In most arts, there’s a fine line between homage and imitation. Go too subtle and nobody gets the references. Go too hard and chances are, you get dinged for pandering.
This time around we land on a couple of films that may do a little of each (in my opinion; Sean might disagree), but they’re good enough that you don’t really care.
We start with Away From Her, a 2006 film written and directed by Sarah Polley. We’ve talked about Polley as an actress in The Sweet Hereafter way, wayback in Episode 5. You may recall that the director of that film was Atom Egoyan. In this film Egoyan acted as an executive producer for Polley’s feature directorial debut. In this film Julie Christie is a woman whose Alzheimer’s is advancing to the point where she has to go into a nursing home. Her husband (Gordon Pinsent) has to deal with the guilt, the loneliness, and a few other unexpected consequences of that decision.
From there we go to 2021’s Bergman Island, written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve. Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth are a filmmaking couple who travel to Faro Island to attend a film screening and generally be Bergman Tourists. Krieps’ character is having trouble working, while Roth’s is very productive. In Bergman style, we see a film-within-a-fim, along with reminders that we, as audience members, are watching a film in progress. If that looks confusing, my apologies. But if you’re familiar with Bergman’s films, you’ll get it as soon as you see this movie.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
Next time around, the influential director is Howard Hawks, and we look at another pair of modern-era films. We begin with Speed (1994), directed by Jan de Bont. (Some people call it The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.) Then we move on to The Martian, from 2013 and directed by Ridley Scott. This may be the only science fiction movie that has an inaccuracy in it that has actually turned off some viewers completely. Fie on them, I say.
Can I just take a moment to sit back and look proudly upon this episode’s cover art? It wasn’t tough to make but I really like the way it came out.
Okay, onward:
It’s often fun to see a film and realize that there’s something about it that reminds you of another filmic work. Maybe it’s a plot point. Maybe it’s the director’s use of the camera. Maybe it’s the overall feel of the thing. And maybe it’s just homage.
In this episode we’re looking at a pair of films that look and feel as though they’d been directed by Alfred Hitchcock. But in fact, Hitchcock was long dead by the time these films were released. (To be fair, he may have been alive while the first one was being made, but still.)
We begin with Diva, a film from 1981 that was directed and co-written by
Jean-Jacques Beineix. Based solely on the title and perhaps the artwork, you’d never have any idea that it’s a taut thriller. It’s got corrupt cops. It has French mobsters. It’s got opera singers and their groupies. It’s got a teenage thief who doubles as a muse for an artist-cum-philosopher. And, because it’s in the style of Hitchcock, it’s got a McGuffin. (MacGuffin? Research says they’re both right, but “Mc” looks better to my eye.) And that’s not all.
From there we jump ahead to 2006 and a film called Tell No One, directed and co-written by Guillaume Canet. This is one based on Hitchcock’s “innocent man” tropes, where a person finds themselves at the center of a big mystery, and everyone thinks he’s the criminal. We spend the film watching him struggle to prove his innocence as the forces around him get closer and closer. Does he know more than he lets on? Is he, in fact, innocent? You’ll be guessing until the very end.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
In our next episode we move from Hitchcock to Bergman. Reel 82 looks at two films made in the style of Ingmar Bergman: Away From Her (2006) and then the aptly-titled Bergman Island (2021). Join us, won’t you?
“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” Howard Beale (Peter finch).
It may be hard to imagine in this day and age of “Peak TV” (or “Too Much TV”), when television is considered an art form equal to, if not greater than, movies, but back even 40-50 years ago, television was considered “a vast wasteland”, to quote Newton Minow, in a speech he made when JFK appointed him chairman of the FCC (my personal favorite crack about television – attributed to both Fred Allen and Ernie Kovacs – is “Television is a medium, so-called because it is neither rare nor well done”). Ironically, though the 1960’s and 70’s were the time of the respected anchor of network news (particularly Walter Cronkite), TV news during that time also came under fire, with people arguing the medium, by definition, simplified news, leading people to treat complex issues in a simple-minded way (Neil Postman, a cultural critic, made arguments like this in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”), but also the fact outside pressures, particularly business, were dictating not just how the news was presented, but what news was shown. Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, was the first big studio movie to deal with this, and while it was advertised with the tag line, “Prepare yourself for a perfectly outrageous motion picture,” much (though not all) of the movie is uncomfortably prescient today.
Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) out with Max Schumacher (William Holden).
Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is a respected news anchor at Union Broadcasting System (UBS) until his ratings go down, at which point he’s given two weeks notice. After going out and getting drunk, as you do, with Max Schumacher (William Holden), Howard’s best friend and vice-president in charge of the news division, Howard announces the next day on the air the news of his firing, and declares he’s going to kill himself the following week. Naturally, this causes a stir, and Howard is asked to clarify his remarks on the air. Instead, Howard claims everything is “bullshit” on the air, and that he’s sick and tired of it (Max lets him rant because he’s upset about the fact Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), the network president, has cut the news division budget). Hackett and the other bosses are angry at first, until Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), an ambitious programming executive, points out Howard is not only getting press (she brings up all of the ongoing news stories, including rising oil prices, New York City going bankrupt, and civil wars in Angola and Beirut, and yet Howard was on the front page of every newspaper), he’s getting ratings, and tapping into the anger a lot of people feel. Diana’s proven right when, on a later broadcast, Howard urges his viewers to get up, go to their windows, open them, and yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” This action boosts ratings even further, gets them national news coverage, and as a result, Diana takes control of the news division, giving Howard his own show. Also, Max gets fired. Not long after that, however, Max enters into an affair with Diana, even leaving his wife Louise (Beatrice Straight). And while Howard is a hit, soon, he runs afoul of Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), chairman of the conglomerate that owns UBS (“And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU! WILL! ATONE!”)
“And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU! WILL! ATONE!” Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) lectures Howard.
Admittedly, Chayefsky and Lumet’s film is dated in some aspects. One of the subplots involves Diana approving of, and supervising, a show based on the exploits of a group that’s the Symbionese Liberation Army in all but name (Kathy Cronkite, Walter’s daughter, plays the Patty Hearst figure, Arthur Burghardt plays a character modeled on Cinque, the leader of the SLA, and Marlene Warfield plays Laureen Hobbs, based on Angela Davis), and while the satire is spot on (especially when the SLA starts to argue about their contract, particularly subsidiary rights), the media did not in fact end up co-opting far left rage like that (I’ll get to what they did co-opt below). More seriously, the idea of someone being a construct of television, and therefore unable to feel, as Diana is told in a speech by Max near the end, is nothing more than a construct, and while Dunaway gives a terrific and hilarious performance, even sneaking in some vulnerability when Max leaves her at the end (though Lumet had told her from the beginning Diana didn’t have any), she’s still playing a symbol, and a sexist one that hasn’t aged well.
Max gets confronted by his wife Louise (Beatrice Straight).
Nevertheless, this is still an uncomfortable movie to watch in the right ways as well. Business has continued to encroach on, and dictate, news at an alarming rate, and even more than what Chayefsky and Lumet show here. Fox News has co-opted right-wing rage (the way Chayefsky thought it would happen with the left-wing), made millions from it, and helped to divide our country. The show about the SLA clones is an awful lot like many, if not most, reality TV shows. Also, though there would likely be more of an organized protest these days, the movie does show how Howard’s obvious mental illness gets exploited by the network higher-ups, despite Max’s feeble protests. Finally, while no one has been killed on the air for ratings (yet), the way Howard’s assassination is planned, during a normal business meeting, is uncomfortably close to how wars and political assassinations are planned today.
Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall).
Chayefsky, of course, was fond of speeches in his work, and at its worst, it could get uncomfortably didactic, but Lumet manages to make them make sense here. Cinematographer Owen Roizman contrasts the studio scenes with scenes outside of the studio well. Except for the network theme music, there’s no music in the film. And the actors delivering Chayefsky’s speeches make them work; I’ve already praised Dunaway’s work here, but Finch is also good playing a disturbed, and badly burnt out man, and he’s matched by Holden in one of his best performances as the voice of reason. Straight, Duvall, and especially Beatty are also good in their supporting roles. Network, unfortunately, is no longer as outrageous as it was, but it’s still entertaining.
Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith) performing.
In his career, Andy Griffith was best known for playing likable characters who are either dimwitted (No Time for Sergeants) or are smarter than they appear (The Andy Griffith Show, Matlock). That likability first came through in his time as a stand-up comedian and in routines such as “What it Was, Was Football”. So it was quite a leap for him to take for his first lead role in movies the character of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, written by Budd Schulberg (adapting his short story “Your Arkansas Traveler”), but the result is a terrific film.
When we first meet Lonesome, he’s in an Arkansas jail for being drunk and disorderly. That’s where he first meets Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), a radio journalist for the show “A Face in the Crowd”. Marcia is there to find someone to put on the program, and she’s charmed by Lonesome (she’s the one who gives Larry that nickname), especially when he starts singing “Free Man in the Morning” (which he claims he made up; Schulberg wrote the lyrics while Tom Glazer wrote the music for this and other songs that appeared in the movie). Not only does Lonesome get out of jail, he also gets a spot on the show, where audiences are charmed not only by his singing, but the way he seems to empathize with his listeners (he brings up the fact housewives are under-appreciated) and the irreverent attitude he displays towards authority figures (sending people to swim in the sheriff’s pool). Soon after, Lonesome gets recruited to appear on a TV show, despite his irreverent attitude towards sponsors as well (he makes sarcastic remarks about the mattress company sponsoring his radio spot, which causes them to want to dump him, until angry customers burn their mattresses). Once the TV show takes off, Joey De Palma (Anthony Franciosa), the assistant to the owner of the mattress company, offers to be Lonesome’s agent and gets him national exposure with a TV show in New York. Lonesome also becomes a spokesperson for Vitajex, the energy company sponsoring the show, and he’s recruited to help Senator Worthington Fuller (Marshall Neilan) in his political campaign. Through it all, Marcia remains by Lonesome’s side but starts to realize he’s become a monster.
