June 13, 2010
20 most surprising female performances (Part 2)
Here is Part 1 of the series, great conversation going on in the comments. Join in!
HEDY LAMARR, Comrade X
Hedy Lamarr, is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful women in the history of cinema. Cameramen fell all over themselves to do closeups of that perfect face. Her beauty can be almost otherworldly. She made a big splash, in the nude, no less, in Ecstasy (some of my thoughts here), a film that was edited within an inch of its life, due to the nudity and the orgasm and everything else, but it brought her to Louis B. Mayer's attention and he made her change her name and brought her to the United States. Cast mostly as mysterious and seductive (no wonder, look at that face), her role as the devout Communist Golubka in King Vidor's Comrade X is a total delight, and shows what a gifted comedienne she was, a talent that was never utilized fully. Her film career was relatively short, unfortunately. I suppose if you are the most beautiful woman in the world, you have a naturally short shelf-life, but to see her in Comrade X makes you realize all the roads not taken by this gorgeous FUNNY young woman. Clark Gable plays "Mac", an American journalist, stationed in Communist Moscow, and he is blackmailed by a local Russian into smuggling his daughter (Golubka) out of the country. Naturally, Gable falls for her. Comrade X comes at an interesting time in Soviet/American relations. Russia was still an ally in the fight against Hitler. Communists were treated in film with humor and mockery as opposed to the paranoia that would come during the Cold War and after. Hedy Lamarr is a True Believer in Comrade X. The character doesn't understand humor, irony, sarcasm, or jokes of any kind. She is 100% literal-minded. Gable, who plays the part he always played, tries to get her to loosen up. She recites one of Marx's books to him, verbatim, during a long night of walking. We hear her declare through the darkness, "CHAPTER THREE" and then start to rattle off the prose. It's hilarious. She has a couple of moments that are laugh-out-loud funny, putting her in a realm with Carole Lombard, or Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, women who knew, instinctively, where the jokes were. On their wedding night, she emerges from the bathroom in a nightgown that is a giant HUGE triangle-shaped garment. She stands there, unaware that perhaps she should have put on something more sexy for such an occasion. She is blunt-eyed and serious. Lamarr the actress knows how funny she looks in that get-up, but the character is not in on the joke whatsoever (a very hard line to walk, which she does brilliantly throughout.) Gable orders her out of the room to put on something more comfortable, and she immediately exits, stating loudly, "Comrade, I am obeying you blindly." I don't think she smiles once in the entire film, and yet the end result is hilarious. She spouts her Communist propaganda with unthinking seriousness, leaving Gable to ponder the absurdity of her very presence, how lovable she is, how strange. Lamarr is so at home in this type of broad material I am shocked it wasn't more successful for her. At the end of the film, she ends up driving a tank, with Gable huddled beside her (another hilarious sequence), and she is explaining to him the chain of command in the Soviet system, again in her rat-a-tat monotone that she uses throughout the film. "First, there is co-pilot. Then there is co-co-pilot. Then there is co-co-co-pilot." Gable interrupts, "Stop stuttering." His line is the CHING of the ba-dum-ching joke, but without her insistent humorless monotone, used from beginning to end of the film, none of the other jokes would work. I was accustomed to seeing Hedy Lamarr in beautiful gowns, in exquisite closeup, and as marvelous as she was, I only saw Comrade X recently, and was blown away by her funniness. This isn't the sort of humor that brings about mere chuckles and gives you time to ponder to yourself, "Oh, isn't that funny." Hedy Lamarr here brings upon belly laughs that make you miss the next 2 lines of dialogue.
PATRICIA CLARKSON, High Art
I suppose now nothing this actress does is surprising. But back then, she was relatively unknown, and certainly hadn't reached a critical mass of fame yet. She was Kevin Costner's wife in The Untouchables, a nothing part, and then came years of bit parts in movies and recurring roles on television. Law and Order and others. She was at a certain level. I know that High Art was the big risk for her, it was her moment of saying, "Is the career I have right now acceptable to me? And if not, then what the hell do I do about it?" But none of that backstory was known to me at the time. I went to High Art (in case others are confused, that's her in a state of undress beneath Ally Sheedy) basically to see what the fuss was about in terms of Ally Sheedy acting again, and instead found myself so drawn to the actress playing Greta that I lost my bearings completely. Greta is German, she is addicted to heroin, she is a lesbian, and she seems to live in a drugged-out dreamworld where she is the reincarnation of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel. Always in an incapacitated state, she can barely button up her blouse when she is in public, and drawls her lines in a tired German cadence, so completely real that I would never have guessed that this actress wasn't exactly what she seemed: a drugged-out performance artist on the Lower East Side. My friend Mitchell had the same response. Again, Clarkson did not have much fame then, or recognizability, so as her name became more known over the years, High Art would come up again and again between us, and as she continued to show her range, her portrayal of Greta becomes even more unbelievable to behold. The only way I can say it is: Clarkson is not herself. It is such a convincing performance that Mitchell and I both thought that the director had found this eccentric dead-eyed German woman in a nightclub somewhere, or maybe a midnight burlesque show, and got her to be in the movie somehow. It's not acting going on here. Clarkson appears to be participating in a documentary.
CATHERINE DENEUVE, Repulsion
One of the most harrowing portrayals of psychosis in all of cinema. And yet, like all great portrayals of psychosis, it has such truth in it, such sanity, that it starts to seem like she is the only sane person in a totally insane and insensitive world. Too many actors love to "play crazy" because it's a good career opportunity, and they get to "lose it", and oh, isn't that fun for an actor? It's condescending to anyone who suffers from depression or madness, and shows a lack of understanding of what it is REALLY like. Deneuve's is a terrifying performance, because it is told completely from her point of view, so whatever outside-influence, a friend who might be able to say to her, "Now, listen, dear, the hands coming out of the apartment walls are not real", is rendered mute and useless. However, as anyone who has been through it knows, psychosis like that is the ultimate in reality, and Deneuve is fearless in going on the journey that this young woman goes on. Not once does she tip her hand. Not once does she let us know that she knows that none of this is real. Fantasies are powerful things, and do not always make "sense". The character she plays here is meek, submissive, and underfed. Her revulsion towards food points towards anorexia, although that is way too easy a diagnosis. Underneath that meek blonde surface is a world of rage (watch the scary moment when she knocks her sister's boyfriend's toothbrush into the wastebasket). As she is left alone for a weekend in her sister's apartment, things start to unravel, and Deneuve starts to shatter, psychically. How easy it is for some of us to slip off the rails. I would even say that the contours of her beautiful face even change, over the course of the film, as she descends deeper and deeper into her world of fantasy. Deneuve was completely in charge of that transformation. One of the most beautiful women in the world, clearly, her roles often utilize that beauty in interesting ways. She knew who she was. She didn't seem to feel that she had to "ugly" herself up to get respect from the acting community. She is on another plane entirely, and in Repulsion, early in her career, she shows the cracks that open up in a person when left to her own devices, when deprived of sleep, of sex, of food. Her fantasies are violent and involve being raped on a nightly basis by a leering intruder. To someone who is always in control, such a moment would of course be the ultimate in freedom. Whatever work Deneuve has done (and the commentary track is fascinating, because it shows how meticulous she is in her process as an actress) is entirely invisible. This is one of her greatest performances, certainly, and one of my favorites given by a female in the history of cinema.
MAGGIE CHEUNG, Centre Stage
This one is a bit of a cheat, and I am admitting it up front. Now that I know who Maggie Cheung is, I am not in the least "surprised" by anything she does. But I saw this film - which also is known as Actress and also known as Yuen Ling-yuk - at the Music Box in Chicago years ago, when it first came out (I have always known the film as Actress), with my friend Ted, and I had no idea who Maggie Cheung was, and it was such a melancholy beautiful intelligent masterpiece that we went out for Chinese food afterwards and were pretty much speechless. It was my introduction to Maggie Cheung, and for that, I can say that I was, indeed, "surprised". I know it's obnoxious to discover someone late and then act as though you are the first person to discover that actress, so please forgive me, those of you who knew for years what a revelation Cheung is. I just had to include her, and this performance specifically, which rocked me to the core. It tells the story of Ruan Lingyu, the big silent film star in China, known as "the Chinese Garbo". She had a short crazy life, and she committed suicide at the age of 24. Stanley Kwan directed, and it's an amazing film, mixing real footage of the silent films of Ruan Lingyu, with current-day production meetings (Stanley Kwan including himself in the film, giving it a documentary aspect, along the lines of French Lieutenant's Woman), and then amazing scenes of Maggie Cheung re-creating Ruan Lingyu's scenes, so that they are spliced together: we see Ruan Lingyu, the actual footage, and then we segue to Maggie Cheung doing the same scene, and to say that this actress is "channeling" something may be a turnoff to those not into New Age views (and I'm not into New Age views, either) but channeling seems to me to be the only appropriate word for what is happening here. Going into it I did not know Ruan Lingyu's horrible end, I was not surprised when it came, due to the passion and intensity Cheung brought to the part. A suicide like that, awful as it is, begins to seem inevitable. While something like Centre Stage could easily have turned into a typical biopic, it doesn't, it most definitely doesn't. It is an examination of art, and what art is, and how an actress melds with her roles, and the toll that places on sensitive people. It takes balls to go toe to toe with a national icon. Cate Blanchett did her best in The Aviator, with mixed results, but remember: Blanchett wasn't asked, in that part, to re-create the ACTING of Hepburn - just her personality and mannerisms. Imagine if Blanchett had had to re-create a scene from Bringing Up Baby, side by side with the real footage. That's what Cheung is asked to do in Centre Stage, and she is extraordinary. Imagine the courage of Cheung, having to face that task.
FAYE DUNAWAY, Arizona Dream
Oh, how I adore this nutty movie, and oh how sad I am that if you rent it (at least in the US), you will be seeing an edited version. I saw it in its original US release, at its full length, and it is a stunner of a picture. It is wacky and insane, and by that I mean it includes Jerry Lewis as well as Paulina Porizkova in the cast. Johnny Depp and Lily Taylor star, and Vincent Gallo is brilliant (especially the scene where he re-creates the crop-duster sequence from North by Northwest at a local open-mike night) and I've seen the edited version and believe me, it suffers. I live in hope that one day it will get a proper DVD release, because this film is a gem. Faye Dunaway plays Lily Taylor's mother, living in an isolated crazy house in the middle of an Arizona desert, obsessed with flying machines (and flying, in general), and she is a complete and utter LUNATIC. She did a workshop at my grad school and I asked her about the script, and if any of their group scenes (particularly a manic dinner scene, with turtles crawling around the table, and Lily Taylor threatening to hang herself from the balcony) were improvised. I was so happy when Dunaway replied to my question (and she got sort of lit-up and excited, like a little girl - how many people ask her about Arizona Dream, of all things?), and she said, "Every word of that scene as we played it onscreen was in the script." So that makes it an even more glorious accomplishment. Wow. Dunaway has always been "over the top" in many of her best roles, she has a theatricality to her that is melodramatic and intense, and here, where she gets to play openly NUTS, she is hysterical and awesome. It's got the same Dunaway trademarks: she's gorgeous, and intense, and she is a woman who keeps her eye on the ball, even if it means ignoring her suicidal daughter, Lily Taylor, who strolls around the house playing her accordion in a lugubrious manner. There are scenes of piercing beauty (one, where she flies through the air, and her face, upon being airborne, is enough to make you want to cry), and then scenes of total madness, with Dunaway pushing wandering turtles away from her food, and babbling on about Papua New Guinea, which she is obsessed with. Her daughter begs her to stop talking about Papua New Guinea, because it is driving her mad, and Dunaway, a woman determined to live her life the way she sees fit, wearing aviator goggles at the dinner table, continues to push on, saying the words "Papua New Guinea" with increased ferocity, until Lily Taylor can bear it no longer and screams, "YOU ARE SO EVIL, MOTHER." My description here perhaps does not do the movie (or the performance) justice, but that is only because Arizona Dream, in its original release, is exactly what I look for from cinema. An individual viewpoint, a philosophy, the courage of its convictions, and a visual look and feel that is unmistakably its own. Dunaway is manic, obsessed, sexy and lost to reason for the entirety of the film. While Faye Dunaway plays a monstrous character in Arizona Dream, no doubt about it, I dare you to watch the expression on her face as she slowly floats through the air, and not be moved. Brave. To my mind, this is one of her bravest performances. She really took risks here.
MERYL STREEP, Death Becomes Her
It is a beautiful coincidence that I would choose Death Becomes Her for my "surprise" performance from Streep in the same week that Nathaniel R. profiled the film in his Streep at 60 series. I love his perception here:
One of the most endearing things about Death Becomes Her from a retrospective vantage is the way it follows so closely on the heels of Postcards From the Edge, forming a prismatic, self-mocking double feature. The subject is an aging actress in career crisis, one who just happens to have an absurdly amazing singing voice; Postcards ends with a big gorgeous musical performance as career redemption and Death begins with its inversion, a big gawdy one as career killer. So this early 90s double offered audiences two potential futures for fictional "Meryl Streep." Or the same future, if you could predict the coming of Mamma Mia! -- it would look exactly like a huge gawdy career killer but be a mammoth hit in actuality!
Yes! I've always felt that Streep is more of a gifted comedienne than a great tragedienne, and that her talent, when it is allowed to come out in its most organic form, runs towards the comedic. I saw her play The Seagull in Central Park, and I know it is hard to believe but the woman got a laugh on almost every line. This was not "tricks", or an actress trying to "fall back on" what is "easy" for her, or any other such situation. This was Streep sensing the comedy inherent in the sheer terribleness of that character, her unbelievable insensitivity (speaking outloud during her son's awful play, murmuring things to herself in a completely audible voice, totally clueless that her son might feel bad), and Streep made it all seem completely natural, showing up people like Philip Seymour Hoffman who was so busy "doing Chekhov" that he forgot to create a living breathing human being onstage. And he's a good actor. But look out. Streep is a powerhouse. Death Becomes Her has what I think is Streep's funniest performance (although there is so much there to choose from), and it is over-the-top, self-referential, and positively RIDICULOUS. She has a way of slanting her eyes almost shut and then moving her pupils off to the side which is one of the most comedic and eloquent pantomimes of "I am so annoyed I barely know what to say" I have ever seen, and she used it in Postcards (her "eye work" is so good in Postcards, I don't even know what else to call it), but here it becomes a psychological gesture, a tip-off that this woman is a snotty terrible piece of work. And again, Streep gets a laugh on every line, every gesture, every word. Not to mention the huge overblown musical number that starts the entire picture. I love it when Streep is silly. Her boobs lift up due to a magical potion, and she stares at herself, enraptured, and states, "I'm a girl!" (Clip below the jump) She has never ever been sillier than here, and it's a performance that still makes me clap my hands in delight when I see it.
JUDY DAVIS, Husbands and Wives
This is a performance worthy of Bette Davis. It's that dramatic, that specific, that loud, and, ultimately, that heartbreaking. It's hard for me to talk about Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives because it is a performance that is so dear to me, and all I can do is just recite her lines and then say, "God, she is so great." Judy Davis plays Sally, and she is married to Sydney Pollack (in one of his best performances, although I find it hard to choose - "So she can't quote Sartre. I love her!"), and in the first scene Sally and Jack announce to Judy (Mia Farrow) and Gabe (Woody Allen) that they are getting separated, and it's all very adult and civilized, and they want everyone to be happy for them, and they're so "evolved" about it, so calm, that it throws Gabe and Judy's marriage into a tailspin. But of course, things are not calm with Sally and Jack, and Sally, single for the first time in her life, suddenly has to deal with things like dating and sex, and she is so uptight and so cerebral that she has a very hard time with it. She goes on a date with this poor guy who tells her he got tickets to Don Juan, and she replies, with an arched eyebrow, "Don Juan?" Pause. Then: "Fucking Don Juans." He protests a bit, and she shouts in his face, 'DON'T DEFEND YOUR SEX." I had been aware of Judy Davis for a long time, and loved her in her breakout part My Brilliant Career, she of the wild frizzy hair and freckled beautiful face. But nothing she had ever done could prepare me for the sheer bravado she brings to the prickly Sally. This is a pretty bleak movie (I love it), and she is so funny right in the midst of her tragic loneliness. Liam Neeson, a lovely man she starts to date, is going down on her in one particular scene, and the camera remains on her face, as she ponders in voiceover, that all people in the world can be broken down into hedgehogs and foxes, and she starts to list all the people she knows: "Judy? Fox. Gabe? Hedgehog." And on and on, a truly perverse scene, as Neeson is trying to pleasure her, and that is what is going on in her head. She stalks through rooms, holding a wine glass, shivering with electric energy, her jaw juts and chomps, and sometimes her eyes go tiny and calculating. You would never know that Davis was from Australia. This is a character who has barely left the state of New York in her entire life. My favorite detail of this character? How obsessed she has become with the "series of breakins" that have gone on in her neighborhood in Westchester. She mentions it to everyone. And then when people are appropriately frightened for her, she murmurs, "It's really really scary." She is a powerhouse woman, who has dominated and frightened everyone in her path, and yet she has this strange investment in insisting that she is "really really scared" about the breakins, and she needs everyone, everyone, to agree that she is vulnerable. I watch the movie and I'm like, "But you're really not scared, Sally. You're just lonely and you miss having a man around!" Yet she continues to insist, in every single scene, "Have you heard about the series of breakins?" Every moment is chiseled to a fine edge, every look, every glance, every slight smile, is part of the masterpiece of acting that is going on here. It's hilarious, it's heartwrenching, it's angry, it's intelligent - one of my favorite performances of the 90s.
MARILYN MONROE, Don't Bother to Knock
Relieve your mind now of the images you have of this person. When I met her, she was a simple, eager young woman who rode a bike to the classes she was taking, a decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted. She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for acceptance by people she might look up to ... The girl had little education and no knowledge except the knowledge of her own experience; of that she had a great deal, and for an actor, that is the important kind of knowledge. For her, I found, everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. She had no interest in abstract, formal, or impersonal concepts but was passionately devoted to her own life's experiences.
So wrote Elia Kazan of Marilyn Monroe in his gigantic autobiography Elia Kazan: A Life
BIBI ANDERSSON, Persona
T.S. Eliot, after reading James Joyce's Ulysses, said, "I wish for my own sake that I hadn't read it." William Carlos Williams, after reading Ulysses, said, "Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least." I have only pulled out the examples having to do with Ulysses because they are at my fingertips, but the question of artistic intimidation is an interesting one, and writers know the situation well. (I wrote about it here.) If you are trying to write something, there are certain writers who inspire you to push on, and then there are others who manage to silence you completely. William Carlos Williams felt threatened by Ulysses, it threatened to silence him. When I went out to Block Island to write, I thought carefully about what I wanted to read out there. There are writers who make me itch to take up my pen, and there are writers who make me feel like putting my pen down forever in despair. I hold my hands up helplessly in the face of them, like William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot (no slouches themselves) did with Joyce. It's not about "classic" literature, either, it's probably different for everyone. The writer who silences ME might not silence YOU. For example, Annie Proulx silences me. I couldn't bring her latest collection with me to Block Island.
All of this is to say: Bibi Andersson's performance in Persona is such that after I saw it in college (when I was studying acting), I knew I couldn't see it again, at least not any time soon, because it threatened to silence me, and weaken my will. I didn't know if I would have the courage to go on in my own pursuit in the face of work like THAT. I refused to see it again, until I felt I could "handle" it. I didn't see the film for almost 20 years after that first viewing. Andersson's monologue, blurted out at night to Liv Ullmann lying in bed, is one of the best pieces of acting ever captured on screen, but why is that? Who can say? It cannot be described. It grips you at the throat, and by the end, when it lets you go, you are changed. It's as simple as that. I knew it when I saw it at age 18. I finished the film and thought, "Well. Nothing will be the same for me ever again, my very molecules have been rearranged, and I certainly can't watch THAT again." I'll let David Thomson finish up this entry for me, because, once again, I feel Bibi Andersson silencing me. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. There are some performances so essential to... see, I don't even have the word for it ... that it's best to just not think about them too much. Enough to know that they exist, that they have been captured, once and for all time. In a way, what happens to Bibi Andersson in the film is the opposite of the effect her performance had on me. In the face of the silent (and silencing) presence of Elizabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), Bibi Andersson suddenly, desperately, cannot stop talking.
