finished starring for director Mike Nichols in a Broadway hit comedy, Barefoot in the Park, so he seemed to be in a good position to headline Nichols’ planned first film. But, as the film’s producer, Larry Turman, spelled out to me, neither he nor Nichols was entirely sure that Redford was the right choice to play an awkward lover who was funny precisely because he was in over his head with a sexy older woman. Enter Dustin Hoffman, who turned in a performance that was a comedy gem.

 By 1969, Redford had made a half-dozen films, both amiable comedies and action thrillers. But lightning struck when he joined with Paul Newman for a true blockbuster, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The two Hollywood hunks proved to have remarkable comic chemistry in a story less about the Old West than about the friendship of two rebellious buddies set against a rapidly changing world. Thinking back about the whole of Redford’s acting career, which includes some major thrillers and some films with strong political implications (see The Candidate and, of course, All the President’s Men), I’m convinced that as an actor Redford was at his best in roles that combined substance with comic flair. These include Butch Cassidy and The Sting, two brilliant pairings with Newman, as well as such more modest efforts as Sneakers (a caper comedy about hackers) and the late-in-life The Old Man & the Gun, shot when Redford was over 80.

 Which brings me to Downhill Racer, made in the same year as Butch Cassidy. Michael Ritchie’s first directorial effort, magnificently filmed on some of the world’s great ski slopes, is a gutsy look at the professional ski circuit, and grapples with the question of what it takes to be a winner. Redford plays an ambitious young racer, summoned by coach Gene Hackman to join the U.S. ski team after (in the film’s highly dramatic opening minutes) a talented skier suffers a bone-shattering fall. We know right away that Redford’s character, Dave Chappellet, is good—but also that he’s not particularly nice. He regards his new teammates as nuisances or rivals, and can’t be bothered to listen to his coach’s warnings. He’s willing to work hard on his own skills, but camaraderie is not for him.

 We understand something about Dave’s psychological makeup during the off-season, when he goes home to rural Colorado. His curmudgeonly dad, clearly a loner, greets him coldly, showing little interest in his son’s efforts to achieve Olympic gold on the way to fame and fortune. A local flame is thrilled to see him, but clearly it’s only sex he’s after.. The pattern repeats itself in Europe, where the sophisticated assistant (Camilla Sparv) to a manufacturer of ski equipment falls hard for him, only to learn that he’ll give her nothing beyond a roll in the hay.  He’s a loner and a user, that’s all.

 I won’t go into the end of the film, when his jest to the team’s #1 skier leads to an outcome he may or may not have anticipated. Is he a carefree hotdogger, or is there something more devious in the back of his mind? That’s an open question, one the film leaves us asking ourselves. I’d much rather watch Redford again in Butch Cassidy.

 

 

Thelma (Without Louise)

 

Old age is not for sissies. That’s one of the lessons taught by the new indie film, Thelma, which is now delighting cineplex audiences. It’s far less fanciful than The Old Man & the Gun,  the 2018 caper film that starred an octogenarian Robert Redford as an ageing bank robber with no desire to go straight. In Thelma, the challenges of negotiating one’s advanced years are not minimized, at the same time that the leading lady (93-year-old June Squibb) shows just how resourceful an angry grandma can be.

 Thelma, it seems, has a close relationship with her grandson, a 20-something slacker who adores her but has not yet figured out the whole process of adulting. When a phone call tells her that he’s been in a terrible accident and that she needs to cough up the big bucks to clear his name, she doesn’t hesitate to comply. It’s a scam, of course, but she doesn’t take lightly the fact that she’s been both fooled and robbed of $10,000 in cash, which she delivered (as instructed) to a P.O box. Revenge is definitely on her mind.

 Thelma, at 93, is a recent widow, one who’s still capable of managing her tidy home. She’s well-equipped with the tools of modern living—a cellphone and a laptop computer—but their more sophisticated functions tend to boggle her nonagenarian mind. (Honestly, I do sympathize.) Online banking, for one thing, seems far beyond her abilities, but in the course of this film she’ll need to gather her wits about her, and learn to seek help wherever she can find it.

