The Screengrab : frank sinatra

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:30:00 GMT

EASY RIDER (1969)

I remember this one time a friend of mine was running behind on an elementary school creative writing assignment, scribbling the last lines of his composition just before the teacher collected our papers, and so his otherwise well-written tale of Old West adventure ended with a coyote suddenly popping up and devouring his cowboy protagonist. The abrupt, nihilistic climax of Easy Rider has a similar slap-dash quality (and why Peter Fonda’s Captain America would follow the gun-toting rednecks who just shot Dennis Hopper’s Billy the Kid rather than, say, driving away from them must have something to do with them funny cigarettes he was always smoking). On the other hand, gun-toting rednecks aren’t exactly known for their tolerance or decision-making skills, so a couple of yahoos taking potshots at hippies doesn’t exactly challenge my willing suspension of disbelief, even today. And considering the apocalyptic culture wars of the 1960s (which claimed RFK towards the end of the film’s production phase) and the outlaw mythos deep in the story’s marrow, some kind of fatal downer was probably inevitable. But Easy Rider’s characters don’t even get the dignity of a last stand. “We blew it,” Fonda’s biker states in a prescient epitaph for the end of hippie optimism and the rise of Nixonian neo-conservatism, just before Captain America gets killed by his own gas tank and his life savings goes up in smoke while he and his buddy die like dogs on the side of a road to nowhere. (AO)

8 ½ (1963)

Fellini’s semi-autobiographical fantasia inspires and infuriates in equal measure, the film’s whimsical imaginativeness somewhat offset by its indulgent self-satisfaction. Nonetheless, even if some of Fellini’s phantasmagoric flights of fancy rub me the wrong way, the ending is a stunner, a carnival-esque This Is Your Life procession of a director’s (Marcello Mastroianni) past and present acquaintances that resonates as an evocative representation of the myriad lives we touch, and are touched by, throughout our fleeting years. (NS)

THE LEOPARD (1963)

Luchino Visconti's epic masterpiece, set in Sicily in the 1960s, is a rich evocation of a whole society on the verge of disappearing, with the changes that Garibaldi's revolution were about to effect seen through the eyes of a middle-aged aristocrat, the Prince, played by Burt Lancaster. The film's long last section -- which gave the Coppola of the Godfather films and the Cimino of The Deer Hunter a high bar to aim at -- is the Prince's world at its apotheosis; the final moments give you a rare sense of a man feeling the summation of his life up to that point and sadly accepting the feeling of his potency slipping away. (PN)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

For most of its running time, this Cold War conspiracy fantasy dances on the line between thriller and satirical comedy, which makes it all the more unnerving when the clock ticks down and the picture suddenly becomes very serious in tone. It's as if the filmmakers' amusement at the ridiculousness of the McCarthyite witch hunters who inspired their story was gradually swamped by their disgust at what they'd done to their country. Sinatra's final speech, lamenting the fact that no one will ever know about the true heroism of Raymond Shaw, is one of the most hearfelt moments of his film career, and the sobering end point that the movie deserves. (PN)

KISS ME DEADLY (1955)

Restored ending:

Chopped ending:

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer is a nasty piece of work on the page, a misogynistic thug with a fascist mentality who lives in a world of strawmen who are always proving him right. When adapting Spillane's novel Kiss Me Deadly, screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides played up Hammer's sadism and narcissism, showing him to be a bully rather than the tough-guy hero Spillane obviously saw. The movie Kiss Me Deadly adds a great McGuffin, too, in the form of a suitcase full of some sort of glowing atomic energy that quickly becomes a nuclear blast when explosed to the air. In the original ending of Kiss Me Deadly, when the femme fatale unleashes the bomb, Hammer and his assistant Velda escape into the surf while the house explodes. At some point soon after its release, however, someone cut up the ending so that it appears that the house explodes before Hammer and Velda escape. This version won many admirers for its raw pessimism. But it wasn't the intended ending, and the restored version, in which Hammer is shot and has to be supported in his escape by his assistant who he's treated like crap throughout the flick, actually seems more narratively satisfying. (HC)

THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Despite its sincere hero, its elaborate plot, and its European trappings, The Third Man is a film noir through and through, and though Joseph Cotten plays the hero as a man on the good side of the law, he’s no less doomed. It’s also one of the most devastating film portraits of unrequited love. Even though he makes it through the film alive, unlike his memorable friend (and later foe), the roguish Harry Lime, like any good noir anti-hero, he’s sunk by his desperate desire for something that will forever elude him. In this case, it’s the love of Alida Valli’s Anna, who can’t shake her passion for Harry even after she finds out that he was a murderous criminal who didn’t love her the way she loved him. Cotten foolishly attempts to apply reason to matters of the heart, and simply can’t understand why Anna would be so devoted to a cruel man who treated her – and everyone else – so shabbily, instead of a good man who really loves her (like, of course, himself). Anyone who’s seen the end of the movie, where Cotten’s Holly Martins waits patiently for Anna outside of Lime’s funeral only to have her walk past him without even a perfunctory glance, has a hard time thinking that the twice-dead Harry is the one who got the better end of the deal. Director Carol Reed and producer David Selznick – who had argued about everything else during the production – agreed on the ending, against the wishes of author Graham Greene, who wanted a more upbeat finish. Greene was a great writer, but Reed and Selznick were right; no happy ending could have bested this heartbreaking scene. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

President Obama is two weeks away from the end of his first 100 days as Commander-In-Chief, and it’s been a wild ride so far, what with all the pirates, puppies and Queen-touching...but naturally, the administration’s main focus has been moving heaven and earth to ensure that nothing will prevent Bank of America executives from receiving my tax money while they charge me 24% interest on my credit card debt, thus ensuring I’ll never be able to afford any of the hundreds of empty, overpriced luxury condos in my neighborhood...because, as we all know, if the day ever comes when bankers and real estate developers make less than a zillion percent profit every second of the day, no matter how badly or unethically they run their businesses, then the terrorists win! (Or something like that...frankly, I’m just happy gas isn’t four dollars a gallon anymore. Hooray, bad economy!)

Anyway, the point is, now that Bernie Madoff has all the world’s money buried in a treasure chest somewhere on Skull Island, Americans have finally realized that money can’t buy happiness, and at long last we’re no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses, but instead living within our means, valuing the simple pleasures of life and judging people on their character, rather than the size of their wallets or the labels on their clothes.

Nah, just kidding: in truth, we’re all still cheating on our taxes, begging for bailouts and building bigger and better Ponzi schemes, because in the words of Danny Devito’s crooked fence in David Mamet’s Heist, “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.” And so, in that altruistic spirit, your pals here at the Screengrab hereby present our very own economic stimulus package: THE BEST & WORST GET RICH QUICK SCHEMES IN CINEMA HISTORY!

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

By the time Mike Judge’s half-brilliant Office Space gets around to its get-rich-quick scheme, its best moments are behind it. It starts out so well, with the story of a chronically bored office drone (Ron Livingston) who finds himself – after an accidental dose of post-hypnotic suggestion – completely incapable of giving a shit about his job. This is Office Space at its best, a note-perfect satire of cubicle life enlightened hugely by the appearance of a character who upends the whole idea of consequence and thus makes for some of the most viciously barbed gags of its day. Once it gets around to Livingston and his colleagues hatching a Superman III-inspired, computer-aided plan to steal millions by shaving half-pennies off of every transaction, it becomes more or less a goofy caper comedy, which, while well-executed, can’t hold a candle to its truly inspired first half. Still, as get-rich-quick schemes go, it’s a classic, and damned if it doesn’t almost work. (LP)

HEAT (1995)

Heat famously brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together on-screen – if only for one diner conversation and a climactic chase sequence – yet it’s Michael Mann’s direction that elevates this cat-and-mouse saga to near-greatness. The story revolves around the efforts of Pacino’s cop to catch De Niro’s crook, two kindred warriors on opposite sides of the law. Though this dynamic is, to put it mildly, hackneyed, Mann’s film is an energized, invigorated work that recalls Jean-Pierre Melville’s noirs, which also focused on peerlessly cool lawmen and thieves whose dedication to customs, habits and ethical codes leaves them isolated. As the criminal struggling to reconcile personal desires for happiness with instincts that warn against being something he’s not, De Niro delivers his last great performance. Pacino’s trademark quiet-screaming overacting and a few too many narrative diversions prove occasionally aggravating, but De Niro’s superb turn helps offset these slight missteps, as does the thrilling in-broad-daylight centerpiece robbery that cements Heat’s status in the pantheon of heist films. (NS)

OCEAN’S 11, 12, 13… (1960, 2001, etc.)

The original 1960 Ocean’s 11’s best get-rich quick scheme didn’t take place onscreen; it was the Rat Pack’s all night, every night ring-a-ding-ding showcase at the Sands while shooting the film on location in Las Vegas. Sure, knocking over five casinos during a blackout on New Year’s Eve has a certain flair to it, but there’s nothing like working 22 hours a day for six straight weeks to really fatten the wallet. In 2001, a Frat Pack led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt staged their own Vegas heist, lifting $150 million from the Bellagio vault with the help of a Chinese acrobat, a Cockney explosives expert mysteriously played by Don Cheadle, and the always indispensible Elliott Gould. The remake took in even more than $150 million at the box office, which led to two further get-rich-quick schemes: the winky, self-referential Ocean’s 12, a sort of spiritual cousin to The Cannonball Run II, and Ocean’s 13, which proved once again that the death knell of a franchise sounds a lot like Al Pacino yelling. (SVD)

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Part of the point of John Huston's classic is that prospecting for gold isn't actually an easy or quick way to strike it rich at all, but once you've laid out for the tools and traveled all the way out into the middle of the Mexican desert and gotten used to the sight of Walter Huston jeering at you without his dentures, you're more than likely to stick with it until you've got something to show for it. After that, all you have to worry about is whether your paranoid, half-mad partner is going to be able to convince himself that you're plotting to steal his share of the "goods" so that he can feel justified in knocking you off and helping himself to your share. Whatever moral and practical defects can be found in Bogart's plan, it has to be said that he's a sage and a prince compared to the hippopotamus-toothed bandit played by the immortal Alfonso Bedoya, whose master plan involves decapitating Bogart and stealing his burros, after he's thrown away those saddlebags filled with the funny yellow powder that's weighing them down. (PN)

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When I was a younger man, summer vacations seemed to last 100 years and every day was at least 24 hours long.

Now, as an old geezer, I can’t help but notice how time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future at an alarming rate. Summers, at best, tend to flash by in a matter of days -- and my days, like everything else, have apparently been downsized...

...or at least that’s how it feels here beneath the mountain of overdue assignments, unfinished projects and blown deadlines I find myself tunneling through of late, with less than a week remaining to file that damn “married filing jointly” 1040 form I haven’t even started yet...

...tick...tick...tick...

...but even as the clock ticks down to the April 15th tax deadline (not to mention the end of the Mayan calendar -- AND THE WORLD!!!!! -- in 2012), we here at the Screengrab figured we could spare a few seconds to salute THE BEST RACE AGAINST TIME FLICKS OF ALL...uh...TIME!

D.O.A. (1950)

This sweaty, 83-minute noir is pretty much all gimmick, but it's the ultimate in race-against-time gimmicks. Edmund O'Brien, who barks out his lines as if trying to reach the pork chop hanging around his neck, plays an accountant who hits San Francisco for a working vacation and discovers that he's been slipped a dose of a "luminous poison" for which there is no antidote. Given no more than a few days to live, O'Brien blows off the guided tour of Alcatraz and tears around the city, doing his unsubtle best to solve his own impending murder and wreak vengeance on his murderer before it's tag-on-the-toe time. The 1988 sequel, directed by Max Headroom creators Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton and starring Dennis Quaid, feels padded at 93 minutes, but it does have a couple of witty strokes in relocating the action to the world of academia -- Quaid plays a lapsed novelist and college professor whose motto of "publish or perish" is used against him by someone who has taken it a little too literally -- and setting it on a sweltering Texas college campus at Christmas time, thus giving Quaid an excuse to sweat even more profusely than Edmund O'Brien even with holiday decorations in the background. (PN)

HIGH NOON (1952)

Fred Zinnemann takes all the suspense out of the race against time; there’s no question of escaping the consequences, only of how they’re going to be dealt with. No one doubts that a gang of badmen are going to arrive in town at high noon, and that they’re going to call out Gary Cooper’s marshal, Will Kane, and seek revenge for him sending them up. Everyone knows what’s going to happen. So why is it one of the most tense Westerns ever made? That’s a testament to Zinnemann’s skill as a director: he manages to work endless amounts of tension, suspense and discomfort out of something we all know is going to happen. The only question is: will the townsfolk stand with Kane, who has protected them before, or will they abandon him in hopes of safety? That’s what makes the passage of time so excruciating in High Noon, and nowhere is it more explicit than in the famous scene where the clock ticks down, inexorably, in a stunning montage accompanied by Dmitri Tiomkin’s pitiless score, and the thing we all knew was going to happen finally happens. It’s one of the best examples in classic Hollywood of wrenching tension out of the inevitable. (LP)

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

Many years and many outbreaks of paranoia later, John Frankenheimer's satirical yet stirring Cold War thriller is still the gold standard for political-assassination fantasies. Among its other virtues, it remains one of the most blackly funny movies ever to come out of Hollywood, but the laughter dies as the noose tightens and Frank Sinatra, losing faith that things will work out, races through the traffic-clogged streets to arrive at the convention hall, just in time to see Laurence Harvey finally earn his Medal of Honor. (PN)

RUN LOLA RUN (1999)

Run Lola Run, about Lola’s (Franka Potente) efforts to save her boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu) from death by procuring 100,000 deutschmarks in 20 minutes, is a tour de force of blistering kineticism that predictably achieved cult canon status the moment it hit theaters in 1999. Yet what elevates Tom Tykwer’s debut above so many other beat-the-clock sagas is its aesthetic flair and inventiveness, its storytelling and visual intricacy, and its deft use of its unique style in the service of a subtly thoughtful meditation on time and fate. Segmented into three sections, each of which finds Lola attempting to achieve her goal, Run Lola Run’s race-against-time narrative presents a free will-vs.-determinism debate in the guise of a frenzied videogame, one in which Lola must use her allotted three lives to figure out how to complete her mission. Playfully philosophical without being pretentious, and excessively flashy without being shallow, Tykwer’s film delivers edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster thrills as well as enough sly substance to warrant coming back for a return ride. (NS)

Hurry!!!! Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Morning Deal Report: Ron Howard’s Strange Adventure

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Ron Howard may be bringing The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft to the screen. Universal has purchased the rights to the Image Comics graphic novel for Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. The comic book “borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world,” Variety reports.

Isaiah Washington is set to play a legendary soul singer in a new biopic. Washington will play Lou Rawls, who “sang in a range of styles that included blues, soul, funk and R&B, selling millions of albums and earning legions of fans, as well as the accolades of Frank Sinatra. He also, according to the script, had a traumatic life, enduring a poverty-stricken childhood and, in adulthood, intense marital strife,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Vanilla Sky reunion? Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are eyeing a new romantic comedy from James Mangold, previously titled Wichita and Trouble Man, but now untitled. “Story revolves around a woman who has terrible luck with men but finds her path intertwined with that of a mysterious handsome man she meets on a blind date,” says Variety.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Frost/Nixon"
Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny

If It's Tueday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Every time Carmine Caridi turns on the TV and sees James Caan kicking the shit out of his brother-in-law or getting gunned down at the toll booth in The Godfather, something inside him dies a little. In his account of the making of that movie in the new Vanity Fair, Mark Seal report that Caridi was cast, as in told that he had the role, as Sonny Corlone, and managed to hold onto it for a few days. "Caridi", Seal writes, "was a Sonny straight out of [Mario] Puzo’s book: a six-foot-four, black-haired Italian-American bull who came from a tough section of New York. Told that he had the part, Caridi quit the play he was appearing in and got fitted for wardrobe. When he walked down the block he had grown up on, people hanging out of windows screamed, 'One of the boys made it!' 'Women were coming up to me with their babies to kiss for good luck,' Caridi says. Caan recalls, 'He was running around with some friends of mine, celebrating. And I said, "Hey, don’t do this. They’re very shaky up there, and I know what Francis wants—no disgrace to you." … He was going to this club and that club,' meaning clubs frequented by the boys from Caan’s old neighborhood. 'They said, "What do you want to hang around us for?" And he says, "Well, I want to get the feeling." They said, "We’ll give you the feeling. We’ll throw you out of the fucking car at 90."'”