Here's Thomson:
Persona is about vampirism and the power of one personality over another; it is about acting and being; it is about performance and silence. And it is what we had for films once upon a time. It is beside the point to say that Ullmann and Andersson are good in the picture. Rather, they are an event of primary importance: No one should be allowed to act professionally without seeing Persona. Of course, in life one cannot impose those rules. All I know is that with students - not just of film, but of every subject - I have shown Persona and had the conversation that followed go on and on until natural darkness overtook us. It could not be more complicated, or less lucid. It is as if Elizabeth Vogler fell silent in Electra because of her own memory of the film. We are in performance: It is a religious condition.
REESE WITHERSPOON, Election
You know you've tapped into some zeitgeist moment when the name of a character you play becomes a reference point, meaningful in and of itself. Recently, I mentioned on Facebook that I was reading a biography of Michael Ovitz, and he "reminded me of Tracy Flick" and everyone knew what I was talking about. Tracy Flick. She stalks the nation. She is everything we should fear. The subversive nature of Election is its strongest asset: that Tracy Flick does not get the comeuppance she so deserves is how life works, especially in politics, where things like ambition + mediocrity rises. And fast. I had seen Man in the Moon with Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, and a pre-teen Reese Witherspoon in an extraordinary film debut. She plays a tomboy, not yet an adolescent yet, and this young actress has a heavy load to carry in that film, and she more than showed her capability. I knew we would be seeing more of her. Time passed. She was terrific, again, in Freeway, and Pleasantville, as a slutty girl who finds redemption through .... reading, a fact that made me love that script forever.
But she bursts into terrible full-form as Tracy Flick in 1999's Election, the girl determined to be President of her class, and nothing will stop her. Tracy Flick is a girl who brings out the worst in others, most notably her civics teacher, played by Matthew Broderick, who sees the evil that she represents, even though she is just a teenage girl, and becomes hellbent on bringing her down.
There are two scenes which elevate her performance into something iconic, something that has something to say, about ambition and politics. One night she is alone in the school, finishing up some work for the upcoming election, and she comes across a hallway lined with posters of her rival. She stares up the hallway, she stares down. She looks dimunitive and fragile. And then, in a burst of hideous energy, she tears down all the posters. She rips them apart. Her legs flail about in her efforts, her face turns into an Edvard Munch scream, her arms wildly gyrate, she is awkward, she is ferocious, it is the underbelly of every single politician in existence, no matter how smiling and slick. Tracy Flick, as seen through the eyes of her civics teacher, is a prissy know-it-all, barreling down the hallways handing out campaign buttons. But here, we see her alone. We do not see her through Broderick's eyes anymore. We get a glimpse of what it is really like for her. It is rage so unbridled that it's almost thrilling, because the movie is a satire, and satire is out-of-sync in these oh-so-literal times, and so I feared that the movie wouldn't be willing to go there. In that scene, the movie says to me, "O ye of little faith. How do ya like THEM apples?" The second scene, which I think is the best work Witherspoon has ever done is when she has lost the election, and there is a quick cut from the victory-triumph at school to her sobbing in bed at home. Again, this is one of a handful of scenes when we don't see her character through Broderick's eyes. In her sobbing is not just sadness that she lost, but outrage that she was cheated out of the win. And you know what? Here's the most subversive thing: she's right. This isn't quiet pretty crying. This is a howl of pain and rage worthy of Oedipus. It's mortifying to watch. It's ugly. It is the ugliest part of us as humans, mixed with the best of us (because doesn't Tracy, after all, have a point?), and it is a scene that stands alone in Witherspoon's career. She has yet to top it.
June 12, 2010
20 most surprising female performances (Part 1)
Alex had a series going on of 20 Most Surprising Female Performances (Here is Part 1 and Part 2). Please please go check out her choices, and also her brief descriptions of why she chose each one. Great stuff, thought-provoking. Alex writes:
These are performances that, for me, were either the first time I saw a side of these actors that truly surprised me, or the first time something connected with me on a very visceral level. Some of these are leading performances, and some are mere minutes of footage. Screen time’s never been a big deal to me. When a performance jumps out at me, there’s never a time limit. I’m always amazed when I remember that Anthony Hopkins time on screen in “Silence of the Lambs” runs about 11 minutes total. He’s that much of a force.Certainly all these women are versatile in their skill and their many, many gifts, but these particular performances still haunt me, and to this day, are ones I still reference when I speak about limitations.
They also brought me great joy and reminded me of the true definition of Fearlessness.
One note: It's so annoying when you put up a list like this and someone inevitably says, "Don't forget to include So and So." I didn't "forget". I already know I didn't "forget". If I wrote such a list tomorrow, I might pick 20 different performances. To those of you who want to play along. Perhaps we overlap. Let's talk about that. Perhaps you disagree with some of my choices. I'd love to hear more. But please don't tell me I "forgot" to include something, okay?
These are performances that surprised me. That surprised me on first viewing, and surprise me still.
So. Here we go.
20 MOST SURPRISING FEMALE PERFORMANCES (Part 1)
ROSIE PEREZ, Fearless
Nothing the hot gyrating dancer from Soul Train and In Living Color had done could prepare us for what she revealed in Peter Weir's 1993 film Fearless, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Spike Lee had picked her out of the crowd (not hard to do), and put her in Do the Right Thing, but here, in Fearless, she got to show what she can really do. This is a heavy-hitting dramatic actress. Her character is damaged beyond repair, weak with grief, and Perez holds nothing back in portraying any of it. She is not always likable. She has flaws. When she is pulled from the wreckage of the plane, her screams and writhing body are not "acted", they are experienced - this is an actress in the ZONE - and it makes all other such scenes pale in comparison. It is a harrowing performance. But the levels she shows: the shyness, the grief, the anger, the dim sparks of humor - This isn't just an emotional attitude (Grieving Mother), this is a fully developed woman, with a life, and a personality, and Perez is totally in charge here, of her talent and instrument, handling the demands of the script. Perez has done a lot of interesting stage work but nowhere on film has she been allowed to be this three-dimensional. There is a scene in the car where Perez feverishly prays the Hail Mary, over and over and over, lost to the world, perhaps forever, as Bridges looks on, horrified, and I sometimes imagine that what I see on his face is he, the actor, thinking, "Holy shitballs, is she good."
BETTY BUCKLEY, Another Woman
In less than 5 minutes of screen time, Betty Buckley almost walks away with Woody Allen's fantastic film Another Woman. She plays the wronged ex-wife of Ian Holm, and she shows up at the engagement party of her ex-husband and his new wife (played by Gena Rowlands) uninvited, and it is a scene so painful, so embarrassing, that I find it nearly unwatchable. She literally vibrates with rage and pain. That's how you do a cameo, folks. She starts off with an embarrassed fumbling, she's there to pick up some of her stuff (oh, really? On that day?), and then picks Rowlands out of the crowd. Ian Holm intervenes, and then all hell breaks loose. When she says the word "ovaries" (she has had a hysterectomy), the event shatters into something else. It is a trainwreck. The wreck of a marriage, the wreck of a life. No one recovers from such an event. Buckley disappears from the film, but she haunts the rest of it. Rowlands can no longer be complacent about her new marriage. She must remember Buckley, and her spitting rage and humiliation, and think to herself: "There. I helped do that. This is the cost of me getting what I want." Betty Buckley is a celebrated actress, of stage mostly, her singing voice bringing her fame and fortune, but here she shows what she is truly capable of. Look out.
HOLLY HUNTER, Living Out Loud
Piano Shmiano, this is Holly Hunter's best performance. She plays Judith Moore, a divorcee who obviously got a great settlement package from her wealthy doctor ex-husband, because she lives in luxury on Park Avenue, but her life seems to have no ... substance. Who is this woman? She gets dressed up at night and goes to a nightclub to watch a singer she loves (played by Queen Latifah), and one night, late night, she befriends (sort of) her elevator man (played by Danny Devito - again, one of his best performances). This is a film that takes place primarily at night, the early hours of the day, when the tide rushes back, and shows you the wreckage of what you have hoped for. Friendships do form, but is it too late? Holly Hunter, who usually plays women of great will and determination (whether they speak or not, a la The Piano), and here, she plays Loneliness with a capital L. To me, this is one of the most acute portraits of loneliness in American cinema. She aches with it. Her skin aches. But this is not a woman accustomed to introspection. She lives totally in a fantasy in her own mind. She sits at the table at the nightclub, ordering martinis (she drinks to dull the pain, Hunter is a great drunk, who knew?), and there are closeups of her face where you can tell that she is not actually there. Or, she IS there, but she's also in her fantasy land, where she sits with a fabulous date at that very same table, a man who will take her home later and make love to her, the wonderful life of connection and relationship that we all dream of. Hunter does this only with her face. She does not live in reality, she lives in that dreamspace. The "substance of things hoped for". There are scenes where she sits alone in her gigantic gleaming kitchen, still dressed up from her night out by herself, wasted from the three or four martinis she had drunk, and she eats a sandwich, and talks to herself. But this is not "movie" talking-to-yourself. All we hear are fragments, brief statements, she is fully in the dreamworld where she is in the midst of a conversation with someone ... we don't know who ... who should be there. These talking-to-yourself scenes are some of the best work she has ever done. They are shockingly vulnerable. Most of us talk to ourselves from time to time. But I've rarely seen a film get it right, what it's like to be that lonely, to have had a "date" with yourself, to sit alone at 3 in the morning, and chat about the day with someone who is not there.
KATHARINE HEPBURN, Bringing Up Baby
Hepburn made her name in films as a dramatic actress. She hit the ground running with A Bill of Divorcement, and then won an Oscar one year later for her tragic portrayal of a haughty pretentious (and yet talented) aspiring actress in Morning Glory. Then came Little Women, where she tore up the screen as Jo March, a literary feisty tomboy. She was a huge star in a very short amount of time. In 1936 came the wonderful Alice Adams, where she was again nominated for an Oscar. After that began her fall from grace, now seen in a completely different light because of her giant life-long success, but in the late 30s that was not at all a done deal for Hepburn. Sylvia Scarlett, her first pairing with Cary Grant, was a flop, and she actually is not all that good in the picture (something she admitted freely). She seemed to stop knowing who she was around this time, at least as an actress. Her stock-in-trade was a heightened sense of drama and emotion, her characters were usually a bit stuck-up. Perhaps the audience tired of seeing her be RIGHT all the time. Then came Bringing Up Baby. A box-office flop at the time, it is now regarded as one of the funniest movies ever made, and an American classic. If you watch Hepburn's films in chronological order, from A Bill of Divorcement to Bringing Up Baby, which I have done, it is nothing less than breathtaking the risks she is taking here, the complete departure her goofy headstrong heiress Susan Vance is. Where did she get the guts? She is hilarious, lovable, clumsy, fearless, and overwhelmingly in love with Cary Grant from the first moment she lays eyes on him. She must have him. In my 5 for the day: Katharine Hepburn piece over at House Next Door, I related the stories of how difficult it was for Hepburn to "get" that part. This makes her success in the role even more amazing, because you can't see the effort at ALL. You would think that this was an actress BORN to play screwball comedy. Unfortunately, it flopped, which was the nail in the coffin for Hepburn's career (so much for current-day assessments of what will and will not last), and she went back to Broadway to do Philadelphia Story, which resurrected her career for all time. But Bringing Up Baby was the real break. She knew, because she was smart, "Okay, the audience is tiring of seeing me play stuck-up prissy characters ... That time is done ... I need to try something else now." A fearless performance, seen in light of her career - and Hepburn was nothing if not a staunch careerist. But she was always more interested in the WORK than the fame. Susan Vance will live on in history, and watching Hepburn run through the dark fields and vales, carrying an enormous butterfly net, calling out in a crazy sing-song voice, "BABY! OH, BABY! COME HERE, BABY! BABY!!!!" is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
MADELINE KAHN, What's Up, Doc?
This has to go down, along with Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, as the most amazing female debut of all time. I can recite this movie by heart ("Can you fix a hifi?" "No, sir." "Then SHADDUP.") and Kahn's portrayal of Eunice Burns is one of the funniest performances I have ever seen in my life. She is put-upon, bossy, humorless, the butt of all the jokes, and yet she has a moment where she sits in her hotel room, devastated, crushed, and the door slams on her, and we hear her say, through the closed door, in a bitter crazy voice, "What more can they do to me." as though she's in a high melodrama. To be introduced to Madeline Kahn through this role and not some other more realistic part, means we, as the audience say, "Well. Clearly this woman can do anything." And she can. Eunice Burns experiences every emotion under the sun: fear ("snakes, as you know, have a mortal fear of .... tile"), annoyance ("Pull the door open"), jealousy ("DON'T YOU KNOW THE MEANING OF PROPRIETY?"), sexual terror ("They tried to molest me." "That's .... unbelievable."), outraged pride ("I am not A Eunice Burns, I am THE Eunice Burns"), confusion ("What on earth are you doing with Howard Bannister's rocks??"), devastation (the one shot of her tossing and turning in her sleep, mumbling in horror and outrage), and uncertainty (knocking on the door of 459 Dirella Street: "Hello? Uhm ... hel-lo? Hello?? hello, hello ... uhm ..."). Madeline Kahn IS comedy in this film, from the tip of her crazy red wig to the points of her ridiculous blue shoes.
LEOPOLDINE KONSTANTIN, Notorious
She is first seen in long shot, at the top of the stairway that will prove so crucial to the gripping finale of Hitchcock's Notorious. There is something eerie about how she appears. She halts at the top of the stairs. We cannot see her face, but across that long echoey space, her figure is creepily eloquent, somehow ominous. This is an actress who clearly has stage training, understanding that acting should be a full-body expression, that you mustn't just wait for your close-up to do the heavy work. Slowly, she walks down the stairs, all in one take. We are seeing her from Ingrid Bergman's point of view and obviously Bergman cannot look away. There is something dreadful about her approach. She never takes her eyes off Bergman and then ... she walks right into her closeup. She is an elderly woman, with silver hair in braids on the top of her head. And there is a look in her eyes that could make your blood run cold. I saw Notorious on the big screen at the Film Forum here in New York, and Konstantin's character was a crowd-pleaser. It surprised me, because I had only seen Notorious in the privacy of my own home, and she always seemed quite scary. While that scariness remained, her moments of relish, of sheer ice-eyed evil ("We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity, for a time."), were even more effective on the big screen. She sits up in bed, greeted by her son Claude Rains, who says that he has something horrible to share, something about his wife Alicia. Konstantin sits up, her eyes on fire with glee, righteousness, and relish, and, in one movement, reaches out to the bedside table and swipes out a cigarette from a gleaming box, saying, as she does so, "I have expected this." Actually, she doesn't just say that line. She hisses it. I have seen that scene a million times, but seeing it in a packed movie house, the audience erupted into laughter. Not making fun of it, but because it is so damn good, it is a moment that is perfectly realized. Let's not forget: The line is: "I have expected this." A simple line, which could have been said in a number of cliched ways, but Konstantin, with her gestures and use of props and fluidity of movement, like some sort of coiled serpent, makes it into a symphony of rage and contempt. Konstantin was an Austrian actress, with a long stage career, who got her start in silent movies. This was her moment, her biggest role and opportunity. She has created an indelible character that lives on in the mind long after the film is over.
NICOLE KIDMAN, The Others
I didn't take Nicole Kidman all that seriously as an actress until I saw To Die For, a brilliant portrayal of a sociopath, one for the books, really. Her marriage to Tom Cruise led her to career choices that fell a bit flat, for me. She had been good before (Dead Calm in particular), but the stardom she received, merely as his wife, seemed a bit top-heavy, and seemed to value the wrong things. But then, the marriage ended, and things started to get very very interesting. The Others is an effective film, in and of itself, but without her chilling tightly-controlled masterpiece of a performance, it wouldn't work at all. It is a thriller, but it needs psychological horror behind the actual horror, and that job rests in her capable hands. She is creating a character here, not just trading on her beauty (which I don't blame her for doing, by the way - she's a star, she's beautiful, of course she will "use" her assets), and her work manages to be both meticulous and raw at the very same time. No easy feat. This is a woman with secrets. The biggest being the one she keeps from herself. Kidman walks briskly, fearsomely, tightly, leaving out all of the warmth that she was able to bring to Moulin Rouge. Not an ingratiating character, Kidman is beyond the concerns of being loved here. The terror of not being known to oneself flickers through her eyes from time to time, and over the course of the film, although I disliked her and was glad I didn't know that woman in real life, I was also afraid for her. Such rigidity cannot last. When she walks through a dark room, jerking the huge heavy curtains closed, as closed as they can possibly be, she manages to turn a moment of casual housewifery business into a deep psychological revelation. Her face is stern, chilly, and so the grief she shows at the end, the terror as the memories come piling back in upon her, is truly heartbreaking.
BARBARA STANWYCK, Ball of Fire
David Thomson observed that her specialty was playing "creatively two-faced characters", and while her deadly femme fatale in Double Indemnity is a classic, I find her portrayal of Sugarpuss O'Shea in Ball of Fire to be a real surprise, evidence of her enormous flexibility. It's a comedic spin on her gun-moll dames, softened up a bit, and humorized. She's a tough gal, a nightclub singer who pals around with a gangster named Joe Lilac (played by Dana Andrews in a very funny performance), and hooks up with stuffy professor Gary Cooper, who is working on an encyclopedia and has come to the section on "slang" and he needs her help translating American slang into something comprehensible to this academician in his ivory tower. Naturally, sparks fly. But she's a woman of the world with shady connections. In Double Indemnity she plays a woman with no moral center. She is like an animal, going after what she wants, regardless of who will get hurt. Here, in Ball of Fire, there is a moment when her treachery is revealed, and the sadness on Stanwyck's face, when she says to herself, "I know what I am... a tramp" is devastating, a moment of self-awareness that cuts to the core. She has never been better. The scene where we first see Sugarpuss O'Shea, performing in a nightclub with Gene Krupa and his Orchestra, is enough to show what Stanwyck is bringing to this part: ease, humor, toughness, an ability to take charge, and a sort of delicious lovability that would make any man go weak in the knees. (Clip below the jump.) At the end of the film, after a disastrous and hysterical aborted wedding ceremony with Joe Lilac, she is asked to defend herself, and she says, of Gary Cooper's Professor:
"I love him because he's the kind of guy who gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk, and I love the way he blushes right up over his ears. I love him because he doesn't know how to kiss, the jerk!"
All you have to do is watch how she says that line to see why she is one of the greatest of American actresses, and why her portrayal of Sugarpuss O'Shea is so moving. His very innocence shames her. Yet she loves him. She loves his innocence. However, there's that epithet at the end, "the jerk"! She's got an edge. She's feeling as mushy as she's ever gonna feel, and that pisses her off. He doesn't know how to kiss, the jerk! That's as open as she's gonna get. She never gives it all up. Holds her cards close to her chest, that dame.
KELLY MCGILLIS, Witness
Kelly McGillis never quite found her way in Hollywood, although she got some good leading-lady parts, and her talent doesn't really show up well in projects like Top Gun and The Accused. She seems uncomfortable in her own skin. Not so in Witness, where she plays Rachel Lapp, an Amish woman embroiled in a crime her son witnessed in the restroom of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. Here, she lands. By that I mean, she has never seemed so comfortable, so present, so essential, so real. Never before and never since. I am interested in the fact that McGillis said she felt totally at sea during filming. She felt outside of the process, and Harrison Ford barely spoke to her, leaving her a bit disoriented. I think Ford was keeping his distance in order to keep their relationship formal and professional, so that the sparks could fly on camera in a way that was startling and new. Some of that chemistry might have been diluted if they had palled around on the set. Regardless of the reasons, McGillis has said she felt totally awkward and out-of-it during the filming of Witness, which makes her accomplishment here even more amazing. It's evidence that being "in control" is not always the best thing for actors. Sometimes a feeling of disorientation can yield astonishing results. The character of Rachel Lapp could have been a cliche, but McGillis is full of surprises here (a good script). But aside from any scenework she does, any of the subtleties she manages to get into the character, what amazes me here is her presence. Ford has great presence, too: watch how Lapp watches him as he gulps down the lemonade. But her presence here is something to be studied and marveled at, mainly because McGillis has pretty much disappeared from the screen by now, and it shows what a good part can do for an actress a bit lost in the career shuffle. Even the way she walks, a sort of plain hearty walk, arms swinging, gives you a sense of the blood pumping through this woman's veins, her heart beating, the beads of sweat on the back of her neck. I find her life here to be palpable, it achieves a certain tangibility rare in movies, and hard to pinpoint or define. Liv Ullmann has that kind of presence. All I can say is, when she is in that kitchen, I smell the coffee brewing, I feel the grains of flour on the tips of her fingers, I can smell the glaze on her cinnamon-rolls bubbling in the oven. I can smell the clean crisp cotton of the sheets, and when she places her hands over Harrison Ford's hot and infected gunshot wound in the middle of the night, the heat emanates from him, and you can feel the cool healing properties of her roughened hands. It's a sexy performance, highly erotic, and that's not because we see her nude at one point. It's because of her presence, her eyes and how they look, the sense that sometimes her breath is coming from high in her throat, the way she gulps, and smiles, and becomes suddenly haughty and forbidding. She vibrates with life, you can almost feel her pulse, keening and thrumming through every scene. So perhaps it's no loss that Kelly McGillis did not go on to become an A-list actress. She seems like a happy person, content with doing stage productions, and also managing a second active career as a drug-abuse counselor. Not everyone has one great performance in them. Some actresses slog along, doing the best they can, without ever landing, without ever capturing life, in its essence, the way McGillis does as Rachel Lapp.
