I’m as Gab as Hell...

Werth: Hey there, Wise.

Wise: Hi there, Werth. 

Werth: Ever since Sidney Lumet died last Saturday, I can’t stop thinking about his movies.



Wise: He was a masterful, prolific filmmaker.

Werth: And one film in particular has stuck in my craw.

Wise: Should I call your internist? 

Werth: That won’t be necessary.  One of my all-time favorite movies is Network (1976), and I know everybody talks about it, but I don’t think its praises can be sung enough.

Wise: Cue the chorus.

Werth: Network’s log line could read: A news agency deals with ratings, revolutionary groups and a messianic newscaster—but the movie deals with so much more than that. Max Schumacher (William Holden) is an aging newsman who finds himself inside bars downing shots of whiskey and reminiscing about his days with Walter Cronkite. His pal Howard Beale is fired for poor ratings by corporate news muckety-muck Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) and ambitious succubus Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway).

Something in Beale snaps (or is illuminated by the truth) and soon he is ending his final broadcast by pulling back the curtain and exposing the bullshit wizards of the corporate news world with a mad soliloquy. His rallying cry, “I’m as mad as Hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore” is shouted from the rooftops and makes the ratings skyrocket. 

Wise: Faye Dunaway makes a lot of people scream from the rooftops.  

Werth: Christensen knows good ratings when she sees them, and soon she re-organizes the nightly news with Beale’s ranting editorials, psychic hoo-haw, and a group of Symbionese Liberation Army wannabes—turning Beale’s cry for legitimate change into a program catchphrase.

Wise: Sounds like a day at the Fox News Network.

Werth: Exactly. Network is more than a smart, funny, pinpoint accurate satire of corporate news. It’s eerily prophetic. The emergence of nothing-is-sacred “reality news”, rabid, almost religious editorializing (whether it’s honest or not), and sacrificing hard news for ratings is so common now that it’s difficult to imagine the days when those elements were new inventions. Today in our 24 hour news cycle, the Cronkites, the Murrows and the Max Schumachers have all been eaten alive by the likes of Christensen’s new “whorehouse network.” 

Wise: What channel is that on Time Warner?

Werth: Paddy Chayefsky’s script is flawless. You could literally sit down and read it like a book. The performances by all the principles are pitch perfect (Holden and Ned Beatty were nominated for Oscars and Finch and Dunaway won). And the man who brought it all together, Lumet, was given his third Oscar nomination for Best Director. Like an experienced conductor, Lumet weaves together the different sounds of biting comedy (Dunaway’s orgasm scene and the contract negotiations with the Ecumenical Liberation Army),  manic passion (Finch’s inspired on-air orations), and nuanced pathos (Schumacher’s wife’s private and touching admonishment of her philandering spouse) without missing a beat, making a film that is still relevant, fresh and entertaining today. Network is a cautionary tale about a society where heroes are built-up and then chewed-up to appease us. It is an ugly reflection of our culture, one we should watch until we’re “as mad as Hell.” 

Wise: You know it’s funny because the Lumet film I’ve been thinking about this week examines many of those same themes—unlikely heroes, delirious arias about personal integrity, mistrust of talking heads—although in an entirely different way.  

Werth: Let me guess, The Wiz.  

Wise: No, The Wiz—wait, what?  How did you guess that?  Is it that obvious?

Werth: Let’s just say that like Lumet, you often return to the ideas that interest you most. 

Wise: I guess that is a trait all us geniuses share.  Anyway, after the success of the all-black Broadway musical version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, plans were made to translate it to film, and when Diana Ross expressed interest in playing Dorothy, the producers decided they needed to find a director of large enough stature to manage both the outsize production and Diana Ross’ fledgling acting career.  Lumet may not have been the obvious choice, but he certainly was an interesting choice because of the ways he transformed the project.  When it first appeared onstage, The Wiz remained much more faithful to Baum’s novel than did the beloved Judy Garland musical, albeit peppered with a jive-talking urban patois meant to reflect African-American experience.  Lumet brought on Joel Shumacher to write the screenplay—

Werth: You mean Joel “Nipples on the Bat-suit” Schumacher?

