In honor of baseball's Opening Week, I thought we'd take a look at some of the best of this blog's posts on America's Pastime. Today it's the story of a baseball team and its new owner, who just happens to be an ill-tempered cat.
Based on the novel by H. Allen Smith (one of the finest humorists of his time), Rhubarb tells the story of a yellow feral cat with a nasty disposition who's "adopted" by a wealthy businessman, T.J. Banner (Gene Lockhart, whom you might remember as the judge in Miracle on 34th Street). Banner, who's constantly surrounded by "yes" men, admires how the cat treats everyone with distain, rich and poor alike. This cat, he says, has spirit. He's a fighter, and if there's one thing T.J. Banner has always admired, it's a fighter. T.J.'s greedy daughter Myra thinks he's crazy, but his public relations man, Eric Yeager (Oscar-winner Ray Milland), affectionately tolerates the old man. It was Eric who was assigned to capture the cat from the golf course where he lived (stealing golf balls off the greens), and when Eric finally succeeds, he has the scratches to prove it.
Although Banner owns many successful businesses, his pride and joy is his baseball team, a bunch of losers named the Brooklyn Loons (read: Dodgers), managed by Len Sickles (William Frawley, Lockhart's political boss in Miracle on 34th Street). If only, Banner thinks, his team had the same fight his cat had, they might win for a change. After watching the cat trash his study, Banner decides to name him Rhubarb, after the term for a baseball imbroglio. (In one scene, trying to explain what the cat's name means, Eric explains: "Lady, you know what happens at a sale, when two women get hold of the same dress? THAT's a Rhubarb!")
After many years Banner dies and, to the amazement of his business associates and Myra (who has been fairly counting down the days to the old man's death), he leaves the balance of his estate, including the baseball team, to the only living thing that ever showed him trust and loyalty - Rhubarb. Realizing the limitations inherent in a cat running an empire, the will provides that Eric will act as Rhubarb's guardian. He's not sure at first, but when Myra attempts to murder Rhubarb, Eric remembers T.J.'s words that "if you're right, fight for it." Rhubarb's always been a fighter, which is what the old man loved about him, and Eric is determined to fight as well.
His biggest fight concerns the baseball team - the players, perhaps understandably, are reluctant to pay for a cat, even if he does own the team. Fans around the league meow at them, and an umpire even left a bowl of milk at home plate before the start of the game. The players are threatening to sit out the season and Eric, along with his fiancee Polly (Jan Sterling), manager Sickles' daughter, realize something has to be done. Eric convinces them that the miracle Boston Braves of 1914 - a team that rallied from last place on the 4th of July to win the World Series (true, by the way) - owed their success to a lucky yellow cat that served as their mascot, they start to have second thoughts. When the Loons' hitters come through in the clutch after having petted Rhubarb, the superstitious players become convinced: with Rhubarb on their side, they can do no wrong.
The Brooklyn team - now dubbed the "Rhubarbs" by the tabloids, with Rhubarb and Eric accompanying them to every game home and away - catches fire and wins the pennant. Now, they're prepared to face their archrivals, the New York club (read: Yankees) in the World Series. The entire city is electrified, and in the days leading up to the Series seemingly everyone in Brooklyn is placing bets on the Rhubarbs to win. The alarmed bookies calculate that if Brooklyn wins, there's no way they'll be able to cover their losses. Then one of them, Pencil Louie, strikes upon an idea - if something were to "happen" to the cat, it would almost certainly mean defeat for Brooklyn, and the bookies would save their skins.
Pencil Louie's first thought is simply to kill Rhubarb, but then he realizes there's money to be made - surely Myra would pay them to get rid of the cat. With Rhubarb thus out of the way, Myra gets her father's fortune, Brooklyn (and the people betting on them) loses, and the bookies get their necks out of the noose. In short order Rhubarb is catnapped, New York evens the series, and all of Brooklyn is in a panic. Eric and Polly launch a desperate search for the missing cat, even resorting to seeding the clouds with dry ice to cause a rainout that postpones Game 7 for another day.
In the end the good guys win, of course. Rhubarb is found, the bad guys are captured, and Brooklyn rallies to win the series. Eric and Polly marry, and Rhubarb is last seen with the female cat who's been sitting in the box behind Rhubarb with her lady owner throughout the season, trailing a litter of little kittens.
Rhubarb is a charming fantasy, featuring a top-notch performance by Milland (including a hilarious send-up of his drunk scene in The Lost Weekend), wild slapstick comedy, and Smith's satiric jabs at television and commercial sponsors (a pivotal moment in one game is interrupted for a "much more important" message from the ever-present Friendly Financial Company, whose commercials are a running joke during coverage of the games).
It tells of a time when baseball was an ingrained part of the American culture, when teams were part of the very fabric of the cities they played in (as the Dodgers were when they played in Brooklyn), and when the idea of a cat owner/mascot wasn't perhaps all that outrageous. And of course it's perfectly believable that baseball players, a superstitious lot since the game began, would become convinced that petting a cat before going to bat would bring them good luck.
Best of all is Rhubarb himself - one source says fourteen cats were used to portray him, with the prime cat being a tiger named Orangey. His transformation from feral loner to tycoon to good-luck charm is the stuff dreams are made of.
Smith's original book spawned two sequels, neither matching the charm and outrageousness of Rhubarb. As both novel and movie, it is the essential baseball story - the tale of a team and its lucky cat.
Controversy has erupted, as you might expect, over Disney's live-action retelling of Beauty and the Beast (see this article for the reasoning why I use "retelling" and not remake) over a controversial scene involving a character that led one drive-thru theater in Alabama to refuse airing it out of respect to the theatergoers, many of whom were part of the 81% that voted a marriage definition that New Yorkers did not approve, and erased on their whim, creating an arrogance that reminded Americans of the House of Hanover that led to the Declaration of Independence.
But why the controversial erotic scene was the larger question. We knew it was the Left's way of social engineering in the theater. Just last week, Disney's ABC aired a television special that glorified the erotic liberty lobby and how they relied on their elites to overturn the laws of the nation, creating in effect a federal Reynolds case where only the large urban enclaves of the Left had a voice, erasing the rest of the nation from having a voice in the public debate over issues. Three days after attending the Renée Fleming recital at the Peace Center, the GLOW Lyric Theatre in the very city performed on Valentine's Day, no less, a concert celebrating the victories of the perversion movement, titled by the codewords of the movement, that throws Christians to the Lions with their language (the title is propaganda that I shall not mention it by name). Antonin Scalia noted that the signature of erotic liberty was determined by a few cities, a patrician group that was out of touch with the rest of the nation, especially with Protestants (let alone conservative evangelicals, which form majorities in many states) not represented by the judiciary that imposed its agenda on that group, "no social transformation without representation." Only the voices of the elites mattered.
This goes to the real issue with the movie in question. It was, as that St. Valentine's Day piece performed by the theater company also fits, a form of regietheater, the director's theater that has been responsible for the worst hacks of opera that we have long referenced. We wrote "Saving Opera from Itself," about the issue from an opera reference, and cited Heather MacDonald's "The Abduction of Opera" in the article. When reading the article in preparation for this commentary, I saw in both the lyric company and the movie examples of the idea of a "superior moral understanding" of the director. But it also fits within the idea of art as shock value.
