Dennis Hopper died today at age 74 after a lengthy and public illness. He was an icon of mid-century rebellion and an always fresh and fascinating character actor throughout a career that spanned the classic era, the American New Wave of the late sixties and early seventies, and his often astonishing later career work in numerous films and television shows after he was finally able to conquer his longstanding issues with substance abuse during the mid-eighties. He didn’t have a lot of starring roles, but that’s show business. (The still above is from one of the very few, Curtis Harrington’s 1961 “Night Tide.” He’s very good in it.)
He was also a photographer, the director of one of the most influential (i.e., copied and later spoofed) single films ever made, “Easy Rider,” as well as a major figure on the Los Angeles art landscape. It’s not often mentioned, but he was also probably the most proudly counter-cultural celebrity to ever openly associate himself with the Republican party, though, as recounted by Edward Copeland in his extremely detailed look at Hopper’s career, he was a true maverick to the end and voted for Obama in 2008.
A key scene and nice mash-up both drawn from Douglas Sirk’s great 1959 Technicolor version — a cannily updated remake, as it happens — of a racially charged classic-era soaper, “Imitation of Life.” I was bummed to miss this film, and a very rare appearance by Juanita Moore who plays the maternal paragon, Annie Johnson — at the TCM Classic Film Festival a couple of weeks back.
Admit, that got to you just a little. That’s beautiful Susan Kohner there, passing for “passing” as it were, as the classic “tragic mulatto.” Somewhat politically incorrect casting aside, she was pretty amazing in Sirk’s film.Anyhow, here’s a pretty cool mom-centric mash-up from the film — and this one doesn’t mess with the aspect ratio and it features a compelling bit of music from girl-group greats, the Shangra-las.
Now that’s it been a few days and I’ve had some time to adjust to the realities of the post-my-ankle-sprain world, it’s perhaps time for me to take a moment to reflect a bit on what I learned from my rather hectic but definitely fun and enlightening time at the TCM Fest which, as previously reported, turned out to be a fairly roaring success and is destined to be repeated next year in Hollywood. Because of time constraints and because I wasn’t able to enjoy the truly titanic number of films seen by, say, a Dennis Cozzalio — currently working on a detailed and sure to be great summary of the event — I’m going to limit myself to a few random observations covering material I have not mentioned in prior TCM-centric posts. (Here, here, and here.) Naturally, it’ll still turn out to be much longer than I originally intended.
Note: You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much here lately. Though I plan to keep FtY on life-support indefinitely, my main blog-home at present remains Premium Hollywood and I encourage all and sundry to follow me on via Twitter and/or Facebook, where pretty much everything I do will get touted for your convenience.
If things had gone a bit differently, she might well have been as huge a superstar as such contemporaries as Audrey Hepburn or Natalie Wood — she certainly had the talent and screen presence to do so. However, as I’m reminded by her New York Times obituary, an ugly situation involving a sexual proposition the married actress got from Howard Hughes likely prevented Jean Simmons from reaching the super-stardom she deserved as much as anyone. The vindictive aviation and filmmaking magnate may have deliberately put her in films he thought were inferior and refused to allow his film studio to lend her out for the lead in “Roman Holiday,” the role that deservedly made Audrey Hepburn a more or less instant star.
Nevertheless, Ms. Simmons, who sadly passed on yesterday at age 80 from lung cancer, outlasted her Hughes contract and gave witty and altogether enchanting performances in numerous and diverse films, ranging from break-out teenage performances as the young Estella in David Lean’s still-definitive 1946 version of “Great Expectations” (she’d eventually play Mrs. Havisham in a TV production) and as Ophelia in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 “Hamlet.” As a puckishly beautiful adult actress who pretty much owned the word “luminous,” she had no problem quietly stealing scenes on an epic scale from the likes of Kirk Douglas in “Spartacus,” Burt Lancaster in “Elmer Gantry,” Gregory Peck in William Wyler’s underrated “The Big Country,” and, most famously these days, Marlon Brando in her only musical appearance, “Guys and Dolls.” Brando was easy to outshine musically though she was also easily his acting equal or superior, but here she shows she would have had to chops to almost hold her own musically with with costar Frank Sinatra, if only the script had called for it. What she lacks in polish, she more than makes up for in sheer commitment.
An admitted survivor of alcoholism, Simmons was a class act on every level who famously complimented Hepburn on her great “Roman Holiday” performance, as painful as it must have been to watch and even though it’s not clear that she wouldn’t have been just as good in the role. She kept working through most of her life — her last significant role was her voice work in the English-language version of “Howl’s Moving Castle” — and her loss to the world of entertainment is not a small one. She was often low-key, but she was never dull.
And here’s one more. Sorry about the double subtitles, but this is a clip of the great opening sequence of Rohmer’s “Love in the Afternoon” (sometimes called “Chloe in the Afternoon” to avoid confusion with the Billy Wilder romantic comedy). It starts out like classic Rohmer and ends with a bit of sci-fi.
The breathtaking cinematography here is by the late Nestor Almendros. Whatever you do, when you see this one, get the Criterion version.
