Pretty in Black and White

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, after viewing several vintage Anne Hathaway films, about how often Hollywood has focused on stories of young women emerging to take over their lives. Obviously, such plot lines are meant to appeal to youthful female audiences, who hope that they too will burst like butterflies from the drab cocoons that have long been holding them in. Think Cinderella turning from a scullery maid to a princess. Think Eliza Doolittle casting aside her Cockney upbringing and her native speech patterns to go to the Embassy Ball and be mistaken for royalty. Think, more recently, of Pretty in Pink (representing other Eighties films of John Hughes) in which Molly Ringwald crosses from the wrong side of the tracks to wow her classmates at her high school prom.

 In many of these films, the focus is on the young protagonist discovering her physical beauty, or maybe demonstrating that she has learned the social skills that will help her navigate the adult world. But there’s a classic 1950 black-&-white comedy (somehow characterized by the often obtuse Golden Globes folks as a drama) in which the female protagonist blossoms, but not because of her improved looks or social manners. Instead, Born Yesterday is a comic paean to the way that political education can change a gal’s life.

 Born Yesterday, based on Garson Kanin’s hit Broadway play, stars the inimitable Judy Holliday as a former nightclub cutie with a New Yawk accent that won’t quit. Though basically a chorine with pretensions—she once spoke three lines on stage—she has long been the sidepiece of Harry Brock, a crude and very rich junkman with his eye on a shady deal involving a U.S. Congressman. (He’s played in the film by Broderick Crawford, who’d just nabbed an Oscar for his lead role as a Huey Long-type in All the King’s Men.) Harry loves Billie Dawn, when he isn’t busy abusing her, because she accepts her own ignorance and never pries into his sordid business affairs. But now that he’s arrived in Washington DC, he figures her uncouth social behavior may become a liability. So he recruits a straight-arrow local reporter named Paul (William Holden) to give Billie a smattering of education.

 Squiring Billie around the nation’s capital, Paul gives her some serious tutelage about American ideals and principles (something we could surely all use today). Though her vocabulary is limited and her shrill voice seems capable of shattering glass, she discovers in herself a thirst for knowledge, as well as a firm determination to no longer be anyone’s patsy. Needless to say, this change in attitude makes an ongoing relationship with Harry Brock untenable. And the smart, well-educated Paul (perhaps savoring his role as her Pygmalion) comes to love Billie’s oddball combination of budding idealism and street smarts.

 George Cukor was known, perhaps unfairly, as a women’s director. He certainly knew how to transfer Holliday’s acclaimed stage performance as Billie Dawn to the silver screen. The voice, the dimples, and the would-be haughty walk are all captured for moviegoers to enjoy. Holliday’s characterization is both funny and lovable, which is perhaps how she remarkably beat out Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard) and both Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (All About Eve) for the Best Actress Oscar of 1951. It was the great triumph of a brilliant but sadly short career. Born in 1921, she died of breast cancer in 1960, just a decade after her greatest triumph. Her last role was a musical performance in another Broadway transfer, Bells are Ringing, in which she was once again irresistibly adorable.

 Dedicated to the memory of Dolly Parton, another adorable blonde who was smarter than she sometimes let on.

 

 

In Network

I first decided to re-watch the 1976 film, Network, in tribute to the late Robert Duvall. Of course I (like pretty much everyone) had seen the movie when it first came out. This dark satire of the television news industry—written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet—was a major hit in a very good year for movies. When Oscar nominations were revealed, Network was up for nine awards, including best picture. The top winner turned out to be Rocky, but other big films of that year included All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, and Taxi Driver, so the competition was clearly fierce. Network won for its original screenplay, and also nabbed three of the four acting awards: for Beatrice Straight as a cast-off wife, for Faye Dunaway as a TV exec who’ll do anything to manufacture a hit show, and (most memorably) for Peter Finch. Finch, playing the newscaster whose firing because of low ratings sends him mentally ‘round the bend, was the first star ever to win an Oscar posthumously. He suffered a heart attack in January 1977, just after a TV talk-show appearance to promote the film, and died at age 60.

