The Screengrab : the asphalt jungle

James Whitmore, 1921 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

James Whitmore, who died of lung cancer at the age of 87 at his Malibu home last week, was the Mr. Flinty of American character actors. Compact, bushy-browed, and shovel-faced, he had the look and manner of an economy-size Spencer Tracy. Whitmore won a Tony for his Broadway debut in the 1947 World War II play Command Decision. Entering movies two years later, he won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his Hollywood debut, the World War II drama Battleground. (He got the part after it was rejected by, yes, Spencer Tracy.) He would go on to play a hunchback small-time crook in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), provide narration for Huston's butchered Stephen Crane adaptation The Red Badge of Courage (1951), sing Cole Porter in Kiss Me Kate (1954), go down fighting against the attack of the giant ants in Them! (1954), preside over the monkey assembly in Planet of the Apes (1968), serve as the corrupt chief inspector of the N.Y.P.D. in Madigan (1968), and witness the bombing of Pearl Harbor as General Halsey in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). In more recent years, he appeared in The Majestic (2001), The Relic (1997), and most notably, The Shawshank Redemption (1994), as the elderly prison librarian who can't cut it on the outside. He also did a lot of TV, including an especially sharp 1986 PBS production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons with Aidan Quinn and Joan Allen. He also won an Emmy Award in 2000 for a guest appearance on The Practice.

Whitmore also has a special place in recent theatrical history as a major popularizer of the historical-figure-based one man show. He started out with a stage show called Will Rogers' USA, where he made with the lasso and the familiar wisecracks, which was recorded for TV in 1972; he later moved on to Harry Truman with Give 'Em Hell, Harry, which was made into a 1975 movie version that earned him another Academy Award nomination. Three years later he filmed his tribute to Teddy Roosevelt, Bully! These things had their folksy charm in their day, and Whitmore is not to be blamed for the fact that after he'd had some success with them, it seemed as if every paid-up member of the Stage Actors Guild was climbing onstage in some period costume with a copy of Bartlett's Quotations tucked under one arm. (In 1986, he provided the voice of the title character of the Will Vinton Studios Claymation feature The Adventures of Mark Twain, thus muscling in on Hal Holbrook's racket.) He was married four times to three different women, including the actress Audra Lindley and his wife at the time of his death, Noreen Nash. He was married to his first wife, Nancy Mygatt, from 1947 to 1971, and remarried to her from 1979 to 1981. They had three sons, including James Whitmore III has directed for TV and acted in TV (The Rockford Files, Baa Baa Black Sheep) and movies (The Long Riders) under the name James Whitmore, Jr.

National Film Registry's 25 Picks for 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The Library of Congress has announced its annual selections of the twenty-five films chosen to be added to those included in the National Film Registry, on the basis of their "cultural, historic, or aesthetic significance." (They've been doing this for nineteen years now; this year's inductees bring the total up to a neat 500.) As usual, the list features a number of Hollywood classics, including John Huston's caper film The Asphalt Jungle (1950); John Boorman's modern Southern Gothic Deliverance (1972); Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, one of the earliest indictments of the potential rabble-rousing power of television; Erich Von Stroheim's silent feature Foolish Wives (1922); King Vidor's 1929 Hallelujah, an early sound musical with an all-black cast, and the 1961 Broadway musical adaptation Flower Drum Song, an early break away from the tradition of casting Caucasian performers in Asian roles; James Whale's Universal horror classic The Invisible Man (1933), starring the voice of Claude Rains; Nicholas Ray's febrile Western Johnny Guitar (1954); the 1957 On the Bowery, an attempt to fuse documentary locations and non-professional actors in a story of skid row alcoholics; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), an adventure film featuring some of the best work of the special effects master Ray Harryhausen; and the obscure sci-fi B-movie,The Terminator (1984). There are also films that document moments in the careers of legendary performers, such as the 1926 W. C. Fields short So's Your Old Man and the early Buster Keaton two-reeler One Week, and such historical curios as Disneyland Dream (1956), a color home movie of a family trip to Disneyland that provides "a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956"; three year's worth of documentary footage that George Stevens shot during World War II; and a film directed by the late James Blue for the United States Information Agency documenting the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Also included are experiemental and student films such as Len Lye's "scratch" film Free Radicals (1979), Mitchell Block's 1973 No Lies, and Pat O'Neill's "city symphont", Water and Power, which dates from 1989--the first year that the National Registry began to make its selections.

The full list is as follows:

1. The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

2. Deliverance (1972)

3. Disneyland Dream (1956)

4. A Face in the Crowd (1957)

5. Flower Drum Song (1961)

6. Foolish Wives (1922)

7. Free Radicals (1979)

8. Hallelujah (1929)

9. In Cold Blood (1967)

10. The Invisible Man (1933)

11. Johnny Guitar (1954)

12. The Killers (1946)

13. The March (1964)

14. No Lies (1973)

15. On the Bowery (1957)

16. One Week (1920)

17. The Pawnbroker (1965)

18. The Perils of Pauline (1914)

19. Sergeant York (1941)

20. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

21. So’s Your Old Man (1926)

22. George Stevens WW2 Footage (1943-46)

23. The Terminator (1984)

24. Water and Power (1989)

25. White Fawn’s Devotion (1910)

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

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