The Screengrab : tennessee williams

Pat Hingle, 1924 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Pat Hingle, who died this past weekend at the age of 84, was one of the most familiar and dependable of all American character actors, over the course of a career in film, TV, and the stage that spanned some fifty years. Born in Denver, Colorado, he served in the navy during World War II and studied acting at the University of Texas. In the first several years of his career, Hingle appeared in the Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (as Gooper, father to the no-neck monsters), Archibald Macleish's J.B. (in the title role), and William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (for which he received a Tony nomination). He also made his movie debut (not counting an uncredited small role in On the Waterfront) in the 1957 Method melodrama End as a Man (A.K.A. The Strange One, based on a play that he had also appeared in. Hingle was offered the title role in the 1960 Elmer Gantry, but before the film started shooting, he suffered a horrendous accident, falling more than fifty feet down an elevator shaft. He was laid up for more than a year recovering from his injuries, which included a fractured skull, his left leg broken in three places, and the loss of a finger. Elmer went ahead with Burt Lancaster , who won an Academy Award for it. Hingle maintained a good-natured attitude towards the whole thing: ""I know that if I had played Elmer Gantry, I would have been more of a movie name. But I'm sure I would not have done as many plays as I've done. I had exactly the kind of career I had hoped for. And I never, never forget that I'm the recipient of the blessing that is life. It was given to me to try again."

Hingle returned to work looking older, gruffer, squatter, and craggier: an easy casting call for authority figures at a time when those roles often meant dads who don't understand their kids (as in Splendor in the Grass, where he played the father of Warren Beatty, who was all of fourteen years his junior) or cops who were either crooked or self-righteously brutal or both. He appeared with Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High, The Gauntlet, and Sudden Impact, played Sally Field's father in Norma Rae, starred in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller's The Price, and did an unholy shitload TV, notably playing Colonel Tom Parker to Kurt Russell's Elvis Presley in John Carpenter's 1979 Elvis and Sam Rayburn to Randy Quaid's Lyndon Johnson in the 1987 LBJ: The Early Years.

Unlike a lot of actors who work that much, Hingle has the distinction of having continued to get better, tapping into deeper veins of regret and exposing a streak of wry humor as he started to get almost as old as his characters. Reviewing the 1985 The Falcon and the Snowman, in which he played the hardass FBI-agent father of Timothy Hutton, Pauline Kael wrote, "It's a role Hingle has played dozens of times --he's a pop-culture joke in this role--but I doubt if he has ever done it as well." Five years later, he went to town in perhaps his best movie role, the terrifying cracker crime lord Bobo Justus in Stephen Frears's Jim Thompson adaptation The Grifters, giving Anjelica Huston the shivers and making it seem as if all the secrets to the universe might be contained in the line, "You'll never shit right again." He also played Commissioner Gordon in the 1989 Batman, a role that he would reprise in three other movies, playing it alongside a total of three different different--Batmans? Batmen? Whatever. More recently, he played Ben Franklin in a late-'90s revival of the Broadway musical 1776 and turned up in the movies A Thousand Acres, Muppets from Space, Shaft, and Talladega Nights. He died at his home in Carolina Beach, North Carolina, where he decided to settle after working there shooting the 1986 Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King's directing debut. ""I really do believe there was a divine hand that headed me here," he had told a local reporter.. "I am happy that I think it's going to end here."

