The Screengrab : yesterday's hits

Yesterday's Hits: The Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

When I first hit upon the idea for Yesterday’s Hits about a year and a half ago, the idea was to look at movies that were extremely popular when they were first released, but which might not have maintained this popularity to the present day. In looking at movies that haven’t necessarily stood the test of time, I hoped to gain some anthropological insight into what audiences of the past responded to, both stylistically and ideologically. And while some of the movies I’ve selected have held up pretty well (and some even better than that), some of the more interesting cases have been the ones that haven’t, for various reasons. In some cases, the popularity of these films have been due to their employing some then-impressive technical breakthrough, while others were very much of their time, featherweight entertainments that simply weren’t built to last.

But ever since I began writing this column, one movie has remained at the back of my mind- D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Generally acknowledged as the first blockbuster in movie history, Birth of a Nation was the film that cemented the commercial viability of the feature-length release, grossing more than $10 million in 1915 dollars, which translates to roughly $200 million today. In addition, the techniques employed by Griffith and his crew were groundbreaking in their day, and exerted a profound influence on cinema that continues even today. Yet despite its influence in film history, Birth is usually condemned for its borderline hateful views on African-Americans and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s this combination of the film’s runaway popularity and its troubling, dated ideology that makes it an ideal subject for a Yesterday’s Hits column.

So what was it about Birth of a Nation that so excited audiences back in the teens? Based on a recent viewing of the film, I’m tempted to say that many audience members simply hadn’t seen a movie this big before. In the first few decades of cinema, the dominant mode of filmmaking was in short subjects, which dramatized small-scale stories over the course of twenty minutes or so. By contrast, Birth of a Nation ran upwards of three hours long. In addition, the scale of its story was big enough to encompass the Civil War (both the Union and Confederate sides), the assassination of President Lincoln, and difficult process of Reconstruction. In 1915, this was a story that was still fresh in the minds of many Americans, and they were no doubt eager to see it “brought to life” on the screen.

Today, after nearly a century of advances in filmmaking technology, the expansiveness of Birth of a Nation is no longer impressive. Yet it’s interesting to observe many of the conventions of contemporary Hollywood cinema in their embryonic form here. The most obvious example of this is Griffith’s use of cross-cutting between different storylines that run concurrently. Today, cross-cutting can be found in the vast majority of films both big and small, but at the time it was practically revolutionary, and it’s sort of amazing to see how closely Griffith’s version of the technique resembles its current form. Birth of a Nation should be taught in every film program as a textbook example of how to use cross-cutting to not only keep several plotlines going simultaneously but also to play them off each other to increase the audience’s level of excitement.

And I have no doubt that it would be if not for the film’s much-ballyhooed reputation of racism, which I must report is completely justified. For much of the film’s first half, this isn’t an issue, as Griffith concentrates primarily on the Civil War, and of the two families- the northern Stonemans and the southern Camerons- whose fates are inextricably linked throughout the story. But once the North wins the war all hell breaks loose, as the newly re-United States is very nearly reduced to a shambles by the Reconstruction process. In the film’s view (and presumably, that of Thomas Dixon’s novel as well), Reconstruction was a period in which opportunistic northern politicians who wanted to punish the south for seceding, and the newly-freed slaves who wanted to stick it to their former masters, nearly ruined this country. And the only thing that prevented them from doing so were the righteous members of the Ku Klux Klan, who brought our country back together by putting the "coloreds" back in their place.

Now, there’s a forgiving part of me that wants to believe that the audiences of the day were so bowled over by Griffith’s filmmaking that they could scarcely be expected to pay attention to the odious racism that runs through the story. But the hard truth is that racism didn’t magically disappear with the passage of amendments thirteen through fifteen, and was still prevalent at the time of Birth of a Nation’s release. What makes the film’s imagery especially alarming is the way it fans the flames of hatred towards African-Americans. Throughout the film, Griffith shows us African-Americans who are stupid, lazy, gluttonous, underhanded, sneaky, and violent- in short, “sub-human”. One of the many glaring examples of this is in the scene depicting the South Carolina Senate, full of freed slaves who prop their bare feet up on the desks, gobble down food in the middle of giving speeches, and use their newly-acquired to enact a law permitting interracial marriage. The most hateful ones of all in Griffith’s eyes are the “mulattos,” who combine the intelligence and cunning of whites with the craziness of “blacks.”

The first half of the film is riveting (it could play as a great Civil War melodrama on its own), while the bald-faced racism of the film’s second half is jaw-dropping But what the two halves have in common is Griffith’s filmmaking sense, even in the wrongheaded later sequences. This makes these scenes all the more disturbing, as the ideas are so mind-boggling yet sold so well, that it’s little wonder that Birth was banned in a number of areas for fear of inciting race-related violence- or that KKK membership increased dramatically in the years following the film’s release.

There’s a famous, possibly apocryphal story that after seeing Birth of a Nation, President Woodrow Wilson declared that, “it’s like writing history with lightning.” This is something of a two-pronged statement, simultaneously praising the power of Griffith’s images and expressing fear at the influence that these particularly images might have over audiences. Today, the majority of Americans no longer hold the same kind of racism that informs Birth of a Nation, but it’s illustrative to remember that nearly a century has passed since its release, and to consider how few of today’s blockbusters will be able to withstand this same level of scrutiny a century from now. If nothing else, to consider Birth of a Nation today is to reflect on, in the words of Haven Hamilton, “how far we’ve come along ‘til now/ how far we’ve got to go.”

Yesterday's Hits: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy)

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

With this week’s release of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, I thought the time was right to look back at an earlier big-screen installment of the franchise. But which one? Despite the enduring popularity of the Star Trek brand, few of the Trek movies could be classified as blockbusters. Even The Wrath of Khan, the current fan favorite among the original-cast adventures, only grossed a fairly unremarkable $78 million domestically. As of earlier this week, the biggest hit out of the Trek movies is the series’ fourth entry, 1986’s The Voyage Home, which was the only pre-Abrams Trek movie to gross upwards of $100 million.

So why, out of ten Star Trek movies to date, was this the one that struck a chord with moviegoers? Much of it had to with the idea that it was, to quote a recent essay at The House Next Door, “the Star Trek film for people who don’t actually like Star Trek all that much.” The Trek franchise won legions of fans with its futuristic stories set in far-flung worlds, but others were turned off by the more science fiction-heavy aspects of the show and movies. So, by setting the majority of its story in 1980s San Francisco, The Voyage Home gave devotees another agreeable two hours to spend with their beloved Enterprise crew, and allowed non-fans to enjoy a Star Trek movie without feeling so, for lack of a better word, geeky. When the film hit theatres over Thanksgiving weekend, it took in the largest opening weekend haul of 1986, and eventually became one of the year’s biggest hits.

Of course, there were other factors that contributed to Star Trek IV’s box office success. Even more than most Trek movies, this one was pretty family friendly, with a few mild expletives (or, as Leonard Nimoy's Spock calls them, “colorful metaphors”), but nothing stronger than a “damn,” “hell,” or “double dumbass on you!” Its timely save-the-whales message didn’t hurt either. Through some deliciously convoluted plot developments, the fate of the human race depends on the survival of two humpback whales, which allowed director Nimoy and his co-screenwriters to shoehorn a lesson into the story in the classic Trek fashion.

But most importantly, The Voyage Home was- and still is- funny. The 1980s were the heyday of the fish-out-of-water comedy, and by placing the familiar Enterprise crew four centuries into the past, the film afforded the characters plenty of opportunities to get laughs from their cluelessness about 20th century life. The film, to its credit, makes the most of the disconnect between the characters and their unfamiliar surroundings, and our knowledge of the crew’s personalities only makes it funnier. So when engineering whiz Scotty (James Doohan) comes face to face with an old-school computer, or Chekov (Walter Koenig) wanders around San Francisco inquiring about “nuclear wessels” at the height of the Cold War, the comedy is richer than it would have been had the characters not been so well established.

One of the better surprises the movie holds is William Shatner’s performance. In the more serious Trek episodes and on the series, Shatner had a tendency toward hamminess, especially when the situation called for big emotions. Here, in a more lighthearted movie, Shatner isn’t exactly natural, but that’s the point- his cartoonishly stalwart bearing allows for a nice contrast with the casualness of the eighties setting. One of the more amusing running jokes in the film is that while Kirk repeatedly admonishes Spock for looking out of place, Kirk really doesn’t fit in any better, although he’s convinced that he does. Because of this, he’s able to sell lines like the scene in which he feels the need to apologize for Spock, explaining that he’s an old hippie who “took too much LDS.” Rather than leaning on the line to milk the joke, Shatner practically throws it away, which makes it that much funnier. In recent decades, Shatner has become a parody of himself, so it’s nice to see him getting intentional laughs.

Aside from the comedy, the movie is more uneven, but it’s still one of the better Star Trek movies. Yes, the plot is ridiculous, but that’s part of the fun. Too many big-budget franchises play it safe in their narratives, setting up a formula and sticking to it from film to film. With Star Trek (especially the movies) the formula is less in the plot than in the characterizations- Kirk’s unconventional but instinctive leadership sense, Spock’s unflappability, Dr. McCoy's (DeForest Kelley) cantankerousness, and so on. Because the characters are firmly established, the filmmakers could afford to be more adventurous with the stories themselves. It’s hard to think of another movie series that could get away with a plot that hinges on an alien intelligence that communicates in humpback whale-song, but somehow The Voyage Home makes it work.

Of course, maybe I’m biased. After all, Star Trek IV was the first Trek movie I saw as a kid, although had already seen quite a few episodes from the series. But while I remember laughing a lot back then, it plays better for me now that I’ve doubled back and caught the rest of the movies. One may not have to be a fan of Star Trek to enjoy the comedy scenes in 1986, but a working knowledge of the movies, especially the second and third films, makes the 23rd Century sequences much more worthwhile. The Voyage Home brings the storyline that began with The Wrath of Khan to a satisfying end in the movie’s final scene, in which the crew takes a long, loving look at their new ship- the all-new Enterprise A. It’s an obvious ending, but at the end of this long, strange journey, the crew has earned it, and so has the movie.

Yesterday's Hits: Fiddler on the Roof (1971, Norman Jewison)

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

In some ways, it isn’t hard to determine why Norman Jewison’s big-screen adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof was a hit. From the time sound was introduced to the cinema, musicals were one of Hollywood’s most popular and enduring genres. But while most musicals of the 1930s and 1940s were frothy entertainments, the fifties saw an increase in musicals that tackled more serious material. And the record-breaking initial Broadway run of Fiddler on the Roof made a film version inevitable, and its status as the top-grossing movie of 1971 was practically pre-ordained.

While the reasons for the long-run popularity of Fiddler on the Roof seem obvious, its initial success is somewhat trickier to pin down. For one thing, the story’s subject matter doesn’t appear to lend itself to the musical treatment. What’s more, a community of Russian Jews around the turn of the century wasn’t the sort of setting to which most sixties-era audiences were normally expected to relate. And quite frankly, even in the post West Side Story-era, the storyline of Fiddler on the Roof was something of a downer. After all, Fiddler was about a man who loses most of what he holds dear- his three eldest daughters and finally his home- before the end of the story, and its treated these losses not as a tragedy (which might’ve allowed for some cathartic tears at the end), but with a sense of resignation.

Yet Fiddler on the Roof made a real connection with audiences of the day for numerous reasons. There was the music of course- Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s catchy, Jewish-inflected song score produced half a dozen songs that quickly became musical theatre standards. Likewise, the movie’s deeper themes- particularly the conflict between forward-thinking youth and their tradition-minded elders- had a great deal of resonance in uneasy sixties. And while Fiddler doesn’t soft-pedal its Jewishness by any means, the characters’ concerns were common enough to many difficult cultures that it came across less as a Jewish story than a universal one.

But most of all, audience members fell in love with Tevye, who quickly became one of musical theatre’s most enduring characters. Tevye is not a larger-than-life hero, but a poor milkman who has been “cursed” with five daughters and no sons, and despairs of finding them husbands. Tevye believes above all in the need to uphold tradition, and it’s the clash between this need and his daughters’ need to forge their own paths in life (especially when it comes to finding husbands) that drives the story. Throughout the story, Tevye struggles with how flexible his love for his daughters will allow him to be, until he finally reaches a point where he must throw up his hands and say, “if I bend any more, I will break.” And all the while, Tevye carries on a conversation with God- so much, indeed, that he must speak to God more than any flesh-and-blood character.

Before MGM brought Fiddler to the big screen, the role of Tevye was most commonly associated with the great Zero Mostel, who originated the character on Broadway. Because of this, there was some controversy when Jewison decided to fill the role not with Mostel, but the lesser-known Topol, who starred in the West End production. In the end, however, Jewison made the right choice for the film. With his outsized style of acting, Mostel was the perfect stage Tevye, able to pitch his performance to the rafters. But for the more naturalistic big-screen production, Topol’s more human-sized turn proved to be ideal. Whereas Mostel’s over-the-top bluster would have overwhelmed everything else, Topol’s never does, and he’s a sensitive enough performer to pull off the smaller character moments, as in the quiet musical number in which he asks his wife of twenty-five years, “Do You Love Me?”

One of director Norman Jewison’s key filmmaking decisions at the outset was to go for a more realistic feel which would make the musical transcend its stage origins. However, this gambit doesn’t always pay off, and occasionally this commitment to realism makes it feel almost like Jewison was uneasy about making a big-budget musical. In some ways, it’s probably good that Jewison limited the dancing to social scenes such as the barroom and Tzeitel and Motel’s wedding. But on the other hand (as Tevye is so prone to saying), Jewison undermines several potentially powerful scenes by having the songs sung in voiceover rather than actually voiced by the characters onscreen.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the “Chavaleh (Little Bird)” number, in which Tevye ponders the loss of his third daughter, who has eloped with a non-Jew. Had Jewison allowed Topol to perform the song onscreen, it might have made for one of the most emotional moments in the film, with Tevye realizing how his need to uphold tradition has lost him a beloved daughter. But instead, Jewison has Topol sing the song in voiceover, shooting him gazing into the distance while imagining his daughters dancing away from him. The number turns into what Roger Ebert calls a “Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude”, and like most scenes of this type, it’s pretty laughable- a far cry from the powerful moment it should rightly have been.

But overall, Fiddler on the Roof does right by its original inspiration, and the elements that people loved in the stage production translated quite nicely to the silver screen. It’s not one of the greatest movie musicals by a long shot, but it’s a worthy adaptation, certainly better than most of the post-Golden Age adaptations of long-running musicals, which all too often get shoddy treatments a la The Phantom of the Opera and A Chorus Line. Perhaps the most definitive testament to the impact of the Fiddler movie is that, nearly four decades after the film’s release, Topol is currently starring in what has been called his “Farewell Tour.” That just goes to show you that while Zero might have originated the role of Tevye, he hardly owns it anymore.

Yesterday's Hits: There's Something About Mary (1998, Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Nowadays, it seems like Hollywood blockbusters are more or less pre-ordained. With budgets routinely crossing the $100 million mark and marketing costs often running into the tens of millions, studios leave very little to chance. By the time movies actually hit multiplexes, the Hollywood hype machine has done its job, and audiences have little choice but to do as they’re told, lining up for movies on opening weekend before moving along to the next big thing. However, occasionally a movie will break free of this usual pattern by striking a chord with audiences. For example, Titanic transcended normal blockbuster status to become a must-see movie, ruling the box office for several months on its way to raking in the highest domestic gross in history. But the following summer brought a word-of-mouth hit that, while it didn’t make Titanic money, completely shattered box-office expectations. The movie was There’s Something About Mary.

Most Hollywood pundits weren’t expecting a whole lot from There’s Something About Mary. In a summer filled with big stars and big budgets, it was a broad comedy with no A-list draws. Leading lady Cameron Diaz made a splash with her debut opposite comedy king Jim Carrey in The Mask, but since then she’d appeared mostly in independent fare, with her only other hit being 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, in which she played a supporting role. Likewise, her costars Matt Dillon and Ben Stiller were hardly major draws- Dillon was seen by many as an aging 80s teen idol who had since entered his character-actor phase, while Stiller was still more of a cult figure than a mainstream star. And while directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly had previously made the popular Dumb & Dumber, its success had been largely attributed to the presence of Carrey in the lead.

Following a series of enormously successful test screenings, the executives at Fox began to realize that they had something big on their hands, if only they played their cards right. Rather than sticking to the usual marketing tactics, they decided to let the movie sell itself, booking an unusually large number of preview screenings across the country, in the hope that the advance word of mouth would boost the film’s box office performance. The gamble paid off, although not right away- Mary was released in mid-July, between the summer’s biggest juggernauts, Armageddon and Saving Private Ryan. But while these movies dominated their first few weekends, Mary opened fairly strongly and maintained this strength as its competitors began to lose steam. Finally, in its eighth weekend of release, There’s Something About Mary topped the box-office charts- a phenomenon that was almost unprecedented.