Wise: That’s the one.  Gone was pre-teen Dorothy and her life on the Kansas farm, replaced by the decidedly mature Ross playing an excruciatingly shy 24-year old elementary school teacher who is swept from her apartment in Harlem to a fantasy version of seedy 1970’s New York City.  This change makes an odd kind of sense in the story, although it necessitated further adjustments to the script to make it even more appropriate to Ross’ talents.  The film becomes even more focused on her emotional arc, often to the detriment of the other characters.  Most significantly, it is now Dorothy who convinces her friends of their unrealized gifts, leaving Richard Pryor’s Wiz to cower in the background instead of performing something like the good-natured flimflam mastered by Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.  

Werth: Pryor looks like he had plenty to occupy him off-camera. 

Wise: Dorothy’s three companions in Oz—Michael Jackson’s Scarecrow, Nipsy Russell’s Tinman, and Ted Ross’ Cowardly Lion—each have marvelous moments even though their talents feel mostly underutilized.  Jackson, in particular, brings real warmth to his portrayal, true grace to the awkward Scarecrow, but he never has the opportunity to make the character fully real.  In his final good-bye to Dorothy, he is almost immediately brushed aside by Diana Ross instead of being allowed to connect with the audience before being shuffled away.  

Werth: Not even the Moonwalk can compete with Ross’ hinge-like, stick-leg, high kicks.

Wise: In some ways, it’s a shame that Lumet and Ross didn’t leave The Wiz to be made by someone else entirely while the two of them developed a film about a reluctant New Yorker who eventually allows both the magic and the mayhem of the city to release her inhibitions.  That would have been a picture ideally suited to Lumet’s affectionate dissections of the city and Ross’ twitchy drive.  

Werth: Maybe they could have called it Twitch and the City.  Or The Blair Twitch Project.  I know!  How about The Twitches of Eastwick?

Wise: Or maybe not... Check back next week for more Film Gab... and less twitching.

Werth: The Seven Year Twitch?

The Big Screen in The Sky

Today we here at Film Gab hang our heads at the passing of director Sidney Lumet. He passed away in the Manhattan home he loved at age 86. Starting off in the, at the time, fledgling industry of television, Lumet directed several stage-to-little screen adaptations that made early television so interesting. It was only a matter of time before he brought his special brand of social consciousness to the big screen with his first film in 1957, 12 Angry Men. It was a homerun that garnered his first of five Oscar nominations. Although he never won a competitive directing Oscar, Lumet would go on to direct some of the most exciting films of the 60's and 70's: The Pawnbroker (1964), Serpico (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), The Wiz (1978) and his prophetic opus to the news industry Network (1976). If the only film Lumet had ever directed was Network, he would still stand as a giant among filmmakers. So, for Mr. Lumet, open up your windows today and shout, "I'm mad as Hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" It's the kind of heavenly chorus that Lumet deserves.

Stressed-out Gab

Werth: Hey there, Wise.  What’s with all the scented candles?  

Wise: Hello, Werth.  It’s Stress Awareness Month and I’m trying to bring a little enlightenment and peace into my world.  Care for some chamomile tea?  

Werth: Only if it’s spiked with vodka. Look, is this a bad time for Film Gab?  Because we can do this after you give yourself an oat bran facial or whatever else you have planned.  

Wise: No, I’m prepared.  Talking to a Friend is one of the Ten Strategies for Stress Reduction.  

Werth: So is Talking about Movies where Characters are more Stressed than You are.

Wise: And I have the perfect stressed-out damsel with Bette Davis in one of her most camp-tastic roles: the tragic southern belle driven crazy by a secret from her past in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. 


Werth: I love a good ellipsis.

Wise: Planned as a follow-up to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? the movie originally re-teamed Davis with Joan Crawford until either illness or on-set rivalry forced Crawford to drop out of the picture.  A number of replacements were considered, including Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young, and Vivien Leigh whose legendary response to the offer was: “I can just about stand to look at Joan Crawford at six in the morning on a southern plantation, but I couldn't possibly look at Bette Davis.”  Instead, Olivia de Havilland got the role of the poor cousin returning to the ancestral home of Davis’s Charlotte who has lived as a mad recluse ever since her married lover was discovered hacked to bits in the summer house.  