Summerfest '08: "The Endless Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

We've featured a lot of different types of movies here at the Screengrab during our excting Summerfest '08 feature, in which we endeavour to review a movie a week with the word "summer" in the title that you can watch while you're putting off trying on your new bikini. We've featured Summer School, a movie that has made people inappropriately nostalgic for the 1980s; we've featured Summer of Sam, a movie in which it is revealed that Satan speaks through us in the voice of dogs, and sounds an amazing amount like John Tuturro; and we've featured Suddenly Last Summer, a movie in which a homosexual predator and his pimp sister wreak havoc on a small European town before he is eaten by the townsfolk. No, really. We've featured not one, but two movies starring Freddie Prinze, Jr., which, believe me, was just as painful for me as it was for you. But while many of these films have inspired us to do a wide variety of things -- become nostalgic for the sight of Kirstie Alley in a bathing suit; go back in time and put Tennessee Williams on anti-depressants; avoid watching any future films starring Freddie Prinze, Jr. -- none of them have actually inspired us to get up off our duffs, get out of the house, and do something other than watch movies all summer. But that changes today as we take a look at the greatest surfing documentary ever made.

So grab your board, hop in your woodie, and join us on a search for the perfect wave as we enjoy The Endless Summer!

THE ACTION: Mike Hynson and Robert August are surfers. That's what they do: surf. Bruce Brown, who wrote and directed the movie, is a filmmaker, but he's a surfer too. Surfers are an uncomplicated lot, and they really want nothing more than to bum around all day waiting for the best wave they can possibly get, and then they want to get out there and shoot that son of a bitch for all it's worth. That's essentially all that happens in this movie: Hynson and August trek from one end of Africa to another, then to Australia, the South Pacific, and anywhere else they can possibly get to, just looking for a really good curl. Brown follows them, training his 16mm camera at them for some blurry nature shots and some absolutely gorgeous filmwork out on the water. The two engage in wacky hijinks, doing very little to dispel the notion that surfers are overgrown, doofy man-children, and Brown provides amiable frat-boy narration, often meandering and nonsensical, to cover the silence of the action scenes (most of the shots had no soundman and hence, no sound). Then they trudge off in search of another wave, and when they find one, they ride it until they just can't ride it no more. That's it, in its entirety: 90 minute of three goofy guys bumming around the globe looking for waves to ride. It's exactly that bad -- and that great.

THE PLAYERS: Hynson and August -- both real surfers who play themselves in this engaging mash-up of sports documentary and home movie travelogue -- are nearly indistiguishable: loopy fellas interested in their sport, soaking up some local color, and not much else. There's probably two of them for no better reason than that it takes some of the pressure off of Brown's narration. Brown himself -- a protege of Bud Browne (no relation), the legendary founder of the surf film genre, who died earlier this summer -- comes across as a strong advocate of the kind of pseudo-mystical dudesmanship that would spring up around surfing following the success of this 1966 film and the simultaneous monster success of the Beach Boys. The novelty of the interaction between the three men comes from a sort of primitive jus'-folks exoticism: the coasts of Africa and beaches of Australia where they spend most of their time in the film were, at the time, largely unknown and unvisited by Americans, and held a hint of the mysterious. By today's standards, Brown would offend by saying he wasn't sure if African tribesmen wanted to surf with them or eat them, but the observation is delivered in such a guileless way you can't hold it against him. The movie also features a cameo appearance by a ex-pro wrestler/surfer named Lord "Tally-Ho" Blears, and you know there ain't nothin' wrong with that.

SUMMER FUN: Are you kidding? In case you missed it earlier, this movie is a documentary about three goofball surfers who wander around creation, riding the waves, scoping out the native honeys, and sipping rum-based cocktails with former professional wrestlers. No matter what you're doing this summer, you wish you were doing this instead. There's rarely been a summer movie -- let alone a documentary -- that makes you want to sell your car, quit your job and change your lifestyle as much as The Endless Summer does. Hell, I don't even like surfing, and I was on the internet pricing boards by the time it ended.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Generally speaking, there is more Hawaiian shirtlessness in The Endless Summer than there is Hawaiian shirtiness, but don't despair: there's plenty of luau loungewear in evidence, including a good bit of it on display during an actual stopover in Hawaii. If you've ever wondered exactly what mood the typical fat party guy is trying to conjure when he dons his favorite Hawaiian shirt, this movie is it.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: While there's some bikini action in The Endless Summer, there's not nearly as much as you might expect. Frankly, as loath as I am to admit it, this represents a certain integrity on the part of the filmmakers; Hynson, August and Brown are dedicated to the art and craft of surfing, and the incidental opportunity it offers to take a gander at beach bunnies is strictly an element of chance. You have to respect that sort of demented focus. So, despite a saddening lack of bikini party time in a film set almost entirely on the beach, I highly recommend The Endless Summer as a palliative to however you've been wasting your life since Memorial Day.

