Thursday, September 15, 2011
Blackbeard, the Pirate (RKO, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Eventually Charles and I watched a movie: Blackbeard, the Pirate, a 1952 production from RKO that was one of those bad movies that was hatched from the shell of what could have been a very good one. The story begins in 1946, when RKO producer Val Lewton — the receipts from whose low-budget but artistically made horror movies had saved RKO from renewed bankruptcy after the fiscal bath they’d taken on Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (as well as the unfinished It’s All True and Pare Lorentz’s un-started Name, Age and Occupation) — wanted to take the step up to “A” productions and budgets. His idea for making the switch was to do a movie based on the life of Edward Teach, the notorious pirate Blackbeard, with Boris Karloff playing him. Then Lewton, doing his usual meticulous historical research, learned that the pirates of Blackbeard’s time had not sailed in large ships, as they’d been shown doing in films like the 1934 MGM Treasure Island, Warners’ 1935 Captain Blood (a star-making vehicle for then-unknown Errol Flynn) and the silent pirate movies these had been remakes of. Instead they had sailed in fleets of small, maneuverable cutters, which they used much the way the modern-day pirates of Somalia use speedboats: to surround the ship they were going to rob, blockade it and remove its valuable cargo (though the Somali pirates are often less interested in stealing from the ship than in extracting a ransom payment from its owners to let it go).
Lewton submitted this to the RKO executives, who angrily told him they weren’t giving him an “A” production budget to make a movie about Boris Karloff commanding a fleet of fishing boats — and they scrapped the project, Lewton left RKO (and made only three more movies in the five years he had left to live) and Karloff filled out his last commitment to RKO by playing the villain in their last Dick Tracy “B,” Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, in 1947. Flash-forward five years: RKO has just distributed yet another version of Treasure Island, this one produced by Walt Disney in England (his first live-action film, made to use his studio’s frozen funds), with British actor Robert Newton as Long John Silver, and it’s been an enormous hit. (Shortly thereafter Disney cut his distribution ties with RKO and founded his own distribution company, Buena Vista.) With the idea of a follow-up in mind, RKO’s executives dusted off the idea of a Blackbeard movie as a vehicle for the same star, Robert Newton, and the script they commissioned (by Alan LeMay from an “original” story by DeVallon Scott) of course had Blackbeard sailing in a big ship much like the ones he and his crew were trying to rob — indeed, Blackbeard sails in two different ships at different points in the film, and he obtained both the same way: by having his crew invade them while they were at port and overpower and murder their rightful captains.
RKO got Raoul Walsh to direct, and under normal circumstances that would have been an excellent idea, but not this time: Walsh seemed uninspired by the by-the-numbers pirate script he got and by Newton’s relentlessly one-dimensional overacting (this is the sort of pirate film in which the pirate captain punctuates virtually every sentence out of his mouth with “Aaargh,” and that gets as monotonous as the one-note villainy of Newton’s character: he’s presented as a total psychopath with no ironically human characteristics whatsoever, and though it’s tempting to imagine the film with Karloff in the lead, frankly the limited range of the character would have given Karloff absolutely nothing to work with of the sort that had made his performances as the Frankenstein Monster, Imhotep in The Mummy, John Ellman of The Walking Dead and the mad scientists he played for Columbia, Universal and Gaumont-British so rich and moving). The real star of the film is Keith Andes, generally written off as just another pretty boy but actually a quite good, authoritative actor who should have had a better career than he did — especially since he had the sort of launching pad up-and-comers dream of: Clash by Night, a prestigious 1952 RKO drama with an all-star cast (Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan and Marilyn Monroe!) and a first-rate director, Fritz Lang, adapting a play by prestigious author Clifford Odets.
Andes plays Robert Maynard, a young surgeon who lives in Jamaica during the time of the pirates (around about the 17th century, one guesses; the real Blackbeard’s dates were 1680 to 1718, but that’s not made especially clear in the film itself). The famous pirate Sir Henry Morgan (Torin Thatcher) has supposedly reformed and worked his way into the British colonial government of Jamaica — indeed, he’s in line to be the next governor — but a rival force within the colonial establishment has put up a reward for anyone who can prove that Morgan is still engaging in piracy, and Maynard is out to get that reward. He ends up shanghaied aboard Blackbeard’s ship after Blackbeard overpowers the captain (a known associate of Morgan) Maynard thought he was sailing under and hangs the poor guy from the yardarm. Also on board Blackbeard’s ship, being held prisoner, is Edwina Mansfield (Linda Darnell, playing essentially the sort of role Olivia de Havilland played in Captain Blood), whose charms have sufficiently attracted Morgan that he orders his men not to fire on Blackbeard’s ship for fear of hurting her — and the rest of the movie features Blackbeard and the other characters chasing each other around the Caribbean. We learn quickly that Blackbeard is such a hard taskmaster even some of his own crew members — including his first mate, Ben Worley (William Bendix in one of his few movies in color) — want him dead, and also he’s hidden the treasure chest from his last attempts at piracy on an island and has carefully secreted it so no one else, not even Worley and Maynard (who were supposedly on the island when he buried it — he actually sent them away to secure the boat they’d used to travel from their ship at anchor to the island itself), knows where it is.
Blackbeard, the Pirate has its virtues — mostly the neon-bright three-strip Technicolor cinematography by William E. Snyder, with James Gooch as the ubiquitous Technicolor consultant; it’s one of the last gasps of the glories of Technicolor before the cheaper, more practical but less spectacular Eastmancolor process took over (and how nice in our day and age to see a movie set in the past in which everything isn’t brown!) — but they’re sunk (pardon the pun) by Newton’s annoying performance in the title role and a script that really doesn’t make much sense and is also awfully gory for a 1952 movie (its TV rating is PG-V and one can easily see why, especially when Morgan orders the supposedly dead Blackbeard’s head cut off — it’s really a lunatic whom Blackbeard disguised as himself, so we’re not surprised, even though the characters are, when Blackbeard turns up alive later in the film — and at the ending, when Blackbeard finally does meet his demise when his crew, angry that he lost the treasure at sea, bury him on the beach and leave only his head sticking up so he can keep consciousness until the tide rises and drowns him). Still, Keith Andes is not only a physically exciting hero, he’s also well equipped to handle the limited dimensions of his role — and Linda Darnell, though a bit more zaftig than she was in her 20th Century-Fox days (when Darryl F. Zanuck tired of her, he seems to have passed her on to Howard Hughes!), is still comely (and looks good enough in the period dresses) to be a perfectly fine damsel in distress for the hero and villains to fight over. But one can’t help but wish that the Lewton/Karloff Blackbeard had been the one that got made instead!
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Act One (Schary/Warner Bros., 1963)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Act One, a 1963 Dore Schary production, released through Warner Bros. and written and directed, as well as produced, by Schary, based on Moss Hart’s entertaining memoir of his start in the theatre. After having had five of his plays — all serious dramas modeled after the works of Eugene O’Neill — rejected, Hart (George Hamilton) decides to take the advice of his friend and patron Joe Hyman (Jack Klugman) and his sort-of agent Richard Maxwell (Sam Levene) and write a comedy instead. He has no idea what he’s going to do for a comedy plot until he reads an issue of Variety and notes that the featured story in it is the turmoil being caused in Hollywood by the advent of talking pictures. He concocts a story called Once In a Lifetime and drafts a play on it, only to get the runaround from a producer named Warren Simon, who keeps him waiting in the lobby of Simon’s hotel for two days (during which time he’s nearly bitten several times by an obnoxious small dog one of the bellboys is walking for a guest — I kept waiting for the payoff of the gag to be that it’s Warren Simon’s dog, but somehow Messrs. Hart and Schary missed that one).
A friend of his who has a contact with the legendary producer Sam Harris (the man who partnered with George M. Cohan for years, gave the Marx Brothers their first major hit, The Cocoanuts, and was reportedly so wonderful and sweet to everyone that the nastiest thing anyone could ever remember him saying about anybody was in 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany, about which his comment was, “Hitler is not a nice fellow”) gets Hart’s play a reading in Harris’s office, whereupon Harris’s verdict is he’ll produce it if Hart can get the legendary George S. Kaufman (Jason Robards, Jr.) to rewrite and direct it. Warren Simon tells Hart to be sure to tell Kaufman that he thinks the play is great, whereupon — on his first phone call with the Great Man — Kaufman snarls that he would never in a million years have anything to do with a play Warren Simon liked, and hangs up. Of course Hart is fearful that he’s blown his big opportunity, but Harris mediates and convinces Kaufman that Hart simply was naïve enough to fall for Simon’s nasty trick.
Work starts on the script, accompanied by a lot of bouncy underscoring by Skitch Henderson that doesn’t sound anything like the real pop music of the 1920’s and 1930’s (and the “source” music heard throughout the film is only marginally closer!), and Schary proves utterly unable to make the on-screen act of writing seem dramatic. He may also have been hamstrung by being unable to quote more than snippets of the actual play Hart and Kaufman wrote: Once in a Lifetime was bought by Universal and filmed by them in 1932, and in the early 1970’s PBS showed the film and hailed it as a major rediscovery — then it got stuffed back in the vaults and hasn’t been let out since then! (The actual film of Once in a Lifetime and Act One would make an interesting double bill, and it definitely goes alongside The Power and the Glory and The Man Who Reclaimed His Head among the early-1930’s movies that remain frustratingly unavailable on DVD.) With Kaufman directing and also casting himself as the fictitious playwright in the story, Once in a Lifetime gets an out-of-town tryout in Atlantic City — and bombs; all Kaufman’s changes haven’t been able to fix the weaknesses in the second and third acts. Hart says he started writing the play at a beach and so he takes his notepad and his script to the beach in hopes that lightning, or at least inspiration, will strike twice — and it does; several months later the play premieres on Broadway, is a smash hit, and Hart’s reputation as a playwright is made.