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why audiences responded strongly to There’s Something About Mary. In the early nineties, many people started to tire of tepid PG-13 comedies, and hard-R laffers geared to adult audiences began to grow in popularity, in the process making stars out of people like Carrey and Adam Sandler. With Mary, the Farrellys tackled subject matter (and bodily functions) that had previously been taboo in big-budget comedies, and much of the film’s buzz centered around its sheer outrageousness. But there was more to Mary than dirty jokes. Most of the scatological comedies being made at the time were buddy movies, in which the female characters were mostly there for decorative purposes.

By contrast, Mary was at its heart a love story about a woman (Diaz) who attracts all the wrong men, and the mishap-prone guy (Stiller) who is her one perfect match. By breaking away from the usual formula for the genre, the Farellys were able to attract female viewers as well as male, making it the year’s mostly unlikely date movie. And in addition to the jokes themselves, the movie offered Diaz as a kind of dream girlfriend for the men in the audience- beautiful, yes, but also able to drink beer, hit golf balls, and talk about sports as well as any guy. Understandably, Diaz made the leap to A-list status on the basis of her Mary performance, and Stiller quickly became a hot commodity as well.

A decade later, it’s the romance that remains the most successful aspect of the movie, keeping the plot grounded even at its most outrageous. Diaz hasn’t been this appealing before or since, in part because the Farrellys understood her appeal. Many filmmakers have cast Diaz in daffy roles or as the sexpot, but her beauty isn’t so much sultry as baby-doll cute. Stiller makes a good match for Diaz- he’s good-looking enough that the relationship doesn’t seem too far fetched, but looks enough like an every-guy that the outcome of the story is hardly a foregone conclusion. And it says a lot about the Farrellys’ worldview that out of all the (mostly very strange) men who pine for Mary, the one we’re meant to root for is the one who is able to see her as a friend instead of an idealized lust object. When a man can have an extended conversation with a woman about the possibility of “meat in a cone,” the two of them must get along pretty well.

On the other hand, the wackier stuff hasn’t dated nearly so well. At the time of the film’s release, much of the buzz centered around such scenes as Stiller’s zipper mishap and the infamous “hair gel” gag, but now that the shock is worn off they come off not so much funny as desperate. There’s a certain comedic logic to the zipper scene, as one person after another crowds into Mary’s powder room to survey the damage (a nod to the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera), but the scene’s “money shot” is nothing but an oh-no-they-didn’t sight gag. And the hair gel bit just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either narratively or physically.

Likewise, the rogue’s gallery of crazy supporting characters wears thin pretty quickly. Matt Dillon’s performance as the untrustworthy shamus Pat Healy is growing on me, mostly because his performance acknowledges the disconnect between the hard-boiled sleazy detective Healy imagines himself to be and the manic loser he actually is. And when he’s trying to play smooth he’s a scream, especially during his priceless “retards” speech. But Chris Elliott is downright creepy as Stiller’s friend with a secret, and Lee Evans’ performance isn’t nearly as funny as the Farrellys think it is. When the camera lingers on his attempts to navigate a pair of crutches, it’s kind of pathetic, and once we find out the truth about Evans’ character, he futzes with an American accent so unconvincing that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

In the past decade or so, There’s Something About Mary has failed to live up to the “funniest movie ever” hype that once surrounded it. Yet considered in light of the Farrelly brothers’ more recent films, it may be more interesting now than it ever was. After Mary, the Farrellys were Hollywood’s reigning kings of lowbrow humor, but after their disappointing follow-up Me, Myself & Irene, their subsequent projects have grown less reliant on sight gags, generally favoring a more gentle, character-based kind of comedy. So far, these opposing comedic impulses achieved their most ideal balance in the brothers’ most personal film (and in my opinion, their best), 2003’s Stuck on You, but this shift was already evident in Mary, even if we didn’t know it yet. There’s Something About Mary may not be as uproariously funny as it was, but it’s a key film in the careers of its makers, and one without whose success their subsequent works may not have been possible.

Yesterday's Hits: Rain Man (1988, Barry Levinson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Here’s the pitch: a young man, reeling from the death of his father, drives across country with the brother he never knew who, as it happens, is autistic. Cast one of Hollywood’s most respected actors as the autistic brother and its hottest leading man as the younger brother, and even today the pitch sounds like something straight out of high-concept hell. Yet despite its premise, which jazzed up the bankable but disreputable formula of the road movie with a mental-illness twist, Rain Man was not only the most popular movie of 1988 but also one of the most acclaimed Hollywood releases of the year, winning both the Oscar for Best Picture and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the only film ever to win both of these prestigious awards.

Today, Rain Man is largely remembered for its awards, for Hoffman’s performance, and the memorable lines he contributed to popular culture, including such favorites as “I’m an excellent driver.” But like many surprise hits, Rain Man was initially seen as a somewhat risky project by Hollywood. Several directors and a number of studios passed on the film before Barry Levinson and United Artists ended up making it. And while the film was in production, both of its stars had doubts about its potential. The film’s opening weekend receipts were disappointing, but soon it began to generate ecstatic word of mouth among moviegoers, eventually raking in over $170 million domestically to become the highest-grossing movie of the year.

So what was the secret to Rain Man’s success? Well, the stars didn’t hurt. By and large, major Hollywood projects were more star-driven in the eighties than they are nowadays, and Rain Man followed the popular Hollywood formula of pairing a respected veteran actor with a hot young star. And in 1988, there was no young star hotter than Tom Cruise. Still riding high from the success of Top Gun, Cruise had earlier in the year turned the cheesy bartending drama Cocktail into a sizable hit. Yet even in his younger days, he had a tendency to seek out established talent. He had followed Top Gun with The Color of Money, which paired him off with Paul Newman under the direction of Martin Scorsese, and Rain Man gave him a similar opportunity to work with Hoffman.

But while Hoffman was the one who got most of the accolades, I think that the film hinges just as much on Cruise’s performance. Don’t get me wrong- Hoffman’s certainly impressive. But due to the nature of Raymond Babbitt’s autism, Hoffman doesn’t have much of a character arc to play- he doesn’t change so much as cycle, again and again, through his daily routine. Levinson and screenwriters Ron Bass and Barry Morrow wisely avoided the temptation to soft-pedal Raymond’s autism by miraculously having him “recover”, and they’re to be commended for this. However, a movie solely about Raymond would have quickly become repetitive (think Jeanne Dielman, which actually sounds awesome so never mind), and certainly would not have been made by a Hollywood studio.

Because of this, it falls to Charlie (Cruise) to drive the story, and Cruise was more than up to the task. Charlie is a complicated character who’s often selfish and unsympathetic. Consider how greedy he can be, especially when it comes to Raymond- he steals Raymond from an institution in an attempt to procure more money from his late father’s estate, and once he discovers Raymond’s prodigious memory and gift for quickly counting large numbers of objects, Charlie decides to take Raymond to Las Vegas to score money by cheating a casino. But Cruise’s refusal to make Charlie a saint makes him all the more relatable. Sure, he can be a self-centered prick, but we also feel his pain whenever we see him dealing with Raymond. After all, keeping one’s life together (especially when the bank is breathing down your neck) is difficult enough without having to plan one’s days around someone like Raymond, for whom the need to eat one’s meals on time, watch The People’s Court, or wear the correct pair of underwear supersedes all else.

Because we see Charlie struggling with Raymond, it becomes all the more heartwarming when he finally learns to love and appreciate his older brother. In many ways, Rain Man may contain Cruise’s most undervalued performance, since not only is he upstaged by Hoffman’s showier work, but he also plays the sort of role that was often associated with him, the yuppie hotshot with an overabundance of alpha-male charm. However, to call Charlie Babbitt a stereotypical “Tom Cruise role” seems reductive, since it overlooks the nuances of the character. Then as now, Cruise was a fine actor, and one who was often doomed to being underappreciated.

Rain Man isn’t a perfect movie. Occasionally, it gets a little too plot-driven, as when Charlie and Raymond make their stop in Vegas. But at its best, it’s as good now as it ever was, due to the performances of Hoffman and Cruise and the rhythm and chemistry between them. Cruise might have joked that it was “two schmucks in a car,” but I think that’s what works about the movie- it gives these two fine actors sufficient time and space to work together without pinning them down to too much plot. And while Raymond doesn’t get better in the end, at least now he has a brother to visit him in the institution.

For better or worse, in the two decades since its release Rain Man has become the dominant pop culture image most people associate with autism. A few years ago, the Onion A.V. Club critic Noel Murray- himself the father of an autistic child- posted his thoughts on the film, filtered through his own experience. In this post (which you can read in full here), he states that although the film gets many of the details of autism right, it suffers because Raymond feels less like a character than a plot device through which Charlie can find redemption, and that the subject of autism would be better served by a movie that followed him and found drama in his routines. It’s a perfectly reasonable opinion of the film considering his circumstances, and I don’t disagree with him. As a movie about autism, Rain Man doesn’t quite cut it. But taken on its own terms, I’d say it still works pretty darn well.

Yesterday's Hits: Home Alone (1990, Chris Columbus)

Paul Clark — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The 1990 holiday movie slate boasted a number of sure-fire hits from many of Hollywood’s most bankable names. Arnold Schwarzenegger was getting pushed around by a classroom full of kids, Sylvester Stallone was revisiting his most iconic character once again, Tim Burton was debuting his first project after Batman made him Hollywood’s hottest young director, and Kevin Costner premiered his debut behind the camera, an epic Western that went on to win several Oscars. Heck, there was even a new Godfather movie. Yet none of these movies went on to become the year’s top grossing blockbuster. No, the reigning king of 1990’s box office boasted little more than a precocious child star, a kid-friendly concept, and a memorable scream.

That movie, of course, was Home Alone, directed by Chris Columbus. Sold to moviegoers with the tagline, “a family comedy… without the family,” the movie’s premise encompassed every kid’s dream- having the run of the house with no adult supervision- and many parents’ nightmare- accidentally leaving their child behind when they leave on vacation. At the center of the action was Kevin, played by Macaulay Culkin, for whom producer/screenwriter John Hughes specifically wrote the role after previously working with him on the previous year’s Uncle Buck. Expectations for Home Alone were relatively low, but good word of mouth about the film and its young star made it the runaway hit of the season, and its overwhelming success led to two sequels.

Alas, Home Alone doesn’t hold up very well, in part because of the mountain of contrivances the movie asks us to accept in order to make the storyline work. To begin with, although I’m sure that children have been accidentally left behind by their parents, it’s hard to believe that it would happen the way it does in the movie- surely one of the adults in the house was an early riser, no? Likewise, a repeated gag involving characters being fooled into thinking that a violent-sounding movie scene is really happening in the house is kind of a forehead-slapper- like any reasonably intelligent adult couldn’t tell the difference between real gunshots to those playing on a television?

But then, intelligence seems to be in short supply among the characters. One of my cinematic pet peeves is when a movie requires that its characters be idiots and Home Alone has some real doozies. Chief among the movie’s morons are Harry and Marv, a pair of bumbling burglars played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Here’s a pair so thickheaded that they get all manner of indignities vested upon them by a little kid, yet never think that, hey, maybe it’d be best to just cut their losses and run rather than risk incurring still more pain and suffering. Of course, it helps that Kevin is preternaturally at jerry-rigging booby traps all over the house with relatively little preparation, and placing them just where the crooks will strike.

This is indicative of the movie’s biggest problem, then Kevin is almost never convincing as a real kid. Oh sure, Culkin bugs his eyes out real cute and delivers the wiseassed one-liners almost like he means them. But it’s just hard to believe that Kevin would be capable of most of what he does or says, whether he’s delivering a monologue in the bathroom mirror or faking out the baddies. Part of the blame must fall on Culkin himself. Like most child actors, Culkin has self-assurance in spades but can’t sell the dialogue as his own, especially not when he’s given lines like “Bless this highly nutritious microwavable macaroni and cheese dinner and the people who sold it on sale. Amen.” Culkin was the biggest child star of his day, making $8 million a movie at the peak of his popularity, but it’s easy to see why he hasn’t been able to make the leap to grown-up roles with the same success that contemporaries like Elijah Wood have.

Time and again, I’ve bemoaned the tendency of many adults to forgive family movies their faults and manipulations on the grounds that they’re “just for kids.” While I realize that children aren’t particularly discerning movie watchers, it doesn’t seem right to use this as an excuse to foist subpar entertainment upon them. Home Alone might have been a hit in its day, but it’s also manipulative and often stupid, and making children watch movies like this is practically an insult to their budding intelligence. With all the high-quality family movies now available on DVD, there’s really no reason to show your kids Home Alone.

Yesterday's Hits: The Santa Clause (1994, John Pasquin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Well, it’s the holidays again, and that means that Christmas movies are back in season. But while Christmas movies have long been an annual tradition, in the last few decades the market for new holiday-themed classics has grown by leaps and bounds. Gone are the days when scruffy little movies like A Christmas Story would do decent business in theatres only to become classics on video and cable. Today, Christmas movies are big business, and rare is the big budget holiday movie that doesn’t clean up at the box office. For my next three Yesterday’s Hits columns, I’ll be taking a new look at three of the biggest holiday hits of all time, to get you all in the spirit of the season. This week, I’ll begin with the 1994 blockbuster The Santa Clause.

The Santa Clause came after nearly a decade of Christmas movies that shied away from dealing with Santa Claus. While this might seem odd nowadays, there was a good reason for this at the time- 1985’s Santa Claus: The Movie was a massive flop, scaring the studios into making less fantasy-based holiday movies in the years to come. But by the mid-1990s, Disney decided it was time to bring back the jolly old elf, and The Santa Clause served up St. Nick with a twist on the old tale. After several established movie stars (Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, to name two) turned down the role, Disney turned to the star of the hugely popular sitcom Home Improvement, a former standup comedian named Tim Allen. The combination of Christmas and Allen’s big-screen leading man debut proved as irresistible to audiences as milk and cookies, and The Santa Clause became the biggest hit of fall 1994, spawning two sequels and propelling Allen to movie stardom.

The premise of the film certainly helped. Rather than beginning with its main character born as Santa, The Santa Clause took the novel approach of having its protagonist Scott Calvin (played by Allen) more or less inherit the job. In the film, if something happens to the current Santa, the next person to don the suit takes his place, with all of the side effects that implies. The Santa Clause’s best sequence takes place right after Scott finds himself thrust into the role of Kris Kringle, when we discover through his eyes the perils of the job- snarling dogs, home security systems, gifts that are too big to fit under the tree. And while Scott predictably finds himself turning physically into Santa, gaining 45 pounds in a week and growing a long white beard in a matter of minutes, the sight gags are fairly enjoyable nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn’t as much fun as the Santa material. Scott’s life in the temperate latitudes includes a well-paying job as a toy company executive and an ex-wife Laura (Wendy Crewson), with whom he shares custody of their young son Charlie (Eric Lloyd). Naturally, Charlie is jazzed about his dad being Santa, but of course none of the other adults believe his stories of when they visited the North Pole and went around delivering gifts. Laura’s new husband Neil (Judge Reinhold) just happens to be a psychiatrist, and he quickly concludes that Charlie is having trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and that Scott with his physical changes is feeding his son’s delusions in order to look better in Charlie’s eyes. The resulting plot developments are too contrived to be effective, and they’re exacerbated by Reinhold’s awful performance, in which he comes off less as a competent doctor than someone who’s suffered a recent blow to the head.

Ever since Charles Dickens penned A Christmas Carol more than 160 years ago, there has been a fairly standard trajectory for Christmas stories and, later, Christmas movies- a character, or group of characters, overcome their self-centered ways by discovering the meaning of Christmas. Even Bad Santa’s Willie, the most dissolute of recent Christmas movie protagonists, ended up finding some member of the Christmas spirit through his unlikely mentorship of a (very strange) kid. The Santa Clause was directed by John Pasquin, who had previously worked with Allen when he directed numerous episodes of Home Improvement, and the movie feels and looks like a big-screen sitcom, with some easy laughs and nothing offensive to scare away audiences. Like most Christmas movies, it’s an okay way to take a break from holiday shopping or entertain visiting relatives. But as a movie, it’s really nothing special.

Yesterday's Hits: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947, Irving Reis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

During the 1930s, there was no bigger star in Hollywood than Shirley Temple. So beloved was little Shirley by both moviegoers and other actors that allegedly she was given an honorary Academy Award for fear that she would defeat older, more experienced performers if she was nominated for a competitive Oscar. However, growing up can be awkward for child stars, and Temple, popular though she was, was no exception. By the early 1940s, she had been largely relegated to supporting “kid-sister” roles in films like 1944’s Since You Went Away.