Marcia (Patricia Neal) readies Lonesome for his radio show.
We’ve all seen tales illustrating the old adage, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – and the movie is also arguably a spin on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein – but Kazan and Schulberg aren’t afraid to play around with things. They make it clear from the start Lonesome is full of contradictory impulses. On the one hand, he’s shrewder than people give him credit for at first (when he and Marcia first get the call about the TV show, he offers to appear on the show for nothing for two weeks, but if they want to keep him, he demands double the salary they initially offered him) and he certainly has his kind side (in addition to making sure Marcia comes along with him to the TV show, in his first appearance on the show, he brings an African-American woman on whose house had burned down and appeals to the audience to send her and her family money – this impresses Mel Miller (Walter Matthau), who’s assigned to write for Lonesome, at first). It’s also true Lonesome gets treated like a hick by his bosses at first (in that same initial appearance on the show, the cameraman sticks a sprig of grass in Lonesome’s mouth, until Lonesome spits it out). On the other hand, when Lonesome and Marcia leave Arkansas to appear on the TV show, Lonesome makes a remark about how he’s glad to leave everyone behind, and talks about them in disparaging terms, until he sees the look on Marcia’s face and claims he was only kidding. When Marcia ends up falling in love with Lonesome, she thinks they’re going to get married, until the real Mrs. Rhodes (Kay Medford) shows up and demands money. When Lonesome promises Marcia he’ll get divorced in Mexico so he’ll be free, he does – only to come back married to Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick), a champion baton twirler. And all of this is before Lonesome gets involved with Vitajex and Senator Fuller.
Marcia works with Mel (Walter Matthau) on Lonesome’s script.
Rhodes was partially inspired by Arthur Godfrey, a popular radio and television entertainer (The Great Man, which Jose Ferrer, directed, co-wrote, and starred in, was also inspired by Godfrey) who was beloved by his audiences, and, to be sure, progressive for his time (when Southern affiliate stations refused to carry his show until he got rid of his barbershop quartet because it had two African-Americans in it, Godfrey told them where to stick it), but whom apparently was not the best person to work for (his downfall came after he fired Julius La Rosa, a popular cast member on his show, for missing a dance lesson even though La Rosa stated he had a family emergency to deal with). Schulberg also added elements of Will Rogers (another entertainer who, according to Schulberg, projected a warm image at odds with his real personality), Tennessee Ernie Ford (the song “16 Tons”), televangelist Billy Graham, and former governor Huey Long. Kazan and Schulberg also seem to be making a counterpoint to Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe, which is also about a woman in media (though here, it’s a newspaper reporter) who discovers someone who becomes a media sensation. Of course, there are clear differences between the two movies, not least of which is “John Doe” (Gary Cooper) in Capra’s movie doesn’t let his power corrupt him, as he believes more in the words that he’s saying, and rebels when he realizes he’s serving someone who wants to use the “John Doe” movement for their own nefarious ends, whereas Lonesome, if he ever had such scruples, loses them pretty quickly.
Betty Lee Fleckum (Lee Remick), who becomes Lonesome’s second wife.
Kazan, of course, is as much remembered today for the fact he not only named names of suspected Communists for the House Un-American Activities Committee, but also took out a full-page ad in The New York Times defending his decision, as for his work. Whatever you may make of what he did,* Kazan still seemed committed to taking on the power structure of the time and the danger it represented. Part of that comes in the fact he and cinematographers Gayne Rescher and Harry Stradling shot the entire movie on location, both in Arkansas and New York City. Kazan also cast locals in both places, which, in Arkansas, included African-Americans (albeit in small roles), as well as famous media personalities as themselves (including Burl Ives, Mike Wallace, and Walter Winchell), and shows the contrast between the lives of both places, though Kazan and Schulberg don’t make things simplistic. For example, though Mel may talk like an New York liberal (and Lonesome initially derides him from that), he’s from the South, having attended Vanderbilt in Tennessee (though Matthau was born and bred in New York City, he does a passable Southern accent), and while Senator Fuller is from the “liberal” state of California, his message is the Republican one of small government (he believes Social Security coddles Americans rather than help them) and “values” (on one broadcast, Lonesome echoes the senator’s message that, “The family that prays together, stays together”), and part of what makes Marcia so revulsed by Lonesome as the movie goes on is how he leans into that message. Kazan and his cinematographers also highlight this at the end, when they shoot Lonesome (thoroughly deranged after, unbeknownst to him, Marcia allowed his off-air remarks deriding his audience to go out for the entire audience to hear) on the balcony of his apartment in what has been sometimes referred to as a “Hitler-cam” shot, which is a familiar device, but works effectively here.
Joey De Palma (Anthony Franciosa) reminds Lonesome who’s the real boss.
