”In the Loop” is a broad and harsh satire in which the feckless and self-serving behavior of political operatives in Britain and the United States threaten to lead inexorably to a completely needless war. To all appearances, the war is not waged for any logical reason, but only to further the personal agendas of a few ego-addled politicos. Farfetched, isn’t it?
Directed by acclaimed British TV comedy veteran Armando Iannucci (”I’m Alan Partridge”), “In the Loop” is largely an extension of the 2005 miniseries, “In the Thick of It,” with its Oscar-nominated screenplay penned by Iannucci and a quartet of writers from the series. And so, “In the Loop” borders stylistically on mock-documentary. However, if it were an actual documentary, it would be in the category of, “I could send you a screener, but then I’d have to kill you.” It’s a real worm’s-eye view of the rush to a war of (poor) choice.
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.
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.
I’ve been largely neglecting this site lately because of my other blogging duties, though over the next few days there will be links and maybe some bonus materials for a couple of Bullz-Eye.com reviews, but I did want to revive a tradition and post a favorite video of mine, the great RKO short film “The House I Live In.” Written by Albert Maltz and directed by Mervyn LeRoy, it’s a wartime propaganda piece for tolerance (except where it comes to our nation’s WWII enemies, of course), and tolerance can always use some good propaganda. Anyhow, I’m never able to get through this one without misting up, and it really does some up what I think all Americans have to be thankful for today and all days, especially this year.
As always, a quick proviso for those who’ve never seen this. The first song Frank Sinatra sings here isn’t much and was clearly the promotional part of the film. If you’re the slightest bit bored/impatient, skip ahead to 2:43 when Frank goes out for a smoke.
An important chunk of entertainment history left us yesterday with the death of Larry Gelbart at 81. Gelbart was gifted both working alone and as a collaborator with other writers. It probably helped that relatively early in his career he labored alongside Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon on comedian Sid Caesar’s classic early variety shows. In the sixties he graduated to Broadway and the movies. With Burt Shevelove, he cowrote the book for the Broadway musical/Zero Mostel vehicle, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (later filmed by Richard Lester) and the hard to find all-star cult British comedy, “The Wrong Box.” A Chicago-born graduate of L.A.’s Fairfax High (right across the street from Cantor’s Deli), he lived in England for a time, working with another nice Jewish boy named Marty Feldman at the height of his English television fame.
He became much better known in the seventies as the primary writer during the early, funnier and more politically pointed days on the television version of “M*A*S*H.” I get to write about him because he made a mark in movies that’s too important to ignore, writing several good ones, and some not so good. He’ll probably be most commonly remembered for his work on “Oh, God” with George Burns in the title role, and what is probably Dustin Hoffman’s best performance in “Tootsie,” which is something of a comedy classic. He also co-wrote with Sheldon Keller the vastly underrated and all but impossible to see spoof of early Hollywood (specifically Warner Brothers) films, “Movie, Movie,” directed by Stanley Donen and starring George C. Scott, Eli Wallach, Trish van Devere, and Barry Bostwick. (A likely model for “Grindhouse,” in that it was also a double-feature complete with fake trailers.) It more than made up for the regrettable but profitable “Blame it On Rio,” written by Gelbart and also directed by Donen, which starred Michael Caine, Joseph Bologna and an extremely young Demi Moore.
In the nineties, he divided his time between Broadway plays like “City of Angels,” a musical spoof of classic hard-boiled detective novels, and pointed TV movies like “Barbarians at the Gate” — a tongue in cheek version of a nonfiction book about the buyout of Nabisco — and 1992’s “Mastergate,” an unbelievably witty parody of the hearings that invariably follow major Washington scandals.
Mr. Gelbart never stopped writing until almost the end, and was easily one of the most respected and beloved writers in all of show business. 81 isn’t exactly young, but we could’ve used a few more years of his presence. It’s a sad weekend for the world of funny.
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.
In a really creepy bit of timing, The House Next Door has just posted a lengthy (I’ve only read about half, so far) but I’d say very worthwhile consideration of documentarian Morris’s entire film career by Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard, including an appropriately skeptical consideration of McNamara’s attempts at self-rehabilitation in this film. You can also see if I was one of those critics Ed and Jason mention who took him at face value in my review from late 2003.
A patriotic holiday tradition here at FtY, possibly just a bit more relevant this year. (And that first song is still a bit dull. You might want to start at about 2:40, when Frank decides to go for a smoke.)
Like all character actors, Karl Malden never got quite the same level of attention as costars like Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Steve McQueen, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, Michael Caine, and George C. Scott. Even the seventies TV series he starred in, “The Streets of San Francisco” found him being overshadowed in the eyes of the teenybopper set by his young punk of a male ingenue costar, Michael Douglas. That was largely because Malden was the kind of performer who understood that acting is a team sport. His best scenes were like great duets with near perfect communication between him and his scene partners. The exception were American Express travelers’ checks; those, he wiped off the screen.
Karl Malden died today at age 97, having been more or less fully retired since appearing in a 2000 episode of “The West Wing.” While he was never precisely an A-lister, he was a go-to actor for secondary leads, president of the Motion Picture Academy, and as far as I can tell a universally respected figure among actors and everyone else associated with the movie industry. He was also married to the same woman for seventy years, a rare enough Holllywood achievement to merit it’s own special Oscar. Not a bad life.
Below the fold is a video tribute I found that, from the misspellings, I gather may come from Serbia. (Malden, whose real name was Mladen Sekulovich, was the son of a Serbian father and a Czechoslovak mother.) The image quality could be better and some of the clips are a little too brief, but it does give you an excellent overview of his truly diverse film career, which included work with some of the greatest Hollywood directors including Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer, and Alfred Hitchcock. It also includes some interesting moments from two oddball spy films, “Murderer’s Row,” which I haven’t seen, and the underrated “Billion Dollar Brain,” which included some pretty amazing scenes between Malden and Michael Caine as his old spy buddy, Harry Palmer, as well as Françoise Dorléac as his treacherous spy girlfriend (though he’s pretty tricky himself).
Given that many of his films reflect what you might call the broad sweep of black history, a way-too-clever writer might try to compare Denzel Washington – exemplary family man, matinee idol with a conscience, two-time Academy Award winner and the first African-American to win a Best Actor Oscar – to our current president. A smarter writer, however, might compare him to other actors, perhaps including those of other ethnicities.
Washington is, among other things, an old-fashioned movie star. Trained on the stage, he confesses to being influenced by “the method,” yet his acting has none of the emotional fetishism that is so common in the post-Marlon Brando movie world. Indeed, his complete ease before the camera and his low-key joy of performance is probably most similar to Spencer Tracy. The stocky, un-pretty Tracy was nearly the physical opposite of Washington. Still, the relaxed charisma, the ability to generate a laugh or a shiver with a simple expression, and Washington’s awe-inspiring commitment and confidence mirrors the ability of the classic era great, whose only advice to young thespians was to learn their lines and avoid bumping into the furniture.
Indeed, as the meticulously handsome Washington steps into the shoes of slob par excellance Walter Matthau in director Tony Scott’s remake of “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3“, it’s an opportune time to take a look at some of the lesser-known films from the actor’s back catalog. They’re quite an assortment, sometimes messy and imperfect, but always worthy of your attention. Denzel Washington rarely makes a boring choice.
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.
