Some Came Running, Some Stayed Away

In 1951, World War II veteran James Jones published a blockbuster novel about the lives and loves of American troops stationed in Honolulu at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. When From Here to Eternity became a film two years later, it took Hollywood by storm. Its 13 Oscar nominations resulted in eight wins, including Best Picture, Best Director, and a statuette for Frank Sinatra, bringing his own bitterness and pugnacious spirit to the role of Maggio, as the year’s Best Supporting Actor.

 It seemed the combination of James Jones’ writing and Sinatra’s acting chops was a potent one. That’s why, when in 1957 Jones published a second novel—this time dealing with a returning soldier during the post-war period—Hollywood again came calling, ready to star Sinatra as a tough-but-tender protagonist in another James Jones adaptation.  But Jones’ new novel, Some Came Running, had a few problems. The New Yorker’s critic colorfully called it “twelve hundred and sixty-six pages of flawlessly sustained tedium.”

 This was the shoot on which Sinatra, always an impatient actor, apparently ripped twenty pages out of the script in order to keep the film’s length close to the two-hour mark. Director Vincente Minnelli, looking for a change of pace from his own sparkling Gigi (also from 1958), had the challenge of corralling Sinatra and co-star Dean Martin, while also staying true to his own artistic vision. It culminated in a brilliantly florid climax, set at night amid the gaudy neon lights of a small-town carnival. The film earned five Oscar noms, mostly in acting categories, but not a single win. (Gigi and the actors from Separate Tables were the year’s big awards recipients.)

 I’ve heard film scholars praise the aesthetics of Some Came Running, as well as Minnelli’s blunt treatment of the hypocrisies of Midwest life. And I can’t deny that there are some strong performances, notably that of Shirley MacLaine (nominated for her first Oscar for this, her all-time favorite role). She plays Ginny, a slightly tawdry but good-hearted waif whose love for Dave leads at last to tragedy. (The film’s tweak of the novel’s original ending definitely increases its poignance.) There’s also good work by Sinatra and by his pal, Dean Martin, as a hard-drinking gambler who’s lovable but on a path to self-destruction.

 All this should make it clear that the film’s plot is an intensely melodramatic one, with far too many characters and lots of lurid small-town misbehavior. When Sinatra’s character, in military uniform, gets off the bus in his old hometown, it’s clear he’s a bit disgusted by the locals, but even more unimpressed with himself. Though he’s published several novels and has something of a literary reputation (like, of course, James Jones), he seems unable to move forward with his writing career. He’s also got a serious grudge against the well-heeled brother (Arthur Kennedy) who’s now one of the town’s leading citizens but chafes at his wife’s snootiness, to the point where he strays with an attractive employee.

 Oddly, it’s through his brother that Sinatra’s Dave comes to know a local professor and his schoolmarm-daughter, both of whom highly respect him as a man of letters. We’re supposed to believe that the prim schoolteacher (Martha Hyer) is Dave’s true love, though—aside from a rare moment when he literally takes her hair down—she seems incapable of passion of any sort.  Her scenes with Sinatra come across as stodgy, as she lectures him on literature and life. Under the circumstances, a gauche, umgrammatical Ginny would seem like an improvement, especially given MacLaine’s wistful charm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bye, Bye, Chita (Rivera)

Believe me, though I struggle each week to find appropriate topics for my Beverly in Movieland blog posts, I’m not thrilled when performers I admire pass to the Great Beyond. Even when they’ve lived long, full lives, it’s sad to think that they’ll be among us no more.

 One shining star who has just left us is the magnificent Chita Rivera, known as a dancer, a singer, an actress, and an all-around grand lady of the American stage. Rivera, one of five children born to a Puerto Rican father and a multicultural mom, discovered her love of showbiz early. Trained in dance, with a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, she soon gravitated toward the bright lights of Broadway. Before she turned 20 she was dancing in touring companies of hit shows, and made her Broadway debut in Guys and Dolls. In 1957 came her breakthrough role: that of the fiery Anita in West Side Story. Her reviews were glowing, though she was not nominated for a Tony, and the Best Musical honors went to another of the year’s hits, The Music Man. (This was an era with a lot of great shows on the Broadway boards.)