In 1947, she decided to make a last-ditch effort to parlay her youthful popularity into an adult career, and what better way to do so than to share the screen with some of the era’s biggest stars? So producer David O. Selznick, to whom she was under contract, gave Temple permission to make a film at RKO Pictures opposite Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. The result was 1947’s The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and it became one of the most popular films of the year. As usual, Grant and Loy were big audience draws, but it was Temple’s presence that put it over the top, as moviegoers were eager to see if the former dimpled moppet could still outshine the grown-up stars around her.

As it turns out, she couldn’t, in large part because she hadn’t really learned any new acting tricks since her childhood days. While as a child she could sing and dance, what really endeared her to audiences was her charm and charisma, and flashing a dimpled smile at the camera could smooth over any juvenile overacting she might have done. As Temple’s mother memorably told her curly-topped little moneymaker before every take, “sparkle, Shirley- sparkle!” But as an adult, she would have to work harder to win over audiences, and her talent just wasn’t up to the task. All too often, she falls back on her stock child-acting tricks- smiling, pouting, posing for the camera- and opposite ace comedians like Grant and Loy she was way out of her depth.

Not helping matters was the screenplay, written by none other than future best-selling author Sidney Sheldon. The most obvious flaw in the screenplay is Sheldon’s unfortunate tendency to have all of his characters speak in arch, convoluted dialogue. It’s hard enough to believe anyone would say, “these are merely the vestments I don as a concession to our outworn education anachronism,” let alone a seventeen-year-old girl, school newspaper editor or not. But an even bigger issue is that it’s hard to buy the events of the story. The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer is no more convoluted than your average screwball comedy, but the best of those films always kept their stories emotionally grounded with their characters. But here, practically every major character is plotting something or other, and once the movie’s happy ending becomes obvious, there’s little else to do but wait for the schemes to play themselves so that Grant and Loy can (SPOILER!) end up together in the end.

But if there’s a bright spot in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, it’s that great movie stars like Grant and Loy could give perfectly fine performances even with second-rate material. Grant is, of course, a treasure, and he takes the kind of role that he could play in his sleep- the ladies’ man- and finds new wrinkles for the character, even while the film does him few favors (who thought those ridiculous “white knight” bits were a good idea?). But for my money, Loy is even better. Loy is essentially the straight man in the story, and she pulls it off by giving her character (Temple’s older sister and guardian) a stern warmth that would have been tricky in the hands of a lesser actress. There’s a reason why both Grant and Loy enjoyed successful movie careers for years to come while Temple had more or less retired by 1950- for grown-up actors, it takes more than cuteness to survive in Hollywood.

Yesterday's Hits, 007 Edition: Thunderball (1965, Terence Young) and Moonraker (1979, Lewis Gilbert)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Quantum of Solace was released in U.S. theatres a week ago today, but I’m still jonesing for that old Bond feeling. Perhaps it was the decidedly un-007-like style of the latest movie in the series, but I for one found myself missing some of the reliable, even cheesy, touches of the old installments. So for this week’s column, I decided to look back at two of the biggest hits of the series to date, one starring Sean Connery (Thunderball), and one starring Roger Moore (Moonraker), thereby making this my first Yesterday’s Hits double feature to date.

At first glance, the two movies wouldn’t seem to go that well together, but a closer look finds a number of similarities beyond the usual Bond clichés. For one thing, both films were the top-grossing Bond titles for their respective stars. In addition, each was the fourth film in which they appeared. Both movies were a great deal more expensive than the films that preceded them. And by some strange coincidence, both movies build to action scenes in which dozens of characters are seen floating- in Thunderball’s case, the scene is underwater, whereas in Moonraker, they’re in space. But perhaps most importantly, neither film is especially well-regarded by devotees of the series. In last week’s list of the best and worst Bond movies of all time, Moonraker was voted the second-worst of the series, while Thunderball was the only “official” Connery title that didn’t get mentioned as one of the best.

Following the smash international success of Goldfinger, it was clear that moviegoing audiences couldn’t get enough of Ian Fleming’s super-spy. So production was quickly begun on the biggest Bond adventure yet, a $9 million spectacular called Thunderball that would once again star the suave, wry Scot Sean Connery. With the Bond formula more or less established from the previous three adventures, it was more or less guaranteed that Thunderball would be an even bigger hit than its predecessor. However, it ended up doing so well at the box-office that it remained the highest-grossing Bond adventure for nearly fifteen years.

The movie that would eventually dethrone it was, of course, Moonraker. Released only two years after Star Wars changed the face of blockbusters, the film was EON Productions’ attempt to cash in on the space opera craze- after all, what locale is more exotic than space? Moore was no Connery, but by 1979 he’d been accepted as Connery’s successor, and placing him against the backdrop of the so-called final frontier was a winning proposition. Despite mostly negative reviews, Moonraker raked in the money, the already tempting deal sweetened by the return of fan-favorite Jaws, played by the one and only Richard Kiel. Moonraker had the highest gross of any Bond movie until Pierce Brosnan assumed the role.

So, do they still work? As it turns out, Thunderball holds up pretty darn well, Moonraker… eh, not so much.

Coming so soon after two nearly perfect examples of the Bond formula done right, Thunderball’s flaws must have seemed especially glaring to fans of the series. Much of the supporting cast is bland and forgettable, with the most egregious offender being Claudine Auger as the principal Bond girl, Domino. In addition, a good deal of the wit that distinguished the previous entries in the series was cast aside here in favor of expensive action sequences. But with action sequences as good as the ones in Thunderball, it seems churlish to complain. Especially great is the extended underwater fight/shootout that comes at the end of the film, in which Bond and dozens of agents take on Largo (Adolfo Celi) and his henchmen for minutes on end, without a shred of dialogue. This scene remains a high-water mark of the series- no pun intended, of course.

And then, there was Connery, still the overwhelming favorite of 007 fans everywhere. By now firmly established in the role, Connery was able to inhabit the character with an easy authority, so much that his successors have all been measured against him. What’s surprising here is that he was actually able to find some new wrinkles to the character even after three previous performances in the role. By this point in the series, Bond has begun to show a little more self-awareness about the demands of his job. There’s an early scene in which Bond has to leave on his mission, and one of his conquests runs after him and asks him to write to her, and all he does is give a stiff little smile and say to himself, “another time, another place.” He also had room for ambiguous gestures, as in the scene where Largo’s agent Fiona (Luciana Paluzzi) gets shot. Does Bond intentionally use her as a shield to save himself, or does it just happen that way? Connery never lets on one way or the other, and the character is more fascinating as a result.

By contrast, there was no room for ambiguity in Roger Moore’s conception of Bond. Moore’s version of 007 was less a hard-nosed secret agent who got his hands dirty than the archetypal “gentleman spy” as a straight-up hero. As a result, his performances were entertaining enough, but didn’t make the character particularly interesting. Also uninteresting here is Lois Chiles as Dr. Holly Goodhead (yeah, I know), another in a line of interchangeable pretty faces who were uneasily shoehorned into doctor roles in Bond movies. With two uncompelling leads, my attention quickly shifted to the villainous Drax, played by the great Michael Lonsdale with the perpetually annoyed bearing of a man who’d prefer not to trifle in the affairs of lesser intellects. With better material, Lonsdale could have made for one of the series’ best baddies, but he’s still pretty darn good.

And then there’s Jaws. I’ve always been a fan of the Jaws character, both in concept and execution. After all, here’s someone who has a limited number of job prospects- for an indestructible giant with metallic teeth, I’m guessing “hired killer” pays quite a bit better than “nightclub bouncer,” with greater travel opportunities to boot. But in spite of these limitations, Jaws makes the best of the hand he's been dealt, and it’s hard to hate the guy even when he’s beating the hell from Bond. Plus Kiel, with hardly a line of spoken dialogue, gives Jaws personality to spare, and it’s nice to see him finally get his own little romantic subplot in the story, even if it’s marred by a cheeseball music cue.

But all in all, Moonraker is pretty shoddy goods. James Bond travels from one exotic locale to another trying to save the world, but there’s no urgency to it, and the formula had become so comfortable that the filmmakers didn’t dare diverge from it (Quantum of Solace has precisely the opposite issue- it diverges from the formula so much it barely feels like Bond). Consequently, it comes off less as a thriller than an inconsequential romp, with such silly scenes as Bond’s Venetian gondola turning into a hovercraft, complete with a bird doing a double-take. Even the once-ballyhooed outer-space scenes look dated and cheesy nowadays. Moonraker might have gone over well with the audiences of the time, but it just doesn’t work today. Thunderball, on the other hand, is still pretty great.

Yesterday's Hits, Veteran's Day Edition: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

World War II was the first major war that was extensively documented by Hollywood. Even as it was in progress, hundreds of newsreels and documentaries helped to increase awareness of how and why we were fighting, including works by major filmmakers like Frank Capra, John Ford and Howard Hawks. But after the war was over, no one was really telling the stories of the men who were coming home and trying to resume their lives again. Sensing the need for this story to be told, producer Samuel Goldwyn commissioned Robert E. Sherwood, who had served as the head of the Office of War Information, to write a screenplay based on the novel Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor, which tackled this subject.

As befitting the importance of the subject matter, Goldwyn then proceeded to assemble an A-list cast and crew for the project. To direct, Goldwyn chose William Wyler, one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers. He then hand-picked an A-list cast, led by Oscar-winning actor Frederic March and popular leading man Dana Andrews as two of the returning soldiers, and Hollywood’s top female box-office draw Myrna Loy as March’s loving wife. In perhaps his biggest gamble, Goldwyn cast in the key role of the disabled Navy veteran Homer Parrish a non-actor named Harold Russell, an actual vet who’d lost both of his hands in battle.

Like all of the risks Goldwyn took in bringing The Best Years of Our Lives to the screen, this one paid off magnificently. Prior to the film’s release, he famously stated, "I don't care if the film doesn't make a nickel. I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it." And while there were at least a handful of people who didn’t see the film, it nonetheless became a massive hit, reportedly the biggest to coming out of Hollywood since Gone With the Wind. On top of that, it also took home seven competitive Academy Awards including Best Picture, best director for Wyler, acting Oscars for March and Russell, and a second honorary award for Russell, “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.”

For years, The Best Years of Our Lives was one of the most acclaimed and beloved of all Hollywood movies. But while the patriotic sentiment that was stirred up by the memory of World War II had helped to make the film one of the biggest blockbusters of its time, subsequent conflicts made war- and the movies based on it- more controversial in the minds of the public. For most movies about war and its consequences, it was no longer enough to matter-of-factly tell the stories of the people who fought and those they left behind. Especially in the wake of Vietnam, war became a political issue, and most directors of war movies wore their own politics (whether they were for it or against) on their sleeves.

By contrast, it’s hard to tell how the makers of The Best Years of Our Lives felt about World War II just by watching the film. But then, it doesn’t really matter. The Best Years of Our Lives is not a pro-war or anti-war story, but one that accepts the war as a fact of like. Al (March), Fred (Andrews), and Homer (Russell) fought in World War II, and now that it’s over they have to deal with what happened while they re-acclimatize themselves to life at home. The film is about how the war affected them and those who love them- no more, no less.

One of the most significant decisions made by Wyler and Goldwyn was that the film would be a character study. Key to this effect is the film’s running time, ten minutes shy of three hours, which affords the audience plenty of time to get to know the three returning men and observe their lives. This extra time makes a difference- rather than trying to pare down the characters’ trajectories in order to make a tight two-hour movie, Wyler and Goldwyn let the stories play out at an unhurried pace. Instead of feeling like a handful of vignettes, the characters in The Best Years of Our Lives are given time to think and change, to make mistakes and learn from them, and ultimately to grow into their new lives.

Each of the three returning men does so in a unique way. Ever since losing his hands, Homer has had trouble with how others treat him, although it's a credit to the film that don't treat him poorly, just... differently. Homer’s story is the simplest, and the most poignant, due in no small part to the directness and un-faked sincerity of Russell’s acting. Al’s storyline is the subtlest of the three, in large part because he’s the one who seems to have his act together. He comes back from the war to a loving family and a successful job in a bank. However, his war experiences begin to manifest themselves in small but recognizable ways. When he gives a loan to a returning serviceman, his boss tells him he should pay more attention to the applicant’s collateral than to his character. He hardly recognizes his kids, who’ve grown up in his absence. And he begins display an increased eagerness to drink, which doesn’t go unnoticed by his wife Millie. Loy is just right as a woman who loves her man enough to forgive him his misdeeds, but would like some way to understand what’s making him do them.

Yet in many ways, it’s Frank who is at the center of the film. Frank, who came from wrong side of the tracks, went to war and became a hero, winning a number of medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross. But his accomplishments mean nothing in the civilian world without the work experience to back them up, and he finds himself working at his old job in a drugstore. And having wooed his wife Marie (Virginia Mayo) with his slick looks in a uniform and his generous Army salary, she’s naturally not too happy to have to live off a soda jerk’s salary. Meanwhile, Frank finds himself falling for Al’s daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright), much to Al’s dismay.

The biggest reason why The Best Years of Our Lives has endured as a classic is because its characters are completely human-sized. While the cast is filled with popular stars of the day, they’re always convincing as complicated everyday people instead of the fantasy archetypes who normally inhabit high-profile Hollywood films. In making the film, Goldwyn, Wyler, and the rest of the cast and crew showed a real respect for the bankers, the soda jerks, the disabled, the nurses, the housewives, the children, and everyone else who’s been affected by war. The title refers to “our lives,” and the filmmakers understand this. And that, more than anything, is why it still works.

Yesterday's Hits: The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)

Paul Clark — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The weeks leading up to Halloween are the most popular time of the year for horror movies, so it was only natural that I would choose one for this week’s Yesterday’s Hits column. But which one? Horror is a popular and relatively profitable genre, in large part because horror movies are generally not too expensive to produce, making it easy for them to turn a profit. Yet there are surprisingly few flat-out blockbusters in the genre. Since 1939, only four movies that might be labeled “horror” have placed among the top five box office hits of their respective years. Two of these were Psycho and Jaws, both of which remain classics not merely of the genre, but of cinema in general. And I wrote about the most recent of the bunch, The Sixth Sense, back in June.

This leaves only The Exorcist. But while William Friedkin’s film has been endlessly parodied over the years, it remains one of the most-watched horror movies of all time, a perennial Halloween favorite. In other words, it’s not what I normally look for in my Yesterday’s Hits selections. So, for the obvious reasons, I’ll be skipping over my usual question of what happened to The Exorcist’s popularity because, well, it never really went away.

What made The Exorcist a hit?: Prior to writing The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty had published several novels without achieving much commercial success, and eventually began writing for movies and television. But The Exorcist changed his fortunes immeasurably. Based partly on an actual exorcism that took place in 1949, Blatty’s novel became a publishing sensation with its no-holds-barred portrait of a young girl’s possession by the devil, and the efforts of her mother and a pair of priests to make her better. Given its critical and popular acclaim, it quickly became clear that The Exorcist would become a major motion picture.

With the newfound power afforded him by his bestselling-author status, Blatty was able to sign on as producer of the Exorcist adaptation. Despite a number of alternative choices on Warner Brothers’ part, Blatty insisted on William Friedkin, a recent Oscar winner for The French Connection, in the hope that he would turn the novel into a serious prestige picture rather than a run-of-the-mill horror movie. In turn, Friedkin jumped in with both feet, bringing the book’s most chilling set pieces to life using state-of-the-art makeup and special effects, which sometimes even endangered the safety of his actors. In addition, the relaxed rating standards of the day allowed Friedkin to make the film more visceral than any big-budget Hollywood production to date. Once word got around that the filmed version of The Exorcist was every bit as horrifying as the novel, audiences turned out in droves, making it the biggest hit of 1973 and one of the top-grossing horror movies of all time.

Does The Exorcist still work?: Yes, although not always in the obvious ways. For one thing, despite its reputation as a classic horror movie, The Exorcist really isn’t all that frightening. There are a handful of eerie moments and memorably macabre images, such as the desecration of a church altar. But by and large, the scares to be found in The Exorcist are of a crude and obvious kind, like Regan (Linda Blair) being tossed around by an unseen presence while lying in bed. Scenes like this are shocking to see once, to be certain, and the level of pre-CGI cinematic trickery is certainly impressive, but they don’t really burrow under your skin in the way the best horror movies do.

However, the movie is successful in a number of other ways, like the way it becomes a story about the limits of science. In the early 1970s, science was making progress to exploring every nook and cranny of the human body, both physically in the case of medicine, and psychologically as well. But in The Exorcist, all of the medical and psychological experiments that are performed on Regan prove futile, and in the end, the only recourse for Regan’s mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn), is religion. In our enlightened age, there’s something undeniably unsettling about the idea that there are still things that lay outside the realm of science, and while Friedkin and Blatty don’t come out explicitly in favor of religion, there’s no denying that it works in the film in ways the medicine does not.