Another person behind the scenes who deserves a lot of credit here is costume designer Anna Hill Johnstone, particularly in how she dresses Marcia. When we first see Marcia, she’s wearing appropriate attire for a radio station in the hot South – a simple, loose-fitting white dress and a white hat to match, which also matches how her personality at the time is loose and easy-going. As the movie progresses, however, Johnstone puts Marcia in more tight-fitting clothing, showing how Marcia is getting beaten down personally and professionally by working for Lonesome, and in the last act, Marcia’s dressed in all black, including a black hat, as if she were in mourning clothes. Glazer, who wrote the score as well as the music for the songs (not just “Free Man in the Morning”, but also “Mama Guitar” and the jingle for Vitajex) also deserves credit for keeping the tone of the movie just right. Paul and Richard Sylbert should be mentioned for their art direction for the TV studio and sets, as they all reach the authenticity Kazan was striving for.
Mel, Marcia and Lonesome after Lonesome’s fall from grace.
Of course, the performances also make this movie work so well. Franciosa, who turned down a potentially higher-paying role because he wanted to work with Kazan, is effective at conveying both De Palma’s charm and the snake-like cunning underneath. This was Remick’s first role, but you wouldn’t know it from the poise she shows throughout her time on screen, even when Lonesome discovers De Palma and Betty Lou have been having an affair. Mel was invented for the movie, and Schulberg wanted him to seem annoying, but Matthau keeps him from being one-note, and handles Mel’s speeches well, especially at the end, when he delivers a blistering prediction of what Lonesome’s career will look like after his fall. But the movie rests on Neal and Griffith, and they deliver. At the time, while Neal had appeared in high-profile films such as The Fountainhead, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Breaking Point (the latter of which is a closer adaptation of Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not than Howard Hawks’ 1944 film version), she was best known for her affair with Gary Cooper (her co-star in The Fountainhead), and had not worked for four years because of that affair, until this role. Though she may have felt she had something to prove, Neal effortlessly takes us through Marcia’s emotional journey, and for all the big emotional scenes she has (as when she cries and yells at Lonesome on the phone to get out of her life near the end), Neal also is able to communicate with just her facial expressions, such as the look of horror she gets on her face when Lonesome brags about how much influence he has. As for Griffith, as I mentioned before, he was known for his affability, and while diving into the dark side underneath that nature while playing Lonesome disturbed him enough that he avoided playing villainous or unlikable characters for several years (Kazan has said he had to get Griffith drunk to get him to be convincing for the climax), Griffith nonetheless conveys that dark side quite well. Given how television has allowed for personalities like Lonesome to prosper, A Face in the Crowd remains disturbingly relevant today.
*-For the record, while I understand Kazan’s feeling he needed to testify in order to keep his livelihood, the fact is, none of the people named by him or others were working to overthrow the government, they had a right to their beliefs just like he did, and while it’s true Communism as practiced in the Soviet Union, its bloc countries, and China was another form of totalitarianism, what Kazan wrote in that ad was self-righteous.
In previous episodes, we’ve dealt with political stories. Most of them involved spies of some kind, or they involved fictional characters overlaid on real-life scenarios.
This time around we have two stories based on real-life events, though there’s a “but” in there. We’ll get to that in a minute. In this episode we’re looking at a pair of political thrillers. We start with The Battle of Algiers, which is from 1966 (though it had several release dates). Now, you hear a title like that and you say, “Oh, war movie.” But the war in this case is taking place in the streets of Algiers, and it involves the events of 1954 through 1957. During that time the French government was fighting off guerilla insurgency. Things are largely stalemated–with incremental escalation the entire time–until the French army moves in. You’ll find yourself unable to figure out who you’re supposed to root for.
From there we move to 1969 and the film Z (or Zed, if you prefer), directed by Costa-Gavras. This is a thinly-fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. We get to see both sides of the dispute in this case, and again it’s tough to tell who the good guys and the bad guys are. It’s a gripping film whose ending is about as cynical as they come. Too bad it’s pretty much what happened.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
Episode 81 will be the first of three episodes where we look at films which are made in a very specific style. Perhaps it’s homage to a director, perhaps it’s unconscious imitation. Find out with us as we review 1981’s Diva, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix. From there we move to 2006 and Tell No One, directed by Guillaume Canet, both of which appear to be shot in the style of Alfred Hitchcock. Join us, won’t you?
We don’t often use topics that I chose, but when we do, we have a lot to talk about. Sean and I both love each of this week’s films so unabashedly that both halves of the episode are rather overstuffed, even after editing.
This time around we’re exploring the dark underbelly of media-based popularity, and while both of these films concentrate on television, this could easily be extended to social media. That’s how eerily prophetic these films turned out being, with the exception of a small detail that I’ll get to in a moment.
We start with 1957’s A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal. The two are a couple whose lived become intertwined as Griffith’s character increases in popularity from local radio, to national television. It’s a fascinating study in “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and while Kazan gave us the breadcrumbs from the first frame in which we see Griffith’s character, we’re still left with a small “what happens next?” One character, played by Walter Matthau, has an idea, but it’s possible he’s being too cynical.