The defining characteristic of the sixties generation and its cultural progeny is solipsism. Convinced of their superior moral understanding, and commanding wealth never before available to average teenagers and young adults, the baby boomers decided that the world revolved around them. They forged an adolescent aesthetic—one that held that the wisdom of the past could not possibly live up to their own insights—and have never outgrown it. In an opera house, that outlook requires that works of the past be twisted to mirror our far more interesting selves back to ourselves. Michael Gielen, the most influential proponent of Regietheater and head of the Frankfurt Opera in the late seventies and eighties, declared that “what Handel wanted” in his operas was irrelevant; more important was “what interests us . . . what we want.”
It did not matter to them that the nation rejected their values. Rather, they forced it with their elites, and now are celebrating such imposition of their degenerate standards by force-feeding down theatergoers, similar to what operagoers have been seeing with the regietheater movement. Regietheater as social change to force down the progressive values rejected by voters and moviegoers goes along with the attitudes of the entire movement. In both the GLOW Lyric Company and the Beauty and the Beast situations, both qualify as regietheater with their intent to impose their values on an audience that rejects such.
Has regietheater created the worst movies and television shows of our times by forcing down every left-wing social agenda on us? Is it time we defund government art, as it has proved itself to be at the root of regietheater, and the shock value?
Sunday is probably the premiere day of the year for auto racing fans. No, scratch that - it is the premiere day, Christmas, New Year's and your birthday all rolled up into one. It starts Sunday morning with the world's most glamorous and prestigious race, the Grand Prix of Monaco (6:30 am CT, NBC), run through the streets of Monte Carlo before all kinds of royalty and celebrity. It continues with America's most famous race, the Indianapolis 500 (10:00 am CT, ABC), somewhat tarnished to be sure, but newly on the upswing as it approaches its 100th running. And for a nightcap there's NASCAR's longest race, the Coca-Cola 600 (4:00 pm, FOX), which starts in the late afternoon and ends under the lights.
With all that, it seemed like a good idea to take a look at Hollywood's treatment of the sport. Not surprisingly, there are movie conventions that find their way into almost every racing film. There are also reminders of why so many people become addicted to cars driven fast and lives lived even faster. Herewith, five films to check out if you need a warm-up for Sunday.
LeMans (1971) Steve McQueen, lots of cars
In the late 60s, the famed 24-hour endurance race became a focal point for American racing. The Ford Motor Company put on an all-out blitz to break the European stranglehold on the race and become the first American manufacturer to win. The biggest names in American racing, drivers such as A.J. Foyt and Dan Gurney, raced at LeMans, and Wide World of Sports presented live via satellite coverage of the beginning and end of the race.
It was in this climate that Steve McQueen’s LeMans appeared. McQueen played Michael Delaney, an American driver returning to the race that almost claimed his life in a fiery crash that did kill a fellow driver and friend. McQueen’s need to come to terms with the past, as well as the inevitable romantic entanglements of the present, provided the backdrop for this often moody story that does a pretty good job of describing the thoughts of a man whose profession forces him to confront death on a regular basis.
There was almost more action behind the scenes than on the screen. McQueen was already an avid race car driver, and LeMans was his dream project – so much so that he put his own money and prestige behind it as producer. He fought the director, John Sturgis, for control of the project – Sturgis wanted to focus on the love story, while McQueen wanted the race itself to be the star. The movie’s budget skyrocketed, much of the original action footage proved unusable, and one of McQueen’s financial partners threatened to shut down filming altogether. Eventually, McQueen was forced to give up his salary, percentage of profits, and future royalties in order to complete the film. Not surprisingly, the enterprise resulted in financial bankruptcy for McQueen.
Notwithstanding the problems, LeMans contains wonderful footage of the famed race. At a time when most people had seen LeMans only in newsreel footage or on television, the big screen provided a magnificent panorama of the sights, sounds and colors of one of the world’s greatest races.
Interesting note: there is no dialogue for the first half-hour. The engines say it all.
Bobby Deerfield (1977) Al Pacino, Marthe Keller
As was the case with LeMans, Bobby Deerfield deals with an auto racer struggling to deal with a deadly crash. Like Steve McQueen’s Delaney, Al Pacino’s Deerfield must overcome the psychological impact of death; and like Delaney, Deerfield is drawn into a relationship with a woman dealing with her own demons. Think of it as Love Story with really fast cars.
That’s not really a fair assessment, however; although Bobby Deerfield disappointed many race fans who were expecting a movie in the mold of LeMans and were turned off by the movie’s incursion into soap opera, it eventually won praise as an incisive, underplayed character study. Pacino himself considered Deerfield to be one of his best performances from that era. While the race footage (from the 1976 Formula One season, featuring Mario Andretti, among others) isn’t perhaps up to the standards of LeMans or Grand Prix, it still packs a punch on the big screen.
While Bobby Deerfield may have failed to capture the drama on the track in the same way as LeMans had, it was a decidedly more peaceful filmmaking experience. There were no power struggles on the set, no creditors threatening to pull the plug, no tensions between the star and the director. Pacino and Keller created a credible chemistry on-screen, a chemistry they took off-screen as well.
The Big Wheel (1949) Mickey Rooney, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway
OK, so The Big Wheel isn’t going to win any prizes. The story is a typically clichéd sports melodrama, the story of Billy Coy (Rooney), the son of a race car driver who is killed in a fiery crash at the Indianapolis 500. (Do you notice a theme running through these movies? Racing movies are definitely not for the faint of heart.) Coy is determined to win the race that claimed his father’s life, and nothing is going to stop him – including a fire that engulfs his car in the climatic final scene.
Oh, and along the way there’s romance, conflict, and angst as well. “Restless! Reckless!” proclaims the DVD cover, and that’s about all you have to know. Rebel Without a Cause with really fast cars on a track that goes around and around.
This was one of Mickey Rooney’s first “adult” roles after his success with Andy Hardy, and while the plot isn’t anything to write home about and the special effects are pretty hokey (come on, that really isn’t Rooney behind the wheel of a burning car, is it?), this is still a movie to be included in the list. For one thing, it takes place at the Brickyard, and the racing footage goes a long way to capturing the look and feel of the Indianapolis 500 as it was back in the day, when the race was literally an all-day affair, a Memorial Day celebration that was equal parts sports spectacle and county fair. This is Indy as it really was – the wooden grandstands festooned with flags and bunting, the cars that were often little more than coffins on wheels, the skill and courage required by driver and mechanic alike to reach the finish line in one piece.
Anyone watching this movie who is only familiar with modern-day racing will be stunned – and educated – by how far the sport as come. It is more sophisticated, less primitive, not nearly as dangerous; but there’s also something more antiseptic about it, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. Combine it with 1939's Indianapolis Speedway with Pat O'Brien and John Payne, and you'll get a pretty good sense of the rich history of the Indianapolis 500.
Winning (1969) Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Robert Wagner
Winning is a throwback to another era, that of the all-around racer. Before the age of specialization, of corporate sponsorship of entire racing series, race car drivers were content to compete in anything that had four wheels. In Winning, Frank Capua (Newman) and his chief rival, Luther Erding (Wagner) battle in sports cars, stock cars and open-wheeled cars, with a climactic finish at the Indy 500.
There are no fiery crashes in Winning, although there is a spectacular pileup at the start of the 500 (the exciting race footage comes from the 1966 contest, which featured a 17-car melee on the first lap). The accident, in which there were no serious injuries, serves to shrink the field, making the one-on-one battle between Capua and Erding that much more intimate. Think Ben Hur, with really fast chariots and no horses.