But most compelling of all is Chris’ character arc, which the movie actually takes seriously rather than simply using it to mark time until the next big shock. Chris is a successful actress and a divorcee, and the only thing that’s really permanent in her life is her little girl. So when Regan begins to exhibit her alarming symptoms, Chris finds herself grasping at any possible solution to make her better, usually to no avail. Despite the fact that she’s not religious, she ends up turning to Father Karras (Jason Miller) for help. In perhaps the most affecting moment in the film, Chris pleads to him, “I want you to tell me that you know for a fact that there's nothing wrong with my daughter, except in her mind. You tell me for a fact you know an exorcism wouldn’t do any good.” Due in no small part to Burstyn’s performance, Chris’ storyline and her relationship with Regan make for such a fascinating chamber drama that it’s almost disappointing that the movie ends up resolving itself with visual trickery and mystical gobbledygook.

At the end of the day, The Exorcist isn’t remotely the scariest movie ever made. However, it still works as the prestige picture that Blatty and Friedkin wanted it to be. Sure, Friedkin might have been a pain in the ass while making the film (literally, in Burstyn’s case), but the story and performances work well enough that the end result was worth the effort. If only the film’s sequels had kept this same balance of drama and supernatural horror, The Exorcist might have been the first installment in a classic series, instead of a hugely popular original that spawned three inferior knockoffs. But no matter- it stands on its own just fine.

Yesterday's Hits: Duel in the Sun (1946, King Vidor)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Duel in the Sun a hit?: David O. Selznick was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1930s, a decade that concluded with his production of Hollywood’s biggest hit of all time, Gone With the Wind. After that film’s runaway success, Selznick could pretty much write his own ticket, and he used his clout to make his dream project, a mega-budgeted adaptation of Niven Busch’s novel Duel in the Sun. Selznick spared no expense- the budget topped out at a then-unprecedented $6 million- to bring this Wild West melodrama to the screen in “Glorious Technicolor”, going through more than half a dozen directors (including Josef von Sternberg) before handing the directorial reins over to Hollywood veteran King Vidor.

In the film’s principal roles, Selznick cast a pair of hot young stars- Gregory Peck, fresh off his breakout role in the Selznick production of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and Jennifer Jones, a recent Oscar-winner for The Song of Bernadette, who took over the role for the pregnant Teresa Wright. He then backed them with a stellar supporting cast, including Joseph Cotten, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Herbert Marshall, and Lillian Gish. But perhaps the biggest factor in the film’s success was its unabashedly lurid story about a “half-breed” woman who was irresistibly drawn to a bad-boy rancher. Combining a horse opera with a soap opera and filling the atmosphere with liberal amounts of (implied) sex, Duel in the Sun stirred up no small amounts of controversy. Yet the hubbub surrounding the film (quickly nicknamed “Lust in the Dust”) ended up helping its box-office performance, and Duel became one of the biggest hits of 1946, bringing in more than $11 million.

What happened?: While Duel in the Sun was a hit with moviegoers, reviews were decidedly mixed, praising the film’s production values while criticizing its script (credited to Selznick himself) and performances. And in spite of the fact that the film eventually made money, Selznick found it increasingly difficult to make films in light of the movie’s runaway budget and extravagant (upwards of $2 million) advertising campaign. Selznick continued to work in Hollywood, but his once-prodigious output slowed considerably in the years after Duel in the Sun. On the positive side, the movie continued Gregory Peck’s steady ascent to leading-man stardom, and three years after the film’s release, Selznick married Jones, a marriage that continued until his death in 1965.

Does Duel in the Sun still work?: Not really. For such a popular genre, melodrama is difficult to pull off on film, especially in a way that ages well. Part of the problem is that melodramas were sometimes the only way to deal with risqué material under the Production Code. But while there was no shortage of controversy surrounding Duel in the Sun, most of the elements of the film that were once controversial edgy- particularly the “half-breed” background of heroine Pearl Chavez (played by Jones) and the “bad girl” urges she feels toward Peck- are dealt with in a hamfisted and uninspired manner.

It doesn’t help that Jones is all wrong for the part. Setting aside the now-politically incorrect use of “brown-face” that was utilized to make the lily-white Jones look the part, she’s simply too prim and polished to be convincing. Jones’ idea of speaking like a half-Mexican, half-Native American woman is to lower her vocal register while droppin’ the occasional “g” from the ends of words. And when even Pearl turns into a lusty, unbridled “bad girl” after falling for Peck’s Lewt McCanlies, Jones’ performance becomes almost laughable, consisting mainly of striking sultry poses and making goo-goo eyes at Peck. Jones never seems comfortable in the role she’s given, and this discomfort comes through in her performance.

Another factor was, to put it bluntly, that there were simply too many cooks. It takes a firm hand on the directorial wheel to pull off a lurid story like this one, but after going through more than half a dozen directors, Vidor was little more than a hired gun, lorded over by Selznick. But rather than allowing the story to dictate the style, Selznick overwhelmed it with production values, in a clear attempt to turn it into Gone With the Wind Goes West. Admittedly, Duel in the Sun is gorgeous, with plenty of sweeping vistas and deep orange sunsets to please the eye. However, the story becomes bogged down by the weight of the production, and many of the more emotional moments get lost in the scenery. The result is a movie that’s tamer and more bloated than any good melodrama should be. Compared to another popular melodrama of the period, John M. Stahl’s still-effective Leave Her to Heaven, Duel in the Sun is little more than an overstuffed curiosity.

That said, the one element of the movie that still works is Gregory Peck’s performance as the strapping Lewt. Later in his career, Peck became associated with playing heroes- not least in his iconic turn in To Kill a Mockingbird- so it’s fascinating to see the traits that made him such a perfect good guy used in service of an unsavory character. It helps that Peck was convincingly tall in the saddle to play a cowboy, all the better to turn the cowboy archetype- morally uncomplicated, decisive, solving problems through action- on its ear. Peck treads a thin line here, giving a performance that’s just dark enough to make the character work in this context, while simultaneously suggesting that Lewt might’ve been the hero under different circumstances. If nothing else, Duel in the Sun showed moviegoers just how commanding a performer Peck could be, even if the movie itself ultimately let him down.

Yesterday's Hits: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, Kevin Reynolds)

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a hit?: As with other oft-filmed tales like Dracula and The Three Musketeers, every era seems to get the Robin Hood it deserves. The silent era got Douglas Fairbanks, in a role that highlighted his formidable athleticism. In the 1930s came The Adventures of Robin Hood (still the version to beat), in which Errol Flynn turned the classic hero into a dashing rogue. The elegiac seventies brought Robin and Marian, which starred Sean Connery as an older and somewhat sadder version of the character. And by the early 1990s, Robin had morphed into the sensitive-hunk archetype that was in vogue at the time, played by one of its biggest stars, Kevin Costner.

In addition to making adjustments to the title character to suit the era, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves also added some politically correct touches, including making Marian more fierce and less of a damsel, as well as keeping with the recent tendency to include a Moorish character in Robin’s Merry Men. Likewise, director Kevin Reynolds was able to juice up the action scenes using then-advanced special effects, including the famous shot in which the camera mimics the point of view of an arrow shot from Robin’s bow. And a full-out marketing blitz ensured that the film appealed to a wide audience, from kids who might be experiencing the story onscreen for the first time to adults who grew up on the older versions but were curious to see a new take on the tale. The strategy worked, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves became the second-highest-grossing blockbuster of 1991, bringing in $160 million in the United States alone and another $225 million internationally.

What happened?: Audiences flocked to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but even on its original release, the movie was plagued by a good amount of negative buzz. For one thing, there was the issue of Kevin Costner’s accent- he begins the film attempting a British accent, but within the first reel it disappears altogether, and neither of these solutions proved especially pleasing to audiences. But a bigger problem was that the film was more violent than its advertising had led audiences to believe. Warner Bros. had pre-sold the film to the family audience with such promotions as children’s toys and a breakfast cereal that was heavily advertised during Saturday morning cartoons. But when parents took their kids to the film, they were faced by such scenes as a man’s hand being severed, a number of people getting burned alive, the possible hanging of a young boy, and the attempted rape of Marian by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Both of these factors, combined with the film’s middling critical reception, helped the keep the film from enduring in the public’s esteem.

Does Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves still work?: Not very well. There’s a popular adage that a blockbuster is only as good as its villain, but Prince of Thieves put that wisdom to the test. This isn’t to say that Alan Rickman isn’t a blast as the Sheriff of Nottingham. But while Rickman- who was given more or less full creative control of the character as a condition of taking the part- makes a sneering, perfectly odious bad guy, he’s so committed to making Nottingham evil that he ends up overwhelming the story. A little of Rickman’s Nottingham goes a long way, but Reynolds structures the story like a cross-cutting tennis match, volleying scenes back and forth between Robin Hood’s antics and Nottingham’s over-the-top reactions to them.

Not helping matters is Costner’s performance, in which his accent issues were the least of his troubles. More damaging is Costner’s laid-back persona, which makes Robin Hood feel something less than heroic despite his good lucks and gift with a bow. In his salad days, Costner’s appeal was that he felt like a working-class everyguy, like a character from a Bruce Springsteen song personified. But when called upon to play a leader of men, Costner doesn’t have what it takes. This quality also makes it difficult to buy Robin’s past as a spoiled rich kid, which is mentioned at several occasions in the film. Perhaps Mel Gibson, who turned down the role before Costner signed on, could have pulled off the character as written, while making him more charismatic and entertaining besides.

But then, entertainment value is in relatively short supply in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The high spirits one normally associates with Robin Hood is largely absent from this telling of the story, replaced by- well, not much of anything. The Merry Men aren’t merry enough, Will Scarlet (Christian Slater) is too bogged down with a secret resentment for Robin Hood to function as a full-fledged character, and Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) has no chemistry whatsoever with Robin, thereby making their romantic subplot less inevitable than obligatory. Practically the only good guy who makes much of an impression is Azeem (Morgan Freeman), the Moor who bound himself to Robin after Robin saved his life. And the battle sequences, ambitious and violent as they are, are neither exciting nor especially clever. In short, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves isn’t much fun. And really, shouldn’t a Robin Hood movie at least be fun?

Yesterday's Hits: The Karate Kid (1984, John G. Avildsen)

Paul Clark — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Karate Kid a hit?: The Karate Kid is nothing if not a formula movie, and a number of ingredients were combined to make the film resound with audiences. To begin with, there’s the always dependable “underdog” element, which director John G. Avildsen previously mined with his Oscar-winning film Rocky. Then, of course, there was a sport that the hero had to learn in order to succeed- karate, of course, to capitalize on the burgeoning martial-arts craze. Finally, it was also a high-school movie- one which found new kid Daniel (Ralph Macchio), recently moved to California from New Jersey, forced to learn karate to fight off the bullies. With these three elements, it hardly mattered to audiences that the film was almost completely predictable.

Like its hero, The Karate Kid was an underdog, with few studio executives expecting it to make much money. What they didn’t count on was the word-of-mouth and repeat business that followed its release. Much of the buzz was fueled by the film’s most popular character, the elderly maintenance man Mr. Miyagi who trains the film’s hero Daniel (Ralph Macchio) in martial arts. As played by longtime character actor Noriyuki “Pat” Morita- recognizable to viewers from his recurring role as Happy Days’ Arnold- Mr. Miyagi’s cranky inscrutability and unorthodox training methods make him feel like a flesh-and-blood version of Yoda. With its comfortable formula and Morita’s scene-stealing (and Oscar-nominated) performance, Karate Kid became the surprise hit of 1984, and beloved Miyagi-isms like “wax on, wax off” quickly entered the pop culture lexicon.

What happened?: As is so often the case, Hollywood just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Flush with the film’s unexpected box-office success, Columbia Pictures promptly green-lit a second Karate Kid adventure, one which took Daniel and Mr. Miyagi to the mentor’s childhood home on Okinawa. But while the second film actually managed to outgross the first, the well had run dry with the third installment, a pale retread of the original movie, which wasn’t that original to begin with. Then, after biding five more years, Columbia decided the public needed yet another Karate Kid, but without Macchio involved the main character became a girl, played by future two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank. Add to this a short-lived Saturday morning Karate Kid series, and you get the idea- the public just got Karate Kid-ed out.

Does The Karate Kid still work?: Not really. Now that the film’s heyday has passed, Karate Kid looks hokier than ever. The formulas that made the movie a hit have been played out, and the film itself isn’t good enough to transcend them. It doesn’t help that the film (which runs a bloated 127 minutes) has a lot of slow patches, which are largely found in the scenes that don’t involve Mr. Miyagi. Daniel’s relationship with “Ali-with-an-I” (future Oscar-nominee-turned-fertility-nurse Elisabeth Shue) starts promisingly, but quickly turns to a clichéd movie romance with a touch of a rich girl/poor boy dynamic, and the screenplay can’t be bothered to find a new wrinkle. No less formulaic is the pack of eeeeeeeeevil martial artists from the Cobra Kai dojo, where all of the best students are blonde preppies and the classes are run like a cross between boot camp and a meeting of the Hitler Youth. It should goes without saying that Daniel is a dark-haired, brown-eyed Italian-American boy.

Then there’s Avildsen’s direction, which is clumsy and hamfisted. In the eight years since Rocky, he apparently forgot how to shoot action, since the fight scenes here generally move too quickly to tell most of what’s happening. Meanwhile, Avildsen intersperses plenty of sunsets, along with a number of cheesy montages, all of which are underscored with the most obvious music choices (I call it “The Tao of Steve Syndrome”). A beach party is set to The Flirts and Jan & Dean’s “(Bop Bop) On the Beach”, a song called a song called “Young Hearts” underscores Macchio and Shue’s first date, and the final tournament is accompanied by Joe Esposito’s deathless dumb-as-dust (and sadly memorable) power ballad “You’re the Best.” All of these factors and more make Rocky look like the model of subtlety and restraint by comparison.

Yet when Mr. Miyagi is onscreen, the movie still works pretty well. Sure, the wise Asian mentor is an age-old stereotype, but Morita makes the character a lot of fun. Supposedly, the great Toshiro Mifune tested for the role, but while his intense presence would have overwhelmed the story, Morita is just stern enough, while leavening the character with a gentle wit that makes him pretty irresistible. It’s been a good twenty years since I last saw The Karate Kid, and I was taken aback by how much of the film didn’t involve Mr. Miyagi. I think it says something about the movie that I’d forgotten most of the movie but remembered almost all of Mr. Miyagi’s scenes, wouldn’t you say?

Yesterday's Hits: Exodus (1960, Otto Preminger)

Paul Clark — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, we paid tribute to the life and career of Paul Newman with a list of our picks for his greatest performances. And looking back, it’s easy to see the Newman made quite a few movies that were not only very good, but eventually became acknowledged as classics. But for this week’s installment of Yesterday’s Hits, I’d like to explore one of Newman’s films that was incredibly popular in its day but hasn’t endured quite like his best films- 1960’s Exodus.

What made Exodus a hit?: It seems strange now, but there was a time when the majority of box office hits were based on bestselling novels. People would read the latest literary blockbuster, then flock to the movies to see the cinematic version of the story. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, historical fiction was in vogue, and one of the most popular books of the time was Leon Uris’ 1956 novel Exodus. A dramatization of the 1948 founding of the state of Israel, Exodus captivated readers who enjoyed the way Uris interspersed a recent historical event with invented and composited characters. By the time Exodus became America’s biggest bestseller since Gone With the Wind, it was inevitable that it would be headed for the big screen.

Knowing the value of the property (Uris sold the rights even before the book hit bookstore shelves) MGM pulled out all the stops to make Exodus a major, A-list production. Tapped to direct was Otto Preminger, one of Hollywood’s best-known and boldest filmmakers, and himself of Jewish descent. In turn, Preminger hired the previously blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to handle screenwriting duties, which along with Trumbo’s work on Spartacus effectively ended the blacklist. The film was to be shot entirely on location in Cyprus and Israel, where the book had also been set. And the casting befitted a production of this scale. The cast was led by Newman, one of Hollywood’s hottest leading men, and also included Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint, Oscar nominees Lee J. Cobb, Ralph Richardson, and Sal Mineo, and up-and-comer Peter Lawford. As expected, the film was a big hit, bringing in more than $8 million domestically to become one of the top grossers of 1960.

What happened?: As with anything else, tastes change. To begin with, readers are a fickle bunch, and the popular taste for historical fiction was supplanted by other genres. Moviegoing audiences soon followed suit, and the historical epics that loomed large over the box office in the early 1960 soon gave way to hits that were more visceral or fanciful. Today, in a time when the only three-hour blockbusters are fantasy stories, Exodus would most likely be relegated to the Oscar-bait pile, given a limited release in late December before going wider in mid-January.