Werth: I hate when that happens.  

Wise: Charlotte has been shunned by the locals ever since the murder thirty years ago, and she gets no sympathy from her neighbors when the state serves her an eviction notice that orders the demolition of her plantation house to make way for a brand-new super highway.  Pinning her hopes on her cousin Miriam to save her home, Charlotte gradually realizes that her poor relation has grown into something more sinister.  With de Haviland’s Miriam on the scene, Charlotte begins having nightmarish visions, flashbacks to her lover’s dismembered corpse, but when she appeals to her cousin for help, the comfort that Miriam offers is cold indeed.  

Werth: And de Havilland definitely uses some of her goody-two-shoes routine from Gone With the Wind to chilling effect.
   

Wise: She really has some terrifying moments, especially when she’s dealing with Charlotte’s loyal maid, played with high Southern Gothic abandon by Agnes Moorehead who received her fourth Best Supporting Actress nomination for her efforts.  But she’s just part of a fantastic cast that includes Joseph Cotten, Victor Buono, George Kennedy, Bruce Dern, and an almost unrecognizable Mary Astor in her final film role as the bitter widow of Charlotte’s dead lover.   

Werth: Moonlight and magnolias mixed with an ax.

Wise: Living up to the myth of Scarlett O’Hara would make anyone anxious. 

 
Werth: Maybe that’s true, but there’s really nothing like the stress of being a woman of leisure in Edwardian England, and that’s why George Cukor’s 1944 thriller Gaslight really stresses me out.

Wise: Really?  I thought it would be the lack of electric lighting.  

Werth: Ingrid Bergman plays Paula Alquist, the blushing bride of handsome and romantic pianist Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer.) They have returned from their honeymoon to live in her childhood home, nestled in a picturesque London square complete with crowing flower peddlers.

Wise: I feel the stress washing over me in waves.

Werth: Did I mention that as a child, Paula found her famous opera star aunt strangled to death in that same house, the murder never solved?

Wise: That could make being carried over the threshold a little creepy.

Werth: Soon poor Paula begins to forget and lose things, hear footsteps at night, and imagine that the gas lamps in her bedroom are dimming all because she is, as her husband so gently puts it,  “high-strung.”

Wise: I’ve heard about cures for high-strung Edwardian women...

Werth: The fun in this film comes from Cukor’s choice to let the audience in on what’s going on. Almost immediately he gives visual cues that the person behind Paula’s impending madness is none other than her loving husband. Playing against the French lover roles that made him famous, Boyer soon reveals that he is, what the French call, a douchebag. His refined sadism and controlling, condescending behavior falls only slightly short of the husband in The Burning Bed.

Wise: That sounds like an abandoned Calvin Klein fragrance. 

Werth: What really makes this thriller work is that even though we know who the villain is, Bergman’s Paula does not—and it is her superb performance as a woman struggling with self-doubt and the terror of encroaching madness that makes us climb the walls right along with her. In another actress’ hands we might say, “Hey, stupid. Look at the keylight shining on your husband’s evil, beady eyes,” but Bergman’s fragility and beauty makes audiences want to protect her—or at least to cheer her on when she decides to protect herself.  That year Bergman would beat no less than Claudette Colbert, Greer Garson, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis to win her first of three Oscars. It was a warm-up for her part as another endangered female in master stress-maker Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Notorious which premiered a few months later.

Wise: Talk about out of the fire and into the Nazi espionage ring.

 Werth: In Gaslight, Bergman is joined by steadily working (but not-at-all British) Joseph Cotten, dithering nosy neighbor Dame May Witty, and in a star-making turn, the very young Angela Lansbury as snide, tartlet maid, Nancy. Cukor is not generally remembered for his thrillers, but it was clearly a genre that he understood. He very skillfully melded his “women’s picture” style with the mystery genre, sculpting nerve-wracking close-ups of Bergman as she strained to maintain her sanity under those maddening, flickering gaslamps.

