Millard Kaufman, who died on Saturday at the age of 92, was a veteran screenwriter with a wide-ranging career that had a few notable highs. A graduate of John Hopkins University, Kaufman served as a marine in the Pacific during World War II. Upon his return to the States, he moved to California and broke in as a writer for UPA cartoons. He first made history as the co-creator, with director John Hubley and actor Jim Backus, of the near-sighted perambulator and Stag Beer pitchman Mr. Magoo. The character first appeared in Kaufman's script for the 1949 short Ragtime Bear; according to that distinguished on-line journal of film studies Wikipedia, "Columbia was reluctant to release the short, but did so, only because it included a bear." On this point, I refer you back to the film's title. (Apparently bears were big box office in those days.) Despite Harry Cohn's ursine fetish, Magoo turned out to be the chief audience attraction, and the blind sumbitch would become UPA's most enduring star character. A year later, Kaufman would officially break into live-action features as the credited author of the cult noir classic Gun Crazy, though in fact, he was fronting for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. On his own, Kaufman racked up two Academy Award nominations for writing Richard Brooks's Take the High Ground! (1953), starring Richard Widmark as a drill instructor, and John Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a taut melodrama notable for its muckraking focus on racist mistreatment of Asian-Americans during World War II.

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Eight films into our little holiday movie marathon, we finally arrive at the one that most of our readers who haven't spent the last sixty years in the Witness Protection Program in a cave on Mars have probably already seen a dozen times or so:  Frank Capra's legendary 1946 Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life.  While there's been dozens and dozens of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, there's only one It's a Wonderful Life:  despite decades of references, parodys, homages and metacommentaries, the big-screen adaptation of the Phillip Van Doren short story "The Greatest Gift" remains one of a kind.  Thanks to an inexplicable chain of events that led to its falling into the public domain for a number of years, it was shown on pretty much every television station at Christmas for decades; finding someone in the U.S. who hasn't seen it is next to impossible.

The challenge when discussing It's a Wonderful Life, then, isn't to explain its plot or detail the great things about it:  these are things most people know intimately from repeated first-hand experience.  The challege is to think of something new to say about a movie that almost everyone of a certain age has seen, probably more than once.  Frank Capra's surehanded direction, the solid script (primarily by Capra and Frances Goodrich), and iconic performances by screen legend Jimmy Stewart (whose interpretation of George Bailey is more responsible than anything for the cultural shorthand we now have for him), future television star Donna Reed, and Hollywood patriarch Lionel Barrymore are the building blocks for a film that defines the word "Capraesque", but what makes it resonate so?  It it simple repetition that makes this the Christmas classic above all others?

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Yesterday, we paid tribute to the life and career of Paul Newman with a list of our picks for his greatest performances. And looking back, it’s easy to see the Newman made quite a few movies that were not only very good, but eventually became acknowledged as classics. But for this week’s installment of Yesterday’s Hits, I’d like to explore one of Newman’s films that was incredibly popular in its day but hasn’t endured quite like his best films- 1960’s Exodus.

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HONORABLE MENTION

300 (2007)



Even relatively anti-war films like Platoon acknowledge the fierce camaraderie and euphoric adrenalin rush of warriors in combat, but this surrealistic adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel about a legendary phalanx of Spartans taking on a zillion enemy warriors is all bloodlust, all the time. Yet, while historically suspect (since modern researchers are pretty sure the power-mad Persian king Xerxes didn’t really command a legion of trolls, orcs and giants from the darkest reaches of Middle Earth), and hardly on par with more serious evocations of combat (like, say, Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket), 300 is notable, like many of the best war films, as a reflection of its time. Some critics detected jingoistic echoes of George W. Bush’s “bring ‘em on” foreign policy in the refusal of Spartan badass King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) to negotiate with foreign powers, going it alone with his own Coalition of the Willing when other nations (and a cowardly Congress...er, Spartan Council) refuse to authorize war against an imminent Persian threat to democracy and freedom. Just as Nixon reportedly watched Patton over and over again before sending troops into Cambodia, it’s easy to imagine Bush viewing 300 to make himself feel better about sending American troops into combat without sufficient body armor: after all, Leonidas and his 299 BFFs take down half Xerxes’ army bare-chested!  Framed as a tale of indeterminate tallness relayed by a warrior to inspire his fellow troops on the verge of combat, the fetishized fairy tale unreality of 300’s violence, tone and (xenophobic) politics, its conflicted homophobic/homoerotic ideal of manliness, its complete surrender to (and celebration of) CGI fakery and its wild popularity and seductive guilty pleasure craftsmanship all combine into a fascinating time capsule of an age when troops compare combat to video games and the line between fact and fiction, has never seemed quite so blurry.

