Newman double: Rally round the sweet bird

After tacking some Brando films recently, here's a brace of Paul Newman ...

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. Handsome Chance Wayne never found the Hollywood stardom he craved, but he's always been a star with the ladies. Now back in his sleepy, sweaty Gulf Coast hometown, hes involved with two of them: a washed-up, drug-and-vodka-addled movie queen, and the girl he left behind - and in trouble. Paul Newman, Best Actress nominee Geraldine Page, Rip Torn and Madeline Sherwood recreate their stage roles and Ed Begley won Best Supporting Actor as the town's corrupt political boss in a bravura film version of Tennessee Williams' Broadway hit. Sex, money, hypocrisy, financial and emotional blackmail - familiar elements of Williams' literary realm combine powerfully as Chance battles his private demons in a desperate bid to redeem his wasted life and recapture his lost sweet bird of youth.   
That's the dvd blurb ...

I can't believe I never saw SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH until today - despite getting that Tennessee Williams boxset in 2006, and liking his texts and short stories, and seeing most of the films, I particuarly like NIGHT OF THE IGUANA and THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS STONE (see Williams label). . I had been meaning to watch it all week, and I am totally stunned by Geraldine Page all over again, her Alexandra Del Lago is on the same level as Leigh's Blanche or Taylor's Maggie the Cat. Ignored for stretches of the movie as Newman's Chance Wayne scenario plays out, he is tired of satisfying rich women in the hope that he can find fame in Hollywood. The film suddenly blazes into life with her astonishing telephone call scene when she realises she is a success and not the failure she imagined after taking refuge in vodka, hashish, oxygen masks and young studs… Chance is her latest, after she promises to get him a movie contract ...

Newman though just isn't that interesting here - maybe I only really like him as HUD - and Chance is quite despicable at first, tape-recording Alexandra's ramblings and trying to impress his old crowd with his Hollywood contacts;   we only really feel for him during his "me, me" reactions while Alexandra is on the phone to Winchell.  What was so touching about this SWEET BIRD was the 2006 documentary with the older Madeline Sherwood (excellent again as Begley's mistress) and Shirley Knight (so perfectly beautiful as Heavenly) talking about the film now, and it fills in how compromised the ending is with Heavenly and Chance driving off together after his face is injured - when of course in the original she has been left barren after a hysterectomy contacted via veneral disease from Chance, who is castrated by her family as their revenge - which certainly ends his career as a stud. Mildred Dunnock is also quietly perfect as ever, and Begley is ideal as the venal corrupt Big Daddy figure, with Rip Torn as his malevolent son.
The screen test with Page and Torn (included on the dvd) was fascinating too as they do the terrific phone scene - they were of course married.  I will now have to go back to Tessessee's SUMMER AND SMOKE with Page as Alma, and of course one could never forget her stunning moments in INTERIORS, and will be catching her role in that HAPPIEST MILLIONAIRE soon ... SWEET BIRD may be by Tennessee, but was "written for the screen" and directed by Richard Brooks, (how could he have been happy with this false ending imposed on the play?) and who helmed those other 'important' literary translations like Lewis's ELMER GANTRY, Tennessee's CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF,  Dostoevsky's THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and went on to Capote's IN COLD BLOOD. I liked his early 1954 THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS when he tacked F Scott Fitzgerald, with the impossibly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, Geraldine Page (1924-1987) here though is a whole fireworks display, and transforms herself into another stunning beauty - like Julie Harris or Kim Stanley she was one of America's greatest stage actresses who was also a movie star. SWEET BIRD may not be the best Williams, but is certainly a compendium of his themes, as like Arthur Miller and William Inge he returns to the same subjects time and time again and creates that recognisable Williams universe.

1962 might have been the best Actress line-up ever - I had Remick as my personal favourite, but now it could well be Page - and with Davis and Hepburn and Bancroft also in the mix, one could almost make it a 5-way win !  SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH was the Williams I did not really know, so its been good to finally see it, it is of course one of the great American dramas, and is currently enjoying a successful revival in London, with Kim Cattrall as 'The Princess'. It might be good to see the play as originally intended ....

RALLY ROUND THE FLAG BOYS. Leo McCarey’s 1958 comedy is another of those Fox movies that never get shown here, so I imagined it would be a treat seeing it again after 50 years or so – I was about 12 when I first saw it.  It’s a moderately amusing affair, not one of the better Newman-Woodward comedies – well, better than A NEW KIND OF LOVE at any rate; its the usual comedy of misunderstandings and poking fun at suburban living. He is a harassed husband trying to get a drink on the crowded commuter train - the men all wear hats - and she is involved in community affairs and leads a protest against a proposed army base in their suburban community, the site of a pilgrims' landing. 