Hart called the book on which the film was based Act One to denote that he wasn’t writing his entire life story — just the start of his career — and it’s full of wonderful Jewish character actors (including an unrecognizable George Segal at the start of his career as Hart’s nihilistic friend Lester Sweyd), and there’s an odd in-joke in the character of “Archie Leach” (Bert Convy), aspiring young actor and friend of Hart’s, who sits in at his lunches at a cheap restaurant (Hart usually ends up paying because he’s the only guy in the circle who’s got a regular job — he’s director of an amateur theatre company sponsored by the — I’m not making this up, you know — “Young Men’s Hebrew Association”!) only to be accosted by one or more girls who remember seeing him at some short-running independent play out in the Village (or somewhere equally obscure), until he laments he’s got a fan club without having wanted one, and at the end he announces to the group that he’s going off to Hollywood, and Hart’s parting shot is, “Don’t let them change your name!” I wonder how many moviegoers in 1963 got it — Archie Leach not only went to Hollywood but became a superstar after he changed his name … to Cary Grant; it would have been easier for the non-cognoscenti to have figured it out if Convy had been able to do a more credible Grant impression (the way Tony Curtis did brilliantly in Some Like It Hot), but here he just sounds like an American trying to talk with rocks in his mouth.
Act One the book I remember as a charming but also thrilling memoir that made the act of writing seem as vertiginously exciting as watching a tightrope walker; Act One the movie is charming but also awfully sentimental (a flaw in Hart’s writing generally; just compare the well-made but sometimes sugary script he wrote for the 1954 version of A Star Is Born to the marvelously acerbic one Dorothy Parker co-wrote for the 1937 original), and George Hamilton doesn’t look particularly Jewish (especially by comparison with the real-life Jews playing his parents, Martin Wolfson and Sylvia Straus!) but he acts the part well enough within limits — Charles commented that Hamilton’s acting skills actually seemed to deteriorate as he got older and lost his boyish good looks! — and the supporting cast is a delight, especially Robards (though one wonders how someone that curmudgeonly could come up with so many great funny lines in his plays!) and Klugman.
The film was Act One, a 1963 Dore Schary production, released through Warner Bros. and written and directed, as well as produced, by Schary, based on Moss Hart’s entertaining memoir of his start in the theatre. After having had five of his plays — all serious dramas modeled after the works of Eugene O’Neill — rejected, Hart (George Hamilton) decides to take the advice of his friend and patron Joe Hyman (Jack Klugman) and his sort-of agent Richard Maxwell (Sam Levene) and write a comedy instead. He has no idea what he’s going to do for a comedy plot until he reads an issue of Variety and notes that the featured story in it is the turmoil being caused in Hollywood by the advent of talking pictures. He concocts a story called Once In a Lifetime and drafts a play on it, only to get the runaround from a producer named Warren Simon, who keeps him waiting in the lobby of Simon’s hotel for two days (during which time he’s nearly bitten several times by an obnoxious small dog one of the bellboys is walking for a guest — I kept waiting for the payoff of the gag to be that it’s Warren Simon’s dog, but somehow Messrs. Hart and Schary missed that one).
A friend of his who has a contact with the legendary producer Sam Harris (the man who partnered with George M. Cohan for years, gave the Marx Brothers their first major hit, The Cocoanuts, and was reportedly so wonderful and sweet to everyone that the nastiest thing anyone could ever remember him saying about anybody was in 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany, about which his comment was, “Hitler is not a nice fellow”) gets Hart’s play a reading in Harris’s office, whereupon Harris’s verdict is he’ll produce it if Hart can get the legendary George S. Kaufman (Jason Robards, Jr.) to rewrite and direct it. Warren Simon tells Hart to be sure to tell Kaufman that he thinks the play is great, whereupon — on his first phone call with the Great Man — Kaufman snarls that he would never in a million years have anything to do with a play Warren Simon liked, and hangs up. Of course Hart is fearful that he’s blown his big opportunity, but Harris mediates and convinces Kaufman that Hart simply was naïve enough to fall for Simon’s nasty trick.
Work starts on the script, accompanied by a lot of bouncy underscoring by Skitch Henderson that doesn’t sound anything like the real pop music of the 1920’s and 1930’s (and the “source” music heard throughout the film is only marginally closer!), and Schary proves utterly unable to make the on-screen act of writing seem dramatic. He may also have been hamstrung by being unable to quote more than snippets of the actual play Hart and Kaufman wrote: Once in a Lifetime was bought by Universal and filmed by them in 1932, and in the early 1970’s PBS showed the film and hailed it as a major rediscovery — then it got stuffed back in the vaults and hasn’t been let out since then! (The actual film of Once in a Lifetime and Act One would make an interesting double bill, and it definitely goes alongside The Power and the Glory and The Man Who Reclaimed His Head among the early-1930’s movies that remain frustratingly unavailable on DVD.) With Kaufman directing and also casting himself as the fictitious playwright in the story, Once in a Lifetime gets an out-of-town tryout in Atlantic City — and bombs; all Kaufman’s changes haven’t been able to fix the weaknesses in the second and third acts. Hart says he started writing the play at a beach and so he takes his notepad and his script to the beach in hopes that lightning, or at least inspiration, will strike twice — and it does; several months later the play premieres on Broadway, is a smash hit, and Hart’s reputation as a playwright is made.
Hart called the book on which the film was based Act One to denote that he wasn’t writing his entire life story — just the start of his career — and it’s full of wonderful Jewish character actors (including an unrecognizable George Segal at the start of his career as Hart’s nihilistic friend Lester Sweyd), and there’s an odd in-joke in the character of “Archie Leach” (Bert Convy), aspiring young actor and friend of Hart’s, who sits in at his lunches at a cheap restaurant (Hart usually ends up paying because he’s the only guy in the circle who’s got a regular job — he’s director of an amateur theatre company sponsored by the — I’m not making this up, you know — “Young Men’s Hebrew Association”!) only to be accosted by one or more girls who remember seeing him at some short-running independent play out in the Village (or somewhere equally obscure), until he laments he’s got a fan club without having wanted one, and at the end he announces to the group that he’s going off to Hollywood, and Hart’s parting shot is, “Don’t let them change your name!” I wonder how many moviegoers in 1963 got it — Archie Leach not only went to Hollywood but became a superstar after he changed his name … to Cary Grant; it would have been easier for the non-cognoscenti to have figured it out if Convy had been able to do a more credible Grant impression (the way Tony Curtis did brilliantly in Some Like It Hot), but here he just sounds like an American trying to talk with rocks in his mouth.
Act One the book I remember as a charming but also thrilling memoir that made the act of writing seem as vertiginously exciting as watching a tightrope walker; Act One the movie is charming but also awfully sentimental (a flaw in Hart’s writing generally; just compare the well-made but sometimes sugary script he wrote for the 1954 version of A Star Is Born to the marvelously acerbic one Dorothy Parker co-wrote for the 1937 original), and George Hamilton doesn’t look particularly Jewish (especially by comparison with the real-life Jews playing his parents, Martin Wolfson and Sylvia Straus!) but he acts the part well enough within limits — Charles commented that Hamilton’s acting skills actually seemed to deteriorate as he got older and lost his boyish good looks! — and the supporting cast is a delight, especially Robards (though one wonders how someone that curmudgeonly could come up with so many great funny lines in his plays!) and Klugman.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
The Lincoln Lawyer (Lionsgate, 2011)
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Lincoln Lawyer, a 2011 production from Lionsgate Entertainment (that’s how the name is spelled in their logo — all one word, and in fact in all caps — though the company is usually referred to as “Lions Gate,” two words but without the apostrophe, and their logo is a couple of giant gates with metal sculptures of lions emblazoned on them being swung into place by such an elaborately stylized array of gears it looks like “Metropolis Productions” would be a better name for them) along with Lakeshore Entertainment (whose logo, even dorkier than Lionsgate’s, is a scrawny little boy jumping off a mini-boardwalk into a lake that hardly looks deep enough for him to swim in) and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment — Sidney Kimmel was also the producer of this film (to the extent that any movie these days has just one producer!) and I had visions of him watching the rough cut of the movie, not liking it, and saying in his best Queen Victoria impression, “We are not entertained.”
It’s based on a novel by Michael Connelly, who seems to me to be one of the few writers today who’s actually achieved the authentic noir voice even though most of his novels are either police procedurals (usually featuring his running character, middle-aged and dyspeptic LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch) or legal thrillers and to my knowledge he’s never attempted a private-eye story à la Hammett or Chandler. I’d read the book a few years ago but oddly had completely forgotten the plot (though fragments of it came back to me as the movie unreeled): slimeball defense attorney Mick Haller (Matthew McConaughey, essentially reprising his role from the film of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill and still a handsome man but visibly older and seedier, as befits his role) is representing mostly prostitutes and drug dealers, along with members of a motorcycle gang who apparently are running a meth lab in the desert (they refer to it as a “farm” but given the level of police scrutiny of it, it’s obviously not producing agricultural edibles, and it appears to be making enough money and operating sufficiently under the radar it can’t be a marijuana grow) and have Haller more or less on retainer (“repeat customers,” he calls them) to handle the defense of any of their number who happens to get popped — including a young man with scraggly hair and a scrawny beard who looks like he got the role by taking first prize in a Charles Manson impersonation contest.
Needless to say, Haller — who suffers from the other actors’ inability to come to consensus on how to pronounce his last name: it usually comes out “Holler,” sometimes “Heller” — is looking for a big-ticket case that will be his way out of a lifestyle that, though he has a home, requires him to run his practice out of his big Lincoln town car (hence the title) because he apparently can’t afford an office (though he’s got plenty of money to bribe bailiffs and the like). He thinks he’s found it when his friend, bail bondsman Val Valenzuela (John Leguizamo), refers him to defend spoiled rich kid Louis Roulet (Ryan Philippe), who’s under indictment for assault with a deadly weapon. It seems he picked up a prostitute at a bar, invited her to his home and then raped her and cut her up with a knife — though his version of the story is that she made a play for him, slipping him her address on a cocktail napkin, only when he went over there he was conked on the head and rendered unconscious almost immediately, and he feels he’s been set up by the woman and the older boyfriend she was with that night, who drives a blue Ford Mustang. One of Haller’s contacts in the justice system slips him a copy of the police file on the case, which contains a photo of a knife that isn’t Roulet’s, but later Haller receives the real police file as legitimate discovery and the photo is of a different knife that is Roulet’s.