Caridi may have been the very image of Sonny Corleone down to his toes, but he didn't have the inside view of the casting process that Caan had by then. Caan was part of the core group of four--along with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert Duvall--who Francis Coppola wanted from the very start. He met with active resistance to both Brando and Pacino from the studio, and though Caan seemed to have the best chance of all them of getting into the movie, the studio wanted Coppola to consider him for Michael, Pacino's part. "That was the last thing Francis wanted," Caan says now, "because he had it in his mind that Michael was the Sicilian-looking one and Sonny was the Americanized version." (It may be some kind of proof of the genius of this casting idea that, after the movie came out, Caan says that he "won Italian of the Year twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.") While Caridi was out spending his salary, Coppola made one last hard press for Pacino as Michael, a move that would practically demand that Caan, then officially cast as Michael, be shifted to the role of Sonny because of the difference in height between Pacino and Caridi. Finally, the Paramount chieftain Robert Evans--who looked much more like a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star than Pacino, and who thought that the role demanded a classically tall-and-handsome Hollywood star type because it was the role he'd have coveted if he were still an actor, relented. "“I don’t think I’ve gotten over it, still,” says Caridi, who at 74 is still a working actor. Coppola must have felt just godawful about all this, because he cast Caridi in small roles in both The Godfather, Part II and, many years later, The Godfather III. Caridi did strike other casting directors as sufficiently mobish that he got to play Frank Costello in Bugsy (1991) and Sam Giancana in Ruby (1992). Whatever happened to all those babies he kissed for luck has not yet been determined.

We've read a lot of articles about the making of The Godfather by now, and if you follow these links the way we tell you to, so have you. The special fascination of Seal's account is the emphasis it places in the actual (ahem) Mafia's role in almost preventing the movie from getting made, in its getting made, and the enthusiasm for it that overtook them once it was finished. Although neither Puzo nor Coppola ever met a real gangster--Coppola recalls that “Mario told me to never meet them, never agree to, because they respected that and would stay away from you if they knew you didn’t want contact.”--many people tried to get into the movie by boasting of their real-life organized crime bona fides. Alec Rocco, A.K.A. Moe Greene, wanted everyone to know that he had a past as a bookie and had the butt-ugly mugshot to prove it. Al Martino, the singer who played Johnny Fontaine, let it be known that he had the role coming to him because he was Johnny Fontaine, mob connections and all, which must have given Frank Sinatra, who reportedly wanted the production shut down because he thought everyone in the world thought that he was supposed to be Johnny Fontaine, mixed feelings. In the end, Martino got the role, despite Coppola's reported preference for Vic Damone, despite the fact that he was so inexperienced an actor that Brando had to resort to throwing an unscripted slap to the face into their big scene together in an effort to startle him enough to get him to come out and play. Bettye McCartt, assistant to producer Al Ruddy, broke her watch on the set one day and was approached by Lenny Montana, the mountainous former wrestler who played the Corleone family emforcer Luca Brasi. McCartt recalls that “He said, ‘What kind of watch would you like?,’ and I said, ‘I’d like an antique watch with diamonds on it, but I’ll get another $15 one.’ A week passes, and Lenny comes and he’s got a Kleenex in his hand wadded up, and he’s looking over his shoulder every step of the way.” He placed the wad of Kleenex on her desk. She opened it, and there was an antique diamond watch inside. “And he says, ‘The boys sent you this. But don’t wear it in Florida.’”

Meanwhile, Joe Colombo, the most "media-savvy" of the leaders of the Five Families, was battling the production through his "civil rights" organization, the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which had "a membership of 45,000 and a $1 million war chest." Looking to make peace, Al Ruddy invited Colombo to come to his office and examine the screenplay. “So next day Joe shows up with two other guys. Joe sits opposite me, one guy’s on the couch, and one guy’s sitting in the window.” Ruddy pulled out the 155-page script and gave it to the Mob boss. “He puts on his little Ben Franklin glasses, looks at it for about two minutes. ‘What does this mean—fade in?’ he asked. And I realized there was no way Joe was going to turn to page two.” Luckily, Colombo decided to cut to the chase: his only demand was that the word "Mafia" be deleted from the script and never appear in the movie. This, it turned out, was not the most difficult thing he could have asked for: the word appeared in the script exactly once, when the movie studio boss played by John Marley read Duvall's Tom Hagen the riot act, telling him in the most offensive way possible that he has no fear of Italian crime lords. Considering that Marley's diatribe also contained the words "dago", "wop", "greaseball", and "goombahs", the general feeling was that even with the "M"-word removed, the speech would still retain the necessary flavor. In the end, the movie would become a beloved totem among Italian Americans, law-abiding and otherwise, but Colombo himself would not live to see it. He was executed by a gunman, presumed to have been hired by rival gangster Joey Gallo, while appearing at an Italian-American Civil Rights League Unity Day celebration in New York in June 1971, at the same time that part the movie was being filmed a few blocks away. Al Ruddy had declined an offer to sit beside Colombo on the dais.

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

BURT & LINDA PUGACH, CRAZY LOVE (2007)

If you never saw this documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (or the talk show promotional tour by its subjects prior to its release), here’s the set-up: already-married New York City attorney Burt Pugach had an affair with a younger woman named Linda Riss, and when she broke it off, he contracted goons to blind her by throwing lye in her face. But wait, it gets even more romantic! After serving 14 years in prison for his crime, Pugach hooked up with Riss again, and eventually the two kooky lovebirds got married. Now here’s the depressing part: if you didn’t know their history, the kvetchy, passive-aggressive old couple portrayed in the film's contemporary interview segments could be ANY miserable old couple stuck in the comfortable rut of a relatively loveless marriage. So for all you dudes out there who think passion equals love and all you ladies with a thing for the bad boys, Crazy Love is a grimly humorous corrective.

MAE & JIMMY DOYLE, VIRTUE (1932)

Far from DVD but recently restored in a pristine new print by Sony (it's a start), Virtue is a stellar script by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin with a premise that hasn't dated one bit: if a woman comes to a relationship with way more sexual experience than a man and it makes him insecure, paranoid and jealous, is there any way for him to get over that and save the relationship? Mae (Carole Lombard) is a former streetwalker who falls in love with cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O'Brien) while working behind the drivers' lunch-counter; Doyle's a tough-talking he-man woman-hater, but Mae wins him over. When they get back from their honeymoon day at Coney Island, the cops are there to arrest her for coming back to NYC after her last arrest; Jimmy vouches for her, but after the cops leave, the real test begins. Jimmy's ridiculously suspicious and obviously the walking wounded, his pride and suspicion a relationship toxin. Unfortunately, there's only so far a Pre-Code movie can go, and rather than having Jimmy and Mae work their problems out in open dialogue, Riskin has to resort to a tricksy but stupid melodramatic murder plot to clear the air. Still, Virtue is superior to, say, Chasing Amy, because being a former streetwalker is a much better metaphor for sexual inequality in a relationship than converting a freakin' lesbian. I mean c'mon. There's no clips online, so enjoy the creepy home footage above of Lombard and Clark Gable doing nothing much in particular.

ANN DARROW & KONG, KING KONG (1933)

When Peter Jackson remade Kong, he beefed up the sympathetic vibes between ape and woman, even including an Edward Scissorhands-ish ice-rink moment at the end; it wasn't beauty killed the beast, but society. Not the case in the original, where a shrieking Fay Wray doesn't realize (as someone once pointed out, and I can't remember how) that Kong is, all things considered, far from the worst thing that could happen to her: he keeps her safe on the island and would never, ever drop her from the Empire State Building. But no: she shrills and is generally totally ungrateful. Naomi Watts and Kong are actually kind of a cute couple; Wray and Kong, forget about it. Someone thought the archaic and perfectly-preserved, unreconstructed attitudes of the original weren't enlightening enough and edited a really bad "modern trailer" for it; it's above.

ALGY LONGWORTH & GWEN, BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1934)

An immensely amusing movie 20th Century Fox apparently never bought the permanent rights to the source material for — hence insanely hard to see — Bulldog Drummond is embodied for an encore by Ronald Colman, who'd already embodied H.C. 'Sapper' McNeile's emblem of British charm and resourcefulness in 1929. But his companion Algy was being played by Charles Butterworth for the first time. As the movie opens, it's Algy's wedding day to Gwen (Una Merkel), but their honeymoon night keeps getting interrupted by Bulldog's murder investigations and tanglings with generic sinister Oriental Prince Achmed (Warner Oland). Bulldog seems like a man of the world (because he's been out of Britain), but everyone else is asexual and stiff-upper-lip; Algy seems either fatalistically resigned to his wedding night being interrupted or actively looking for excuses to get out of it. (His bride is American, hence presumably experienced, which implicitly adds to the panic.) His final line at the film's final interruption — the relationship is never so much as close to consummation — is astonishing: "Perhaps you and I will be happy in our Platonic little way." They're the most sexually trapped married couple ever.

ED & LOU AVERY, BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956)

The mismatch between Ed (James Mason) and Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) is a geographical one set up in casting: even if you don't know that Mason's British (and not terribly good at concealing his accent) and Rush is a corn-fed Coloradan, you can sense a mismatch from the opening moments, when Ed announces everyone they had over for their suburban party was "dull" and failed to say anything witty, surprising or interesting. When Ed starts binging on cortisone and turns into a raving psychotic with delusions of grandeur, it merely confirms that there's no way he should be in the same suburban house as the rest of America. He needs to get back to where he belongs. Nicholas Ray's movie was a flop when it came out, and now it's a kind of overrated cult classic, but it's still compellingly sardonic stuff.

DAVE HIRSH & GINNIE MOOREHEAD, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

When Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) wakes up on a bus back in his hometown, he's got a wicked hangover and a girl he doesn't remember having picked up, Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). He sends her packing, but she keeps hanging around, and eventually they're a couple, out of intertia as much as anything: Hirsh wants to do the Right Thing, and Ginnie is so pathologically needy she's hurt by the slightest rejection. What Dave doesn't realize is that doing the right thing is the wrong thing for both of them; [MAJOR SPOILER] Ginnie ends up dead, and Dave ends up with more guilt than he knows what to do with. Ironically, in reality Sinatra made sure MacLaine would get her big death scene so she could have her big star breakthrough ("Look, I want the kid to get killed, she'll get an Oscar nomination," he reportedly said. "I don't care about my role."), and she got it. But on-screen, they're a couple trapped together by both of their faults: her needs, his unwillingness to be a bastard when it has to be done. Short-term kindness is long-term cruelty.

ROSEMARY & GUY WOODHOUSE, ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

This one's a literal from-hell: what could be worse than having a husband who'll trade you in to a Satanic coven in exchange for a boost for his acting career? I've long maintained Rosemary's Baby is actually a black comedy — it has more nervous laughs than most real comedies — but there's no denying that anyone married to John Cassavetes is in for the long haul in general. Mia Farrow just gets an especially bad break.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Presents: Cinema's Greatest Comebacks (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

RIP TORN in DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

A director I know who once worked with Rip Torn described him as a man filled with rage at all times, which may or may not be true. Yes, the actor famously smacked Norman Mailer on the noggin with a hammer in a bizarre fight somehow related to the production of the 1970 film Maidstone (an altercation that may or may not have been staged, but definitely seemed to draw actual blood). And, yes, there was that time he passed on the Jack Nicholson role in Easy Rider (specifically written for him by Terry Southern) after Dennis Hopper pulled a knife on him during a fight in a New York restaurant. So maybe he’s not the mellowest cat in the pet shop (and, sure, the man has been known to have a drink on occasion), but Torn nevertheless managed to maintain a fairly steady career, mostly as a character actor, from the time of his first screen appearance in the 1956 Baby Doll and his Broadway debut a few years later in the original cast of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth through subsequent decades of TV and movie appearances. Yet, despite the occasional high class gig (like Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter in 1984 and a 1989 Nicolas Roeg adaptation of Sweet Bird starring Elizabeth Taylor), Torn’s later career had a distinct whiff of has-beenery (Jinxed, The Beastmaster)...until, that is, Albert Brooks cast him as the bombastic afterlife attorney Bob Diamond in Defending Your Life, thus unleashing the full, hitherto untapped comic brilliance of Torn (and, to a lesser extent, Meryl Streep), launching a late-period renaissance in the actor’s career as the go-to guy for directors and showrunners looking to capture that “Rip Torn” feeling, including Garry Shandling (who assured Torn’s place in comedy heaven by casting him as uber-producer Artie in The Larry Sanders Show), Barry Sonnenfeld (who assured mainstream theatrical heat via Men In Black) and, lately, America’s sweetheart Tina Fey and the gang over at 30 Rock. Who knew an angry guy could be so frickin’ lovable?

BURT REYNOLDS, BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Burt Reynolds probably thought Rent-a-Cop would be his big comeback vehicle. Or Switching Channels. Or how about Cop and ½ ? That's why Boogie Nights almost has to be considered an accidental comeback; there's no evidence to suggest that Reynolds felt it had any more merit than, say, Striptease or Mad Dog Time – quite the opposite, in fact, as the one-time Bandit fired his agent after seeing the rough cut of Paul Thomas Anderson's opus. Hey, if you throw enough shit at the wall, something's bound to stick, and few have flung as much feces as our man Burt. Indeed, it is perhaps this very quality that makes Reynolds so convincing as porno patriarch Jack Horner, a kindred aging show-biz vet who mistakes his life's work for great art. Reynolds won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for this performance, then parlayed the resulting goodwill into a string of firecracker roles that launched him back onto the Hollywood A-list. What, you missed Crazy Six, Waterproof, Pups, Grilled, Universal Soldier II and III and Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale? Your loss.

BILL MURRAY in RUSHMORE (1998)

Let's maintain a little perspective here. Chevy Chase would probably love a big, spangled comeback, though he turned down the Kevin Spacey role in American Beauty, apparently because he was concerned that it was dirty and would sully his image so that he would be less likely to be invited to do such family fare as Snow Day. Murray, who hasn't always seemed that interested in being a movie star, has never really gone as far away as Chase, who was all but driven from the A-list by a torch-carrying mob. But Murray spent most of the '90s veering between lightly promoted character roles (in such movies as Ed Wood and Wild Things) and star vehicles that he often seemed a little embarrassed about. (In the TV commercials for his 1997 The Man Who Knew Too Little, he offered to personally recompense any dissatisfied viewers for the price of their ticket, vowing, "I will put money in your hand with no anger in my heart.") If his melancholy, graying performance in this Wes Anderson picture feels like a breakthrough and a comeback, one that lifted him to a different level in movies, it may be because it never feels like a gag, or a stunt; you never pick him out in the frame and think, "Hey, there's Bill Murray!" Fourteen years after his weird attempt to stretch himself in The Razor's Edge, Murray, always good company in a movie, had quietly evolved into an actor.

FRANK SINATRA in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

Some revisionists (such as David Thomson) have questioned just how desperately Sinatra needed the role of Maggio to salvage his career, or even how badly the career needed salvaging; it's true that the singer was under fire from newspaper columnists and self-righteous "morals" groups for his divorce and his (then liberal) politics, but it's not as if it were dog-food-for-dinner time. But everyone who was there agrees that Sinatra felt as if his world had collapsed; he may still have been rich and famous, but he didn't feel like Frank Sinatra anymore, which is to say that it had been a while since a mob of screaming teenage girls had threatened to lick his clothes off. And anyway, of all the great movie-star comebacks, this may be the only one to have inspired a major subplot in a great movie, and to be based on a rumor so widely circulated that the people who saw The Godfather were assumed to know damn well who "Johnny Fontaine" was and the title of the "new war picture" that he so badly wanted to be in. Though it does seem to be untrue that the Mafia got Frank the job. If it were some piddly-ass thing, Sinatra might have turned to his shadier friends, but for this, he felt he needed to use his big guns. So Ava Gardner got him the job.

MARLON BRANDO in THE GODFATHER & LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972)

In last year's TCM documentary Brando, Michael Winner, who directed Brando in the 1971 film The Nightcomers, described how he was able to sell the American rights to Universal Pictures as part of the studio's scheme to get rid of its connection to the star. Universal had a multi-picture deal with Brando, and the bosses jumped at the chance to use Winner's film to burn off its contract with the actor whose recent track record -- Morituri, The Appaloosa, Candy, The Night of the Following Day, et al -- seemed to be that of a spent force. Francis Ford Coppola famously had to fight the Paramount brass just to get permission to have Brando do a screen test, even though demanding a screen test of Brando was considered such an insult that many expected that once the request had been made, Paramount would have the relief of never hearing from him again. By all accounts, Brando was always helpful and considerate during the filming, though he later made it clear that he felt that he'd been screwed financially on the deal. The movie was still chugging along happily at the box office when Tango, the adults-only character drama that Brando had done for Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, was shown at that year's New York Film Festival and set off the first shock waves caused by both the power and sexual directness of Brando's performance. As an actor, he would never dive as deep again, and as a co-worker, he would never be so well-behaved again -- certainly not for Coppola, who he tortured for every perceived Godfather-related slight he'd shrugged off, first by refusing to do a cameo in The Godfather, Part II, then by keeping one eye firmly on the clock while making Apocalypse Now. But the one-two punch of these two masterpieces left him with a mystique that he would carry to the end of his days, and though his post-1972 resume is strange and spotty, no one doubts that he was doing whatever it was he wanted to do.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

OST: "The Man with the Golden Arm"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions. Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies. There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties. Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental. Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.

Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model: Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day. But Elmer Bernstein? Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long. Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard. Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook: the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments. He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie. Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?

Frank Sinatra, for one. Sinatra knew Elmer Bernstein well from his early sojourns in Hollywood, and once he was cast to play the lead in Otto Preminger's adaptation of a harrowing Nelson Algren novel about a recovering junkie, he approached the director -- not known for his stylistic daring -- and tried to convince him that Bernstein could swing. Preminger decided to take a chance, and as a result, two careers were charged with new vigor: Sinatra won widespread praise for his performance, and convinced skeptical critics that he was capable of being a great actor. As for the composer, he turned in, to the surprise of everyone but Francis Albert Sinatra, one of the most compelling -- and compulsively re-listenable -- crypto-jazz scores of the 1950s. When combined with one of Saul Bass' most stunning title sequences, it all adds up to an absolutely riveting blend of music and visual. Anyone teaching a class about the particular spirit of that period of urban drama needs nothing more for their audiovisual centerpiece than the first five minutes of The Man with the Golden Arm.

BEST TRACKS: The finest tracks on the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm are those where Bernstein collaborated with an actual jazzman -- conducter, arranger, trumpeter and former Woody Herman sideman Shorty Rogers. Rogers' bold, accusatory horn is a big part of what makes the movie's opening theme -- better known as "Frankie Machine", after the name of Sinatra's character -- so unforgettable, and his deft arrangement and understanding of Elmer Bernstein's distinct sense of melody, combined with his own rhythmic sensibility, also makes a success of the wonderfully chaotic "Audition". Other great tracks include the manic "Breakup: Flight/Louie's/Burlesque" medley and the mournful "Finale". Overall, it works thematically, but is still strong enough to stand on its own as a skillful period jazz record.

Related Posts:

OST: The Pink Panther

OST: Blue Velvet

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT GIVES THANKS FOR:

BLUE VELVET (1986)

I'm not sure that it's possible to fully appreciate how thankful some of us are for Blue Velvet, the greatest American movie of the 1980s, without having suffered the indignity of being a movie freak in the 1980s, when this picture arrived like cool water to a man stranded in the desert. The biggest surprise may not have been that David Lynch, who by that time had Eraserhead and The Elephant Man to his credit, had this inside him, but that he was allowed to get it out of his system with the financial assistance of Dino De Laurentiis, who bought the property out of development hell and gave Lynch carte blanche to express his vision, asking only that the sucker come in at no longer than two hours. This was apparently De Laurentiis' way of thanking Lynch for all the unhappy work the director had put in cranking out Dune, another De Laurentiis production. Given that Dune failed to result in the intended franchise hit, nobody in Hollywood would have been surprised, let alone appalled, if Dino had told the boy from Missoula to take a hike, and take his leading man (Kyle MacLachlan, who made his film debut in Dune, and who had signed to appear in a string of sequels that were never going to happen) with him. Instead, De Laurentiis succumbed to an unusually well-timed bout of honor, and given the results, only the churlish would whisper that it's too bad that it didn't last long enough for Lynch to cut a deal with him to make Ronnie Rocket. Because of this, anyone who's thinking of talking some shit about Dino De Laurentiis -- the man whose other credits in 1986 alone included Tai-Pan, King Kong Lives, and Maximum Overdrive -- had better check with me first to make sure you've got the right. Unless you've paid for a movie masterpiece and been married to Silvano Magnano, you probably haven't.

MOUSEHOLES (1999)

Helen Hill, who died in 2007, and who earlier this week was awarded a Leo Award by the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, was a friend of mine. Helen was an independent filmmaker, though given the way that term is bandied about these days, it doesn't begin to capture just how independent she was; she never had an agent or a distributor, but finished her short animated films when she could and trucked them around to festivals with a reel tucked under her arm. Her masterpiece, Mouseholes, is a tribute to her dead grandfather that draws on home movies, Helen's own childlike animation, and tape-recorded conversations to make something sublime out of one of the most remarkable things about movies, and one of the key ways in which they have forever changed our world: their ability to enable us to hold onto a few invaluable pieces of the people we've lost, like ghosts trapped in bottles. For Helen, the film was about hanging onto part of her grandfather; now, for those of us left behind, the film has become about holding onto part of the woman who made it.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Let's be clear about this: the reason that one of the best, funniest comedies in the history of movies exists is that its producer-director, Howard Hawks, had the balls and the taste to be corrupt in just the right way. A lot of people with as much talent as Hawks would never have thought of taking The Front Page, which then had a pretty good claim to being the greatest American play yet written and is nothing to sneeze at now, and turning it into a romantic comedy by giving the lead role a sex change and turning the other male lead into her ex-husband, who's waiting to make his next move. And while Hollywood was, and always will be, full of crass jackals who'd think nothing of trying something like that, hardly any of them would have been able to pull it off. (A 1988 remake of Hawks' rip-off, set in the world of TV news and starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner called Switching Channels was apparently made just to demonstrate this very point.) By now, His Girl Friday is so solidly (and deservedly) entrenched in its super-plus classic status that most people are barely aware of what a cold-blooded commercial calculation it's based on, or even that it has a title that ought to make you barf. I bring all this up now not because it takes anything away from the wonderfulness of the movie, because it doesn't: if I'm ever exiled to a desert island, this son of a bitch is coming with me. But it's worth keeping in mind, so that in a movie culture increasingly open to conventional wisdom and partisan warfare, everyone keeps in mind the final word on how greatness is achieved: you just never know.

TOKYO OLYMPIAD (1065)

Kon Ichikawa's 170-minute documentary record of the 1964 Olympic Games was commissioned by the Japanese government as part of their effort to use the games as their announcement that the country had transformed itself since World War II and was eager to be regarded as a smoothly functioning, hospitable member of the world of nations. Originally, the Japanese telegraphed both the ambition of the project, and their willingness to meet the rest of the world halfway, by hiring Akira Kurosawa, who at that time had no serious challengers for the title of the Japanese director who was best-known and most revered outside Japan. Luckily, somebody had a reality check and realized that Ichikawa, who was known for his ability to improvise in the face of changing conditions, was better suited temperamentally to this mission that the proud old samurai and control freak Kurosawa. Besides, the world already had one great Olympics documentary showing what the games looked like through the eyes of a director accustomed to bending reality to her will: Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad, legendary for the way it transforms the musclular bodies on display into black-and-white film poetry. Ichikawa's brightly colored film captures the atmosphere, the flavor, the summer fun aspect of the whole spectacle, as well as the awesome mixture of the personalities involved. And though it's a measure of Ichikawa's mastery that it all looks effortless -- a few thousand people got together and had some contests, and all he did was point a camera at it and boil the results down to the good stuff -- the sense it gives you of the scale of the enterprise is explanation enough as to why there weren't more Olympics movies like this prior to the mid-1960s. Of course, there'll never be anything like it ever again; none of the people who might put up the money would see the point, because now we get to watch it all while it's happening, on TV. Whoopy-dink.

THE FILMS OF W.C. FIELDS

Pauline Kael: "From their titles, it's hard to tell the W.C. Fields movies apart; as John Mosher observed, 'Fields is Fields, a rose is a rose.' " Wilfrid Sheed:"...we demand more of Fields than even comic genius. We have to believe he meant it. We want certification that such a one existed: a mean, child-hating con man who was so funny about it that he made these things all right." Although there were other great screen comedians who were funnier in a greater number of ways, such as the Marx Brothers, and others who were more gifted visually as moviemakers, such as Buster Keaton, Fields' scraggly, underfunded, rattily uneven body of work retains the special fascination of representing one mean-spirited bastard's judgement on, and self-defense strategy against, the world. Fields has turned out to be one of those movie figures, like Bogart, who never goes out of style or fully loses connection with the modern world, yet it doesn't get any easier, as the years go by, to believe that the movies themselves got made on the level. The Fatal Glass of Beer, Million Dollar Legs, Mississippi, It's a Gift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break -- they all look as if they made late at night when the studio bosses had gone home and the security guards had passed out drunk, using money that whimsically crooked bookkeepers had skimmed from the budgets of Rin Tin Tin pictures. Although there are people working today who are probably as talented as Fields, and maybe even as idiosyncratic, there are no parallels for his career; as soon as Bill Murray, probably the closest living point of comparison, showed that he could make people laugh in a thrown-together movie like Stripes, he was thrown into big-budget special effects exravaganzas like Ghostbusters and eventually forced to turn character actor, which might have been his strategy for self-defense. To find anything close to Fields' vehicles today, you'd probably be best off searching the schedule of the Animal Planet channel.

RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (1979)

Hard to believe now, but there was a time in our culture when stand-up comedians didn't get to leave behind every inflection of their act, cusswords included, perfectly preserved on cable TV specials. Lenny Bruce, who more or less invented the modern conception of the nightclub comic as satirical firebrand and verbal cartoonist, left behind only a posthumously released film record of one of his last performances, caught after his legal and drug problems had snuffed out his energy and wit and reduced him to a wry, paranoid figure snuffling in front of a bare brick wall. (Earlier clips of Bruce doing a TV-friendly version of his act on the Steve Allen show give you some idea of how much of his act was physical, and so is missing from the performances that were released on records.) Bruce's greatest disciple, Richard Pryor, was much luckier: this full-feature performance film caught him in full flight at the height of his powers, at a time when he was using everything he'd learned about working a crowd and applying it to a young lifetime's worth of experiences and observations. The film was released a year before Pryor, in a guilt-stricken, coke-baser's frenzy of despair, lit himself on fire; its sequels, starting with the 1982 Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, record his partially successful attempt to relaunch himself after that traumatic meltdown, and his subsequent discovery that both his health and his inspiration were all but shot. But at least future generations won't be in any danger of thinking that this man was just the guy in The Toy.

McCABE & MRS. MILLER; THE LONG GOODBYE; THIEVES LIKE US; CALIFORNIA SPLIT; NASHVILLE (1970s)

In 1970, Robert Altman, then 45, directed the first hit film of his career, M*A*S*H. Ten years later, on a wavering leash from producer Robert Evans and a fluctuating budget, he directed Popeye, which was to be his second hit, even though it turned out to be the kind of commercial success whose star, Robin Williams, would still be apologizing for it twenty years later. In between those two hits, Altman would be able to make thirteen feature films, make them his way, for good or ill, and get them distributed by major studios whose bosses were still reeling in confusion from the collapse of the old system and cowed by Altman's many prizes and adulatory reviews. The five listed above are my favorites from that amazing body of work, which is as alive and unconventional as any large-scale attempt to understand America that any artist has ever embarked on. You might prefer five others; I'm generally up to taking another look at any of them, except maybe for Quintet and A Perfect Couple, because I find that revisiting even the ones that I think stink on ice feels less like looking at dead, bad old movies than like revisiting distant, weird members of the family who I haven't seen since the last time they got out of rehab. The fact that any of them exist at all is conclusive proof that desperate bewilderment at the top is not the worst thing you could have in the movie business. You might think that the same guys who were prepared to sponsor Altman to such a degree on the basis of one hit would have handed him the keys to the kingdom after he'd had a second one, but by 1980, the corporate heads had decided they knew what they were doing again, and the next year, Altman gave up on Hollywood and spent the rest of the decade working in theater and cable TV and making filmed plays on shoestring budgets, with only one small return to actual feature filmmaking, the barely released O. C. and Stiggs. He restarted his movie career right on schedule, in 1990, beginning with Vincent and Theo, a Van Gogh biopic that is as great as anything he ever made, and as unprofitable.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

The greatest fusion of commercial thriller and political satire ever to come out of Hollywood -- and, as directed by John Frankenheimer, a still-stunning mixture of old-studio technique and new-style TV-age hipness -- is fairly high on the list of movies that nobody should have been able to get made at all. The novel, by Richard Condon, was a great success but also widely taken for being unadaptable. In fact, George Axelrod, who did the masterful screenplay, has said that he was stymied with a concrete case of writer's block until the film's star, Frank Sinatra, cured him by calling up and saying that it had been a while and he would like to see some pages. (Axelrod was the film's co-producer, alongside Frankenheimer, so technically, he was Sinatra's boss, but let's get real: having Frank Sinatra call you up and tell you that he sure would like to see you flap your arms and fly over the Chrysler Building might turn out to be the cure for gravity.) It wouldn't be until the late 1970s that the mercurial Sinatra would gain control of the picture himself and pull it from theatrical distribution or TV broadcast until 1988. The reasons for this, mostly financial in nature, aren't altogether clear, but contrary to popular urban myth, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with guilty feelings related to the possibility that the movie anticipated the Kennedy assasination. (By then, Richard Condon had written a novel, Winter Kills, that was directly based on JFK assassination conspiracy lore, and that book was made into a movie, written and directed by William Richart and starring Jeff Bridges, the blighted production and distribution history of which would spur rumors and allegations related to the organized-crime connections of some of its financiers and the disinclination of Embassy Pictures to alienate its own connections in the defense industry.) But I can say that I remember finally seeing The Manchurian Candidate for the first time -- actually, the first three times -- in the spring of 1988 at the Prytania Theater in New Orleans, and that of all my experiences with movies that have been re-introduced to the public after a spell in the vault, none has been as far from disappointing as my experience with this one.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE (1945)

Marcel Carne's three-hour-plus romantic celebration of the life of the theater, as rich and satisfying as any epic-scale film entertainment in history, was made during the Nazi occupation of France, a time when the Vichy government imposed rationing and other restrictions on materials and did not permit the production of any movie intended to be longer than 90 minutes. (Carne got approval to proceed with his script only by pretending that the finished product would be released in two parts.) The production provided employment, and gave cover, to many Resistance members, who worked as extras alongside Nazi loyalists who had been assigned to the project by Vichy, smiling and nodding in polite conversation with those scumbags while memorizing their faces and imagining how they were going to look with nooses draped around their necks. (Legend has it that Carne dragged out the production towards the end in anticipation of the arrival of the Allies so that the movie could wrap in a free France.) This kind of big moviemaking is commonly associated with decadence now, but Carne's commitment to his elegant conception and vast canvas was strong enough that he plowed ahead, creating the illusion that he had much greater material resources than he had. Some contemporary "independent" filmmakers who think they're demonstrating their own artistic integrity when they can't bother to focus the camera properly ought to be made to sit through this movie and then handed ritual seppeku blades, in trust that they'll do the right thing.

JAWS (1975)

I was eight years old. She was two: this was 1977, the first year she was "officially" re-released after her debut in 1975, to compete with this slutty new number on the block named Star Wars. A lot of the kids I knew were all excited about the new girl, and couldn't understand why I was so excited about the chance that I might get to see some old hag who everybody had been talking about for a couple of years, but I had done some asking around, and everything I discovered seemed to confirm that the new girl didn't have a shark. And I had been fascinated by the thought of Jaws for, it seemed, my whole life; it seemed that, for as long as I could remember, I'd heard people talking about her in vague, soft whispers. I knew that I was supposed to be too young for her, because I'd spent so many hours -- yes, hours -- lying on my belly looking at the newspaper ads, and gazing at that special box that read, "May Be Too Intense for Younger Children." (As the Mad magazine parody pointed out, putting that line in the ads as a means of keeping kids out of the theaters was like trying to keep ants away from a picnic by pouring sugar on the ground.) Ultimately, I got to see it because the Disney cartoon The Rescuers was also playing at McComb, Mississipp's only two-screen theater -- McComb, Mississippi's only movie theater -- and because my mom decided that she'd rather be getting her hair done and shooting shit with the girls for those two hours than sitting next to me watching Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor lend their voices to the characters of a couple of mice. After I got home -- following a very awkward car ride during which I, still in a state of shock, deflected my mom's questions about the movie she thought I'd seen with a series of "Hah?"s -- I would go through many stacks of white typing paper trying to adapt the movie to comic-strip form, in much the way that Hunter Thompson, I would read later, had spent his youth copying pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald longhand, so that he could feel their prose rhythms coursing through his fingers. It was the closest I had come at that time to writing a movie a love letter. In retrospect, she probably thought I was kind of goofy, if she thought of me at all. I was just one of millions of boys staring at her with my eyes and mouth wide open, I know that. And in the years since -- Christ, in the decades since -- I've known a lot of movies that were smarter, sweeter, more generous, more mature, more beautiful, and had more to teach me about the world. But you never forget the first one. This year she turned thirty-three, and it would be an understatement to say that she still looks good for her age. I expect that, if I'm still around when she's sixty-six, I'll still want to drink her bath water.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:30:00 GMT

DREW BARRYMORE (1975 - )

As inspiring figures go, Barrymore pulls double duty by proving that it's possible to be both a Barrymore and a former child star and still not go tragically off the rails, even though the attractions of the grape are not unknown to her. (Lindsay! We know you read this feature religiously! Put down that bottle and pull over to the side of the road and take some notes!) She made her film debut at five in the aptly titled Altered States; two years later, E.T. the Extra-terrestrial made her a household name and led to her becoming the youngest-ever host of Saturday Night Live, a record that I hope is still in her name: I'm too afraid to check to see who might have broken it since. After an early spell (she was barely in her teens) as a tabloid star with stints in and out of rehab, Barrymore's mature career began with her attention-getting bad girl performance in the 1992 Poison Ivy, in which she played the jailbait from hell. Her work in that film was highly creditable, but it soon became clear that she wasn't really cut out to be playing mean girls: she was just too damned lovable. Since then, she's contributed her glow to such offbeat projects as Guncrazy, Home Fries, and Donnie Darko, which was partly financed by Flower Films, the company she co-founded in 1999, and which has produced such vehicles as Never Been Kissed and the Charlie's Angels films. Her charitable endeavors extend to many of her romantic comedies: she has convincingly simulated a yearning interest in such male co-stars as Adam Sandler (twice!), Jimmy Fallon, and Tom Green. (Let's not go there.) Barrymore has the potential to be a major dramatic actress, as has been most clearly demonstrated by her remarkable turn as a girl whose life is twisted out of shape by a pregnancy born of a mercy fuck (with Steve Zahn), but in the meantime, in fluffy comedies and talk show appearances, she continues to do the great work that it sometimes seems that she, alone of all the actresses in Hollywood, is fully capable of doing: she gives cuteness a good name.