Does Exodus still work?: Almost, but not quite. It begins very well, with the famous incident in which hundreds of Jewish refugees attempted to escape their captivity on the island of Cyprus and sail to Palestine. In this section of the film, Preminger does a very good job at capturing the event in a way that does justice to those who lived it and while also being narratively compelling. These scenes aren’t particularly complex from a moral standpoint- the British are trying to block the Jews from their freedom, so they rebel by staging a hunger strike- but they have a clarity of purpose that gets the movie off on the right foot.

However, once the story gets to Palestine, much of the focus is lost, and despite a stirring score by Ernest Gold, the film begins to seriously drag. The cast of characters, previously united by the escape attempt, splinters the story into a number of different plot strands that are meant to encompass the difficult birthing process for the state of Israel. For example, Newman’s Ari Ben Canaan works with his father (Cobb) to establish the nation in a peaceful manner, whereas Dov Landau (Mineo) joins up with a group of resistance fighters. These stories are only as effective as the characters who inhabit them, and unfortunately, the quality of character development varies greatly.

Given particularly short shrift are the women. The American nurse Kitty Fremont (Saint) is clearly meant to function as the audience surrogate in the drama, gradually coming to an understanding of the ongoing plight- and enduring humanity- of the Jewish people. But as a character, she’s kind of a non-starter, carried along by the demands of the plot instead of by her own strongly defined nature. Even more sketchy is the character of Karen, played by newcomer Jill Haworth. In the course of the film, Karen reveals herself as a symbol of the fortunes of the Jewish people in Palestine. At the beginning of the story, she’s full of hope and promise, only to grow increasingly disillusioned once she arrives. By the time the film turns her into an innocent martyr in the final reel- buried alongside a sympathetic Arab, no less- the symbol has become far too belabored for its own good.

Faring much better is Mineo, who was never one of the breakout stars of the Method generation but who was one of its most interesting actors. Dov’s storyline is somewhat awkwardly integrated into the rest of the film, but they work pretty nicely on their own, due in large part to Mineo’s performance. It helps that the Dov Landau storyline contains some of the film’s edgiest material, as when he admits to working as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and more. Preminger, never one to shy away from controversy, changed Dov’s back story from the original novel, so whereas he survived as a forger in Uris’ book, Preminger and Trumbo made his method of survival somewhat more unpleasant. I admit that I was a little shocked that the line, “they used me… like a woman!” passed muster under the Production Code.

As for Newman, it’s not one of his great performances, but he’s fine in a role that makes effective use of his star charisma. And when he’s called on to make an impassioned speech in the film’s final scene, he pulls it off without coming off as sanctimonious. There are a number of elements to the film that just don’t work, or which have dated poorly. However, the sentiments Newman expresses in his final eulogy are as relevant today as ever. The situation between the Jews and Arabs is as uneasy as it ever was, and we’re no closer to a solution than we were half a century ago. And while Exodus doesn’t quite stand the test of time, these lines still hit home:

”The dead always share the Earth in peace- and that’s not enough. It’s time for the living to have a turn. The day will come when Arab and Jew will share in a peaceful life this land that they have always shared in death.”

Yesterday's Hits: The Carpetbaggers (1964, Edward Dmytryk)

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Carpetbaggers a hit?: Americans have long been fascinated with the lifestyles and misadventures of the filthy rich. While the wealthy and powerful may have the same urges and appetites we do, their affluence allows them to exert these on a much grander and more ambitious scale, and in more lavish settings. It was this idea that drove the lurid, sex-soaked novels of Harold Robbins, one of the most popular novelists of the 1950s and 1960s. And for The Carpetbaggers he took his inspiration from perhaps the most famous millionaire of the day, Howard Hughes. Even more than in real life, the book’s Hughes surrogate Jonas Cord Jr. collected companies by day and female conquests by night, with no regard for the damage he caused. And while few readers would want to know Cord in real life, many of them enjoyed his exploits on the page, and the book would end up being the most-read novel of Robbins’ career.

When Hollywood came calling in 1964, it was only natural that some of the book’s racier elements would have to go. But while the scenes depicting brutal murders and such then-abnormal sexual practices as fellatio ended up being cut en route to the big screen, Edward Dmytryk’s film version was still decadent by the standards of the time. After all, the story more or less begins with Cord putting the moves on his father's widow. With its combination of upper-class soap opera and Hollywood story, The Carpetbaggers proved almost as irresistible to moviegoers as it did to readers. The film (sold with the tagline, “this is adult entertainment!”) was one of the top grossers of 1964, becoming Paramount’s biggest hit in nearly a decade. To quote another famously over-the-top film, “nothing exceeds like excess.”

What happened?: In both printed and cinematic form, The Carpetbaggers was distinguished primarily by virtue of its outrageousness. Trouble is, by the end of the 1960s, the qualities that once titillated audiences of the movie seemed positively quaint. With the fall of the Production Code, it was no longer particularly exciting for a movie to imply sexuality, not when people could see explicit nudity in a number of big-budget Hollywood releases. Decades later, the formula Robbins had perfected for literary success had mostly been co-opted by television dramas like Dallas and Dynasty. Most tellingly, before the film’s 2003 DVD release, Paramount submitted The Carpetbaggers to the MPAA for a rating, and the much-ballyhooed “adult entertainment” hit of 1964 earned a family-friendly PG.

Does The Carpetbaggers still work?: Not really. Oh sure, the sets and costumes look great, but the movie’s little more than a soulless product. Part of the problem is the direction by Dmytryk, a longtime studio director long past his prime. Dmytryk’s primarily concern when making The Carpetbaggers appears to have been to utilize the ‘Scope frame to bring out every bit of possible opulence from his settings. But he did so at the expense of any possible drama in the story. It’s never a good sign when two of the film’s principal characters are sharing an important moment and your eyes are too busy looking at the beautiful paintings and ornate statues to care what’s being said.

Not helping matters is the film’s conception of Cord as a blinkered, ego-driven monster. Throughout almost the entire 2 ½ hour running time, Cord’s actions are motivated almost entirely by his desire to keep the upper hand, to maintain his advantage over the rest of the world. George Peppard’s performance is just fine- he plays the role more or less as written, and plays it pretty well. The trouble is that there’s never anything underneath. He wants his life to be lived by his rules, and damn the consequences. As he tells his wife Monica (Elizabeth Ashley), “what I need is the most freedom and the fewest responsibilities.”

Consequently, when the movie finally does try to explain what makes Cord tick in its final five minutes, it feels like a cheat. To pin Cord’s psychological issues on a single trauma from childhood is the kind of horribly reductive Freudianism that afflicted far too many films during the period. Consider what Citizen Kane would have been like had Welles meant for the audience to take Rosebud as a genuine insight into the title character and you’ll have an idea how laughable the psychological aspect of The Carpetbaggers really is. Follow this with an eye-rolling final scene, in which the sensationalism of what’s come before is countered with a reassertion of family and morality, and you’ll see the central problem with The Carpetbaggers- not only is it not nearly as outrageous as it thinks it is, but it doesn’t even have the conviction to follow through to the end.

The Carpetbaggers isn’t a worthless movie. The production values are handsome, and the Hollywood material is fairly entertaining, especially when one tries to figure out which real-life figures are being represented in the story. A handful of supporting performances also work, in particular Alan Ladd (in his final big-screen performance) as Cord’s friend/conscience Nevada Smith, and Carroll Baker, who made for such an effective stand-in for Jean Harlow that Paramount cast her as the real thing in a biopic that was made the following year. But ultimately, The Carpetbaggers just isn’t much of a movie. The history of Hollywood’s blockbusters is chock full of movies like this, that made a splash in their time, but just haven’t endured over the years. Yet they remain out there, waiting to be rediscovered by folks like me who are curious to see what moviegoers enjoyed way back when.

Yesterday's Hits: City Slickers (1991, Ron Underwood)

Paul Clark — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made City Slickers a hit?: The Western was one of classical Hollywood’s most popular genres. But while the greatest Westerns have endured in the American consciousness to this day, the popularity of Western films went downhill during the 1960s. By the 1980s, the number of Westerns made by Hollywood had dwindled to a handful of titles per year, and only a few of these (Young Guns, Dances With Wolves) made any money. At a time when people sat through long commutes to work and sweated the economic recession, it was hard for most audiences to relate to the old-fashioned cowboy mythos.

Yet even then, Westerns exerted a pull on our imaginations. The inspiration behind City Slickers was the way it combined the pleasures of an old-fashioned cattle-drive Western with characters with whom the audience could identify. The movie’s heroes weren’t larger than life, but rather a trio of middle-aged everyguys trying to escape the doldrums of modern life- bad marriages, dead-end jobs, fears of growing old- by embracing (after a fashion) the cowboy lifestyle, if only for two weeks. Add to this the presence of popular comic Billy Crystal, who has recently shown his leading-man chops with 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, and the combination of comedy and cowboys proved irresistible to audiences. City Slickers became one of 1991’s biggest hits, raking in nearly $125 million at the domestic box office.

What happened?: Sometimes, there’s no easily-pinpointed factor to explain a movie’s fall from its original level of popularity. While some blockbusters continue to factor prominently in popular culture and others fall from grace, most just sort of fade into the background. Of course, the misbegotten 1994 sequel City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold didn’t help matters. But mostly, City Slickers’ lack of enduring pop culture influence can be chalked up to the fact that it appealed primarily to middle-aged moviegoers, rarely the sort of audiences that fanatically obsess over a movie until it enters the popular lexicon.

Does City Slickers still work?: It mostly does, although it’s not without its drawbacks. For a movie that was sold primarily on its famously funny leading man, the comedic scenes are among the movie’s least effective. Part of the problem is Crystal, whose trademark kvetching (and oft-repeated refrain of “hel-loooooooooo???”) quickly becomes irritating. Not helping matters is director Ron Underwood’s misguided decision to underscore all of the big slapstick moments with jaunty, cutesy music by Marc Shaiman. These scenes lean too heavily on the wacky factor, which drains away whatever wit was originally there.

But while it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is, City Slickers is a sturdy and self-aware twist on the Western genre. Despite their fast-paced modern lives, lifelong friends Mitch (Crystal), Phil (Daniel Stern) and Ed (Bruno Kirby) were raised on Westerns, and this colors their experiences on the trail. They show both fear and respect for aging trail boss Curly (Oscar-winner Jack Palance), who Mitch proclaims “the toughest guy I’ve ever seen,” but the two of them also bond during their time together on the trail. The characters explicitly reference Red River, The Magnificent Seven, Rawhide, Bonanza, and other favorites, but they do so in a way that presents them as shared pieces of their past instead of simply clever allusions. And the movie becomes surprisingly exciting when the unlikely cowpokes have to bring the herd in by themselves, and it’s a satisfying scene when they actually pull it off.

However, City Slickers is at its best when dealing with the friendship between its heroes. Screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel were Hollywood’s go-to guys in the late eighties and early nineties for mainstream fare about middle-aged everyguys, and this movie demonstrates why. Likewise, Crystal, Stern and Kirby have an easy and infectious bonhomie that makes them convincing as three men who’ve remained friends through both good and bad. The late Kirby is especially good as the most pragmatic of the three, who worked his way up from a difficult childhood to create a comfortable life, but has never lost his taste for adventure. And verbal shtick aside, Crystal is affecting as the ill-at-ease salaryman Mitch, who ventures West with his lifelong friends with the goal of “finding his smile.” In the end, he does, and so did I.

Yesterday's Hits: Kramer vs. Kramer

Paul Clark — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Kramer vs. Kramer a hit?: In the 1970s, divorce rates were higher than they’d ever been. A downturn in the economy meant that working people had to work harder to make ends meet, while the women’s liberation movement opened up the eyes of women nationwide to opportunities that existed for them outside the home. But while a number of films had dealt with the subject of divorce, Kramer vs. Kramer was one of the first high-profile Hollywood releases on the subject. Due to its subject matter and the prestigious nature of the project, the film received a great deal of attention from the media, which aided the public’s awareness of it immensely.

Also, the presence of Dustin Hoffman in the lead role was intriguing to moviegoers. At the time, Hoffman was best known for putting his Method acting skills to work at playing quirky outsiders. By contrast, the character of Ted Kramer was very much a “regular guy”- an ad man working his way up the ranks of his company until his wife leaves him, forcing him to raise their child more or less alone. Whereas a more conventional star might have been less than convincing as a struggling father, Hoffman made the character vulnerable and down-to-Earth, which in turn made him sympathetic even when he gets frustrated with his son and the hand that life has dealt him. Combined, these two factors helped to make Kramer vs. Kramer not only the toast of the 1979 Academy Awards, but also the year’s biggest box-office draw.

What happened?: Coming at the tail end of the 1970s- the “last hurrah” of the heyday of Hollywood’s maverick filmmakers- the relatively modest Kramer vs. Kramer hasn’t sustained its initial critical love when compared to more ambitious and director-driven films of the era like Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz. That Kramer vs. Kramer bested those films for the Best Picture Oscar only added to the sentiment that the end of the seventies brought a golden age of Hollywood filmmaking to a screeching halt.

But Kramer vs. Kramer hasn’t fallen from grace so much as it’s lost much of its visibility. When a movie’s success is predicated on the hot-button issues it raises, it can often look dated once those issues have become commonplace. So it was with Kramer vs. Kramer, especially when it came to its single-father storyline. At the time of the film’s release, the idea of a man who puts his career on the back burner to raise a child on his own was new territory for Hollywood. But whereas the philosophy behind Ted Kramer’s lifestyle change once came off as a bold statement on parenthood, it now seems like only the proper thing to do under the circumstances. Good, but hardly groundbreaking.

Does Kramer vs. Kramer still work?: Yes, although not always in the ways director Robert Benton and novelist Avery Corman originally intended. The title of the film refers to the custody proceedings between Ted and his ex-wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) that comprise much of the film’s final third. Unfortunately, the case and the fallout from the decision is perhaps the least interesting aspect of the movie, mostly because it’s the most bound to plot conventions. This extends to the film’s final scenes, which set up a bittersweet ending until the need for a happy ending rears its ugly head. When Joanna shows up at Ted’s on the date she was scheduled to take her son Billy (Justin Henry) home with her only to announce that she thinks he should stay with his dad, it feels more like plot contrivance than a decision made by the character.

However, the film works nicely as a time capsule of the way gender roles were shifting in the late 1970s. As a college-educated woman who came of age during the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, Joanna holds no small amount of resentment for being relegated to the role of housewife while Ted furthers his career. It’s telling that once she’s returned to New York to be a mother again, she explains herself primarily in the language of self-help and psychoanalysis that was gaining traction in popular culture at the time. Meanwhile, Ted’s metamorphosis into a capable single parent prefigures the more gender-neutral parenting roles that have become the norm today.

However, Kramer vs. Kramer is at its best when it’s deals in a straightforward manner with its central relationship, between Ted and Billy. Ted is hardly a saint- he has something of a temper, which causes him to lose his patience. But Benton takes the time to show him making a new life for himself and his son. Much of the credit should go to Hoffman, who not only gives one of his least mannered performances, but also is able to create a completely believable relationship with then-seven-year-old Justin Henry. It’s because we buy the two of them as father and son that we care when it looks like the two may be separated. There’s a lovely moment that comes when Billy sees his mother for the first time when over a year. In his excitement, he sprints toward Joanna and doesn’t look back. Rather than showing a closeup of Hoffman’s reaction, Benton holds camera on him in long shot, and the surroundings dwarf Ted in a way that mirrors the insignificance he’s feeling.

Whereas in 1979 the big story of Kramer vs. Kramer was its portrayal of a man raising a child alone, today it’s more noteworthy as a cinematic portrayal of what it means to be a single parent, regardless of gender. From my experience dating a single mother, I’ve learned rearing a child by oneself requires a lot of sacrifice, and the scenes in which Ted’s work performance suffers as a result of his parental demands rang absolutely true for me. But I also appreciated the more low-key moments in which we see Ted and Billy forging a loving father-son relationship. I especially liked two scenes that involve Ted making French toast for Billy- the first taking place the day after Joanna has left, the second on the morning Billy’s scheduled to leave with her. The difference between these two scenes- one frantic, the other routine- says it all about how far they’ve come together.

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.

Yesterday's Hits: The Passion of the Christ (2004, Mel Gibson)

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

What made The Passion of the Christ a hit?: In the 1950s, the popularity of the “religious pictures” genre was at its peak, with Hollywood studios making big-budget Biblical adaptations featuring lush production values and big stars. However, half a century later the genre had long since degenerated into cut-rate affairs starring Tinseltown has-beens and never-would-bes. So when Mel Gibson, at the time not only one of Hollywood’s biggest stars but also an Oscar-winning filmmaker, decided to leverage his considerable clout to make a movie about Christ’s crucifixion- and in two dead languages, no less- most showbiz insiders declared the project to be an epic folly.