Looking at the photo of the wounded girl, Haller goes into a flashback and notes its similarity to that of the dead victim in a previous case he handled, in which a Latino allegedly murdered a prostitute, slashing her face and vagina to ribbons. In that case Haller’s client at first asserted his innocence, then let Haller talk him into accepting a plea deal that would get him a life sentence (which as a practical matter would mean he’d get out in 15 years) instead of the death penalty — only now, from the similarity in the wound patterns, Haller concludes that Roulet committed both crimes and the victim in his current case, Reggie Campo (Margarita Levieva), was lucky to escape with her life. (She escaped because two neighbors — “a faggot couple,” Roulet calls them — overpowered Roulet and literally sat on him until the police arrived and arrested him.) Haller’s suspicions that Roulet is actually guilty harden when his own investigator, Frank Levin (a nicely seedy William H. Macy), is killed and Haller himself is framed for the crime. During a meeting just before trial — since Haller doesn’t have an office of his own, it takes place in the offices of Cecil Dobbs (Bob Gunton), a civil attorney who handles the business affairs of Roulet and his formidable mother, Mary Windsor (Frances Fisher) — Roulet confesses to the earlier murder but doesn’t mention the killing of Frank. Haller’s dilemma thus becomes how to live up to his legal duty of representing Roulet’s interests and winning him an acquittal in the current case while still nailing him for the murder — and doing so without using any of the information Roulet has given him, which he can’t reveal because Roulet is protected by attorney-client privilege.
As if that weren’t enough plot for you, Haller also has an ex-wife, Maggie McPherson — nicknamed “Maggie McFierce” — with whom he had a daughter, Hayley (Mackenzie Aladjem), and though they occasionally get together and even have sex, their split seems mainly motivated by the fact that she remained a prosecutor after he quit to become a defense attorney and she can’t get over her contempt for all the scumbags he puts back on the streets despite her best efforts to convict them. She was originally assigned to prosecute the Roulet case, but when Haller signed on as the defense attorney she recused herself and the case fell to Ted Minton (Josh Lucas), a pretty generic garden-variety movie prosecutor in the Hamilton Burger mold, a plodder easily outwitted by the star defense-attorney protagonist. It ends with Minton putting a notorious jailhouse snitch on the stand and Haller easily discrediting him, but not before the snitch has mentioned that Roulet committed murder in the earlier case and therefore put that information on the record in a way Haller can’t be held responsible for — and a bizarre confrontation between Haller and Roulet in which, anxious to forestall Roulet’s planned kidnapping of Hayley as revenge for her dad’s having set him up for a murder charge, Haller called in his friends from the motorcycle gang (ya remember the motorcycle gang?) to beat up Roulet (“I just want him hospitalized, not killed,” Haller explains) and smash his beloved black Maserati sports car — and then there’s a shootout between Haller and, of all people, Roulet’s mother, Mary Windsor, who it turned out killed Haller’s investigator Frank Levin (ya remember Frank Levin?) because he had found a piece of evidence (a parking ticket) linking Roulet to the previous murder.
While modishly neo-noir in its cynicism and its total rejection of any milk of kindness in human nature — Haller may get justice done at the end but he’s as much an opportunistic slimeball at the end of the movie as he was at the beginning — at least The Lincoln Lawyer isn’t as cynical and despairing as the works of James Ellroy or the movies based on them, and though director Brad Furman (who’s Brad Furman?) is pretty undistinguished and one misses the élan with which a 1940’s director like Hitchcock, Huston or Hawks could have handled this story, it’s a quite effective professionally made movie, well adapted by John Romano from Connelly’s already cinematic novel, and with a chilling performance by Ryan Philippe as the principal villain. He’s neither exaggeratedly overplayed like Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill and The Hoodlum nor exaggeratedly underplayed like Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train or Anthony Perkins in Psycho (the two Hitchcock films that between them revolutionized the depiction of criminal psychopathology on screen); he’s just an ordinary guy with too much money for his own good, who just happens to have as his hobby murdering people and then setting other people up to take the fall, and by his sheer ordinariness and banality Philippe out-acts the rest of the cast — McConaughey is professional but uninspiring as usual (there’s a reason this guy hasn’t become a superstar despite landing a dream series of parts) but Macy, Tomei and especially Frances Fisher as the psycho’s mom are excellent and well worth watching.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (Woolner Bros./Allied Artists, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I squeezed in a movie before we crashed: Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, a 1958 production of the Woolner Brothers (let’s see, at the top of the studio food chain we have the Warner Brothers, and at the bottom the Woolner Brothers) for release by Allied Artists, née Monogram, and a pretty sleazy 65-minute “B” in the old Monogram tradition but — oddly, given its reputation, a film just barely well-made enough that it avoids being the camp classic it’s been hailed as.
Directed by Nathan Juran (though he was so embarrassed by the result that he used his first and middle names only and took his credit as “Nathan Hertz”) from a script by Mark Hanna (I couldn’t help but joke, “Well, he had to change careers after William McKinley was assassinated”), Attack of the 50-Foot Woman has two parallel plot lines: a spacecraft — shaped like a giant metal ball rather than a saucer this time, and referred to as a “satellite” throughout (according to an imdb.com “trivia” poster, this was because after seeing the photos of the first Sputnik, Hanna didn’t realize that “satellite” meant something that orbited a planet: he thought it referred to any spherically-shaped spaceship) — travels across the earth before landing in a small California town on Route 66 (which still had enough cachet the road sign with that magical numeral is prominently displayed several times in the film); and there’s also a romantic triangle between wealthy woman Nancy Fowler Archer (Allison Hayes, top-billed and dark-haired this time), her husband Harry (William Hudson), and Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers), the gold-digging floozy Harry is not only having an affair with but flaunting it by necking with her in the local restaurant/bar in full view of all the townspeople.
The gimmick is that the spaceship is inhabited by just one crew member, who looks like a normal human being except that he’s 30 feet tall (though, as a number of imdb.com contributors pointed out, the interior of the spacecraft is scaled for normal-sized humans rather than giants) — and he’s played by Michael Ross, who also appears in normal human size as the bartender at the place where Harry and Honey hang out. The film makes a common mistake in 1950’s horror and sci-fi — it takes too damned long to bring the monster out; the film is 45 minutes old before we see the 30-foot alien and it takes 10 minutes after that before the alien uses his advanced technology to upscale Nancy to his own size. According to the official synopsis, he does this because he has the hots for her himself but realizes they couldn’t possibly have a sexual relationship unless they are similarly scaled — but that’s really not made clear in the film itself. For the last 10 minutes of the running time we basically see Allison Hayes calling, “HARRY! HARRY!” as she walks through the Southern California desert, trampling one balsa-wood model building after another, in her demented search for her no-good and now considerably smaller husband — the scenes depicting this are some of the worst process work ever passed off in a film for general commercial release — until she finally gets to the bar, catches Harry and Honey together, and crushes them both under the beams of the bar’s (former) roof as she rips the place apart (literally).
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman is made with a dogged earnestness that keeps it from working as camp, but it’s too dorky and too slow to make it as serious drama either — though one of the bright points in it is the performance by Yvette Vickers, who totally out-acts the two leads and turns in a reading of her character that fully dramatizes the character’s surface and the depths of her sexual hold on Harry, who’s so smitten she can tell him out-front that his only interest in her is getting his wife’s money and he still falls into her arms like a puppy dog. Incidentally, Yvette Vickers met a macabre real-life end when her body was found in her apartment by a concerned neighbor who entered and found cobwebs on the mailbox, lights and a space heater still running, and a corpse so mummified by the passage of time as to be unrecognizable — she’d been there probably for a year without anyone noticing! It’s an even more grim story twist than the ones in her movies, which were mostly cheap sci-fi and horror “B”’s like this one and her immediate followup, Attack of the Giant Leeches, though she got her start in a tiny role in the classic Sunset Boulevard — also about a long-forgotten recluse who had once been a great star.
Charles and I squeezed in a movie before we crashed: Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, a 1958 production of the Woolner Brothers (let’s see, at the top of the studio food chain we have the Warner Brothers, and at the bottom the Woolner Brothers) for release by Allied Artists, née Monogram, and a pretty sleazy 65-minute “B” in the old Monogram tradition but — oddly, given its reputation, a film just barely well-made enough that it avoids being the camp classic it’s been hailed as.
Directed by Nathan Juran (though he was so embarrassed by the result that he used his first and middle names only and took his credit as “Nathan Hertz”) from a script by Mark Hanna (I couldn’t help but joke, “Well, he had to change careers after William McKinley was assassinated”), Attack of the 50-Foot Woman has two parallel plot lines: a spacecraft — shaped like a giant metal ball rather than a saucer this time, and referred to as a “satellite” throughout (according to an imdb.com “trivia” poster, this was because after seeing the photos of the first Sputnik, Hanna didn’t realize that “satellite” meant something that orbited a planet: he thought it referred to any spherically-shaped spaceship) — travels across the earth before landing in a small California town on Route 66 (which still had enough cachet the road sign with that magical numeral is prominently displayed several times in the film); and there’s also a romantic triangle between wealthy woman Nancy Fowler Archer (Allison Hayes, top-billed and dark-haired this time), her husband Harry (William Hudson), and Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers), the gold-digging floozy Harry is not only having an affair with but flaunting it by necking with her in the local restaurant/bar in full view of all the townspeople.
The gimmick is that the spaceship is inhabited by just one crew member, who looks like a normal human being except that he’s 30 feet tall (though, as a number of imdb.com contributors pointed out, the interior of the spacecraft is scaled for normal-sized humans rather than giants) — and he’s played by Michael Ross, who also appears in normal human size as the bartender at the place where Harry and Honey hang out. The film makes a common mistake in 1950’s horror and sci-fi — it takes too damned long to bring the monster out; the film is 45 minutes old before we see the 30-foot alien and it takes 10 minutes after that before the alien uses his advanced technology to upscale Nancy to his own size. According to the official synopsis, he does this because he has the hots for her himself but realizes they couldn’t possibly have a sexual relationship unless they are similarly scaled — but that’s really not made clear in the film itself. For the last 10 minutes of the running time we basically see Allison Hayes calling, “HARRY! HARRY!” as she walks through the Southern California desert, trampling one balsa-wood model building after another, in her demented search for her no-good and now considerably smaller husband — the scenes depicting this are some of the worst process work ever passed off in a film for general commercial release — until she finally gets to the bar, catches Harry and Honey together, and crushes them both under the beams of the bar’s (former) roof as she rips the place apart (literally).
