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.

 

 

A Jamaica Farewell to Harry Belafonte

My mother considered herself the #1 fan of singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte, who has just died at the age of 96. All of her adult life she adored Belafonte’s singing, his acting, his political stances, and his dusky good looks. And, of course, she passed on this passion to her children.

 There was a time when Belafonte regularly brought his electrifying stage show, complete with backup singers and dancers,  to L.A.’s outdoor Greek Theatre. When the dates were announced, my mother would quickly order two sets of tickets. On one night she’d attend with my father. On another, she’d bring my young sister and me to see the great man in person. I mean this literally—one year she figured out where the entertainers parked their cars, and stationed the three of us where we’d be sure to meet her hero. It worked. Belafonte emerged, and graciously greeted the dressed-up little girls. (He had some of his own at home, so he knew how to talk to kids.) When he complimented me on my pretty dress, I proudly explained that my mother had bought it on sale. It became a family story that was told many times over. Years later, he was equally ingratiating when I (then a young journalist) met him at a record industry luncheon. Someone snapped a photo, which you can see below. It became a prominent feature of my mother’s kitchen bulletin board.

 Belafonte studied acting before he became known as a singer of calypso tunes. One of his earliest films, Carmen Jones (1954), was a musical in which he didn’t get to sing a note. This  all-Black version of Bizet’s Carmen,  adapted from a hit Broadway show, required operatic warbling, and both he and star Dorothy Dandridge were dubbed. Later in the decade, he starred in screen dramas that always had a racial element at their core. A Caribbean-set political and romantic drama, Island in the Sun,  allowed him to bare his torso on-screen and to romance—with serious consequences—the very blonde Joan Fontaine.

 The Belafonte film from the 1950s that I remember best is an imaginative apocalyptic story called The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959). It’s set in Manhattan, in the aftermath of some sort of nuclear disaster that has rid the city of virtually all its inhabitants. The only survivors in this New York ghost town seem to be Belafonte (a mine inspector who was deep underground at the time of the blast), a pretty young Caucasian woman played by Inger Stevens, and a crusty older sailor (Mel Ferrer). What we’ve got here, as the survival of the human race seems in question, is a potential love triangle with strong racial overtones. The film was the first offering of Belafonte’s own production company, dedicated to portraying the African-American experience on-screen.

 In later years, as he began to emphasize social activism over acting, Belafonte took on fewer film roles, though he did appear in movies directed by his close friend, Sidney Poitier. These included 1972’s Buck and the Preacher and the 1974 comedy Uptown Saturday Night, in which his crime-boss character, Geechy Dan, is a wicked send-up of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone. As he aged, he continued to take on occasional roles in films that had personal meaning to him, like Bobby, about events surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy.  His last film appearance was a powerful one, in Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansmen (2018) He was over ninety when he played for Lee a civil rights activist describing in horrific detail a Klan lynching.  May he rest in peace.

From Uncle Tom to Sweet Sweetback: The Academy Museum’s New Exhibit

As Black History Month winds down, I want to consider the Academy Museum’s new major exhibit. Called “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971,” it’s slated to run through July 16, and it’s well worth seeing for its insights into how African-American actors and interracial subject matter came to be a part of mainstream Hollywood motion pictures.

 In cinema’s early days, Black characters were exclusively played by white actors in dark makeup. This held true when the characters were evil (the rapists and rapscallions who go after white women in Birth of the Nation are the obvious example). But it also applied when they were sympathetic, as in many early filmed versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The exhibit’s second room, which includes the provocative “Balcony Seating Only” installation, reminds us that Black audiences who chafed at the indignities of segregation once flocked to so-called “race movies.” Films like 1937’s “Harlem on the Prairie,” starring Herb Jeffries, mimicked popular Hollywood genres (for instance, the western and the detective story) but featured all-Black casts.

 It was the advent of the musical that allowed African-American performers to become increasingly popular with white audiences. The exhibit pays tribute to such crossover 1940s talents as the Nicholas Brothers (seen in their fabulous staircase number from Stormy Weather) and the sultry Lena Horne, a great favorite of my parents. Of course some terrific film clips from musicals like Porgy and Bess (1959) and Carmen Jones (1954) are on view. While watching the latter I was thrilled to spot my first teacher, future Kennedy Center honoree Carmen de Lavallade, among the background dancers.

 Some Black musical talents were featured in white films too, but generally in roles that could be snipped out for the Southern market. In this section of the exhibit I learned for the first time about “soundies,” two-minute musical presentations viewable by the Word War II-era public through coin-operated machines located in nightclubs and other gathering spots. The soundie has been called an obvious precursor to today’s music video: at the museum I watched Fats Waller outrageously mugging to “This Joint is Jumpin’” and Cab Calloway extolling the charms of “Minnie the Moocher.”  

 There’s a big jump from the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s to the era when Sidney Poitier played out on screen the tough issues facing African-Americans within the unfolding history of this nation. The exhibit naturally showcases Poitier’s landmark Oscar win for Lilies of the Field, as well as his appearance in such controversial hits as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night (both 1967). Appropriately, visitors can watch the clip of Poitier, his eyes flashing in anger, returning the slap of a bigoted Southern land-baron in the latter film. But this focus on Black stars does not preclude attention to rising Black directors like the gutsy Melvin Van Peebles, whose bold and angry Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) pointed the way toward the so-called blaxploitation era.    

 I realize that exhibits such as this one are constrained by what they can realistically cover. Time and space are not, needless to say, limitless. But I’m curious to know why 1971 was chosen as an ending date for this exhibit. The evolution of the heroic and strait-laced Poitier persona into Shaft and Superfly is surely worth exploring. And I’d love to know about the changing dynamics of audiences who are increasingly ready to root for a Black character more human and more flawed than those Poitier once played. Which, I guess, means a second part to “Regeneration” is much needed. When it opens, I’ll be there.