What they didn’t count on was Gibson’s ability to mobilize the Christian audience, a demographic too infrequently catered to by the studios. Gibson screened the film for months in advance for religious leaders of all stripes, from Protestant ministers to His Holiness, Pope John Paul II. This in turn led to an unprecedented number of special church-group screenings, reeling in many viewers who didn’t often attend movies, much less non-English-language films. By the time of the film’s release, a great deal of hype (and no small amount of controversy) has sprung up around The Passion, reeling in not only religious but secular viewers as well. The Passion quickly became an unlikely success, bringing in nearly $371 million in the United States alone, the highest gross of any R-rated film to date, as well as becoming the highest-grossing film ever made in a foreign language, dead or otherwise.

What happened?: Like it or not, people usually go to movies to enjoy themselves, and The Passion of the Christ wasn’t a whole lot of fun. With its religious subject matter and extreme violence, The Passion was the sort of movie most of its viewers watched more out of a perceived religious obligation than a desire to be entertained, and the repeat business was minimal. The following spring brought Gibson’s somewhat toned down edit entitled The Passion Recut, but this new version was a box office disaster. In addition, the crush of religious-themed mainstream movies that The Passion’s success seemingly heralded never happened, revealing the movie’s blockbuster grosses to be more a singularity than a sign of a new direction in audience tastes.

Does The Passion of the Christ still work?: Yes, and much better than it did on my first viewing, truth be told. As an agnostic, I initially found Gibson’s approach alienating, because so much of the film’s impact is dependent on a viewer’s acceptance of Christ’s divinity. But having seen the film a second time removed from the hype, I found myself more in agreement with Gibson’s methods. No, The Passion doesn’t really court the non-believers in the audience, but that’s not its goal, and it would be a mistake to hold that against it.

This isn’t to say the film doesn’t have its faults. Gibson is a talented filmmaker, but he’s often prone to overstatement, and his lack of subtlety distracts from some of the more powerful aspects of the film. This is most apparent in his portrayal of the Pharisees, shown here as a group of bloated, pompous elders puffed up by their own self-importance. Rather than showing how threatened they were by the power Jesus had over His disciples, Gibson instead turns them into one-dimensional villains. In addition, there are several other scenes- Judas Iscariot being hounded by demonic children, Jesus as a carpenter seemingly inventing the tall table- that just plain don’t work.

But overall, the film is better than I’d remembered. Jim Caviezel’s work as Christ is pretty heroic considering how much of his screen time is spent being beaten, tortured, and crucified, but he also makes a surprisingly down-to-earth Christ in his calmer scenes in flashback. Likewise, there are a number of effective supporting characters to serve as audience surrogates. Unlike the Pharisees, Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov) is seen with complexity as a victim of circumstance, a man who’s torn between keeping the peace and freeing a prisoner who committed no wrongdoing. I also liked the way Gibson uses the character of Simon of Cyrene (Jarreth Merz), who the Romans rope into helping Jesus carry the cross only to find himself horrified at the brutality with which he’s treated.

Most poignant of all is Maia Morgenstern as Mary, Jesus’ mother. Rather than sanctifying the character, Gibson and Morgenstern turn Mary into a terrified woman witnessing her son’s violent, protracted death. Of all His followers, only she can truly be sure of His divinity, but that matters little in light of the violence that is committed against Him. She’s a believer to the end, but she’s also the same woman who has cared for him all His life. Morgenstern’s performance is largely wordless, but the look in her eyes says everything we need to know.

Ultimately, the movie succeeds as an illustration of the trials Jesus Christ faced in the final days before His death. This comes through most clearly through the graphic nature of its brutality, with Gibson lingering on every blow from the torturers’ weapons, every thorn that pierced His head from the Roman soldiers’ scornful makeshift crown, every stumble under the weight of the cross. And the movie doesn’t shy away from the violence once He’s reached Calvary either- we see the nails pierce His flesh and the mounting of the cross itself (with Christ attached, no less). Never before has a film made so plain how much suffering that Christ endured, it is said, for our sins.

But there’s more to the film than blood and gore. What makes these scenes as effective as they are is that Gibson focuses on Christ’s humanity rather than his divinity. “Behold the man,” says Pilate to the crowd gathered for Jesus’ trial. For nearly the entire film, God is absent from the proceedings, although Satan makes several appearances to tempt Jesus to turn his back on God. This makes the experience feel that much lonelier for Christ, who has given His life for His Father only to have to forge on alone when He needs Him most (little wonder that He cries out, “why have you forsaken me?”). This in turn makes His sacrifice that much more meaningful, that He would not only give in to His punishment, but would willingly subject Himself to it in the first place, out of belief that it would indeed make a difference. After viewing The Passion, Pope John Paul II was rumored to have stated, “it is what it is.” Yes, and in that respect, it works.

Yesterday's Hits: The Jazz Singer (1927, Alan Crosland)

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Jazz Singer a hit?: The talking, of course. For more than three decades, moviegoers could travel to the other side of the world or even back in time, but they couldn’t hear the people onscreen actually talking. But in the late 1920s, various studios began to experiment with synchronized sound. While several short films, including Disney’s Steamboat Willie, had been already released with spoken dialogue, The Jazz Singer was the first widely-seen sound feature. Because of the sound equipment, the cost of the film was roughly twice that of a normal Hollywood production, but the movie proved so popular that its success demonstrated the commercial viability of “talkies.” According to Oscar legend, Hollywood’s executives were so bowled over by the success of The Jazz Singer that it was declared ineligible for the first-ever Best Picture Oscar, so afraid were they that it would run away with the award.

What happened?: When The Jazz Singer was first released, audiences couldn’t get enough of “a movie that talked.” But within a few years, talkies became fairly commonplace, to the point where the majority of big-budget releases had spoken dialogue throughout. As a result, the occasional sound scenes in The Jazz Singer no longer held any magic. Unfortunately for The Jazz Singer, this gave viewers ample opportunity to pore over the more rudimentary aspects of the film- the acting, the directing, the storytelling, and so on. And in these respects, The Jazz Singer was even less sophisticated than it was technologically.

Al Jolson, the star of The Jazz Singer remained a popular singer and performer in the decades that followed, and the film itself experienced a resurgence in popularity with the release of the twin biopics The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again in the late 1940s. But with the increasing consciousness of race in the United States, the scenes in which Jolson performs in blackface caused the film to fall out of favor with audiences and critics, turning it into little more than a footnote in the history of cinema.

Does The Jazz Singer still work?: Nope, and not just for the obvious reason. I hadn’t seen The Jazz Singer prior to watching it for this review, and its reputation led me to expect a movie that was chock full of minstrelsy. Actually, it contains roughly ten minutes of blackface- two musical numbers and a dramatic scene. But even those scenes left a bad taste in my mouth, less for their offensiveness than for their sheer ridiculousness. While I realize that blackface was considered a legitimate form of entertainment in the 1920s- instead of a reason to be kicked offstage at a Friars’ Club roast- it doesn’t make it any less laughable today.

What’s more, it feels completely gratuitous to the story that the film is telling. Jack Robin (Jolson) works his way to the top as a straight jazz singer, and once he hits Broadway he suddenly begins blacking up for performances, and the film treats this sudden change like it’s perfectly natural. What’s more, in the backstage scene involving Jack and his mother, the presence of blackface subverts the dramatic intent of the scene. When Jack’s mother cries out that her son has to come home to be reconciled with his dying dad, it’s supposed to be heartbreaking, but all I could pay attention to was Jolson’s blackened face and curly wig. Surely that couldn’t have been the film’s intention, could it?

But even out of blackface, Jolson’s performance hasn’t aged well at all. Jolson was primarily a theatrical performer, which is reflected by his overly emphatic acting style- an arsenal of broad facial expressions, shoulder shrugs, eye rolls, and head tilts. But while these gestures might play well on the stage, they’re unsuited to the cinematic medium, and even in intimate moments it feels like Jolson is playing to the cheap seats. What also becomes apparent in close-ups is the strange glint in Jolson’s eyes, which is interpreted by the other characters as pep but looked more to my eyes like mischief, almost malevolence. This gives The Jazz Singer a creepy vibe that couldn’t have been the filmmakers’ intention.

Rare and special is the film that actually holds up to eight decades’ worth of hindsight, and The Jazz Singer isn’t remotely that rare or special. Setting aside its technological advances, it was the kind of broad, simplistic melodrama of the sort that gives silent movies a bad name among non-cinephiles. That it was made at a time when silents were reaching their artistic apex just demonstrates how forgettable it really is. If not for its status as Hollywood’s first sound feature and the subsequent uproar over its racial insensitivity, it’s pretty safe to say The Jazz Singer would have been pretty much forgotten by cinema history, like so many other films of the period.

But hey, it’s still better than the Neil Diamond version, right?

Yesterday's Hits: Romeo and Juliet (1968, Franco Zeffirelli)

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Romeo and Juliet a hit?: While it’s debatable whether Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s finest play, it’s almost certainly his most beloved. After all, not everyone can relate to the trials and tribulations of kings, but most of us know what it’s like to be young and in love. Yet until 1968, all “straight” big-screen adaptations of the play had been cast with adults. By casting a pair of age-appropriate teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey (who were 17 and 15, respectively, during filming) in the title roles, Zeffirelli’s take on Romeo and Juliet appealed to youth in a way previous productions could not.

While the handsome production values and timeless source material appealed to older moviegoers, it was the attractive stars- along with the story of two idealistic lovers defying their oppressive parents to be together- that helped the film hit home with younger audiences. Romeo and Juliet became one of the great big-screen romances of the late 1960s. Not incidentally, it also spawned the hit song “A Time For Us” (based on Nino Rota’s love theme from the film) that quickly became a staple of many weddings of the day- my own parents' wedding included.

What happened?: For years, Romeo and Juliet sustained a degree of popularity among movie lovers, even after it had disappeared from first-run theatres. But after the rise of video, the film took on a new life as a teaching aid in classrooms across the country. However, rather than increasing the film’s popularity with audiences, this favorite of sixties-era youth suddenly turned into something dry and academic, a movie that was to be suffered through rather than enjoyed. As the years passed, fewer audiences came to Zeffirelli’s film on their own, and by the time Baz Luhrmann made his own pop version of the play in 1996, the love it had once received from moviegoers had long since subsided.

Does Romeo and Juliet still work?: Much to my surprise, it does- quite well, in fact. Like many people my age, I hadn’t seen the film since it was shown to us back in high school, during freshman-year English class. At the time, I barely paid attention to the movie itself, mostly being grateful that we didn’t have any reading to do on the days the movie was playing. But the intervening years- and my greater love for Shakespeare’s work- have allowed me to appreciate how well Zeffirelli captured the spirit of the original play, while at the same time making it completely cinematic.

Naturally, it’s hard to argue with the source material- after all, it’s Shakespeare. But while he made judicious trims to the original text, Zeffirelli was extremely successful at capturing the universal appeal of Romeo and Juliet on film, while keeping it completely in period. It couldn’t have been easy, but Zeffirelli immerses us in the world of pre-Renaissance Verona so sure-handedly that I never once scoffed at the idea of watching actors prancing around in tights and speaking in verse.

Even more than most classical playwrights, it’s difficult to fully appreciate Shakespeare simply by reading the plays. On the page, the language has a tendency to overwhelm the story, so that a reader will often find it difficult to puzzle out everything that’s happening, what with all the dialogue. One of the triumphs of Zeffirelli’s production is how un-stagy it feels. As the events play out onscreen, they work as drama rather than filmed theatre, which gives them an immediacy lacking in many other Shakespeare adaptations.

This is where Zeffirelli’s decision to cast age-appropriate unknowns, rather than older established stars, paid off beautifully. Watching previous productions of Romeo and Juliet- say, the George Cukor version starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard- there’s always a degree of self-consciousness to the performances, as if the actors are trying to recapture the impetuousness of youth in order to make the story work. This wasn’t a problem for Whiting and Hussey, who although they sometimes struggled a bit with Shakespeare’s language, had no trouble whatsoever with the tempestuous emotions that are so often stirred up by young love. It’s because of this that I believed these two as Romeo and Juliet in a way I’ve never been able to with other actors, no matter how talented they might be.

Another reason the movie works is because Zeffirelli doesn’t shy away from the more comedic aspects of the film. Many filmmakers are so in awe of Shakespeare that they approach his work like pious students, making stone-faced adaptations of Great Works of Literature. But Zeffirelli recognized that, like almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Juliet contains crowd-pleasing- even “low”- humor. For example, on the page the Nurse feels like little more than a plot device, a servant character who secretly aids the lovers. But as played by Pat Heywood in the film, she’s a serial scene-stealer, attending to her business as she tries- and usually fails- to keep her bawdy side in check.

Zeffirelli’s embracing of the play’s humorous material pays off magnificently in the film’s centerpiece, the confrontation between Mercutio and Tybalt. Most directors would have their sword fight play out solemnly, accompanied by exciting music. But instead, Zeffirelli has the irrepressible Mercutio (John McEnery) clown around with Tybalt (Michael York), as a way to defend himself against a superior swordsman. Of course, the crowd eats it up, and the scene is accompanied by a great deal of laughter by those gathered around. As a result, it hits that much harder when Tybalt stabs Mercutio in earnest, since the almost slapstick-y sword fight has suddenly turned deadly serious.

But consider what happens afterward. Tybalt, realizing what has happened, runs away with his men. But Mercutio’s friends interpret his stumbling as yet another jest, and continue laughing. The more he visibly suffers, the more they laugh at his perceived joke, while only Romeo begins to see the truth. It’s not until Mercutio struggles up a flight of stairs and screams, “a plague o’er both your houses!” that they realize what’s really happened.

In the end, this is probably the greatest triumph of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet- that he’s able to find the emotional truth behind Shakespeare’s beloved romantic tragedy in a way that gives it immediacy. It’s the difference between a director who simply respects Shakespeare and one who loves him enough to do justice to his work. Romeo and Juliet isn’t simply a dutiful Shakespeare adaptation; it’s an involving and emotionally satisfying movie in its own right.

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.

Yesterday's Hits: Forrest Gump (1994, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Forrest Gump a hit?: A number of factors that played a significant role in making Forrest Gump a success. To begin with, there was the storyline, which placed a Pilgrim’s Progress-style narrative in the context of the second half of the twentieth century. Forrest (played by Tom Hanks) meets many of the most significant people of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, while bearing witness to or even playing a part in a number of important events from the same period, all the while acting like it’s no big deal. And not only does he survive the journey, but he becomes an unlikely success, armed with only the sage words of his Mama (Sally Field), his undying love for Jenny (Robin Wright), and his own good nature.

In his re-creation of recent historical events, director Robert Zemeckis combined cutting-edge effects with good old-fashioned nostalgia, giving the audience a chance to see a fictional character interact onscreen with such key figures as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and John Lennon, instead of having actors portray them. In addition, the storyline combined a sincere celebration of hearth-and-home values with the ironic touch of making its uncannily lucky protagonist a simpleton with an IQ of 75. Forrest Gump became a monster word-of-mouth hit due to these factors as well as the iconic performance of Hanks, a well-liked (and Oscar-winning) actor who cemented his status as Hollywood’s favorite Everyman with this film. It was the #1 hit of 1994 and took home six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, plus a second consecutive Best Actor statue for Hanks.

What happened?: As is often the case when a movie becomes a surprise smash, Hollywood took the Gump brand and rammed it down the throats of America. Soon after the film became a hit, Paramount commissioned a volume entitled Gumpisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump, which basically consisted of folksy quotations from the film. Other tie-ins soon followed- posters, cookbooks, even a chain of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurants. Eventually, the majority of people were more or less Gump-ed out.

In addition, the fall of 1994 brought the year’s other big word-of-mouth hit, Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s film was as cool and edgy as Gump was warm and fuzzy, and the two were quickly positioned as pop-culture polar opposites. While this assessment is somewhat unfair to both films- even Tarantino acknowledged as much- Pulp quickly came to symbolize the future of movies, while Gump was the establishment. Even today, Pulp’s critical rep remains intact, while Gump’s has fallen quite a bit- witness the former’s #1 status atop EW’s recent “New Classics” list, while the latter failed to crack the top 100.

Does Forrest Gump still work?: Sort of, although it’s not without its problems. The combination of sentiment and irony that Zemeckis tries to pull off here is a tricky one, and I don’t quite think he succeeds. There’s no small irony in Forrest’s situation- in a tricky time, he becomes a success largely because he doesn’t know any better than to live according to his nature. He doesn’t know better than to do as he’s told and be loyal to those closest to him, which helps him to become a star football player, a war hero, a table tennis champion, a successful shrimp boat captain, and a philanthropist, all with an intelligence level that wouldn’t have allowed him to enroll in public school without the (ahem) intervention of his Mama.