Add in Joan Collins as Angela, the vamp next door who has designs on Newman, Jack Carson as a military man, and the teenage Tuesday Weld who has just discovered boys (Dwane Hickman). Its from a novel by Max Schulman and an uncredited George Axelrod had a hand in the script. Its interesting seeing the serious Newmans trying to do comedy in Rock and Doris or Jack Lemmon style, but much as they try comedy is just not their forte. Luckily Joan and Tuesday have the required light touch. Re-seeing RALLY ROUND THE FLAG BOYS again yesterday after a 50 year gap what seemed funny then was painfully tedious now. Jack Carson has a few funny moments though particularly when he is fired into space in that rocket, but on the whole, it all seems tediously slow. 

More William Inge ...

Come Back Little Sheba (1952) / The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs (1960)

Finally, I get to see COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA, despite having the dvd filed away for years! - as it fits in with my current William Inge kick (THE STRIPPER is reviewd below). This is another perfect early '50s black and white drama, a successful play, and won the Academy Award as best actress for its star Shirley Booth (winning it over Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward emoting in WITH A SONG IN MY HEART and marvellous Julie Harris as THE MEMBER OF THE WIEDDING).

Based on William Inge's classic play COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA is the stirring tale of a life-weary couple who rescue hope from the ruins of the past. Shirley Booth stars as Lola, a slovenly housewife to Doc Delaney (Burt Lancaster) a recovering alcoholic. The Delaney's life is duill and unchanging, but takes a dramatic turn when the couple take in a charming boarder, Marie (Terry Moore). Marie becomes the daughter the Delaneys never had. But when Marie takes up with a boorish boyfriend Doc descends into a jealous tailspin and must once again face the temptations of the bottle. An unforgettable film shimmering with life-truths and dramatic intensity that also nabbed a nomination for best editing.

The humdrum life of the Delaneys is caught perfect, in Daniel Mann's film, as produced by Hal Wallis. Lola is a gift of a part, she can be supremely irritating with her constant chatter, but Booth shades her many facets perfectly, whether pining after her lost dog, Sheba, or coping with Doc in one of his moods, like when he hits the bottle again and gets that knife .... Terry Moore is ideal here as the nice young girl, and Richard Jaeckel scores as the boy .... Burt Lancaster again shows what a powerhouse actor he is, as in THE ROSE TATTOO opposite another Oscar winner Anna Magnani, contrasting these serious roles with his more matinee fare of the time.

As the story develops we understand why the Delaneys are the way they are. Its pure Inge territory here, and interesting to contrast with Tennessee Williams' A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, about another middle-aged couple and the young girl coming between them, as in Williams view, Eddie Carbone (Raf Vallone) no longer desires his homely wife (Maureen Stapleton) and wants the step-daughter himself and is incensed when she takes up with young Jean Sorel, as in Lumet's 1961 film, which leads to tragedy all round. There is a more optimistic ending in the Inge play and film. Booth was an extraordinary actress who only made a few films, I would love to see her THE MATCHMAKER from 1958 (with young McLaine and Perkins) [I have just sourced a cheap copy on Amazon], as she must have been an ideal Dolly Levi then. (Several of her stage roles were filmed by Katharine Hepburn: THE TIME OF THE CUCKOO as SUMMERTIME, and DESK SET). 

 

THE DARK AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS was another Inge success, I remember its release in 1960, and again it contains some marvellous performances, particularly by Angela Lansbury, Eve Arden and the young Shirley Knight. The lead couple are Robert Preston (firing on all cylinders as usual, in a role rather like his THE MUSIC MAN in 1962) and Dorothy McGuire as his wife.

In Oklahoma in the 1920s, Ruben Flood loses his job as a traveling salesman, when the company goes bankrupt. This adds to his worries at home. His wife Cora is frigid because of trying to make ends meet. His teenage daughter Reenie is afraid of going out on dates, but eventually makes friends with a troubled Jewish boy Sammy, and his son is a mama's boy. He finally storms out of the house when Cora falsely accuses him of having an affair with Mavis Pruitt.