CLAUDIA CARDINALE (1938 - )

You might have noticed that the first clip is in Italian sans subtitles. But I make no apologies for including it! Still, I love you, dear Screengrab reader, almost as much as I love Claudia Cardinale, so there’s a second clip, this time with subtitles, of Ms. Cardinale being charming. Now here’s an amazing fact: both of these films (The Leopard and 8 1/2, that is) are from the same year. You might have noticed that Cardinale is one of the most beautiful women to grace the big screen. You might have noticed that these clips are from two of the finest films in Italian cinema. You are quite observant!

GENEVIEVE BUJOLD (1942 - )

Bujold got her first big break co-starring with Yves Montand in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est Finie; that movie opened up possibilities in French films that she spurned to star in two godawful independent Canadian productions, Isabel and The Act of the Heart, that were directed by filmmaker and jackass Paul Almond, to whom she was married from 1967 to 1973. This detail set the tone for much of her career: a great actress with the ability to make direct contact with an audience, Bujold spent the seventies being courted by Hollywood studios and touted in the press as a big star in the making, but she kept slipping away from the bonds of real fame by her insistence on doing the roles she wanted to do. (One big exception was Earthquake, in which she played Charlton Heston's girlfriend as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Universal Pictures for breach of contract.) During her ingenue period, she won an Academy Award nomination for playing Anne Boleyn to Richard Burton's Henry VIII in her first U.S. picture, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), then slipped away to Greece to contribute a stunning cameo as Cassandra in the Michael Cacoyannis film of The Trojan Women (1971), had a freak-out scene for the ages in Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), and came as close as she would ever come to mainstream stardom in Michael Crichton's Coma (1978). In her mature-actress period, she stirred strange longings in Clint Eastwood in Tightrope (1984), stirred even stranger ones in Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988), and introduced some experience and earthiness to Alan Rudolph's soap-bubble worlds in Choose Me (1984), Trouble in Mind (1985), and The Moderns (1988). It's been a while since she was in anything that anybody saw, but she is never to be counted out and it's good to know that she's still out there, waiting for some young hotshot director who isn't afraid of writing a part for a strong woman to do himself a favor.

MAGGIE CHEUNG (1964 - )

Born in Hong Kong, Cheung later moved with her family to the U.K. when she was eight, which accounts for the British accent with which she spoke her English dialogue in the French film Irma Vep (1996), directed by her sometime husband Olivier Assayas. Her dry, witty performance in that movie as some version of herself, politely standing around between takes on a movie set while an assistant with a spray bottle applies the right sheen to her shiny black cat suit, was a measure of how far she'd come since her early days in movies: a former model and First Runner-Up in the Miss Hong Kong beauty contest (who beat her? who the fuck beat her!?), Cheung can be seen not doing much besides looking damned good in a number of HK films, including such Jackie Chan classics as Police Story and Project A Part II. Cheung has given credit for her emergence as an actress to Wong Kar-wei, master of all things beautiful, who brought her out in As Tears Go By and later used her in Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. While developing her talent, Cheung has also managed to maintain a presence in the Hong Kong action-fantasy cinema, co-starring in such films as The Heroic Trio and Green Snake; both strands of her career came together triumphantly in Zhang Yimou's Hero, where she kicked ass and broke hearts with the best of them. She gave her finest dramatic performance to date in her most recent film, Assayas's Clean, for which she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. She has since announced that she's quitting acting to concentrate on her music. Her fans can be forgiven for hoping that she eventually finds composing to be insufficiently gratifying to her ego and comes slouching back.

MIA FARROW (1945)

The daughter of film director John Farrow (The Big Clock) and actress and Tarzan main squeeze Maureen O'Sullivan, Farrow burst into the late '60s with a waif-like quality that, married to her china doll features, was at its best sexily androgynous and at its not-best borderline elfin. She became a star from her role in the TV series Peyton Place, which she quit at the behest of her new husband, Frank Sinatra; she then blew off the marriage to Sinatra by refusing to give up her starring role in Rosemary's Baby. That movie made her an even bigger star, but it also raised the possibility that she might wind up being exploited in picture after picture as the most defenselessly threatenable potential victim since the days of silent melodrama. Perhaps alert to this danger, she spent most of the next ten years alternating between very bad choices (Secret Ceremony, The Great Gatsby) and, so far as a movie career was concerned, making no choices at all. In 1978, she appeared as a member of ensemble casts in Robert Altman's A Wedding and the Agatha Christie film Death on the Nile and, in both, revealed a new eagerness to subvert audience's sympathetic expectations of her and to use her own weirdness for comic effect. It wasn't long after that she took up with Woody Allen, and starting with 1982's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, embarked on a ten-year stretch where she appeared almost exclusively in his movies. In the best of them, he examined every angle from which she could be charming, and she has him to thank for having broadened and solidified her enduring screen image. There's a whole lot of other stuff he did for which she has not been inclined to thank him, and when their professional and personal relationships both ended with an abrupt thud around the time of the release of 1992's Husbands and Wives, she hurtled out of his orbit and latched onto supporting roles in other people's movies with what looked an awful lot like relief. From the first of her post-Woody movies, John Irvin's Widow's Peak (1994) to the most recent, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, she can generally be counted on to serve as a delightful addition to any project that is salvageable and as something fascinatingly odd in any project that isn't. Last year, Time magazine named her as one of the world's most influential people for her various humanitarian endeavors.

DIANE KEATON (1946 - )

Keaton's warmth and talent, and her special ability to make neurosis seem cuddly, made her everybody's favorite screen comedienne in the seventies, when she starred with her off-screen partner Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper (where she did a mean Brando impression), Love and Death, Manhattan, and of course, Annie Hall, which made her not just a star but a zeitgeist figure. Although she's kept working since that peak -- unlike other actresses, such as Jill Clayburgh, who seemed to embody something very much of the moment for, well, a moment -- there's a sense that Keaton doesn't really get her full due, maybe because her moment is supposed to have passed. (She's always criticized for being too "contemporary" when she plays period roles, even though she's been brilliant in such movies as Mrs. Soffel, where she springs Mel Gibson from a Pittsburgh jail at the turn of the century, and, of course, Reds.) Even when her career was red-hot after her Oscar win for Best Actress in Annie Hall, her success in comedy and the relative dullness of her role in the Godfather movies led to a false impression that she's a funny woman wasted in heavy drama. This may have led to her being overpraised for her work in the strident Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which came out the same year as Annie Hall, but it also cost her full recognition for her greatest performance, in the stunning divorce drama Shoot the Moon in 1982. She also gave a wrenching performance in The Little Drummer Girl, reasserted her comedic chops carrying Baby Boom to the finish line, partnered beautifully with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek for Crimes of the Heart, re-teamed with Woody Allen for Manhattan Murder Mystery, and directed for TV (including episodes of Twin Peaks) and movies (including the oddball documentary Heaven and the underrated Unstrung Heroes). She also helped produce Gus Van Sant's Elephant and dabbled in real estate. Her biggest recent splash in movies was in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, where she has a nude scene, the point of which was the horror that the sight of a naked woman only a decade younger than him inspired in her co-star Jack Nicholson. In fact, she looked pretty good -- certainly better than Nicholson does with his clothes on -- and her performance (and unsurgically enhanced body) helped make the movie a hit among women who enjoyed seeing Keaton getting hit on by Keanu Reeves. She can now be seen in TV commercials as the face of L'Oreal.

MAE WEST (1893-1980)

Mae West was beautiful, talented, versatile, and groundbreaking. Big deal. So were a million other women who don’t have nearly the reputation she does in the history of Hollywood. The reason that we’re writing about Mae West is because she took what was implicit in showbiz and made it explicit: her career, from beginning to end, was all about sex. Never before had anyone become so famous speaking so openly about what goes on between men and women – and she didn’t limit it to that paradigm, either. West was sexually experimental and was rumored to have had affairs with a number of women; and, despite the greater fag-hag veneration of Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, she was also one of the earliest advocates of gay rights, having written a sympathetic play about homosexual men as early as 1928. Oh, yeah: she was a writer, too. Always more than just a pretty face and a round set of hips, West was an engaging speaker, a witty and talented writer, and by all accounts, a legendarily adept improviser. (She said one of her greatest regrets is that she never got to share the screen with Groucho Marx, the only comic she considered her equal at thinking on one’s feet.) Like most people who considered sex a serious business, she couched much of her speculations about it in humor, but that didn’t save her from being repeatedly censored, censured, prosecuted (at least twice successfully) for obscenity, and banned from half the radio and television networks in the country. West never stopped working, and while her latter-day projects like Sextette are often considered more creepy than funny, considering that she kept her career going for some 70 years while pioneering gay rights, women’s liberation, and sexual freedom some thirty years before the rest of the country came around, we’d say she earned a little indulgence.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, & Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

PAM GRIER (1949 - )

She was the undisputed queen of black '70s cinema. In tight pants, high heels and with razor blades in her Afro, Pam Grier burned up the screen in movies like Foxy Brown and Coffy. Independent black cinema fell on hard times by the end of that decade and she did not make the leap over to the Hollywood mainstream. For years she worked smaller film roles and TV here and there. That is, until Quentin Tarantino cast her in what might have been his — and her — best film ever, Jackie Brown. There Pam plays a middle-aged woman, a struggling air-hostess, slightly frayed at the edges but tough as nails...and what a sight to see.

SOPHIA LOREN (1934 - )

In pure feminine power and deliciousness, few can rival Sophia Loren in her glory years. It is hard to believe now, but the first lady of Italian film actually made her way onto the screen after fellow Italian bombshell Gina Lollobrigida. In fact she was discovered by (and subsequently married, then split with) Carlo Ponti, who also launched Lollobrigida's carreer. While works of Talmudic length could be written on Loren's looks, she's no mean actress. Get thee to a video store for Two Women or El Cid to appreciate her in the fullest.

ANNE BANCROFT (1931-2005)

Born Anna Maria Italiano in the Bronx, she followed that age-old tradition of taking a more WASPy sounding stage name. Anne Bancroft will, however, always be Mrs. Robinson to us. There are more prolific actresses out there, but you can't deny the power of her performance as a beautiful, sad, alcoholic older woman to Dustin Hoffman's younger man in The Graduate. Now that we are sniffing thirty ourselves we realize that (A) Mrs. Robinson wasn't supposed to be particularly old in the movie and (B) at 36, Anne Bancroft was only a few years older than Hoffman. In any case, leopard print never looked so good. And never did a lady lead with so much out-of-control control. It isn't easy to top one of the best movies of all time and nothing Bancroft did after that (no, not even being the voice of the Queen in Antz) made the same splash. Mel Brooks married her, though, so you know she was special.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE (1934 - )

My first Shirley MacLaine memory: sitting in front of my parents' stereo (approximately the size of the desk I'm sitting at now), playing my mother's copy of the Sweet Charity soundtrack and staring intently at the redhead on the album cover. I may have only been six or seven years old, but I had good taste. I lost track of Shirley after that, until she resurfaced as the kook on Larry King talking about her past lives in Atlantis and her UFO frequent-flier miles, just another Hollywood punchline. What a cad I was, forgetting what a beautiful thing we had there in front of the stereo all those years ago. But it all came back to me when I finally got around to seeing the work that made her famous in the first place. In her trademark roles – The Apartment, Irma la Douce, Sweet Charity and especially Some Came Running, she's pixie-cute, charming, funny, sometimes annoying and ultimately heartbreaking. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress five times, finally winning for Terms of Endearment. In 1993, I saw her open for Frank Sinatra at the Worcester Centrum; her show-stopper was, of course, "If My Friends Could See Me Now." I'd be lying if I said she looked like she'd stepped right off that long-ago album cover, but I will tell you she still had the gams.

CLAUDIA JENNINGS (1949-1979)

If such redneck romps as Gator Bait, Truck Stop Women and Moonshine County Express aren't part of your cinematic education, you may not have even heard of Claudia Jennings, but in the mid-1970s she was the queen of the drive-in, the ultimate hick chick. Born Mary Eileen Chesterson in St. Paul, Minnesota, Jennings studied dramatic arts as a child and performed with the Hull House theater company in Chicago after graduating high school. She took a day job as a receptionist for Playboy magazine, where her knockout looks did not go unnoticed. She posed for the magazine in 1969 and again in 1970, when she was named Playmate of the Year. Moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting, she landed a supporting role in the 1972 roller derby flick Unholy Rollers. Her role in 1974's Truck Stop Woman, in which she hijacked trucks using sex as her primary weapon, became the model for the rest of Jennings' leading roles: drop-dead gorgeous, sexually uninhibited and tough enough to take on the big boys. Long before Thelma and Louise hit the road, Jennings and Jocelyn Jones played a sexy pair of bank-robbing outlaws in The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. In Gator Bait, Jennings is a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. A decade before Sigourney Weaver's supposedly groundbreaking turn in Aliens, Jennings was already kicking ass and taking names – and doing it in the tightest, tiniest pair of Daisy Dukes possible. Her final performance came in David Cronenberg's little-seen 1979 racing picture, Fast Company – ironic, in that Jennings was killed in an auto accident on the Pacific Coast Highway that year, a couple of months shy of her thirtieth birthday. Her cinematic legacy may be a minor one, but in the realm of the hick flick, Claudia Jennings still reigns.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER (1958 - )

Although it wasn't her first movie, most filmgoers got their first good gawk at Pfeiffer in the 1983 Scarface. Although opinions were mixed (and would remain so for a while) about whether she could act, the camera loved her, and the way she embraced the role of the world's surliest cokehead gangster's moll established that she wasn't persnickety about wanting to be liked. Any doubts about her acting had been pretty much cleared up by the time of Dangerous Liasons, in which she was excellent in one of the film's major roles that was probably the least fun to play. That movie and her other 1988 releases, Married to the Mob and Tequila Sunrise, made it clear that likability itself was comfortably within her range. Her singing sexpot in The Fabulous Baker Boys was pure starshine, her alienated early '60s runaway housewife in Love Field a terrific stretch, and with all due respect to Julie Newmar, her Catwoman gave the most insouciant reading of the line "Meow!" on record. Her movies have gotten worse, and her last one, I Could Never Be Your Man. ended up going straight to DVD. But she remains a welcome presence on-screen.

ANNA MAGNANI (1908-1973)

If Sophia Loren could have taken out a patent on the movie image of the Italian woman as lusty, ripe, and sensual, Magnani embodied the idea of the Italian as a woman who might have stepped off an opera stage, made of common clay but transcendently beautiful in a way that represents what people used to call "a force of nature." She had been acting in movies (and also singing and performing in cabaret and nightclubs) since the earliest days of sound pictures, but it was Roberto Rossellini's 1945 Open City, and in particular her death scene, that made her an international star. She continued to work in Europe with such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti (Bellissima), and Jean Renoir, who after using her in The Golden Coach proclaimed her the greatest actress he'd ever worked with. Hollywood never quite knew just what to do with her, but she did find something of a patron in Tennessee Williams, and she won an Oscar for the film version of The Rose Tattoo. Magnani once said that "Women like me can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me," and in that movie you can see what she meant: she looks at her co-star, Burt Lancaster, as if he were Arnold Stang. (She was apparently perceived as a bit much even by her co-star in The Fugitive Kind -- the ill-fated screen version of Williams' Orpheus Descending -- a shy, retiring fellow named Marlon Brando. "Every time I play a scene with her," Brando is supposed to have said, "I'm gonna have a rock in each hand.") Her death in Rome, at the age of 65 from pancreatic cancer, occasioned a public funeral ceremony rumored to have made the Pope jealous.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs (Part Two)

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

004. Diamonds Are Forever

The second-best Shirley Bassey theme, and you can probably guess from the previous entry that Moonraker doesn’t outrank it in my book. (That’s a hint, as if you needed one.) Kanye West sampled it for “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” but perhaps even more intriguing is this tidbit from Wikipedia: “In an interview for the television programme James Bond's Greatest Hits composer John Barry revealed that he told Bassey to imagine she was singing about a penis.” And this was many years before Goldmember.

