Seeing Double: “Cat Ballou”

I loved running across the factoid that Michael B. Jordan’s performance(s) in Sinners marked the second time that a Best Actor Oscar went to someone playing twins. (The  most famous literary work featuring two lookalikes is Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in which Sydney Carton nobly sacrifices himself to the bloodthirsty mob because of his close physical resemblance to French aristocrat Charles Darnay. Several film adaptations have been made, notably the 1935 epic starring Ronald Colman, but I gather no actor has ever played both roles.)

 Once I read that the only previous Oscar-winner playing twins was Lee Marvin in 1965’s Cat Ballou, I felt obliged to check it out. A huge hit, it racked up five Oscar nominations. Several of them related to the film’s rollicking score and to the comic ballad used to narrate the proceedings. (It was sung on-screen by the delightful duo of Stubby Kaye and Nat “King” Cole, the latter of whom died of lung cancer shortly before the film’s release.) There was also recognition for the adapted screenplay and film editing. But the only win on Oscar night belonged to Lee Marvin, who took on the wacky dual roles of Tim Strawn, the tin-nosed hired assassin who threatens Cat and her gang, and Kid Shelleen, the legendary gunslinger who’s only effective when he’s drunk. The two men are eventually revealed to be brothers, though not necessarily twins, and its’ clear that Marvin relished every moment of his time on-screen.

 The film’s story is something of a masterpiece of silliness. The title role is played by Jane Fonda. Though she was still in her twenties back then, it was her ninth film, and she was firmly in the ingenue phase of her career, making movies like Barefoot in the Park and Barbarella in which she showed emotion by opening her eyes very wide. (For me her true acting breakthrough was in 1969’s grim They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) In Cat Ballou, Fonda starts out as an innocent finishing-school grad traveling west. Through a series of mishaps she discovers love and bad behavior, ending up as the leader of an outlaw gang which of course is a good deal more virtuous than the honchos of the little prairie town in which the action mostly unfolds. Other actors along for the ride include the agreeable Michael Callan and impish Dwayne Hickman (much loved by young folk for his goofy TV role as perennial teenager Dobie Gillis, and here having fun as a pretend preacher). 

 But how did Marvin, whose dual roles are not particularly large or challenging, ever manage to win that Oscar? I can only conjecture. First of all, at the ceremony held in 1966, the big winner was The Sound of Music. The Sixties were difficult years, politically speaking, and I think voters liked supporting something that was musical and upbeat, despite its inclusion of Nazis threatening Austria. (Other Best Picture nominees included Doctor Zhivago, Ship of Fools, Darling, and one wry comedy, A Thousand Clowns.) Among that year’s Best Actor candidates were two Serious Thespians from Britain, Richard Burton (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) and Laurence Olivier (Othello). Also nominated were towering dramatic performances by Oskar Werner (Ship of Fools) and Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker). I think audiences in that era needed a laugh, and only Lee Marvin supplied one. It didn’t hurt that he was in Ship of Fools too, as an over-the-hill baseball player.

 Disappointingly, in Cat Ballou Marvin’s two outrageous characters are never on screen at the same time. Kudos to Sinners for seamlessly accomplishing that feat. 

 

Remembering Norman Jewison

When I was a graduate student at UCLA, leading introductory literature classes, I was surprised by the number of celebrities’ kids who showed up on my roster. One was the son of Charlton Heston, who brought in to show me his father’s prized first edition of Hemingway’s cryptic story collection, In Our Time. One was the pretty, wholesome daughter of handsome, wholesome singer Pat Boone. One was Kevin Jewison, a pleasant young man who turned out to be the son of film direction Norman Jewison, the Oscar-winning director who just passed away at the ripe old age of 97.

 Looking back at Jewison’s long career, I was struck by how varied it was. Jewison, one of those famously “nice” Canadians, was born and raised in Toronto, and entered the entertainment world via Canadian television. That led him to NBC, where he seems to have been typecast as the director of innocuous musical specials, like The Chevy Showroom Starring Andy Williams (1959) and Bulova Watch Time with Pat Boone (1961). He also had the opportunity to work with such notable talents as Danny Kaye, Harry Belafonte, and Judy Garland, before pivoting into film. Following some innocuous Doris Day romantic comedies, he found more of a challenge working with Steve McQueen in 1965’s The Cincinnati Kid, a tough-minded film about serious poker players and the women who love them. The next year, he released The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, a timely Cold War satire –about a Russian submarine running aground off the New England coast—that made a comic star out of Alan Arkin. It led to four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor: I found it absolutely delightful at the time, but less so when I re-watched it decades later.

 In 1968, Jewison was back at the Oscars with In the Heat of the Night, a tight and tidy drama about racial tension in a small Southern town following a murder. The fraught interplay of the town sheriff (played to a fare-thee-well by Rod Steiger) and a Black big-city cop (Sidney Poitier) was brilliantly acted under Jewison’s direction. At a time when interracial tension was very much on the public’s mind, the film was nominated for five Oscars. It won four, including Best Picture, Best Actor (the much-deserving Steiger), and Best Screenplay (a vast improvement over the clumsy novel on which it was based). But Jewison lost to Mike Nichols of The Graduate in the Best Director category.

 In 1972, Jewison (who had to patiently explain to reporters that despite the implications of his name he was NOT Jewish) produced and directed a creditably gritty screen version of the beloved stage hit musical, Fiddler on the Roof. He followed up with something completely different, the film translation of Jesus Christ Superstar. Then came the violent and futuristic Rollerball (which indirectly led –as I well remember—to Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000), and a series of powerful films about social injustice. But his last really huge hit, leading to another Best Picture Oscar and another Best Director nomination, was a charming romantic comedy, 1987’s Moonstruck. Though he was nominated three times for the Best Director Oscar, he was fated never to win that prize. But the Academy did grant him in 1999 the coveted Irving Thalberg Award, in honor of his role as one of Hollywood’s most creative producers, alongside such industry masters as Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg.

 And son Kevin, my amiable former student, became a motion picture cameraman, whose credit I just noticed on Sleepless in Seattle.