JUDY GARLAND, The Clock
Garland was obviously a phenom in many ways, but The Clock, directed by future husband Vincent Minnelli, was her first adult part, and also the first time where she was the lead in a movie where she didn't sing. It was jarring to many, and she was eventually swayed towards her more traditional successes, but The Clock, and her work in it specifically, is amazing, and really shows just how talented this "phenom" really was. She plays a young working girl in New York City who meets a young soldier on leave (played by Robert Walker), and over the course of a long night, they fall in love. He is only in town for 24 hours, before shipping off to Europe and WWII. They meet-cute, they wander the Park, they go to a museum, they lose track of one another on the subway, they befriend a milkman and go with him on his rounds ... the movie is a delight, full of unforgettable characters (I love Keenan Wynn's railing drunk in the diner who accidentally punches Garland in the face with a wild gesture, in a laugh-out-loud funny moment), and Garland is so good here. She is charming, natural (watch her behavior with the bottle-opener in her apartment, she makes "business" look so easy), sexy, funny, and you totally believe that Robert Walker would fall in love with her instantly. She puts a lot of specificity into her characterization, she's not a gaga-eyed young romantic, there's a bit of weariness to her. Not that she's been around the block, but she's navigating life by herself, and she knows that a girl has to look out for her OWN interests. So she tries to keep Walker at bay, from time to time, reminding him to slow down, boy, slow. When they lose one another on the subway, Garland is desperate. She doesn't even know his last name. On a crazy gamble, she goes to a nearby USO office and tries to explain the situation, that she is looking for someone ... but she doesn't know his last name ... and he looks like this ... and I don't know where I can find him ... and please ... could you help me? The USO worker is appropriately confused, can't help her without a last name, and as Garland slowly backs out of the office, the realization that she has lost this man ... she has lost him ... no way to find him ... sinks in, all of a sudden, and she says, in a spontaneous moment of panic, "What am I going to do?" In the next second, she realizes that she is falling apart in public, in front of a stranger, and she does her best to halt the flood that is coming, but it is already too late, so she hastens to the door to flee, to be alone with her sadness. It is a brilliant moment, of unforced feeling that appears to be happening TO her, the character, rather than orchestrated BY her, the actress. Garland is marvelous in musicals. I don't discount that part of her talent. If your only conception of Garland is her as a musical actress, see The Clock and get ready for the surprise of your life.
June 10, 2010
"He tried to get into the Brat Pack, but he wanted to change it to The Smile Bunch."
So says Molly Ringwald about Ralph Macchio. His "niceness" was what held him back, apparently.
Not anymore. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
A gripping new documentary about his struggle back to superstardom: Wax On, F*** Off.
(Note from me: I have written before about how one episode of Eight is Enough changed my life. Nothing has made me happier than the fact that someone put this video together. I am literally smiling from ear to ear right now.)
"This time give us a little awe."
Excerpt from Bradford Dillman's book Are you Somebody? An Actor's Life:
In The Greatest Story Ever Told [John] Wayne was cast as a Roman captain who visits the scene of the Crucifixion and says, standing at the feet of Christ, "Truly this was the son of God."Director George Stevens was riding a crane when the actor stepped in for a take.
Wayne said, "TrulythiswasthesonaGod."
"Cut. Duke, let's remember you're talking about Jesus here. You might want to take the speech a bit slower."
"You got it, George."
Take Two. The Centurion says, "Truly. ThiswasthesonaGod."
"Cut. Duke, not reverent enough. Let's try it again, and this time give us a little awe."
"You got it, George."
Take Three. The superstar says, "Aw, truly. ThiswasthesonaGod."
June 8, 2010
June 6, 2010
Quotes on acting 12: Minnie Maddern Fiske
"Genius is the great unknown quantity. Technique supplies a constant for the problem. Fluency, flexibility, technique, precision, virtuosity, science - call it what you will. Why call it anything? Watch Pavlova dance, and there you have it. She knows her business. She has carried this mastery to such perfection that there is really no need of watching her at all. You know it will be all right. One glance at her and you are sure. On most of our players one keeps an apprehensive eye, filled with dark suspicions and forebodings - forebodings based on sad experience. But I told Gabrielle Rejane once that a performance of hers would no sooner begin than I would feel perfectly free to go out of the theatre and take a walk. I knew she could be trusted. It would be all right. There was no need to stay and watch."
-- Minnie Maddern Fiske, famous American actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Quotes on acting 11: Pauline Kael on Marlon Brando
"We all know that movie actors often merge with their roles in a way that stage actors don't, quite, but Brando did it even on the stage. I was in New York when he played his famous small role in Truckline Cafe in 1946; arriving late at a performance, and seated in the center of the second row, I looked up and saw what I thought was an actor having a seizure onstage. Embarrassed for him, I lowered my eyes, and it wasn't until the young man who'd brought me grabbed my arm and said, 'Watch this guy!' that I realized he was acting."
-- Pauline Kael
Quotes on acting 10: Sidney Lumet on Ingrid Bergman
"In Murder on the Orient Express, I wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the Russian Princess Dragomiroff. She wanted to play the retarded Swedish maid. I wanted Ingrid Bergman. I let her play the maid. She won an Academy Award. I bring this up because self-knowledge is so important in so many ways to an actor."
-- Sidney Lmet
Making Movies
Quotes on acting 9: George Bernard Shaw on Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
I love this because it shows Beerbohm's inability to be in anything BUT the moment. Rather amusing. I love descriptions of performances that we, in the modern age, actually cannot see. They only existed on the stage, in the performance at that moment. I have tons of these anecdotes, and I adore them.
Now if I were to say that [Sir Herbert Beerbohm] Tree foresaw nothing and considered nobody, I should suggest that he was a much less amiable man than he was...Of the foresight which foresees and faces entirely uninteresting facts, and the consideration which considers entirely uninteresting persons, he had as little as a man can have without being run over in the street. When his feelings were engaged, he was human and even shrewd and tenacious. But you really could not lodge an indifferent fact in his mind. This disability of his was carried to such a degree that he could not remember the passages in a play which did not belong or bear directly upon his own conception of his own part: even the longest run did not mitigate his surprise when they recurred. Thus he never fell into the commonest fault of the actor: the betrayal to the audience that he knows what his interlocutor is going to say, and is waiting for his cue instead of conversing with him. Tree always seemed to have heard the lines of the other performers for the first time, and even to be a little taken aback by them.
Let me give an extreme instance of this.
In Pygmalion the heroine, in a rage, throws the hero's slippers in his face. When we rehearsed this for the first time, I had taken care to have a very soft pair of velvet slippers provided; for I knew that Mrs. Patrick Campbell was very dexterous, very strong, and a dead shot. And sure enough, when we reached this passage, Tree got the slippers well and truly delivered with unerring aim bang in his face. The effect was appalling. He had totally forgotten that there was any such incident in the play, and it seemed to him that Mrs. Campbell, suddenly giving way to an impulse of diabolical wrath and hatred, had committed and unprovoked and brutal assault on him. The physical impact was nothing; but the wound to his feelings was terrible. He collapsed on the nearest chair, and left me staring in amazement, whilst the entire personnel of the theatre crowded solicitously round him, explaining that the incident was part of the play, and even exhibiting the prompt-book to prove their words. But his morale was so shattered that it took quite a long time, and a good deal of skillful rallying and coaxing from Mrs. Campbell, before he was in a condition to resume the rehearsal.
The worst of it was that as it was quite evident that he would be just as surprised and wounded next time, Mrs. Campbell took care that the slippers should never hit him again, and the incident was consequently one of the least convincing in the performance.
George Bernard Shaw
Herbert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories Of Him And Of His Art (1920)
Hahahaha
Quotes on acting 8: Stella Adler on playing Ibsen
You have to learn the size of Ibsen. The size of the conflict. The size of the land and how it stuck out into the sea. The size of the darkness. The snowfalls and the sparkling glaciers. The mountains. Surrounded by water, oceans, the largest ice floes in the world. The sea is so deep you could take the tallest building and sink it without leaving a ripple on the surface. The rocks, the sea, the crags, the waterfalls. Do not play it small. You play too local, too little. Stretch it, because that is what is in the mind of the playwright... In most of Norway, there are only two real months of daylight. People live without the sun - seventeen hours of night. This affects their temperaments, how their houses are lit. How do you light your house when it's dark outside all day? That is up to you to find out. Ibsen says the lines should sound different depending on whether they are said in the morning or evening. You must know whether your scene is taking place in day or night. Otherwise you will just walk in, out of - and into - nowhere. An actor who gets up to act without knowing when and where he is is insane. Everybody is somewhere. Except an actor, often. He's the only one who can be somewhere and not know where.Navigation in Norway is very dangerous. It is continuously stormy. The nervousness of the weather affects the personality of the people, dating back to the Vikings. They are dominated by darkness and blackness. There are very few musical comedies that come out of Norway. What does "twenty miles south of Oslo" mean? I could say, get fifteen books on Oslo, on the Vikings, on the history of the royalty there. I'll give you this free of charge. But for Christ's sake, learn where you are going to do your acting. Be interested in the fact that Norway has the largest ice fields in the world and that it's very difficult to travel except by sleigh. I like that. I like knowing that Nora comes home by sleigh. People pass each other on the narrow road. I know that a sleigh has bells and that sleigh bells have a kind of gaiety in them. If it is dark eight months of the year, they must give themselves something to make them happy. They recognize each other's sleigh bells. Twilight is at noon. That affects you, if night lasts seenteen hours. If you know this, it will affect your acting. It will make you understand certain things you need to understand. They have hailstones of a size we can't imagine. These hailstones will be used in the last act of Enemy of the People. People throw them at Dr. Stockmann's house. You have to know such things. You must not be so much with you. Whatever is left of my me, you can have. I do not give a goddamn about my me, only what I can give you. That is what is important. That is why my life has been important. I am interested in acting, not 'being a professional'.
When you look out your stage window, you must see water - fjords and water running along the streets. It's 1880, but it's not an 1880 street. It's a 1780 street with planks. The water runs along these planked streets. You can only cross them a certain way. It is not easy going. You can go by horse or maybe by stagecoach. You come home late because you had to catch the coach. If you're late just because the words say so, you are in trouble. But not if you know that it's because there was too much baggage to put on the coach. Don't act from the words. Act from knowing whether you arrive by coach or whether you have money enough to hire a sleigh.
The fjords are very threatening. They are black and contain bodies that have been disintegrating slowly for years because the water is so cold. It is a country with a great many psychological problems. Everybody is in trouble. The churches date from the twelfth century. The twelfth century in this crazy Scandinavia produced a very special kind of architecture. It's a big thing about the churches there. Look them up. They have great gargoyles. Do not think of your own pretty little church in East Hampton. You have to see that church people go to with the gargoyles and the frightening things inside it.
Their unique landscape is unduplicated anywhere on earth. What made Ibsen so great is that he used this unusual place to give him such great truths. So when you think of this space, think of it not as your space. Think of the mountains, the water. It must inspire awe in you, so when you get to a difficult scene you will have the help of the landscape. So that if you get to a scene where someone has to flee, you will see the waterfalls, the difficulties.
All of a sudden, now, I want to cry ... Why should I tell you everything? When you are a teacher, you have to give everything away. When you are not a teacher, keep it all secret. Give nothing away. Keep it for yourself. It is not your job to share it; it is to keep it. I have a right to tell you because I am a teacher. You have a right to tell nobody because you are not a teacher: The landscape has to inspire you with awe!
The fingers of water reach seventy miles into the land from the sea. That makes quite an obstacle if you are thinking of leaving Norway. To cross the sea from the north and come south means that you have risked death to get there, and when you arrive you must arrive with death in you. In Mrs. Linde's entrance, when she says, 'I have just arrived from the North,' and somebody says, 'How did you do it?' - it does not mean by what conveyance. It means, 'How did you survive?'
-- Transcription of one of the many lectures actress and acting teacher Stella Adler gave to her class on the plays of Ibsen
Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov
Quotes on acting 7: Bette Davis
"I was thought to be 'stuck up'. I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure."
-- Bette Davis
Quotes on acting 6: Sidney Lumet
"[During the rehearsal period] I'm finding out things about the actors. What stimulates them, what triggers their emotions? What annoys them? How's their concentration? Do they have a technique? What method of acting do they use? The 'Method' made famous at the Actors Studio, based on the teachings of Stanislavsky, is not the only one. Ralph Richardson, whom I saw give at least three great performances, in theatre and film, used a completely auditory, musical system. During rehearsals of Long Day's Journey Into Night, he asked a simple question. Forty-five minutes later I finished my answer. Ralph paused a moment and then sonorously said, 'I see what you mean, dear boy: a little more cello, a little less flute.'"
-- Sidney Lumet
Making Movies
Quotes on acting 5: Barbra Streisand
I had Barbra Streisand audition a couple of times for shows and the reaction was: 'She sings great, but what can we do with a girl who looks like that?' Along came I Can Get It For You Wholesale. I thought the role of Miss Marmelstein might just fit Miss Streisand.I scheduled her last on the day of auditions. She arrived late, rushed onstage in her raccoon coat, explaining she was late because she'd seen the most marvelous shoes in a thrift shop window and just had to go in to get them. Only one of each pair fit, but she loved them anyhow and didn't we think they were wonderful? She was wearing two unmatched shoes. She started to sing and then stopped after two notes, chewing gum all through this rapid-fire monologue, saying she must have a stool, could anyone find a stool for her, please? By this time the auditors were muttering to me, 'Where did you find this nut?' She sang the first two notes of her song, then stopped again. This time to take the gum from her mouth and squash it on the underside of the stool. THEN she sang. She mesmerized 'em. They asked her to sing two more. After that, they converged on the stage to explore their new discovery up close.
David Merrick, who was the producer, took me to the back of the house alone.
'I thought I told you,' he said, 'that I don't want ugly girls in my shows!"
'I know, David, but she's so talented.'
'Talented, shmalented. I don't want ugly girls in my shows.'
'But --'
'There's no buts! Look at them, swarming all over her. They love her! What am I going to do now? I'll never get rid of her!'
Then - when Miss Streisand and all the others had gone, Mr. Laurents called me back. He was alone, sitting onstage on the stool Miss Streisand had commandeered.
'Look at this.' Arthur Laurents said to me. 'Run your hand over the bottom of this stool.'
I did. There was no gum. She hadn't recovered her gum. Arthur had been watching to see if she would. There had never been any gum.
'My God,' said Arthur. 'What have we got on our hands here?'
It was the first inkling of what an incredible actress this young singer was: an adventuress who at 18 had her shit together so strong, she took the risk of putting on an act about a raccoon coat, shoes that didn't match, a stool, and a piece of imaginary gum.
It wasn't long after that, Mr. Merrick was paying her $5,000 a week to do Funny Girl and she was the biggest star on Broadway.
-- Michael Shurleff
Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part
Quotes on acting 4: Laurette Taylor
"The student of acting sits before her performance [as Amanda Wingfield in Glass Menagerie] and marvels at the series of constant surprises with which she rewards him. Her phrasing and accent of a line is so often unexpected, her movement so unanticipated. But each surprise is confirmed and justified by its inevitability. To traffic in the unexpected for its own sake is dangerous; when Miss Taylor offers the unexpected, you say, 'Of course. That is the only way it should have been done.' There is not a single cliche in her performance from beginning to end. That is why you sit so breathless to see what this woman will do next."
-- Norris Houghton on Laurette Taylor
Quotes on acting 3: Eleonora Duse
"I feel that I have never known nor shall I ever know how to act! Those poor women in my plays have entered so totally into my heart and head, that while I am striving as best I can to make the audience understand them, I almost feel like comforting them ... but it is they who, little by little, end up by comforting me! How - and why, and at what point - this affectionate, inexplicable, and undeniable "exchange" takes place between those women and me ... it would take too long and be too difficult to relate precisely. The fact remains that, while everybody else is suspicious of the women, I get along beautifully with them! I pay no attention if they have lied, if they have betrayed, if they have sinned, if they were born crooked, as long as I feel that they have wept, that they have suffered as a result of lying or betraying or loving."
-- Legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse
Quotes on acting 2: Michael Caine
"As I get older, I'm also a lot more interested in the circumstances under which a film will be shot. Will it be a little shoestring picture that will have us sitting in mud huts in Tanzania? Or are we going to be put up in the George V in Paris? I never used to look at that side of making a film. I once spent 26 weeks in a Philippine jungle which, looking back, could just as well have been the tropical garden at Kew, for all the difference it made to the picture. We lived for 26 weeks in an unfinished brothel. The rooms were expected to be used for twenty minutes at a time and were furnished accordingly. 26 weeks in rooms like that. And there wasn't a girl in any of them. After that experience, I did The Magus without ever reading the script because the weather in England is lousy in January and I'd get a few weeks in the South of France out of it. That choice was a bit of a mistake on some ground, but in terms of climate, I had a winner. I close a script quickly if it starts: 'Alaska: our hero is stumbling through a blizzard...' "
-- Michael Caine
Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making
Quotes on acting 1: Anton Chekhov
"Describe at least one rehearsal of Three Sisters for me. Isn't there anything which needs adding or subtracting? Are you acting well, my darling? But watch out now! Don't pull a sad face in the first act. Serious, yes, but not sad. People who had long carried a grief within themselves and have become accustomed to it only whistle and frequently withdraw into themselves. So you can often be thoughtfully withdrawn on stage during conversations. Do you see?"
-- Anton Chekhov, letter to Olga Knipper
January 2, 1901
May 29, 2010
May 26, 2010
John Ford to John Wayne
As told by John Wayne to Peter Bogdanovich:
There's one thing [Ford] always told me. He said, "A lot of scenes are corny, Duke. Play 'em. Play 'em to the hilt. If it's East Lynne, play it! Don't avoid 'em, don't be self-conscious about 'em. Play 'em."
Happy birthday, John Wayne!
From Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors
His performances in these pictures [Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, The Wings of Eagles, Man Who Shot Liberty Valance] rate with the finest examples of movie acting, and his value to each film is immeasurable; yet none of them was recognized at the time as anything much more than "and John Wayne does his usual solid job," if that -- more often he was panned. The Academy nominated him only twice; first for Allan Dwan's excellent Sands of Iwo Jima, an effective and archetypal John Wayne Marine picture of non-Ford/Hawks dimension. Yet I remember that Wayne's sudden death from a sniper at the end of Sands was the first real shock -- and one of the most lastingly potent -- I ever had at the movies. The reason why this worked so powerfully for me at age ten, as well as for millions of all ages, was because of Wayne's even then accepted indestrucability. In fact, Sands of Iwo Jima was the second of only five films in which Wayne dies. Still, it wasn't until twenty years later, when he put on an eye patch, played drunk, and essentially parodied himself in True Grit, that anyone thought he was acting, and so with this over-the-top performance Duke Wayne got his second nomination and finally won his Oscar.The particular quality in a star that makes audiences instantly suspend their disbelief -- something men like Wayne or Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda naturally bring with them when they enter a scene -- is an achievement which normally goes so unnoticed that most people don't even think of it as acting at all. To a lot of people, acting means fake accents and false noses, and a lot of emoting ... John Wayne was at his best precisely when he was simply being what came to be called "John Wayne".
David Thomson, from his lengthy entry on Wayne in his The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated
As a child he moved West and, after a football scholarship at the University of Southern California, Tom Mix got him a job at Fox. There he met John Ford and worked as a set decorator on Mother Machree (28). Gradually he edged into acting, by the storybook means of being a bystander. His first big part was in The Big Trail (30, Raoul Walsh). Walsh had seen him carrying a big armchair above his head - carrying it witih flair and flourish.
Stanley Crouch on The Searchers:
When Wayne, as Ethan, comes upon the black smoke and the orange flame of the burning house left by the Comanches, his face is one of absolute terror, panic, and rage. At the top of a hill, Wayne flings out his right arm to free his rifle from the long, colorful buckskin sleeve in which it has been sheathed. The force of that flung arm is one of the most explosive gestures in all of cinema, and also among the most impotent: No one down there is alive, and Ethan knows it. He is, at that moment, like the man in Bruegel's The Triumph of Death who so impressed Hemingway because his choice was to draw a sword when faced with the irreversible horror of encroaching doom.