Summerfest '08: Summer School

Summerfest '08: "Suddenly Last Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Last week on Summerfest '08, we brought you a ripe slice of faux-Tennessee Williams by way of William Faulkner, with the overheated 1958 steamer The Long Hot Summer. This week, we're cutting out the middleman and bringing you actual Tennessee Williams -- or as actual as Tennessee Williams could get given the restrictive studio censorship of the 1950s -- with Suddenly Last Summer. As if reacting to a thrown-down gauntlet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a year after The Long Hot Summer debuted, said "Oh yeah? We'll just see about that!", and brought in an even more dysfunctional cast to film an even more flowery tale of sexual repression with an even more transparently, and yet never explicitly, gay subtext than Hollywood was previously willing to put up with. If you think all this sublimated gayness, sweaty sexuality, and boiled-over Freudianism is pretty heavy water for a frivolous feature about movies with the word 'summer' in the title to carry, well, blame Hollywood, not us -- apparently there's something about the months from May to September that gets producers and directors all moist and lascivious. If someone out there has access to a university press, there's probably a good thesis floating around about why, exactly, "summer blockbuster" has transitioned in meaning these last few decades from "steamy romance about forbidden love" to "movie with lots of CGI where stuff gets blown all to shit". It probably says something profound about our culture, unless it doesn't.

Anyway, let's get on with the latest forbidden fruit in our cinematic basket: crack open some cognac, find yourself a nice Mediterranean beach on which to lounge, and join us for a viewing of Suddenly Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Catherine Holley (played by a luscious-looking Liz Taylor) has just returned from Europe, where she has gone all wiggy. Apparently, while she was visiting, her cousin Sebastian, played by nobody because we never see him, was killed under mysterious circumstances, and the whole thing was just too, too unpleasant and caused Catherine to have a nervous breakdown. Once she starts to recover, she makes cryptic but extremely disturbing comments about Sebastian's demise, which rubs his mom (played by Katherine Hepburn as the wonderfully named Mrs. Violet Venable) the wrong way. Violet insists that Sebastian was a very nice young man and a deeply sensitive artist and that's all there is to that, and when Catherine insists that there was something peculiar about the lad, she is instructed to shut her yapper or have it shut for her, in the person of professional psychiatrist and lobotomy practitioner Montgomery Clift. Eventually the truth comes out, or as much of the truth as the producers were allowed to show at the time: Sebastian was murdered by his neighbors for his predatory sexual practices, and Catherine -- like Violet before her -- was being used by the nefarious fellow as his procurer. (In fact, what is only hinted at in the movie is made explicit in the play: Sebastian was a pederast at worst and a seducer of young men at best, who was not only killed by his neighbors, but eaten by them as well. Creepy!)

THE PLAYERS: As if the plot of the movie, with its pedophilia, murder, pimping, lobotomies and cannibalism wasn't a big enough bummer, apparently the behind-the-scenes action was soaked in bad vibes as well. Pretty much everyone involved in the production of Suddenly Last Summer hated each other with a capital H: Katherine Hepburn hated Elizabeth Taylor for stealing her spotlight. Elizabeth Taylor hated Joseph L. Manckiewicz for mistreating her friend Monty Clift. Manckiewicz hated Clift for his alcoholism, bad behavior and unprofessional demeanor. Producer Sam Spiegel hated Montgomery Clift because he was gay. And the screenplay was co-written by Gore Vidal, who basically hates everyone on general principles. Clift had been in a horrible car accident on his way to Taylor's home before filming began, and the treatment he received (and dished out) on the set helped send him into a downward spiral from which he would never recover; and Taylor, on the end of a prolonged stretch as America's sweetheart, gained a reputation for difficulty during the filming of Suddenly Last Summer that would dog her throughout the 1960s and beyond.

