What Price Hollywood? (1932)
The regular way of thinking in Hollywood was that movies about the picture business seldom succeeded. But What Price Hollywood?, director George Cukor thought, was different for one clear reason—producer David O. Selznick had an unqualified love for the business, an idealism that could shrug off the normal pose of irony or cynicism. And so, Selznick used it more than once—for this, really, is the model for A Star Is Born, which came five years later.
It’s an RKO film in which an alcoholic movie director, Max Carey (Lowell Sherman) helps a Brown Derby waitress, Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) become a movie star. And as she rises, so he sinks deeper. But this is less a love story than A Star Is Born. Indeed, Mary’s romance is with an actor, Lonny Borden (Neil Hamilton), and that allows a more thorough portrait of Carey as a fallen master, a man who really understands the movies, but who has lost faith in them.
There is another major character, Julius Saxe (Gregory Ratoff), the producer, a man who tells his writers they should be able to tell their stories in fifty words or less—but who takes so much longer himself. Selznick and Ratoff were old friends, and Ratoff is older than his boss here, but there’s a good deal of affectionate needling in the portrait of a rough-diamond producer.
The project began as a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns. Gene Fowler and Rowland Brown took it from there, and Jane Murfin and Ben Markson did the screenplay. Charles Rosher did the photography and there are some very lively montage sequences to suggest drunkenness and the whirl of hype in the movie business—not too far apart. A young Pandro Berman was the associate producer and Carroll Clark was the art director.
Connie Bennett is not the ideal waitress, maybe. In Hollywood, she was a very social figure and a leading clotheshorse. She makes no great effort to abandon those atmospheres, but she’s amusing and she has a droll chemistry with Lowell Sherman, who carries the picture. Sherman (1885–1934) was a fascinating figure—as an actor he often played lecherous hounds (as witness Way Down East) and as a director he was a sophisticate, too (She Done Him Wrong, Morning Glory). He married three actresses, and he died—far too soon—of the same kind of excesses that affect his character in this film.
As for Cukor, he was just beginning, and a beneficiary of the friendship with Selznick—and that’s the lesson, really: that Hollywood in those days was a small club in which friends stuck and worked together. Thus, just over the horizon, Cukor would meet Kate Hepburn and launch a lifelong friendship. In turn, that points to how valuable the protected gay community was in Hollywood, a center of wit and a steady, acerbic correction to the devout stress on happy, healthy love affairs between formulaic men and women. But as early as sound, Hollywood guessed attraction was a lot busier than that safe traffic.
What’s Up, Doc? (1972)
What did Peter Bogdanovich do after the slow, moody exploration of landscape and relationships in The Last Picture Show? He made a screwball comedy that seemed unaware the genre had been dead for twenty-five years. It was as if Preston Sturges were taking a pee and would be back any minute. It only adds to the hallucinatory magic of this film that in the thirty-four years since it was made no one else has attempted a screwball comedy.
So where do we begin with the praise? Let’s start at the script—by Bogdanovich and Buck Henry, Robert Benton, and David Newman—and its inner knowledge that in screwball it is necessary to like everyone and to see that madness exists in everyone, not just those spokesmen for gaiety who are acting crazy. Indeed, acting crazy may be the one chance at sanity anyone has. This is fabulously personified at that moment when Barbra Streisand awakens, discovers she is next to a piano, and starts, “You must remember this…” She knows she needs to sing, for sanity’s sake, and without a cue or a pretext in the action.
The setting is San Francisco. Ryan O’Neal is a stupid musicologist who will be saved for fun (if he’s lucky) by Barbra, who exists in the story like an unruly wind, or like Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (the most obvious model for this film). But doing those routines with Grant and Hepburn was one thing. Let’s remember that both Streisand and O’Neal had it in them to be insufferable—in which case their lightness of touch here is breathtaking. The momentum of look-alike bags, mistaken identity, and rapid double-take response mounts and ends in a chase that has elements of Keystone. The film was a huge success, and it made a lot of money. Only snobbery kept it out of the awards. Seen today, there is no mistaking the wit, the precision, the timing, the class.