Natalie Wood on that moment in The Searchers when he picks her up - a moment that still, to me, this day, having seen it 20 or so times, takes my breath away.
John Wayne was a giant to me, and when he picked me up in that scene near the end of the picture, he was able to lift me as though I were a doll. It was pretty frightening because he had this look of hatred and I thought that he could easily crush me. But then there would be an almost indefinable gentleness that would come over him as he cradled me and said, 'Let's go home.' Everyone had always told me, 'John Wayne's no actor. He always plays the same part.' I can tell you, Mr. Wayne was a very fine actor. He said to me, 'When I pick you up, I may seem a little rough, but I'll be as gentle as I can be.' I said, 'You must pick me up without worrying about that or you might not give the performance you need to portray.' He smiled and said, 'Well, little lady, you're a real professional, that's for sure.'
David Thomson:
Throughout the 1930s Wayne was a star of matinee Westerns, sometimes a singing cowboy, working his way round most of the smaller studios and making something like a hundred films. By 1939 he was with Republic when John Ford asked him to be the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach. The success of that film lifted Wayne from regular work to stardom. Republic pulled themselves together for a major vehicle for him - Dark Command (40, Walsh) - and Ford called on him again to play a seaman in The Long Voyage Home (40).
John Wayne started out as a prop guy. He was a college student, and he picked up extra cash doing props for movies and occasional extra work. This was how he met John Ford. He almost got fired from a couple of Ford's films for various snafus. It took Ford a while to start "using" Wayne. It wasn't immediately apparent that this gangly raw kid had movie-star potential.
From Who the Hell's In it, by Peter Bogdonavich:
There's a moment in Rio Bravo -- which features, I think, Wayne's most genuinely endearing performance -- when he walks down the street of the jail/sheriff's office toward some men riding up to meet him. Hawks frames the shot from behind -- Wayne striding slowly, casually away from camera in his slightly rocking, graceful way -- and the image lingers a while to let us enjoy this classic, familiar figure, unmistakable from any angle, Americ'as twentieth-century Hercules moving across a world of illusion he had more than conquered.
Mark Rydell, director of "The Cowboys", and his star, John Wayne
Mark Rydell was about 30 years old when he directed (and produced) The Cowboys. It was 1972. John Wayne had been making pictures since the 20s. He had been a star for decades. Not just a star, but an icon. Rydell was a Jewish kid from the Bronx who had directed a couple of episodes of Gunsmoke and, I think, 2 feature films. What would the experience be like? Would John Wayne run all over him? How on earth would he direct John Wayne? There are a couple of great stories about the filming of this marvelous movie (and I also love Rydell's image of John Wayne sitting, on break, trying to eat his lunch, while all the kids who were in the movie climbed over him "as though he was a monkeybar ..." They loved and trusted him that much.)
Here's one of Mark Rydell's many moving memories of what it was like to direct John Wayne in The Cowboys. This is an anecdote about the filming of the beginning of the cattle drive - obviously a complicated shot, with horses and herds of cattle and camera equipment, and extras and cowboys and stunt doubles ... not to mention John Wayne.
Here's Mark Rydell on what happened on that day.
And we had 1500 head of cattle. And there's an interesting story of the first angry moment that I had with John Wayne. I was sitting up on the head of a crane. We had 9 cameras, and we were shooting this scene which had to do with starting the cattle drive. And in the background of this 1500 head of cattle, we had all the families of the kids, and all the kids are in position getting ready to start this cattle drive, and being said goodbye to by their parents. And John Wayne was seated on his horse about 50 feet in front of me and I was facing all these cattle on the top of the crane, and the scene begins with him riding over to Roscoe Lee Browne who was sitting on the top of this six-up that he had to drive, and the dialogue, if I remember correctly, is he says, "Are you ready, Mr. Nightlinger?" and he says, "Ready when you are", or something like that. And you know, you don't start 1500 head of cattle by saying, "Go". What happens is, you have to push the cattle in the rear and they move and they push the cattle in front and sometimes it takes 5 minutes for them to be going. So I didn't roll the cameras because I didn't want to waste film until the cattle were moving. There was an enormous amount of cattle. This was really a remarkable production achievement, with Wayne riding past hundreds and hundreds of heads of cattle, all which had to be handled. It was quite a complicated procedure that required a lot of attention. So Wayne decided it was time to go - so he rode up - I hadn't even started rolling the cameras yet - so he rode up to Roscoe and said, "Are you ready, Mr. Nightlinger?" Well, of course, I hadn't even rolled the cameras yet. So I lost my temper. I stood up on the crane and said, "Don't you ever do that. Go back to your spot. I'll tell you when we're going to roll our cameras, I'll tell you when 'Action' is!" and as I was talking to him, I was thinking: what a stupid thing for me to do, to yell at John Wayne, in front of all these kids and all these people, it was humiliating. And I was really sorry, but I had stuck my neck out - and I was right, by the way. And he knew I was right. He went back to his place, did the scene, got in his car - it was the end of the day - and drove into town. All of the crew came over to me one by one to shake my hand, as if to say goodbye, because they thought I would be fired for having contested John Wayne in any way whatsoever. And the Ravetch's were there, and they were horrified, and I got in the car with them to drive back to our production office in Santa Fe, and I was just mortified with guilt for having done this! And they kept saying, "Why did you do that?" And I kept saying, 'I just lost my temper!" And we got back to the production office and there were four calls from John Wayne. And I thought, this is it. I'm fired. I'll be on my way back to Los Angeles in a moment and one of John Wayne's former directors will be down here to take over the picture. So I finally got up my courage and I called him. And he said, "Mark, let's have dinner." And I thought, 'Okay, there's the kiss of death." So we met, and, by the way, there was nothing more remarkable than the experience of going to dinner in Santa Fe with John Wayne, who was 6'5" and an icon. He walked into the restaurant and the place gasped! We sat down for dinner and I am waiting for the axe to fall, for him to say, 'Son, you're a nice guy, but I think we're going to be better off with a better director." You know, I was waiting for that horrifying moment! Which never came, by the way. And he proceeded to tell me that I treated him the way John Ford treated him. I had yelled at him, and he was very impressed that I had the courage to tell him off. He knew that I was right, and he was wrong. Even though it was something I certainly never should have done, he was impressed that I had the courage to do it. And he called me "Sir" from that day forward, and for the rest of the 102 days we shot this picture. And that's the kind of guy he was.
Maureen O'Hara in her autobiography 'Tis Herself: A Memoir
There is only one fitting way to end our discussion of The Quiet Man, and that's with a whisper. No matter what part of the world I'm in, the question I am always asked is: "What did you whisper into John Wayne's ear at the end of The Quiet Man?" It was John Ford's idea: it was the ending he wanted. I was told by Mr. Ford exactly what I was to say. At first I refused. I said, "No. I can't. I can't say that to Duke." But Mr. Ford wanted a very shocked reaction from Duke, and he said, "I'm telling you, you are to say it." I had no choice, and so I agreed, but with a catch: "I'll say it on one condition - that it is never ever repeated or revealed to anyone." So we made a deal. After the scene was over, we told Duke about our agreement and three of us made a pact. There are those who claim that they were told and know what I said. They don't and are lying. John Ford took it to his grave - so did Duke - and the answer will die with me. Curiosity about the whisper has become a great part of the Quiet Man legend. I have no doubt that as long as the film endures, so will the speculation. The Quiet Man meant so much to John Ford, John Wayne, and myself. I know it was their favorite picture too. It bonded us as artists and friends in a way that happens but once in a career. That little piece of The Quiet Man belongs to just us, and so I hope you'll understand as I answer:I'll never tell.
One of my favorite reaction shots from him is Wayne's body language when O'Hara whispers whatever it is she whispers to him. You can feel him go from 0 to 1000 in one second, and it is all he can do to wait until they get back to their house and into their bed. It's subtle evocative and totally clear physical acting. Last moment of the movie, I'm sure fans will remember it.
David Thomson:
Even at that stage [the late 30s, early 40s], Wayne had this virtue denied to Ford's "stock company": he did not ham. Universal put him opposite Dietrich in Seven Sinners (40, Tay Garnett) and Republic lowered its sights to more Westerns. For the next few years he made fodder at his home studio and more adventurous work outside, much of which only exposed his monotonous fierceness: Reap the Wild Wind (42, Cecil B. De Mille); The Spoilers (42, Ray Enright); Flying Tigers (42, David Miller); with Joan Crawford in Jules Dassin's crazy Reunion in France (42); and The Fighting Seabees (44, Edward Ludwig). In 1945, he was in Back to Bataan (Edward Dmytryk), Flame of the Barbary Coast (Joseph Kane), and was overshadowed by Robert Montgomery in They Were Expendable (Ford). He was bizarrely paired with Claudette Colbert in a comedy, Without Reservations (46, Mervyn Le Roy), but Rebublic still pushed straight Westerns at him.
More from the transcript of the interview John Wayne gave with Peter Bogdonavich - I wish all action stars looked at their jobs in this way. We'd get some better movies.
Any time there was a chance for a reaction -- which is the most important thing in a motion picture -- he [John Ford] always took reactions of me, so I'd be a part of every scene. Because I had a great deal of time in the picture when other people were talking, and all my stuff was just reactions. They become very important throughout a picture, they build your part. They always say I'm in action movies, but it's in reaction pictures that they remember me -- pictures that are full of reactions, but have a background of action.
Katharine Hepburn on John Wayne in her autobiography Me : Stories of My Life
From head to toe he is all of a piece. Big head. Wide blue eyes. Sandy hair. Rugged skin - lined by living and fun and character. Not by just rotting away. A nose not too big, not too small. Good teeth. A face alive with humor. Good humor I should say, and a sharp wit. Dangerous when roused. His shoulders are broad - very. His chest massive - very. When I leaned against him (which I did as often as possible, I must confess - I am reduced to such innocent pleasures), thrilling. It was like leaning against a great tree. His hands are big. Mine, which are big too, seemed to disappear. Good legs. No seat. A real man's body.And the base of this incredible creation. A pair of small sensitive feet. Carrying his huge frame as though it were a feather. Light of tread. Springy. Dancing. Pretty feet.
Very observing. Very aware. Listens. Concentrates. Witty slant. Ready to laugh. To be laughed at. To answer. To stick his neck out. Funny. Outrageous. Spoiled. Self-indulgent. Tough. Full of charm. Knows it. Uses it. Disregards it. With an alarming accuracy. Not much gets past him.
He was always on time. Always knew the scene. Always full of notions about what should be done. Tough on a director who had not done his homework. Considerate to his fellow actors. Very impatient with anyone who was inefficient. And did not bother to cover it up.
David Thomson:
Then came two films that radically enlarged his image: Fort Apache (48, Ford), in which he played a cavalry captain, and Red River (48, Howard Hawks). Not least of his achievements as a guide to players is the way Hawks was the first to see the slit-eyed obdurate side to Wayne's character. Tom Dunson is a fine character study: a man made hard by an early mistake and by the emphasis on achievement with which he tried to conceal that mistake. With Ford again, Wayne was one of Three Godfathers (48), a truly awful movie. But in 1949, he was Captain Nathan Brittles at the point of retirement in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford), and in 1950 the trilogy was completed withthe leisurely Rio Grande (Ford). Asked to be older, a husband and a father, Wayne became human and touching.
More from Katharine Hepburn:
Life has dealt Wayne some severe blows. He can take them. He has shown it. He doesn't lack self-discipline. He dares to walk by himself. Run. Dance. Skip. Walk. Crawl through life. He has done it all. Don't pity me, please.And with all this he has a most gentle and respectful gratitude toward people who he feels have contributed very firmly to his success. His admirers. He is meticulous in answering fan mail. Realistic in allowing the press to come to the set. Uncomplicated in his reaction to praise and admiration. Delighted to be the recipient of this or that award - reward. A simple man. None of that complicated Self-Self-Self which seems to torment myself and others who shall be nameless when they are confronted with the Prize for good performance. I often wonder whether we behave so ungraciously because we really think that we should have been given a prize for every performance. And are therefore sort of sore to begin with. Well, as I began - he is a simple and decent man. Considerate to the people who rush him in a sort of wild enthusiasm. Simple in his enjoyment of his own success. Like Bogie. He really appreciates the praise heaped upon him. A wonderful childlike, naive open spirit.
From Who The Hell's In It, by Peter Bogdonavich:
In a lifetime of almost thirty years as a top-ten box-office attraction (plus twenty before that as a not unpopular star actor), Wayne's accumulated persona had even before his death attained such mythic proportions that by then the most myopic of viewers and reviewers had finally noted it. He brought to each new movie (good or bad) a powerful resonance from the past -- his own and ours -- which filled the world with reverberations above and beyond its own perhaps undistinguished qualities. That was the true measure of a great movie star of the golden age.
David Thomson:
Next, however, came The Searchers (56, Ford), one of his finest films - once more a study of an unapproachable stubborn man, finally excluded from the family reunion as a romantic but lonely figure facing the landscape. He coasted with The Wings of Eagles (57, Ford), Legend of the Lost (57, Hathaway), and The Barbarian and the Geisha (58, John Huston), before making Rio Bravo (59, Hawks). Once more, Hawks enlarged Wayne by concentrating on an alcoholic Dean Martin and having Wayne watch him "like a friend". It worked - as did the application of Angie Dickinson's talkative emotional crises to Wayne's solidity - so that Rio Bravo is not just Wayne's most humane picture but the one that makes him most comic.
David Thomson:
His death moved nearly everyone, as had his brave walk down the Academy staircase, two months before death, to give the best picture Oscar to ... The Deer Hunter (that'll be the day, indeed.)He made too many pictures, of course; but only because for so long he was a guarantee of profit.
Wayne and Bogdanovich again:
One of the most memorable moments of any picture I've seen you in is a silent moment in The Searchers. After you see what's been done to the white women, there's a close-up of you, camera moves in --I turn back. Terrific shot. Helluva shot. And everybody can put their own thoughts to it. You're not forced to think one way or the other.
Your gestures in pictures are often daring -- large -- and show the kind of freedom and lack of inhibition you have. Did you get that from Ford, or did you always have that?
No, I think that's the first lesson you learn in a high school play -- that if you're going to make a gesture, make it.
To be honest: that has to be some of the best acting advice I've ever heard.
"If you're going to make a gesture, make it."
So much of bad phony acting is when people make gestures half-heartedly, or they PRETEND to make gestures .... hoping the audience won't pick up on the fact that they're not REALLY making the gesture ...
but audiences always know the difference between phony and real. They just do.
David Thomson:
But what a star, what a presence, and what a wealth of reserve he brought to that bold presence. (So you wonder if he couldn't have played comedy.)Nor has he dated. All one can say is that he filled the screen role of a necessarily difficult man as naturally as most actors wore clothes. There was an age when people could be stars without undue grandeur or self-mockery. Whether Wayne is looking at the land that may make a great ranch, or turning in a doorway to survey his true home, the desert, every gesture was authentic and a prized disclosure. He moved the way singers sing, with huge confidence and daring. You have to imagine how it all began in the way Raoul Walsh saw him carrying that armchair - as if it was a young girl in a red robe being lifted up in mercy and wonder.
John Wayne told Peter Bogdanovich:
A funny thing happened with Ford after The Big Trail. He was a strange character, you know. After I did that picture, I came back, and he was making Up the River. I went over and said, "Hi, coach." Nothing. I thought he didn't hear me. So I figured, Oh, well, he didn't even see me. The next time I saw him I went, "Hi, coach, hi." And again I didn't get anything. So the next time I just went right up in front of him and went, "Hi, coach." And he turned and talked to somebody else. I thought, That's that -- he won't speak to me. I don't know how the hell I can communicate.About two years later, I was in Catalina with Ward, having a belt, and Barbara [Ford], his daughter -- she was a little girl then -- she ran in and said, 'Daddy wants to see you." I said, "Whoa, wait a minute, Barbara, you got the wrong boy -- must be Ward." She said, "No, it's you, Duke." So I said, "Yeah, honey, run along, you know this is a bar." So his wife, Mary Ford, came to the door and she said, "Duke, come here. Jack is expecting you out there." I said, "All right." So I went out to the Araner, his boat, and I go aboard -- I remember Jim Tully was there and four or five guys -- and Jack was in the middle of a goddamn story, and he looked up at me and said, "Hi, Duke, sit down." And to this goddamn day I don't know why he didn't speak to me for two years.
Excerpt from Michael Caine's awesome book Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making
I noticed that American actors always try to cut down their dialogue. They say, "I'm not going to say all this. You say that line." At first I couldn't figure out why; I came from theatre, where you covetously count your lines. But it's a smart approach for an actor to give up lines in the movies because while you wind up talking about them, they wind up listening and reacting. It's no accident that Rambo hardly speaks. Sylvester Stallone is not a fool.I remember when I first went to America, right after I made Alfie. I met John Wayne in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He'd just got out of a helicopter, he was dressed as Hondo and he came over and introduced himself to me.
I said: "I do know who you are, Mr. Wayne."
He said, "You just come over?"
"Yeah."
He said, "Let me give you a piece of advice: talk low, talk slow, and don't say much."
Katharine Hepburn again:
As an actor, he has an extraordinary gift. A unique naturalness. Developed by movie actors who just happen to become actors. Gary Cooper had it. An unselfconsciousness. An ability to think and feel. Seeming to woo the camera. A very subtle capacity to think and express and caress the camera - the audience. With no apparent effort. A secret between them ... Wayne has a wonderful gift of natural speed. Of arrested motion. Of going suddenly off on a new tack. Try something totally unrehearsed with him. He takes the ball and runs and throws with a freedom and wit and gaiety which is great fun. As powerful as is his personality, so too is his acting capacity powerful. He is a very very good actor in the most highbrow sense of the word. You don't catch him at it.
From Who The Hell's In it, by Peter Bogdonavich:
To me, Duke had always seemed slightly out of breath, as though he hadn't yet caught up on the last twenty years, not to mention the last twenty minutes. Both [John] Ford and [Howard] Hawks truly loved him, of course, and even knowing him a little, as I did, it was pretty difficult not to like him. All this, and a lot more, obviously communicated itself to the public -- still the top American star more than seventy years since his beginning. His visual legacy has defined him as the archetypal man of the American West -- bold, innocent, profane, idealistic, wrongheaded, good-hearted, single-minded, quick to action, not given to pretension, essentially alone, ready for any adventure -- no matter how grand or daring; larger, finally, than life or death.
Such a handsome man.
I love how, in that first famous entrance in Stagecoach, Ford moves in quickly to his face, and there's a slight moment where Wayne is out of focus. I love how Ford kept that. It gives it an immediacy, a sense of reality ... that moment of blurriness.
A powerful actor, one I never get tired of studying: his walk, his line readings, his eyes, his reactions ... He's subtle, he's physical, he's funny, he's smart in his choices. And then, of course, there's the magic.
Movie magic.
You know it when you see it.
Wayne had it in spades.
May 22, 2010
It's so funny when William Powell lies
In Libeled Lady, William Powell plays Bill Chandler, a guy hired (or, actually, RE-hired) by newspaper editor Warren Haggerty (played by Spencer Tracy) to basically set up heiress Connie Allenbury (played by Myrna Loy) for a big fall, so that they can derail her libel suit against the newspaper. It is Chandler's job, during a cross-Atlantic cruise, to ingratiate himself with the Allenbury's, make Connie trust him, and hopefully fall in love with him so that he can then ... but the plot is far too Byzantine and ridiculous to describe, and if you haven't seen it, you really must, and Jean Harlow is involved, and she's awesome, and what are you waiting for, but the point is:
Chandler (Powell) knows that in order to get to Connie he has to butter up her father first (played by the reliably awesome Walter Connolly). So he does a bit of research and finds out that Mr. Allenbury is a passionate trout-angler. Angling is his main love in life. Chandler crash-studies angling in his stateroom on the ship, and then pulls out all of the trivia and lingo when he meets Allenbury, and keeps trying to draw the conversation to fish. Powell blurts out, randomly, a propos of nothing: "MY favorite sport is fishing."
Uhm, nobody asked you, bub. The confused glances given to him by Loy and Connolly make the situation even funnier.
It is so much fun to watch William Powell lie. And make things up. I could watch it all day. It borders on the absurd (borders?), and as he gets deeper into his lies (his character knows NOTHING about fishing), the more he continues to insist that he knows what he is talking about.