SUMMER FUN: There's less fun going on here than in any film we've yet reviewed as part of Summerfest '08. Even Ingmar Bergman comes across as a good-time party happenin' kind of dude compared to the dour demeanours and permanent trauma expressed on screen in this bummer in the summer. Between Sebastian getting eaten by his neighbor and Liz and Kate being posthumously unmasked as gay pimps, no one is particularly enjoying themselves in this movie, not even the normally impish Gore Vidal. The one guy who has something to do in the movie other than feel sorry for himself is the psychiatrist played by Montgomery Clift, who if nothing else has the golden opportunity to run a couple of million volts through Liz Taylor's thinkbox, but even that doesn't seem to get him very excited.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Folks, this movie stars Montgomery Clift as a brain specialist. He ain't wearing no Hawaiian shirts. We never get to see Sebastian, but it's a pretty fair bet he would prefer to have been killed and eaten to wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Albert "Dr. Cyclops" Dekker, who in perfect keeping with the tone of the film was a closeted homosexual who died of autoerotic asphyxiation with hypodermic needles jutting out of his arms and curse words written on his body, appears in Suddenly Last Summer, and while he might conceivably owned a Hawaiian shirt, he's certainly not wearing one here. Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams likely never touched a Hawaiian shirt in their entire lives. This is possibly the least Hawaiian-shirt-friendly summer movie ever made.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Although the film is set in the 1930s, the fashions are all contemporary to when it was made, in 1959. And that's good, if for no other reason than it allows us to take a gander at the lovely Liz Taylor bedecked in a white bikini when seeing Liz Taylor in a bikini was still a very desirable thing. Of course, there isn't much of it -- the movie was made from a stage play, and almost all of the action still takes place indoors -- and she isn't exactly having a party in her bikini as she is sitting around feeling suicidal and blathering on and on about how her gay cousin was killed and eaten by teenagers. Still, in a movie as relentlessly bleak as Suddenly Last Summer, you take what you can get. Party on!

Summerfest '08: "The Long Hot Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT

When we started Summerfest '08 a few weeks ago, our goals were simple: identify a handful of movies with the word 'summer' in the title; figure out which ones were worth popping on to your DVD player while waiting for your watermelon to fully saturate with vodka; make a couple of snotty comments about them; and carry on with the knowledge that we have helped keep you cool for a few hours. This week's picture, though, falls rather short of that final goal. Whether you're watching it from a hammock in your backyard or a clean, sleek love seat in the basement, 1958's The Long Hot Summer won't cool you down. It'll make you hot: hot like a sweaty southern summer. Hot like a repressed debutante. Hot like Paul Newman in an undershirt before his face became synonymous with upscale salad dressings and organic Orio knockoffs. Reading (and with good reason) like a bizarre mash-up of Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, The Long Hot Summer lives up to its name like no movie before or sense, and if you weren't sweating before you started watching it, you will be afterwards. Hell, you don't even have to watch it -- although we don't know why anyone would deny themselves the pleasure of watching Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick looking like wilted hothouse flowers, all you have to do is listen to the overblown hotbox noir dialogue in this picture to positively swoon from the torridness of it all.

So mop your face with a handkerchief, push your hat back on your head, order up a tall mint julep, and get ready for The Long Hot Summer.