A film about Greece, made by an expatriate Greek director, but featuring an all-star French-speaking cast, “Z” is, alongside John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend,” one of the most important political films of all time. Even if, artistically and in terms of sheer entertainment, it’s not quite on the same level as either of those masterpieces, it had an immediacy those films lacked. Unlike Godard and Frankenheimer, director Costa-Gavris wasn’t only working out of political conviction, he was trying to free his homeland.
Shot and financed in the former French colony of Algeria, “Z” is based on a thinly fictionalized novel by Vasilis Vasilikos detailing the 1963 murder of pacifist leader Gregoris Lambrakis and the investigation that followed. Presaging the John F. Kennedy assassination by several months, the killing helped set the stage for a full-scale fascist military takeover of Greece, which lasted from 1967 to 1974. That, in turn, set the stage for Costa-Gavris, a promising young director hot off the success of his first film, “The Sleeping Car Murders,” to recruit a cast of mostly French stars to participate in a film designed specifically to raise a worldwide alarm. With the tacit acceptance of the U.S. and Western Europe, the world’s cradle of democracy was harboring a totalitarian regime that regularly tortured and murdered dissidents and had banned everything from the Beatles and long hair, to Mark Twain, Dostoyevsky, and a certain letter of the alphabet. With “Z,” Costa-Gavris made sure the world knew that.
The ending of Budd Schulberg’s extraordinary life at age 95 tonight is just a little strange for me personally. By a very odd coincidence, just last night I finished watching the 1959 TV production of “What Makes Sammy Run?,” Schulberg’s great and possibly never-to-be-filmed 1941 novel about Hollywood dehumanization (yes, it goes back that far, at least). The DVD included an interview he gave just last year and, given his age and fairly obvious frailty, I wondered how long it would be before I’d be writing one of these posts on him. He was not a young man, but this is still too soon.
Anyhow, what can you say about the writer of “On the Waterfront” and “A Face in the Crowd” — two of the most acclaimed screenplays ever written — and the nastily on-point movie business novel which was so effective it drove John Wayne to physical violence? Of course, Schulberg got it from all sides, though for differing reasons.
Like most liberals, I have serious complaints with how Schulberg comported himself during the McCarthy era, and certain lines in both of his great scripts slightly stick in my craw. While, unlike many, he never abandoned his liberalism, it’s clear to me that his entirely justified anticommunism took a form that helped that American extreme-right, harmed the first amendment, and bolstered the most vicious aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Still, there’s no denying the power and clarity of his writing or the moral values they expressed at their best.
As it happens, I posted one great scene from “A Face in the Crowd” last week. Here’s another clip from that should knock your socks off.
From the only surviving dramatization of the ultimate Hollywood novel.
“On the Waterfront” has never been a huge personal favorite of mine, but it’s easy to see why this became one of the most famous scenes ever in movie history. And it’s more than five minutes of two guys talking in the back of a cab with no action or movement other than the tremendous emotions between two brothers. Hard to imagine anyone in mainstream movies having the guts to pull this one off now.
[Today’s entry at Premium Hollywood had some FtY suitable material, so here it is again.]
Filthy lucre is today’s theme in movieland. Really, it’s every day’s theme, but it’s on my mind today.
* Nikki Finke, who actually makes money blogging, notes a pay cut for William Morris assistants, who already work ridiculously hard for the hope of decent money some day, and are expected to work a minimum of fifty hours a week. Presumably they get some overtime (though one wonders if they’re not working actually quite a bit more — Hollywood and Walmart have been known to have a few things in common in the past). They’d better because their boss’s brother is the White House chief of staff. Could get messy, otherwise.
Finke also has an interesting — inasmuch as I can follow it — look at some silver linings amidst the major studio’s fiscals clouds.
* A noted casting change in the third “Twilight” will probably not affect grosses perceptibly, but there’s no stopping those wagging tongues.
* And with all the fuss at Comic-Con, the appearance of anime genius Hiyao Miyazaki got all but ignored by the media, as far as I can tell. “Princess Mononoke” beat “Titanic” in Japan. If it had done so here, it’s fair to say he wouldn’t have been a relative afterthought.
* What of “District 9″? Given one of a few strong early reviews by Justin Chang, will politically trenchant, if thoughtfully violent/icky, Sci-Fi set in South Africa find a big enough American audience? (H/t Jeffrey Wells.)
* For those of you who live outside of California, it might be interesting to note that while mass chaos seems far away here, the state’s fiscal crisis really is effecting everything and everyone to varying degrees. People I know who work in the public sector out are personally experiencing furloughs and pay cuts to go with them, classroom sizes are ballooning absurdly and on it goes to some pretty scary and sad places.
It may not be directly related, but the Los Angeles Times report that the L.A. County Museum of Art is ending its weekend programming hits me where I live. As Anne Thompson points out, some of that may be due to some very canny competition from the terrific Los Angeles Cinematheque, a relatively very young organization that has actually come to the fore during the DVD era with two theaters at opposite ends of town offering some pretty great programming.