003. Live and Let Die

I’ll admit this is a sentimental favorite. Live and Let Die was the first Bond I saw in theaters – yes, I was part of the generation that had to be convinced Roger Moore wasn’t the James Bond for the ages – and the soundtrack album was one of the first LPs I purchased with my allowance. It still holds up, though, and I must correct the Times piece on one factual matter: Sir Paul isn’t singing “in this ever-changing world in which we live in,” it’s “if this ever-changing world in which we’re livin’.” OK, so it’s not much better, but give him credit for “You gotta give the other fella hell.”

002. You Only Live Twice

It’s too bad Frank Sinatra never got around to recording a ring-a-ding-ding Bond theme, but his daughter Nancy acquitted herself nicely with this haunting entry. It’s not clear whether John Barry told her to imagine she was singing about a penis. But you can bet he’d never tell Frank that. (Yes, I’m vamping now. I really have nothing to say about “You Only Live Twice” except that it’s stuck in my head now.)

001. Goldfinger

Well, of course. Shirley Bassey’s first Bond theme set the template for all that would follow. It’s the brassiest, it’s the bombastic-est, it’s simply the Bondest. Choose it at your next karaoke outing. You’ll make a lot of new friends.

Part One

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

My friends, last week in this space we paid tribute to the Top 10 films of the late, lamented Paul Newman, one of our favorite movie stars of all time...which, not surprisingly, got us thinking about the very qualities that separate the film industry’s classic, iconic Leading Men – the true gods of the silver screen – from, say, Shia LaBeouf.

My friends, I ask you: what is that special something, that ephemeral je nes sais quoi that makes for a truly great Leading Man? Is it talent? Sex appeal? Box office clout? Are we drawn more to the stars who remind us of ourselves or those who embody exactly the qualities we lack (but do our best to imitate in hopes of meeting girls)? Do the off-screen good deeds and/or drunken racist ranting and/or pro-Xenu proselytizing of the men behind the movies matter? Do we forgive the occasional bombs and missteps in a long, prolific career, or do we prefer a shorter resume packed with performances of a generally higher quality? And do foreigners count?

My friends, these difficult questions led to much consternation and debate within the hallowed halls of The Screengrab...but in the end, we all came together as a website, setting aside our individual differences to bring you this historic document, our bipartisan, multilateral picks for THE TOP 25 LEADING MEN OF ALL TIME!

25. FRANK SINATRA (1915-1998)

Sinatra's movie career had three distinct acts. In the 1940s, as a young singing heartthrob, he starred in such godawful musicals as Step Lively and The Kissing Bandit while dabbling with "acting" (as the kids call it nowadays) in such roles as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells. Some twenty years later, with his stardom set in concrete, he got paid for palling around on-screen with his buddies in such stuff as the original Ocean's Eleven and 4 for Texas, as well as for honoring his serious (or at least his self-serious) side by allowing his grumpy mid-life crisis to be recorded on camera in such downers as The Detective and The Naked Runner. But in between, starting with the famously career-reviving supporting performance as Maggio in From Here to Eternity, Sinatra had a good, solid career as a leading actor, a period which includes his political-assassination double feature of The Manchurian Candidate and the lesser-known 1954 Suddenly, in which he invades a house and plans to take out the president from a conveniently placed window. This period also included his best co-starring gig with Dean Martin in Some Came Running, his vividly sweaty impersonation of the nightclub comic Joe E. Lewis in The Joker Is Wild, and (especially) his rhythmic, convincing embodiment of a junkie poker dealer in The Man with the Golden Arm. The trick to getting work of this caliber out of Sinatra seems to have been that he felt in danger of fading away and washing out -- or at least becoming just another rich, famous entertainer -- and he had to deliver, a feeling that gave a charge to everything he did...for a while. When he felt his confidence return, he knew he wasn't going anywhere and so, in movies at least, he turned into a coaster. Maybe it's too bad that some way couldn't have been found to throw a good scare into him every ten years or so. But how the hell are you going to scare somebody after they've agreed to star in Dirty Dingus Magee, and even that check has cleared?

24. MONTGOMERY CLIFT (1920-1966)

James Dean was a tragic figure, but Montgomery Clift was a doomed one. When he finally died in 1966 (of arterial sclerosis, though his former acting teacher called it a slow-motion suicide), he was readying to play a lead role in Reflections in a Golden Eye opposite his friend Elizabeth Taylor; Marlon Brando took over the role. The two had a lot in common, including searingly handsome faces that would eventually be scarred by their self-destructive behavior and ill health, and a propensity for masterfully portraying emotionally complex working-class characters. That Brando was, at the time, considered the more stable of the two gives some indication of just how fucked up Monty Clift was. Brought up in an abusive family situation, wracked his entire life by ill health, and paralyzed by guilt over his own homosexuality and drug addiction, Clift was beloved by half of Hollywood and despised by the other half. So ruined was both his body and his career by the early ‘60s that he nearly became, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, the third Hollywood legend to make The Misfits their final film. Happily, Clift survived just long enough to turn in a riveting performance in Judgment at Nuremberg, but the cards were dealt for him almost from the time he was born. He didn’t live past 45, and for someone who had such a great reputation as an actor during his prime, he made precious few movies – only 17 total, and a dozen as the lead. But he left hardly a screen credit that didn’t make a lasting impression, and his legacy, curiously enough, can be seen in music: a number of bands have written songs about poor doomed Monty, including R.E.M. (“Monty Got a Raw Deal”), Jets to Brazil (“Conrad”), and the Clash (“The Right Profile”).

23. JAMES CAGNEY (1899-1986)

Cagney was originally cast as the sidekick to the hero in his first big picture, The Public Enemy, but after the director, William Wellman, saw the rushes from the first day's shoot, he had a rude shock when he discovered that nobody could take their eyes off the runty smartass guy who wasn't supposed to be the star. It is a tribute to the common-sensical, whatever-works spirit of the early talkies that Wellman, rather than agonize over this perturbing situation, marched onto the set the next day and simply informed the two actors that they'd be swapping parts. Anybody who wanted to establish, with as little effort as possible, that the movies are probably the work of the devil could do worse than to screen a few of Cagney's choicest gangster movies -- say, The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, and his middle-aged kiss-off to the genre, White Heat. In these films, Cagney emanates danger and energy as naturally as an electrified fence, and his satisfaction in being able to discharge his anger in ways that are unpleasant for the people he's discharging it all over is deeply unwholesome, but no actor in history has ever been more dependably watchable. A veteran of the vaudeville stage, he used a dancer's physicality, as well as his natural likability and an unpredictable streak ot dark wit, to keep his tough guys from ever seeming like mere brutes or bullies. He had range, and he tore it up in his hoofers' musicals, including the movie he was proudest of, the George M. Cohan musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy. But he remains chiefly identified as old Hollywood's favorite unromantic urban tough guy. (Bogart, who he shot full of lead in a couple of movies, has the romantic division sewn up.)

22. BURT LANCASTER (1913-1994)

Lancaster established his stardom as a big manly hunk of action star, but he's endured better than many of the trigger-happy lunks who starred in Hollywood action pictures, because he was both a throwback to the days of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and a predecessor to the gravity-defying stars of Hong Kong martial arts movies. A former gymnast, Lancaster had turned to acting after an injury cut short his career as a circus acrobat, and in such movies as The Crimson Pirate (co-starring his former circus partner, Nick Cravat, who appeared in nine of Lancaster's movies, and who died the same year Burt did) and Carol Reed's Trapeze, he demonstrated that it was possible for a big man to spin and pirouette through the air in ways that were not dreamt of in John Wayne's philosophy. At first, other aspects of the actor's art, such as speaking dialogue and making it through a whole scene without yawning, came less naturally to him than dancing in mid-air, but Lancaster, a long-range-plan kind of guy, became interested in developing the skills that would enable him to keep his career going when he could somersault no more. He also seemed to think that it would be a useful thing to make a few movies that would be good enough that he could stand to look at himself in the mirror the day after the premiere. In some of the "serious" pictures he made (The Devil's Disciples, The Rose Tattoo, Come Back, Little Sheba, Birdman of Alcatraz) when he was still in his beefcake prime, Lancaster seemed to be sponsoring his own on-the-job-training acting course. The training paid off when Luchino Visconti offered him the role of the prince in the 1963 epic masterpiece The Leopard, arguably the finest work of his career and one more film that likely wouldn't have been made at all without Lancaster's participation. Infuriatingly, The Leopard would not be seen in its full, uncut majesty in the United States until 1983. However, there was something fitting about that, because by the time it did arrive here, Lancaster's work in Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1981) and Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), to name two, had established him as one of the great old men of the movies, a weathered but still-beautiful oak of a man whose courtly bearing seemed to mark him as an emissary from a better time.

GARY COOPER (1901-1961)

Gary Cooper is one of the greatest stars in Hollywood history, and yet he never strayed very far from one very basic role. That was both the upside and the downside of the old star system; it may have prevented more versatile actors from taking on roles that would have let them break out of their public personality, but it also kept stars of somewhat limited talents thriving by letting them play to their strengths. Cooper the actor wasn’t hard to define: he was the straight-shooting, simple fella who might not have been too bright, but damn it, he knew what was right, and he was going to do what was best no matter what. He essentially filled that narrow role again and again throughout his career, mostly in the Westerns that made him famous; it was a limitation he recognized, but probably never fully accepted. When the roles within that archetype were good enough, when they were handled by capable directors and backed up with good supporting casts, you could see why Gary Cooper became a legend: as Alvin York in Sergeant York, as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, and most especially, and unforgettably, as Will Kane in High Noon, he didn’t so much transcend his limitations as an actor as he did fill out the outlines of his role with complete perfection, with nothing left out. In life, Cooper was a much more complex and contradictory character than any of the roles he played on screen, but the biggest contradiction of all is that the actor, with all his shortcomings, will be remembered long after the man is forgotten.

Click Here for Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Five

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

TALIA SHIRE: The world of the Corleones is one that shuts out its women. Their job is to produce and raise the children, and they are basically treated as children, to remain innocent and untainted by knowledge of what their family's prosperity is based on--as if they could really not know, or as if there could be absolution in ignorance. The big exception is Michael's sister Connie, played by Francis Ford Coppola's sister, Talia Shire. (One advantage of this side of the casting is that Coppola instinctively understood how to get guys to act like brothers to a little sister. James Caan says that Coppola would engineer situations on the set, asking Caan to shoo away some bastard who was "bothering" Talia; it was only later that Caan realized that Coppola was psyching him up for the big scene where Caan's Sonny, after seeing bruises on his sister's face, performs a little marriage counseling by tracking down his brother-in-law and stomping a mudhole in his ass.) Maybe because he didn't want to seem to be playing favorites, Coppola treated Shire's character a little negligently in the first film; she doesn't really threaten to rise above the level of a victim and a plot function until her big explosion at the end, screaming that Michael has had her husband killed. But in Part II, she enters the movie like a house on fire, a fabulously turned out slightly-older woman who's going to do whatever it takes to embarrass the family she blames for wrecking her life, even if that means she has to hang out with Troy Donahue. Eventually she wears herself out with her own acting out and returns to the nest, and by the time of Part III, she's more active plotter than Michael. She has her ideas about how things ought to be done and takes full advantage of all the perks she figures she has coming to her as blood relation. And nobody is going to take her out in a rowboat and put one in her head while it's bowed in prayer.

The Godfather is one of two big movie franchises that dominate Shire's filmography. The other is the Rocky series, where she played Adrian, the ugly duckling who became the hero's loyal wife, hanging in there from the 1976 original through to Rocky V in 1990. (Her absence from the 2006 Rocky Balboa is explained by her character's death from, in the tasteful words of her widower, "da woman cancer.") Although she was perfectly charming in the first Rocky movie, the role called for her to return to the likable-mouse range of the first Godfather movie, and in invited audiences to like her for being so drably unimaginative and for being faithfully devoted to America's Lug. The success of Rocky did lead to her having, for a few months from 1979 to early 1980, a brief fling as a leading lady, but the movies she starred in--the uneven and off-putting Old Boyfriends and the terrible horror pictures Prophecy and Windows (which is the only film directed by Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, and which cast Shire as the target of a dangerous lesbian stalker played Elizabeth Ashley)--were such bombs that they left Shire open to public ridicule. The whole experience may have let her a little gun-shy; for the next ten years or so, she didn't stray far from Rocky's apron strings, and though she has continued working pretty steadily in recent years, she seems to have a pretty good sense for picking scripts whose finished films will scarcely see the light of day. I suspect that Shire may still have some surprises in her, but it remains to be seen whether anyone will arrange for them to be turned loose.

G. D. SPRADLIN: A big believer in the value of a varied CV, the Oklahoma-born Spradlin was an attorney, an independent oil man, and a politician before turning professional actor in his mid-forties. He had already built up an impressive roll call of intimidating but not always trustworthy authority figures--cops, doctors, politicians, military officers--before Coppola brought him on board to play Senator Pat Geary, a man who the Senate doorkeeper can't introduce with the words "the honorable..." without dissolving in giggles. Having earned his place in movie history, Spradlin continued to play admirals, sports coaches (including, in the 1979 North Dallas Forty, a character said to be modeled on Tom Landry), and even, in his last job before his official retirement in 1999, Ben Bradlee in the cross-eyed Watergate spoof Dick. All of these roles now seem informed by the fact that the man onscreen once set his nastiest sneer in place to go head to head with Michael Corleone, and that it took a bloody bed full of dead girl to make him blink, and shudder. Especially worthy of mention is his other job for Coppola, in Apocalypse Now, where he plays the general who gives Martin Sheen his assignment up river, and where his sad, weary face--the face of a man who by God will do the job he signed on to do, but at the time he signed on he sure didn't know he was going to be doing this shit--is like a red flag to the star, and maybe to the audience. Whatever happens next, you can't look into those eyes and say that you weren't given fair warning.

LENNY MONTANA: Six feet six inches tall and not whisper-thin, Montana (nee' Lenny Passofaro) worked as a bouncer and is rumored to have had some kind of mob connections before he entered show business as a professional wrestler, where he worked under the names Lenny the Bull, Zebra Man, and Chief Chickawicki. Lenny was 45 when he made his movie debut in The Godfather playing Luca Brasi, the old family enforcer who didn't expect to be invited to his boss's daughter's wedding. If the scene in which Luca thanks Don Corleone for having been so honored had been played and shot as written, it might have been less memorable. As it turned out, Lenny the Bull was so starstruck by Marlon Brando that he couldn't be in Brando's presence for two seconds without looking as if he were going to shit his pants and maybe bleed from the eyes a little, so after all attempts to calm him down failed, Coppola reconceived the scene: in the finished product, Luca is so overwhelmed by the Don's willingness to let him enter his home through the front door in broad daylight, and so unused to social interaction that doesn't involve threatening to leave someone with fewer body parts than he had when he showered that morning, that he has laboriously prepared a written speech for the occasion, which he has trouble getting out even in the sealed labratory conditions of the Don's office. In Lenny's other big scene, he gets to have a drink with some fellows who pin his hand to the bar with a knife and then garrote him, and Lenny played it as if getting throttled with piano wire came much more naturally to him than wedding-day small talk. Given the massive international success of The Godfather and Lenny's easily recognizable face and physique, is it any wonder that his acting debut did lead to other offers? He appeared in James Toback's Fingers, a TV film starring Frank Sinatra called Contract on Cherry Street, the Jackie Chan vehicle The Big Brawl, the Steve Martin hit The Jerk, and Robert Aldrich's ...All the Marbles, as well as in such trivia as the Italian spoof The Funny Face of the Godfather. He even took a co-writing credit on one of his last films, Blood Song, a horror flick that co-starred Richard Jaeckel and Frankie Avalon. His artistic vision more or less fulfilled, Lenny retired from the screen that year and died in Italy in 1992.

