The Screengrab : the singing detective

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

6. DR. EUDORA NESBITT FLETCHER (MIA FARROW) in ZELIG (1983)

For much of his film career, Woody Allen usually showed his full intensity when he applied himself to two kinds of scenes: those dealing with his search for the perfect woman, and those dealing with his search for the perfect therapist. He reached an apex of some sort in the parody documentary Zelig, where Allen's human-chameleon character finds the perfect woman in his psychiatrist, who helps him deal with his condition, and even rescues him from Nazi Germany. This paragon, who eventually marries her patient and lives happily ever after with him in wedded bliss, is of course played by Mia Farrow, who at the time was auditioning for the role of the director's idea of the perfect woman in real life.

7. DR. SIDNEY SCHAEFER (JAMES COBURN) in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

Dr. Schaefer is the embodiment of the hip shrink in the swinging '60s era, a strutting, phallic super-intellectual who is the psychiatrist as member of the Best and the Brightest. Lured away from his hepcat bachelor pad, he is brought into the halls of Washington power to serve his country as best he can--by giving the President of the United States someone to unburden himself to. Unfortunately, Dr. Schaefer grows increasingly paranoid as the president shares more and more secrets of his office with him in the course of his treatment. Even worse, it turns out that he's not paranoid at all: foreign powers are out to abduct him to find out what he knows, and government agents are ordered to assassinate him so that he won't be a potential threat. In the end, Schaefer endears himself to the smartest of the American agents (Godfrey Cambridge) and Russians (Severn Darden) on his trail by helping them deal with their neuroses, and together they bring down the ultimate threat, a sinister, monopolistic telephone company.

8. DR. ROBERT ELLIOTT (MICHAEL CAINE) in DRESSED TO KILL (1980)

In what's widely acknowledged to be the lamest and most interminable scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, psychiatrist Simon Oakland helpfully explains Norman Bates' split personality by positing that whenever Norman was aroused by a woman, the Mother side of his personality would take over and kill the object of his lust. Leave it to apt Hitchcock pupil Brian De Palma to turn this already perverse idea on its ear in his most Psycho-like film, Dressed to Kill. The pitch: "what if Norman Bates and Simon Oakland were really the same person?!?!?" By day, Dr. Robert Elliott is a psychiatrist catering mostly to bored Manhattanites. Dr. Elliott's couch-side manner is sound, somewhat distant but always professional, even when the occasional patient comes on to him. But all is not right in Dr. Elliott's life- he keeps getting menacing calls from a former patient named Bobbi, by his/her own admission "a woman trapped in a man's body." And what's happened to the doctor's straight razor? In case you hadn't guessed, Bobbi is Dr. Elliott, and vice versa, and like Norman Bates, the Bobbi personality takes over whenever Dr. Elliott gets turned on, like when hot-to-trot patient Angie Dickinson comes on to him. He deals with the situation by stalking her as she enjoys a hot afternoon with an anonymous pickup and knifing her to death in an elevator. Dr. Louis Judd would be regard the outcome as a welcome victory for his side.

9. DR. SIGMUND FREUD (ALAN ARKIN) in THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION (1976)

Herbert Ross’ appealing adaptation of Nicholas Meyer’s winning novel is chock-full of tall orders in the casting department. Ross scored big right off the bat by getting Nicol Williamson to play the role of the world’s greatest detective in his revisionist Sherlock Holmes yarn, and followed it up by getting heavy hitters like Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave to round out the cast. But who would he feature as Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology and the rogue physician to whom Holmes appeals to cure his insidious addiction to cocaine? Would you believe. . . Alan Arkin? And would you further believe that Arkin is damn near the best thing about the movie? It would have been easy enough to play his hand as one of the most towering cultural figures of the 20th century entirely as a goof, delivering some variant of his then-current New York sharpie persona. But instead, he’s downright charming, underplaying the man from Vienna nicely, which allows his interactions with the histrionically intense Williamson as Holmes to become wondrous little bits of acting. The movie’s plot is a bit woozy, but Arkin – who, twenty years later, would play a somewhat less adventurous shrink in Grosse Pointe Blank – is still a delight.

10. [TIE]: DR. STIRLING (ANNE HECHE) in PROZAC NATION (2001) and DR. GIBBON (MEL GIBSON) in THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003)

To tell the truth, these are both terrible movies — Prozac Nation didn't even get released theatrically — and neither of these characters is especially notable. But we just get a kick out of the fact that somebody thought it would be a good idea to cast these particular actors as mental health professionals.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.

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.