The Times‘ John Horn strikes a perhaps overly drastic or even borderline intellectually snobbish note on that point, though it’s true that this is not a golden age for art movies. LACMA was more prone than any other venue to offer works by such cinephile-only filmmakers as Bela Tarr, whose best known movie is the 7.5 hour “Satantango,” and will be closing out with the far-from-Frank Capra Alain Resnais.
Nevertheless, the museum’s Bing Theater was certainly not above offering crowd-pleasing fare from time to time and, indeed, not doing so would be to ignore a huge part of film history. Still, a cannier mix might not have hurt so much. Since they are talking of tie-ins with museum shows, programs similar to (or identical to) New York’s MOMA collaboration with Tim Burton might be in order. If regular film programming ever does return to MOCA, a little more Charlie Chaplin and a little less Maoist-period Godard might not be the end of the world, either.
With the help of its TV-friendly vibe and the support of high profiles fans like Quentin Tarantino, Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” remains possibly the most popular of all classic-era westerns. The laid back seriocomic oater starred John Wayne as a tough frontier sheriff in conflict with a powerful rancher; Dean Martin as his easygoing deputy ruined by the bottle and a bad woman; teen idol Rick Nelson as a young whippersnapper able to work miracles with a gun; Walter Brennan as a wily coot; and gorgeous newcomer Angie Dickenson as the ultra-sexy female gambler who keeps Wayne guessing throughout. Though the kind of unassuming film that feels like a cult hit, it was actually an immediate success on its original release in 1959.
Five or six years later, however, the classic era was dead, and the title characters of “Bonnie and Clyde” were coming to shoot up the corpse, but older filmmakers for the most part saw no reason to change. Howard Hawks, moreover, had never been had a problem with cannibalizing his past. If something worked once, why not let it work twice? So in the wake of a couple of non-western box-office bombs, he decided that the downbeat western adaptation of a novel by Harry Brown that science fiction novelist and screenwriter Leigh Brackett (“Rio Bravo,” “The Empire Strikes Back”) was drafting would instead become a laidback seriocomic oater. It would star John Wayne as a tough frontier gun-for-hire in conflict with a powerful rancher; Robert Mitchum as an easygoing sheriff ruined by the bottle and a bad woman; James Caan as a young whippersnapper able to work miracles with a knife; character actor Arthur Hunnicut as a wily coot (Walter Brennan was unavailable); and attractive newcomer Charlene Holt as Wayne’s sexy girlfriend, who occasionally confuses him. Hawks denied it was a remake, and for the first third of the film, the plot appears to be leading elsewhere, but by the one-hour mark we’re watching the movie Brackett referred to ruefully as “The Son of Rio Bravo Rides Again.”
Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 landmark is in many respects the ultimate “arty foreign flick.” Credited with launching the mid-century foreign film craze on college campuses and boho communities around the U.S., Sweden’s “The Seventh Seal” is frequently listed alongside “Citizen Kane,” “The Seven Samurai” and “The Rules of the Game” as one of the top four or five greatest works of film art. It’s also a serious contender for the most parodied film of all time, having been sent up in innumerable places and contexts including Woody Allen’s “Love & Death,” “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” and the “Cheating Death” segment of “The Colbert Report.” The downside of its huge artistic rep is that probably no other single film has had to deal with as much of an “eat your vegetables” reputation, so that even some cinephiles approach watching it more as a duty than a pleasure – even though many other art house faves are actually far more unapproachable. It’s gotten to the point where even many serious film fanatics downplay it, avoid it completely, or achieve a kind of super film snob nirvana by looking down their noses at it.
They get away with that last part because of something you’ll never know about “The Seventh Seal” until you actually see it: as death-obsessed, arty foreign flicks go, it’s actually kind of fun. There’s no getting around the portentous stylistic flourishes or the deep dish subject matter – nothing less than the meaning of life and death – but Bergman’s signature film also has its share of risqué knockabout humor, as well as a bit of horror, violence, more than a little melodrama, and some of the most stark black and white imagery ever committed to film. It’s important to realize, though, that this might not actually be Bergman’s best film. Heck, as with any movie, it’s possible you’ll hate it. You have my permission.
The setting is medieval Europe at the time of the devastating Black Plague. Knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), who has recently returned from the pointlessly bloody crusades, is confronted by the hooded figure of Death (Bengt Ekerot). It should be curtains, but the warrior insists that, while his body might be afraid, he himself is not. He nevertheless challenges the specter to the most famous board game in movie history — a single game of chess, which he has correctly surmised is Mr. Personified Death’s weakness. The delaying tactic works for the length of the film, as the knight and his cynical squire (Gunnar Björnstrand) have a series of encounters, all variously dealing with the subject of life and its inevitable end, as plague-borne hysteria sweeps the land and threatens Jof, a likable actor (Nils Poppe), Mia, his loving wife (Bibi Andersson), and their infant son.
Forward to Yesterday is dedicated to all that is valuable yet deemed—rightly or wrongly—to be dead or dying in movies and popular (and unpopular) culture, politics included.