There is a love story, of course – in this case a triangle involving the two drivers and Elora (Woodward), Capua’s wife, who finds Capua becoming more distant as he struggles to overcome a career slump. There’s also tension between Capua and his sponsor, who turns to Erding when Capua seems washed up. These hackneyed conventions are made more tolerable by the surprisingly affecting relationship between Capua and his stepson (played by Richard Thomas), who finds in Frank the father he never had, and works hard to bring Elora and Frank back together. In the end, it works.
This movie owes everything to Paul Newman. It was originally conceived as a television movie, but the participation of Newman and Woodward elevated it to the big screen. It elevated it in other ways as well; Newman has always been the kind of actor who could take a B concept movie and somehow make it more than the sum of its parts (see the otherwise routine Harper detective movies, for example). Newman, like McQueen and other racing buffs, had little time for the romantic elements of the plot; it was the fast driving that turned him on. Always a fan of racing, it was here that he learned to drive competitive cars, and his love of the sport translated into a second career as a professional racer.
Interesting note: Dave Grusin, who did the music for Bobby Deerfield, scored Winning as well.
Grand Prix (1966) James Garner, Yves Montand, Toshiro Mifune
The Tiffany of racing movies, Grand Prix has it all. Director John Frankenheimer spent the season on the Formula One circuit, and his innovative camera mountings on the cars presaged the in-car cameras that dominate televised racing today. Frankenheimer combined this with a multishot approach to editing that often turned the screen into a montage of multiple angles and storylines running simultaneously. The result was a visual masterpiece of breathtaking racing action in a widescreen setting, which won the film three Academy Awards for effects.
For Formula One fans, Grand Prix sounds an often nostalgic note, vividly capturing many of the old European circuits that used to run along treelined public roads, with spectators standing perilously close to the track. Many of these are no longer used in Formula One, replaced by modern, more compact circuits designed to keep both the fans and the drivers safer. Safe they may be, but they’re often also flat, dull, and without much in the way of character. In Cars at Speed, his magnificent book on the Grand Prix circuit, Robert Daley mentions that auto racing’s early appeal often laid in the fact that spectators could envision themselves on the same roads as the racers, an illusion shattered with the man-made circuits of today.
While the racing action dominates Grand Prix, there is a story as well, that of four drivers battling for the Formula One championship: Garner, the American banished from Lotus for reckless driving, seeking redemption with Mifune’s new Japanese team (Garner, like McQueen and Newman, would take up racing as a serious sideline) ; Montand, the aging Ferrari champion looking for one final title while struggling with an altered perception of his sport; Brian Bedford, Garner’s former teammate, dealing with the twin specters of a near-fatal accident and the legacy of his late brother, also a world champion; and Antonio Sabato as the young Italian driver who lives only for the moment, understanding that life on the edge is what makes the whole thing worthwhile. There are, naturally, romantic triangles and fiery crashes – but without them, where would a racing film be?
Even in the somewhat soapish subplot, Grand Prix manages to sound the right notes, allowing the characters the opportunity to talk about how they cope with a job that requires you to put your life on the line every moment. The common theme is that of fatalism: you choose what you do for a living, you find a way to rationalize what happens, you live with whatever consequences may develop. You’re conscious of the risk, but if you think about it too much (as Montand’s character does in the second half of the film), you become paralyzed by it and lose the edge that keeps you alive. Phil Hill, the former world champion who appears in a bit part in Grand Prix, once said that a race driver expects to die behind the wheel. But he had thought about it so much, it no longer had any meaning for him: “I don’t believe in the law of averages. A driver makes his own averages.”
Bonus: Since I wrote this piece back in 2008, there emerged a movie that surely would have earned a spot on this list: Senna, the remarkable 2010 documentary on the life and death of the great Ayrton Senna, directed by Asif Kapadia.
The movie uses no voiceover narration, preferring instead to allow the participants themselves, along with announcers in various race footage, to tell the story of the young man from Brazil who rises through the ranks to become world Formula One champion. And Senna's story is not an easy one: his fierce rivalry with teammate and nemesis Alain Prost, his battles with F1 officials, and his role as a icon to his Brazilian countrymen - the one person in a poor and corrupt country in which they can take pride.
Kapadia succeeds in creating a deepening sense of foreboding; of course, the threat of death is never far removed from the world of motor sports, and as we approach the fateful 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, we see Senna, in an unreliable and difficult-to-control McLaren, being told by his close friend Sid Watkins, the F1 medical director, that the two of them should just chuck it and go fishing. I can't, Senna tells him, although there is no reason why he can't: multiple world championships, more money than he could possibly need, and already a status as one of, if not the, greatest grand prix champions of all time. Wisely, the film doesn't dwell on Senna's fatal accident, coming one day after the death in practice of fellow driver Roland Ratzenberger and two days after Rubens Barrichello had barely escaped being killed in practice. The crash is shown only once, but it is enough. It is, as The Sun's critic Alex Zane says, "fascinating and profoundly moving."
Something has come to my attention over the years with regards to what we learn in literature, numerous trips to the theatre, especially for opera, and even with movies and television that has arrived at my attention because of a term that does not fit with popular culture when those who attend opera and live theatre will understand when considering the news North Carolina legislators plan tax breaks for what is called a remake of a popular 1987 movie. Fan boards are complaining about the idea, but it took a reading back in middle school of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and frequent attendance in live theatre in order for me to consider they are not using the correct term.
The correct term that is not used is a retelling of the story. Many great stories in literature are often retold, and the retellings are given credit (such as Beowolf). When a theatregoer attends a live theatre event, things change in each different setting of the opera or theatre play, with directors and others making key changes to make the telling of the story considerably different. It was reminiscent of a question they asked in a middle school literature class regarding Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to imagine how it would be set in the time (1980's) and not in 44 BC, with costuming and other text. Such examples of this I have learned are a Gianni Schicchi in New Orleans that was set in the city itself and not in Italy, the local Methodist college's setting of Die Zauberflöte set in the middle of New York City, a college opera setting of Il Barberi di Sivilgia set in the Roaring 20's, with flapper dresses and the "carnival barker" type outfits, and of course, as we have mentioned in the past, Der Schauspieldirektor set in 2010 Wien, complete with Herr Frank becoming Donald Trump, complete with suit and pink tie.
So why the hubbub over movies being remakes and not being called retellings? Sure, we know Footloose 1984 was told in the Rust Belt of wide-open Michigan near the Motor City, and the 2011 retelling was set in the middle of Georgia in a far different era, complete with different genres of music in order to make the point we are not in rock and roll Midwest but we are in the country and western South. And we know how different versions of the Robocop franchise were set in different eras, but especially in science fiction, we are supposed to predict what will be the technologies of the future, as we saw in the Australian-taped Mission: Impossible of the late 1980's because of the writers' strike, where the show began to enter the real of science fiction -- many of the technologies thought back then were even futuristic of the time 30 years ago, but are now legitimately used by detectives now. If you retold a science fiction movie from the 1970's in the 2010's, you would predict what the future would be in 2050, not 2000.
So if Dirty Dancing is retold in a different environment, it cannot be set in the Catskill Mountains of the 1960's. When the story is retold as in the franchise's Havana Nightssetting, the setting is evidently in Cuba around the time of the Revolution. There is a festival in North Carolina that is being considered for this retelling, but the director has to make it a considerably different retelling such as the Appalachian Mountains in the 1980's, the coal mines in the mountain ranges, or the beautiful skiing resorts there in the 1990's. Those of us who attend live theatre have the understanding that when stories are retold, they have different angles that allow regionalism to show its setting. Maybe they should theme it in Appalachia, and in the end create a reason to visit the area. There is no justice in calling it a remake when it is a retelling set not in the Catskills of the 1960's but in the Appalachian Mountains in the 1980's or 1990's.