Naturally, this gets him into all sorts of trouble, the kind of "actor's nightmare" well-known to creative people everywhere: the nightmare of suddenly being onstage, in the middle of a production, and you are the lead, and you have never had a rehearsal, do not know the lines, the blocking, you know NOTHING.
In Libeled Lady, this is what happens to William Powell.
Because once you tell an ardent fisherman, "I live to angle. As a matter of fact, I have fished for trout at Lake Taupo" (and you say this because you KNOW it will impress, even though you are not sure why, but the book you read seemed to think it was important, and you know that that will mean your angling listener will take you seriously) - you can't go back. You can't then soft-pedal it and say, "Oops, my bad, I don't really love fishing", or ... "You must have misunderstood me. I actually have never held a fishing pole in my life."
And that is where William Powell is so funny: when he is in a situation where there is finally no return (I just watched Love Crazy - my review here - and that movie is all about the point-of-no-return, poor guy). Powell is so funny when the screws are tightening and when he, a dignified gentleman, or someone who wants to be thought of that way, is put in the position of looking like a fool.
For example, the clip below. Mr. Allenbury, thrilled to finally meet someone who is as passionate a fisherman as he is, invites Mr. Chandler to come on a fishing outing. The book Powell is reading? "Trout Fishing For Beginners."
May 20, 2010
"Where's his damn box set?" - Kim Morgan on John Garfield
A recap of the Arthur Lyons Film Noir festival in Palm Springs by Kim Morgan, with a special focus on John Garfield. He's long been a favorite of mine. Due to my obsession with all things Actors Studio starting from when I was 13 years old, he came on my radar long before he might have otherwise, because of his association with the Group Theatre in the 30s, started by Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman, and his sort of shadow-box-dance with Marlon Brando for roles in Streetcar and On the Waterfront (which was actually written for Garfield). He was known as Julie Garfinkel back then. The internalized anti-Semitism of the day brought about the name change, but to his good friends - and he had many (despite the horrible way he ended) he was always known as "Julie" or "Jules-y".
John Garfield's daughter Julie was at the Film Noir fest, and Kim Morgan got to interview her about her father:
The picture I presented was one of his greatest films, and his last movie before he passed away -- He Ran All the Way (1951). A movie made by many victims of the blacklist, including director John Berry and co-writers Hugo Butler and Dalton Trumbo (who was jailed as one of the "Hollywood Ten"), the story of a criminal on the lam, a desperate man, a man in a panic who takes a family hostage only to be tortured by his conscious and the cold hands of fate, held extra resonance. There was the power of the film itself, the history and real life tragedy of its star, and then Julie sitting next to me. She had never seen her father's final film on the big screen, and experiencing her taking in daddy so beautifully shot by James Wong Howe, and his tough, vulnerable, wounded, complicated performance was especially moving.
I did not know that John Garfield, at one point in his life, sold diaphragms door to door. Can you imagine? That guy in the picture above selling birth control at your door?
A giant star in his day, who died way too young, his death hurried upon him by the stress and harassment he was receiving from the HUAC, his funeral in 1952 was a mob scene of fans. But now? What has happened?
Go read Kim's piece. It's an emotional tribute to an actor rather forgotten nowadays.
I wrote about John Garfield's screen debut in Michael Curtiz's Four Daughters (1938) here.
A great American movie star.
May 18, 2010
"Jesus Christ! That's Henry Fonda!"
A great post from one of my new favorite blogs (I spent a good two hours the other day scrolling through the damn thing - it's RICH) about Henry Fonda, typecasting, and Sergio Leone's casting of Fonda as the heavy in Once Upon a Time in the West. There are two clips included: one of Fonda's entrance in that film (a great entrance, with a flashy "look at me, Ma" camera move) and the second a clip of Fonda talking about that entrance on a 1975 talk show. I suggest watching the second clip first, of Fonda describing the entrance, and then go back to watch the entrance itself. Notice Fonda's technical memory of each shot, each POV in that opening sequence. That's a pro.
And of course. Leone was right. You'll see what I mean after you watch the clip of Fonda on the talk show.
Great stuff.
Go read the whole thing. And scroll through that incredible site. He's got a great eye.
"He's the man standing up there beside Errol Flynn." - Amanda McBroom
Amanda McBroom
I said recently on Twitter (I know, so ridiculous, like that has any validity whatsoever - however, apparently it's all going into the Library of Congress, so at least my name will live on forever in some capacity) that the best byproduct so far of Ridley Scott's self-serious and "historically accurate" Robin Hood is that Errol Flynn is all over the place right now, and I'm in heaven about it. He's always had the props, obviously, but it's nice to see him get the props once again, in almost every single review, from folks who miss the jaunty careless air he brought to a role that is, honestly, just an excuse for some swashbuckling and some fun. Shouldn't it all be a bit more fun? (Thanks, Mr. Ebert. I agree.)
I grew up on Errol Flynn movies, and when the Dean Stockwell obsession took over my life in 2007, I loved going back to re-watch Kim, a movie I had seen on a fuzzy black-and-white television in our family den when I was about 10 years old. Stockwell tells stories of how Flynn treated him and what that experience was like, and it's pretty cool.
All of this is to say:
Cabaret singer Amanda McBroom is the daughter of David Bruce, an actor who worked with Errol Flynn multiple times, a man with a long career (there's a wonderful tribute to him here). McBroom is also a songwriter (she wrote, you know, that little-known song called "The Rose", made famous by another performer), and she wrote a song about her father called "Errol Flynn" that came up on my iPod shuffle today and, as always, I had to skip right over it, because it's far too emotional for me to listen to when I'm out and about doing errands. I cannot listen to it with any distance. It dissolves me. Repeatedly.
I won't even speak any further about it. Some things are beyond words, and it's better to just point to the source, and say: "There. Look at that." It is a song that has even more poignancy to me now than it did when I first heard it.
It's a tribute to her father, yes, but it's also a tribute to artists. To the loneliness of the pursuit, and to the inherent dignity in a job well done, even in B-movies, even with your name far far below the star's name. David Bruce was just such an actor.
Below the jump is a clip of Amanda McBroom performing "Errol Flynn". It's controlled, elegant, with abysses of emotion below the surface. And listen to those lyrics.
May 3, 2010
Psychopaths and morality: Jeremy Renner and Sissy Spacek
Fascinating article called Psychopaths and Rational Morality: The Frontal Cortex, with an even better conversation going on in the comments. Go read the whole thing, it's very interesting.
It is one of my obsessions: psychopaths, antisocial personalities, whatever name you want to call them, and has been obsessing me for years. I suppose it dovetails with my obsession with cults, brainwashing, and any kind of pressurized groupthink. The function of the brain, perhaps, and what it means when something appears to be "missing" or "altered".
I've been working on something (in my head so far) about Jeremy Renner, based not just on his performance in The Hurt Locker, but also in Dahmer (my review here), Neo Ned (my review here), and North Country - a terrible movie, but he's wonderful in it.
The character Renner plays in 28 Weeks Later has some similarities to these, although it takes on a heroic feel here - but the underlying emotional apparatus is very similar to the rest of his roles. It has to do with his facility at playing what I would call "antisocial" men. But his take on it is quite subtle, quite intuitive, and I would be interested to hear him speak of it more - but perhaps it's something you don't really want to talk about. If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. The Hurt Locker is the culminating moment of his examination (in some pretty poor films) of these types of men, and it's interesting because in that film it shows that there is a place in the world for such individuals, where their talents - and their lack of empathy - are actually essential to their jobs. Most psychopaths are in prison, but there are "successful" psychopaths (I knew one once, and I am pretty sure I recently met another one - dodged a bullet there!) - people who are able to operate without turning into criminals. The character of Sgt. James in Hurt Locker is the classic example of a man who cannot "fit in" to the normal world, and he seems, frankly, baffled by his personal relationships, when he thinks about them at all. His wife, his son ... He does not lack feeling, far from it, it's just that his feelings don't get in the way of him being who he needs to be. It's not that he WON'T negotiate, it is that he is unable to. The now-famous moment in the grocery store at the end of the film is a perfect representation of that.
But I will save all of that for the post I want to write about Renner, and the characters he plays - because I feel he occupies a very individual position, not just now, but for all time. I am hard pressed to come up with a comparison - although I have found one. Again, I'll save that for the post proper, whenever I write it.
That article I linked to above, an examination of morality, emotion, logic, and psychopaths, is exactly the type of thing I have been thinking about, when I have been thinking about Jeremy Renner. However: even without neuroscientists adding to our knowledge of brain function, these individuals are known and recognized, and have been since the beginning of time.
I recently read Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
It's a really good book, with many fascinating case studies (of "successful" psychopaths - meaning those who have never broken the law, a rare breed - because they fly under the radar, and yet they still destroy lives - and then the more garden-variety "unsuccessful" versions, filling up the prison population) - and Hare resists "diagnosing" people that he doesn't know. People come to him all the time with "is so and so a psychopath", and he can't say, without having studied the individual himself. Hannibal Lecter comes up a lot, as the modern-day version of what people think a "psychopath" is. He cautions against that limited interpretation, because you may miss what is going on right in front of you, because the person doesn't SEEM like a "psycho". One of the defining characteristics of a psychopath is "charm". It may be glib or superficial, but it can certainly work upon you, if you do not pick up on the other signals. Many of them are highly skilled in diffusing suspicion. Their emotions are shallow, they do not understand things such as love or empathy. Hare quotes psychologists J.H. Johns and H.C. Quay, who wrote famously that psychopaths "know the words but not the music".
Truman Capote in In Cold Blood
Many people who routinely work with people who score high on Hare's psychopath checklist report feeling a strange skin-crawling sensation when in the presence of these people. I have no statistics to back this up, but I would warrant a guess that that skin-crawling feeling (reported by multiple people, remember) has some evolutionary purpose. Something deep and survival-based. The feeling Rikki-Tikki-Tavi got when he made eye contact with the cobra, perhaps. Get away from this creature. Either kill it, or RUN.
Gavin de Becker talks about the "gift of fear". Fear like that tells us when something is wrong. Listen. It is a gift from millions of years of evolution. Take that, Kirk Cameron.
One of the best fictional portraits of a psychopath in the history of literature is Steinbeck's Cathy (even just the name gives me the creeps) in East of Eden. I was surprised that Hare did not reference it in his book, since he does use multiple examples from literature and film. Steinbeck, in his Biblical allegory, is certainly making a connection between psychopaths and the Devil. Cathy has the Devil in her. She is cool, calculated, gorgeous (the perfect smokescreen), and a liar. She lies indiscriminately (one of the defining characteristics of a psychopath). They lie so often that those listening to them, operating from their own assumptions of sanity, and how normal people behave, sometimes get caught up in it. We are not used to dealing with such creatures (thank God). They have a tendency to fool everyone: parole officers, prison officials, social workers ... They are masters of deception. And yet, often, people cannot put their finger on what is "off", what is wrong. Steinbeck in East of Eden writes:
Cathy was chewing a piece of meat, chewing with her front teeth. Samuel had never seen anyone chew that way before. And when she swallowed, her little tongue flicked around her lips. Samuel's mind repeated, "Something - something - can't find what it is. Something's wrong," and the silence hung on the table.
This is a textbook response to people like this, according to Hare: Something's "off". But what? What exactly is "wrong"? You can't point right at it, but you know it's there. A skin-crawling sensation the only indication that perhaps you are in the presence of something quite different from your garden-variety human being.
Steinbeck doesn't mince words. Here is how he introduces Cathy:
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.
There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.
As though nature concealed a trap, Cathy had from the first a face of innocence. Her hair was gold and lovely; wide-set hazel eyes with upper lids that drooped made her look mysteriously sleepy. Her nose was delicate and thin, and her cheekbones high and wide, sweeping down to a small chin so that her face was heart-shaped. Her mouth was well shaped and well lipped but abnormally small -- what used to be called a rosebud. Her ears were very little, without lobes, and they pressed so close to her head that even with her hair combed up they made no silhouette. They were thin flaps sealed against her head.
Cathy always had a child's figure even after she was grown, slender, delicate arms and hands -- tiny hands. Her breasts never developed much. Before her puberty the nipples turned inward. Her mother had to manipulate them out when they became painful in Cathy's tenth year. Her body was a boy's body, narrow-hipped, straight-legged, but her ankles were thin and straight without being slender. Her feet were small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs. She was a pretty child and she became a pretty woman. Her voice was huskily soft, and it could be so sweet as to be irresistible. But there must have been some steel cord in her throat, for Cathy's voice could cut like a file when she wished.
Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.
She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her. Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try and find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly. And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.
Cathy was different from other children in many ways, but one thing in particular set her apart. Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops. And this slavishness to the group normally extends into every game, every practice, social or otherwise. It is a protective coloration children utilize for their safety.
Cathy had none of this. She never conformed in dress or conduct. She wore whatever she wanted to. The result was that quite often other children imitated her.
As she grew older the group, the herd, which is any collection of children, began to sense what adults felt, that there was something foreign about Cathy. After a while only one person at a time associated with her. Groups of boys and girls avoided her as though she carried a nameless danger.
Cathy was a liar, but she did not lie the way most children do. Hers was no daydream lying, when the thing imagined is told and, to make it seem more real, told as real. That is just ordinary deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar -- if he is financially fortunate.
Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also -- either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.
Since Cathy was an only child her mother had no close contrast in the family. She thought all children were like her own. And since all parents are worriers she was convinced that all her friends had the same problems.
Cathy's father was not so sure. He operated a small tannery in a town in Massachusetts, which made a comfortable, careful living if he worked very hard. Mr. Ames came in contact with other children away from his home and he felt that Cathy was not like other children. It was a matter more felt than known. He was uneasy about his daughter but he could not have said why.
Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain.
It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some directions she was completely blind in others.
Now we come to something else, that I have written about before, but which is appropriate enough here to reference again:
Roger Ebert writes in his review of Terrence Malick's great film Badlands:
She claimed she was kidnapped and forced to go along with Starkweather. When they first were captured, he asked the deputies to leave her alone: "She didn't do nothing." Later, at his trial, he claimed she was the most trigger-happy person he ever knew, and was responsible for some of the killings. It is a case that is still not closed, although "Badlands" sees her as a child of vast simplicity who went along at first because she was flattered that he liked her: "I wasn't popular at school on account of having no personality and not being pretty."
Badlands is narrated by Holly, but we don't get much information from her voiceover. Her voice is flat. Tired-out. There is no introspection in her. She appears to be passively reacting to events. The accepted "narrative" of these two spree-killers is that Kit (played by Martin Sheen) was the loose cannon, and she was just along for the ride because she loved him. She had more sympathy, maybe because she was a woman, and maybe because it seemed she was victimized, she got roped into something she wanted no part of. This is how that pairing is often portrayed. Are they in the grand tradition of criminal pairings (like I talked about here)? Or are they something totally different? Kit is painted as the truly bad guy (albeit damaged and blunted by life), but what about her? What is it like to be her? How does she react to things? What is HER damage?
Sissy Spacek (and Malick) work subversively here, leaving most of the script uneloquent on her reasoning, which makes her a pretty frightening character. I WANT to see her as "kidnapped", almost, but that's not the case. She participates, even in her ultimate passivity. Doing nothing is also participation, when you are on a killing spree. But her motives remain mysterious. You don't see evidence of a grand passion (the way you do in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, or even Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers - where it is obviously the alchemy of the two personalities that jumpstarts them) - you don't see her operating under any kind of NORMAL or recognizable motivation: love, yearning for a home, a partner - even flat-out boredom - none of those things seem to occur to this freckled flat-eyed teenager. In a way, it is Sissy Spacek's most creepy performance.
In the middle of Without Conscience, which is basically a self-help book (How to Know If You are Dealing with a Psychopath, and How to Get the Hell Away From Them), Hare analyses the character of Holly in Badlands, from his perspective as a psychologist who has worked mainly in prisons. As he mentioned, he is not in the business of long-distance psychoanalyzing, but here, he shares a theory he has about the murderous duo portrayed in Badlands, and I found it startling and unusual. Something that isn't really in the preferred "narrative" of that particular film, which, as I mentioned, usually sees Kit as the leader, and Holly as the passive follower. Normally, I don't like film analysis such as this - which is trying to prove a specific point (that has nothing to do with the art of film-making). For example, a cultural conservative saying, "Such and such is a good movie because it presents core values that I agree with, and here's why ..." It's shallow and uninteresting, and more like an undergraduate thesis paper than actual film analysis. It is interested in things other than movies. But here, at least in Hare's thoughts on Badlands, I make an exception, because he takes the film at its word, first of all - and appears to be judging it as a work of art, not a case study. He sees its effectiveness, and also perceives an opportunity to illuminate the character of the elusive "psychopath", by talking about the film. He does it in such a manner that it really got my attention.
It's a way of looking at the characters of Kit and Holly (but especially Holly) that I have not seen spoken of before, in reviews of Badlands.
Check it out:
Terrence Malick's movie Badlands, loosely based on the killing career of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, is a chilling film fantasy with a coldly realistic core. The fantasy resides in the character of Kit Carruthers, whose irresistible charm and slick patter is absolutely consistent with the psychopathic profile but whose attachment to his girlfriend Holly runs too deep and strong to ring true. One might be tempted to dismiss this movie as the typical Hollywood romance of the psychopath with a heart of gold, but look again. Behind Kit sits Holly, strictly along for the ride. It takes a second viewing for the real case history to pop into the foreground: If Kit is the moviemaker's conception of a psychopath, Holly is the real thing, a true "other" brilliantly portrayed by Sissy Spacek as a talking mask.Two aspects of Holly's character exemplify and dramatize important aspects of the psychopathic personality. One is her emotional impoverishment and the clear sense she conveys of simply going through the motions of feeling deeply. One clue is the sometimes outrageous inappropriateness of her behavior. After Kit guns down her father before her eyes for objecting to his presence in Holly'w life, the fifteen-year-old youngster slaps Kit's face. Later she flops into a chair and complains of a headache; later still she flees with Kit on a cross-country killing spree after he sets fire to her house to conceal her father's body.
In another example, with several more murders to his name now, Kit lazily separates a terrified couple from their car at gunpoint and directs them out into an empty field. Casually, Holly falls into step with the frightened woman. "Hi," she says, in her flat, childish voice. "What will happen?" asks the woman, desperate for some understanding of what's going on. "Oh," answers Holly, "Kit says he feels like he just might explode. I feel like that myself sometimes. Don't you?" The scene ends with Kit locking the two in a root cellar in the middle of the field. Just about to walk away, he suddenly shoots into the cellar door. "Think I got 'em?" he asks, as if swatting at flies in the dark.
Perhaps the film's most subtle evidence of psychopathy comes through in Holly's narration of the film, delivered in a monotone and embellished with phrases drawn straight from the glossies telling young girls what they should feel. Holly speaks of the love she and Kit share, but the actress manages somehow to convey the notion that Holly has no experiential knowledge of the feelings she reports. If there was ever an example of "knowing the words but not the music," Spacek's character is it, giving viewers a firsthand experience of the odd sensation, the unnamable distrust and skin-crawling feeling, that many - lay people and professionals alike - report after their interactions with psychopaths.
There is a great great compliment to Spacek there, in the simple phrase: "the actress manages somehow to convey ..."
It is the "somehow" that contains the compliment. The great mystery of great acting. "Somehow". Who knows HOW she does it. It doesn't even matter how.
I think that is a fine analysis of the creepiness (and also deeply insightful nature) of Spacek's work in that film.
Back to the original reason for writing this post: Great article (and comments discussion) about psychopaths and morality.
May 2, 2010
Master class with Liv Ullmann
I've got Liv Ullmann on the brain after watching the HBO "Master Class" show, where she coached 5 young actors in the Mitch-Blanche date scene in Streetcar Named Desire (which she was, at that time, directing, with Cate Blanchett - I couldn't get tickets to the damn thing at BAM, and believe me, I tried - I hate to miss EVENTS like that). The Master Class was so moving on so many levels. It made me think about being young, hopeful, ambitious, full of desire to do well ... and also the people who offered helping hands along the way. Ullmann has thought deeply about Streetcar, and there were snippets of the rehearsal process with Blanchett, including an incredibly moving moment where she is speaking to Blanchett about the "waltz" (from Streetcar), and Ullmann said, "The waltz is here." She reached out and touched Blanchett's heart. "The waltz is here." It is not something heard, or something from the outside - it is here.