From there we move on to 1976’s Network, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Peter Finch, William Holden and Faye Dunaway. Finch is a television news anchorman who, on the cusp of being fired, decides to say exactly what’s on his mind, and the audience reaction is as unexpected as it is sensational for the network brass, who want Finch to keep doing the Angry Prophet of the Airwaves thing. It hardly matters that Finch’s character is starting to spiral in mentally; the executives are willing to exploit him for as long as he’s profitable…and no longer. So what happens next?
Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky wrote such a perfect satire that people today don’t even seen the satire in it, because it’s so prophetic. As I mentioned, the film got one detail wrong: Media has tapped into conservative grievances and politics rather than the liberal side.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
In our next episode we’ll be looking at a couple of political thrillers from overseas. We start with 1966’s The Battle of Algiers, and move on to Z (or Zed, if you prefer) from 1969. Join us, won’t you?
Sally (Meg Ryan) and Harry (Billy Crystal) talk about their recent bad dates with other people.
Many of my friends from high school and college, and whom I still keep up with, are women. I find it easier to relate to them, and easier to talk to them. So the idea of a movie whose professed message is, “Men and women can’t be friends” would, at first glance, seem like something that would be anathema to me. And yet Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally…, written by Nora Ephron, is a terrific and funny romantic comedy even if you don’t agree with that message.
Jess (Carrie Fisher) and Sally spot Harry in a bookstore.
Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) first meet in Chicago in 1977 when she drives him from Chicago to New York City (her best friend Amanda (Michelle Necastro) is Harry’s current girlfriend), where he’s getting work as a journalist, and she plans to be a political consultant. She’s turned off by his lack of manners (he spits grape seeds into her car window without checking to see if it’s open first) and his life view (he’s so obsessed with death, he reads the last page of any novel he reads first, so if he dies, he’ll know how the book ends). He’s bemused by her food ordering habits (she’s very much into ordering things on the side) and the way she plans out everything to the last detail. They argue about the ending of Casablanca (he thinks Ilsa really wants to stay, and only leaves because Rick put her on the plane, while she thinks Ilsa really did want to go with Victor). Despite everything, Harry makes a pass at Sally, which disgusts her even more. This is when Harry comes up with the idea that “Men and women can’t be friends”, because according to him, sex always gets in the way. So, when she drops him off at Washington Square Park in New York City, they assume they will never see each other again.
Harry and Sally the second time they meet each other.
Five years later, Harry walks by when Sally is saying goodbye to Joe (Steven Ford), her current boyfriend, at the airport. He pretends not to recognize her (instead, he greets Joe), but when they’re both on the plane, he talks to her after she orders something on the side from the flight attendant (the person next to Sally even offers to switch seats with Harry). He reveals he’s engaged to be married, while she says her relationship with Joe is good. He offers to take her out to dinner, she reminds him what he said about men and women not being able to be friends, and while he denies saying it at first, he admits saying it, tries to make an exception when the man and woman in question are each involved with other people, but then realizes that doesn’t work either. Once again, they go their separate ways.
Sally and Harry in Central Park.
Five years later, Harry and Sally are both living in New York City, but their circumstances have changed. Sally has broken up with Joe because she’s realized what she saw as their carefree relationship (having no kids, not getting married) really wasn’t making them happy, nor was it that carefree. Harry, meanwhile, has gotten divorced, and as he tells his friend Jess (Bruno Kirby), he’s found out his ex has been seeing another man. They run into each other in a bookstore (while Sally is with her friend Marie (Carrie Fisher)), tell each other about their situations, and, slowly, tentatively, start to become friends. But are they actually becoming more than that?
Jess (Bruno Kirby) and Marie find out separately Harry and Sally have finally slept with each other.
One rule I have about any genre movie, including romantic comedies, is if it fulfills the requirements of that genre, I’m willing to forgive quite a lot. There are other things for me to forgive in Reiner and Ephron’s movie aside from the central message of “Men and women can’t be friends”. Like many other comedies at the time, and afterwards, we don’t really see any of the characters work, and their jobs are only referred to a couple of times; when they tell each other, and when, while Harry, Marie, Jess, and Sally are on a double date, Marie ends up quoting something from a column Jess wrote, which leads the two of them to fall in love and eventually marry. Also, while only Woody Allen movies up till then were using standards as movie scores, as that’s the music he mostly only likes (this movie was heavily influenced by Allen’s movies like Annie Hall), the success of Reiner’s movie, as well as Harry Connick Jr’s recordings of standards for the film’s score (there are a few original recordings of standards as well) led every many other romantic comedies, or dramas, to assume they had to use standards for their music, not because it was organic to the movie, but just because. Finally, on the face of it, Harry and Sally as characters seem overly schematic upon first glance. Nevertheless, as I said, if a romantic comedy is both romantic and funny, I will forgive a lot, and Reiner and Ephron make this both romantic and funny.
The famous deli scene.