True to form and training, Bogdanovich gives lavish attention to the smaller parts, especially the “idiots” required in screwball comedy. Madeline Kahn was making her debut as Ryan O’Neal’s fiancée and she is perfect. Kenneth Mars is delicious as a fraudulent expert. And Austin Pendleton is quite lovely as the man who is hiring.
Polly Platt was production designer, and it’s fair to suppose that she did a lot more. Bogdanovich has never said a word to deny her contribution to his early films. But here’s the point: there is a skill and a precocious experience already in the making of What’s Up, Doc? that hardly goes away. Yet in fact Bogdanovich has fallen on hard times and television work. He does not have people like Streisand ready to work with him today. And that is immensely to the misfortune of Ms. Streisand and the rest of us. I cannot put it any other way—this is a gem, the real thing, a riot. Oh, go see it!
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)
For much of his career, apparently, Mikio Naruse was placed in Japan as being another Ozu—yet not quite as good. However, I have tried in this book to probe Ozu a little just because I feel that his revered style contains or masks some rather bleak views of family life. So it’s very useful to look at Naruse closely, and to say that perhaps he grants his female characters an extra degree of liberty and pain compared with Ozu. Relatively speaking, the best informed Western filmgoers know only a fraction of Japanese film, and not much more Japanese history.
To take just two examples of the difficulty this can lead to: Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), it seems to me, is more mature and complex in its views than any American films being made at that time. Does that mean that Japan, in 1939, was a more humane and developed society than the U.S.? Or, consider that Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) has been a far more popular film in Japan than in America. That seems reasonable, because Letters pursues a Japanese point of view. But that is not the reason for the success. Rather, it is because sixty years later, the events of Iwo Jima were still largely unknown in Japan. How can that be?
In other words, most Westerners still need much more education in Japanese thought to grasp what many of their films are saying. And Naruse is a case in point in that for most of his career he pursued the social status of women. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is about a working woman, Keiko (Hideko Takamine), who is manageress of a bar in the Ginza district. It is her job to keep the largely male customers happy while looking after the bar girls. The bar premises are above the place where Keiko lives—itself a striking arrangement in Western eyes, but perhaps normal in Japan. The movie is beautifully made, in an Ozu-like style that involves long takes and simple camera positioning—the material that allows us to see human interplay and to feel the impact of this life on Keiko. Moreover, Hideko Takamine—one of Naruse’s favorite players—is superb.
So here is a fine piece of social realism and incipient feminism, from 1960, yet more lively in its action than most Ozu films. Indeed, as I suggested, Naruse can help us to feel the disciplinarian in Ozu, the formalist even. I do not mean to dispute the depth of feeling in Ozu, but I am still not sure how angered he is at accepting the situations he sees. He might have said that my difficulty came from a deluded rebelliousness or a Western sentimentality. Yet Naruse’s film is closer to my mood. And Mizoguchi is another matter again in that he sees through every veil of form or face to recognize the human truth. And where do these films stand in the overall deployment of Japanese culture and attitudes? The qu
estion is so open that it compels one to see more Japanese films.
Whisky Galore! (1949)
It was in 1938 that Michael Balcon took over at Ealing Studios, and began one of the great careers as production chief—spurred and stimulated no doubt by the hardships of Britain at war and the relative dismay of the same country at peace. What better situation or demonstration of the latter could there be than the most fortunate, if unhappy, wreck (no lives lost) of a ship carrying fifty thousand cases of Scotch whisky off the shores of an island called Todday?
You will not find such a place on the maps, but you can locate Johnnie Walker, black and red label, in any reasonable liquor store. Imagine then the plight of serious drinkers in a time of peace when the word “plenty” was mocked by the scarcity of the real stuff. Moreover, you can see the risk—of the possible pollution and the damage to the fishing industry, to say nothing of the hazard if foolhardy swimmers went out there on their own to the rocks in an effort to make the place safe.