Some of the young actors "got" it, others didn't (one in particular - a girl whose interpretation of the Mitch-Blanche scene is that Blanche wants to "get with" Mitch. What play did SHE read?) Alex and I had to pause it a bunch of times to discuss it. Alex said, "I do not understand why so many actresses, when playing Tennessee Williams, equate fragility and damage with weakness." The resistance in the young actress to being "weak" kept her from even being able to read the play correctly. However, after a couple of notes from Ullmann, the young actress really did give it her best shot - but it was a struggle for her. She was a hot young girl, probably unused to having to play anything other than "winners". But still: watching the work process, the rehearsals, all of the different actors playing the same scene ... and Ullmann's notes, and script analysis - fantastic stuff, look for it if you haven't seen it yet.
I will never be reconciled to the fact that I couldn't get in to see the Ullmann/Blanchett Streetcar, but it sure was a treat to watch her hold that master class with these eager sweet young actors. I loved watching them work. Take chances. Go out shopping for rehearsal clothes that they thought said "Mitch", "Blanche". Beautiful. And then, in a couple of moments, as a couple of them did that scene, you could feel ... trembling on the edge of the sparse rehearsal room, the raw unvarnished setting ... you could feel ... the play. IT was in the room. A couple of them actually approached to getting the play, and there were some cut-aways to Ullmann's face watching these scenes, and the smile - the smile on her face - My God, she has a light-switch inside of her. Is there anyone more luminous?
David Thomson writes of Ingmar Bergman's Persona in his book "Have You Seen . . . ?"
It could not be simpler. A great actress, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), was playing in the last performance of Electra. In the second act, she stopped. She would not take a prompt or a cue. It lasted a minute. Then she went on again, as if nothing had happened. She laughed afterward - she said she had this terrible fit of laughter in her. She had supper as usual with her husband. But next morning she was speechless. "This state has now lasted for three months." Tests reveal nothing in the way of a health problem or a hysterical reaction. These are the notes given to Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) as she prepares to meet Elisabeth Vogler. This is the start of Ingmar Bergman's Persona.The nurse is amiable, decent, professional - I daresay she takes some pride in having common sense, a practical nature, a basic belief in people being healed. I mean, a nurse has got to believe that, just as an actress has got to hope that there are people out there who will be reached by the messages she believes she is sending. Anyway, the nurse cannot stand the silence. So she begins to talk and the film settles into a rhythm we know - from being at the movies: one person talks and the other listens - and the listener becomes more powerful, for the more the talking person talks, the more surely plea and desperation creep in. And Alma the sensible is a mess - why do you think nurses wear starched white clothes, with a watch clipped to their lapel, if they aren't in terror of disorder?
But Alma has become an actress, too. It may be that in her jumbled life she has never talked so much to anyone, never performed, and never had the chance to find that level of self-expression. And thus Alma comes to the discovery that actresses know, and which sometimes tempts them into silence: that they are being used by the listeners, that they have become fantasy creatures, imaginary figures, personalities to play with. It could not be simpler: It is black-and-white, a little over 80 minutes, a film that might have been made over a long holiday weekend for next to nothing. And it is about vampirism and the power of one personality over another; it is about acting and being; it is about performance and silence. And it is what we had for films once upon a time. It is beside the point to say that Ullmann and Andersson are good in the picture. Rather, they are an event of primary importance: No one should be allowed to act professionally without seeing Persona. Of course, in life one cannot impose those rules. All I know is that with students - not just of film, but of every subject - I have shown Persona and had the conversation that followed go on and on until natural darkness overtook us. It could not be more complicated, or less lucid. It is as if Elisabeth Vogler fell silent in Electra because of her own memory of the film. We are in performance: It is a religious condition.
The waltz is here.
April 21, 2010
Not like you need another reason to love Myrna Loy ...
But here you go, just in case.
Thanks, Siren. I have been re-watching all of the William Powell/Myrna Loy movies recently (my review of Love Crazy here), and I never fail to just fall in love with both of them, repeatedly, watching them act together. Myrna Loy, with her cool humorous approach to the insanity of her partner, in film after film, is a delight. I look forward to reading her autobiography, thanks for the recommendation and terrific excerpt.
In praise of Bruce McGill
Bruce McGill is one of my favorite actors of all time and he's one of those guys who would have fit in perfectly with the old studio system, embodying as he does a first-rate support player, a guy with major chops who can do anything: drama, comedy, farce - he can come from any region of the country, he can be sentimental, he can be sincere, funny, broad - there's nothing the guy can't do. He would have played all the parts that Thomas Mitchell played (another one of my favorites). He is, like most character actors, a far better actor than most established movie stars - at least in terms of scope and versatility - and any project he is in is better, automatically, because of his presence.
You never EVER catch this guy acting.
I have a special fondness for his performances in two episodes of Quantum Leap - the first episode as well as the emotional final episode. How wonderful that he was chosen to bookend that series.
If you remember the final episode of Quantum Leap, McGill plays the bartender who, in his own mysterious knowing way, shows that he is the key to the entire experiment. He has been there all along. But the way he plays his scenes with Scott Bakula is with just the right amount of kindness, opacity (he tells him nothing new), and a sort of individualistic tough love, smiling at Bakula's bafflement, but not cruelly. He gives him the space to figure it out for himself. It's really a wonderful piece of acting.
He makes other actors better. Just by standing next to them.
Al Pacino, in The Insider, does some terrific work - not as self-involved and egomaniacal as some of his more recent parts have been. His movie-star persona fits nicely with Lowell Bergman, the part he is playing. He can play to his strengths. He is a speech-maker, a bombastic guy (on occasion), he does his schtick where he talks quietly and deliberately and then suddenly explodes on one or two words ... and while I have been tired of that Pacino schtick for a decade or so now, here it is effective. It is in service to the story. It is not just Pacino trying to "make something happen in the scene".
But let me tell you: Nothing Pacino does in The Insider, nothing Russell Crowe does in The Insider, can come close to the power and electricity from Bruce McGill's one big moment in that courtroom: "Wipe that smirk off your face!"
Now Pacino and Crowe have other concerns. I don't mean to make an unfair comparison. They are carrying the picture, they have to modulate and gradate their performances, showing the slow transformations of these two guys. They do stellar jobs. But in a movie such as this one, with so many elements, so many different sections, you need these power-hitters in the smaller parts. In giant ensemble pictures, with a couple of mega-watt movie stars in lead roles, it is essential (and yet so many films do not realize this, and cast giant movie stars in EVERY part - whether it's appropriate casting or not) to fill in the second-and-third-tiers with talented and sometimes-anonymous character actors. The old studio system knew this well. The new Hollywood doesn't always realize this. They have forgotten. Character actors are there to add reality, depth, and power, to ground the movie stars in a world that we, the audience, can recognize. Character actors look like us. Their teeth aren't fixed, their hair isn't perfect, they're just regular people.
In a film such as The Insider, with so many terrific moments from the lead actors, it is heartening to see how much time and weight is given to these secondary characters. Not only is it heartening - it is really WHY the film works. Again, not to take away from what the three leads, Plummer, Pacino and Crowe - bring to the project - their contributions are substantial. But without Debi Mazar, Lindsay Crouse, Philip Baker Hall, Colm Feore, and the spectacular Bruce McGill, our beautiful movie stars would be acting in a vacuum.
Bruce McGill's contributions to a film like The Insider are not, in general, discussed or pointed out. They're appreciated, but in an invisible way. It's taken for granted. The blessing and the curse of the character actor. McGill wouldn't be nominated for an Oscar for The Insider. The part is too small. But if you want to see an actor tap into what my acting teacher in college called "the pulse of the playwright" - if you want to see an actor absolutely embody every single thematic element of the project without being didactic or boring, if you want to see an actor enter a film and - with one or two moments - dig deep and hard into the real guts of the script and almost stroll away with the entire picture - watch Bruce McGill in The Insider.
"Wipe that smirk off your face!"
Frankly, acting doesn't get any better than that.
Russell Crowe and Al Pacino should feel lucky that someone like Bruce McGill is in "their" movie.
April 17, 2010
Some actors you admire
Some actors you viscerally dislike
Some actors you can take or leave
Some actors you scorn, due to their lack of: talent/sensitivity/imagination
And some you just love.
Whatever they do, whereever they go, you love their mistakes, their embarrassments, their successes. You're in it for the long haul. I could give seminars on how to be a proper fan, how to keep the love alive even when their star has fallen a bit, and their movies become ridiculous, tedious, terrible.
This feeling goes beyond admiration. It is not intellectual. It's from the heart.
It can't be explained rationally.
All of this is to say, I saw some photos from an upcoming film, and felt a burst of excitement.
And also love. Like: Yay, look at him go. I love you, dude! No matter what you do, where you go, I'll be there. He always - ALWAYS - gives me SOMEthing good - (well, maybe not always - there are a couple of films there ... but MOST of the time - and you can't say that about a lot of actors.)
But like I said: the feelings I have for this actor transcend other concerns, which come into play when I "admire" other actors, as opposed to flat-out love them (i.e. Is the movie about something that interests me? Have I seen this actor do this type of role before? Who is the director?)
With this particular actor, I don't give a crap.
I love the guy. Whatever he does, I'll be there. He's led me down some pretty awful pathways, it's true, but that's the thing about being a fan. That's the thing about love. When you're in, you're in.
April 16, 2010
"And never mind his crimes. I forgive him."
Johnny Depp reads a letter written to him by Hunter S. Thompson. Amazing. Make sure you click through to watch Parts 2 and 3. I especially liked their exchanges about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the movie), and Depp sending him the Polaroids of the wardrobe and hair choices, and Thompson's response to that.
April 6, 2010
"Contrary to what we'd all come to believe, Dennis Hopper is not immortal. Let's appreciate him now."
So writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the introduction to his stunning video collage on Dennis Hopper.
It's not short. So take the time. Do not miss this one.
March 26, 2010
March 19, 2010
Sheriff Jeremy Renner
Pink rides into a dusty ole frontier town, ready to stir up some "Trouble", High Noon style (the shot of her coming through the town gates a direct steal of that famous shot in High Noon). The town trembles at her approach. She sneers at them. A sheriff (Jeremy Renner) all in black stands on a rooftop, watching her ride by. He is now an Oscar-nominated actor for The Hurt Locker, but certainly someone I've been aware of for quite some time (since I saw Dahmer and my basic response was: who the hell is THAT?). The video for "Trouble" is pure fluff, but a lot of fun: one of my favorite Pink songs, and in retrospect, now knowing who this guy is, and what a brilliant actor he is, it's hysterical watching Renner, all in black, with a silver sheriff's star on his chest, haul Pink around, stalk her through music halls and saloons - naturally not just because she's dangerous - although she is that - but because he wants her. Bad.
In the end Pink prevails. Naturally.
High Noon meets Coyote Ugly, starring Pink and Jeremy Renner.
March 16, 2010
Johnny Depp: The Mad Hatter's context
I have always felt that context was decisive, when it came to acting styles. I have heard it said that an actor should approach King Lear in the same way he approaches a French farce, and while I understand the point, I think it goes too far (as most generalizations do). The point of approach is important, and if there is a sense that you are condescending to the material, that you feel it is somehow beneath you, then that is obviously not good. I used an example from Katharine Hepburn's life to illustrate this point in the post I wrote about her at HND. She was known for melodramas and weepies, up until that point. She had won an Oscar. She literally did not know how to "do" screwball comedy, and kept telegraphing to the audience, "I'm being funny!" It took a lot of work for her to get into the right context. And by context I mean: the stakes are just as high in Bringing Up Baby as they are in Macbeth - that is one of the reasons why it is so funny, and why comedy in general, when it does work, works. Stakes. Everything one does when one is acting must have stakes behind it. The stakes must be incredibly high. It may seem ridiculous that Cary Grant is wearing jodhpurs digging up the yard looking for a lost dinosaur bone, but why it is so funny is because it is so serious to HIM. If you condescend to the material ("David Huxley's problems are just silly compared to Hamlet's problems"), then the entire project suffers. You have not created the proper context for your work. The context of King Lear is different than the context of Noises Off, and the actor who can go from one to the other, seamlessly, adjusting his or her approach and talent to the material, is a rare gem indeed.
Another example I can think of is Gena Rowland's acting. If you saw her only in her husband John Cassavetes' pictures, you would be forgiven if you thought that she only had one context, and that was Cassavetes' context. She so inhabits his world, of manic madness and alcohol addiction and neurosis, that she has melded completely with her director. But then you see her in Woody Allen's Another Woman, and suddenly there is a revelation about this woman's talent. I remember Mitchell saying this to me, years ago, in college, when we were talking about Rowlands - and I just looked up Roger Ebert's review of Another Woman and find, gratifyingly, that he says the same thing:
There is a temptation to say that Rowlands has never been better than in this movie, but that would not be true. She is an extraordinary actor who is usually this good, and has been this good before, especially in some of the films of her husband, John Cassavetes. What is new here is the whole emotional tone of her character. Great actors and great directors sometimes find a common emotional ground, so that the actor becomes an instrument playing the director's song.Cassavetes is a wild, passionate spirit, emotionally disorganized, insecure and tumultuous, and Rowlands has reflected that personality in her characters for him - white-eyed women on the edge of stampede or breakdown.
Allen is introspective, considerate, apologetic, formidably intelligent, and controls people through thought and words rather than through physicality and temper. Rowlands now mirrors that personality, revealing in the process how the Cassavetes performances were indeed "acting" and not some kind of ersatz documentary reality. To see "Another Woman" is to get an insight into how good an actress Rowlands has been all along.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Rowlands is able to so completely adjust her context, depending on the project she is in, that when you see her in this or that part, you think, "THAT is her at her most natural state." But it's all different states. She does not bring the Cassavetes energy to the Woody Allen picture. It's not just that her energy is different, she seems to have actually switched souls. This is not a gift that all actors have. Some are eager to show "range", yet they have no idea how to operate in a context other than the one they are already familiar with.
Johnny Depp has always been an actor who is able to switch contexts with breathless agility. I guess you would call him "versatile", but I am not wacky about that word, because it sounds too practical, too much like a trick. Depp has never had a signature part, although I suppose the word "quirky" comes up a lot with him (He picks "quirky" parts, he's "quirky"!) another word I am not wacky about, because it's too easy, too pat, it doesn't come close to explaining what is going on with this actor. I don't have enough distance yet from his body of work to see what it will look like after he is gone, but I have a feeling it will be one of those things that just continues to magnify in stature as the years pass. But who can say. For now, we are just left with the movies he makes, and also the pretty much inarticulate interviews he gives, where he is cagey about talking about acting, and doesn't seem to have a language to describe what he does. (I experienced this in person, as well, when he came to my school.) Acting, for him, seems to happen in a realm that has nothing to do with words. It's like a painter, perhaps. If it's not on the canvas, then all the explaining in the world won't matter. "What I was GOING for was ..." Nope. What matters is whether or not you succeeded. So I'm not sure, I cannot speak for Johnny Depp, and I won't even try. I can just give my response to this guy.
He is sensitive, that's obvious. When he is involved in a project, he takes on the concerns/mood/theme of the whole. That's a movie star. He melds himself to the needs of the director, the story. Harrison Ford talks a lot about this as well, although he doesn't have the same range. I have always felt, though, that Ford's personality would go very well in screwball comedies, that there would be something very interesting about seeing that big handsome guy bumbling around (a la Cary Grant), and his virtually supporting role in Working Girl showed how deft his talent really is. He's got a great sense of humor. He is interested in story, not himself, which is one of the reasons why the last Indiana Jones movie was so much fun. Look at the flexibility with which he leapt back into that part after so many years. To nail the point home, he knew the context. He knew what movie he was in. So many actors at his level of fame lose their ability to do that, out of caution, fear, whatever, and so they keep repeating themselves, sometimes to almost grotesque levels (phone call for Al Pacino ...) As far as I'm concerned, Al Pacino has one context. And when he's in a project that aligns with his limited context, nobody is better. He has a signature. Or ... he did. Now, I'm not so sure.
Johnny Depp's context in Public Enemies is completely different from the context in Alice in Wonderland. But I never feel like it's a trick with him, or anything facile. It seems to be a natural extension of his talent. Something he has fun with. Total immersion. He's a complicated guy, I have a hard time getting a line on him, but I do know this: I always want to watch him. And it is my opinion that he keeps getting more and more interesting. I feel like he's just getting started. Finding his sea-legs. But what a body of work already.
As John Dillinger (and I wrote about this extensively here), Depp had a thin-lipped almost blank quality to him. This is more brilliant under examination, and goes along with Michael Mann's themes of celebrity and adulation: Dillinger was a blank slate for the Depression-era audience who watched his exploits. Things were projected onto Dillinger. He was glamorous, he represented THEM, he was the glorious little-guy standing up to the banks, and etc. Even the cops got in the act. This is one of the facts of Dillinger. He was a cultural phenomenon. But let's also be honest: Dude robbed banks. He was a hardened criminal, almost totally institutionalized. Both are true. It is a very American story. The script of Public Enemies served Depp's creation of context here, because we are not told anything about Dillinger, his early life, his Freudian issues - nothing like that. His dad beat him. That's all we know. But other than that: all we are left with is the dead-eyed smiling-face of Johnny Depp, a boyish lock of hair coming down on his forehead, just like Dillinger's, and a strange blankness behind all of it. Depp is embodying not just the character he is playing, but the legend itself of Dillinger. This is no small task. If you think that's easy, or a done deal, or so obvious, then you obviously haven't seen a lot of biopics, which explain too much, and feature actors who have been unable to create a context for themselves in which to operate. Depp, along with Michael Mann, created a blank canvas, pretty much. That's what I found so strange and singular about the film (again, see my post about it), is that it really had no interest in explanations. Here's what happened. Dillinger said this about himself. So we'll show that.
Depp's disinterest in audience sympathy has always been a rather extraordinary thing for an actor who was once a teen idol, featured on the pages of Tiger Beat (just take a look at Corey Haim to see where his path COULD have gone, and where it most usually goes). Depp just flat out did not have an interest in that kind of fame, although he HAD that kind of fame, and unlike other actors who spit on the same audience who made them famous (Zac Efron's recent comments about High School Musical come to mind), Depp never seemed to get caught up in it to the extent that it defined him. It had to be difficult, and I know he has struggled with the tabloids, and his love life, and drugs, and all of that, but his work remained strange, whimsical, fun, moving. He did not repeat himself. But at the same time, you didn't sense an effort there to not repeat himself, as you do with some actors. He was as at home in Edward Scissorhands as he was in Benny and Joon, as at home in Pirates of the Caribbean as he was in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?. He switched contexts with such ease. Also, it seemed fun for him. He seems to have fun in his career, as seriously as he obviously takes it. I am not making a value judgment here, by the way, about actors who have more struggles in the areas where he has ease. Acting is a tough career, and those who are really talented often have the toughest time, even if they have a lot of opportunities. I love Daniel Day-Lewis, and think he's a genius, plain and simple, but I get the sense that acting really bothers him on some level, and he has to leave the career, from time to time, to get his bearings, to regroup. That's the nature of his talent. So I'm not being positional here. I am just talking about Johnny Depp, and what I sense in him specifically, which I think is quite rare.
One of his strengths is that he has avoided the big action blockbuster route, something that I think has really impacted Russell Crowe's career (and not in a good way). Crowe seems to struggle more openly with the demands of Hollywood and what it wants from him - and some of his huge hits have been so defining that they have ended up limiting him. I'd love to see him do a quiet little movie directed by, oh, Wes Anderson, or Sofia Coppola. I'd love to see him be allowed to switch contexts again, which he was so damn good at in the beginning of his career. As an example: watch Proof, Romper Stomper, The Sum of Us, LA Confidential and The Insider back to back, and you will see an actor who is seemingly comfortable in whatever context is thrown at him. He's like Rowlands: his very soul seems to change, in these projects. Now, not so much. Fame is not easy. And fame like Crowe's is a blinding light. It's hard to go back to being fearless and NOT worrying about your Gladiator fan base and what they will think of you.