Attack of the 50-Foot Woman is made with a dogged earnestness that keeps it from working as camp, but it’s too dorky and too slow to make it as serious drama either — though one of the bright points in it is the performance by Yvette Vickers, who totally out-acts the two leads and turns in a reading of her character that fully dramatizes the character’s surface and the depths of her sexual hold on Harry, who’s so smitten she can tell him out-front that his only interest in her is getting his wife’s money and he still falls into her arms like a puppy dog. Incidentally, Yvette Vickers met a macabre real-life end when her body was found in her apartment by a concerned neighbor who entered and found cobwebs on the mailbox, lights and a space heater still running, and a corpse so mummified by the passage of time as to be unrecognizable — she’d been there probably for a year without anyone noticing! It’s an even more grim story twist than the ones in her movies, which were mostly cheap sci-fi and horror “B”’s like this one and her immediate followup, Attack of the Giant Leeches, though she got her start in a tiny role in the classic Sunset Boulevard — also about a long-forgotten recluse who had once been a great star.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
The Missing Corpse (PRC, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I chose to run an episode of an odd public-access show from Ohio called Weirdness, which was essentially a D.I.Y. version of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with two local hosts, a man and a woman (though I got the impression they weren’t a couple), doing a live introduction from the site of a now-closed amusement park (the show included TV commercials the park had run in the 1950’s when it was a going concern), showing a bad movie (though they didn’t talk over the soundtrack the way the MST3K cast members did, or run subtitles lampooning the movie the way the hosts of the San Diego-based Schlock Theatre did on Channel 6 from 1980-1982) and interspersing it with sketches of their own (one of which was a tip for job-searchers that seems all too relevant now: when you have a long employment gap on your résumé, plug it by saying you were a “consultant”!) and fragments of old film, including a trailer for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and some of those visit-the-snack-bar hard-sell commercials they used to show at drive-ins, with almost pornographic close-ups of hamburgers and hot dogs being cooked. (Charles noted how badly scratched these clips were from how often they’d been run “in the day.”)
The film they showed on this episode was a 1945 PRC production called The Missing Corpse, which judging from the title I thought would either be a gangster movie or a horror film. Surprise — it was a comedy, or at least what Dwight MacDonald once called a movie that “in form and intent” could be called a comedy, since it was obviously intended to evoke audience laughter but dismally failed in that regard. An indication of what a cheap movie this was is the fact that veteran character actor J. Edward Bromberg actually got top billing as Henry Kruger, publisher of the Tribune, with a clueless wife, Alice (Isabel Randolph), who seems to want to sleep all day (composer Karl Hajos — one of the many people whose other credits had proved they had far more talent than they got to display here — quotes the song “Beautiful Dreamer” as she debates whether or not she wants to get up) and two scapegrace children, son James (Eric Sinclair) and daughter Phyllis (Lorell Sheldon). Both James and Phyllis have the typical movie rich-kid’s bad habit of staying out all night, drinking and partying in the company of unworthy companions, and the Tribune’s rival paper, the Argus, has acquired and published a photo of Phyllis doing so in the company of Argus reporter Jeffrey Dodd (John Shay).
This led Henry Kruger to travel to the Argus office in high dudgeon (actually he used a car) and complain to the reporter, Andy McDonald (Paul Guilfoyle), and actually threaten him — only McDonald is actually killed by his partner in crime, “Slippery Joe” Clary (Ben Welden), and Clary gets rid of the body by stuffing it in the trunk of Kruger’s car. Meanwhile, Kruger has decided to take a vacation, and so he and his companion Mack Hogan (Frank Jenks) — the official synopsis describes Hogan as Kruger’s chauffeur but for most of the trip Kruger himself is driving — without any idea that they’re carrying a dead body in their trunk. Once they get to Kruger’s lakefront cabin, where they intend to spend a few days fishing, the cabin is beset by all sorts of people, including a nosy motorcycle cop (Archie Twitchell) as well as Clary and various Kruger family members, and for various reasons writers Harry O. Hoyt (story) and Raymond Schrock (script) were utterly unable to make interesting, the dead body gets moved about the house so fast and so extensively McDonald seems to get around more in death than he did in life (much like the similarly mobile corpse in Monogram’s Spy Train, which compared to this one is a deathless masterpiece!). A decade later Alfred Hitchcock would take the same basic premise and make The Trouble with Harry, which while not one of his better movies is a lot more charming and likable than this one, and though The Missing Corpse benefits at least from Eric Sinclair and John Shay — two considerably better-looking actors than PRC usually got in their juvenile roles — it’s simply dull: singularly unfunny (Charles remembered the Hal Roach film Merrily We Live, which revolved around a rich family and a wife with a penchant for taking in ex-cons and giving them jobs as servants, another film with a similar “feel” to this but far, far more entertaining!), ill-acted (there’s a reason Bromberg, an effective character actor, didn’t get tapped for more leads, and the actor playing the cop is downright offensive), dully photographed and abysmally written.
Harry O. Hoyt was the director of the 1925 film The Lost World and had just worked on PRC’s marvelous thriller Lady in the Death House when he made this; Karl Hajos had written the score for Universal’s 1935 chiller The Werewolf of London (one of the least regarded horror productions from the Laemmle era but still, to my mind, considerably better than the more famous Wolf Man from 1941 with Lon Chaney, Jr.); producer Martin Mooney had been associated with productions ranging from the 1936 Warners gangster film Bullets or Ballots (with Edward G. Robinson as an undercover cop and Humphrey Bogart as the gang boss he’s trying to bring down) to what were probably PRC’s two finest films, Bluebeard and Detour; and director Albert Herman was a hack but a lovable one whose trademark — though it isn’t seen here — was his unique approach to having his characters break down a door: instead of opening on its hinges the door would fall flat, top first, which under normal circumstances is physically impossible. The Missing Corpse is one of those films whose execution is “off” from the beginning — we realize early on that whatever genuinely interesting premises or dramatic issues (or potentially funny gags) the filmmakers may stumble on, they’re not going to do them justice, and you just let it unspool and wash over you — aided in this case by the sketches the Weirdness crew staged, which were equally amateurish but at least were intended to be amusing from their sheer amateurishness.
I chose to run an episode of an odd public-access show from Ohio called Weirdness, which was essentially a D.I.Y. version of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with two local hosts, a man and a woman (though I got the impression they weren’t a couple), doing a live introduction from the site of a now-closed amusement park (the show included TV commercials the park had run in the 1950’s when it was a going concern), showing a bad movie (though they didn’t talk over the soundtrack the way the MST3K cast members did, or run subtitles lampooning the movie the way the hosts of the San Diego-based Schlock Theatre did on Channel 6 from 1980-1982) and interspersing it with sketches of their own (one of which was a tip for job-searchers that seems all too relevant now: when you have a long employment gap on your résumé, plug it by saying you were a “consultant”!) and fragments of old film, including a trailer for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and some of those visit-the-snack-bar hard-sell commercials they used to show at drive-ins, with almost pornographic close-ups of hamburgers and hot dogs being cooked. (Charles noted how badly scratched these clips were from how often they’d been run “in the day.”)
The film they showed on this episode was a 1945 PRC production called The Missing Corpse, which judging from the title I thought would either be a gangster movie or a horror film. Surprise — it was a comedy, or at least what Dwight MacDonald once called a movie that “in form and intent” could be called a comedy, since it was obviously intended to evoke audience laughter but dismally failed in that regard. An indication of what a cheap movie this was is the fact that veteran character actor J. Edward Bromberg actually got top billing as Henry Kruger, publisher of the Tribune, with a clueless wife, Alice (Isabel Randolph), who seems to want to sleep all day (composer Karl Hajos — one of the many people whose other credits had proved they had far more talent than they got to display here — quotes the song “Beautiful Dreamer” as she debates whether or not she wants to get up) and two scapegrace children, son James (Eric Sinclair) and daughter Phyllis (Lorell Sheldon). Both James and Phyllis have the typical movie rich-kid’s bad habit of staying out all night, drinking and partying in the company of unworthy companions, and the Tribune’s rival paper, the Argus, has acquired and published a photo of Phyllis doing so in the company of Argus reporter Jeffrey Dodd (John Shay).
This led Henry Kruger to travel to the Argus office in high dudgeon (actually he used a car) and complain to the reporter, Andy McDonald (Paul Guilfoyle), and actually threaten him — only McDonald is actually killed by his partner in crime, “Slippery Joe” Clary (Ben Welden), and Clary gets rid of the body by stuffing it in the trunk of Kruger’s car. Meanwhile, Kruger has decided to take a vacation, and so he and his companion Mack Hogan (Frank Jenks) — the official synopsis describes Hogan as Kruger’s chauffeur but for most of the trip Kruger himself is driving — without any idea that they’re carrying a dead body in their trunk. Once they get to Kruger’s lakefront cabin, where they intend to spend a few days fishing, the cabin is beset by all sorts of people, including a nosy motorcycle cop (Archie Twitchell) as well as Clary and various Kruger family members, and for various reasons writers Harry O. Hoyt (story) and Raymond Schrock (script) were utterly unable to make interesting, the dead body gets moved about the house so fast and so extensively McDonald seems to get around more in death than he did in life (much like the similarly mobile corpse in Monogram’s Spy Train, which compared to this one is a deathless masterpiece!). A decade later Alfred Hitchcock would take the same basic premise and make The Trouble with Harry, which while not one of his better movies is a lot more charming and likable than this one, and though The Missing Corpse benefits at least from Eric Sinclair and John Shay — two considerably better-looking actors than PRC usually got in their juvenile roles — it’s simply dull: singularly unfunny (Charles remembered the Hal Roach film Merrily We Live, which revolved around a rich family and a wife with a penchant for taking in ex-cons and giving them jobs as servants, another film with a similar “feel” to this but far, far more entertaining!), ill-acted (there’s a reason Bromberg, an effective character actor, didn’t get tapped for more leads, and the actor playing the cop is downright offensive), dully photographed and abysmally written.