Obviously, the scene most people remember from this movie is the scene where Sally, trying to convince it’s possible one of the women Harry slept with might have faked an orgasm with him, fakes one in public when they’re having lunch at Katz’s Deli, and it remains as hilarious today, after rewatching it several times, as it was when I first saw the movie the summer before my senior year at Gonzaga (there were three women sitting behind me in the theater, and I thought all four of us were going to die laughing).* As funny as that scene is, however, it’s not the only funny part of the movie. The humor of the movie comes through the characters and how they react to each other and the situations they get into, from the way Sally orders (inspired by how Ephron ordered food in real life; when Reiner saw her ordering like this when they went out to lunch, he convinced Ephron to give that aspect to Sally), to Harry’s depressed view of life (which comes from how Reiner felt at the time the script was being developed). Even the scene where Harry, after finding out his ex-wife is getting re-married, takes his anger about that out on Jess and Marie, goes to funny places. At the same time, while I’ve often felt Ephron only goes to a very superficial level with her stories and her characters, that’s not the case here, as we really get the anger underneath both characters, as well as their unhappiness. Yet, that doesn’t take away from the comedy – Sally comforts Harry after a woman he went on a date with reminded him of his ex-wife, until she finds out he still slept with the woman – and nor does it take away from the romance. The climax, when Harry declares himself to Sally, works not just because of the sharpness of the writing – Harry tells Sally he loves her for all of her faults, which he lists, and Sally tearfully tells Harry she hates him – but because the relationship between them during the entire movie has built to that moment.
Harry and Sally get together at the end.
Barry Sonnenfeld shot the movie, and he doesn’t overwhelm the movie with showy cinematography, but makes the city look beautiful. At the same time, he frames the actors in just the right way, as in the scene on the airplane when Harry peers behind Sally’s seat after overhearing her place her drink order. As I mentioned above, while the use of standards in romantic movies has become a cliché, Reiner makes it work here, as the ones he does use (Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s recordings of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “Our Love is Here to Stay”, Ray Charles’ recording of “Winter Wonderland”) haven’t become stale from overuse. And the cast members make it work. While Fisher and Kirby are very good in supporting roles, the movie depends on Crystal and Ryan, and they come through in spades. In later comedies, especially those directed by Ephron, Ryan would rely too much on tics and mannerisms, but here, she plays Sally’s eccentricities as normal instead of affected (even the scene where she’s putting envelopes in a mailbox one at a time, driving Harry crazy). Crystal, in turn, in movies often relies too often on the easy one-liner, but the one-liners here are funny (as when he’s discussing the difference between “high maintenance” and “low maintenance”), and digs deep into Harry’s anger. Even if, as I said before, I think men and woman can, and should, be friends, I also think When Harry Met Sally… remains a terrific romantic comedy.
*-On the DVD commentary, Reiner confirmed what I’d long suspected; the montage of scenes of Christmas time in NYC, before we get to Harry helping Sally take a Christmas tree to her apartment, was put in after the deli scene so audience members would have time to recover from having laughed so hard.
In addition to “devil” movies, another type of horror movie I tend not to be fond of are slasher movies. Part of the reason is they tend to go for excessive gore, and while I don’t mind violence in movies, I do mind what I think is gratuitous violence, or violence where it seems as if the sole purpose of the filmmaker showing you this violence is to invite you as a viewer to get off on it. Just as bad for me is the fact many of the victims in the slasher movies I’ve seen are girls or women, and even worse, many of the victims are killed after they’ve had sex, sending a message girls and women shouldn’t have sex, or enjoy it, and if they do, that they deserve to die, which is reactionary, to say the least. Having said that, I must admit one of my favorite horror movies is a slasher movie, John Carpenter’s original version of Halloween, about the night he came home.
Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), Lynda (P.J. Soles), and Annie (Nancy Loomis).
“He” is Michael Myers, whom we first see as a little boy (played by Will Sandin) stabbing his sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) on Halloween night in 1963 in Haddonfield, Illinois. Subsequently, Myers is committed to a sanitarium run by Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance). However, Dr. Loomis is unable to get through to him, and becomes convinced Myers is a sociopath. On top of that, Myers escapes before Dr. Loomis can take him to appear before a judge, and returns to Haddonfield. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), a high school student who is stuck babysitting while her friends Annie (Nancy Loomis, now Nancy Kyes) and Lynda (PJ Soles) are planning nights with their boyfriends, is only vaguely aware of the menace that’s come to town until it’s almost too late.
Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance).
As with other Carpenter movies, Myers (the actor we see when the mask is taken off is Tony Moran, though Nick Castle plays him when he’s wearing the mask) is pretty much an unstoppable, and more importantly, an unknowable force. Much of the movie is simply Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey shooting from Myers’ point-of-view, or, alternately, showing him just off in the distance, watching Laurie, which adds to the creepiness. Also helping with the suspense is the music Carpenter himself composed for the film; much like Bernard Herrmann’s score for the original version of PSYCHO (more on that film’s influence here below), it only uses a few notes, but they’re very well. Carpenter made this as less bloody and more creepy than most slasher films, which is another reason I like this. As for the fact the people killed here are either killed after sex (Judith, Lynda and her boyfriend) or when planning to have sex (Annie), Carpenter and Debra Hill (who co-wrote the film with Carpenter and also served as one of the producers) admitted they never intended for the movie to portray sex in a reactionary way, and that the victims in this movie were killed because they weren’t paying attention to what was going on around them, while Laurie survived because she was. Also, we’re left to intuit how disturbed Myers is when it comes to sex.