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)

Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

19. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)

When Truffaut delivered his famed advice about the impossibility of anti-war film, he might as well have been talking about movies like The Great Escape. Not that it’s anything even remotely like an anti-war film: though its final moments contain some of the futility and brutality of war, they’re aimed squarely at the enemy, and the movie itself is a pure, unvarnished celebration of movie-style heroism and the fighting man at his best. But when Truffaut noted that action argues only for itself, this is the sort of thing he meant: even the ultimate futility of the real-life escape attempt fictionalized by John Sturges in this WWII classic is swept away on the back of all the thrilling set pieces, cunning scenes of calculation, defiant acts of heroism, and sheer thrilling action. Even if you know what’s going to happen to the individual escapees in the end, you can’t help but get caught up in the excitement of it all again and again, borne along by Elmer Bernstein’s unforgettable score and some larger-than-life performances by the likes of Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve “Hey, Guys, Let’s Throw a Motorcycle Chase Scene in Here, Why Not?” McQueen. Even the poster knew what it was selling, tagging the movie as “THE GREAT ENTERTAINMENT,” putting a good-times spin on the 30-years-later words of a rapper who issued his grim tales of ghetto warfare under the telling title Your Entertainment, My Reality. The Great Escape even spawned a genre of epic war pictures that clung to its formal elements: the dangerous-secret-mission plot, the all-star cast arrayed on boxes on the poster, all given colorful nicknames, the overblown heist-movie action elements. But the lousy quality of most of its imitators shouldn’t be held against it: its ‘reality’ may have been pure fantasy, but you can’t watch despairing anti-war pictures all the time.

18. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

This awesomely well-executed slab of 1950s melodrama is based on the first novel by soldier turned writer James Jones, and it isn't actually set in wartime: it chronicles the frustrations and tensions that are building among the men killing time at a military base in Hawaii in 1941, which will explode when the Japanese attack on December 7. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's scene on the beach deserves an automatic inclusion in any montage of legendary screen make-out scenes, and Frank Sinatra's supporting performance as the uncontainable Maggio more than justified both his career comeback and the gangsters-got-him-that-job rumors that were set in stone in the early scenes of The Godfather. (Even though, sadly, the rumors probably weren't true; it's more likely that Ava Gardner got him that job.) But the movie belongs to Montgomery Clift's beautiful performance as the doomed bugler Robert E. Lee Pruitt, who loves the army and can only say, when it's pointed out that the army is making his life miserable, "A man loves a thing, that don't mean it's gotta love him back." Which is pretty good advice no matter what you love, especially if it's the movies.

17. BEFORE THE RAIN (1994)

This Macedonian film, written and directed by Milčo Mančevski, shows how the passions that war thrives on spill over uncontainably into the lives of people who want no part of them. The Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija plays a burned out war photographer who, after being affected by a violent ourburst in supposedly civilized London, goes home to retire in the Macedonian countryside and finds that the remote village that represents peace and tranquility to him has been split by civil war and the woman he left behind lives in fear for her daughter's life. The powerful-looking, bearded Šerbedžija does about as good a job as any actor ever has at suggesting an intelligently troubled man's desire for a peaceful life, and his feeling that no alternative could be worth living.

16. ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)

(See #11)

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Four

Phil Nugent — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

RICHARD CONTE: Classically handsome and deep-voiced, with a trace of something anxious and melancholy behind the eyes, Conte made his Broadway debut in 1939 and was scooped up by the movies later that same year. The studio announced its intention to shape him into "the new John Garfield", but although Conte had plenty of starring opportunities during World War II when many other established and potential stars were busy overseas, he never seemed to be cast right or to have the material he needed to make a real impression. He did solid enough work in war pictures like Guadalcanal Diary and A Walk in the Sun, where his down-to-Earth, Jersey boy quality provided a much appreciated contrast to that film's misguided poetic intentions. But in muddled, sub-par noirs such as Jules Dassin's truckin' picture Thieves' Highway and Otto Preminger's demented, drooling Whirlpool, he just looked as despondent and confused as the people in the audience. He was much better in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1949 drama House of Strangers, which, while not strictly speaking a crime movie, has similarities to The Godfather, with its squabbling Italian family balling itself up over questions of loyalty and patriarchal authority.

It soon became clear that film noir was Conte's natural milieu, but by the time he gave his strongest performance in the strongest movie of his career to date, Joseph H. Lewis's intense 1955 low-budget crime picture The Big Combo, film noir had slid down to a B-movie genre. Conte starred in Fritz Lang's The Blue Dahliah and Phil Karlsen's The Brothers Rico, then rid out the 1960s alternating between TV guest shots and opportunities to hang out with Frank Sinatra. (He appeared in the original Ocean's Eleven and then turned up in three other Sinatra movies, Assault on a Queen, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement. Maybe Sinatra decided that, on Ocean's Eleven, he'd taken one for the team by agreeing to play the character who is required to say the line, "Give it to me straight, Doc. Is it the big casino?") Conte was reportedly considered for the role of Don Vito himself, but that was in the early stages, when the studio was thinking of making The Godfather as a cheap little action movie. Its elevation to prestige-epic level automatically took him out of the running for the title role, but by casting him as Don Barzini, the smiling-cobra nemesis of the Corelones who plays toastmaster general at the big meeting of the five families, Francis Ford Coppola was counting on Conte's movie past, with its long-time connection to the world of gangsters and other classic movie toughs (such as Edward G. Robinson, who played Conte's blustery Italian papa in House of Strangers) to give added weight to a character whose brief amount of screen time belies his power and importance in the narrative. Barzini was Conte's last hurrah as a Hollywood actor. He died in 1975 after spending the last three busy years of his life working in Italy and France, where even hacks know enough to be impressed with a long-time professional who has Fritz Lang pictures on his resume.

RICHARD BRIGHT: Was ever an actor more misleadingly named? It's not that Bright was dull, by any means. But he seemed to be allergic to flashiness and determined to never call undue attention to himself. He was very close to being the ideal example of a hard-working, serious character actor who finds his place in the overall pattern of whatever movie or play he's in, selflessly executes it with an unfussy mastery, and then recedes into the background until he's needed again. In 1965, he did his part for free expression and the counterculture by playing Billy the Kid (to his co-star Billie Dixon's Jean Harlow) in Beat poet Michael McClure's experimental play The Beard, which ended with a scene in which Dixon delivered a closing monologue while Bright simulated cunnilingus on her; the play so impressed the authorities that every night, the police came around after the performance to take Bright and Dixon down to the station house so that their eager fans there could have their fingerprints. In 1971, Bright appeared in The Panic in Needle Park, a young-junkies-in-love movie that marked Al Pacino's starring debut. The next year, he found the role for him as Al Neri, the most durable and colorlessly loyal of Corleone underlings in The Godfather. He would reprise the role of Al in Part II, and Part III, made fifteen years and set twenty-odd years later, found him still faithfully plugging away. He can also be seen in The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Rancho Deluxe, Mararthon Man, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Citizens Band, Once Upon a Time in America, and a great many other films. In 2002, he contributed a brief but memorable cameo to an episode of The Sopranos, playing the leader of a low-rent murder-for-hire crew, who negotiates a contract between puffs on an oxygen inhaler stuffed up his nose. Four years later, he was accidentally and fatally struck by a New York City bus.

AL LETTIERI: Lettieri kicked around in TV and movie bit parts for a decade or so before starting to get real supporting roles in such movies as The Bobo with Peter Sellers and The Night of the Following Day, a godforsaken kidnapping-plot movie starring a peroxided Marlon Brando. His performance as Solozzo the Turk is not the most subtle and nuanced element of The Godfather--Lettieri's performance was never the most subtle and nuanced element in any of his movies, not even the ones that starred Charles Bronson--but he had energy and the distinctive presence of a man who'd decided to act as if looking like a warthog in spats was really working for him. The Godfather established Lettieri as a good man to hire if you were making a movie whose heroes were killers and thieves and you needed a clearly contrasting type to make it clear why these other killers and thieves were the good guys. If sheer, unadorned vicious meanness is what floats your boat, it's hard to think of a riper example than Lettieri's bad guy in the 1972 The Getaway, who enlivens his pursuit of the movie's ostensible hero and heroine by abducting a husband and wife (played by Archie Bunker's little girl, Sally Struthers, and Jack Dodson, formerly Howard Sprague on The Andy Griffith Show) and indulges in an infantile, trashy affair with the wife while the husband is forced to watch from the back seat. Off camera, Lettieri seems to have been one of those uncontainable, life of the party types who other character actors tell stories about until they turn into legendary figures. He is said to have arrived on the set of the Bronson vehicle Mr. Majestyk in a car full of hookers he'd thoughtfully brought along to service the crew, which definitely puts those gift baskets that Jay Leno sends out into perspective. Once there, he persisted in addressing his co-star, who played a melon rancher in dutch with the mob, as "my melon-Chollie baby," something that all the witnesses agree seemed to strike Bronson as the single least amusing thing in the world. Sadly, Lettieri would have no more time to feel around for the location of Charles Bronson's funny bone. He died of a heart attack in 1975, at 47.

Morning Deal Report: Harry Potter and the Half-Assed Release Date

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The Dark Knight has finally been dislodged from its perch atop the box office charts. Tropic Thunder took over the number one slot with a weekend total of $26 million. Batman and company fell to second place with $16.8 out of a total of $471 million, which means it has passed Star Wars on the all-time list just as The Clone Wars debuts with $15.5 million. Vicky Cristina Barcelona had a blockbuster opening by Woody Allen standards, finishing the weekend in 10th place with $3.7 million.

Bad news for Hogwarts fans: the sixth movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has been bumped from its November release to next summer. As this AP story notes, Entertainment Weekly didn’t get the memo, despite being owned by the same parent company as Potter distributor Warner Bros. In other kid lit news, a live-action Goosebumps feature is headed for the big screen. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, Problem Child) are adapting the R.L. Stine series, per the Hollywood Reporter.

Finally, the Moulin Rouge is returning to the silver screen. Toulouse Latrec fans need not apply, however, as Variety reports The Fabulous Moulin Rouge concerns a short-lived Las Vegas casino “that sprang up in 1955 and closed six months later under mysterious circumstances just as it was gaining momentum and attracting singers such as Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra.” We suspect the involvement of Danny Ocean.

Related:
Trailer Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip "The Clone Wars"

Yesterday's Hits: Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Michael Anderson)

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there’s one thing Hollywood is sorely lacking nowadays, it’s larger-than-life figures. Nowadays, most moviegoers want their industry types to be down to earth, but in the classical era of Hollywood, it was a different story. Tinseltown was ruled by grandiose, even vulgar men who flaunted their wealth, made bold statements and engaged in dangerous behavior just to fuel their taste for adventure. Today’s peekaboo paparazzi photos and pregnancy gossip pale in comparison to the stories of Errol Flynn’s legendary parties and John Huston deciding to make a movie in Africa with the notion of shooting an elephant while he was there.

Michael Todd was one of these men. Todd began his career in Hollywood by running a construction company that specialized in soundproofing studio stages, but after he was bankrupted by the Depression, his colorful life really began. He began producing stage shows, often of ill repute. He romanced Gypsy Rose Lee, star of one of his productions. He married Joan Blondell, after his first wife died under suspicious circumstances. He gambled and spent money like a decadent prince, causing Blondell to divorce him and leading to his second bankruptcy. He staged a nudie musical written by the future king of Thailand. And if that’s not enough drama for one lifetime, he later married Liz Taylor. Todd also had a hand in the development of the three-screen Cinerama process before pioneering a technological breakthrough of his own, the Todd-AO process, which Todd envisioned as being “Cinerama coming from one hole.” And the crown jewel of Todd-AO was 1956’s Around the World in 80 Days.

What made Around the World in 80 Days a hit?: In addition to its wide screen and greater clarity (Todd-AO cameras shot at 30 frames per second instead of the usual 24), Todd-AO also employed the widest-angle lens of the era, approximately 150 degrees. These factors made the format ideal for filming grand epics and panoramic vistas. The first Todd-AO release was 1955’s Oklahoma!, but the maximum potential of the format was realized the following year with Around the World in 80 Days. A long in-development project that had yet to come to fruition, Todd used his newly-regained resources- much of which had been earned by his stake in 1952’s This Is Cinerama- to film his adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel on location all around the world, showing off what Todd-AO was truly capable of doing.

For such an ambitious production, it was only fitting that Todd would fill it to the brim with international stars, all the better to draw in moviegoing audiences worldwide. After pairing up-and-coming Hollywood leading man David Niven with popular Mexican entertainer Cantinflas (as Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, respectively), Todd then surrounded them with a galaxy of stars in cameo roles. It seemed like wherever the travelers went, another handful of familiar faces would drop in to greet them, with bit roles for the likes of Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, Charles Coburn, Peter Lorre, George Raft, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, and Edward R. Murrow as the narrator of the film’s introduction. The combination of globetrotting adventure and big stars worked like gangbusters, with the Around the World in 80 Days pulling in $23.1 million dollars- the second-highest gross of 1956 behind The Ten Commandments- and taking home five Oscars including Best Picture.

What happened?: Jules Verne’s novel, written in 1872, was meant to inspire a sense of wonder in its readers. But as is often the case with gee-whiz science fiction, much of the wonder evaporated once the fantasy became reality. By 1956, humanity had long since “conquered the air,” and the notion of circumnavigating the globe in four score days didn’t hold too much magic. So while Around the World in 80 Days offered audiences the irresistible combination of big stars and widescreen vistas, the story was little more than an excuse for a series of misadventures involving Phileas and/or Passepartout rather than the wondrous futuristic spectacle Verne had intended.

In addition, while Michael Anderson was credited as the director, this was without a doubt Mike Todd’s film, something that was discovered early on by the film’s original director, John Farrow. But Todd wouldn’t be around much longer to enjoy his success. In 1958, while flying his unfortunately-monikered plane “The Lucky Liz,” Todd suffered a fatal crash. This negated the possibility of any more ambitious Todd-produced epics, as well as beginning the slow decline of the Todd-AO process, which continued in a more conventional 24fps format through the sixties before dying out altogether.

Does Around the World in 80 Days still work?: Not really. If the film was charming in 1956, it’s merely quaint today. For one thing, the much-ballyhooed international shoot comes across mostly as hype nowadays. To modern audiences’ more sophisticated eyes, the seams in the production really show, as when the film cuts from a sweeping foreign vista to a shot of the stars gazing at it in wonder. Much of the action that actually involves the actors looks like it was filmed on soundstages. This isn’t categorically a problem, but when a movie’s primary selling point is that it was filmed on locations around the world, it feels like something of a cheat when the international shots appear to be second-unit work.

In addition, the principal actors in the film are consistently underwhelming. Watching his work as Phileas Fogg, it’s clear why David Niven never became a superstar- not only does he lack the necessary star presence, but his screen persona isn’t very interesting. Phileas Fogg is clearly meant to be an upper-class eccentric- independently wealthy, time-obsessed yet impulsive. Yet with Niven in the role, we have to take the movie’s word for it as regards his eccentricity, since all he brings to the table is a vague air of urbane sophistication. Perhaps a leading man who was more adept at comedy- Cary Grant, perhaps, or Alec Guinness- could have made the role enjoyable, but with Niven it just sort of sits there.

Similarly, despite his celebrity status south of the border, Cantinflas wasn’t cut out for stardom stateside. He looks fairly uncomfortable acting in English, and his physical schtick isn’t very funny, although Anderson and Todd’s insistence on extreme long shots doesn’t help any. Shirley MacLaine, in one of her first films, is sorely miscast as the Indian maiden Aouda, in keeping with classic Hollywood’s highly uncool tradition of “browning-up” white actors for ethnic parts. And while Around the World in 80 Days popularized the practice of “cameo” roles, they’re almost always distracting. Is that brief flash of recognition that comes over audience members when the piano player turns out to be Frank Sinatra really worth the tedious setup? I would argue that it’s not.

In the end, Around the World in 80 Days hardly seems to warrant the “epic” label that many ascribe to it. Far from justifying the largesse of the production, the film feels like an amusing trifle with some picturesque scenes interspersed in order to make the film feel like an event. With comedy that isn’t especially funny and lead actors who get outshone by both the scenery and the stars in the bit roles, Around the World in 80 Days amounts to little more than a widescreen travelogue- diverting in spots with some pleasant company, but not very interesting cinematically, and not really worth revisiting.

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Peter Sellers, THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU (1980)

Peter Sellers (arguably) got away with heavy lids and mangled diction in his portrayal of the Charlie Chan-esque detective Sidney Wang in Neil Simon’s 1976 murder mystery spoof Murder By Death partly because the performance matched the film’s smart, silly, good-natured tone: Wang was likeable and sophisticated rather than the butt of, y’know, a bunch of sophomoric “wang” jokes, and what racial humor there was tended to satirize Hollywood’s portrayal of Asians more than making fun of actual Asians (“Moose on wall talk!” Wang says at one point, prompting the exasperated response, “THE moose! THE moose! Say your goddamned articles!”). Unfortunately, Sellers’ portrayal of Sax Rohmer’s controversial master criminal Fu Manchu a few years later was nowhere near as smart or successful, featuring brain-dead groaners like the following lyrics to Manchu’s climactic glam rock number (don’t ask): “The cops they tell you I ain’t nice, the Fu knows how to fry the rice.” Making Sellers’ depressingly bad final performance even more ignominious, though, is the fact that, without Fu Manchu, the legendary comedian’s last film would have been the far more fitting career zenith, Being There. (Although, either way, the actor’s reputation still would have suffered the final ignominy of 2004’s bizarrely overpraised HBO hatchet job The Life and Death of Peter Sellers).