Harry O. Hoyt was the director of the 1925 film The Lost World and had just worked on PRC’s marvelous thriller Lady in the Death House when he made this; Karl Hajos had written the score for Universal’s 1935 chiller The Werewolf of London (one of the least regarded horror productions from the Laemmle era but still, to my mind, considerably better than the more famous Wolf Man from 1941 with Lon Chaney, Jr.); producer Martin Mooney had been associated with productions ranging from the 1936 Warners gangster film Bullets or Ballots (with Edward G. Robinson as an undercover cop and Humphrey Bogart as the gang boss he’s trying to bring down) to what were probably PRC’s two finest films, Bluebeard and Detour; and director Albert Herman was a hack but a lovable one whose trademark — though it isn’t seen here — was his unique approach to having his characters break down a door: instead of opening on its hinges the door would fall flat, top first, which under normal circumstances is physically impossible. The Missing Corpse is one of those films whose execution is “off” from the beginning — we realize early on that whatever genuinely interesting premises or dramatic issues (or potentially funny gags) the filmmakers may stumble on, they’re not going to do them justice, and you just let it unspool and wash over you — aided in this case by the sketches the Weirdness crew staged, which were equally amateurish but at least were intended to be amusing from their sheer amateurishness.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Monster (Media 8 Entertainment, Newmarket Films, DEJ Productions, Sony, 2003)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2004, 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I went to a film screening in Hillcrest of the movie Monster, writer-director Patty Jenkins’ heavily fictionalized version of the Aileen Wuornos story. It’s the sort of movie that overwhelms you without actually leaving you able to say you liked it; between Charlize Theron’s rivetingly unattractive presence as Wuornos (one wonders why her middle-aged male victims were so hard up for sex that they actually were willing to pay money to fuck her) and Jenkins’ alteration of her female partner into a pathetically immature child-woman (played nobly by Christina Ricci) — a characterization which reminded me very much of Teresa Wright’s role in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (also a film about a young suburban girl who discovers that the person she thinks is going to lift her from the doldrums of her existence and her suffocating family turns out to be a multiple murderer!) even though the rest of the film is essentially an all-female Bonnie and Clyde — Bonnie and Claudia, as it were — Monster is a compelling but also resolutely unlikable movie which pushes its attempt to earn audience sympathy for Wuornos to the breaking point. It’s the sort of movie that drives a reviewer nuts because you want to acknowledge the filmmakers’ accomplishment but you also don’t want to promise your readers that they’ll have a good time if they see it! — 1/9/04
•••••
Monster: Intense but Unlikable Spree-Killer Story
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Originally published in Zenger’s Newsmagazine issue #115, January 2004
The blurbs in the ads for writer-director Patty Jenkins’ film Monster include words like “Remarkable!,” “Raw and Riveting,” “Unforgettable!,” “Astonishing!” What you won’t find are words like “likable,” “entertaining,” “emotionally moving,” “wonderful” — words that really don’t apply to a film that frustrates a reviewer because it’s so obviously well-made, and so intensely carries the thrust of the filmmakers’ convictions in every frame, you want to recommend it. And yet you also can’t honestly tell your readers that they’d actually enjoy this film.
Though the actual meaning of the title refers to a giant Ferris wheel that frightened the protagonist as a kid, Monster is also a fitting name for its central character: Aileen Wuornos, the real-life murderess who blazed a bloody trail across Florida in 1990-91. A prostitute of one sort or another since the age of nine, Wuornos picked up seven men, ostensibly to sell them sex, and killed them. When she was finally captured, her defense was that the men had attacked her and she had killed them in self-defense — and years after her arrest in 1991, but before the state of Florida put her to death in 2002, it turned out that at least for her first victim, that had been true. He’d had a record of assaulting, raping and brutalizing prostitutes, and Wuornos’s claim that she’d had to fight him off and kill him to save her own life rang true. But the incident seemed to have finally stripped the already well-worn gears in her brain and led her to re-enact the crime with male after male she picked up on Florida’s back roads.
What made Aileen Wuornos’s story a media sensation was not only that she was proclaimed the world’s first female serial killer — which she wasn’t; as a prostitute with no record of violent crime until her first killing, she was strictly speaking a spree killer (like Andrew Cunanan), not a serial — but she was also having a sexual affair with a woman, Tyria “Ty” Moore, a bike-riding butch dyke who frequented the Lesbian bars in Daytona Beach and, though not a criminal, was almost as hard-bitten as her partner. The police caught Wuornos by staking out the low-class trucker bar at which the pair liked to hang out, then sought Ty’s cooperation by having her call Wuornos in jail and trying to trick her into a telephonic confession. Eventually Wuornos pled guilty to save Ty from prosecution — and then suffered the indignity of seeing Ty as the prosecution’s star witness in her trial.
The irresistible combination of tabloid-friendly news hooks in the Wuornos story — a female mass murderer! A prostitute! A Lesbian! — has led to an extensive literature on the case as well as no fewer than four films. One was a made-for-TV “quickie” from the early 1990’s called Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, which focused on the police work that cracked the case. One was a 1992 documentary by Nick Broomfield (Biggie and Tupac) called Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, which featured interviews with Wuornos but also made the media frenzy around Wuornos its subject. The third, released almost simultaneously with Monster, was another documentary by Broomfield, this time co-directed with his producing partner Joan Churchill, Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer — inspired largely by Broomfield’s supremely mixed feelings about being subpoenaed by the state of Florida during Wuornos’s last court hearings to bolster the case for executing her instead of letting her live out her life in prison.
Monster is essentially a tour de force for Charlize Theron, who played Wuornos as well as co-producing the film (it’s nice to see more actresses actually developing their own projects instead of sitting on their asses lamenting the studio system’s failure to generate any good roles for women). It was written and directed by Patty Jenkins, who wrote an article in Landmark Theatres’ house magazine FLM saying that she’d long had an interest in making “a Raging Bull-style character film about Aileen Wuornos.” Under Jenkins’ direction and the ministrations of a makeup artist credited only as “Toni G.,” the naturally attractive Theron was converted into a repulsively hard-edged homeless street hooker, complete with sunburned face, droopy eyelids and teeth caps. Her performance is indeed “riveting,” to quote one of those sensational adjectives used in the ad blurbs, but it’s also physically difficult to watch. The utter conviction with which Theron turns herself into a piece of human flotsam only deepens one of the mysteries of the Wuornos case — namely, why were the middle-aged men she killed so hard up that they were willing to pay for sex with someone so relentlessly unattractive.
Though Monster is being billed as a true story, it really isn’t — something Jenkins finally gets around to admitting at the end in a credit-roll disclaimer that says that Wuornos is the only character in the film who isn’t fictional. Like the 1970’s biopics of Billie Holiday and Buddy Holly, which turned these musicians’ fascinating real lives into Hollywood clichés, Monster is not only not especially interesting as fiction but leaves one with the impression that if its maker had stuck to the real story she would have had a much richer, deeper and better film. Nothing in Monster is further from the truth than its depiction of Wuornos’s girlfriend and their relationship. The hard-edged biker-dyke the real Wuornos fell for becomes “Selby Wall” (Christina Ricci), a teenage Lesbianette whose big concern is to avoid having the family friends she’s staying with in Florida ship her back to her parents in Hawai’i, where daddy is just waiting to clap her into a reparative therapy center in the hope of turning her straight.
Much of Monster plays like someone got the idea to redo Bonnie and Clyde with an all-female cast — Bonnie and Claudia, as it were — but as false as it is to the real sinew of Wuornos’s story, in some ways the character arc of “Selby Wall” is the most interesting part of this film. It’s strikingly reminiscent of the character Teresa Wright played in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 classic, Shadow of a Doubt — also a film about an immature young woman who has to grow up in a hurry when she realizes that the person she hoped would lift her out of her drab suburban existence is in fact a multiple murderer — and though Ricci is hardly in Wright’s league as an actress (nor is Jenkins in Hitchcock’s as a director), nonetheless she gives the film a moral center it desperately needs and her story has a genuine pathos that Wuornos’s, as Jenkins tells it, largely lacks. — 1/11/04
•••••
The film was Monster, the 2003 release very loosely based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, a hard-bitten homeless woman in Florida who worked as a highway prostitute (picking up men as they drove by on the freeway and getting them to stop) and ultimately killed seven of her would-be johns between 1989 and 1990, finally being arrested at a bar appropriately called “The Last Resort” (the real bar “played” itself on film). It was written and directed by Patty Jenkins, though the Wuornos story had already been the subject of two documentaries and a true-crime book that was adapted into a TV-movie with Jean Smart as Wuornos. Jenkins actually used only the basic situation for her script — Wuornos had a girlfriend when she was captured, though it’s unclear whether she was Lesbian (in the movie she’s never had sex with a woman before she and her girlfriend meet), Bisexual or just living the stereotype of the prostitute who has sex for pleasure with the gender other than the one with which he or she has sex for money. (I read this theory in a 1970’s book that argued that most female prostitutes were Lesbian and most male prostitutes were straight.)
The Wuornos story fascinated criminologists and true-crime buffs because until her case broke the conventional wisdom in criminology was that women were psychologically incapable of being serial killers on their own (though a woman could conceivably assist a male serial killer with whom she was romantically or sexually involved). I saw the movie when it was initially released (my journal entry on it is dated January 9, 2004) at a press screening at Landmark Hillcrest and actually reviewed it for Zenger’s, and though this time around on DVD it didn’t seem quite as overwhelming as it had in a theatre when it was brand-new, it’s still a remarkable film and in particular a tour de force for its two leading actresses, Charlize Theron as Wuornos (she won an Academy Award for Best Actress) and Christina Ricci as her girlfriend Selby (her real name was Tyria Moore, but Patty Jenkins changed all the names of the characters, except Wuornos herself, for her film).