 This latter point is key: through most of the film, Thelma is so convinced of her own abilities that she disdains asking anyone for assistance. Certainly her easily frazzled daughter (Parker Posey) and her acerbic son-in-law (Clark Gregg) are too busy worrying about her physical and mental state to be much help. As she’s soon to discover, most of her old friends are dead or incapacitated: one still lives independently, but seems unaware that her large old house is infested with roaches. An unexpected source of strength is Ben, a former travel companion who now (since the death of his wife) makes his home in an assisted living facility, where he is starring as Daddy Warbucks in an in-house production of Annie. He’s played by the charmingly mellow Richard Roundtree: the film first screened after his 2023 death (at age 81) from pancreatic cancer. Roundtree is, of course, best known for his iconic title role in the 1971 blaxploitation hit, Shaft. In Thelma he’s no longer a tough guy who’s quick on the trigger, but he still remains unforgettable. And he and Squibb play off of one another—sometimes amiably, sometimes testily—like the old pros they are.

 But in many ways the key relationship in Thelma is that between the title character and her grandson, winningly portrayed by young Fred Hechinger. The love between them is easy to see, as is the faith they feel in each other’s smarts. Writer/director Josh Margolin unabashedly modeled the title character after his own magnificently feisty Grandma Thelma, who once almost fell for a similar scam. Says Margolin, ‘I wanted to explore her fight for what’s left of her autonomy just as I was beginning to consider mine.” He chose an action drama of sorts because “as far as I’m concerned, watching my grandma get onto a high mattress is as thrilling and terrifying as Tom Cruise driving a motorcycle off a cliff.” The real Thelma, glimpsed in the film’s coda, is now 103 years young.

 

 

 

 

An Ode to the Elastic, Electric Donald Sutherland

I first knowingly encountered the late Donald Sutherland in 1968, in an odd little British film called Joanna. Then and now, I’ve been unsure if Joanna was intended as an ode to Swinging London (the miniskirts! the casual sex!) or a morality tale or a spoof. It did have a very pretty leading lady, a score by Sixties fave Rod McKuen, and several hunky young men. It also had Sutherland as the wealthy but terminally ill Lord Peter Sanderson, who hosts Joanna and her groovy friends at his sumptuous home in Morocco. When he came on screen, I thought I had never seen such a weird-looking person. There was a fey quality to him that had me completely baffled: was there some sort of comment being made about his sexuality? I didn’t know, but I didn’t much care. Joanna was a movie that didn’t invite hard thinking.

 It took a while to realize I’d seen Sutherland a year earlier in a vastly different role, that of a not-too-bright Southerner named Vernon Pinkley who hilariously steps in to impersonate a general in a World War II action drama, The Dirty Dozen. That was the thing about Sutherland: you couldn’t pin him down. Even his nationality seemed flexible: the Canada-born Sutherland played British and American roles with equal conviction.

 It was in 1970 that Sutherland had his big Hollywood breakthrough. Though for fans of the long-running TV series, Alan Alda will always be the REAL star of M*A*S*H, Robert Altman’s original film starred Sutherland as Hawkeye Pierce. He and Elliott Gould as best buddy Trapper John McIntyre found stardom as two young battlefield surgeons who cope with the horrors of the Korean War by way of outrageous antics. One year later he played the title role in Klute, a neo-noir thriller best remembered for Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning role as a prostitute being stalked by a killer. Sutherland’s role is that of a detective who becomes Fonda’s protector and then her lover. The powerful connection between Fonda and Sutherland,  which allegedly spilled over into their personal lives, led to Sutherland’s deep involvement in Fonda’s crusade against the Vietnam War.