Post script: Bobby's home church is supporting a mission in Oceana, WV, in the Appalachian Mountains.
Apparently the Academy Awards are this Sunday night. I say "apparently" because I'm actually writing this on the Friday before the Oscarcast, just to show how foolish and predictable the whole thing has become, and how easy to predict it is.
Time was when I really looked forward to the Oscars. That was before the show itself expanded from the tidy 90-minute-to-two-hour broadcast it had always been to the bloated four-hour telethon it has recently become, before the movies themselves separated into three categories: CGI-laden superhero spectacles, slob-driven gross-out comedies and politically-charged arthouse dramas. Back then I hadn't seen most of the nominated movies - I wasn't old enough to get in to a lot of them - but it didn't matter, because they were the movies everyone wrote or talked about, and even if you hadn't seen them yourself you'd heard about them, and you were able to develop something of a rooting interest in one or more of them. The actors and actresses in them were also common faces - you'd seen them on magazine covers or on television, and there was a very glamorous aura around them.
Even the broadcast itself was different - it was traditionally on Monday, late in the evening, which gave you something to look forward to throughout the dreary Monday workday (or schoolday, in my case). It was to entertainment what Monday Night Football was to sports, and I don't know why the Academy wasn't able to understand how the NFL made Mondays special that way.*
*I've read that one of the NFL's ambitions in constructing an entire urban village around the new Rams stadium in LA is to have a theater worthy of hosting the Oscars. Doubtful it will ever happen, but if it did perhaps they'd be able to give it some of that Monday night buzz.
If you're like me, if the magic is gone from your relationship with the Academy Awards, then it's as a public service that I present this rundown of what happened on the show last night, even though it hasn't actually happened yet. Think of this as my gift to you, freeing up your Sunday evening so you can do something fun instead.
Host Chris Rock spent most of the evening making jokes at the Academy's expense. He never explicitly mentioned "#OscarsSoWhite" because that's what everyone expected him to do, but he walked right up to the edge all evening, which became a knowing joke between him and the hip audience. Everyone had a good laugh (or two or three) at Donald Trump, with several reference to it being a "Uge" night, and at least two presenters came onstage wearing various versions of The Donald's hair. One acceptance speech will refer to the courage of women like Hilary Clinton, and at least one arriving celebrity will be shown wearing a Bernie Sanders button.
Speaking of which, attendees and participants never were quite able to figure out how to show their solidarity with this year's social justice cause. At first the idea was to wear black ribbons in support, the way they had worn red ribbons during the AIDS crisis, but this backfired when it was pointed out most viewers wouldn't be able to see the ribbons against the black tuxedos. An alternative - to switch to white suitcoats (always fashionable) in order that the ribbons would show up better, was rejected for obvious reasons, as was the idea of wearing blackface to show that "we are all black under our skin."
The Revenant was the big winner last night, taking home the awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Everyone hailed the movie's astounding ability to depict the struggle between humankind and the environment, and how people can only achieve ultimate victory through cooperation with our animal brethren. Likewise, Best Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was praised for delivering an acceptance speech largely devoid of the environmental polemics he's best known for. In a subtle, reflective speech, DiCaprio mused on how he never imagined he'd be standing at the podium holding an Oscar, concluding that it proves how "this is a wonderful world - let's be sure and keep it that way."
The Best Actress award went to Bree Larson for the little-seen Room, who praised the courage and determination of the real-life women who've undergone the same ordeal as her character. Best Supporting Actress was won by Kate Winslet for Steve Jobs, in an upset over The Danish Girl's Alicia Vikander, whose campaign was doomed by too many health-conscious Academy members who thought Vikander was playing a pastry chef. The emotional highlight of the evening was Sylvester Stallone's victory in the Supporting Actor category. The audience rose in ovation as Stallone mounted the steps to the stage, pausing at the top to recreate his famous Rocky pose on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The telecast will end sometime around 12:30am Eastern, and over the next couple of days there will be discussion over the show's record low ratings, and what can be done about it. Four months later, Jimmy Kimmel will be presented as the host of the 2017 broadcast.
There - now that you've read it all, you don't have to feel as if you missed anything. Your gratitude will be award enough for me.
The third month of the year is here, and a few random thoughts came this week regarding news bits. Here are a few quickies to ponder.
Whose Side Are You Supporting, Congressman? The relegation of my area (because of certain Tea Party "Spirit of 1773" conservatives in the area, no doubt) to the ultra-liberal, race-baiting Sixth Congressional District is analogous to that of a football club that has gone from the Comcast-broadcast Barclays Premier League to the Al Jazeera [through their sports subsidiary beIN]-broadcast SkyBet Championship (and lower leagues). The ugly colours displayed itself because this Congressman who ignores me for not being in his qualifications has decided to skip Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech to the Joint Session of Congress this week. Whose side are you supporting? Either you're with Israel or you're with Iran, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (not the Iraqi government), and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Mr. Clyburn is far worse than Mr. Wilson, mind you.
Are Streaming Television Services Opening the Door to the Dreaded X Rating on Television? It is well known movie theatre chains (Carmike, AMC, Regal) will not accept carrying X-rated (referred by the MPAA as NC-17) movies, as it will hurt revenue because of core teenage audiences (R allows as long as there is an adult watching with the child), there is an association with pornography with the X rating though some are for violence, and additional patrol to ensure those under 17 are not attending an explicit movie. But with streaming television replacing network and even pay television, the ads for people to subscribe to such services are promoting TV-MA rated series, which are the television equivalent of X ratings. If the theatre chains make it clear "no means no" for X ratings, why are television viewers being told the best shows on television are the X rated shows? It seems further that the streaming services are promoting the raunchiest shows, which have no accountability to censors or advertisers, and to claim "artistic excellence" means as raunch as it can be. Remember that a popular movie based on a raunchy book was awarded a British equivalent of an X rating, and edited to an R in the United States to avoid the X that would drive it away from theatres. What are we saying when premium pay is opening the door to "too hot for movies" on television, and winning?
The ChromaLusion Dress? The recent media rush over the perspective that the colours of a dress were of different colours had me looking back at NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon's Chevrolet Monte Carlos he raced for his former sponsor DuPont (NYSE : DD, sponsor of Mr. Gordon from 1992-2012, when the company sold the division that sponsored his #24 Chevrolet; the new successor company, Axalta, NYSE : AXTA, has sponsored his Holden since 2013) around the turn of the century. Various liveries for Mr. Gordon, especially at the All-Star Race, featured a DuPont (now Axalta) branded ChromaLusion paint that changed colours upon reflection of lights.
There is also a Superman from the 1999 Charlotte spring races that used ChromaLusion.
When I saw that dress story, I looked back at the archives of the legendary #24 DuPont Chevrolet (and successor Axalta Holden Commodore) and see how that the dress story was not new. I've seen this with a car that changed colours.
