The Screengrab : rod steiger

When Good Directors Go Bad: Waterloo (1970, Sergei Bondarchuk)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the great cinematic epics, none is bigger than Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace. Simply put, everything about the film is massive- its budget (upwards of $100 million in 1960s dollars), its production schedule (nearly five years), its cast (tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers were used as extras in the battle sequences), even its running time of nearly eight hours. Yet War and Peace would merely be a footnote in movie history if its largesse was its only notable quality. Reviews of the day praised it not only for its epic scope and impeccable production values but also for its emotional sensitivity and human drama. Even today, War and Peace remains a masterpiece of its kind, and the rare adaptation of a great novel that does justice to its classic source material. For this not insignificant miracle, credit should be given not only to the Soviet film industry but also to Bondarchuk's sure-footed direction.

After the international acclaim for War and Peace, Bondarchuk decided to make a film about The Battle of Waterloo. For most filmmakers, this would have seemed a hugely ambitious project, but compared to War and Peace, a seemingly modest one for Bondarchuk. In order to bring the project to the screen, Bondarchuk received financial backing from Italian super-producer Dino De Laurentiis, and together they enlisted several well-known actors, led by Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington. In addition, the film's $25 million budget afforded Bondarchuk the chance to re-create the battle on the same scale as the wartime sequences in War and Peace. But despite these factors, Waterloo was a disappointment both with critics and with audiences, garnering mostly middling reviews and making back less than one-fifth of its original budget, and sending its once-hot director back to the USSR for the rest of his career.

After Waterloo flopped big-time at the box office, De Laurentiis chalked its failure up to the lack of big-money stars in the cast. But while it's tempting to wonder what sort of Napoleon could be played by De Laurentiis' first choice Richard Burton, I'd say that Steiger did just fine with the role. This is especially true in the character's more grandiose moments- Steiger was always a magnificent ham, and Napoleon gave him a chance to cut loose in some entertaining ways that livened up the film. And for his part, Plummer did a capable job as the arrogant upper-class general Wellington.

Likewise, I'd say the battle sequences are as spectacular as advertised. As in War and Peace, the sight of thousands upon thousands of actual humans on the battlefield is still impressive, and still impossible to duplicate with CGI. In order for the sheer magnitude to achieve its intended effect, Bondarchuk films most of the battle in long shots, the better to comprehend the narrative of the battle itself. I also liked Bondarchuk's use of "God's eye" shots at several times in the battle, especially when the English Army forms itself into tight squares to fight off the advancing French cavalry. Had Bondarchuk tried to make a tactics-heavy recreation of the battle a la Cy Endfield's Zulu, Waterloo might have been a classic.

As it stands, the film is a missed opportunity, primarily because he and screenwriter H.A.L. Craig simply can't find a way to successfully integrate his principal characters into the battle. One of the triumphs of War and Peace was that Bondarchuk made us care about the people who were fighting the battle. But rather than exploring the lives of some of the soldiers in any kind of depth, Bondarchuk concentrates his narrative on Wellington and Napoleon and the differences in their approaches to war. This contrast is fairly interesting early on, but once the battle begins the tactic stops working. After all, it's hard to care about two men who essentially stand back and watch as thousands of men march to their deaths.

Today, any notoriety Waterloo may have comes mostly from the rumor that its disappointing box office performance led to production being shut down on Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon. But whether or not this is the case, the bile this idea summons up in some cinephiles is somewhat unfair. After all, hugely expensive epics were on their way out, and besides, Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead, so it's not like his career took much of a hit. Taken on its own terms, Waterloo ultimately doesn't work, but there are dazzling sequences that demonstrate what a gifted filmmaker Bondarchuk was, and it's a shame that more of his work isn't available in the U.S. I guess seeing him “go bad” on such a grand scale has made me want to see him make good again.

