The Screengrab : dynasty

Yesterday's Hits: The Carpetbaggers (1964, Edward Dmytryk)

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Carpetbaggers a hit?: Americans have long been fascinated with the lifestyles and misadventures of the filthy rich. While the wealthy and powerful may have the same urges and appetites we do, their affluence allows them to exert these on a much grander and more ambitious scale, and in more lavish settings. It was this idea that drove the lurid, sex-soaked novels of Harold Robbins, one of the most popular novelists of the 1950s and 1960s. And for The Carpetbaggers he took his inspiration from perhaps the most famous millionaire of the day, Howard Hughes. Even more than in real life, the book’s Hughes surrogate Jonas Cord Jr. collected companies by day and female conquests by night, with no regard for the damage he caused. And while few readers would want to know Cord in real life, many of them enjoyed his exploits on the page, and the book would end up being the most-read novel of Robbins’ career.

When Hollywood came calling in 1964, it was only natural that some of the book’s racier elements would have to go. But while the scenes depicting brutal murders and such then-abnormal sexual practices as fellatio ended up being cut en route to the big screen, Edward Dmytryk’s film version was still decadent by the standards of the time. After all, the story more or less begins with Cord putting the moves on his father's widow. With its combination of upper-class soap opera and Hollywood story, The Carpetbaggers proved almost as irresistible to moviegoers as it did to readers. The film (sold with the tagline, “this is adult entertainment!”) was one of the top grossers of 1964, becoming Paramount’s biggest hit in nearly a decade. To quote another famously over-the-top film, “nothing exceeds like excess.”

What happened?: In both printed and cinematic form, The Carpetbaggers was distinguished primarily by virtue of its outrageousness. Trouble is, by the end of the 1960s, the qualities that once titillated audiences of the movie seemed positively quaint. With the fall of the Production Code, it was no longer particularly exciting for a movie to imply sexuality, not when people could see explicit nudity in a number of big-budget Hollywood releases. Decades later, the formula Robbins had perfected for literary success had mostly been co-opted by television dramas like Dallas and Dynasty. Most tellingly, before the film’s 2003 DVD release, Paramount submitted The Carpetbaggers to the MPAA for a rating, and the much-ballyhooed “adult entertainment” hit of 1964 earned a family-friendly PG.

Does The Carpetbaggers still work?: Not really. Oh sure, the sets and costumes look great, but the movie’s little more than a soulless product. Part of the problem is the direction by Dmytryk, a longtime studio director long past his prime. Dmytryk’s primarily concern when making The Carpetbaggers appears to have been to utilize the ‘Scope frame to bring out every bit of possible opulence from his settings. But he did so at the expense of any possible drama in the story. It’s never a good sign when two of the film’s principal characters are sharing an important moment and your eyes are too busy looking at the beautiful paintings and ornate statues to care what’s being said.

Not helping matters is the film’s conception of Cord as a blinkered, ego-driven monster. Throughout almost the entire 2 ½ hour running time, Cord’s actions are motivated almost entirely by his desire to keep the upper hand, to maintain his advantage over the rest of the world. George Peppard’s performance is just fine- he plays the role more or less as written, and plays it pretty well. The trouble is that there’s never anything underneath. He wants his life to be lived by his rules, and damn the consequences. As he tells his wife Monica (Elizabeth Ashley), “what I need is the most freedom and the fewest responsibilities.”

Consequently, when the movie finally does try to explain what makes Cord tick in its final five minutes, it feels like a cheat. To pin Cord’s psychological issues on a single trauma from childhood is the kind of horribly reductive Freudianism that afflicted far too many films during the period. Consider what Citizen Kane would have been like had Welles meant for the audience to take Rosebud as a genuine insight into the title character and you’ll have an idea how laughable the psychological aspect of The Carpetbaggers really is. Follow this with an eye-rolling final scene, in which the sensationalism of what’s come before is countered with a reassertion of family and morality, and you’ll see the central problem with The Carpetbaggers- not only is it not nearly as outrageous as it thinks it is, but it doesn’t even have the conviction to follow through to the end.

The Carpetbaggers isn’t a worthless movie. The production values are handsome, and the Hollywood material is fairly entertaining, especially when one tries to figure out which real-life figures are being represented in the story. A handful of supporting performances also work, in particular Alan Ladd (in his final big-screen performance) as Cord’s friend/conscience Nevada Smith, and Carroll Baker, who made for such an effective stand-in for Jean Harlow that Paramount cast her as the real thing in a biopic that was made the following year. But ultimately, The Carpetbaggers just isn’t much of a movie. The history of Hollywood’s blockbusters is chock full of movies like this, that made a splash in their time, but just haven’t endured over the years. Yet they remain out there, waiting to be rediscovered by folks like me who are curious to see what moviegoers enjoyed way back when.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Savage Grace"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The 1985 book Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, told the story of Barbara Daly, a social climbing beauty who married Brooks Baekeland, the heir to a plastics fortune, and her incestuous relationship with her damaged son, Tony, who wound up stabbing her to death in 1972. Coming out when it did, in the era of the Reagans and Dynasty and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the book had a special appeal, especially since it was written mostly in the form of an oral history, with testimony from various observers and other interested parties. Tony's murder of his mother may have made it possible to file it neatly under "true crime", but what gave it is juice was the chance to sit in on what amounted to a seminar's worth of gossip about just how deeply twisted and fucked-up a very rich, very beautiful, very socially ambitious family really was. For maximum impact, the book ought to have been filmed not long after it came out, maybe with Brian De Palma or the Barbet Schroeder of Reversal of Fortune at the helm, but it might still be good sleazy fun if Tom Kalin hadn't gotten ahold of it.