This came from a novel by Compton MacKenzie, based on a real wreck off Eriskay. It was apparently Charles Frend who proposed it as a topic—if not a crisis—at an Ealing board meeting, and Balcon jumped at it. The screenwriting job was given to Angus MacPhail (he had written It Always Rains on Sunday and was a developing alcoholic) and the directing job was given to Alexander Mackendrick. Technically, Mackendrick was born in the U.S., in Boston, because his parents were traveling. But that eccentricity was allayed by his being raised in Scotland and educated at the Glasgow School of Art. This was his first feature.
The unit was sent to the island of Barra to get the scenery and the atmosphere. Gerald Gibbs was the cameraman. Jim Morahan did art direction. There was music by Ernest Irving, and Joseph Sterling and Charles Crichton edited the picture. It proceeds sensibly with the old Scottish maxim that in a time of crisis free enterprise will prevail, and it shows how in a community like Scotland there may be no finer blender of conservative and socialist, man and woman, than whisky. It is part of an Ealing attempt to go to the corners of the British Isles and to show local independence. Mackendrick directs with a light hand, or with the generosity of a man who knows he has a natural hit here for the taking. So it proved. The film was a big success, especially in America, where it was called Tight Little Island and served to allay some of the reckless fears over mature drinking encouraged by films like The Lost Weekend.
Of course, Balcon was canny: not all the players were Scots—that could have called for subtitles. But there were enough natives scattered in there to satisfy purists: Basil Radford, Catherine Lacey, Bruce Seton, Joan Greenwood, Wylie Watson, Gabrielle Blunt, Gordon Jackson, Jean Cadell, James Robertson Justice, John Gregson, James Woodburn, and Duncan Macrae.
White Heat (1949)
By 1949, Bogart and Edward G. Robinson were set on very different courses away from their gangster past. So it says something profound about the demon in Jimmy Cagney that he wanted to get back to that outlaw, and that, when there, he was able to make him better than ever. The Cagney pictures of the 1930s were made very fast, and very conscious of their own factory. But White Heat is something else, even if it was seeing Cagney come back to vicious life that taught the others what this picture might be.
Virginia Kellogg wrote a couple of treatments on the story, which differs a great deal from the movie. It was only when Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts came onboard that it started to shape up. Cagney would visit them in their office and ask what they were after. “An evil man,” they said, “but we want the audience to understand why.” Jimmy lapped it up and it’s worth saying that this was his first film where the nutsiness of his character was of interest.
Goff and Roberts did several drafts and the script came much closer to the movie—though Cagney improvised sitting in his mother’s lap and kicking his girlfriend off the chair, two very memorable things in the picture. It seems to be set in 1949, though I think it feels at least ten years earlier. So Cody Jarrett is a man of about fifty with a mother, Ma Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly), who is plainly of far higher rank and greater intimacy than his nominal wife, Verna (Virginia Mayo). In an effort to break the gang, a government man, Vic Pardo (Edmond O’Brien), is put with Jarrett in prison, and in time he becomes a trusted confidant. But while Jarrett is doing his time, Ma dies—clearly because of the callousness of Verna and her stud, Big Ed (Steve Cochran).
Jarrett is tightly wound in all ways. When he hears of Ma’s death—in prison, in the dining hall—his berserk dance of rage is breathtaking. And thereafter, you may decide, he is mad, though he remains sympathetic. Here is the trick of the picture. Cody is so much nobler than Verna and Ed. He is being betrayed by Vic. And who is his greatest pal? It is Ma who comforts him when his headaches come on and who advises him on how to intimidate the gang. And when Cody dies—in destructive splendor—she is the one he is talking to: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world.”
Sid Hickox did the photography and Raoul Walsh was ready for every improv Cagney offered. Indeed, the direction is the primary level of Cody’s support in the film—it’s his privacy and his stage. Edward Carrere did the art direction and Max Steiner the music.