 Another disappointment: in 1961, when West Side Story was turned into a film, the role Rivera had created on stage went to a different fiery Latina, Rita Moreno, who went on to win an Oscar for her performance. (On screen, the role of Anita seems to be an awards magnet. Though Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of the film was nominated for seven Oscars, the only winner on Oscar night was the actress playing Anita, Ariana DeBose. A sidenote: in the remake, Spielberg gave Moreno a juicy new supporting role as Valentina, the widow of drugstore owner Doc, who gets to sing “Somewhere” at a key moment in the film.)           

 I’ve always wondered why Rivera was not asked to repeat her Broadway role. Age had nothing to do with it: Moreno was actually a year older. I’m hardly privy to any behind-the-scenes gossip, but have always suspected the choice was made because Moreno (a Hollywood veteran who had played supporting roles in Singing in the Rain and The King and I) was equally talented AND a great deal prettier than her Broadway counterpart.

 In any case, Rivera recouped on Broadway as the female lead in Bye Bye Birdie, opposite Dick Van Dyke. Her character, Rose Alvarez, was specifically written as a Latina (which is one reason Dick’s stage mother disapproves of her so heartily). When the play became a movie, Van Dyke was invited along, but Rivera’s part was taken by Janet Lee in a dark wig. Ah, Hollywood! Fortunately, though, we do have some Rivera performances on film. She had played Gwen Verdon’s pal, Nickie, in the stage version of Sweet Charity.  In 1969. when Bob Fosse directed the film version, Verdon was replaced by Shirley MacLaine as the taxi dancer with a heart of gold.  And Rivera (hooray!) again got to play Nickie, displaying her musical talents along with MacLaine and Paula Kelly in the clip below.   

 She finally won a Tony Award in 1993 for a phantasmagoric role in Kander and Ebb’s musical take on Kiss of the Spider Woman. I don’t much remember that, but I’ve hardly forgotten her 2015 appearance in the short Broadway run of Kander and Ebb’s eerie The Visit. At 82, she didn’t exactly dance, but her performance was stunning. I watched it along with my own first dance teacher, the great Carmen de Lavallade. It’s one of my favorite memories.

 It’s been a tough week for Broadway fans. On January 30 we also lost Hinton Battle, a Tony-winning featured dancer best known for creating the role of the Scarecrow in Broadway’s The Wiz, which—by the way—was directed by Carmen de Lavallade’s talented husband, Geoffrey Holder.

 

 

We All Ride in a Yellow Rolls-Royce

“They don’t make them like this anymore!” – That’s the tag line on the DVD box containing a splashy British film from 1964. The posters from the era proclaim, “The season’s most exciting cast . . . in the year’s most magnificent movie.” Well, no. Though the international cast is full of big names, excitement is definitely lacking. But The Yellow Rolls-Royce is a great example of how, in the advent of television, movie folk were desperate to use spectacle as a way to separate the big screen from the little ones in people’s living rooms.

 The Yellow Rolls-Royce, written by famed British dramatist Terence Rattigan (Separate Tables) and directed by Anthony Asquith, is one of those compilation films that try to yoke together separate tales set  in different locations and time frames by means of some sort of linking device. (A more recent example: 1998’s rather lugubrious The Red Violin). Here it’s a 1931 stretch limo, in gaudy yellow and black, that passes from owner to owner, from country to country. The real star of the film is undoubtedly that magnificent car, first seen being secretly conveyed through the streets of London to a posh dealership. There it’s spotted by a veddy wealthy British aristocrat (Rex Harrison), who quibbles about the placement of its back-seat telephone, but snaps it up as an anniversary gift for his beloved wife.

 What he doesn’t know is that this wife (a young Jeanne Moreau), having tired of life among the British swells, has found herself a handsome young functionary with whom to canoodle. Naturally, the yellow Rolls-Royce plays a role in their assignations. (It has roll-down window shades that come in very handy under the circumstances.) There’s a mournful, but by no means tragic, ending to their story, at which point the car is quickly returned to the dealer.

 After the bittersweet tone of Story #1, we move on to Italy, where after many presumed adventures with owners from diverse lands, the Rolls is acquired in Genoa by a Miami mobster played by the unlikely George C. Scott, who seems to be having a ball speaking in dems and doses. His sidekick is the always welcome Art Carney, and his blonde-bimbo fiancée is none other than Shirley MacLaine. She falls for street photographer/gigolo-in-training Alain Delon, but ultimately recognizes on which side her focaccia is buttered. Of course the Rolls figures into the story.