When I reviewed it initially I drew a comparison between it and Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt — also a story about an innocent young woman who’s bored with her family and her home life, who attaches herself to a dashing stranger who comes in from outside and turns out to be a serial killer — though Jenkins didn’t make the two characters virtually doppelgangers of each other the way Hitchcock and his writer, Thornton Wilder, did. Instead she seemed to relish the differences between them and the sheer unlikeliness of their pairing — Wuornos a hard-bitten rambler who (according to her Wikipedia page) had been having sex for money and other material rewards since she was 12 and who was simply used to the idea of trading her body to survive since it was the only salable commodity she had; Selby a product of a broken but still churchgoing and God-fearing family who had somehow come aware of her own Queer orientation and was hanging out in a bi-gender Gay bar (I guess we’re supposed to assume that Daytona Beach, Florida, where most of the film takes place — and where my husband Charles lived during part of his childhood — was too small to have a separate Lesbian bar) when Aileen breezed in with $5 from her latest trick and a thirst for a beer.
Ironically, according to imdb.com both actresses put on weight for their roles — Charlize Theron gained 30 pounds (though she still looks considerably scrawnier than the real Wuornos — indeed one of the most bizarre aspects of the case was that there were men out there driving the Florida roads who were so hard up for a live body to stick their dicks into that they were willing to pay money to have sex with someone who looked so ragged and downright ugly) and Christina Ricci (who deserved an acting award as much as her co-star did — whatever happened to her? She’s worked steadily since but the only subsequent credits whose titles I recognize are Black Snake Moan, another story about sexual obsession, and Speed Racer) added 10 pounds — and the most formidable aspect of the film, and what makes it watchable, is the awesome chemistry between Theron and Ricci.
You really believe these two unlikely people have hooked up and formed such a fierce and energetic bond it can overcome everything from their constant arguments (mostly over Selby driving the cars Wuornos has stolen from her victims and Wuornos worrying that she’ll be seen in one of the cars and it will lead the police to them) to the murders (Ricci’s portrayal of the complex emotions her character must be feeling as she learns the woman she regards as her savior from a dull “normal” existence is killing people and justifying it as self-defense) — though Jenkins’ film loses something from leaving out the detail that when Wuornos was finally arrested, her main priority in talking to the police was to make sure they understood her girlfriend had nothing to do with the killings. (She didn’t know at the time that Tyria, a.k.a. “Selby,” had been instrumental in her arrest — she had placed phone calls on a line the police were tapping under instructions from them to get Wuornos to make an admission they could use to get an arrest warrant — and she certainly couldn’t have anticipated that her girlfriend would be the key witness against her at her trial, dramatized cruelly and effectively by Jenkins with one shot of Ricci on the witness stand, decisively pointing out Wuornos at the defense table as the person she’s been testifying about: Jenkins puts the point across with one simple hand gesture from Ricci and not a word of dialogue!)
As I recall (I haven’t seen it in years), the TV-movie Overkill paid a lot more attention to the role of the police in the case, and in particular made it clear that the cops had been staking out the Last Resort bar for days before they finally arrested Wuornos (they sent two undercover cops in biker drag into the bar to get close to Wuornos and make the arrest — and in Jenkins’ film it’s an out-of-the-blue surprise when the guys Wuornos is cruising as either her next potential johns or her next potential victims turn out to be the cops that arrest her), whereas Jenkins’ focus was far more on Wuornos herself and the history that had so totally screwed her up that she started lashing out against her johns and killing them.
Ironically, the killing for which she was convicted and sentenced to death (she was executed on October 9, 2002) — her first, of 50-year-old electronics store owner Richard Mallory in Clearwater — is now largely believed to have been legitimate self-defense; he already had a record of rape convictions and was apparently fond of picking up prostitutes, binding and gagging them, and then helping himself to freebies, and people who knew him thought it was only a matter of time before this got him into trouble. Psychologically, Mallory’s assault and her self-defense killing of him seem to have set her off and taken the brakes off her inhibitions so she was capable of killing the other six (in one of the film’s most chilling sequences she offs a man who had no interest in her sexually and had just picked her up to offer her a ride and some help). Though Monster might have been an even richer movie than it is if Jenkins had used more of the real story, as it stands it’s still pretty chilling, hardly the sort of movie you can recommend to someone who wants a good time but vividly written and staged, with Wuornos emerging, if not as a sympathetic figure, at least a comprehensible one. — 9/3/11
I went to a film screening in Hillcrest of the movie Monster, writer-director Patty Jenkins’ heavily fictionalized version of the Aileen Wuornos story. It’s the sort of movie that overwhelms you without actually leaving you able to say you liked it; between Charlize Theron’s rivetingly unattractive presence as Wuornos (one wonders why her middle-aged male victims were so hard up for sex that they actually were willing to pay money to fuck her) and Jenkins’ alteration of her female partner into a pathetically immature child-woman (played nobly by Christina Ricci) — a characterization which reminded me very much of Teresa Wright’s role in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (also a film about a young suburban girl who discovers that the person she thinks is going to lift her from the doldrums of her existence and her suffocating family turns out to be a multiple murderer!) even though the rest of the film is essentially an all-female Bonnie and Clyde — Bonnie and Claudia, as it were — Monster is a compelling but also resolutely unlikable movie which pushes its attempt to earn audience sympathy for Wuornos to the breaking point. It’s the sort of movie that drives a reviewer nuts because you want to acknowledge the filmmakers’ accomplishment but you also don’t want to promise your readers that they’ll have a good time if they see it! — 1/9/04
•••••
Monster: Intense but Unlikable Spree-Killer Story
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Originally published in Zenger’s Newsmagazine issue #115, January 2004
The blurbs in the ads for writer-director Patty Jenkins’ film Monster include words like “Remarkable!,” “Raw and Riveting,” “Unforgettable!,” “Astonishing!” What you won’t find are words like “likable,” “entertaining,” “emotionally moving,” “wonderful” — words that really don’t apply to a film that frustrates a reviewer because it’s so obviously well-made, and so intensely carries the thrust of the filmmakers’ convictions in every frame, you want to recommend it. And yet you also can’t honestly tell your readers that they’d actually enjoy this film.
Though the actual meaning of the title refers to a giant Ferris wheel that frightened the protagonist as a kid, Monster is also a fitting name for its central character: Aileen Wuornos, the real-life murderess who blazed a bloody trail across Florida in 1990-91. A prostitute of one sort or another since the age of nine, Wuornos picked up seven men, ostensibly to sell them sex, and killed them. When she was finally captured, her defense was that the men had attacked her and she had killed them in self-defense — and years after her arrest in 1991, but before the state of Florida put her to death in 2002, it turned out that at least for her first victim, that had been true. He’d had a record of assaulting, raping and brutalizing prostitutes, and Wuornos’s claim that she’d had to fight him off and kill him to save her own life rang true. But the incident seemed to have finally stripped the already well-worn gears in her brain and led her to re-enact the crime with male after male she picked up on Florida’s back roads.
What made Aileen Wuornos’s story a media sensation was not only that she was proclaimed the world’s first female serial killer — which she wasn’t; as a prostitute with no record of violent crime until her first killing, she was strictly speaking a spree killer (like Andrew Cunanan), not a serial — but she was also having a sexual affair with a woman, Tyria “Ty” Moore, a bike-riding butch dyke who frequented the Lesbian bars in Daytona Beach and, though not a criminal, was almost as hard-bitten as her partner. The police caught Wuornos by staking out the low-class trucker bar at which the pair liked to hang out, then sought Ty’s cooperation by having her call Wuornos in jail and trying to trick her into a telephonic confession. Eventually Wuornos pled guilty to save Ty from prosecution — and then suffered the indignity of seeing Ty as the prosecution’s star witness in her trial.
The irresistible combination of tabloid-friendly news hooks in the Wuornos story — a female mass murderer! A prostitute! A Lesbian! — has led to an extensive literature on the case as well as no fewer than four films. One was a made-for-TV “quickie” from the early 1990’s called Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, which focused on the police work that cracked the case. One was a 1992 documentary by Nick Broomfield (Biggie and Tupac) called Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, which featured interviews with Wuornos but also made the media frenzy around Wuornos its subject. The third, released almost simultaneously with Monster, was another documentary by Broomfield, this time co-directed with his producing partner Joan Churchill, Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer — inspired largely by Broomfield’s supremely mixed feelings about being subpoenaed by the state of Florida during Wuornos’s last court hearings to bolster the case for executing her instead of letting her live out her life in prison.
Monster is essentially a tour de force for Charlize Theron, who played Wuornos as well as co-producing the film (it’s nice to see more actresses actually developing their own projects instead of sitting on their asses lamenting the studio system’s failure to generate any good roles for women). It was written and directed by Patty Jenkins, who wrote an article in Landmark Theatres’ house magazine FLM saying that she’d long had an interest in making “a Raging Bull-style character film about Aileen Wuornos.” Under Jenkins’ direction and the ministrations of a makeup artist credited only as “Toni G.,” the naturally attractive Theron was converted into a repulsively hard-edged homeless street hooker, complete with sunburned face, droopy eyelids and teeth caps. Her performance is indeed “riveting,” to quote one of those sensational adjectives used in the ad blurbs, but it’s also physically difficult to watch. The utter conviction with which Theron turns herself into a piece of human flotsam only deepens one of the mysteries of the Wuornos case — namely, why were the middle-aged men she killed so hard up that they were willing to pay for sex with someone so relentlessly unattractive.
Though Monster is being billed as a true story, it really isn’t — something Jenkins finally gets around to admitting at the end in a credit-roll disclaimer that says that Wuornos is the only character in the film who isn’t fictional. Like the 1970’s biopics of Billie Holiday and Buddy Holly, which turned these musicians’ fascinating real lives into Hollywood clichés, Monster is not only not especially interesting as fiction but leaves one with the impression that if its maker had stuck to the real story she would have had a much richer, deeper and better film. Nothing in Monster is further from the truth than its depiction of Wuornos’s girlfriend and their relationship. The hard-edged biker-dyke the real Wuornos fell for becomes “Selby Wall” (Christina Ricci), a teenage Lesbianette whose big concern is to avoid having the family friends she’s staying with in Florida ship her back to her parents in Hawai’i, where daddy is just waiting to clap her into a reparative therapy center in the hope of turning her straight.