Wise: Whew!  I’m not sure if delving into these stress-filled movies made me feel better or worse.  Maybe we should put on some Enya and journal about our experiences.   

Werth: You do the Orinoco Flow. I’ll think of themes for next week’s Film Gab.

 

April Gab’s Day!

Werth: Hey, Wise!

Wise: Hey, Werth!

Werth: I just got a message from Olivia de Havilland’s agent and she is so impressed by our blog that she AND her sister, Joan Fontaine, want to do an interview with us!

Wise: Jiminy Crickets! That’s amazing! I can’t wait—

Werth: April Fool’s!

Wise: I hate you.

Werth: I can’t believe you fell for that. Everyone knows that Olivia and Joan don’t speak to each other.

Wise: Kind of like us after this blog?  

Werth: You’ll regain your sense of humor after I talk about my favorite fool-full flick, Murder by Death!

Wise: An appropriate title for what I’m thinking about right now.

Werth: Murder by Death is the 1976 comedy that spoofs all those crime-solving characters from literature and film. Famed TV and theater writer Neil Simon pokes fun at such mystery mainstays as Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Charlie Chan. The world’s greatest detectives have been invited to a mysterious manse to solve a murder that will  be committed at midnight. Or will it...?

Wise: I don’t know. Do I look like Jessica Fletcher?

Werth: A little around the mouth. Anyway, these silly sleuths attempt to find out who killed who in order to win a million dollars—and to survive the night.

Wise: Sounds like Clue.

Werth: There are definite similarities (including Eileen Brennan starring in both), but Murder by Death came first. Murder’s cast is a veritable who’s who of actors who excel at scenery chewing: Peter Falk, the aforementioned Eileen Brennan, James Coco, Nancy Walker, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Elsa Lanchester and in a piece of inspired Yunioshi casting, Peter Sellers as that Far East flat foot, Sidney Wang.

Wise: Do all your favorite movies have offensive Asian stereotypes?   

Werth: What’s even more amusing are the comic turns by normally dramatic Alec Guinness as befuddled, blind butler Bensonmum and author turned caricature 

Truman Capote as the evil mastermind Lionel Twain. Even young James Cromwell plays a Belgian smart-mouth chauffeur. With Simon’s characteristic joke and pun-laden dialogue, there’s no reason for Murder by Death to have a challenging mystery. Most viewers will just be happy with the octogenarian fart-jokes gleefully burbled by eternally aged Estelle Winwood as Nurse Withers.

Wise: A fool’s paradise.

Werth: Has your mood improved enough to tell us your favorite silly cinema?

Wise: Oh, you know how I love to suffer fools gladly.  Especially when they’re in a movie as hilarious as Wet Hot American Summer.  Directed by David Wain and featuring the alumni of the comedy troupe, The State, the film is bursting with an almost embarrassing amount of talent: Molly Shannon, David Hyde Pierce, Amy Poehler, Janeane Garofalo, Paul Rudd, Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, and Bradley Cooper.  

Werth: Before he served his time as Renee Zellweger’s arm candy?  

Wise: It also showcases a fully committed and fully absurd cameo from Law & Order’s Christopher Meloni as a Vietnam vet camp cook who speaks to a can of mixed vegetables and has romantic designs on a mustard-colored, side-by-side refrigerator.   

Werth: Do all your favorite movies have offensive Vietnam vet stereotypes?  

Wise: The movie barely made it to theaters when it was released in 2001, but it has since become a cult classic.  Ostensibly, it’s a parody of summer camp movies from the early 80’s, and while it does tinker with the likes of Meatballs and its ilk, there are moments inspired by The Bad News Bears, The Breakfast Club, and Serpico. 

Werth: Serpico’s Bad News Meatball Breakfast?

  

Wise: It’s definitely not a Noel Coward drawing room comedy, but the surreal humor and the enthusiastic cast make it a real gut buster.  Plus the finale includes a hilarious musical tribute to Joan Crawford’s most memorable work.  