Laurie prepares to defend herself.
Carpenter often wore his influences on his sleeve, and Halloween is no exception; the sheriff is named Leigh Brackett, after the screenwriter who often worked with Carpenter’s favorite director, Howard Hawks (including his favorite Hawks film, Rio Bravo) – the kids Laurie babysit even watch Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (which Carpenter would remake in 1982) on TV – while Dr. Loomis is named after the character of Marion Crane’s boyfriend in Psycho, and while Carpenter was originally unsure of casting Curtis, once he found out Curtis was the daughter of Janet Leigh, who of course played Marion Crane, he signed her on. Curtis had never appeared in a movie before this (she had done some guest spots on a few TV shows, and had appeared in the TV series version of Operation Petticoat, from a movie starring her father Tony Curtis), but you wouldn’t know it from the assurance in which she holds the film together. She’s able to convince you of how smart Laurie is, as well as how resourceful she is, and able to take care of the children under her charge. And Pleasance is appropriately authoritative as Dr. Loomis (though I would have liked to have seen what Christopher Lee, who was offered the role and turned it down, would have done). As with Psycho, there have been a lot of ripoffs of Halloween, including the many sequels and remakes, but the original still stands as a great horror movie.
Oddly enough, I hate the artwork on this episode but I love the fact that I was able to match the films’ respective fonts. You win some, you lose some.
We conclude our mini-series with another pair of films that you can’t help but love. Unfortunately, they’ve also had a ripple effect, and the ripples weren’t so great.
We open with Halloween, from 1978. This film was directed by John Carpenter and stars Jamie Lee Curtis. She’s a teenager who has some truly weird adventures in babysitting. It also stars Donald Pleasance as the voice of reason that everyone ignores.
Halloween set many of the horror/slasher film tropes in motion, for sure. But Hollywood has this unfortunate habit where everything has to be bigger, and scarier, and gorier, and just…more. And so other films of the genre suffered specifically because they tried too hard to replicate the original.
From there we jump to 1989’s When Harry Met Sally…, which also set the template for a lot of films in that “star-crossed lovers” rom-com category. The bad news is that the films in its wake didn’t pay enough attention to what made this couple star-crossed, and Hollywood wound up cranking out a lot of films that looked the same, and (perhaps worse) sounded the same, soundtrack-wise, but were clearly not the same in terms of quality.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
In Reel 79, we’re going to take you on a tour of the dark side of television. We’ll start with A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by Elia Kazan and starring Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith, in one of the few times you’ll see him as this kind of character. From there we go to 1976 and Network, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Peter Finch and William Holden. These are two films that were so oddly prophetic that most people today don’t realize they were originally intended to be satire. Join us, won’t you?
This was originally written on Facebook as a post in talking about my favorite movies released in the U.S. in 1988.
Macon (William Hurt) and Sarah Leary (Kathleen Turner).
As I’ve been writing these reviews, you might have noticed how I’ve tried to bring up the ways even movies I love may have issues in how they deal with issues that have come under higher scrutiny today, such as gender identity and sex. But those aren’t the only issues that may change the way you might view a work of art today. Consider, for example, the fact cities throughout the United States, and arguably the world, have become more homogenized, especially New York City. To bring in tourist dollars and out-of-town business, the Powers That Be in cities have driven out much of what gives these cities an identity in the first place – arts, local cuisine, small businesses – and replaced it with businesses that could be found anywhere. The attitude seems to be people who visit cities don’t want to experience what makes that city unique, they want to know where they can find a McDonald’s when they visit. To be sure, this isn’t a new attitude. The hero of Anne Tyler’s novel – and Lawrence Kasdan’s movie adaptation – The Accidental Tourist – which was published in 1985 (while the movie came out in 1988) writes travel books for people who hate to travel, and who are looking for where to get a McDonald’s in Paris, rather than where to get the best example of French food, Given the caveat I find that kind of attitude abhorrent, I must admit I still find The Accidental Tourist to be a wonderful novel and movie (Kasdan and Frank Galati wrote the screenplay).
Macon with Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis) and his dog Edward.
The writer of those books in both the novel and the movie is Macon Leary (William Hurt), who makes a living at this. Macon really doesn’t like to travel, which, according to his publisher Julian (Bill Pullman), makes him ideal to write the books. Macon, however, is cut off from life in other ways, especially since his son Ethan was murdered at a shooting in a fast-food restaurant (Jim True played the role in flashback scenes, but they were cut from the movie). Leary’s been unable to express his grief or reach out to people, and it’s because of this his wife Sarah (Kathleen Turner) decides to leave him. Macon retreats even further into himself, especially when Edward, his dog (actually, he was Ethan’s), leaps onto Macon one day, causing him to fall down and break his leg. Because of this accident, Macon moves in with his sister Rose (Amy Wright), and his brothers Charles (Ed Begley Jr.) and Porter (David Ogden Stiers). Because Edward starts to act out towards not just Macon, but the others, Macon finds he needs to get a dog trainer, and reluctantly reaches out to Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis), who works at an animal hospital (called Meow-Bow) that also boards animals (Macon left Edward there at the last minute when he had to go on a trip and the usual place didn’t take Edward), because she also trains dogs. While Muriel is able to train Edward to get him to be more well-behaved, she also gradually draws Macon out of his emotional shell, even though (or maybe especially because) she’s much more outgoing than he is.