That's just for openers. The 1920s Midwest is nicely depicted and the usual Inge small town life and concerns. Preston is the still virile husband whose wife rejects his early morning advances before he heads off on a week out of town, then he loses his job while she buys a new dress for their daughter's college dance... she (Knight) meets that nice Jewish boy .... Cora, the troubled wife, invites her droll but exasperating sister Lottie (Eve Arden, to the manner born) to dinner, with her hen-pecked husband, Lottie too reveals her own problems.  Ruben has been seeking comfort from local widow Mavis Pruitt - 

Angela Lansbury, never better - the widow woman in her prime who still has her needs, but settles for what she can get and realises that Ruben is a family man. There is that lovely scene as she advises Cora that if she will not make love with her husband then other women like her are willing to ..... McGuire, whom one does not usually think of in connection with leading '50s actresses, has another lovely role here, as a devoted wife, as in FRIENDLY PERSUASION opposite Cooper in '56, and the mother in SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, as well as those wives and mothers in A SUMMER PLACE, SUSAN SLADE (as per reviews at Troy Donahue label),  and others, and two leads with Clifton Webb in THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN and THE REMARKABLE MR PENNYPACKER, in 1959 - that one is coming up soon.  

Delbert Mann's film of Inge's play is a marvellously engrossing film - my favourite Inge, it is not just a nostalgia piece, but captures the changing times, sexual repression, anti-Semitism (the country club dance is "restricted" as Shirley Knight's Jewish 
date is brutally told), and snobbery of that kind of Midwest town. 
All the sadness and joy of human life is here, it gets very emotional like the lovely scene between father and daughter, and that nice climax. Lee Kinsolving too scores as the young man, he only lived to be 36. More Inge at reviews of ALL FALL DOWN and BUS RILEY IS BACK IN TOWN (1962, 1965, Trash labels) and THE STRIPPER.  
I find Inge's hits PICNIC and BUS STOP problematic - Holden is too old and Roz Russell too OTT in the former and its all rather too saccharine, whereas that one-dimensional cowboy and his folksy mentor Virgil are just too annoying in the latter, despite Cherie's best efforts,

'60s double bill: Bedazzled by Petulia

I had not seen PETULIA since the '60s and always meant to return to it, so finally I have .... this 1968 comedy drama set in San Francisco is probably the perfect late '60s film, capturing that time and place as perfectly as Antonioni's BLOW-UP sums up the mid-60s in London. And then there is Julie Christie, as mesmerising as ever .... Richard Lester's film fragments the story ("Me and the arch kook Petulia"), Nicolas Roeg shoots it all and John Barry did the score, and we get snippets of Janis Joplin and her band .... how '60s is that ? (Roeg also photographed Christie's FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, FARENHEIT 451 and later directed her in his DON'T LOOK NOW).

 
Sparkling San Franciscan socialite Petulia (Julie Christie) wants an affair. She’s been married six months and hasn’t had one yet. Lucky surgeon and soon-to-be-single Archie (George C Scott) catches her eye and their tentative romance begins. Beneath Petulia’s charming kookiness it becomes clear that her new husband (Richard Chamberlain) is physically abusive.

A film set in late '60s San Francisco is bound to be visually vivid, and PETULIA  is a marvellous-looking movie that makes great use of colour. There are psychedelic light shows accompanying musical appearances by The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, striking vistas of Bay Area locations and Alcatraz, and the candy-coloured mod fashions of the era.  PETULIA depicts the messy complexity of relationships, one nice scene being where Scott and Petulia encounter each other on those streetcars going in different directions. He is taking his kids to see the penguins, she follows and sits wordlessly as they meet and touch and she departs again .... then there is that long scene between Scott and ex-wife Shirley Knight (doing wonders here, as she did in Lester's 1974 high seas thriller JUGGERNAUT with a role that barely exists on paper) where frustrations spill over .... Chamberlain is cast against type here as the husband who batters his wife to a pulp, so why does she stay with him?

There are plentiful examples of Lester's penchant for absurdist humor, caustic irony, and the sad/funny details of human interaction, and his razor-sharp editing. There is a lot of jumping around in time as we learn the story of Petulia and her abusive husband and the little Mexican boy very slowly over the course of the film.

Lester's '60s movies really are as essential as the decade's Losey, Schlesigner or Richardson movies, and I love his '70s capers too - the MUSKETEERS, ROYAL FLASH etc, as per reviews here (Lester label).