Werth: What?! Don’t tell me they do some sort of disrespectful, drag-queen Mommie Dearest shenanigans! Cause I don’t think that’s funny!

Wise: April Fool!

Werth: God, that revenge dish was served cold!

Werth: We’ll warm it up next week with a fresh plate of Film Gab.  

Big Screen in the Sky

Actor Farley Granger died yesterday in Manhattan at age 85. Granger came to prominence in 1948 in Alfred Hitchcock's disturbing re-telling of the Leopold and Loeb murder case, Rope. Legendary for its camerawork (it was composed of just ten shots) Rope also was noteworthy for its homosexual murderous duo. While Granger nor his co-star John Dall ever speak of the love that dare not speak its name, the film sizzles with an underlying attraction and dependence between the two young men. Hitchcock would use Granger again in the center of a strange mano-a-mano pairing in 1951's Strangers on a Train. In Strangers, Granger strikes up a bizarre relationship with Robert Walker when Walker's sociopathic, and strangely effete character takes Granger up on an offer to kill someone for him. Granger is surprised to learn that a conversation he thought was simply a lark becomes a deadly case of prid pro quo. As with Rope, there is an underlying tone of homosexuality, that if fully expressed would have doomed the movie's script to the garbage can. But thanks in good part to Granger's performances, the subtexts can be read and enjoyed by those who wanted to read between the lines. It probably didn't hurt that Granger was a self-professed bi-sexual who wooed the likes of Shelley Winters, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents. While not necessarily out and proud, Granger certainly gave a face to a different kind of male lead in 1940's Hollywood.

Re-Maker's Mark

Werth: Say, Wise?

Wise: Yes, Werth?

Werth: Which of us is going to call our cable operator to subscribe to HBO so we can watch the new mini-series version of Mildred Pierce?

Wise: I assumed you were going to boycott it because they didn’t CGI Joan Crawford into it.

Werth: Well... as good as Joan would be in the new version, I am confident that Todd Haynes is going to do a beautiful job on it.

Wise: Beautiful—but not better?


Werth: Oh I’d never go that far. First of all, I don’t think that these two projects should even be compared. They are from two TOTALLY different eras and directorial styles and, to be honest, Haynes is going to be more faithful to the James M. Cain novel that was the source material for both films. Secondly, the original 1945 Mildred Pierce is a masterwork of filmmaking and performance that casts a long and unmatchable shadow.

Wise: Kate Winslet has big eyebrows to fill.

Werth: Exactly. When shooting began on Mildred Pierce in December of 1944, the film’s star, Joan Crawford, was in a very precarious position. Her reign as the queen of MGM had unceremoniously concluded a year earlier because she had been labeled box-office poison and even worse, she was approaching Tinseltown’s unacceptable feminine age of forty.

Wise: You’re going to be unacceptable soon.

Werth: Hopefully blogs are more forgiving than Hollywood. Crawford signed a deal with rival studio Warner Brothers and waited for the script offer that she hoped would put her back on top of the Hollywood heap. Crawford read Mildred Pierce and saw her opportunity, but director Michael Curtiz was initially not so keen on working with the notorious diva. He even made her audition for the part. Legend has it he ripped the shoulders of her dress from her body as he railed against shoulder pads, only to find, those were Crawford’s actual shoulders.

Wise: Curtiz would have hated 80’s fashions.

Werth: Despite Curtz’s initial doubts, after seeing the film it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Crawford in the role. Mildred Pierce tells the story of a hard-working, single mother who busts her hump as a waitress while climbing the rungs of the culinary ladder to success—all so she can provide everything she didn’t have for her daughter Veda. Played by actress Ann Blythe, Veda is like a tall, cool glass of acid. The ultimate social climber, Veda wants the finer things in life and is willing to step on anyone to achieve them, even if that means trading bitchslaps with her blindly adoring mother.

Wise: I'm gonna name my first baby Bitchslap.  