The supporting cast includes John Archer, Wally Cassell, Mickey Knox, Ian MacDonald, Fred Clark, Pat Collins, Paul Guilfoyle, Fred Coby, and Ford Rainey.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
There were many people who regretted the breakdown in 1985 of the sequel to Chinatown. Robert Towne, writer of the original film, had been about to direct The Two Jakes when it collapsed. Well, it came back a few years later, as a broken thing. By then it mattered less than it might have because in a magical way, Who Framed Roger Rabbit had taken up the slack. We are talking about one of the most ingenious films—not just a profound and haunting fable on all the connects and disconnects between real people and the unreal on screen, but exactly the lament for Los Angeles in the new age of the automobile that Robert Towne had intended.
It comes from a novel, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary K. Wolf. In turn this was made into a screenplay by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman. Robert Zemeckis would direct, but the venture had the backing of a team of producers that included Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, and Kathleen Kennedy. It had a nutshell idea: Eddie, a real, scruffy L.A. private eye (Bob Hoskins), is so down on his luck that he has to take toons for clients. What are “toons”? Well, toons are initially cartoon characters, people drawn, not made by God’s wise and delightful processes. But that is much more than just the artifice that can keep them in the same frame—according to Anchors Aweigh. It is also an allegory for… well, whatever you want. But for Eddie (who has had trouble with toons before) there is an almost racial tinge to his hostility. And the toons are kinda wild. Let me just add that Who Framed Roger Rabbit falls close to the Rodney King incident and the episode called O.J. In other words, when I put this forward as an instructive American film, I am boosting not just the inspired fraternity of toons and people (essentially the work of animator Richard Williams) but the larger ideas behind it. And this is a film about cloning and race, as well as drawing style.
It is also a sexual delirium, thanks to the way Jessica Rabbit (Roger’s wayward wife) is drawn, vocalized by Kathleen Turner (it’s Matty from Body Heat on electric kool-aid), and sung by Amy Irving. And then you have the generally deranged and gob-smacked performance of Bob Hoskins, who can hardly move or breathe without having drawn arms around his neck. I often think that a little Hoskins goes a long way—but he is gorgeous here.
Joe McCoy and Alan Silvestri did the music. Dean Cundey photographed it. Arthur Schmidt did the editing. Roger Cain and Elliot Scott did the production design. And Joanna Johnston did the costumes.
The human cast also includes Joanna Cassidy, Christopher Lloyd (magnificent as Judge Doom), Charles Fleischer’s voice doing Roger (and some others), Stubby Kaye, Alan Tilvern, Richard Le Parmentier, Joel Silver, and many voices by the incomparable Mel Blanc. It cost at least $70 million, but it grossed $154 million in
the U.S. alone, and it is one of the last great works of wit and beauty, magic and terror, to come out of a Hollywood studio. They gave Best Picture that year to Rain Man.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Edward Albee’s play opened in October 1962 and ran for 664 performances, with Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard, and Melinda Dillon. Early reactions were that it was too foulmouthed and downbeat ever to make it to the screen, but Ernest Lehman persuaded Warner Brothers to put up the money for a film he would write and produce. Warners had to agree that no one under eighteen would ever see the film, and that helped formulate the modern ratings system.
In the play, George and Martha, the warring married couple, are in their early fifties. Elizabeth Taylor in 1966 was thirty-four. But Lehman reckoned that the part could be brought down a little while Taylor could let her looks go some. There was a meeting, and Taylor was tough, competitive, argumentative, a ballbuster. As they talked about it (and the talk meant her getting $1 million) they wondered about George. “What about him?” said Taylor, indicating Richard Burton on the other side of the room. Burton was only forty-one, though capable of looking older, or more tired. So casting’s magic settled on the project, and all of a sudden the film became obvious.
Many directors were considered, but Lehman liked the chances of newcomer Mike Nichols, who had not made a film yet—though he had agreed to do The Graduate. Sandy Dennis was cast, and when Robert Redford absolutely refused the second male role it went to George Segal. Haskell Wexler was hired to do the photography, and Richard Sylbert created the production design. Later on, Sam O’Steen edited the picture. The casting had made it expensive, but this was at a moment when Burton and Taylor were still hot (as opposed to ridiculous), and it’s plain that both of them were excited by the project and quite able to recognize its affinities with their own turbulent relationship.
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