 Finch’s big line in Network—”I’m as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"—is still with us. And so, of course, is the idea that TV execs (like the one effectively played by Duvall in the film) are more concerned with ratings than with quality content. But in many respects, Network surprised me. First, of course, is the fact that television today is far from what it was in the 1970s. Back then there existed a limited number of major networks: CBS, NBC, ABC. Much of the American public got its news from respected anchors like Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. The film invents a fourth network, UBS, for dramatic purposes: when its longtime anchorman goes berserk and starts hollering out of windows, a large slice of the nation pays attention. Today, by contrast, our news sources are so widespread and so splintered that it’s hard to imagine public attention being focused on a single individual in quite the same way.

 I was also surprised by the film’s shifting tone. From what I’ve read, this was quite deliberate on the part of Chayefsky and Lumet, with low-key realistic scenes at the start of the film gradually giving way to stylized moments full of manic energy. A beautifully played early scene features Finch, as the newly-fired anchorman, and the great William Holden as his longtime pal who’s now the news division president. Two veteran newsmen, they commiserate with one another about how times have changed, making jokes to cover their mutual dismay.

 But then Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen enters the picture, and the whole mood changes. She sees in the crazed on-air pronouncements of Howard Beal (Finch) a new direction for TV news broadcasts, and quickly turns a hard news show into “infotainment,” of a sort that (alas) would not be so surprising today. Moreover, while spinning journalism as a form of public amusement, she also captures the heart of the long-married Holden, with predictable results. Late in the film, as Diana looks for new stars-in-the-making, there are some pointed references to a group of Symbionese Liberation Army-style young radicals who’ll do pretty much anything to be featured on TV. It’s very dark and, sometimes, very funny. Though the Patty Hearst era and the near-shooting of President Ford by Squeaky Fromme seem like ancient history now, Network brings them back to those of us old enough to remember.  

 

Down and Out in Beverly Hills: “Sunset Boulevard”

Sunset Blvd. is one of the most memorable thoroughfares in SoCal, winding graciously from the Pacific Ocean through the leafy residential neighborhoods of the very rich and on to the glitz of the Sunset Strip. And Sunset Blvd. is one of the most memorable movies ever to come out of the Hollywood studio system. Part of why it resonates is because director (and co-writer) Billy Wilder, after years of churning out stellar films like Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, knew everything about that system. His shelf full of Oscars and other awards gave him the confidence to bite the hand that had fed him nicely since he emigrated from Germany one step ahead of the Nazis in 1938. Before I watched the film again recently, I had forgotten all the little pokes Sunset Blvd. takes at studio bosses, like the producer who admits he turned down the chance to film Gone With the Wind because he figured no one cared about the Civil War. And then there’s the young director who’s so ignorant about the legendary silent star Norma Desmond that when she visits the Paramount lot he’s only interested in renting her vintage limo to use in his next picture.

 But if most studio types don’t come off well in Sunset Blvd., the film is fundamentally more interested in those at the very top and at the very bottom of the above-the-line food chain. At the top are the stars, those ethereal but rock-hard creatures so beloved by their public that they can get away with pretty much anything, including shrugging off those who helped them in their climb to success. One such is Norma Desmond (the unforgettable Gloria Swanson) , a silent-era queen of cinema who now employs the director who’d discovered her as a manservant in her crumbling Beverly Hills mansion. The fact that he also happens to be her former husband reminds us that stars feel entitled to use people and move on.

 One problem with stars, though: they generally have a lights-out date. They grow older and less beautiful: in Norma’s case the coming of talkies introduced an entirely different style of acting, one dependent as much on verbal dexterity as on facial expressions and pantomime. Starting in the 1930s the role of screenwriters changed too, with many bright young men (and a few women) imported from the east to add literate sophistication to studio films. That’s how former Dayton, Ohio newsman Joe Gillis (William Holden) showed up in SoCal, only to find himself trading his soul for the occasional studio paycheck. Here he is describing his most recent picture: “Last one I wrote was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know because when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat.”  

Billy Wilder knew a thing or three about studio-mandated script changes, and about how writers in Hollywood both love and hate a system that abuses them without shame. He also, surely, knew something about faded stars. A current screenwriting student of mine, Paul Blyskal, commented recently about the film’s most famous Norma Desmond line: “I am big! It's the pictures that got small.” To Paul “the tone of the line is simple and proud. But it also resonates as deeply unhinged. And it contrasts beautifully with Joe Gillis' style of self-presentation. He is no less ambitious about his future, but his ambitions are more disguised and presented less confidently, buried under vacillations and self-deprecations, offered with the pretense that he doesn't really want what he wants. Norma Desmond isn't ashamed of what she wants.”