Julian Edge (Bill Pullman), Macon’s publisher.
When critic Nathan Rabin, then writing for the A.V. Club, reviewed Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (my least favorite Crowe movie, though it did get better for me upon rewatch), he tagged the character Kirsten Dunst played in the movie, Claire, as a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”. Rabin described this type of character as one who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” In other words, these characters – most often girls or, in some cases, women – exist solely to bring the lead male character out of their funk, or teach them life lessons, and, in general, make them better people, without having a life of their own. Muriel may seem like this at first – this type of character, it should be said, has been around in literature for a long time – but Tyler and Kasdan are much smarter than that. Muriel does have a life of her own – she has her own son, Alexander (Robert Gorman), who is a sickly boy (the novel goes into more detail as to what he’s allergic to, which is a lot), and is barely able to make ends meet. Not only that, but she makes it clear to Macon she’s not just there to help him; when Macon says they should transfer Alexander to a private school (he thinks Alexander doesn’t know how to subtract), Muriel wonders if that means Macon is going to pay for it, and tells him in no uncertain terms not to make any promises he can’t keep, especially if he doesn’t plan to stick around. That comes into play even more when Macon runs into Sarah again, and it’s clear they still have feelings for each other.
Macon’s sister Rose (Amy Wright) on the day of her wedding to Julian.
There’s a review quote on the inside back cover of my copy of Tyler’s novel that reads, “(Tyler’s) second-greatest gift is tolerance. Her greatest gift is love…” To me, that’s a good summation of Tyler’s gifts as a novelist. While she can sometimes go overboard on the quirks, as well as in portraying people too set in their ways, at her best, she makes those characters come to life, and always brings out the real emotions underneath. Tyler treats the characters in a comic way – the Learys all play a card game called Vaccination, with rules no one but them seem to know; they also can’t seem to go anywhere without getting lost – but she’s able to make us laugh with the characters, rather than at them (other than this novel, my favorites she’s written are Digging to America and Saint Maybe). Kasdan may have had to cut out a lot in adapting Tyler’s novel (deleted scenes can be found on the DVD), but he retains the spirit of it. A scene early in the movie (which is in the novel, though later in it) shows Macon, while on the plane, running into a man (Bradley Mott) who, as it happens, uses Leary’s books as a guide not just to travel, but to life, and again, we laugh with Leary here, not at him. Of course, Kasdan, along with his usual collaborators – cinematographer John Bailey and editor Carol Littleton – also accomplish visually what Tyler did in writing, especially near the end, where Macon encounters a boy in Paris (where he’s on a trip) who resembles Ethan. Kasdan is able to show us this just from the way Macon looks at the boy.
Muriel (Geena Davis) gets a surprise at the end of the film.
Of course, Kasdan also gets help from the actors. Hurt makes himself shrunken and paler than usual as Macon. You truly believe he’s cut himself off (in contrary to the cynicism he showed in The Big Chill and his free-spirited nature in Children of a Lesser God), and he makes the process in which Macon learns to eventually engage with the world again seem natural. Turner, better known for playing either femme fatale roles (Body Heat, Prizzi’s Honor) or characters caught up in adventures (Romancing the Stone and its sequel), shows a lot more to her in playing the grief-stricken Sarah, though it turns out she’s also got more steel in her than you think, especially when she comes out to take over for Macon when he hurts his back. Pullman was best known at the time for comic roles in movies like Ruthless People and Spaceballs, but while he has his comic side here as well – when he finds out Rose had been looking for the right envelope to mail him Macon’s latest work, Julian dubs it the “Macon Leary 9 by 12 envelope crisis” – he shows a lot of depth, especially in the scenes where he’s with Rose. And Wright, Begley, and Stiers are believable as siblings who are comfortable with each other. But it’s Davis who makes the movie work as well as it does. Muriel could have easily just have been a collection of quirks, but Davis makes her real by underplaying. She also does a lot with her face, especially in the scene where Macon comes over to tell her he can’t see her and ends up finally opening up about Ethan; she just leads him inside, and with a look, we can see the empathy and sadness in her eyes. It’s also there in the end, when Muriel, leaving Paris (she’s followed Macon there, without his wanting her there), sees Macon, and the way she reacts shows you why she deserved to win an Oscar for her performance (even if you think it was for the wrong category). The scenes where Macon looks for American food abroad still make me wince (though there aren’t as many in the movie as were in the novel), but The Accidental Tourist remains, for me, a wonderful movie because of the care and affection for the characters.