 Another intensely dramatic role for Sutherland was opposite Julie Christie in 1973’s psychological thriller, Don’t Look Now. The eerie Venice-set drama, brilliantly directed by Nicolas Roeg, focuses on young parents trying to get past the accidental death of their young daughter. In the midst of their all-consuming grief,  there’s a sex scene that raised many eyebrows for its convincing eroticism, leaving some viewers certain that the intimacy on screen was genuine.  (Sutherland has staunchly denied this.) He was also a grieving father in Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People (1980), though most of the film’s accolades went to Mary Tyler Moore and young Timothy Hutton, who played his wife and his surviving son. But none of this should imply that Sutherland only took on somber roles. He played everyone from heroes to goofballs, like the pot-smoking professor in National Lampoon’s Animal House. He was even a stuffy British patriarch (and Keira Knightley’s father) in Joe Wright’s 2005 version of the Jane Austen classic, Pride and Prejudice, as well as the chief villain in The Hunger Games. Though Oscar nominations eluded him, the Academy in 2017 granted him an honorary Oscar “for a lifetime of indelible characters, rendered with unwavering truthfulness."

Today son Kiefer (named after Donald Sutherland’s very first director) carries on the family commitment to screen acting. But it’s unlikely he’ll ever top his father’s long and varied list of achievements. 

 

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.

 

 

Mary Tyler Moore: She Turned the World On With Her Smile (but she wasn’t always smiling)

The pandemic re-introduced me to the simple joys of TV’s long-running Mary Tyler Moore Show. From 1970 through 1977,  the nation watched Mary Richards (a smart and attractive single gal with a megawatt smile) at home in Minneapolis, where she toiled in a local TV station’s newsroom while also hanging out with pals and occasionally dating someone who never turned out to be Mr. Right. The description hardly sounds like much, but the show’s writing and its casting were so smart that viewers turned in week after week. At the time, Moore was remembered by sitcom fans as the wife of Dick Van Dyke on his long-running series. The show that bears HER name introduced us to Ed Asner (who went on to play his curmudgeonly Lou Grant character on a fine dramatic series set at an urban newspaper), Ted Knight (as doofus newscaster Ted Baxter). Valerie Harper (as Mary’s lovelorn buddy, Rhoda Morgenstern), Cloris Leachman (as Mary’s ditsy landlady), and the inimitable Betty White (as the station’s s man-hungry “Happy Homemaker”). Tying it all together was plucky Mary: a female maneuvering in a man’s world while trying not to let her natural femininity get quashed.

 Mary Tyler Moore, originally an aspiring dancer, moved from TV commercials to sitcoms with ease. She seemed to have it all, despite a background that was more wine than roses. As made clear in a recent documentary, Being Mary Tyler Moore, alcoholism ran deep in her family. So did early deaths: her sister died of painkillers and alcohol at age 21; her brother succumbed to kidney cancer at 47; her only son died of an accidental gunshot wound at 24. She herself struggled with diabetes while also managing to surmount years of alcoholism.

 One of the painful ironies of her son’s death was that it came a mere three weeks after the release of her all-time major film role, that of a bereaved mother in Robert Redford’s directorial debut, Ordinary People (1980). The film, based on a novel by Judith Guest, zeroes in on an affluent suburban family rocked by the death of its eldest son in a boating accident. Tyler Moore played a woman whose considerable social charm masks a rigidity that makes her unable to show compassion toward the younger son (Timothy Hutton) whose guilt for his part in the accident is destroying his life. The film was named Best Picture by the Academy, and Hutton’s youthful performance (he was 20) won him a Supporting Actor Oscar. Tyler Moore was nominated too, in the Lead Actress category, though she lost out to Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner’s Daughter. But the role of Beth Jarrett showed the world she could do far more than be perky.

 There were to be many disappointments in her life, like the last-minute cancellation of a musical version  of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in which she was set to star on Broadway. Her first marriage, at age 18, dissolved quickly. Her second, to TV executive Grant Tinker, with whom she founded the highly successful MTM Enterprises, also ended in divorce. Unexpectedly, she fell for a 29-year-old cardiologist, Dr. Robert Levine, when she was in her late forties. To everyone’s surprise, they remained married for 34 years until her death in 2017. He continues to be devoted to her memory,  and was deeply involved with the making of the documentary film. The doc contains frank interviews with Mary, showing her to be far more thoughtful about her personal lapses than one might guess. It also chronicles her passion for animals and for ever-changing hair-dos.