Yesterday's Hits: The Longest Day (1962, Andrew Marton, Ken Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki)

Paul Clark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Longest Day a hit?: In 1962, World War II was still fresh in the minds of the American people, most of whom were alive when it was being fought. In the intervening years, movies about the war became popular, but seventeen years after the war was over, super-producer Darryl F. Zanuck decided the time was right to make the biggest war movie of all, focusing on one of the turning points of the war- D-Day. Zanuck called upon Cornelius Ryan to adapt his exhaustive book, which approached the battle through many different perspectives, from the top brass on both sides to the men on the ground, and Zanuck even went so far as to have the French and German soldiers speak their own languages for the film rather than having everyone speak English.

In addition, Zanuck enlisted an impressive cast- one that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Roddy McDowell, Curt Jürgens, Jean-Louis Barrault, Red Buttons, and an up-and-comer named Sean Connery- to help him pay tribute to the men who fought and died to help turn the tide for the Allied forces. It worked, and The Longest Day became one of the biggest hits of 1962, grossing almost $40 million domestically, trailing only another pair of super-productions- How the West Was Won and Lawrence of Arabia- at the yearly box office.

What happened?: While the American people saw World War II as both a military and a moral victory, the country was soon to enter into a conflict that wasn’t nearly so simple- Vietnam. As our involvement in Vietnam dragged on for years with no victory in sight, both the soldiers and the people at home were souring on the idea of war, especially as images of various atrocities began showing up on television. After Vietnam, war meant something very different to many Americans than it did after World War II, and the war movies that came out of Hollywood reflected this. The morality of these movies became more complex, with less cut-and-dried heroism and more characters questioning the validity of war. This coincided with the fall of the Production Code, and consequently battle scenes became much bloodier and more chaotic. 1998 brought the most violent mainstream war movie of all, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, whose brutal take on D-Day quickly replaced The Longest Day’s comparatively tame recreation of the battle in the minds of most moviegoers.

Does The Longest Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Having been raised on violent, gritty anti-war movies, I expected a star-studded classically-styled movie about Normandy to come off as quaint. But it actually holds up pretty well. Much of this has to do with how its story is told- instead of re-creating the battle from one perspective, we see it from many angles- the Allied generals who planned it, the Germans who didn’t quite anticipate it going down like this, the paratroopers who were dropped inland, the men on the beach, the Resistance fighters, even the residents of the surrounding towns. Because of this, The Longest Day becomes less about morality than it does about tactics and strategy- hardly a contemporary approach to the war movie, but a compelling one nonetheless.

Even the star-studded cast worked better for me than I’d anticipated. Often, casting so many stars can be distracting, with the familiar faces taking the audience right out of the action. But here it’s almost necessary to keep all of the different plot strands straight. It helps that most of the big names are playing officers, so we can remember that Mitchum is leading the boys on Omaha Beach, Fonda heading the charge on Utah, Wayne commanding the paratroopers, and so on. Wayne’s presence is key here- he never fought in World War II himself, but he appeared in so many war movies both during and after the war that he fit the Hollywood mold of a soldier more than most of the stars who actually did fight.

One could make a similar claim for The Longest Day- it didn’t exactly look like war, but the classical Hollywood image of what war ought to look like. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of changing times. At one point in his career, Zanuck famously quipped, “There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic.” The Longest Day fudged a number of details about D-Day (for example, a key battle takes place at an abandoned casino that hadn’t even been built yet in real life), but from a dramatic standpoint it works. And although it doesn’t correspond to our contemporary idea of what a war movie should be, it’s fascinating as an example of what was once the prevailing popular view of war, from a time when it was easier for us to feel that way.