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in THE CANNONBALL RUN II (1984)

Neither Frank Sinatra nor Dean Martin was primarily known for his film work, but both made their mark. Sinatra won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity, and Dino won accolades for his role in Rio Bravo. Their Rat Pack movies like Ocean's 11 and Robin and the Seven Hoods were popular successes if not particularly memorable films, but the quasi-Rat Pack flick Some Came Running represents the high-water mark for both ring-a-ding-dingers as actors. If it had ended there, no complaints. Sadly, Burt Reynolds succeeded Frank and Dean as ringleader of the next generation of Rat Packers, and coerced both (along with cohort Sammy Davis, Jr.) into The Cannonball Run II, perhaps the laziest big screen version of Hollywood Squares ever conceived. How lazy? The actual cross-country race was animated by Ralph Bakshi, while Sinatra's scene with Reynolds was clearly shot on two different continents in two different decades. As for Martin's "I'm not really drunk, I'm just pretending to be drunk" performance, let us not even speculate. Both made appearances on TV subsequent to Cannonball II, but cameos on Magnum PI did nothing to rectify this sad cinematic end.

Veronica Lake in FLESH FEAST (1970)

Never a great actress but one of the indelible beauties of '40s Hollywood, Veronica Lake -- she of the blonde peek-a-boo hairdo and world-weary kewpie doll face -- vanished into tabloid infamy and then total obscurity after her peak of wartime fame but managed a small, brief comeback in the late 1960s when nobody was looking. The 1966 Canadian film Footsteps in the Snow was her first movie in fifteen years, and one year later she starred in the mega-low budget horror film Flesh Feast, which wasn't released until 1970, three years before her death. (Presumably it took the producers that long to collect enough change digging under the couch cushions of friends and family members before they had enough saved up to get the film developed.) Lake, her distinctive looks now a fond memory and her acting chops still at the beginners' stage, plays a mad scientist who has developed a youth-restoring technique that involves the application of flesh-eating maggots. The members of the local chapter of the Unrepentant Old Nazis Party employ her to help them regenerate der Fuhrer, little knowing that Dr. Lake lost her family to the Nazis and she is actually looking to have Hitler strapped to her surgical table so that she can give him a good talking-to. The climactic face-off between these two raises the question of whose shame is greater: the once iconic Hollywood star who has sunk to the level of flinging maggots in the face of an actor pretending to be Hitler, or an actor whose career reached its high point when he got maggots flung in his face by a Hollywood has-been?

James Cagney in TERRIBLE JOE MORAN (1984)

James Cagney had been retired from acting for twenty years when he agreed to join the large, distinguished cast of 1981's Ragtime. As New York Police Commissioner Waldo, Cagney looked stumplike and was largely immobile, but he also had the old fire in his eyes to set off his wry half-smile and dandy period mustache, and managed to bark out his lines with gratifying professional force. Plans were made to take advantage of Cagney's new willingness to perform by starring him in a TV movie in which he would play an aging New York boxer. A script was custom-tailored to the old star, clips of the young Cagney (taken from boxing pictures he had made decades earlier) were interwoven to create some nostalgic poignance, and an ace supporting cast (counting solid pro Art Carney and up-and-comers Ellen Barkin and Peter Gallagher, if not local cameo hog Edward I. Koch) were brought in, seduced with the promise of working with a legend. But by the time the film went into production, Cagney's health had declined, to such a degree that he looked miserably pained and unhappy even for a man in a wheelchair. In fact, Cagney was in such bad shape that he couldn't always deliver his lines audibly, so someone had the bright idea of bringing in night club impressionist Rich Little to dub his lines for him. The upshot is that Cagney's "final role" amounts to footage of a dying man being wheeled around the set while listening to someone do his best Jimmy Cagney imitation. Cagney's old co-star Pat O'Brien, who also appeared in Ragtime, reportedly urged the legend to return to acting by telling him, "Do it, Cagney. It's medicine." But Terrible Joe Moran makes you wonder if sometimes the cure isn't worse than the disease.

Click here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Cyd Charisse, 1922--2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Cyd Charisse, nee' Tula Ellice Finklea, has died at 86. With legs on hinges and a face abd figure that, to steal a line from dance critic Raymond Chandler, were enough to make a bishop kick a rock through a stained glass window, Charisse was one of the most spectacular ornaments of Hollywood movie musicals in the 1940s and 1950s. Not the least of her achievements is that she was the performer who most conspicuously played a big role in the careers of both the twin titans of dancing movie stars, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. As a young dancer, Tula Ellice joined the Ballets Russes when she was a teenager and married her dance instructor, Nico Charisse, in 1939. (The union would last eight years and produce a son, Nicky. Her second marriage, in 1948, to actor-singer Tony Martin, would last until her death, sixty years later.) She made her movie debut in the 1943 Something to Shout About, but the real kick-start to her film career came when she first danced with Astaire, in a sequence shot in 1944 for inclusion two years later in the variety feature Ziegfeld Follies. Almost ten years after their first encounter, she played the female lead in Astaire's great 1953 comeback movie The Band Wagon, where they danced together in two big numbers, "Dancing in the Dark" and the Mickey Spillane parody ballet "Girl Hunt." They would later appear together in the 1957 Silk Stockings. She also danced with Kelly in the big climactic number to Singin' in the Rain (1952), and co-starred with him in Brigadoon (1953), and It's Always Fair Weather.(1955). Of their collaborations, Astaire later wrote that when you danced with Charisse, "you stayed danced with."

Charisse also appeared in such musicals as The Harvey Girls with Judy Garland and The Kissing Bandit with Frank Sinatra, and in the musical biopics Words and Music (with Tom Drake and Mickey Rooney as Rodgers and Hart) and Deep in My Heart (starring Jose Ferrer as Sig Romberg). She also took straight dramatic (i.e., non-dancing roles) in films ranging from Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town to the 1978 Warlords of Atlantis, and after her retirement from movies, she sometimes turned up on such TV shows as Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, and Murder, She Wrote. When she "acted", whether it was in the non-musical scenes of The Band Wagon or her services to Jessica Fletcher, Charisse usually seemed not quite there, distracted, and occasionally out to lunch. But the contrast between her usual lack of presence and the voltage she gave off as soon as she started throwing those legs around just made her seem that much more fascinating, as if she were an ordinary mortal who had the ability, when her body heard the music, of communing with strange gods, from the hips down.

Original Vs. Remake: Ocean's Eleven

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the passing of Ol’ Blue Eyes (and the recent timely release of several DVD box sets of his cinematic output), we here at Screengrab decided to have Frank’s original 1960s casino caper and George Clooney’s 2001 remake face off in the ring-a-ding to see which is truly the heavyweight champ of hangin’-out-with-your-famous-pals cinema. Awright, boys...come out swingin’!

DANNY OCEAN

I vividly remember the day when my esteemed Screengrab colleague, Scott Von Doviak, told me I had to drop whatever I was doing and go check out Steven Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight. “You mean the movie with that guy from E.R.?” I replied, incredulous, thinking perhaps I’d misunderstood. "The guy from One Fine Day? Batman & Robin? That guy?” “Yes,” Mr. Von Doviak replied. “I’m afraid we have to start liking George Clooney now.” And, in fact, the statement was prescient, because soon The Cloon had established himself as the Sexiest Man Alive, the Last True Movie Star, the eternal bachelor, the guy with the pot-bellied pig, the sensible humanitarian do-gooder, and the guy my wife has informed me she’d run off with in a heartbeat...and I wouldn’t even blame her, because he’s just that fucking cool. But you know what? He’s still not as cool as Frank Sinatra in 1960. Advantage: Original.

THE ELEVEN

Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck, Carl Reiner, Bernie Mac...these are all fairly cool people. Sammy and Dino? They're so cool I don’t even need to mention their last names (though I suppose it’s a toss-up whether Joey Bishop is cooler than Scott Caan or vice-versa). The big problem is that no matter how cool Sammy and Dino are, and as well as they wear suits and swill cocktails, they’re part of a gang that just doesn’t have many good scenes, good lines, or all that much to do. Advantage: Remake.

THE DAME

Not that she had all that much to work with in an underwritten role, but the best part of Julia Robert’s performance (as the art curator at the Bellagio?) is the meta gag of “introducing” her in the credits like a dewy fresh unknown. Angie Dickinson doesn’t fare much better, despite an arguably better wardrobe, and this category would probably be a draw if not for the mitigating factor of Shirley Maclaine’s great cameo as “Tipsy Girl” in the original, giving what noted Rat Packologist John Mitchell calls “the only actual performance in the movie,” cementing her as “any reasonable drunk’s pin-up girl.” Advantage: Original.

THE HEIST

The original scores big points for its highball concept, cooked up by five writers, including Billy Wilder(!). Meanwhile, by plotting a heist where Sammy Davis, Jr.’s character masquerades as a tap-dancing garbage man, the film either criticizes 1960s racism or embodies it (depending who you ask). But the heist in the remake (scripted by Ted Griffin) is faster paced, requires more costumes and gadgets, and wraps up with a nice, lyrical moment by the Bellagio’s dancing waters (as opposed to the original’s surprisingly downbeat buzzkill pall of failure and mortality). Advantage: Remake.

THE SCORE

Even without the groovy remix of Elvis Presley’s lost classic “A Little Less Conversation,” the soundtrack to the 2001 edition of Ocean’s is worth a listen for the space age bachelor pad rhythms of David Holmes’ swingin’ retro score and classic cuts from Perry Como, Percy Faith, Quincy Jones and Claude DeBussy. But the original featured Sammy’s aforementioned sanitation song and dance “Ee-O-Leven” and Dean Martin performing a vibe-tastic version of “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head”...and you really can’t argue with vibes. Advantage: Original

THE SEQUELS

This one is pretty close to a draw, but Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen were marginally less dreadful than the original’s quasi-sequels Sergeants 3, 4 For Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods, so... Advantage: Remake.

And thus, in a tight race between style and substance, the winner is...REMAKE!

(Coming up next: the dueling Dawns of the Dead!)

Remake vs. Original: Kong vs. Kong vs. Kong

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

After marveling at the remarkably rendered 1930s New York of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, I got a mad craving to go back and revisit my first Kong...not the 1933 classic, but the 1976 version I saw as part of a long-ago birthday field trip, sitting uncomfortably close to my grandmother while naked Skull Island native boobies bounced gloriously on one of the big, wide screens of the late, lamented Westgate Cinema in beautiful, balmy Brockton, Massachusetts.

Even more recently, my wife rented the original as part of her own private ongoing Netflix survey course of film history, allowing me to compare all three apes in a cinematic steel cage match. Which film is The King of Kong? Let’s check the scorecard!

THE BEAST:

It’s the eternal question: stop-motion, CGI or a guy in a monkey suit? The original Kong was groundbreaking and iconic. Peter Jackson’s ape was fearsome and expressive and goofed around on an icy pond. And, as Dino De Laurentiis promised vis-à-vis his bicentennial version: “When Jaws dies, nobody cries. When Kong dies, they all cry.” To be honest, this race is too close to call, so I’ll go with the chimp that started it all. Advantage: Original.

THE BEAUTY:

Jessica Lange, God bless her, is automatically disqualified for playing a character named “Dwan.” Naomi Watts delivered a charming, well-rounded performance as Ann Darrow, generating about a hundred times more chemistry with her simian co-star than she did with Sean Penn in 21 Grams. But as good as she was, Dr. Frank-N-Furter didn’t sing about Naomi Watts in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He sang about the one-and-only iconic Fay Wray. Advantage: Original.

THE HERO:

A little Adrian Brody goes a long way for me, and I don’t remember much about Bruce Cabot’s performance as Jack Driscoll in the original (other than it was perfectly fine). But, c’mon...Jeff Bridges on Skull Island in a crazy Amish beard? The Dude abides. Advantage: 1976.

THE SHOWMAN:

Jack Black gave a fine, relatively understated performance as Carl Denham in the 2005 version, and Robert Armstrong totally owns the classic line, “It was beauty killed the beast.” But I have to say I’m partial to Charles Grodin’s oilman turned showman for providing the classic Kong story with a truly hissable villain...plus he’s the only one who gets squashed by a giant ape foot. Advantage: 1976.

SKULL ISLAND:

The 1976 version featured the aforementioned naked breastices, and Kong’s battle with the dinosaurs in Peter Jackson’s remake was insanely exciting, but the original directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack achieved the same level of wonder and excitement with a quarter of the technology. Bonus points for Noble Johnson’s portrayal of the Skull Island chief, the only truly dignified, humane and memorable “native” character in any version of Kong. Advantage: Original.

THE SHOWDOWN:

Kong’s original battle with the biplanes atop the Empire State Building is classic movie magic, and Kong’s battle with helicopters on and around the Twin Towers now sadly packs an emotional wallop it didn’t originally possess, but I could have spent hours drinking in Peter Jackson’s obsessively detailed CGI New York, even without the breathtaking action in the foreground. Advantage: 2005.

And so, after tallying the votes, the winner is...ORIGINAL!

Stay tuned for next week’s exciting Original vs. Remake smackdown (in honor of the release of The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector's Edition DVD box set): Sinatra's Eleven vs. Clooney's Eleven!

DVD Digest for May 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: two new Criterion DVDs, the comeback effort of a master filmmaker, and the Chairman of the Board all compete for your DVD dollar. Who will win? Why, DVD buyers, of course!

DVD of the Week: For sheer comprehensiveness, nothing can touch Warner’s 22-film, 5-box-set tribute to the one and only Frank Sinatra. For all of Sinatra’s success as a recording artist, he was also a talented actor, given the right role, and this week sees the release of a number of his finest films. Among these are his Oscar-nominated performance in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, both of which are included in the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set. But if you prefer Sinatra the fresh-faced young crooner, check out Frank Sinatra: The Early Years, which includes such early-career titles as Step Lively, It Happened in Brooklyn, and The Kissing Bandit. Or see Sinatra match his pipes with Gene Kelly’s nimble feet in The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, comprised of the classic musicals On the Town, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Anchors Aweigh. And if special features are your thing, there’s always The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector’s Edition, which finds the Chairman at his least inspired vehicles but leaves plenty of room for gawking at swingin’ celebrities of yore. Heck, Warner is even releasing 1993’s miniseries Sinatra on DVD this week, in case you want your Sinatra without all that Sinatra. All that’s missing is Sinatra’s two most acclaimed films, The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity. But I’m guessing you already own those, right?

As previously mentioned, this week also brings the release of two brand-spankin' new Criterions, Louis Malle’s The Lovers and The Fire Within. Also of note in classics on DVD: The Big Trail: Fox Grandeur Special Edition; the Godard double-feature of La Chinoise (Kino) and Le Gai Savoir; a new edition of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (Fox); Saturday Night Live: The Complete Third Season (Universal); and the Fox Western Classics Collection, which includes the new-to-DVD titles Garden of Evil, Rawhide, and The Gunfighter. And in shameless cash-in news, this week brings new DVDs of all three Indiana Jones films, with a few added extra features so that buyers won’t feel completely ripped off.

In more recent films, today brings the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony, also Blu-Ray), his first official directorial effort in a decade. The film was generally regarded as a critical and popular disaster, but I found it fascinating- flawed to be sure, but intriguingly so- and I believe it’ll finally be appreciated for what it is on DVD. Also this week: Diane Lane in Untraceable (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Diane Keaton, Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah in Mad Money (Anchor Bay); and the French horror film Frontier(s) (Lionsgate). The other major new release this week is the DVD debut of The Animation Show 3 (Paramount), last year’s touring program of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. The DVD includes Hertzfeldt’s latest masterpiece Everything will be OK, as well as sixteen other shorts, some of which have been added especially for the DVD release.

This week’s Blu-Ray only releases are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Fox); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Fox); Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox); and just in time for this weekend’s new blockbuster, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which brings me to this week’s Huddleston corner, in which we sigh over the lonely release of Warner’s One Missed Call on HD-DVD. I mean really, guys- you’re just kidding around now, right?