A Law With No Sense. Sixty years ago, the 24 Heures du Mans crash involving Pierre Levegh's Mercedes running over an Austin-Healey into the stands, killing 83, led to a ban in motorsport in Switzerland. After a test by former F1 test driver and INDYCAR podium finisher Simona de Silvestro, there is a push to legalise only electric motorsport in the country, while the 60-year ban on petrol circuit racing continues. Why only allow electric cars and not petrol? Are you selling out to those who push for green standards? (The 24 Heures disaster also led to a ban of over 30 years of Mercedes-Benz in motorsport and the American Automobile Association disbanding the Contest Board that sanctioned the Indianapolis 500; interestingly, AAA members couldn't race at Darlington in its early years because the AAA didn't like Bill France; when the Contest Board dissolved after the disaster, Mr. France, Mr. Hulman, and the SCCA formed the Automobile Competition Committee of the United States, the new national governing body of motorsport in the country; today, there are six member clubs of ACCUS. Some INDYCAR fans are outraged because the reigning Rookie of the Year for the Indianapolis 500 recently had his FIA licence suspended by ACCUS for domestic violence, since an ACCUS member can suspend a competitor's FIA licence, and the suspension goes into effect for all other ACCUS members.)
It's been so long since I started this thread that's it's difficult to recall what the point of it all was supposed to be. (And I'm glad I haven't been kicked off the blog for being so late in getting this up!)
But this whole discussion started with the death of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf last month. As was mentioned back then, virtually every obit of the great opera star mentioned her past association with the Nazi party in WW2 Germany. And I supposed it's a natural segueway, once you've talked about Schwarzkopf, to look at the lives of two other prominent German artists: Leni Riefenstahl and Richard Wagner. (Günter Grass doesn't really count, since he wasn't part of my original plan and, anyway, I've already talked about him enough.)
And in looking at their lives, we continue to be drawn to the central question of the discussion: what is the relationship between the artist and the art? As Roger Ebert has noted, it raises the “classic question of the contest between art and morality: Is there such a thing as pure art, or does all art make a political statement?"
Leni Riefenstahl was one of the great film documentarians of the 20th century. From Wikipedia: (I'll quote liberally here, since I have no desire to get this blog tied up in a plagerism accusation:
Riefenstahl's techniques, such as moving cameras, the use of telephoto lenses to create a distorted perspective, aerial photography, and revolutionary approach to the use of music and cinematography, have earned Triumph recognition as one of the greatest propaganda films in history. [...] The film was popular in the Third Reich and elsewhere, and has continued to influence movies, documentaries, and commercials to this day, even as it raises the question over the dividing line between "art and morality."
But, as you might have gathered from the above paragraph, there’s that Nazi thing again. Of all Riefenstahl's documentaries, none is perhaps as famous - and infamous - as Triumph of the Will. It is a magnificent, terrible film of a horrible story - the Nazis and their Nuremberg rallies during the '30s. And in telling that horrible story, it also ensured that filmmaking would never be the same again.
Film historians have seen Riefenstahl's influence in movies ever since. Star Wars, Citizen Kane, Gladiator, Lord of the Rings - all bear the marks of Riefenstahl's style. The famous opening scene of Triumph, in which the camera moves through the clouds to capture an aerial shot of the city of Nuremberg (to the music of Wagner, naturally) must have influenced Wim Wenders' opening of Wings of Desire. The sports documentarian Bud Greenspan, one of the finest filmmakers of the 20th century (Ken Burns could take a chapter from him), considers her one of the greats.
It's an assertion few would dispute, in the academic sense. But can’t you detect just the smallest bit of embarrassment whenever one praises the work of Riefenstahl? True, Triumph of the Will is a staple of many “best all-time” lists, but there’s this sense that even when we praise Riefenstahl, we must immediately apologize or explain away the praise, lest we fall under guilt-by-association. The closer we get to her work, the more we edge away from it. It’s not likely you’d hear Seinfeld emerge from the theatre saying, “It’s about Nazis! Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” (Warning: Do not insert any Soup Nazi jokes here.)
No, you’ll never hear anyone say there’s nothing wrong with being a Nazi. In our time the Nazi brand is, as I've said before, the Scarlet Swastika, an accusation so accursed that its use has become widespread, indiscriminate, a self-parody. And yet it is a charge that carries power, a negative sort of prestige, a stigma that taints whatever it touches. And we ask ourselves if we should be ashamed by our admiration and praise of the artist’s work, if we can morally separate the ideology of the artist from the art itself.
Riefenstahl’s work does not allow us that luxury. The subject matter of Triumph of the Will is in your face, and you can't ignore it. As the Wikipedia bio puts it, "it is nearly impossible to separate the subject from the artist behind it." She “claimed that she was naïve about the Nazis when she made it and had no knowledge of Hitler's genocidal policies. She also pointed out that Triumph contains ‘not one single anti-Semitic word’“; but it is difficult (although not impossible) to conceive of her as both ingénue and naïve girl, the brilliant and innovative filmmaker who was still a babe in the woods when it came to world politics. This is what she would have liked you to believe, but her actions often belie that contention. Roger Ebert points out, "the very absence of anti-Semitism in Triumph of the Will looks like a calculation; excluding the central motif of almost all of Hitler's public speeches must have been a deliberate decision to make the film more efficient as propaganda." And so, given all this, we’re tempted to see in her films things that aren’t really there, images that dance before us like the ghosts from black & white TV. Only these are real, the ghosts of Hitler’s victims that only become clearer as the picture is drawn into sharper focus.
Therefore, as viewers do we punish the filmmaker because of the subject of her films? Do we hold Riefenstahl accountable for her Nazi associations? And if so, do we also apply the same standards to Sergei Eisenstein, who exploited Russian nationalistic pride in Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky? (Yes, I know Eisenstein had his quarrels with the authorities, but large families often do that.) Eisenstein is often ranked in the pantheon of filmmaking, Potemkin appearing on most ten-best lists, but I rarely see him carrying around the baggage that accompanies Riefenstahl. And we won't even get into the almost-paranoid, conspiracy-laden propaganda of liberal filmmakers like Oliver Stone?
Now, it's true that Eisenstein wasn't a documentarian as was Riefenstahl. Nonetheless, his movies were fraught with nationalistic fervor, clearly designed to influence and inspire the viewer. (The Communists, in fact, thought Eisenstein worried too much about things like art and budgeting, and wanted even more propaganda in the content.) As for Stone - well, we know most of his films have an agenda.
Some like to pair up Triumph of the Will with Frank Capra’s direct answer to them, the Why We Fight series of films. (And, by the way, given how anti-American Hollywood has become, it would have been interesting to see how Capra's reputation might have suffered had he been young enough when he made this series. Surely in the Hollywood of the late 60s through today, he would have been seen as a toady for the government.)
In fact, however, the true companion to Riefenstahl’s masterwork might be D.W. Griffith’s TheBirth of a Nation. This truly was a landmark of filmmaking, but most today remember it only as a racist piece of propaganda, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. True, perhaps, but Griffith's influence, like Riefenstahl's, cannot be denied. True also that Griffith, like Riefenstahl, is held at arms' length by most.
So what's the point here? It's not an apology for Leni Riefenstahl (or D.W. Griffith, for that matter). It's merely an observation on how we allow our politics to color the way we see things. As I've asserted in the past, it is hard to believe that Riefensthal would be held in such contempt had the Triumph in question been Lenin's October Revolution.
As we watch the ridiculous accusations of Nazism that are so commonplace nowadays across the political blogosphere, and perhaps most absurdly from the Muslims who brand the Jews with the contemptuous tag, we are reminded that Nazism is the singular golden sin, the mark from which its bearers cannot recover. It is reminiscent of the "unforgivable sin" that Christ warns us of, though most of those wielding it would fail to recognize that analogy since they don't recognize the source.