THE ACTION: In what is, surprisingly, not the beginning of a porn movie, a young stud named Ben Quick hitches a ride into a town called Frenchman's Bend, in rural Mississippi. Ben has a reputation for barn-burning, which is the sort of thing people did for kicks back then while waitig for a new farmgirl to seduce. Most people are none too happy to see Ben come to town -- most especially Clara and Eula Varner, played by Woodward and Remick, but town patriarch Will Varner sees a youthful reflection of himself in the sweaty hothead. He also sees a number of qualities lacking in his son Jody (Tony Franciosa), who, this being the 1950s and all, the movie is not allowed to say is a homosexual. Gaudy, sexually charged patter ensues. Eventually, everyone in town erupts in an explosion of damp clothing and meaningful looks, and the barns of Frenchman's Bend will never be the same again.

THE PLAYERS: The Long Hot Summer is directed by Martin Ritt, a longtime Hollywood pro who directed dozens of pretty decent movies without ever having developed much of a reputation for anything other than reliability. He does have to his credit the fact that, according to Hollywood legend, during filming of this movie, he became the only person to get the notoriously implacable Orson Welles to behave by driving the great man out to the middle of the Louisiana swamp and threatening to abandon him there if he didn't shape up and start making nice. While the movie is based on three short stories by William Faulkner ("Spotted Horses", "The Hamlet", and "Barn Burning"), it's written in high noir style by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, a duo mostly noted for their work in westerns, and plays like Tennessee Willliams if he liked girls as much as he liked decadence. The entire cast, including a shockingly smokin' Angela Lansbury as Welles' mistress, absolutely swelters in the crushing heat.

SUMMER FUN: No one goes to the beach, but everyone's having fun, if you know what we mean. Volleyball is likewise in short supply, but Newman's Ben Quick seems to be having a great time trying to decide which of the two innocent flowers of southern maidenhood he's going to trample into the dust first. Orson Welles is a holy terror in this movie, overacting like there's no tomorrow and no doubt making everyone else on the set wish that Ritt had shot him a few times before dumping him in the swamp; but he seems to be having a good time despite the fact that it was so hot during filming that the big honking prosthetic nose he wore as Will Varner kept falling off of his face. The only person who isn't having any fun (at least until the movie's tacked-on happy ending) is the relentlessly abused Tony Franciosa. who everybody else yells at.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: It was once a fashion truism that the south was always ten years late on picking up any new fashions, and this was certainly true at the time; while denizens of the West Coast had been rocking jazzy Aloha shirts just after WWII, in the Louisiana of The Long Hot Summer, it was the kind of garment that only someone like Tony Franciosa would wear, if you get catch the drift. Newman, however, permanently etched himself in the libidos of America's women by parading around in nothing but a fedora, an undershirt and a few strategically placed sweat stains, and Orson Welles was kind enought to refrain from sporting a fat-guy Hawaiian until his Muppet-era films. The kind of fun being had in this movie was far too nasty and naughty to lend itself to the cheap signifier of Nylon with Polynesian patterns.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Sadly -- almost unforgivably, given that this is a movie that contains not only a young Joanne Woodward but Lee Remick as well -- there are no bilkinis to be found anywhere in The Long Hot Summer. However, that's understandable; with no cooling sea breezes on their way from the humid Gulf Coast, they probably wouldn't have been all that comfortable; and with a guy like Ben Quick (which one hopes merely describes his method of seduction and not its end result) around, bikinis would probably just get in your way. In the end, the movie is a bit overripe, far too determined to be Tennessee Williams with too little Valium, and not as deep as it should be given the Faulkner pedigree. But it's hot as hell in that partcular southern-Gothic way, it's reasonably well-acted, and it's got enough snappy dialogue to choke Orson Welles. Of whom Newman says: "I respect him. I admire his manners and I admire the speeches he makes and I admire the big house he lives in. But if you're saving it all for him honey, you've got your account in the wrong bank". Now that's hot.

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.