Werth: Curtiz expertly blended the drama of a woman’s film with the visual styling and plot of film noir (there were no murders in Cain’s novel). The film plays a riveting tennis game between the past’s bright, sunlit kitchens and the present’s starkly shadowed police station and is full of wonderful volleying from Blythe, slimy Jack Carson and fresh as paint Eve Arden. But without a doubt, the titan that stands out in this film is Crawford. She often played determined, come-from-nowhere shopgirls who had to fight their way to the top with nothing but raw ambition—

Wise:  After all, that was how Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford.

Werth: But something about this role is different. Crawford added nuances of vulnerability, naive motherly love, and worldly regret that made Mildred a complex and unique film character. She wasn’t just a bitch. She was a victim of social constraints and her own myopic love for her daughter. No matter how many critics, historians and feminists write about this role, Crawford defies easy definitions of the Post-WW II woman. There she stands on the steps of the courthouse at the end of the picture, a symbol of failure and possibility. Getting the last laugh at “box-office poison,” Crawford won the Academy Award for Best Actress that year and kick-started another fruitful period in her career.

Wise: You might say that Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce is a re-make of a movie that re-made Joan Crawford.

Werth: I’m guessing that’s your intricate segue into your favorite re-made movie.

Wise: I do love elaborate transitions, especially this week when I’m not just talking about one re-make, but two, plus the play that the original film was based on.  So it’s almost like a re-make to the fourth power.  

Werth: I might need a drink just to understand that. 

Wise: Me too.  But let’s try to figure this out together.  First there was 1940’s The Shop Around the Corner with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, directed by Ernst Lubitsch from a Hungarian play called Parfumerie.  Nine years later it became a musical vehicle for Judy Garland and Van Johnson called In the Good Old Summertime directed by Robert Z. Leonard.  Finally, in 1998, it became You’ve Got Mail directed by Nora Ephron and starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. 

Werth: The ending of You’ve Got Mail literally caused me to stand up in the theater and shout out to Meg Ryan, “Stab him!”

Wise: While The Shop Around the Corner and In the Good Old Summertime share more plot points, all three films focus on the central couple who secretly exchange anonymous love letters while they unknowingly bicker with each other in their everyday lives.  What’s so interesting, though, is that despite the similarities, all three of these movies are decidedly different and they each showcase their stars in wildly different ways.  

Werth: Which is a big contrast to Mildred Pierce because no matter how great Kate Winslet is in the role—and I don’t doubt she will be—she’ll never be synonymous with the part the way Joan
Crawford is. 

Wise: Exactly.  The Shop Around the Corner is a rueful film, something of a love letter itself to the charms of European life that were rapidly disappearing under the heels of the Nazis during WWII.  Stewart and Sullavan both give tender, elegant performances under Lubitsch’s direction while preserving an undercurrent of bleakness that suggested that even the most star-crossed lovers had a chance of missing one another.  

Werth: Like me and Hugh Jackman.

Wise: Summertime has a much more rollicking tone.  Judy belts out some tender and fun numbers, all while keeping an eye on Johnson’s flimfalmmery.  It also features a fantastic tumble from the prince of silent pratfalls, Buster Keaton, the sweetly amusing love story between Spring Byington and S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, plus the screen debut of three-year-old Liza Minnelli.  

Werth: I’m surprised she didn’t get her own number.  

Wise: You’ve Got Mail was the third onscreen pairing of Ryan and Hanks and a lot of the plot simply vanishes to make room for their patented, and very marketable, sparring, and yet it shares a certain melancholy with Lubitsch’s original film.  Ephron gives a plum role to New York’s Upper West Side, bathing it in golden light and lamenting the loss of its neighborhood feel.  Ephron even does the unthinkable by closing the central shop, Ryan’s bookstore for children, even though the gift shop in Around the Corner and the music store in Summertime both survive.  


Werth: It’s a tough world out there for bookstores... and books.

Wise: What makes up for it, in my mind at least, is the fact that life-long Oz fan Ephron prominently features a number of L. Frank Baum’s books in the set design.  

Werth: I knew you’d bring it back to Oz somehow.  

Wise: Does this mean you don’t want to hear about the planned Wizard of Oz remake?

Werth: Let’s save that for when we re-make Film Gab next week.