National Socialism keeps us in a trance, as perhaps it should. It holds the figures of history hostage, as perhaps it might. But we do not diminish the horror of the truth it represents to assert also that the word "Nazi" is the crown jewel of political correctness, the golden spike to be driven through the heart, the one word that guarantees the discrediting of its intended. Some would wear the title as a badge of honor, an ideology to be embraced, others are shamed with a scarlet letter and their lips burn with Judas' kiss of betrayal, and still others feel the sting of its indiscriminant application.
But while Schwarzkopf shrugged off the label, and Riefenstahl tried to run from it, Richard Wagner might have welcomed it with open arms. But that's for another time.
My own relationship to the movie is more amorphous; when it first came out, it was a movie that I very much wanted to see – the mysticism and existentialism appealed to me. Then Dances With Wolves came out. It was a movie I was predisposed to hate, and hate it I did.* There were, I thought, only two good things about Dances With Wolves – the performance by Graham Greene, which was Oscar-worthy, and the score by John Barry. (But then, c’mon - it’s John Barry! You were expecting someone playing a xylophone maybe?)
*I didn’t want to see it; I was more or less forced to go to it because my wife and I were invited by one of her best friends and her husband. Of such sacrifices are successful 20+ year marriages made. It's also how I talked my wife into going with me to see the re-release of Apocalypse Now.
What I disliked the most, perhaps, was Kevin Costner. It wasn’t just Costner’s acting, which was wooden at best, but the fact that he’d produced and directed the movie, which I thought an overstuffed, elongated piece of propaganda. At that moment, I decided that I didn’t want anything to do with Costner or any movie he was in.* And since that included Field of Dreams, there went that.
*Excepting JFK, which we, once again, were forced to see along with my wife’s friend and her husband. I suppose that says something about their tastes in movies. I actually thought JFK was pretty good, providing you understood you were watching a fantasy movie. Much like Field of Dreams, I suppose.
I realize that so far this piece, which started out to be about Field of Dreams, has in fact been about anything but. So to bring it back to topic: Posnanski talks about how he understands all of the negatives that the film’s haters bring up: the sentimentality (which crosses over the fatal border from nostalgia), the hokie, saccharine dialogue, the Capra-esque themes (Capra being another director I don’t much care for), even the part about making Shoeless Joe Jackson right-handed instead of left-handed. But, for all that, it was his father’s favorite movie, and it’s about one of Posnanski’s favorite things – baseball.
Poslnanski describes Field of Dreams as “not only the strangest baseball movie ever made, it’s one of the strangest movies ever made.” And as you read his description (if you haven’t seen the movie), you’d have to agree with him.
A man in a cornfield hears a voice. The voice tells him to build a baseball diamond so that the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson can come back and play baseball again. The voice tells him to go find a famous and reclusive writer (in the book, it is J.D. Salinger; in the movie it is someone named Terence Mann) and take him to a baseball game. The voice tells him to go find a dead ballplayer who only got to play one inning of one game.
There’s more, but I think that gives you the flavor. All of this sounds like something I’d have been inclined to like, or at least be intrigued by. The thing about it, he says, you have to open yourself up to a movie like this, to run the risk of being burned or confused by a movie that’s “so unapologetically hopeful. It is so unapologetically optimistic.”
And maybe that’s where the idea would lose it for me. Perhaps had the movie been written by someone like Rod Serling, it would have been a bit different. Serling was no stranger to sentiment, as anyone who’s seen the Twilight Zone episodes “Of Late I Think of Willoughby” or “Walking Distance” would attest. Serling’s magic, when he wasn’t busy being didactic, was that he could give a scenario like this an edge, some kind of twist that convinced the protagonist it was time to stop looking backward and start looking forward. That didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the past, or learn from it, or even keep it close to him – just that you can’t live in the past for more than the length of time you spend in it, the truth being that the present becomes the past almost instantly, and we have enough trouble keeping up with the present. Vintage Serling could have taken this fantasy concept and honed it with the edge that would keep people from gagging on the dialogue or the music; he would, in fact, have shown that the only place a field of dreams can exist is in the Twilight Zone.
In the end, though, I’m left critiquing a movie I haven’t seen, and probably won’t. And the whole point of this piece, my piece, isn’t Field of Dreams, or JFK, or Kevin Costner, or even Rod Serling.
It’s Posnanski. It’s how good a writer he is, that he can compel you to spend some time thinking about, and writing about, a movie you haven’t seen, and probably won’t. The fact that a writer – strike that, a good writer – can do that is one of the things that made me want to be a writer in the first place. And so if I ever do see Field of Dreams, I’ll probably have him to thank for it. (Or curse him for it, depending on what I thought of it.) But it’s a reminder that every writer needs every once in a while, the reminder about the power of the written word, the reminder to keep writing.
I don't know why I've always had fond memories of Mickey Rooney. I don't remember having watched his Andy Hardy movies when I was a boy, but perhaps I did. Maybe there was something about his broad comedy style, or perhaps it was his diminutive size that appealed to me as a child. But whatever the reason, and despite the negative publicity that often surrounded him, I always liked him.
The former child star, now all of 30 years old, is the host and occasional star of Shirley Temple's Storybook, airing on NBC. She'd retired twice from acting, most recently at 21, having made 33 movies and more than $3,000,000. Since then she's been Mrs. Charles Alden Black, married with three children, but she's never really been that far from the public eye. Dolls, storybooks, and TV repeats of her movies have ensured that Shirley Temple will always be an American icon. She relates a story of how her mailman, "a darling old man about 70, said to me, 'Mrs. Black, does Shirley Temple live here?' And I said, 'Why yes, I used to be Shirley Temple.' 'Oh, my!' he cackled. 'You used to be my favorite movie star - when I was a little boy!'"
Shirley Temple Black has led probably one of the most successful lives of any former child star. Although Storybook ended after two years, she continued to make television appearances, then became involved in politics (she'd always had an interest in current events), ran unsuccessfully for Congress, served as a representative to the United Nations, and was appointed U.S. ambassador to Ghana and later Czechoslovakia. She survived breast cancer and was one of the first celebrities to speak openly about it. And the name Shirley Temple is still - and will continue to be - magic.
In a day when most child stars seem to wind up on the police blotter as often as in the movies, when many others fade into obscurity or struggle with a lifetime of psychological problems, Shirley Temple stood apart. She was a movie star, mother, patriot, diplomat - and she did it with panache. She was an individual who could remind the hardest politician that he was now in the presence of a real star, and her name alone brought back a wash of memories to generations who'd grown up with her and had passed her down to their children.
Shirley Temple was an American icon. She may have died today, at the age of 85, and she will be missed, but she'll not be forgotten. ◙
The original title of this piece was “Am I stupid?” which I rejected for a number of reasons, chief among which was my fear of what your answer might be. But upon further reflection, “Am I missing something?” is, I think, a much more accurate question, because the evidence seems overwhelmingly against me.
The subject in question is John Ford’s epic Western The Searchers, which starred John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter. Glenn Frankel, author of a recent book detailing the making of the movie, wrote a companion piece for Powerline in which he discusses the movie’s meaning and its context in American history.
Frankel considers The Searchers “a great American film, a critical triumph for Ford, Wayne and all of those associated with it,” and Ford himself as “Hollywood’s greatest historical mythmaker.” The commenters at Powerline, as well as film critics everywhere, seem to bear out this impression. For years I’ve heard talk of The Searchers as not just Ford’s greatest movie, but one of, if not the, greatest American movies ever made.
And here we come to my dirty little secret: I’m not a fan of The Searchers. In fact, I’ve never been able to sit all the way through it.
[Pause]
For those of you still reading, let me explain.