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One of the favorite activities of the modern movement conservative is to claim that, since not every single aspect of the culture panders to him, he is being discriminated against.  Having never actually experienced any actual discrimination -- unlike, say, black people -- the right-winger seems to believe that it is an oppression too heavy to be borne that he is sometimes made aware of things that he does not personally enjoy.  Liberal arts classes in college taught by liberals?  Discrimination against conservatives!  Some people don't adhere to the tenents of the Southern Baptist Convention?  Discrimination against conservatives!  Young people listening to the rappity-hop music?  Discrimination against conservatives!

This week has seen a big push in one of the favorite such complaints of the movement conservative:  that, because of the preponderance of liberals in Hollywood, conservatives are being discriminated against in Hollywood.  Jason Appuzzo, founder of the late, unlamented Libertas Film Festival, was one of the biggest purveyors of this ridiculous myth; Brent Bozell is another.  But in the last ten days, we've seen an op-ed by Jon Voight in the right-wing Washington Times in which he blamed American liberals for the murder of millions by the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and claimed that "if, God forbid, we live to see Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way".  The editorial was widely scoffed at, and conservative gadflies, who mistake being made fun of for being blackballed and having your entire career destroyed, immediately came crawling up from the cellar to complain about "establishment entertainment journalists expertly wielding the tools of the New McCarthyism".  So says Andrew Breitbart (who, earlier this year, I heard peddle the absurd notion that Hollywood celebrities are afraid to say they support our troops in Iraq, lest they face censure at the hands of the liberal bosses).  While conservatives almost universally react to liberal opinions on the part of entertainers with some variant of "shut up and sing" (witness the widespread hostility the Dixie Chicks faced a few years ago), let one of their own get laughed at for mouthing of some ill-conceived right-wing talking point, and we're witnessing the vile fascism of "a town that doesn't embrace free speech anymore".  Breitbart's commenters are even worse, claiming that "the old McCarthyism was harmless compared to the new".  (Those who wish to compare and contrast may note that Mr. Voight currently has three films in production, and starred in one of the most successful films of 2007, as opposed to, say, Dalton Trumbo, who spent a year in prison because of the blacklist, or Hanns Eisler, who was more or less forced to leave the country and ended up in the hands of the Soviet East Germans, or Alvah Bessie, who never worked in her chosen profession again, or Canada Lee, Bartley Crum and John Garfield, who all died because of the horrible after-effects of coming under McCarthyite scrutiny.)

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SAN FRANCISCO: The 6th Annual Noir City Film Festival at the Castro is jam-packed with seamy rarities and not-available-on-DVD obscurities. It opens on January 25 with a tribute to actress Joan Leslie, who'll be interviewed onstage between screenings of the 1947 Repeat Performance and the striking 1943 backstage drama The Hard Way. There are also tributes to Dalton Trumbo — the Trumbo-scripted Joseph Losey film The Prowler will be introduced by modern noir master James Ellroy, and they'll even show the movie if ever stops talking — actress Gail Russell, and the granite-jawed Charles McGraw, who appears in Anthony Mann's Border Incident and Reign of Terror (sometimes known as The Black Book, and starring Richard Basehart as that least likely of noir villains, Maximilien Robespierre. ("Don't call me Max!")

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Filmmakers disappear for all sorts of reasons. Eccentric geniuses like Kubrick and Malick are known for taking many years between projects and working in complete secrecy. Actors (Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando) and writers (Dalton Trumbo, Stephen King) may dabble with one-and-done efforts and never return to the director’s chair. An Ed Burns may make a big splash with his debut, churn out a series of increasingly lame follow-ups, and eventually find himself releasing his films directly to iTunes.

For this inaugural edition of Vanishing Act, we set the wayback machine for the summer of 1999, when Blair Witch mania swept the nation.

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In his new memoir Born Standing Up, Steve Martin recalls that, back in the late ‘60s, he romanced the daughter of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, until the director John Frankenheimer stole her from him while filming Trumbo's script for The Fixer. After mentioning that, two decades later, the director tried to seduce Victoria Tennant at a time when she was Martin's wife, Martin notes that "Frankenheimer died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him." Unlikely though it may seem, John Frankenheimer actually did get a few movies directed when he wasn't concentrating on screwing with Steve Martin's love life. The 2000 Reindeer Games was his last film, and though not in the same league as his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate, it's actually one of his live ones.

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Julian Schnabel, who's proved to be a much more interesting film director than he was a painter, has caused quite a stir in France with his latest, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Opening in limited release this weekend, the film deals with a French fashion magazine editor who suffers a paralyzing stroke and is forced to communicate with the world — telling tales not only of his internal imprisonment, but also of his rich interior life — the only way he can: by blinking out the words with his left eyelid, the sole part of his body he can still control. The idea that the human body is as much a prison as a vehicle is as old as Shakespeare, and it's likewise yielded a number of fine films, particularly from directors who've had their own bodies betray them, or those of their loved ones. When the mind is still sharp but seems to exist solely as a captive of a body, without which it cannot survive, but to which it is frustratingly bound, some outstanding, if terribly depressing, dramatic situations can ensue. Here are five films dealing with the ways in which the mind can become a prisoner of the body — and the ways in which those minds seek escape.

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