The trouble is that the irony of the situation only really works if we believe Forrest is slow-witted, and I never quite did. The trouble has less to do with Hanks’ performance as it does with the literal nature of film. On the page, Winston Groom sketched out the character of Forrest using only language, and despite the book’s numerous other flaws, we believed its hero was an idiot. Not so in the film. Hanks does a fine job with the role as written, but too much intelligence flickers behind his eyes for us to believe he’s as simple as the film says he is. In addition, screenwriter Eric Roth often falls back on impeccably written monologues to allow Forrest to express his deeper feelings, a tendency which runs contrary to the character’s nature. Such soliloquies would require no small amount of thought, and if there’s one thing Forrest Gump isn’t, it’s a thinker.

When viewing the film again recently, I also found the film’s treatment of Jenny to be fairly ugly. Forrest Gump uses Jenny as a counterpoint to Forrest, a woman whose background is considerably more unfortunate than Forrest’s. Unlike Forrest, Jenny is intelligent enough to think for herself, but the choices she makes for herself- posing for Playboy, shacking up with the leader of the SDS at Berkeley, getting into drugs- invariably get her into trouble, and time and again Forrest has to bail her out. This just doesn’t sit well with me- Forrest coasts on the tide of fate and is rewarded by meeting three presidents, seeing the world, and becoming independently wealthy, while Jenny uses her free will to get kicked out of college, abused by her revolutionary boyfriend, and turn into a junkie, before rebounding in time to die of a mysterious “virus”? I’m not sure whether this counts as misogynistic or simply anti-thought, but either way, I don’t like it much.

There are a few other elements that didn’t work for me. That extended sequence of Forrest running back and forth across the country serves little discernible purpose besides giving us picture-postcard shots of the American landscape, throwing a couple of nostalgia jokes into the story, and filling up a few years of Forrest’s life before Jenny calls again. And I became annoyed with the film’s tendency to use the most obvious soundtrack choices, especially during the scenes set in the late sixties. “Fortunate Son”? “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair)”? “Let’s Get Together”? Check, check, and check.

In spite of these flaws, much of Forrest Gump remains quite effective, beginning with Zemeckis’ use of special effects. Much was made at the time of the way the film placed Forrest into old newsreel footage, but while those effects have grown dated, other instances of CGI in the film are far more impressive. The most obvious example of this is the still-convincing removal of Lt. Dan’s legs, aided in no small part by Gary Sinise’s performance. But even in less obvious special effects scenes- the football games, the demonstration in Washington, D.C.- Forrest Gump remains a standard-bearer for photo-realistic CGI, which is a testament to Zemeckis and his effects teams’ attention to detail.

But in the end, it’s the human element that’s the heart of Forrest Gump. I’ve always been a fan of the way the film handles the complex dynamic between Forrest and Lt. Dan, as well as how their relationship between the two men evolves over time. I also found the simplicity of the friendship between Forrest and Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) to be surprisingly touching. And on the occasions when the screenplay gives Forrest dialogue that actually sounds like it might come out of the mouth of a man with a 75 IQ (rather than a screenwriter who’s trying to “write dumb”), Hanks’ performance is deserving of the love that was bestowed on it at the time. I especially liked the following exchange between Jenny and Forrest, which does a better job of getting to the heart of Forrest’s character than any Oscar-friendly monologue ever could:

Jenny: Why are you always so good to me, Forrest?
Forrest: You’re my girl!

Yesterday's Hits: "Crocodile" Dundee (1986, Peter Faiman)

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One of the oldest and most dependable of storytelling formulas is the Fish Out of Water storyline, which entails taking a character out of his natural habitat and placing him somewhere altogether different. The Fish Out of Water (or “FOW”) formula has been around for centuries, and has been a popular one for movies almost since their beginning. But the heyday for cinematic FOW comedies was the mid-to-late eighties, following the release of the 1984 blockbuster Beverly Hills Cop, one of the quintessential Fish Out of Water movies. From there, the formula caught fire in Hollywood, and studios applied it to movies of all sorts, from the fourth Star Trek movie (which placed the Enterprise crew in 20th Century San Francisco) to an Arnold Schwarzenegger family movie. But in my estimation, perhaps the purest distillation of the formula can be found in the surprise 1986 hit, “Crocodile” Dundee.

What made ”Crocodile” Dundee a hit?: In the mid-eighties, there was an upswing in American interest in Australia. With international tourism at an all-time high, more and more people wanted to jet off to exciting new locales, and Australia was ideal for their purposes- beautiful, distant, home to a wide variety of environments, and (perhaps more importantly) English-speaking. Fueling interest were a series of commercials made by the Australian Tourist Commission for American audiences, which starred a former day laborer-turned-popular Australian television personality named Paul Hogan, who invited viewers to come “Down Under” for their next vacation.

At the time of its American release, ”Crocodile” Dundee was already a huge hit in Australia, due in large part to Hogan’s television popularity. But the film’s success in the States owed less to Hogan’s TV-commercial ubiquity than to good, old fashioned word of mouth. ”Crocodile” Dundee- due in no small part to Hogan’s good-natured performance- ended up grossing nearly ten times its opening-weekend take of $8 million, a figure that’s almost unheard of nowadays. In addition, the Aussie craze kicked into overdrive, with Down Under tourism increasing by more than 40% after the film’s release, one of the biggest movie-inspired tourism spikes to happen to any foreign country pre-Lord of the Rings.

What happened?: ”Crocodile” Dundee was a pop-culture sensation and propelled its leading man to big-screen stardom, but by the end of the 1980s, the ardor had cooled. 1988 saw the release of a sequel, but while it was also a hit, it was of subpar quality and didn’t linger in the memory like the first film did. By the time 1990 saw the release of Hogan’s first non-Dundee leading man role in Almost An Angel, the once-hot star (who was by that time upwards of fifty years old) was looking like a one-trick pony, playing leathery, twinkly-eyed charmers who use their wits to get them out of tight spots. Hogan had ceased to be the scrappy underdog whose easy smile won over audiences in the first film, and his subsequent star vehicles- the quasi-Western Lightning Jack, a big-screen remake of Flipper- failed to set the box office on fire. Following the turn of the millennium, Hogan returned once more to the role that made him famous, in the misguided Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.

Does ”Crocodile” Dundee still work?: When I first made my list of potential Yesterday’s Hits back in December, one of the first movies that sprung to mind was this one. However, I was sort of dreading the idea of watching it again, in part because for years it seemed to me like the epitome of eighties formula fare, to say nothing of the bad taste left in my mouth by the terrible sequels. But while I wasn’t exactly wrong about the film’s narrative, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed myself during ”Crocodile” Dundee. More than two decades later, the movie still has a lot of charm and good cheer.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its problems as well. To begin with, there’s no real chemistry between Hogan and leading lady Linda Kozlowski. This seems odd, since the two later married in real life, but they just don’t click onscreen, and as such the film’s final scene doesn’t work nearly as well as it should. In addition, the movie trades almost entirely in clichés, from the stereotyped portrayal of Kozlowski’s editor/fiancé (Mark Blum) as a snob who takes every opportunity to expose Dundee as a bumpkin (for his part, Dundee socks him in the face) to the Tarzan/Jane dynamic of the Hogan/Kozlowski relationship. In the latter case, the movie even makes this explicit in a dialogue exchange, which is almost never a good idea, and certainly isn’t one here. Also, as with many other eighties blockbusters there’s an undercurrent of gay-panic humor that didn’t wash well with me- it’s not blatant, but there was enough of it to be somewhat troubling.

But while the movie traffics in formula, I was surprised by how pared-down the storytelling is. The first 45 minutes or so of the movie show Hogan taking Kozlowski on a guided tour of the outback, and demonstrate the character’s skills on his home turf. Then the action moves to New York, where Dundee navigates the city with a combination of outback survival skills and friendliness. There’s a refreshing lack of gratuitous subplots, something that marred the film’s sequels. Instead, the plot becomes almost imperceptible, so that even if we notice the formula at work, we barely mind. One major constant of the FOW storyline is that the protagonist’s nature tends to make him surprisingly well-suited to his new environment, and in ”Crocodile” Dundee, this happens almost instantaneously. Yet the character’s personality and skills have been well-established enough that I bought it completely.

Rather than leaning heavily on narrative, ”Crocodile” Dundee takes its cue from its hero. Much of Mick J. “Crocodile” Dundee’s success in New York is predicated as much on his innocent good nature as it is on his innate street-smarts. Rather than closing himself off from those around him like many city-dwellers tend to do, Dundee walks right up and makes friends, and with his easygoing smile and “no worries” demeanor, Hogan’s performance sets the tone for the rest of the film. Sure, ”Crocodile” Dundee may lack the narrative tension that’s found in most films of this sort, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. ”Crocodile” Dundee has no lofty goals beyond providing a couple hours of genial entertainment, and on those grounds it still gets the job done.

Yesterday's Hits: Summer of '42 (1971, Robert Mulligan)

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One of the many cool regular columns that we’re running right now on Screengrab is Leonard Pierce’s weekly feature Summerfest 2008. All summer long, Leonard has tasked himself to write about one movie a week with the word “summer” in the title. Personally, I’m hoping he gets around to one of Eric Rohmer’s seasonal classics- either Summer/The Green Ray or A Summer’s Tale- but I realize that at one movie a week, the series will be far from comprehensive. Happily, Leonard has given me permission to help him out on that front, to write up a Yesterday’s Hits that neatly dovetailed with his goal. So to that end, I’ve decided to review a summer-y hit of yesteryear, Robert Mulligan’s 1971 film Summer of ‘42.

What made Summer of ‘42 a hit? After the fall of the Production Code, the newfound permissiveness changed the face of Hollywood filmmaking. But while many filmmakers tried to push the envelope of what was acceptable, Summer of ‘42 took a different approach, injecting sexuality into the framework of what was essentially a nostalgia piece for a more innocent time- the 1940s. It was this period setting- and the tastefulness of the storytelling- that appealed to older audience members who otherwise might not have been interested in an R-rated movie about the sexual stirrings of teenagers. At the same time, it was this same nostalgia which appealed to the children of a more permissive era, who marveled at how naïve the children of the period were, learning about sex from books and hemming and hawing at the idea of buying birth control at the local pharmacy.

But one also shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of the film’s most prominent storyline, the deflowering of the film’s teenaged protagonist “Hermie” (Gary Grimes) by the recent war widow Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill). The older-woman fantasy has long been a popular one among young men, and Summer of ‘42 was one of the first Hollywood films to portray it in any detail. Unlike The Graduate, which pretty much turned its older woman into a predator all the better to hammer home its youth-friendly message, Summer of ‘42 told its older-woman/younger-man story with a tenderness befitting those fantasies held by generations of teenagers. Combine all of these factors with a fresh-faced cast of unknowns and the film became a surprise hit, one of the top grossers of 1971 and an Academy Award winner for Michel Legrand’s bittersweet score.

What happened? Compared to most hits of the day, Summer of ‘42 was fairly small-scale and unassuming, so it didn’t linger in the zeitgeist in quite the same way as, say, contemporaneous fellow Yesterday’s Hits selections The Way We Were and Love Story. For one thing, the nostalgia Mulligan’s film offered paled in comparison to the melodramatic pull of Love Story, and its low-wattage cast couldn’t compare with the pairing of Streisand and Redford. Finally, while the sincerity of the film’s portrayal of 1940s sexual innocence originally appealed the audiences, it became less relatable as the years passed, to the point where the famous condom-buying scene was parodied in an English television commercial. Like so many films, both in the past and today, Summer of ‘42 just wasn’t made to withstand the passage of time.

Does Summer of ‘42 still work? Kind of. One of the most charming aspects of the movie is its time-capsule quality, both of the 1940s and the 1970s’ concept of 1940s life. In our more sexually-frank age, it’s hard to remember a time when sex wasn’t just a mouse-click away, but Mulligan and writer Herman Rauscher portray this time with warmth. At the same time, the movie gets a lot of more universal details right, especially the way young men always try just a little too hard to impress women, to say nothing of those tentative grope session in the back row of the local movie house- a detail that rings just as true when the movie is Now, Voyager as when it’s Iron Man.

But there’s always something that has stuck in my craw about the older-woman fantasy, both in the film and in general. Namely, what does the older woman think? In Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien- currently the benchmark for onscreen portrayals of this premise- the question was answered by making the older woman the central player in the story. By contrast, in Summer of ‘42, Dorothy exists almost entirely to be admired by Hermie- first from a distance, then up close, then closer still. After Dorothy’s husband ships off to war, she befriends the kid, and the same day she finds out her husband has been killed, she responds by sleeping with him. After that, she disappears forever. To quote the Church Lady, “how conveeeeeeeeeenient!”

In the end, Summer of ‘42’s nostalgia is too rose-colored by half. The film was based on the real-life experiences of screenwriter Herman Rauscher (note the protagonist’s name), whose memories of the actual events were surely smoothed out from almost three decades’ distance. But the reality of one’s teenaged sexual awakening- not only Rauscher’s but practically everyone’s- is almost never this tidy. Most of the time, it’s fraught with anxiety and more than a little shame, two factors that can’t be dealt with simply by staring meaningfully into the distance as Hermie does in the film. By downplaying this emotional prickliness, Summer of ‘42 became a favorite date movie for 1971 audiences, but had the film kept more of this, it could very well have become a true-blue classic.

Yesterday's Hits: Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The more research I do into potential Yesterday’s Hits titles, the more I begin to think that true classics that were hugely popular in their time are an anomaly. This seems especially true of big, effects-driven summer blockbusters. When throwing tens- or even hundreds- of millions of dollars behind a movie, the studio is reluctant to take any unnecessary risks. Of course, there are still films that try to be unique and special, but they’re a risky proposition, since for every Back to the Future there’s a Hulk. More often than not, studios leave little to chance in order to make a splashy, inoffensive movie that appeals to as many people as possible. And while movies like this sometimes make a lot of money, they rarely linger in the public consciousness for very long. By way of example, and just in time for Independence Day, I offer up… well, Independence Day.

What made Independence Day a hit?: A few months ago, I spotlighted one of the biggest hits of the 1970s Irwin Allen disaster movie cycle, The Towering Inferno. The key to that movie’s success was the combination of big stars, state-of-the-art effects, and plenty of destruction to keep audiences entertained. When making Independence Day, the major inspiration of director/producer team Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin was to fuse the Irwin Allen formula with an alien-invasion plot a la War of the Worlds. And while Independence Day lacked the megastars of its 70s-era predecessors- its top-liners were Will Smith, then best-known to many from TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a post-Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum, and Bill “Not Paxton” Pullman- the relatively low-wattage cast only served to direct more attention to the effects-driven mayhem.

Realizing this, Emmerich, Devlin, and 20th Century Fox mounted a highly effective advertising campaign that played up the movie’s effects. Even today, the movie’s most iconic image contains no actors whatsoever, but simply shows an alien craft blowing up the White House. And despite the lack of box-office draws, the ads paid off magnificently, with the movie earning over $300 million in the United States alone, making it the highest-grossing movie of 1996. In addition, Independence Day propelled Smith to movie superstardom and launched his self-promoted reign as the king of July 4th releases.

What happened?: For a movie that enjoyed such popularity on its initial release, Independence Day enjoyed very little long-term love. The major reason for this was because there was very little about that movie that hadn’t been cribbed from earlier, better-loved blockbusters. The plot was formulaic, the characters were one-dimensional, and the aliens bore a strange resemblance to the extraterrestrial baddies from the Alien franchise. Even the movie’s major selling point- the effects- suffered in the long run. Independence Day was made to enjoyed in theatres, so inevitably the movie’s effects would suffer on the small screen, and as the years passed they became less impressive in light of more groundbreaking effects like those in Titanic and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And really, without plot, characters, aliens and special effects, what’s left to Independence Day?

Does Independence Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Of course, for the movie to work it requires some willful suspension of disbelief. And by “some,” I mean “a whole truckload.” To put it bluntly, Independence Day is pretty kind of stupid, and the more one thinks about the plot the dumber it gets. Even more than most alien-centric thrillers, the logic behind the invasion just doesn’t hold water. Similarly, the human race’s eventual solution to the threat is so harebrained that one could hardly be blamed for rolling one’s eyes.

Likewise, most of the characters are pretty standard-issue. Each is assigned a quirk and a conflict and set loose within the story, and their separate character trajectories all proceed more or less as we expect them to. Some of the actors do a better job than others at making them work- Smith has an easy charm and Goldblum’s nebbish routine is almost always fun, but Pullman is clearly keeping his more eccentric impulses in check to play the President. In addition, the film’s most entertaining supporting character (Brent Spiner’s endearingly daffy alien expert Dr. Okun) isn’t around nearly long enough, while the most irritating (Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s perpetually kvetching dad) has far too much screen time. Of all the characters in the movie, he survives?