There’s no question that The Searchers is a complex movie. Wayne, already recognizable as the prototypical American hero, here becomes the antihero – his goal in searching for his niece, kidnapped by the Comanches, is not to return her to her family, but to kill her – because in living with (and presumably having “relations” with) Indians, she has contaminated herself. We are repelled by Wayne’s motive, and yet we are compelled to follow him.
Or at least that’s what I understand. But this movie just doesn’t push my buttons. Perhaps it’s the plot, although there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it – I generally like ambiguous storylines. It can’t be that it’s a Western – I like most of John Wayne’s Westerns, as well as Clint Eastwood’s, and I’ve got a batch of Westerns in my vintage TV collection. Westerns are the great morality plays of American culture.
Maybe John Wayne isn’t enough of a heroic figure in this movie. I like The Duke unambiguously playing The Duke, and perhaps this isn’t enough, even though it has to be one of Wayne’s great performances. Still, I prefer him in Rio Grande, or Big Jake, or some of his later movies. Maybe the story is just too disturbing for me to get into – if it had been made by, say, Eastwood in the early 70s, I might feel different about it.
I will admit that I don’t generally go for John Ford movies, but that’s not to say I hate them all. For every Searchers, Fort Apache, or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon -not my favorites- there’s Rio Grande, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Last Hurrah – movies I’ve enjoyed to one degree or another over the years. And nobody understood the mythos, or was able to capture the West and its landscape, better than Ford. In his hands, the setting truly was one of the characters.
My only thought is that it has something to do with the score. One of the things I seem never to be able to escape from – one of the things that most irritates me – is the oppressiveness of the music score in the typical John Ford movie. No matter where you turn, the music is there, often cloying, always attempting to foreshadow the action, seldom (at least to my ears) serving any purpose. Someone once compared movie music to umpires at a baseball game – if you notice them, they’re not doing their job. And you cannot help but notice the score in a John Ford movie, especially Max Steiner’s score for The Searchers. People don’t think that John Ford’s a sentimentalist, but that’s just what the music suggests to me.
But then, maybe I’m wrong. Probably I am. The Searchers is a great movie, and I just don’t see it, don’t appreciate it. For years I felt the same way about the Fred Zinnemann/Robert Bolt movie A Man For All Seasons. Tried for years to watch it, never could make my way past the first thirty minutes. Finally, a few years ago, I did – and was greatly rewarded by a terrific movie. Perhaps, given enough opportunities, I’ll be able to sit through The Searchers and come to the same conclusion.
In the meantime, I’m still left to wonder what I’m missing. ◙
If you’re like me (and goodness knows, you should be), you probably can’t count the number of times you’ve sat at home watching The Manchurian Candidate on DVD and thinking to yourself, “This movie isn’t bad, but I’d really like to see it as an opera!” If you have had that thought (and I confess, I haven’t), the Minnesota Opera has heard you: "The Minnesota Opera is commissioning a work based on The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 political thriller that also was adapted into two movies...The new opera is scheduled to be performed in the 2014-15 season."
I’m not entirely sure what to think of these two developments, although I suspect they’ll either be works of genius or complete train wrecks. Of the two, I lean slightly toward the JFK opera, based solely on the success of John Adams’ Nixon in China. I would never have thought that would make a successful opera, let alone that I would have found it strangely affecting, and to that point it would seem that the story of JFK’s last day lends itself structurally and dramatically to a more compelling story.
I'm more leery when it comes to The Manchurian Candidate, though. First of all, unlike JFK, it’s a work of fiction, and whereas you can interpret many facets of a real-life story (precisely because there are so many of them), an existing work of fiction has a much narrower frame of reference with which to work. You can cite the fact that Candidate has already existed as a book and two different movies, but in doing so you invite the second challenge: the iconic status of the original 1962 movie, which starred Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey and Angela Lansbury. I haven’t seen the Denzel Washington/Meryl Streep remake, so it might well have stood on its own as a reimagination of the story*, but the original casts a shadow that’s very hard to get out from under. As Terry Teachout recently said about such situations, "it's all but impossible to survive the comparison game."
*The original wasn't always faithful to the book either, but it got all the important things right.
Then there’s John Frankenheimer’s imaginative direction of the original, especially the famous “garden party” scene. How that winds up in the movie is difficult for me to imagine. Not impossible, mind you – just difficult. Very difficult.
But who knows? I’ve been wrong before (many times), and I’ll be wrong again (many times, which, come to think of it, is a reason you might not want to be like me after all). Candidate does come with solid credentials: composer Kevin Puts, who won the Pulitzer for his opera Silent Night, also done for Minnesota. I could be just as surprised by this as I was by Nixon in China. We’ll have to see.
I can’t help but think though, and not for the last time, that if it’s political opera you want why not remount something like Menotti’s The Consul, as timeless as they come? Or you could look to an opera that deserves to reemerge on the scene: Pizzetti's Assassino Nella Cattedrale, his interpretation of Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Having just seen this, I'll have more thoughts to share in an upcoming piece.
***
Bobby passes along a sad note on a loss to the opera community:
Shanghai-born mezzo Zheng Cao, 46, died last Thursday night at her San Francisco home after a long battle with cancer. Her roles
include "Madama Butterfly," "Idomeneo," "The Mother of Us All," and "The
Bonesetter's Daughter." She is survived by Dr. David Larson, her
parents, and a sister. ◙
OK, so this isn't strictly speaking an opera post. Nonetheless, it does have a connection to opera. Therefore, it's good enough for me. And since I'm the editor, that's really all that matters, anyway.
Actually, it reads more like one of Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story" pieces. It concerns the composer Leonard Kastle, who died last year. As seen on the left, Kastle was the composer of the opera Deseret, about which we wrote a couple of years ago. The producer of that telecast, Warren Steibel, was better known as the producer of William F. Buckley's Firing Line. (The fact that Buckley was a conservative and Steibel a liberal is a great story in and of itself).
When Steibel was given $150,000 by a friend in order to make a movie, he turned to his friend Kastle for ideas. Together, they came up with The Honeymoon Killers, based on the story of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, known as the Lonely Hearts Killers. So far, so good. Kastle wrote the scrpit. The director that Steibel hired, a a newcomer named Martin Scorsese (! Yes, that Marty Scorsese), didn't work out so well - Steibel accused him of taking an entire afternoon to film a beer can, and fired him. Eventually, unlikely as it may seem, Kastle ended up directing the picture, his only work as a movie director. Even more unlikely, the movie wound up a cult classic.
Kastle remains best known as a composer and director of musical productions. The Honeymoon Killers, however, remains his best-known work. And you can't tell its story without tying in William F. Buckley Jr. and Martin Scorsese. And now you know the rest of the story. ◙
One more thing. There was always just one more thing with Peter Falk.
Twice he was nominated for Academy Awards for Supporting Actor (Murder, Inc. and Pocketful of Miracles). He could have continued as a supporting actor, he could have made a career of playing the heavy. He was nominated for two Emmys for guest-starring roles in early 60s television, wining one. He could have been a terrific television character actor. His first television series, a lawyer drama called The Trials of O'Brien, was cancelled after one season. He could have hopped from one series to another, ala McLean Stevenson and Robert Urich.
All of these things could have happened, but there was always one more thing.
There was Columbo. This will be his crowing achievement, one of the greatest television characters of all time, with plots that were worthy of his talent, and guest stars who were bigger than the featured stars of most series. The story is that Bing Crosby turned down the chance to play Columbo because it would interfere with his golf game. Bing Crosby would not have done justice to the role, not in the same way that Peter Falk did. It was so successful that, after the original series ended, he came back a few years later and launched another version, and it was a hit, too.