Much of Monster plays like someone got the idea to redo Bonnie and Clyde with an all-female cast — Bonnie and Claudia, as it were — but as false as it is to the real sinew of Wuornos’s story, in some ways the character arc of “Selby Wall” is the most interesting part of this film. It’s strikingly reminiscent of the character Teresa Wright played in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 classic, Shadow of a Doubt — also a film about an immature young woman who has to grow up in a hurry when she realizes that the person she hoped would lift her out of her drab suburban existence is in fact a multiple murderer — and though Ricci is hardly in Wright’s league as an actress (nor is Jenkins in Hitchcock’s as a director), nonetheless she gives the film a moral center it desperately needs and her story has a genuine pathos that Wuornos’s, as Jenkins tells it, largely lacks. — 1/11/04
•••••
The film was Monster, the 2003 release very loosely based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, a hard-bitten homeless woman in Florida who worked as a highway prostitute (picking up men as they drove by on the freeway and getting them to stop) and ultimately killed seven of her would-be johns between 1989 and 1990, finally being arrested at a bar appropriately called “The Last Resort” (the real bar “played” itself on film). It was written and directed by Patty Jenkins, though the Wuornos story had already been the subject of two documentaries and a true-crime book that was adapted into a TV-movie with Jean Smart as Wuornos. Jenkins actually used only the basic situation for her script — Wuornos had a girlfriend when she was captured, though it’s unclear whether she was Lesbian (in the movie she’s never had sex with a woman before she and her girlfriend meet), Bisexual or just living the stereotype of the prostitute who has sex for pleasure with the gender other than the one with which he or she has sex for money. (I read this theory in a 1970’s book that argued that most female prostitutes were Lesbian and most male prostitutes were straight.)
The Wuornos story fascinated criminologists and true-crime buffs because until her case broke the conventional wisdom in criminology was that women were psychologically incapable of being serial killers on their own (though a woman could conceivably assist a male serial killer with whom she was romantically or sexually involved). I saw the movie when it was initially released (my journal entry on it is dated January 9, 2004) at a press screening at Landmark Hillcrest and actually reviewed it for Zenger’s, and though this time around on DVD it didn’t seem quite as overwhelming as it had in a theatre when it was brand-new, it’s still a remarkable film and in particular a tour de force for its two leading actresses, Charlize Theron as Wuornos (she won an Academy Award for Best Actress) and Christina Ricci as her girlfriend Selby (her real name was Tyria Moore, but Patty Jenkins changed all the names of the characters, except Wuornos herself, for her film).
When I reviewed it initially I drew a comparison between it and Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt — also a story about an innocent young woman who’s bored with her family and her home life, who attaches herself to a dashing stranger who comes in from outside and turns out to be a serial killer — though Jenkins didn’t make the two characters virtually doppelgangers of each other the way Hitchcock and his writer, Thornton Wilder, did. Instead she seemed to relish the differences between them and the sheer unlikeliness of their pairing — Wuornos a hard-bitten rambler who (according to her Wikipedia page) had been having sex for money and other material rewards since she was 12 and who was simply used to the idea of trading her body to survive since it was the only salable commodity she had; Selby a product of a broken but still churchgoing and God-fearing family who had somehow come aware of her own Queer orientation and was hanging out in a bi-gender Gay bar (I guess we’re supposed to assume that Daytona Beach, Florida, where most of the film takes place — and where my husband Charles lived during part of his childhood — was too small to have a separate Lesbian bar) when Aileen breezed in with $5 from her latest trick and a thirst for a beer.
Ironically, according to imdb.com both actresses put on weight for their roles — Charlize Theron gained 30 pounds (though she still looks considerably scrawnier than the real Wuornos — indeed one of the most bizarre aspects of the case was that there were men out there driving the Florida roads who were so hard up for a live body to stick their dicks into that they were willing to pay money to have sex with someone who looked so ragged and downright ugly) and Christina Ricci (who deserved an acting award as much as her co-star did — whatever happened to her? She’s worked steadily since but the only subsequent credits whose titles I recognize are Black Snake Moan, another story about sexual obsession, and Speed Racer) added 10 pounds — and the most formidable aspect of the film, and what makes it watchable, is the awesome chemistry between Theron and Ricci.
You really believe these two unlikely people have hooked up and formed such a fierce and energetic bond it can overcome everything from their constant arguments (mostly over Selby driving the cars Wuornos has stolen from her victims and Wuornos worrying that she’ll be seen in one of the cars and it will lead the police to them) to the murders (Ricci’s portrayal of the complex emotions her character must be feeling as she learns the woman she regards as her savior from a dull “normal” existence is killing people and justifying it as self-defense) — though Jenkins’ film loses something from leaving out the detail that when Wuornos was finally arrested, her main priority in talking to the police was to make sure they understood her girlfriend had nothing to do with the killings. (She didn’t know at the time that Tyria, a.k.a. “Selby,” had been instrumental in her arrest — she had placed phone calls on a line the police were tapping under instructions from them to get Wuornos to make an admission they could use to get an arrest warrant — and she certainly couldn’t have anticipated that her girlfriend would be the key witness against her at her trial, dramatized cruelly and effectively by Jenkins with one shot of Ricci on the witness stand, decisively pointing out Wuornos at the defense table as the person she’s been testifying about: Jenkins puts the point across with one simple hand gesture from Ricci and not a word of dialogue!)
As I recall (I haven’t seen it in years), the TV-movie Overkill paid a lot more attention to the role of the police in the case, and in particular made it clear that the cops had been staking out the Last Resort bar for days before they finally arrested Wuornos (they sent two undercover cops in biker drag into the bar to get close to Wuornos and make the arrest — and in Jenkins’ film it’s an out-of-the-blue surprise when the guys Wuornos is cruising as either her next potential johns or her next potential victims turn out to be the cops that arrest her), whereas Jenkins’ focus was far more on Wuornos herself and the history that had so totally screwed her up that she started lashing out against her johns and killing them.
Ironically, the killing for which she was convicted and sentenced to death (she was executed on October 9, 2002) — her first, of 50-year-old electronics store owner Richard Mallory in Clearwater — is now largely believed to have been legitimate self-defense; he already had a record of rape convictions and was apparently fond of picking up prostitutes, binding and gagging them, and then helping himself to freebies, and people who knew him thought it was only a matter of time before this got him into trouble. Psychologically, Mallory’s assault and her self-defense killing of him seem to have set her off and taken the brakes off her inhibitions so she was capable of killing the other six (in one of the film’s most chilling sequences she offs a man who had no interest in her sexually and had just picked her up to offer her a ride and some help). Though Monster might have been an even richer movie than it is if Jenkins had used more of the real story, as it stands it’s still pretty chilling, hardly the sort of movie you can recommend to someone who wants a good time but vividly written and staged, with Wuornos emerging, if not as a sympathetic figure, at least a comprehensible one. — 9/3/11
Friday, September 2, 2011
Up the Down Staircase (Park Place/Warner Bros., 1967)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I watched this morning was part of TCM’s salute to schoolteachers on the eve of the new school year: Up the Down Staircase, a Warner Bros. production from 1967 based on a novel by Bel Kaufman which was in turn based on her own experiences as a young teacher in an inner-city public high school in New York City. I first saw this story in an issue of Scholastic magazine when I was in high school myself — it was an article with a set of stills from the film that illustrated its synopsis — and later I actually read Kaufman’s book, which I found utterly delightful, told with a light touch that is almost totally absent from the film. The book qualifies as an epistolary novel — one told in the form of letters, memos, diary entries and other writings allegedy by the characters — though Kaufman “cheated” a bit by having most of it narrated in the voice of the central character, new teacher Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis, whose combination of a hot body and a weird face, with that tiny mouth that always looked like she was pouting whether she was or not, limited her range but was just right for this part), writing to a friend of hers from the graduate program she attended in college before taking the teaching job.
As a result, we get some marvelously satirical asides from Sylvia as she observes what’s going on in the school and tries her best to instill some amount of knowledge in an incredibly unruly batch of students — though they rarely reach the thuggish level of the kids in The Blackboard Jungle or To Sir, With Love, they’re singularly disinclined to take either her or the school or their education at all seriously. Though the script was done by a recognized playwright, Tad Mosel, with a good track record at creating both critically acclaimed plays and box-office hits (sometimes the same plays!), he jettisons Kaufman’s ironic tone and makes the school and its students considerably darker (literally — there are more Blacks, and fewer ethnic whites, in the student body at Calvin Coolidge High School than I’d thought there were when I read the book — and figuratively) than Kaufman did.
The essence of the story is still the same: a loosely connected chain of events in the life of a first-semester public school teacher and the people she encounters: principal Dr. Bester (Sorrell Brooke — a short, bald, rather oafish man — I’d imagined him as tall and white-haired, perhaps because that’s what my real-life high-school principal looked like); “administrative assistant” Mr. McHabe (played by short, sandy-haired Ray Poole, and once again quite a different “type” than what I’d imagined from the book: my vision of McHabe was tall, with slicked-down black hair, black horn-rimmed glasses and an implacable bureaucratic mien that made him a cross between Robert McNamara and a member of the Sopranos); his own assistant, Sadie Fitch (Jean Stapleton in a role she was almost perfectly suited for, though it’s jarring that she was so much slenderer in this 1967 movie than she was just four years later when she made her debut as Edith Bunker); Ella Friedenberg (Florence Stanley), the school’s guidance counselor and uncredentialed psychiatrist (“she thinks she’s Freud, but she’s really Peeping Tom,” is one of Sylvia’s asides that couldn’t be used in the film because Mosel wrote the script in a straightforward structure — I think he should have used a voice-over narration to reflect the perspective of Sylvia’s experience through the letters she’s writing to her friend, so he could have put in asides from that as well as her marvelous description of McHabe — based on his signing his memos “Adm. Ass’t.,” for “administrative assistant” — as “Admiral Ass”); Henrietta Pastorfield (Eileen Heckart), a 20-year veteran of the English department who loses her marbles when her star student (whom, it’s suggested, she has a crush on) is found necking in the library with a low-life girl from the student body; and Paul Barringer (played by Patrick Bedford in a performance that makes him less charming and even more infuriating than he was in the book), who responds to the love letter written to him by student Alice Blake (Ellen O’Mara) by correcting her grammar and telling her to look up the spelling of the name of the Lady of Shalott in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem The Idylls of the King (the King was Arthur and the Lady was a young woman who had a crush on Sir Lancelot which, when she realized it was totally unreciprocated, led her to commit suicide — and in Tennyson’s final ironic fillip Lancelot comes across her body and says, “She has a lovely face”) — leading her to throw herself out of the window of her inamorata’s third-floor classroom, hoping for death and ending up in traction in a hospital.