John Phillip Law, 1937--2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:00:00 GMT

John Phillip Law has died at the age of 70. Six foot five with blond hair, blue eyes and finely crafted features, Law worked in New York theater in the early 1960s before breaking into Hollywood films as the romantic juvenile in Norman Jewison's 1966 comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. He would go on to appear in two megaton bombs directed by Otto Preminger, the Southern gothic Hurry Sundown the acid-testing comedy Skidoo, in which he played a hippie. That project turned out to be harbinger of the career to come, as was this quote from an interview Law gave in 1966: "I've had more kicks out of playing far-out things. It's like putting on a funny face and going out in front of people and going, 'yaaaaaa.' " He was about to have plenty of opportunities to put on his funny faces. In 1968, in one of his highest-profile roles, he appeared opposite Jane Fonda in Barbarella (1968), playing a blind but well-hung angel and wearing enormous, tacky-looking wings. He also starred in a failed 1971 film version of the Jacqueline Susann pulp bestseller The Love Machine and had the honor of being kissed on the lips by Rod Steiger in The Sergeant (1968). In 1974, he donned a turban to star in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, one of the better later showcases for the stop-motion special effects of Ray Harryhausen.

Although he slipped far down from the A-list in Hollywood, Law kept working, on TV, in oddball low-budget genre films such as Night Train to Terror, and often in Europe, where he made such films as the 1967 spaghetti Western Death Rides a Horse with Lee Van Cleef. In recent years, he began to acquire a new fan base among new filmgoers who saw him as a key figure in the 1960s international cinema of the weird. (In 2001, Roman Coppola honored him as a living memento of that era by casting him in his directorial debut, CQ.) One movie that made a cult comeback through that particular pipeline is Diabolik (sometimes called Danger: Diabolik), a 1967 sci-fi comic-strip caper directed by Mario Bava, starring Law as a space-age super-cat burglar; it served as the inspiration for a Beastie Boys video (see below) and was the last film shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Law, a dedicated actor who was almost equally famous for his dedication to the Playboy mansion, could scarcely have asked for a more appropriate, and affectionate, tribute.

The Spirit of '67

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Pictures at a Revolution, a new book by Entertainment Weekly staffer Mark Harris, zeroes in on a signal moment in popular culture — 1967, a time when the old Hollywood studios were losing their grip on mass taste and hip young American filmmakers were beginning to be influenced by the European New Wave directors — by examining the making of each of the five films nominated for that year's Academy Award for Best Picture. The list consists of In the Heat of the Night, the eventual winner, and the four also-rans, Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Dr. Dolittle. The films themselves go a long way towards making Harris's point that Hollywood was cracking apart at the time from confusion, internal conflict, and dry rot; it's hard to believe that they were all made in the same year, let alone that an industry would have chosen all of them to point to with pride as the best of which they were capable.

The ones that seem most clearly of their time are Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate. The latter was a crowd-pleasing zeitgeist movie, a time-stamped movie of the moment, but Bonnie & Clyde was a genuinely revolutionary film at the time — the writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, had originally hoped to attract Francois Truffaut to direct — and a certified classic. It was also a movie that, had it won the Oscar, would have set off a chain of massive coronaries through three-quarters of the executive suites in Hollywood. As for In the Heat of the Night, it was recently re-issued on a new DVD, which set off a fresh round of condescending notices pointing up its flaws. It is in fact an entertaining little murder melodrama with a number of strong virtues — notably the dazzling cinematographer by Haskell Wexler and Rod Steiger's Oscar-winning performance — but it is the kind of movie that was overrated in its day and is now fated to be underrated, as punishment for being a good movie that won an award that should have gone to a great movie. It looks even better if compared to the other big racial-tolerance message movie, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which is where most of the dry rot settled.

In its general outlines, this will be familiar territory to many readers of film books; the Bonnie & Clyde story has been especially thoroughly covered already, but even the ringer, the expensive and unwatchable Dr. Dolittle, has already been dealt with at some length in a well-known book: John Gregory Dunne's 1969 The Studio, a first-hand journalistic account of how thoroughly that movie's tortured production bollixed Twentieth-Century Fox at the time. But Harris is a good writer and has managed to wring fresh material from such interview subjects as Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Towne, and Buck Henry, while plugging the gaps with well-chosen insights drawn from such sources as Sidney Poitier's memoirs. Overblown title and all, Harris's book is a fascinating, five-sided snapshot of a remarkable moment in movie history.