This would have been enough for some actors, but there was always one more thing. He didn't stop making movies. He made The In-Laws with Alan Arkin, and everyone who's seen it seems to have a favorite scene.
Now, a lot of TV stars are able to make a good movie or two - ask Helen Hunt. But there was one more thing.
He had a charming appearance in a very strange movie, Wim Wenders' wonderful Wings of Desire, playing himself as an angel Yup. But it worked.
He played the grandpa in The Princess Bride. A lot of memorable scenes in that movie. Falk was content to stay in the background. But would there have been a story without him?
As I say, there always seemed to be one more thing with Peter Falk. Just when it would have been easy to remember him as he was, to look back in appreciation at what he had done, he came up with something new. And so, when it came out a year or so ago that he had Alzheimer's, it was a bitter pill: not just because of the personal tragedy, but because this time there wouldn't be one more thing, he wouldn't come back to add another memorable moment to his terrific career.
And so when Peter Falk died last week, it was the end. But, of course, it was also the beginning. Because when you look back at what Peter Falk did, the guest apperances and the movies and Columbo and the rest, you realize that as long as that work exists, as long as you can bring it up on your TV or DVD or laptop, there will always be, after all, one more thing. ◙
First things first: Mel Gibson delivers a brilliant performance in The Beaver, Jodie Foster's movie about a man's breakup and redemption. It may well have been his best performance since Gallipoli, and were it not for his current state of disgrace, there would surely be an Oscar nomination in his future. Perhaps even that won't be enough to keep him from a nomination, since there are few things Hollywood likes more than a good comeback story; but I still think it's a longshot. Nonetheless, his portrait of a tortured man hanging on to sanity, filled with loathing for others and himself, had to have given us an insight into the man that one seldom gets from an actor. He wasn't playing a role so much as he was using his own experience to interpret the role. If his own life is anything like this (and I think it is), I have the greatest compassion for him.
There was also a lot to like from the script, which led us down one road, toward the seemingly inevitable feel-good conclusion, and then took us in a completely different direction. Hitchcock, who was a master at mixing light humor with dark terror, often showed us that the most effective horror comes from the inoccuous - and what could be more inoccuous than a motley beaver hand-puppet?
Indeed, as The Beaver opens, we are presented with the portrait of a man - Walter Black - on the verge of self-destruction. He is deeply depressed (although, unless I missed it, we are never told exactly if there was a single episode that tipped him over the edge, only that depression appears to run in the family), unable to find help from any form of treatment (amusingly shown in a montage with voiceover), and his wife (Jodie Foster) has packed up their two kids and left him. Alone and drunk, on the verge of suicide, he discovers the puppet - who, the next thing he knows, has taken over his therapy. And wouldn't you know, the Beaver seems to be the only one who can actually penetrate the fog and reach Black where it counts. (One might wonder if the fact that Gibson voices the Beaver with no attempt at ventriloquism is meant to suggest that the answers have been inside him all the time, blocked by a lack of self-confidence, but the script misses the opportunity to go there. Not the only opportunity it misses.)
So far, so good. Black returns to his family a new man, charming younger son Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) and giving his wife a cautious optimism. Only older son Porter (Anton Yelchin) remains antagonistic - but Porter has his own problems,* and it's clear that he's already well along on the same road to mental illness that his father and grandfather have already trod. Perhaps we're supposed to feel some sympathy for Porter, but I didn't - I kept thinking someone should have sat down with him a long time ago and laid down the line.
*Starting perhaps with his name? A wimpy name like Porter is perhaps the strongest evidence of how disengaged Walter must have been in this marriage.
And here we start to get into the greatest problem with The Beaver: Jodie Foster herself. Foster has shown some skill in past as a director, and her two Academy Awards are testimony to her talent, but in this role she's completely out of her element. Foster's Meredith is far too much a co-dependent, unable to reach either her husband or her two children, who desperately need parenting and aren't getting it. Foster's great strength as an actress is just that: her strength. And a weak character like this is not for her, not at all. It would not be hard to understand how Walter could come to feel that only the Beaver cares for him; I could not imagine that Meredith ever could have given Walter what he needed. Foster can, and should, play a stronger character - but more about this shortly.
I don't generally like to give away the ending of a movie, but in this case I feel I have to in order to prove my point. [PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD] Near the end, we find out that the Beaver has taken over Walter, convincing him that only he has Walter's best interests at heart, that his family has betrayed him, that everyone else has betrayed him, that he must listen only to the Beaver. (A point of view for which I had some sympathy, by the way.) We now see that Walter, in addition to being depressed, might also be schitzophrenic.* He no longer has control over the Beaver, who now controls him.
*A bit which Anthony Hopkins, Foster's Silence of the Lambs mate, did much better in a much better movie, Magic.
When Walter, sensing this, tries to call Meredith on the phone, the Beaver forces him to hang up, and proceeds to beat Walter up (in a scene that's much more horrifying and less silly than it sounds). Now, we're presented the opportunity for Foster to shine, perhaps directly confronting the Beaver (something she has been loathe to do, always talking to Walter instead), willing to do anything to save the man she loves, even if it puts her own life in danger.
But no. The plot drums up the lame excuse that Meredith has to stay with an ill younger son, and sends the older son to check on his father. To his horror, Porter discovers that Walter, realizing that he must escape the Beaver in order to survive, has cut his own arm off to rid himself of the puppet.
This was the point at which the film finally lost me. And this is the reason why The Beaver ultimately fails.
In her best roles, I've always thought Jodie Foster had something of Barbara Stanwyck in her. Stanwyck was a tough broad (and I say that with admiration), who didn't take anything from anyone. As the heavy, she could put the fear of God into you; as the heroine, you knew she'd fight to the death for what was right I(and thank your lucky stars that she was on your side). Now, imagine Stanwyck in this role, going to Walter and confronting the Beaver, treating it as if it were alive (as, in a way, it is), screaming "Give me back my husband, damn you!" She wouldn't have been afraid to fight the Beaver, and Walter too, if that were needed. And my money would have been on her. It would have been a ferocious, terrifying scene. And it would have guaranteed Stanwyck an Oscar nomination.
Foster, I think, could have pulled this scene off. Maybe this sudden toughness would have seemed too much out of character. Perhaps, given Gibson's personal history of confrontational relationships, there was some discomfort about the possibility of a physical confrontation between Foster and the puppet, which surely would have meant Foster vs. Gibson. Maybe she and the writer thought such a confrontation smacked too much of a stereotypical thrillier, ala Fatal Attraction. On the other hand, maybe they should have tried doing a drama cum thriller, rather than a comedy-drama.
Alas, we're only allowed to review the movie at hand, not the movie as it might (should?) have been. And that's why The Beaver winds up a failure: a noble one, perhaps, an ambitious one, full of promise (I haven't even mentioned the excellent performance of Jennifer Lawrence as Porter's girlfriend, who shines in a somewhat tortured subplot). But a failure nonetheless. It's best not even to discuss the film's end, which is either a too-pat happily-ever-after finish, or a hopefull, this-is-the-ending-that-might-be that was executed with too much subtlety.
In the last analysis, Jodie Foster the director was let down by Kyle Killen, the writer, and - perhaps more importantly - by Jodie Foster, the actress. For when Mel Gibson, whose strength has always been in action movies, shines as the most sensitive actor in your drama, you know you're in trouble. ◙