Also among the dramatis personae are Joe Ferone (played by Jeff Howard in a startling resemblance to Henry Winkler’s character of the Fonz on Happy Days, all dark hair, leather jacket and smoldering looks à la James Dean or the young Elvis), the school’s tough guy who turns out to have an I.Q. of 139 (five points higher than mine!) and to do well in school when the spirit moves him and he’s not either terrorizing his teachers with switchblades or threatening to rape him, both of which he does to Sylvia in the film; and José Rodriguez, the quietest person in class who blossoms out in the film’s finale (he’s the judge in a mock trial Sylvia stages based on the novel Silas Marner) and, at least in Mosel’s reworking of Kaufman’s material, inspires her to stay at Calvin Coolidge instead of resigning and taking a job at an elite private school.
Up the Down Staircase comes off rather oddly now that the public schools are even more regimented than they were in 1967 — back then there was still room for an innovative student who cared about her students to motivate them and try to get them to learn by associating their lessons with their lives (one of the film’s most effective scenes is one in which she gets her students to appreciate A Tale of Two Cities by comparing the period Dickens was writing about — France during the Revolution — with Dickens’ time and their own 1967 realities, and for once in a movie we see a portrait of a great teacher and how she can make even the unlikeliest set of students come alive with the thrill of learning) and any pretense at the school’s being there for educational discovery and student self-improvement has been replaced by a relentless career emphasis and so-called “teaching to the test,” tests having become the all-important means of grading not only students but teachers as well. A modern-day remake of Up the Down Staircase would be conceivable but only if it were completely reshaped to fit contemporary realities — and it would probably end with Sylvia Barrett getting a layoff notice as a combination of her disinclination to “teach to the test” and the teachers’ unions’ ability to channel layoffs on the basis of sheer seniority rather than teaching skills — with the result that the oldest and most burned-out teachers stay on the longest. (This may be a good way to run a steel mill but it’s a lousy way to run a school.)
A modern version would also have to make the neighborhood around the school a good deal more threatening — whereas the 1967 version hinted at drugs and gangs, the 2011 film would have to show them directly as a clear and present danger for both students and school personnel as well as the neighborhood itself and the parents and people raising the kids. It’s depressing that the state of public education, especially in neighborhoods of color in big cities, is so much worse than it was in 1967, but Up the Down Staircase emerges as a surprisingly optimistic work rather than the cry of despair it is now. The film was directed rather sluggishly by Robert Mulligan — who occasionally threw in an odd camera angle just to prove he could — and it was produced by Alan J. Pakula, who would probably have been a better choice to direct as well; a Pakula version would probably have made Sylvia Barrett less polite and more obsessive, more like Jonathan Kozol or Herb Kohl in her determination to do right by her students no matter what — but it still holds up surprisingly well, better than some of the more blatantly melodramatic inner-city school movies like The Blackboard Jungle (which I can’t watch, if only because the scene in which the wanna-be hip teacher brings his priceless jazz record collection to school and the students smash it to bits, leading him to a nervous breakdown, hits too close to home for me — I mentally remixed it to have the students discover he has a copy of Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” put it on expecting to hear Bill Haley’s version and find out it’s better!).
The film I watched this morning was part of TCM’s salute to schoolteachers on the eve of the new school year: Up the Down Staircase, a Warner Bros. production from 1967 based on a novel by Bel Kaufman which was in turn based on her own experiences as a young teacher in an inner-city public high school in New York City. I first saw this story in an issue of Scholastic magazine when I was in high school myself — it was an article with a set of stills from the film that illustrated its synopsis — and later I actually read Kaufman’s book, which I found utterly delightful, told with a light touch that is almost totally absent from the film. The book qualifies as an epistolary novel — one told in the form of letters, memos, diary entries and other writings allegedy by the characters — though Kaufman “cheated” a bit by having most of it narrated in the voice of the central character, new teacher Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis, whose combination of a hot body and a weird face, with that tiny mouth that always looked like she was pouting whether she was or not, limited her range but was just right for this part), writing to a friend of hers from the graduate program she attended in college before taking the teaching job.
As a result, we get some marvelously satirical asides from Sylvia as she observes what’s going on in the school and tries her best to instill some amount of knowledge in an incredibly unruly batch of students — though they rarely reach the thuggish level of the kids in The Blackboard Jungle or To Sir, With Love, they’re singularly disinclined to take either her or the school or their education at all seriously. Though the script was done by a recognized playwright, Tad Mosel, with a good track record at creating both critically acclaimed plays and box-office hits (sometimes the same plays!), he jettisons Kaufman’s ironic tone and makes the school and its students considerably darker (literally — there are more Blacks, and fewer ethnic whites, in the student body at Calvin Coolidge High School than I’d thought there were when I read the book — and figuratively) than Kaufman did.
The essence of the story is still the same: a loosely connected chain of events in the life of a first-semester public school teacher and the people she encounters: principal Dr. Bester (Sorrell Brooke — a short, bald, rather oafish man — I’d imagined him as tall and white-haired, perhaps because that’s what my real-life high-school principal looked like); “administrative assistant” Mr. McHabe (played by short, sandy-haired Ray Poole, and once again quite a different “type” than what I’d imagined from the book: my vision of McHabe was tall, with slicked-down black hair, black horn-rimmed glasses and an implacable bureaucratic mien that made him a cross between Robert McNamara and a member of the Sopranos); his own assistant, Sadie Fitch (Jean Stapleton in a role she was almost perfectly suited for, though it’s jarring that she was so much slenderer in this 1967 movie than she was just four years later when she made her debut as Edith Bunker); Ella Friedenberg (Florence Stanley), the school’s guidance counselor and uncredentialed psychiatrist (“she thinks she’s Freud, but she’s really Peeping Tom,” is one of Sylvia’s asides that couldn’t be used in the film because Mosel wrote the script in a straightforward structure — I think he should have used a voice-over narration to reflect the perspective of Sylvia’s experience through the letters she’s writing to her friend, so he could have put in asides from that as well as her marvelous description of McHabe — based on his signing his memos “Adm. Ass’t.,” for “administrative assistant” — as “Admiral Ass”); Henrietta Pastorfield (Eileen Heckart), a 20-year veteran of the English department who loses her marbles when her star student (whom, it’s suggested, she has a crush on) is found necking in the library with a low-life girl from the student body; and Paul Barringer (played by Patrick Bedford in a performance that makes him less charming and even more infuriating than he was in the book), who responds to the love letter written to him by student Alice Blake (Ellen O’Mara) by correcting her grammar and telling her to look up the spelling of the name of the Lady of Shalott in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem The Idylls of the King (the King was Arthur and the Lady was a young woman who had a crush on Sir Lancelot which, when she realized it was totally unreciprocated, led her to commit suicide — and in Tennyson’s final ironic fillip Lancelot comes across her body and says, “She has a lovely face”) — leading her to throw herself out of the window of her inamorata’s third-floor classroom, hoping for death and ending up in traction in a hospital.
Also among the dramatis personae are Joe Ferone (played by Jeff Howard in a startling resemblance to Henry Winkler’s character of the Fonz on Happy Days, all dark hair, leather jacket and smoldering looks à la James Dean or the young Elvis), the school’s tough guy who turns out to have an I.Q. of 139 (five points higher than mine!) and to do well in school when the spirit moves him and he’s not either terrorizing his teachers with switchblades or threatening to rape him, both of which he does to Sylvia in the film; and José Rodriguez, the quietest person in class who blossoms out in the film’s finale (he’s the judge in a mock trial Sylvia stages based on the novel Silas Marner) and, at least in Mosel’s reworking of Kaufman’s material, inspires her to stay at Calvin Coolidge instead of resigning and taking a job at an elite private school.
Up the Down Staircase comes off rather oddly now that the public schools are even more regimented than they were in 1967 — back then there was still room for an innovative student who cared about her students to motivate them and try to get them to learn by associating their lessons with their lives (one of the film’s most effective scenes is one in which she gets her students to appreciate A Tale of Two Cities by comparing the period Dickens was writing about — France during the Revolution — with Dickens’ time and their own 1967 realities, and for once in a movie we see a portrait of a great teacher and how she can make even the unlikeliest set of students come alive with the thrill of learning) and any pretense at the school’s being there for educational discovery and student self-improvement has been replaced by a relentless career emphasis and so-called “teaching to the test,” tests having become the all-important means of grading not only students but teachers as well. A modern-day remake of Up the Down Staircase would be conceivable but only if it were completely reshaped to fit contemporary realities — and it would probably end with Sylvia Barrett getting a layoff notice as a combination of her disinclination to “teach to the test” and the teachers’ unions’ ability to channel layoffs on the basis of sheer seniority rather than teaching skills — with the result that the oldest and most burned-out teachers stay on the longest. (This may be a good way to run a steel mill but it’s a lousy way to run a school.)
A modern version would also have to make the neighborhood around the school a good deal more threatening — whereas the 1967 version hinted at drugs and gangs, the 2011 film would have to show them directly as a clear and present danger for both students and school personnel as well as the neighborhood itself and the parents and people raising the kids. It’s depressing that the state of public education, especially in neighborhoods of color in big cities, is so much worse than it was in 1967, but Up the Down Staircase emerges as a surprisingly optimistic work rather than the cry of despair it is now. The film was directed rather sluggishly by Robert Mulligan — who occasionally threw in an odd camera angle just to prove he could — and it was produced by Alan J. Pakula, who would probably have been a better choice to direct as well; a Pakula version would probably have made Sylvia Barrett less polite and more obsessive, more like Jonathan Kozol or Herb Kohl in her determination to do right by her students no matter what — but it still holds up surprisingly well, better than some of the more blatantly melodramatic inner-city school movies like The Blackboard Jungle (which I can’t watch, if only because the scene in which the wanna-be hip teacher brings his priceless jazz record collection to school and the students smash it to bits, leading him to a nervous breakdown, hits too close to home for me — I mentally remixed it to have the students discover he has a copy of Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” put it on expecting to hear Bill Haley’s version and find out it’s better!).
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