Abby Mann, 1927 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Abby Mann has died at the age of 83. For many years there, Mann symbolized Serious, Hard-Hitting screenwriting on Moral Issues inspired by Contemporary Themes. Like his doppelganger, Paddy Chayefsky, Mann attracted attention for his work on such "golden age of television" shows as and Studio One., where his seriousness of intent and hard-hitting tone made it clear that he would be a natural collaborator for the director-producer Stanley Kramer. Kramer brought Mann into movies, where he won an Academy Award for his first screenplay, for 1961's Judgement at Nuremburg, and followed that up by adapting Katherine Anne Porter's novel Ship of Fools for Kramer. He also wrote A Child Is Waiting, produced by Kramer and directed by John Cassavettes; Vittorio De Sica's The Condemned of Altona; and the Frank Sinatra vehicle The Detective. By the end of the 1970s, his and Kramer's brand of speechifying topical melodrama was actually more in demand in TV than in movies, and Mann gravitated back to the small screen; he inadvertently created the hit cop show Kojak and made Telly Savalas a star by writing The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a 1971 TV-movie based on an actual case of police injustice, with Savalas's "Kojak" as the muckraking hero; in 1978, he had his sole fling as a director by filming his script for the 1978 miniseries King, starring Paul Winfield as the civil rights leader. That program stirred up controversy for speculating on a conspiracy behind King's assassination, much as his 1985 script for The Atlanta Child Murders was criticized for implying that the black man convicted for the crimes, Wayne Williams, was a patsy for a mysterious white killer, or killers. His last filmed scripts were for the HBO films Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story (1992), Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995), and Whitewash: The Clarence Bradley Story.

Yesterday's Hits: The Bells of St. Mary's (1945, Leo McCarey)

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

After last week’s review of Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du Péché, I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a nun-themed post every week. I’ve since reconsidered, but the truth is that there are quite a few memorable nun movies. Just think- a When Good Directors Go Bad on Neil Jordan’s We’re No Angels, a Movie Moment column on the rose-scourging scene in the Japanese nunsploitation classic School of the Holy Beast, a comparison piece on the wimple-worthiness of Anna Karina and Audrey Hepburn- the list goes on, even before the nuns go on the run. It’s hard to talk about nun movies without The Bells of St. Mary’s quickly coming up, so with the Easter season upon us I decided to revisit Leo McCarey’s 1945 film.

What made The Bells of St. Mary’s a hit?: 1944 saw the release of Going My Way, which introduced audiences to Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley character. Audiences quickly fell in love with Father O’Malley, a young priest who kindly ministers to the poor with a smile and a song. Crosby- and O’Malley- won over both audiences and Oscar voters, with Going My Way proving to be both the biggest hit of 1944 and the year’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Actor (Crosby), and Best Supporting Actor (Barry Fitzgerald), among others. Based on this success, it was almost inevitable that a sequel would be a hit.

But what really put The Bells of St. Mary’s over the top was the presence of Ingrid Bergman. Bergman, who was already a popular and Oscar-winning leading lady, was best known at the time as a serious actress, playing dramatic roles in Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Gaslight. The Bells of St. Mary’s gave her the opportunity to play a somewhat more lighthearted role, as the devout Sister Benedict. Even audiences who hadn’t seen Going My Way turned out for the unlikely yet intriguing Crosby-and-Bergman matchup, and The Bells of St. Mary’s is widely believed to be the first sequel ever to outgross the original film.

What happened?: The Bells of St. Mary’s had few pretensions other than to make war-weary audiences feel good for a couple of hours. A movie this featherweight was practically fated to see a fade in its popularity, especially compared to the more lavish color musicals and spectacles of the fifties. In addition, both of the film’s stars saw their box-office heat wane. Bergman’s slide came first, following the controversy over her affair with Roberto Rossellini, hardly the best way to endear yourself to Bells’ core audience. Bing held out longer, drawing in crowds well into the fifties, but his appeal to younger audiences was shrinking as they embraced younger performers like Frank Sinatra. By the time rock’n’roll hit the scene, Bing felt like a relic to them.

Does The Bells of St. Mary’s still work?: Not really. Watching the film again, the two words that kept springing to mind were “quaint” and “cornball.” The Bells of St. Mary’s is so committed to making the audience feel good- whether it’s through gentle laughter or easy tears- that the film never has any edge to it. At the beginning of the film, O’Malley is warned about the strong-willed nuns, but aside from a few heated discussions over how the school is run, little becomes of this. Likewise, the episodic nature of the story isn’t a problem, except that all of the subplots are resolved in the easiest and most predictable way possible.

Consider the story of Horace P. Bogardus (Henry Travers), the rich man and city bigwig who is erecting an office building next to St. Mary’s. Bogardus, like so many other rich men in movies, only seems to think about money, while the nuns pray in the hope that he’ll turn over the building to them to use as their new school. So O’Malley does a little scheming, and after Bogardus falls ill, the nuns’ prayers are answered, with Bogardus requiring surprisingly little convincing to make a gift of his not-inexpensive new property. This wouldn’t be so bad except that every subplot in the film is resolved in much the same way.

In addition, the film’s characterizations are almost distractingly thin. O’Malley doesn’t play any notes that he hadn’t already played in Going My Way, and none of the supporting characters show any real depth. Most disappointing is Sister Benedict- the film sets her up as a formidable rival to O’Malley, but none of this pans out. Instead, she becomes practically saintly, as she sticks to her principles, has Job-like patience with her students, and prays for Mr. Bogardus. Even when she does something questionable, such as teaching a picked-on boy how to box, she does so for all of the right reasons. It’s a shame, since as Bergman plays the character it’s easy to imagine how, with only a few script changes, Sister Benedict might have been interesting and multi-dimensional, rather than the sanctimonious cipher we see in The Bells of St. Mary’s.

But then, when you’ve got a valuable property, why rock the boat? Even the film’s most potentially divisive element- its setting in a Roman Catholic Church and school- is portrayed in the most sanitized way imaginable. This is understandable, as in the year before Vatican II and President Kennedy there was some suspicion among non-Catholics about Catholic tradition. However, aside from a few throwaway lines (like the bit about a kid named Luther- “how’d he get in here?”) and the presence of priests and nuns, there’s little actual Catholicism on display here. Heck, many of the ads for the film didn’t even show its stars in their clerical garb, so clearly the religious issue wasn’t a very big one for the film and its studio.

In many ways, The Bells of St. Mary’s is an ideal example of a movie that is a hit in its day but hasn’t stood the test of time. While there’s nothing edgy or controversial that would have incurred the ire of 1945 audiences, it always offers nothing that’s especially interesting to moviewatchers in 2008. But then, how many of today’s hits will we be able to say the same about sixty years from now?

Grumbling About Mumbling: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Other Mushmouths

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ever since Frank Sinatra christened Marlon Brando "Mumbles" on the set of Guys and Dolls, inarticulate and incomprehensible speech has been a mainstay of American cinema, particularly among Method actors. David Jenkins of The Guardian has had enough, and it's Philip Seymour Hoffman who has pushed him to the breaking point.

Jenkins' snippy piece begins: "So there they are, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney, emoting like nobody's business after they've buried the woman who was, respectively, their mother and their wife, in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. There's a silence, and then Hoffman speaks — whereupon Finney slaps him. It's clearly a crucial moment, this explosion of violence, but I've yet to talk to anyone who could hear what Hoffman actually said."

Jenkins goes on to bemoan the mushmouthed stylings of the cast of Charlie Wilson's War (including Hoffman again), Miami Vice (with non-American Colin Farrell cited as a prime offender) and even There Will Be Blood. (He lets the Coens off the hook, noting critic Anne Billson's explanation for the clarity of speech in No Country for Old Men: "The Coen brothers are famously proud of their dialogue, so they make sure you can hear it."

The piece traces screen mumbling back to Brando, of course, but also pins some of the blame on Robert Altman for his trademark overlapping dialogue. It's a little hard to believe that nearly forty years after MASH critics and filmmakers could still be uptight about Altman's brilliant cacophonies, but Sexy Beast producer Hercules Bellville agrees. "I've got no problems with 1940s films; then only Peter Lorre had a strange accent. Now there are all sorts of odd accents and dialects, and the colloquial is often rapid and slurred. But technically, there's no reason for it."

These guys are way too uptight; after all, it's not as if American audiences have never had trouble deciphering British speech, and you don't hear us complaining. To quote Benicio Del Toro in The Usual Suspects, "Gbaughg thfllwoogha schwfjflhaw."

Take Five: Assassination!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Ever since a November afternoon in 1963, a man in a high place with a rifle and a head full of malice directed at the President of the United States has arguably been our most persistent national nightmare. And from Abraham Lincoln's assassination by one of the nation's best-known actors to the appropriately ham-handed attempt on the life of the ineffectual Gerald Ford by a Manson Family hanger-on, the murder of famous politicians has absorbed our national attention in the news, so why shouldn't it equally influence the kind of movies we watch? Pete Travis' Vantage Point opens across the country this weekend; early buzz has it that the movie, about the assassination of someone pretending to be the president, is all style and little substance, wasting its interesting cast on a movie filled with jump-cuts and car chases. The assassination of a political leader, more often than not (especially in recent big-budget actioners like Shooter), is just a McGuffin to carry us to the punch-outs and crashes. Still, there have been a number of movies in which the killing of a high-profile politician has driven the plot with highly engaging results; today in Take Five, we'll look at a few of the best.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

One of the first post-Kennedy assassination films, John Frankenheimer's best film was actually released before that fatal day in Dallas; but its theatrical run was unluckily ill-timed with the events of November 22nd, 1963. It was pulled from release and remained unavailable for decades until Frank Sinatra, who played the movie's protagonist, personally intervened to help get it back into production in the VHS era. It was a generous decision: the original Manchurian Candidate remains a masterwork of suspense and intrigue, with a towering performance by Laurence Harvey as the doomed assassin of a presidential candidate. The movie's stunning fantasy sequences, bittersweet moments of drama and romance, constant air of paranoid menace, and final bloody ending make it an assassination classic.

NASHVILLE (1975)

It's easy to forget that Robert Altman's sprawling, brilliant evocation of the Great American Movie revolves not around the country music industry, but the assassination of a political aspirant. Hal Phillip Walker is the unnerving, straight-talking and possibly deranged populist running for president as a political caucus convenes in Tennessee, and if we can see the assassin (played as an enigmatic cipher by David Hayward) coming a mile away, we are at least allowed the final shock in his choice of targets. In the end, as Walker's ominous black limos swarm around and speed him to safety and away from the body of beloved country star Barbara Jean, the schmaltz-peddling Haven Hamilton shows a surprising degree of grace under fire, intoning the charged lines "This isn't Dallas, it's Nashville! They can't do this to us here in Nashville! Let's show them what we're made of."

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Widely condemned upon its release for allegedly glorifying vigilante justice, Martin Scorsese's masterpiece in fact does something entirely more subtle. Travis Bickle is the perfect psychological profile of a crazed assassin: alone, isolated, alienated, a military veteran with a gun fetish and a desire to be something -- anything -- to someone. The scenes where he stalks the presidential candidate Charles Palatine (like Hal Phillip Walker, a somewhat mysterious populist) are highly influenced by the life of Arthur Bremer, are a terrible portent -- but our expectations are short-circuited when Bickle misses his chance, and a potential monster becomes a local hero simply by changing his choice of targets. Bizarrely, the performance eventually helped inspire John Hinckley when he shot Ronald Reagan four years later.

MALCOLM X (1992)

Spike Lee's epic biopic nicely answers a tricky question: how do you make the story of an important historical figure suspenseful and compelling when you already know what's going to happen to him in the end? It helps that Malcolm X -- played perfectly here by Denzel Washington in perhaps his finest hour as an actor -- had an endlessly compelling life story even before the hail of gunshots that ended his life. Lee likewise makes a difference by letting his opinions about the circumstances of Malcolm's death be clearly known and telegraphing the final moments with a deluge of high-pitched emotional moments, but never letting the entire thing slide into self-parody or triteness. Not only a terrific story about a squalid and unnecessary political killing, but also one of Hollywood's finest biopics.

MUNICH (2005)

Stephen Spielberg still doesn't seem to know how to make a movie without screwing it up somehow, and the sad truth is that Munich's ridiculously over-the-top sex scene just about sinks it; filmgoers and critics seem to be able to talk about little else. It's too bad, because you take that monstrous aberration away, and what you've got is a compelling and effective little psychological thriller. Spielberg has never been the most subtle filmmaker in the world, and there's no way he's not going to let you leave the theatre without being beaten over the head with the movie's central thesis that there's not much moral or psychological difference between the men who assassinate innocent people in the name of a cause and the men who assassinate the assassins, but the movie is still expertly done and well worth seeing as long as you close your eyes when Eric Bana takes his clothes off.

Forgotten Films: "The Oscar" (1966)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The dreamers and the schemers...the hustlers and the hopefuls...the free-loaders and the phonies...the fakers and the famous...all fighting for the highest possible award! — tag line for The Oscar

It is not yet known just what kind of Academy Awards ceremony we're going to have this year if the writers' strike continues to complicate Hollywood's efforts to switch on the glitz. It could be said that in its long, star-studded history, the Academy hasn't really done all that much for the art of the motion picture, but it did inspire one of the all-time classic surreal trash movies, that one in a gazillion that justifies the often-misused and overtolerant phrase, "so bad it's good." The Oscar may not deserve to actually be called "good" in any sense, but it is a classic, if it's possible to be a classic among shitbombs.

It's certainly been a classic source of embarrassment for a great many famous people, some of them talented. With at least one of them, "talented" is barely an adequate word: this film marks the movie debut — no one who has seen it ever calls it his "acting debut" — of Tony Bennett, the man Frank Sinatra called "the best singer in the business." Bennett is also a famously nice guy, which is why this movie does not come up in his interviews; it would have been like an interviewer saying to Sinatra, "So, sport, what's it feel like to have screwed things up with Ava Gardner?", except that, with Bennett, it would have been the star, rather than the interviewer, who wound up broken and weeping. Bennett doesn't play a man who lusts for the Oscar — that role falls to Stephen Boyd, an actor who was put on this Earth for the single purpose of making Kirk Douglas look subtle. Boyd plays Frankie Fane, a fast-rising hotshot actor who tears a swath of destruction through the people in his life as he charges to the top. No friend or agent commands his loyalty. No woman strikes him as undumpable — this is a guy who's looking for a chance to trade up when he's with Elke Sommer! Bennett plays the one friend who tries hardest to stick by him, a groveling shmuck named Hymie Kelly. Hymie's decent nature prevents him from doing the world a favor by running Frankie over with his car, but he does let loose with his true feelings in voice-over soliloquy.

The notorious opening of the movie finds him sitting in the audience at the Oscars presentation, waiting to hear Frankie's name called, and setting the audience up for the deluge of flashbacks that will bring the us up to speed, by gargling these lines: "You finally made it, Frankie! Oscar night! And here you sit, on top of a glass mountain called "success." You're one of the chosen five, and the whole town's holding its breath to see who won it. It's been quite a climb, hasn't it, Frankie? Down at the bottom, scuffling for dimes in those smokers, all the way to the top. Magic Hollywood! Ever think about it? I do, friend Frankie, I do..." This, it will turn out, represents the movie's style of dialogue at its mildest and most naturalistic. Bennett, who has spun such magic with the words provided to him by Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn, and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, here had the chance to work with a real peach: Harlan Ellison. The movie's script is credited to Ellison, Russel Rouse (who directed it), and Clarence Greene (who produced), and Ellison's penchant for dialogue that's so florid it's borderline lurid — pulp poetry with a touch of hepcat — is much in evidence. (Hymie tells us that, "Like a junkie shooting pure quicksilver into his veins, Frankie got turned on by the wildest narcotic known to man: success! The parts got bigger and bigger, and Frankie got hungrier and hungrier." When Frankie is tired of being judged, he protests, "Will you stop beating on my ears! I've had it up to here with all this bring-down!")

The story the movie the tells and the movie itself actually have much the same punchline: Frankie, who's burned so many people that it's begun to hurt his career, gets the Oscar nomination, and its potential to provide him with a comeback, because he's been cast as "a man without morals," a role in which he can hardly help but be convincing, and the movie, which promises to rip the lid off Hollywood unreality, is itself a prime specimen of it. Beloved among a select set of aficionados of unintentional comedy, The Oscar is criminally unavailable on DVD, which might be a hint that, even after more than forty years, not everyone out there appreciates the joke. But somebody must hold the broadcast rights. If the WGA shuts down the Oscars telecast, whichever TV network is holding the bag ought to move heaven and earth to get ahold of The Oscar and show it instead. They'd be doing the Lord's work.

Johnny Grant, 1923 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Johnny Grant died last week, at the age of 84. A living reminder of Old Hollywood, Grant, who in his later years resembled Mickey Rooney's good twin, achieved fame in the 1940s as a radio newscaster and disc jockey. In 1952, when he was at station WINS in New York City, Grant, with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, co-hosted the first ever nationally broadcast telethon, for which the country forgives him. (The goal was to raise money to send American athletes to the Olympics.) Grant also served an U.S.O. ambassador, joining Hope on many of his tours to entertain G.I.s in various war zones. And he appeared in several movies, including White Christmas, The Girl Can't Help It, and Beau James (starring Hope as New York's party-hearty Mayor Jimmy Walker), usually as an anonymous announcer, reporter, or master of ceremonies. But his defining moment came in 1980 when he was made Honorary Mayor of Hollywood. In that capacity, he was on hand to induct more than 500 worthies into the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Grant, who didn't want a funeral, reportedly left behind the request that his ashes be scattered beneath the Hollywood sign.

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.