Pauline Kael though did not like it at all, as covered in her essay "Trash, Art and the Movies" (in her GOING STEADY collection), where she has "rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikeable (or bloodier) movie" and its commercial success "represents a triumph of publicity". "PETULIA is the come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America-party" and the film is his (Lester's) "hate letter to America" (much the same I imagine as Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT was a year or two later). "Probably the director who made 3 celebrations of youth and freedom (A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, HELP!, THE KNACK) is now desperate to expand his range and become a "serious" director..." She does agree though that "Julie Christie is extraordinary to look at"  ....  For me though it is a great '60s American film like the recently-reviewed here THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, THE GROUP, THE STERILE CUCKOO, PRETTY POISON or LAST SUMMER and Coppola's delightful YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW.

BEDAZZLED, 1967 - more '60s high jinks and delirious comedy. Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore were possibly the finest comedians the UK has ever produced before Monty Python .... we loved their satirical tv shows (in black and white) then, Cook also had a (large) hand in the comic magazine "Private Eye" that was essential then too (I remember going to their offices to purchase a red enamel cofee pot, a trendy item to have then, and pinning the "Private Eye" covers on the kitchen wall). So it was marvellous to see them on the big screen in Cinemascope and Colour for 20th Century Fox and directed by Stanley Donen (on a roll then, after his '60s hits like CHARADE, ARABESQUE and TWO FOR THE ROAD - he came a cropper though with his next after this, the dreadful STAIRCASE... ). Not only is BEDAZZLED a brilliant modern version of Faust, but it's also a hilarious satire on the '60s. 

Dudley Moore plays Stanley Moon, a short order cook and a loser who works in a Wimpey Bar (before McDonalds came along). The fabulous Eleanor Bron plays Margaret Spencer, a waitress at the fast food restaurant where Stanley works. Stanley's spent six years trying to work up the courage to ask Margaret out, but just can't seem to manage to do so. Peter Cook plays the Devil, or George Spiggott. George has taken an interest in Stanley after his failed suicide attempt. George offers Stanley the standard Seven-Wishes-For- Your-Soul contact and Stanley reluctantly agrees. The problem with the wishes is that Stanley is never specific enough and something always goes wrong to prevent Stanley from having Margaret all to himself, as either an intellectual, then as a rock star, then as a wealthy industrialist etc. 

As each fails, he becomes more aware of how empty his life had been and how much more he has to live for. He also meets the seven deadly sins who try and advise him.We get Raquel Welch as Lust, and Barry Humphries as Envy. Bron is wonderful here (as she was in HELP! and in Donen's TWO FOR THE ROAD as that obnoxious American tourist) as the heavily made-up waitress intoning her hamburger orders "heavy on the onions". The London scene of the time is nicely depicted, even from the top of the GPO Post Office Tower, and the final segment with the leaping nuns will have you helpless with laughter ... Cook is a very petty devil, sending pigeons to drop their droppings on businessmen, scratching vinyl records and pulling the last page out of Agatha Christie novels, his magic words are "Julie Andrews" ! Dudley is great here, before his later less funny films. There was of course that remake, but I didn't bother with it, it just would not have the same funny memories for me. 

Soon: '60s thrillers like Lumet's downbeat THE DEADLY AFFAIR, Ken Russell's flashy BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN ...and some early '60s dramas: THE MARK, THE THIRD SECRET, THE INSPECTOR (LISA).

The Group

Mary McCarthy's novel THE GROUP was one of those best-sellers of the '60s, like John Updike's RABBIT RUN, which the intelligentsia just had to have on their bookshelves. In 1966 Sidney Lumet turned it into a movie, which I have finally caught up with and quite fascinating it is too. It is almost a costume drama really with all those '30s fashions, as we follow the girls from the Class of 1933 at Vassar through the highs and lows of the 1930s leaving them two and half hours later as war is declared and they are burying one of The Group.

It's 1933, and eight young women are friends and members of the upper-class group at a private girl's school, about to graduate and start their own lives. The film documents the years between their graduation and the beginning of the War in Europe, and shows, in a serialized style, their romances and marriages, their searches for careers or meaning in their lives, their highs and their lows.

 

Lumet (RIP label) assembled quite a collection of rising young actresses, its the best female line-up since THE WOMEN in 1939 or its 1956 remake THE OPPOSITE SEX (which was also a dizzying '50s fashion show with a great crowd of '50s gals, as per  my other posts on it here, but not the dire 2009 version - which ironically cast Candice Bergen as Meg Ryan's mother!) Then of course there was THE CHAPMAN REPORT (1962 label) and the enjoyable trash that is VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and items like STEEL MAGNOLIAS.