Depp was a heartthrob. But somewhere, he must have known who he was, what he was capable of. His homage to Buster Keaton in Benny and Joon is a real clue, and I thought a lot of his performance in that movie when I watched him as The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. Buster Keaton wore a poker-face, even as buildings collapsed around his body. It was a mask. There was great sadness in his face, and yet you laugh hysterically watching his films. The face is a big part of it. His spectacular athletic ability is breathtaking, but without that poker-face, he wouldn't be Buster Keaton. He'd just be a stunt man. Depp has that quality. Much of his work seems to involve "masks" (shut up, Mitchell), but the thing about "masks" is that in days of yore, when an actor put on a mask, he embodied the mask - the mask told him what to do. The mask led the way, not the other way around. Buster Keaton's poker-face was a mask, a brilliant construct that makes his films the heart-rending and hilarious films that they are - and I think Depp uses masks in a similar way. It is not something to hide behind, as other actors seem to hide behind changes in their appearance (prosthetics, bad teeth, or even an accent - all of these things are masks, in a sense). Depp seems to use masks in the way the ancient Greek actors did, or the commedia dell arte troupes did (sorry, Mitchell, I know - I hate them too - just making a point) - the masks telegraph to the audience: This is the character. You know this person already. He is a lover. A thief. A king. Keith Richards. Whatever. It plays on the audience's sense of familiarity. But then the brilliance of the actor that can inhabit a mask elevates it from a trick or an effect. Meryl Streep does this, obviously, in a way that is extraordinary. But I don't see Depp as similar to Streep. His work is more mannered, and that is what is so fascinating about him to me. He does not lack reality - on the contrary, whatever he is in seems totally real to him. He adjusts his context completely, depending on the project. I have often wondered if that is why he came off as so shy, and almost boring, when I met him. Of course that was an artificial situation, so let's put THAT into context as well ... but his inventiveness and sheer virtuosity seems to be in evidence only in his acting. He came off as soft-spoken and sweet, almost embarrassed, and like he couldn't wait to get out of there. It was endearing.
It's like meeting a writer you admire and love and seeing that they are just a regular old person. I met Sharon Olds, she came to see a show I did, and I spoke with her a bit afterwards. I am absolutely in LOVE with Sharon Olds, her work has a burning intensity of feeling and personal anguish that I found it hard to reconcile with the nice lady with glasses and a low-maintenance haircut that I was talking with. I love that. She was the opposite of eccentric. She obviously, from her work, lives life in a deeply personal way. She resonates, she vibrates, she turns her life into her poetry. But there she was, chatting with me, and there was nothing extraordinary about her at all. That was the best part of it. Johnny Depp was a little bit like that in person.
Frankly, it made his work seem even MORE important. It made him seem even more like a freak, outside the normal constraints of career-planning and fame-management. The personae cannot be reconciled. They are not meant to be. He is all of his roles. Every time you see in something, you think: THIS is the best context for him. And that feeling lasts until you see the next project.
As The Mad Hatter, Johnny Depp takes on almost a "scarecrow"-like role, to Alice's Dorothy. He has been sitting at his long banquet table for years, waiting for that little Alice girl to come back. Perhaps it is the wait that pushed him even more over the edge. Depp seems to suggest this, with the Keaton-esque grief and loss that always flickers on the periphery of this performance. What I got mostly from his performance was loneliness. And what loneliness can do to a sensitive soul. Depp is not "playing" mad here. He IS mad. There are times when his eyes get suddenly serious and grim, based on no external stimuli, he is responding to some inner cue, and it is truly delusional. The Mad Hatter has an inner monologue of paranoia and denial that is going on at all times, and all Depp needs to do is look off to the left, or look inward, for a split second, for us to get all that. He resists camp, despite the makeup, the colored contact lenses, the wig, the crazy Artful Dodger costume. Depp uses camp very specifically, and Pirates of the Caribbean is the most campy performance since Tim Curry in Rocky Horror Picture Show. (By the way, I love the stories of the producers seeing the first batch of dailies for Pirates - and saying to Depp, "Are you going to do the whole performance that way?") Depp has a campy drag queen in him. Obviously.
We have seen it time and time again (and that is Depp in Ed Wood, one of my favorites of his performances), but, like a conductor, he can adjust it, he can modulate it. IT serves HIM, not the other way around. This is a very delicate dance, hard to describe. You just know it when you see it.
The Mad Hatter is a tragic character, an artisan in exile, sitting at his trashed banquet table in the woods, telling the same jokes with no punchline over and over and over again. The boredom of it has gone to his brain. Who is he without his work? Which was passed onto him from his ancestors? Who is he without a rollicking companion? He has gone mad. Maybe he was always a little bit mad, but here we see him at the breaking point. It is a very very funny performance, in its specificity. He has moments where his head bucks up, his eyes widen, and he repeats the same line over and over again, with different inflections, like he is trying to make sense not of events, but of the chaos in his own mind. It is strangely moving. He has captured the cruelty and anarchy in Lewis Carroll's classic, which is, in its essence, a nasty piece of work, full of nasty characters who treat Alice with abominable callousness.
In Tim Burton's Alice, the Mad Hatter shares center stage with Alice and the Red Queen (a brilliant turn by Helena Bonham Carter). Contrasted with those three, I felt that Anne Hathaway as the White Queen did not find a proper context for herself. She didn't inhabit that context with nearly the amount of freedom and reality that the other actors did. She was play-acting, she was pretending, she was aware that she was in a Tim Burton movie. She hadn't worked it out for herself. Burton's Mad Hatter becomes Alice's primary compatriot. This is not quite what Carroll wrote, but this movie is not exactly the book - it's a re-visiting of a place that Alice went to as a little girl (the story of the actual book). Now, as a young woman, she revisits that place, not remembering that she had been there before. Here, the Mad Hatter takes on iconic proportions. He is "the one". Not the white rabbit. But he. In Alice in Wonderland, it is the pursuit of the white rabbit that pushes Alice on. The white rabbit is the key. But here, the Mad Hatter is the key. He is the one who recites the Jabberwocky poem, preparing Alice for her Frodo-like confrontation with the feared beast. As he recites that poem, a Scottish lilt comes into his voice, something he had perhaps crushed down in the various royal courts he worked in, and you can feel him going back in time. He is reciting something that was recited to him. His eyes are full of horror and remembrance. He could say these words in his sleep. Depp's relishing of Lewis Carroll's nonsensical words take the exact right tone. It is how I have imagined these words being said. It is the fearfulness behind all of the "nonsense" penned by Lewis Carroll. The nonsense is used not as sheer fantasy, but as a way to express the absurdity of reality. It is close enough to reality to be frightening. We cannot laugh at the Jabberwocky, because the nonsensical words strike at the heart of what we most fear, the monsters that come to us in dreams. Watch how Depp recites that poem. He knows exactly what he is doing. He is lost in it. There is a technique here - I believe that - I believe he has a reason for doing every single thing that he does, as an actor. I can picture him working on a role with mirrors alone at home, surrounding himself with reflections so he can see himself, and adjust. Play with different effects, a full-bodied performance, as all of his performances are. There is a rock-hard technique at work in Alice - watch the specificity of it, the choices made. Yet never do I feel Depp's work to be labored. That is his magic.
He's on a big playground. He gets to play. The context may change. He is in Roman Polanski's context in The Ninth Gate, and so his acting adjusts itself accordingly. In Tim Burton's context, he operates with the same level of commitment and specificity - but he seems to be a different actor entirely.
Mike Nichols has said that one of the defining characteristics of working with Meryl Streep is that she seems to have the attitude of, "Oh, goody - I get to do this again today!" I get that feeling from Depp as well, which is why I think his work has such breadth and joy and feeling in it.
His conception of The Mad Hatter is what matters to me here. He and Tim Burton obviously have a great and close working relationship. There is probably a lot of shorthand there. Johnny Depp doesn't need to be directed. He always knows what movie he is in. It is the keen of sadness in his Mad Hatter that strikes me now. It is a poignant performance. And - beautifully - totally - MAD. This isn't movie madness. He is actually mad. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is populated by frightening random wackos, who batter Alice about between them. These are not cuddly eccentrics. You feel that they could fly off the handle. You feel that events could spin out of control. And they do. Alice grows, shrinks, grows, shrinks - she is a completely passive participant in this crazy-making world, a terrible metaphor for what can be done to children by the cruel adults surrounding them. Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter is unwound, totally. He loses track. He can't concentrate. He goes off into his own flights of fancy, and then comes back to the present moment, with a little tick of loss on his face, like: "what is wrong with me?" The final exchange between he and Alice is a perfect button to this. There is no ulterior motives here, no "sense" - he cannot be explained, or talked down. He is who he is. He is a hatter by trade, and he is stark staring mad. He also loves Alice and has missed her human presence. Instead of coming off as cuddly, however, Depp comes off as, again, a very Buster Keaton-like presence, with a mask of madness, his eyes clicking and thinking and reflecting and deflecting - with an almost total avoidance of sentimentality, and yet with great heart, great potential for feeling.
The contexts in which Johnny Depp can operate are wide and seemingly endless. He doesn't have many failures under his belt. I know he doesn't like What's Eating Gilbert Grape, because he was on drugs throughout the shooting - and so Depp has said when he re-watches that film, all he is aware of is how "polluted" he is. This may be the case, but I think his simple belief in that story, that very specific family dynamic, is one of the reasons why it works so well. If he did that cloudy with drugs, then just look at what he is able to do clean and sober.
There is not a lot of explaining that happens with Depp. He has a mystery to him. To me, what is so extraordinary about him is his willingness to submit to as many different contexts as he possibly can.
And so, like a painter, he can point at the canvas of work and say, "There. I put all of it there. There's nothing more to say about it."
March 10, 2010
R.I.P. Corey Haim
I suppose this won't be much of a surprise to those of us who have followed Haim's tailspin - and to those of us who fondly remembered his heyday in the 80s - but Corey Haim has died of an accidental overdose. I'm sad about this one. Perhaps he is mainly remembered for his performance in The Lost Boys, which he starred in with that OTHER troubled Corey - but I will always hold Haim in my heart for his beautiful strange performance in the under-rated Lucas. I have been wanting to write Lucas up for a while in my Under-Rated Movies Series (you can check out the other titles I reviewed here - scroll to the bottom), and I am sorry I didn't do it before now, when the movie will take on an elegiac mood. If you haven't seen Lucas, and I told you the plot, and I mentioned that Charlie Sheen is in it as the "cool kid" in school, you might write it off as regular old teenage fare. You would be wrong to do so. The script of Lucas is sensitive and observant, and like the best of the movies made for this demographic, it takes note of the stereotypes, because we all know that high school is one of the most hierarchically-based times of our lives, but it also doesn't accept that stereotypes are actually who we are. In high school, we play roles. Or, more accurately, we are ASSIGNED roles. You're the geek. You're the hot chick. You're the brain. You're the jock. John Hughes was right. We all experienced that. Lucas has some tricks up its sleeve, but not because it is interested in being tricky - but because it knows that if you dig a little bit deeper, you will find humanity literally EVERYWHERE. Even in high school. Corey Haim plays a little isolated weirdo, who is obsessed with bugs. He rides around on his bicycle with a butterfly net stuck to the back. He is smarter than everyone else, and he knows it - he has that arrogance that can come from being REJECTED because you acutally, you know, use your brain. But Haim is wonderful in how he suggests the pain that is beneath that, the pain of rejection and alienation, not to mention the unspeakable awfulness of his home life, which is not even revealed until later in the movie. Lucas, on one of his summer bug-outings, meets a pretty redheaded girl, and they bond, in that time-out-of-time way that can happen during summer vacation, when more things are possible. Would they ever have become friends during the school year, in between classes? Probably not.
I'll write a better review of Lucas in a bit, when I've had a chance to watch it again.
But for right now I will say this: Corey Haim, as Lucas, creates an unforgettable character, flawed and annoying at times, but also heartbreaking and funny. He is that weird kid you might have overlooked at school, because of his weirdo hat and big weird glasses - he would have that label of WEIRD - but he embodies that character like he was born to play it. You ache for him. You LOVE him. You want to protect him, because he is so scrawny and little, but as the film goes on, and you watch him navigate, you realize that Lucas is no victim. He may be a pipsqueak, but he is doing the best he can, and his survival skills are strong indeed. He is nobody to feel sorry for. Lucas will go on to flourish out in the real world, where his brains will be praised and admired. For now, in high school, he tries to deflect rejection by having contempt for the social structures of the world in which he lives. He hates everyone. But that is a stance that cannot be sustained, for someone like Lucas. He's not an anti-social poseur. He's not a phony. He doesn't wear black as a protest, he doesn't rebel. He falls in love for the first time. And, wonder of wonders, this redheaded girl in a white skirt, actually seems WORTHY of his love. She is not portrayed as "out of his league", or as a hottie from a mansion, or any other unimaginative trope from movies such as these. She is new in town, kind of lonely, nervous about school starting, and she's a nice girl. She likes Lucas. He's funny. He's fun to hang out with.
Corey Haim has been gone from the scene for a long long time. He burned out pretty quick. And I have mourned that loss. Because I will always ALWAYS think of him not as a hot young teen star, with slicked-up hair and sunglasses - but as the scrawny kid, on the cusp of being a real teenager, wearing a floppy hat and wielding a butterfly net. It's rare that you see a young man at that age who can suggest such vulnerability, yet also such strength and smarts.
Roger Ebert said of Haim in his review for Lucas:
Lucas is played by Corey Haim, who was Sally Field's son in "Murphy's Romance," and he does not give one of those cute little boy performances that get on your nerves. He creates one of the most three-dimensional, complicated, interesting characters of any age in any recent movie. If he can continue to act this well, he will never become a half-forgotten child star, but will continue to grow into an important actor. He is that good.
Yes. He was.
Rest in peace.
More love for Lucas here.
February 26, 2010
"My goodness, these are very deep questions you’re asking me. Why don’t you ask me what my favorite color is, or my favorite pop group?"
Wonderful thoughtful interview with John Banville about his new book The Infinities
I love his writing (the Banville books, as well as the Benjamin Black books), and I love the connections I have with him and my father - he was probably my father's favorite living author - and I love that Banville seems to see his art as something that is, well, fun. Even though if you read something like his Booker-award winning novel The Sea
I also feel that his pseudonym Benjamin Black, the writer who writes Dublin noir-style crime stories, has set him free, although I don't think he sees his Banville books as drudgery. It's almost like a great tragic actor deciding to do Importance of Being Earnest in summer stock, before going back to play Macbeth in Stratford the following fall. It's all the same actor, same commitment, but there is a certain feeling of release that seems to come when you don't feel the need to rip your guts out. It's a BREAK, a necessary palate cleanser. Banville talks about this quite openly. A new Benjamin Black is coming out and Banville says about it:
I have a new novel coming out shortly under Benjamin Black’s name. It’s a completely different discipline. I like doing it, it’s an inglorious craftwork that I enjoy immensely. And yes, I’ll keep doing it. It’s an adventure I’ve embarked on, and whether I’m making a mistake or otherwise, I don’t know.
If you go back and read all of the MOUNTAINS of press that Christine Falls
You can feel how much FUN he has with this crazy gift he has been given, this writing gift.
For example:
What kills art is solemnity. Art is always serious but never, never solemn. Good art recognizes, as I say, our peculiar predicament in the world, that we’re suspended in this extraordinary place, we don’t know what it’s for or why we’re here. We know vaguely, but there is no answer to it. It’s simply that by just some chance of evolution we evolved beyond the animals, we got consciousness of death, which goes back to the beginning of our conversation, gives all life its flavor. This is peculiar to us, so far as we know. Who knows, the animals may know that they’re dying but it doesn’t shape their lives in the way that consciousness of death shapes ours. But art, as I say, has to be light, it has to be frivolous, and it has to be superficial in the best sense of these words. Nietzsche says upon the surface, that’s where the real depth is, and I think that’s true. I never speculate, I never psychologize, I just present, so far as I can, the evidence—this is what one sees, this is how the world looks, this is how it tastes and smells. In other words, I don’t know how to answer your question.
hahahaha
I do love that: Art is serious but never solemn.
You get that from his books.
Banville has been very eloquent on Joyce. He is an Irish writer, after all. You're gonna be asked about Joyce. Banville is probably the most successful and renowned Irish writer today (although it is, as usual, a crowded field), and yet his philosophy (although he does not call it that) is similar to that of Joyce's. Joyce famously said about Ulysses, "on my honour as a gentleman, there is not one serious word in it." I believe him, as I have said before. A book can be serious without taking itself seriously and without being serious in and of itself. I enjoy things that are not top-heavy, tipping over with their meaning. It's one of the reasons why I loved Then We Came to the End
So there is something fun about Banville's approach to his work that I find very liberating, and fun to read about.
There’s no message. I constantly say one of my absolute mottos is from Kafka, where he says the artist is the man who has nothing to say. I have nothing to say. I have no opinions about anything. I don’t care about physical, moral, social issues of the day. I just want to recreate the sense of what life feels like, what it tastes like, what it smells like. That’s what art should do. I feel it should be absolutely gloriously useless.
Obviously, when you read something like The Sea, or his earlier books - the one on Kepler
Portrait of the Artist is one of the angriest books in the English language, but it is Joyce's stance as an artist that seems to change the way I perceive it. His desire was not to stick it to the British through literature. Many people did that, and while they may have made a splash in their day, their books would not stand the test of time. Joyce's desire was to capture, in language, what life feels like. He could only write about what he knows (he is the classic example of that - I don't think you always have to "write what you know" - that's balderdash - but Joyce ONLY wrote from personal experience - he didn't create characters, or create plots, nothing writerly whatsoever). Joyce wrote what life feels like. And that included things like listening to sermons and thinking about hell and masturbating and overhearing conversations about Parnell, and all of these highly explosive topics. But if you've read the book, then you know that it is not a polemic, a pamphlet, and the meaning is hidden, if there is one.
Once I got that Joyce didn't care about meaning, I was able to click into his stuff with the greatest of ease.
I love Banville's thoughts on that. Love it to death, as I work hard on my own writing, sitting and staring at the blank page.
I also love the section in the interview about naming characters and how important it is to find the right name. For him, once he gets the names, all else follows.
Ah, what can I say, love this man so much, and the interview is a good one. The interviewer had done her homework, and gave him some very thought-provoking questions (which Banville commented on a couple of times). She got some really great responses.
Groucho Marx to Peter Lorre
(speaking of James Joyce...):
October 5, 1961Dear Peter:
It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce's "Ulysses". All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years' difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.
You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.
Best to you both.
Regards,
Groucho
February 23, 2010
My interview with actress Zoë Daelman Chlanda
Recently, I sat down with acclaimed indie horror actress Zoë Daelman Chlanda and we talked about acting, her process, her place in the independent horror genre, and her latest film - the horror short Contact directed by Jeremiah Kipp.
Check out my interview with Chlanda at House Next Door.
Chlanda as Koreen in "Contact"
February 20, 2010
Virginia Woolf on Ellen Terry
When Ellen Terry was onstage, observed Virginia Woolf, "all the other actors were put out, as electric lights are put out."
This is a blessing and a curse. Star power. Charisma. You either have it or you don't.
In 1907, great English actress Ellen Terry (who was approaching her 50th year onstage) appeared in George Bernard Shaw's satirical Captain Brassbound's Conversion. Shaw wrote the part of Lady Cicely Waynflete for her, and he styled the male character, Captain Brassbound, against beloved English actor Henry Irving, who had just died the past year (and who had worked with Ellen for decades). Ellen Terry, in her 50s now, struggling with her eyesight, and the fact that there were basically no parts written for women of her age in the theatre, was moving into a new phase of her life. It was not easy. For decades, she had worked in Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre, a place that gave her steady work and (for the most part) good roles, not to mention the fact that Henry Irving was her dear friend. Now she felt a bit adrift. Shaw thought she was the best thing since sliced bread - and had been kind of insinuating to her through their correspondence that limiting herself just to Lyceum productions was not good. Henry Irving resisted the modern drama. He stayed away from Wilde, Ibsen, Shaw - and there are parts in all of those playwrights' plays that Ellen could have soared in. Now with Irving gone, Shaw saw his chance.
The play ran for 12 weeks in 1906. Ellen knew she was too old for the part. She knew something was "off". She also had a hard time remembering her lines, and would sometimes go blank.
Regardless, the show went on. Now this is interesting. Terry stumbled badly in the beginning of the run. Virginia Woolf saw the show one night. She was a giant fan of Terry. Woolf recorded her observations:
[When Ellen Terry spoke] it was as if someone drew a bow over a ripe, richly seasoned 'cello; it grated, it glowed, it grumbled. Then she stoped speaking. She put on her glasses. She gazed intently at the back of the settee. She had forgotten her part. But did it matter?
To a fan like Woolf, it might not have mattered, but Terry was crushed. Had she lost her touch? It was an odd sensation for her, to not know how to BE onstage anymore. She dashed off apologetic letters to Shaw about it, frantic that she had ruined his play. Shaw wrote her back and says something rather extraordinary (and rare) for a playwright:
Behave as if you were more precious than many plays, which is the truth.
He's telling her that the play is NOT the thing - it is what YOU bring to it that is so special. He had a way of relaxing her and also stimulating her that was quite unique in her long career. His words relaxed her. Apparently, she stopped worrying about the lines so much, and didn't "blank" out if she forgot them. She just improvised along as the character, because she knew the character (there's that confidence thing again - she remembered what she DID know) - she knew how to keep the play alive, with the lines or no. Bernard Shaw approved and wrote in a letter to a friend:
[She is] magnificent ... She simply lives through Lady Cicely's adventures and says whatever comes into her head, which by the way is now much better than what I wrote.