Take Five: Filmic Youth

Peter Smith — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Many years ago, a friend of mine coined the term "The Coppola Line". An artistic equivalent of baseball's Mendoza Line (the .200 batting average below which a hitter is considered detrimental to his team despite any defensive abilities he might possess), the Coppola Line was the point at which someone's bad work outweighed the value of his good work. If you made six good movies and five bad ones, you were above the Coppola Line; if you recorded three good albums and four bad ones, you were below it. It was named, of course, for Francis Ford Coppola, the man who best epitomized this dreadful ratio, who made some of the finest films in American cinema in the 1970s before cranking out dud after dud in the 1980s and 1990s. With his eagerly anticipated movie, Youth Without Youth — releasing this Friday — he hopes to become the first filmmaker named Coppola to rise back above the Coppola Line after sinking below it. The motion picture business, only slightly less a youth-centered industry than the music biz, has always been obsessed with youth, so if Youth Without Youth turns out to be another stinker, here are some 'youth movies' that will help make up for it.

ASSASSIN OF YOUTH (1937)

Lest you think that anti-drug hysteria is a relatively recent development in American culture, look back to this grade-Z production from the Depression, when apparently people didn't have anything to worry about other than the notion that smoking the devil weed might turn their children into murderous zombies. Starring a cast of no-names in roles so flat they can't even be called caricature, Assassin of Youth can still be enjoyed on an ironic level, preferably while stoned: it's the kind of raving, no-budget hackwork that makes Reefer Madness look like an even-handed documentary.

SPIRIT OF YOUTH (1938)

Widely considered one of the greatest boxers of all time, Joe "The Brown Bomber" Louis only appeared in one film, which should clue you in that he wasn't quite as gifted as an actor. Still, there're a few reasons to recommend this film, which was meant to be a loose parallel of his fighting career and was released during his second year as reigning heavyweight champion. Louis has no chops talking in front of the camera, but he's grace in motion when he gets the chance to fight, and the movie is one of the few where Mantan Moreland is given the opportunity to show some actual acting skills and not just behave as a comic stereotype. The DVD release of Spirit of Youth can be seen all over America, unlike the movie's theatrical release — it was not shown in many Southern theaters for fear that the audience would become enraged at the sight of a black fighter defeating white opponents.

NO REGRETS FOR MY YOUTH (1946)

An early film from Akira Kurosawa, this one is known as Waga seishun ni kuinashi at home, but in any language, it's a prime building block in what would become one of the greatest careers in cinema. The story of a college professor who is removed from his post for opposing the war against China, No Regrets for My Youth is one of the first Japanese films to speak out openly against the fascist regime that took power in the 1930s — and that's not the only taboo it breaks, as it deals, as openly as possible given the time and place of its making, with homosexuality. As if all that's not enough to tempt you to hunt down the DVD, it also features a character nicknamed "The Poisoned Strawberry".

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)

Hollywood generally didn't know how to handle Tennessee Williams. Much of the sexuality (especially homosexuality) in his plays had to be removed or toned down to placate the censors of the time, and unless handled just right, his florid dialogue, so powerful on stage, could come off as campy on screen. Writer/director Richard Brooks did a pretty decent job in this adaptation, abetted by a great cast that included a young, handsome Paul Newman as a zooted-out drifter, Geraldine Page (light-years removed from her later dowdy-matron roles) as a sex kitten, and Ed Begley and Rip Torn gnawing on the scenery as a powerful southern lawman and his jealous son.

YOUTH OF THE BEAST (1963)

Seijun Suzuki's Yaju no seishun (usually translated as Youth of the Beast) is one of his finest slices of deranged yakuza action — and as such, it's one of the movies that helped get him blackballed from the industry for decades. Like most of his films, it's a demented ball of non-stop energy, filled with fantastic eye candy, crazily giddy performances (especially an all-time classic role from Jo Shishido as the relentless young gangster of the title), and stylistically sexualized violence. Recently released in a jam-packed Criterion Collection edition, Youth of the Beast is living proof of why the Japanese film industry couldn't figure out what do do with Suzuki for the longest time.

— Leonard Pierce