The girls soon discover that outside the protective bubble of college and "The Group", which their wealth, position and privilege have guaranteed them, real life presents considerable greater challenges. Touching on everything from politics, birth control, lesbianism, marriage, mental illness, marital abuse, adultery, childbirth, alcoholism and date-rape all tied up in two and half hours, as well as how one's ideals can take quite a beating when confronted by the disappointments and compromises of the real world.

The film focuses mainly on Kay (Joanna Pettet) and Polly (Shirley Knight) and we see lots of catty Libby (Jessica Walter, as mesmerising as she was in PLAY MISTY FOR ME), there's Elizabeth Hartman again as Priss (see YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW, below).  Sapphic Lakey (Candice Bergen) is absent for most of the film but returns in some style from Europe with her Countess in tow, and has a nice pointed final scene with Kay's husband (Larry Hagman - even more obnoxious here than in DALLAS).  Kay and husband have a perfectly '30s apartment (below) but their marriage soon unravels .... Polly has problems with men and her father who may be mentally ill ... Priss has childbirth and baby problems, as Libby becomes a prime bitch. The actresses are fascinating here, early in their careers. Some fared better than others, and others like Hartman and Joan Hackett sadly died far too young. The men though here are an unappetising bunch: Hagman, Richard Mulligan, Hal Holbrook .... surely the girls deserved better. Good to see the ever-dependable Shirley Knight and Joanna Pettet too, one of those '60s girls who seemed to have disappeared. Candice is as slinky as ever here ....

Watching THE GROUP is like enjoying a satisfying novel with well-developed characters and sub-plots and situations and that perfect period detail, one of Lumet's better films then, and a superior soap opera too which puts recent 'chick flicks' to shame. Pauline Kael did a lengthy piece on the making of the film for "The New Yorker" which is included in her collection "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang".

Perfectly '70s

As the disaster movie genre gained momentum in the seventies, with those hilarious choices like AIRPORT 75 and THE SWARM and the very entertaining EARTHQUAKE, a rather overlooked one (I never got to see it at the time, but it must have played at my local cinema) this British film JUGGERNAUT depicted a grittier, more realistic and suspenseful alternative, and is also quite humourous with those subsersive Richard Lester touches (mainly provided by Roy Kinnear). This was an early example of a plot that sidestepped natural disasters in favour of man-made terrors - as in THE CASSANDRA CROSSING, BLACK SUNDAY etc.

David and Richard discuss filming with Antonioni

JUGGERNAUT with an entire ocean liner held hostage, matched Hollywood for tension and accurately portrayed the stressfulness of the hostage situation. There’s a taut parallel race against time as the police desperately try to track down the identity of the bomber, while disposal experts tackle the seven booby-trapped drums of explosives - if any three explode, the ship will sink. The blackmailer calls himself ’Juggernaut’ and detonates warning blasts to prove that he’s not bluffing. Either pay up, or lose the ship and all onboard. The tension racks up as it all comes down to which wire to cut: the blue wire or the red wire.

Another gripping sequence is the bomb squad’s parachute jump to get to the liner. Rough seas prevent the passengers from abandoning ship, they also make getting onboard a lethal and hazardous task. It seems the "Brittanic" ship is cruising in the middle of winter in a storm in the North sea.

What is interesting about it now is the great cast: it stars Richard Harris and David Hemmings, who engagingly represent the best of the bomb squad. Omar Sharif is the increasingly desperate captain. They all look so young: Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, John Stride, and there are pop-ups by Cyril Cusack and Michael Hordern. A young Simon McCorkindale is also on the crew, but I did not spot him, and there's that guy who was on tv a lot then: Tom Chadbon. That 70s technology is a hoot now too.

Shirley Knight shows again what a brilliant actress she is, as - rather slimmer here - she does wonders with the non-existant role of the captain's lady friend; she is saddled though with a hideous 70s white dress with round holes in it and a silly feather boa.

Director Richard Lester, in between the brilliant THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS films adds to the wry sense of gallows humour among the doomed passengers, in particular the attempts of the entertainment officer (the fantastic Roy Kinnear) to lift their spirits. Once again, Lester adds snippets of dialogue to almost every character onscreen, no matter how incidental, and makes it all riveting entertainment.

I presume too Harris and Hemmings got to talk about their Antonioni films - David enjoyed the whole BLOW-UP experience, as detailed in his autobiography while Harris it seems hated working with Antonioni in Italy on THE RED DESERT (above with Vitti) and more or less walked out of the film. I like Lester's 1975 ROYAL FLASH too, another great humourous costume drama, (as per review here - Lester label), with another great cast (McDowell, Bates, Reed, Bolkan and even Alastair Sim in his last role).