Yet the movie does more or less what it sets out to do- that is, to entertain the audience by blowing stuff up real good. Emmerich and Devlin’s hearts might not be in Independence Day’s story or characters, but they’re certainly in the explosions, and they definitely deliver in this area. I think it’s telling that many of the effects in the movie were accomplished at least in part by using detailed models, as the filmmakers were so excited to set the world ablaze onscreen that they actually constructed the models to be blown up rather than simply using all-CGI effects like many other movies of the period. As a fan of old-school analog effects, I appreciated the extra effort that went into doing this.

Listen, by any rational standards Independence Day is not a very good movie. It’s formulaic, and I’m pretty sure I killed some brain cells just by watching it again. But deep within the heart of many a moviegoer there’s a part that can’t resist movies that are loud and dumb and willfully cheesy with plenty of explosions, to say nothing of Will Smith talking about “whupping E.T.’s ass.” To ask for intelligence from Independence Day is like reading Strindberg for the jokes- that’s not the point, so why bother looking? As Pope John Paul II once said of another potential Yesterday’s Hits entry, “it is what it is,” and for what it is, it gets the job done. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Yesterday's Hits: Top Gun (1986, Tony Scott)

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Readers, I have a little confession to make: up until last week, I’d never watched Tony Scott’s Top Gun from beginning to end. Yes, I’d seen parts of the film here and there on television, but I’d never actually sat down for the purpose of actually watching Top Gun in its entirety. However, I was familiar enough with the film by reputation and through hearing others talk about it that I was fairly sure I wasn’t missing much. Yet the film was so popular in its day that it was almost inevitable that I would be writing it up for a column sooner or later. So in writing this week’s column, I wouldn’t be simply reviewing Top Gun on its own merits, but viewing it through the prism of its pop-cultural impact- not normally the way to review a movie, but more or less the modus operandi here at Yesterday’s Hits. So get ready to take a ride on the highway to... the danger zone!

Why was Top Gun a hit?: In the days of Old Hollywood, the big splashy entertainments were usually distinguished by their sheer magnitude, with towering sets, far-flung locations, and the proverbial “cast of thousands”. But all of this changed in the 1970s, when directors like Spielberg and Lucas made hugely popular blockbusters that were distinguished less by their largesse than for their momentum. By the time 1986 rolled around, audiences were feeling the need for speed, and Top Gun delivered. Top Gun boasted eye-popping aerial photography and combat sequences that rivaled almost anything that had been shown onscreen up to that point, and allowed the U.S. Navy to show off some of their most state-of-the-art fighter planes.

But if audiences came for the jets, they stuck around to witness the birth of a new superstar, Tom Cruise. Cruise had made a big impression three years prior in Risky Business, but it was Top Gun that propelled his career into the stratosphere. Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell isn’t a great role, but it was tailor made to Cruise’s onscreen persona- boyish, driven, confident, almost impossibly handsome. Maverick such was a quintessential eighties hero (his goal: to be “the best of the best”) and so successfully did Cruise fit the role that he represented the kind of man who women wanted to be with and men wanted to be like. Top Gun became the runaway hit of 1986, taking in $176 million in the United States alone. In addition, the film became an invaluable recruiting tool for the Navy, which stationed recruiters outside of many theatres, resulting in an almost unprecedented number of applications.

What happened?: After its theatrical release, Top Gun became a sizable hit on home video and maintained most of its popularity through the end of the decade. However, by the time the nineties rolled around, the alpha-male lifestyle and master-of-the-universe mindset of the eighties had fallen out of fashion, and movies like Top Gun became more interesting for their kitsch value than as entertainment.

Consider the whole Tarantino issue. In the 1994 indie Sleep With Me, Tarantino expounded upon a theory that posited Top Gun as a movie about Maverick struggling with his homosexuality. How well the theory holds up when watching the film is almost immaterial- although scenes like the infamous volleyball game, in which Cruise, Val Kilmer and Rick Rossovich all play shirtless and covered in sweat as Kenny Loggins sings “Playing With the Boys” on the soundtrack certainly don’t discourage this interpretation. But what’s important is how alien the un-ironic brand of manliness in the film translated to the more self-aware age, and how cheesy it all feels in retrospect. Even now, when we can’t look back at the eighties without a certain snickering nostalgia, Top Gun isn’t remotely the manly-man classic it set out to be.

Does Top Gun still work?: Not really. For such a mammoth box office hit, there really isn’t much to Top Gun. The movie’s storyline, such as it is, is just a framework on which to hang a series of flight sequences, interspersed with love scenes and bits of strutting-peacock machismo. From a visual standpoint, the movie’s still fairly exciting when the planes are in the air, but considering that most of these scenes are actually simulated missions rather than actual combat, there’s not a lot of tension to them. As the aviators battle to determine who will be Top Gun, the movie comes off a lot like a baseball movie in which most of the story is devoted to players in spring training duking it out for a spot on the roster. The real combat sequence at the end is considerably more exciting, but it’s too little, too late, once one realizes that the entire preceding ninety minutes have all essentially been the setup.

If the story is thin, the characters are even thinner. From Maverick on down, the people who populate the film are defined by one or two basic motivations. Maverick wants to be the best and discover what happened to his father. Charlie (Kelly McGillis) wants a big promotion in Washington, and to get closer to Maverick for various reasons. Iceman (Kilmer, clearly bored) wants to beat Maverick. The film’s only interesting character is Maverick’s “rear man” (heh heh) Goose, played by Anthony Edwards. Goose is best friends with Maverick and would follow him anywhere, but feels conflicted about risking his life in combat because he has a wife and kids. Naturally, Goose is doomed, but because we actually care about him as a person instead of just an action figure, his death is one of the few parts of the movie that makes an impression.

As a whole, Top Gun is curiously soulless. Looking back at the classics of the past that have truly endured, it’s clear that all of them were lovingly crafted, with the filmmakers taking a real emotional stake in the films they made. This isn’t the case with Top Gun, a movie in which every element is calculated and focus-grouped to appeal to the widest possible audience. For example, there’s the film’s love scene. Cruise and McGillis exhibit almost no chemistry or sexual tension throughout the film, yet test audiences complained about the lack of a love scene, so Scott shot one months after principal shooting was completed. The scene is so perfunctory that it doesn’t work except to satisfy an obligation to a formula, and much of the rest of the film feels the same way. No wonder the theory Tarantino voiced caught on- at least it gives audiences something to entertain themselves while the movie itself is on autopilot.

Oh, and in case you still haven’t seen it for yourself, here’s a clip of Tarantino from Sleep With Me sharing the Top Gun theory, coming to us through the magic of YouTube.

Yeah, Quentin gets the line wrong, but still- it's tough not to watch the film now without thinking "Swordfight! Swordfight!" at least once.

Yesterday's Hits: The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan)

Paul Clark — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Compared to what Screengrab’s resident box office prognosticators had predicted for it, The Happening’s $30-odd million opening weekend gross was something of a surprise. However, judging by the peals of laughter which accompanied the Friday night screening I attended- combined with mostly dumbfounded reaction to his previous films Lady in the Water and The Village- I think it’s safe to say that M. Night Shyamalan’s reputation among the public has gone down the tubes. It’s strange to think that it hasn’t even been a decade since Shyamalan was Hollywood’s resident whiz kid, turning a low-key chiller into one of the biggest sleeper hits of the 1990s. Today I’ll be taking a second look at that film, 1999’s The Sixth Sense.

What made The Sixth Sense a hit?: In this age of focus groups and micro-managed marketing campaigns, surprise blockbusters have become exceedingly rare. In fact, it seems like the only box-office surprises left are the flops. But The Sixth Sense pulled it off through a mix of numerous elements. First, there was the film’s late-summer release, arriving just in time when slam-bang effects and big-budget bloat was beginning to wear down audiences. Then there were the trailers and TV spots, which wisely played up the story’s big hook, which was nearly encapsulated in one unforgettable four-word line (that would be “I see dead people,” not “keep moving, cheese dick”). And of course there was that final twist, which at a time before every genre film felt obligated to include a twist came as a legitimate surprise to most viewers.

But while all of these elements might have combined to make The Sixth Sense a hit, it would take more than that to take the film’s grosses to nearly $300 million in the U.S. alone, second only to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace among 1999 releases. Credit good old-fashioned word-of-mouth for the film’s ultimate success. The Sixth Sense was, quite simply, a movie that got people talking, with those who raved about the film convincing their friends, family and coworkers to check it out for themselves. Word of mouth is the hardest kind of buzz to harness properly, but if you can make it work for you, there are few better ways to tap into the zeitgeist, and The Sixth Sense is proof of that.

What happened?: If surprise blockbusters are few and far between, rarer still are huge hits that don’t experience some kind of backlash, and no sooner did The Sixth Sense become one of the most popular movies ever than the backlash began in earnest. The primary target for the naysayers was the famous twist, with people calling the film a one-trick pony and even claiming (truthfully or not) that they saw it coming.

But even more damaging to the film’s reputation in the long run was Shyamalan himself. The Sixth Sense turned the young filmmaker from Philadelphia into one of Hollywood’s marquee directors. The trouble began when Shyamalan began to buy into the hype that had arisen around him. His presence became increasingly ubiquitous in the marketing of his films, with Shyamalan claiming proprietary credit for all of his subsequent efforts to date. Likewise, his attempts to recapture the box office magic of The Sixth Sense have resulted in ever more misguided marketing ploys- remember the awful television “documentary” just before the release of The Village?

Most of all, Shyamalan’s films seem to have suffered due to an need on the director’s part to re-create the success of The Sixth Sense by sticking as closely to his original template as possible. Looking at his subsequent efforts, one notices Shyamalan’s trademark combination of funereal pacing, domestic drama, and the use of an often profoundly quiet soundtrack to build tension. While these stylistic tropes suited The Sixth Sense perfectly, they haven’t fit his other stories nearly so well. However, with Shyamalan’s increased clout has become a maverick tendency on his part to be unreceptive to constructive criticism from others (Exhibit A being Bob Balaban weaselly film critic character in Lady in the Water). As a result, Shyamalan’s recent films have become increasingly schizoid in tone, with goofball humor clashing with tense moments in a way that deflates any suspense the film is trying to create. The films are sometimes interesting- Lady in particular has a crazy charm to it- but it doesn’t make them good.

Does The Sixth Sense still work?: Sure does. Not having seen the film since its initial release, I wasn’t sure whether my knowledge of the twist would spoil the film for me, but I was relieved that it didn’t. In fact, knowing how the film plays out makes one more mindful of the clues Shyamalan sprinkles throughout the film, and watching the film again, I was impressed by how little Shyamalan cheats in order to make the twist happen. He reveals just enough to let the audience know that something is afoot, but never fudges the rules he’s set forth in the story, and if you look closely enough- or know what’s going to happen- you can see this.

Of course, none of this would have worked in the first place had Shyamalan made the audience feel like they were watching a “twist movie.” But to his credit, the film’s drama is compelling enough on its own that first-time viewers aren’t simply waiting for the other shoe to drop, narratively-speaking. Bruce Willis gives one of his best performances in The Sixth Sense as child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe, who can’t understand why his career and marriage have gone completely to hell after his shooting by a former patient. Likewise, his scenes with Haley Joel Osment as Cole, the forlorn, pint-sized medium in his care, are nicely-performed and written, with Willis proving remarkably patient with his gifted young costar, and Shyamalan giving both some real opportunities to interact onscreen rather than piecing Osment’s performance together in the editing room as one sometimes has to do with child stars.

But the real heart of the film comes in the scenes between Cole and his working-class mother Lynn, played by Toni Collette. Shyamalan is often dismissed as being beholden to his twists, but in The Sixth Sense he creates original characters with very specific relationships, and this- not plot manipulation- is what drives the film. The relationship between Cole and Lynn is always completely convincing, not only because of the performances by Collette and Osment, but also because of the details Shyamalan injects into their scenes together. By the end of the movie, I legitimately cared about these people, and Shyamalan rewards this by saving their best scene for last, when Cole finally decides to confess his secret to his mother. Many of Shymalan’s later films have also attempted one last final tug at the heartstrings, but generally without the same emotional investment, which makes these scenes feel gratuitous at best, and laughable at worst. Perhaps if Shyamalan would put as much care into creating his characters as he would formulating his storylines, he might be able to capture the public’s imagination again the way he did with The Sixth Sense.

Yesterday's Hits: The Robe (1953, Henry Koster)

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Since the rise of DVD, the entertainment media has made a fuss over the declining profitability of theatrical exhibition. According to any number of articles on the subject, the increased quality of home viewing has resulted fewer people leaving the house to spend their entertainment dollar. But whether or not this is actually the case, any student of film history can tell you that this is hardly the first time Hollywood has faced this kind of crisis. After all, with the advent of television in the 1950s, Hollywood found themselves having to get creative in order to make money with their movies. In order to compete with television, the studios decided to give viewers what they couldn’t get on their televisions, and the best way to do this was to make their movies big. A number of large-format processes resulted from the period- Cinerama, VistaVision, and the like. Fox’s new format was CinemaScope, and the first film released in this process was 1953’s The Robe.

What made The Robe a hit? Well, CinemaScope certainly had a lot to do with it. The ‘Scope screen was huge, but unlike other new formats such as Cinerama, CinemaScope only required one projector, making it a good deal viable and easier to operate for most theatres. A good number of theatres upgraded to CinemaScope, but even those that didn’t were still able to play the film, as the studio took care to shoot the movie in standard spherical format as well.

But regardless of the shape of the screen, audiences took to The Robe in a big way. Biblical epics were very much in vogue during the early 1950s, not least because the biblical source material made them much easier to swallow for the Breen Office, still Hollywood’s arbiters for onscreen morality. Likewise, audiences responded not only to the lavish sets and costumes, but also to the larger-than-life heroes and villains, uncomplicated morality, and grandiose re-enactments of the stories they’d heard all their lives but hadn’t seen come alive onscreen before. The Robe had all these elements, and combined with the novelty of CinemaScope, the film became the second-biggest hit of 1953, putting millions of dollars in Fox’s coffers and CinemaScope on the map.

What happened? There are certain movie genres that remain popular over time and others who fall out of fashion, and Biblical epics fell into the latter category. No matter how ambitious the films were, they were also almost invariably marked by a tendency toward hamfisted dialogue and storytelling, as well as overripe performances. As the 1950s continued, Biblical epics became simultaneously more expensive and less profitable, and while the genre still produced the occasional hit- most notably The Ten Commandments- for the most part viewers had moved on to other genres. And unlike many other genres, the Biblical epic has yet to come back into fashion or undergo a critical resurgence, perhaps because nowadays we prefer our epics without all that pesky moralizing. But whatever the reason, The Robe is remembered today almost entirely for its status as the first CinemaScope release, rather than for its own merits as a film.

Does The Robe still work? Not really. To begin with, the film’s story isn’t especially compelling. The Robe was based on a bestselling novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, but while Douglas’ work had a great deal of appeal for readers, his storytelling was fairly prosaic. Like a number of other films of its kind, The Robe tells the story of Christ through a peripheral figure, this time the Roman centurian Marcellus Gallio (played by Richard Burton) who is present at the Crucifixion and wins Christ’s robe in a game of dice. But after Christ’s death, Marcellus begins to imagine that the Robe is cursed and soon embarks on a mission to discover the secret of the Robe, only to fall in with Christ’s followers. You can imagine where it goes from there- Marcellus begins to believe, he returns to Rome to spread the good news, and ends up becoming a martyr. Not much of a story, that’s for sure.

Of course, Burton’s presence in the lead role makes it easier to take. Long one of my favorite actors, Burton supposedly considered The Robe one of his worst films, but while this is hardly a top-notch Burton performance, it’s always a pleasure to watch him onscreen and savor his amazing voice. Most of the supporting cast can’t measure up- Victor Mature mostly counts on his beefcake physique to carry his performance, Jean Simmons is pretty but little else as Burton’s love interest, and Michael Rennie’s Peter is defined almost entirely by his rockin’ beard. The only secondary player to make much of an impression is Jay Robinson. Robinson’s take on Caligula isn’t in the same league as John Hurt’s in I, Claudius, but he’s still fun to watch, especially when he’s yelling out orders with hammy relish. It’s a campy performance, but it’s better than we get from most of his costars.

Strangely, it’s this lack of campiness that may have contributed to The Robe’s loss of popularity. The Biblical epic is traditionally one of the most campiest of genres, and in particular the saints’n’sinners epics of Cecil B. DeMille can still be enjoyed for their cheeseball value. By contrast, director Henry Koster was a skilled craftsman, but lacked DeMille’s flair for shameless entertainment, and consequently The Robe is too straight and respectable to work in the same way as DeMille’s films. Aside from Robinson’s scenes and Burton’s bits of Robe-inspired madness, there’s not much fun to be had while watching the film. And since the movie doesn’t work as straight drama either, that doesn’t leave us with any other reason to watch it. All that’s left is to be thankful to the film for getting the ball rolling on widescreen filmmaking, which ended up resulting in many movies that are far better and more enduring than The Robe.