As he demonstrated with his first film, the art-house train wreck Swoon, Kalin lacks, and may be completely uninterested in, certain attributes that are helpful to narrative filmmakers. He isn't very good at working with actors to develop characters, he can't shape his materials into a coherent story, and he has no ability to create a sense of believable life onscreen. What he mainly has is an interest--a chilly, academic interest--in "transgressive" behavior that, in Swoon, resulted in a movie that, to the extent that it was coherent at all, seemed to suggest that Leopold and Loeb were martyred victims of society because all they did was kill a kid, whereas everybody else was homophobic. Savage Grace seems taken with the idea of Barbara Daly Baekeland as heroic victim, a woman who's so much ;arger than life that the world can't possibly give her all the love and attention she requires. It's a choice that cuts off Julianne Moore's oxygen supply as an actress; instead of getting the chance to play the sacred monster of the book, she's stuck in a vaccuum, working her Mona Lisa smile. The movie begins with Barbara (Julianne Moore) and Brooks (Stephen Dillane, whose performance as a stiffly dashing natural aristocrat looks to have been researched by spending a few mornings studying Eric Braeden's Victor on The Young and the Restless) already married, and already practically sworn enemies. It's less interested in even comprehending how they wound up together than in charting the downward spiral of Barbara and Tony (played as an adult by Eddie Redmayne, a relative newcomer to movies who needs to learn that it's okay to just tell the camerman, "Look, don't light me so that I look like that guy in Napoloen Dynamite, okay?"), in each other's arms.

Even with Moore spouting such lines to her son as, "Will you still love me when my hair is gray and my tits are sagging?", the relationship is much closer and more tender than it was portrayed in the book; Barbara is no longer the kind of woman who'd ship her kid off to school to get him out of her way while she's planning to lay siege to the dinner-party circuit, and Tony is no longer a violent, angry boy whose final attack on his mother was just the last in a series. (The actual death scene is staged as a Sid and Nancy-style cop-out: Hey, let's go in the kitchen and act out hysterical scenes from old Joan Crawford movies, oh shit, look out for that knife!) It would seem odd if Tony did have a well of killing rage stored up against his mother in this version, because Moore's Barbara doesn't seem to cause him much pain; her social-climbing foolishness hurts no one but herself. Dishonest as it is, what really kills the movie is Kalin's simple inability to bring any of this stuff to life. His erotic images--Tony dancing on the beach with another boy to please a girl he likes; Barbara, at the wheel of a car with Tony and the girl in the back seat, swerving around to toss them into each other's arms; a little homage to Un Chant d'Amour with Tony's boyfriend from the beach delicately slipping a puff of cigarette smoke into his mouth-- have no excitement to them, and the most explicit sex scene, with Barbara coming to Brooks as a supplicant on her knees and he brutally taking her from behind, is mean-spirited in a way that does nothing but stress the dubious notion of Barbara as everybody's victim. She winds up alone in her big house, attempting suicide in between bouts of sex with gay men, including her son. Julianne Moore goes through her paces dutifully, but she might need to take a little break from representing scandalously rethought versions of maternal figures from earlier eras. The truth is that she doesn't get much of a chance here to do anything that doesn't set off echoes of things she's done before, and when you consider what she actually gets up to here, it's kind of scary to think that she's in a rut.

Forgotten Films: "Just Tell Me What You Want" (1980)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In his the most recent film of his incredibly long, checkered, impressive career, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (out on DVD next week), director Sidney Lumet played to his strengths: his rapport with his actors, and his ability to tap into an energy that can be exciting even when it turns scabrous. Lumet turned those qualities on his own show-business-industry set in his 1980 comedy Just Tell Me What You Want, which came out early in 1980, got appalled reviews, and vanished from sight. Like much of Lumet's work, the movie is uneven and feels patched-together in places, but the very qualities that seemed to gross out critics at the time are part of what makes it such a bold, distinctive entertainment, a romantic comedy without illusions. It's cynical without being judgemental, which is so unusual that some reviewers may have had trouble believing what they were seeing. (Lumet got great reviews for some of his duller '80s films that were eager to point fingers at their characters' moral defects.)

Its hero, and its target, is Max Herschel, a self-made corporate head (played by the stand-up comic Alan King) who sees everything, including his love life, as a succession of deals to be made. Max is married (to a drug-addled, bejewelled WASP goddess played by Dina Merrill), but he's been juggling a long-term affair with a TV producer (Ali MacGraw), and when she leaves him for a playwright (Peter Weller) who represents artistic purity and uncommercial values, Max freaks. What makes his decision to wage war on his ex-girlfriend, by wrecking her career while offering her writer-lover the chance to corrupt himself by adapting his own work to the movies, weirdly charming is that, like Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, he's trying to win her back by bringing her to her senses. He's right to think that she really belongs in the executive suite with him instead of blowing on her fingers in a cold hovel playing muse to some proud literary loser. And Alan King, in his only starring movie role, makes Max a hard man to dislike. (The large, lively cast also includes Myrna Loy, smooth as silk in her final screen role as Max's secretary.) Just Tell Me What You Want may have been a few years ahead of its time; a year after its release, Ronald Reagan was president, manipulative rich bastards were on their way to being redefined as glamorous "Masters of the Universe", and in People magazine and on TV series such as Dynasty, Americans were cheering on pushy, multimillionaire hustlers without a fraction of Max's charm. It might be the tragedy of Donald Trump's life that he had to settle for playing himself instead of staying home and letting Alan King do it for him.

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.