 Story #3 plays out in 1941, on the border between Trieste and Yugoslavia. A mega-wealthy and mega-powerful American, played by Ingrid Bergman, buys the yellow Rolls, although it has clearly seen better days. Determined to motor into Yugoslavia to visit her friend the president, she blithely ignores the very real threat of a Nazi takeover.  At first she seems tragically naïve, but when a Yugoslav partisan (Omar Sharif) begs her to transport him back to his country in the boot of the Rolls, she blossoms into a fierce defender of Yugoslav freedom.—and into the earnest, patriotic Bergman we know and love from films like Casablanca.  

 This third segment definitely has the most meat to it; it’s also the only one of the tales  in which a central character grows and changes. Otherwise, these are mostly interesting stories that didn’t much capture the hearts of the viewing public. The whole impetus for the Yellow Rolls-Royce was The VIPs, a highly successful all-star film from the same production team. That flick, set at Heathrow Airport, featured Taylor and Burton at the height of their celebrity, along with Maggie Smith, Orson Welles, and others.  But not, I believe, a single Rolls-Royce.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Love Letter to “Terms of Endearment”

Longtime fans of Shirley MacLaine know she’s had something of a charmed career. As a young Broadway dancer in a hit musical called The Pajana Game, she understudied star Carol Haney, who was known to have an iron constitution and a strong will. The word was that she never missed performances. But then she injured her leg . . . and when Shirley took over, there was a Hollywood talent scout in the audience. Her very first film, in 1955, was the female lead in a rare Alfred Hitchcock comedy, The Trouble with Harry. Three years later, she was cast in the year’s biggest blockbuster, Around the World in 80 Days, in the unlikely role of an Indian princess rescued from her husband’s funeral pyre. (In those days, there was not much of a move toward ethnic authenticity in casting.)

 From the first she tended to be cast as kooks, innocents, and mid-century versions of manic pixie dreamgirls. (This was perhaps not surprising, given her off-center spiritual views, which include firm beliefs in reincarnation, space aliens, and other unconventional lifeforms.) Billy Wilder took full advantage of her winsome presence in The Apartment, and later cast her again with Jack Lemmon in the frothy Irma la Douce. There she played a good-hearted prostitute, a character somewhat akin to a later signature role, that of Charity Hope Valentine in the film version of Neil Simon’s musical, Sweet Charity. (In Sweet Charity, she’s officially a taxi-dancer, but it’s based on Fellini’s earthier The Nights of Cabiria, and in both cases she’s a girl whom guys really shouldn’t bring home to Mama.)

 All that was in the Sixties. It took until 1983 to reveal to audiences MacLaine’s full dramatic range. As wealthy Houston matriarch Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment (adapted by James L. Brooks from a Larry McMurtry novel), she’s hardly just an adorable pushover. Sharp-tongued and self-possessed, she rules her small domain with an iron fist. Of course this is crazy-making for her free-spirited daughter, Emma (Debra Winger): Aurora even ducks out of her only child’s wedding at the very last moment because she doesn’t care for the bridegroom. There’s a lot of love (and a lot of sex) in this story. Emma can barely keep her hands off her new husband (Jeff Daniels), a college professor with a roving eye. Though the widowed Aurora haughtily staves off suitors of her own, she finally discovers her own wild side in an unlikely affair with a retired astronaut played by Jack Nicholson. But the real love story in Terms of Endearment is that between mother and daughter: though they fight incessantly, these two can’t get enough of one another, even when circumstances force them to live thousands of miles apart. Until their lives turn a tragic corner, they don’t fully realize the truth: that theirs is a love that can endure anything . . . just about.

 Terms of Endearment marked Brooks’ debut as a film director, after years of writing for movies and TV. And what a debut it was! The hugely popular film was nominated for 11 Oscars, and won 5, including 3 for Brooks (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay), and acting honors for MacLaine and Nicholson. (Winger was nominated too.) Though this was a year of power-house ensemble performances in such films as The Big Chill and The Right Stuff, no one seemed to second-guess the Academy on its choices.  Terms of Endearment packs a wallop partly because all its characters, however badly they behave at times, are ultimately redeemable, proving themselves worthy of our love.