I love this anecdote because it shows, yet again, that Ellen Terry had a process that, like every process, needed to grow and change as she grew and changed. One size does not fit all. This is true of different people and how one thing will work for one, and not work for another, but it is also true of the same person at different points in her life. "Why did this work for me without me even thinking about it when I was 22??" Well, maybe because you were 22, and you are 52 now. But instead of staying stuck in that stuck place (or just resting on her laurels and retiring) - Terry kept at it. In front of an audience. She figured out her way during the run of the play. Obviously she could do that because she was a giant star, but it is still so heartening to me to see her still working, still willing to fail.
I will let Virginia Woolf have the final word (all of these excerpts come from Michael Holroy'd's book on Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families
Virginia Woolf on Ellen Terry:
Shakespeare could not fit her, not Ibsen; nor Shaw. But there is, after all, a greater dramatist than Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Shaw. There is Nature ... now and again Nature creates a new part, an original part. The actors who act that part always defy our attempts to name them ... And thus while other actors are remembered because they were Hamlet, Phedre, or Cleopatra, Ellen Terry is remembered because she was Ellen Terry.
February 17, 2010
Interpreting Lady M: Sarah Siddons/Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry, 16 years old
I am finally reading Michael Holroyd's A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families
I never felt so strongly as now that language was given to me to conceal rather than to reveal - I have no words at all to say what is in my heart.
When Terry's memoir came out, Virginia Woolf, a big fan, wrote in her diary about it:
... a bundle of loose leaves upon each of which she has dashed off a sketch ... Some very important features are left out. There was a self she did not know.
But the strength of her memoir, why it is so fantastic, is her memories of rehearsal processes, for all of her plays, and how she created this or that role, and why Irving's Hamlet was so good, what it was he DID as an actor that was so amazing. She has a great eye. But the more shocking elements of her life (her failed marriage as a teenager to the painter GF Watts, who made her famous, her living in sin with Edward Godwin which put her beyond the pale of respectable society - but frankly she had had enough of marriage with that Watts fellow, the two children she had with Godwin - one of whom grew up to be the famous Gordon Craig - and etc.) are left out of her memoir, or she hints at them, but does not reveal. That is her prerogative, but it sure is interesting to get a fuller picture of this famous woman, not only as an artist but as a human being. Michael Holroyd wrote a giant (three-volume, I believe) biography of George Bernard Shaw, which took up most of his life. Shaw was friends with Terry and they had a voluminous fascinating correspondence. A Strange Eventful History is that interesting and rare thing: a group biography.
Henry Irving, as Shylock
Henry Irving, dedicated somewhat gloomy actor (or "actor-manager" as was the term back then, because that was really the way to make your mark - you had to have your own theatre), is someone I knew nothing about, besides what Terry said about him, and besides what all of the people (people like Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Shaw, many others) who saw him act thought of his performances. There is a tragedy to his personality. He had nothing but theatre. It probably saved his life, but there is a lot of wreckage there because of it: a failed marriage, a contentious relationship with his two sons (who despised him and yet who also needed him desperately), and who knows what was going on in his relationship with Terry.
Holroyd makes the leap that they were lovers, and while there was certainly speculation at the time that that was true (they traveled together, he would visit her house and "sleep over", all those things) - the evidence is pretty slim. The fact that Ellen Terry, in letters and her memoir, rhapsodizes over his beauty does not necessarily mean that she was in love with him. There is such a thing as artistic appreciation. I could write a paragraph about my dear friend David, and how much I love him, his face, his eyes, the way he smiles, that may make you think I am in love with him, but we are dear friends, and to me his personality is one of the best I know, and I have no problem appreciating him aesthetically. The fact that people were suspicious that Terry and Irving were having an affair is not necessarily proof. Gossip happens. You can't give too much credence to it. I am not saying I DON'T believe they had an affair (although it wouldn't really be an affair - she, by that point, was a widow, and he was separated from his wife) - but I don't think Holroyd proves his case as much as HE seems to think he does.
Additionally, please, biographers: an actor is separate from his work, that is part of the appeal of acting. The fact that Irving wanted to play "Mephistopheles" in Goethe's Faust may have had NOTHING to do with any biographical element of his life - purging a demon, or trying to deal with the loss of his sons, whatever. Irving knew good theatre, and knew a good part for him when he saw one. Much of acting is about ESCAPING, and I see this kind of thing in theatrical biographies time and time again, and I just don't think it's appropriate to speculate like that. It makes you look like the outsider that you are. ACTORS understand how it works. You should take them at their word. If you look at the scope of someone's work, and see certain themes, well, that certainly is interesting ... but it doesn't necessarily follow that the themes are in place because the actor's mother didn't love him enough. This sort of analysis seems to diminish the actor's talent. I can certainly look at some of Montgomery Clift's roles, for example, and see there the SPLIT that I believe was in Clift's personality - the abyss between one side of himself and the other. He was gay at a time when you really couldn't be gay. He didn't want to be gay. He was truly tortured by it (unlike Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote, his contemporaries, who lived "out" lives and yes, paid prices for it, but they lived "out" anyway). Clift couldn't. His sex life was tormented and anonymous and he hated himself afterwards. All of these things are certainly present in his work, because he's an actor - he uses EVERYTHING - you can see that split in A Place in the Sun, in The Misfits, in The Heiress, From Here to Eternity. But to say that this was all just a biographical PURGING, as opposed to an organic outgrowth of his natural tendencies and talent ... is a misunderstanding of how acting itself works. Much of it is on an unconscious level. You don't say, "I'd like to work out my feelings about my mother in this particular role." That may be a byproduct, you may be surprised at the things you discover in the process, but it just doesn't work like that.
Holroyd makes that mistake quite a bit, it's one of my pet peeves, but his research more than makes up for it. He gets, as much as possible, first-person accounts of the performances, people who were THERE, so that THEY can tell us how Irving affected them, or Terry. One of the things I really liked to learn was Terry's growth as an actress. She was a star, remember. She was seen as emblematic of their particular age. This was a good and bad thing. It could limit her. She realized her own limits when she played Lady Macbeth, a totally different part for her. Terry was known for her grace and charm, which apparently came naturally to her, flowing out of her in undulating waves that captivated her audiences.
Bram Stoker (friend and assistant to Henry Irving at the time) said that Terry "moved through the world of the theatre, like embodied sunshine." She was not a great tragedienne, like Mrs. Sarah Siddons, star of Drury Lane Theatre in the 18th century, whose Lady Macbeth was apparently off-the-charts, and still being talked about in Terry's time, even though no one alive at that time could have seen it. It was one of THOSE performances, and Siddons haunted Terry. Here is Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth:
Interesting to compare and contrast that with Terry as Lady Macbeth:
If I could play interpreter for a second, although one is a painting and one is a posed still photograph, what I see as the differences here are: Siddons's Lady Macbeth is an iconic vision of tragedy and doom. It is horrifying, in its own way. Terry's Lady Macbeth adds a level of femininity and grace to it, which is horrifying in ITS own way, considering Lady Macbeth's actions. It's perverse.
There are contemporary reports from Siddons's production of Macbeth that audience members literally fainted at Sarah Siddons' show of intensity. There is a great anecdote, one I treasure, of how Sarah Siddons, to get into the mood for the sleepwalking scene (because, remember, Lady Macbeth is barely onstage in that whole play - you have a LOT of downtime with Lady M!) she would go out into the alley behind the theatre, in costume, and chop wood. It got her into the proper frenzy so that she could go on and say "out damn'd spot" and have it be believable. Isn't that marvelous? You do what you have to do.
But Terry was not known for her tragic roles. She was known for her warmth and loving quality, something far more appropriate to comedies. I loved this comment from Terry. It came from her after her triumphant performance as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (which pre-dates her Lady M):
It is only in comedy that people seem to know what I am driving at!
God, I love that. She really did understand her own gifts. She was not universally beloved - Henry James had a problem with her acting (but then, that may have been envy speaking, since he was dying to write plays himself, and felt left out of that world). But still, his cranky comments on her still give a really nice glimpse of what exactly it was that she was about. He wrote:
[Terry] is greatly the fashion at present, and she belongs to a period which takes a strong interest in aesthetic furniture, archaeological attire, and blue china.
Ouch. Henry James' assessment, which is a criticism, is actually the very thing that Oscar Wilde found so enchanting (remember the comment that made him notorious at Oxford, before he was famous for his writing: "I am finding it harder and harder to live up to my blue china.") I am sure Henry James was digging at both Terry and Wilde in his comment.
Elizabeth Robins, an American actress at the time, said that Ellen Terry had "the proportions of a goddess and the airy lightness of a child."
Now perhaps you can see why Terry playing Lady Macbeth might have been a challenge for her. Lady M having the "airy lightness of a child"? Really? Terry herself saying that it is "only in comedy" that people seemed to know what she was "driving at"? How will that type of talent handle the demands of Lady Macbeth's voracious ambition and eventual madness?
Holroyd's book (and why it is so good) does not short-change the artistic journey of these people, which, for me, is the real interest in it. Lady Macbeth was going to be a new thing for Terry. Holroyd doesn't pontificate on his own about why - he goes into Terry's process, how she worked on it, etc., and it is really interesting stuff. Her Lady Macbeth ended up being one of her greatest triumphs. Not beloved by all - because Terry seemed to take a different "spin" on it than what was expected. I love all of this information because it seems to show the flexibility of Shakespeare's work, first of all, purists be damned, and also it shows Ellen Terry's self-knowledge. Her understanding of her own strengths as an actress. She could not out-Siddons Siddons, and she knew it. So what would be her "way in"? Fascinating questions.
Terry, in her memoir, writes of Irving as Macbeth:
When I think of his "Macbeth", I remember him most distinctly in the last act after the battle when he looked like a great famished wolf, weak with the weakness of a giant exhausted, spent as one whose exertions have been ten times as great as those of commoner men of rougher fiber and coarser strength."Of all men else I have avoided thee."Once more he suggested, as only he could suggest, the power of Fate. Destiny seemed to hang over him, and he knew that there was no hope, no mercy.
As they began rehearsals for Macbeth, Henry Irving wrote Terry an extraordinary note, which really illuminates their special artistic relationship and symbiosis:
To-night, if possible, the last act. I want to get these great multitudinous scenes over and then we can attack our scenes ... Your sensitiveness is so acute that you must suffer sometimes. You are not like anybody else - see things with such lightning quickness and unerring instinct that dull fools like myself grow irritable and impatient sometimes. I feel confused when I'm thinking of one thing, and disturbed by another. That's all. But I do feel very sorry afterwards when I don't seem to heed what I so much value ... I think things are going well, considering the time we've been at it, but I see so much that is wanting that it seems almost impossible to get through properly. 'To-night commence, Mattias. If you sleep, you are lost!'
After the play opened, Terry wrote in her diary:
It ('Macbeth') is a most tremendous success, and the last three days' advance booking has been greater than ever was known, even at the Lyceum. Yes, it is a success, and I am a success, which amazes me, for never did I think I should be let down so easily. Some people hate me in it; some, Henry among them, think it my best part, and the critics differ, and discuss it hotlly, which in itself is my best success of all! Those who don't like me in it are those who don't want, and don't like to read it fresh from Shakespeare, and who hold by the 'fiend' reading of the character ... One of the best things ever written on the subject, I think, is the essay of J. Comyns Carr. That is as hotly discussed as the new 'Lady Mac' - all the best people agreeing with it. Oh, dear! It is an exciting time!
A "new 'Lady Mac', huh? Intriguing. It takes courage to "re-interpret" such a well-known character. It doesn't always succeed. There have been a couple of instances recently where a performance has made an indelible impression, something that helps people to re-think, in general, the WAY a certain part should be played. There was the Doll's House a couple years back, with Janet McTeer's Nora, a performance people are still talking about. I don't want to say it was a re-thinking, which implies that other interpretations are wrong. It went at it from a different angle, let's say - it went deeper as well. Scholars can opine and theorize but very often it is the ACTOR (or the director) who can break new ground with such well-known plays.
All of this talk about Macbeth reminds me of the second season of Slings & Arrows, the Canadian TV show I have raved about before. Each season shows the New Burbage Theatre Festival rehearsing a different Shakespeare play, and season 2 is Macbeth. They have hired an actor who has played the part three times before, a big stage star, who is cocky and assured that he knows more about Macbeth than anyone, and he becomes, very quickly, un-direct-able. He will not stray from his own interpretation, which worked so well for him in the past. The director wants him to go another way, and the clashes they have in rehearsal are fascinating - a great lesson in script analysis, first of all - and secondly, a great lesson in the importance of interpretation. The thing about Shakespeare's work that is so exceptional, I would say, is how adaptable it is. How flexible it is. Change the focus of your lens, and hierarchies of new meaning come into focus. Change the focus again, and you still get clarity, brilliant clarity, but you have new hierarchies. It is not "relative", it won't take ANYTHING (as I've said before, productions that try to turn Taming of the Shew into a feminist manifesto and Merchant of Venice into a play about ANTI-Semitism always have a rough time - you have to muck with the text too much. You have to basically de-nature Shylock. You can't get away from the Shylock-ness of Shylock. Good luck trying - many a brilliant theatre director has tried - but I haven't seen it done successfully yet.) So it isn't that there are no limits to the interpretations, it is that it shifts, subtly, depending on the lens through which you look. Do you want your "version" of the play to be about forgivness and mercy? Or do you want it to be about the ravages of war? The dissolution of personality that comes along with power? It's all there. Focus in on any one of those things and the play will play along, so to speak.
In the 2nd season of Slings & Arrows, Geoffrey (the director) wants to focus on the fallibility of Macbeth, the humanity of him. They key to much of this is in the scenes with his wife, Macbeth's private relationship, where we can see what is going on behind closed doors. The text supports that interpretation. The scenes between them pulse with sexual feeling and anxiety. Talk of nipples and sucking and sex and all of that. It is not an out-of-left-field interpretation. So Geoffrey wants his Macbeth to be a man, driven to heights of murder and carnage, through an anxiety about his sexual potency with his wife. Again, this is supportable in the text. Much of their scenes together is Lady Macbeth pushing him to go further, go further. It is SHE who is the engine. She builds him up, with one hand (so to speak), telling him how much he deserves because he is great and powerful, etc. etc. - and emasculates him with the other, basically saying to him, "Are you a man or what??" A potent combination, lethal in this case. Geoffrey's actor playing Macbeth has always been in productions where Macbeth basically is a psychopath, a criminal personality, whose bloodlust and ambition knows no bounds. There IS no moral compass. This is also supportable in the text (I think Macbeth, along with Crime and Punishment is one of the great descriptions in the canon of what it actually feels like to have no moral compass. You get INSIDE it, rather than stay outside of it - which then implicates you, the reader/audience member. Raskolnikov is not without sympathetic qualities. Neither is Macbeth. Admitting that is one of the truly unbalancing things about that play). You could make a great case for either interpretation, but the actor's job is to fulfill the director's interpretation - so there is a huge ongoing clash between actor and director in Season2 of Slings & Arrows. The actor (Henry Breedlove) insists that Macbeth is a criminal psychopath, with no morality whatsoever, (and the actor manages to suggest that there is some fear there, some resistance based on a reluctance to reveal certai sides of himself) - so to "slow things down", so to speak, in the first scene between them, as Geoffrey wants, and to have Lady Macbeth undress her husband and wash the blood of battle off of his body - was unthinkable to Mr. Breedlove. He basically refuses to do it. It's too human. HIS Macbeth would never allow it.
Interestingly enough, that is just how the scene was played in Patrick Stewart's Macbeth that I saw at BAM a couple years back.
Lady M did not undress her husband, but she did fawn all over him, kissing him, caressing him, putting her hand between his legs - not only to relax him, but to also dominate him. It was made even more disturbing because of the age difference between the two actors (Stewart is, in all honesty, too old for Macbeth) - but they made it work: it looked a bit like an older guy with his libido not what it used to be, trying to keep up with his hot young wife. And it made a lot of sense. That one of the reasons he follows through on her commands, is not just for his own lust for power, but his own anxiety about losing her and not seeming like a man to her. He is very very worried about that.
Lady Macbeth says it right out, in her soliloquy after reading his letter to her:
Yet do I fear thy nature,
It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.
She understands her power over him, calling out to him in her mind:
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valor of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown'd withal.
She sees his weakness. To her, "milk of human kindness" is weak. She's a tough customer. After making their plans to kill Duncan (she pushing him on), comes the psychologically devastating Act I, scene vii, where you can see what she "does" to this guy, her husband. Not that he is a victim, he falls prey to his ambition as well - but it goes back to the PAIR theory of criminal psychology. Would Macbeth have done this on his own? I think if Shakespeare had wanted to make that point, he would have made Lady Macbeth more of a worried nonentity, like the other wives of his other tragic heroes. The wives who cajole, plead, try to hold their husband back, keep him safe. Shakespeare is up to something different here. Also, knowing his obsession with twins (it shows up in almost every play), I have to believe it is deliberate: the "twinning" of Macbeth and Lady M. The sense that only together would they be able to accomplish murder. Alone, they are helpless, together they are deadly. Anyway, back to Act I, sc. vii, which is upsetting reading - on multiple levels. (I touched on this in my review of Don't Deliver Us From Evil, referencing the Macbeths in the opening.) Directly before this, Macbeth has his waffling "if it were done, when tis done, then twere well it were done quickly" soliloquy, where you can feel him basically getting up the guts. A remnant of conscience. Lady M. bursts in on his reverie, interrupting him. The end of the soliloquy ends with a dash, which tells you the kind of symbiosis and interconnection Shakespeare wanted to create here. Lady M won't even let her husband finish his damn soliloquy properly.
Lady M. He has almost supp'd. Why have you
left the chamber?
Macbeth: Hath he ask'd for me?
Lady M: Know you not he has?
Macbeth: We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honor'd me of late, and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.
[Uh-oh. Lady M is not gonna like this.]
Lady M: Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life
And live a coward in thine own esteem.
Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"
Like the poor cat i' th' adage?
[Ouch. She certainly knows how to push his buttons. "You coward." Potent stuff, which is certainly supported by Macbeth's next line:]
Macbeth: Prithee peace!
I dare do all that may become a man
Who dares do more is none.
[His humanity is hanging by a thread here. He could definitely hold onto it if she would just stop badgering him! Prithee, peace! This is blood to a vampire. Now comes one of Lady Macbeth's most revealing and awful speeches - look at its power. It still amazes me.]
Lady M: What beast was't then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time, nor place,
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
[Holy shit. There are many levels here. She is making the analogy of nursing a baby to nursing her husband - which is disturbing, on a sexual level. She is revealing that she once had a child, she gave birth, she has "given suck", but the babe obviously is no longer with them. Equating her husband with the now-dead baby is manipulation of the highest order. It also goes along with her famous cry early in the play: "Unsex me here." She begs the "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" to "unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty." Now, now, this is interesting. Lady Macbeth needs spiritual HELP to be "unsexed", ie: lose her humanity - even she can't do it alone, and she also knows that she must be "unsexed" in order to then be filled with "direst cruelty". All of this, though, is a private moment with herself. Her husband is not let in on that struggle. To him, she shows a passionate commitment, unwavering, inhuman to the extreme. Heady stuff.]
Macbeth: If we should fail?
Lady M: We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we'll not fail.
After her big pumping-up speech about how the murder of Duncan is going to go ("don't worry, dear, I've thought of everything, leave it all to me"), Macbeth explains, in a line that makes me wince for him:
Macbeth: Bring forth men-children only!
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.
I don't know if Lady Macbeth can no longer have children, or what the deal is, but that's an intense line, especially following her loving and then awful image of nursing a baby and then plucking her "nipple from his boneless gums" ... This is an intense relationship here, suffocting, a bell jar of mirroring images and symbols. They are intertwining, they are becoming one. It is awful - no wonder why people have such a bad response to this play. Psychodrama, man.
I guess if Macbeth were "just" a psychopath, a kind of Scottish Ted Bundy or Scottish Idi Amin (the "last King of Scotland" indeed), it might be easier to deal with him, explain him away. This is the struggle that goes down in Slings & Arrows, a struggle that encapsulates the centuries of struggle that usually go into doing this particular play "effectively". It's tough. It's one of Shakespeare's bloodiest. There is no moral. Or, what's the moral: Don't let a psychopath ruin your country? It is nihilistic in a way that the other tragedies are not, with their piercing moments of mercy, revelation, and awareness of all that is lost (Lear's "never, never, never, never", and Hamlet's "the rest is silence" being primary examples of their tragic understanding of how THEY AND THEY ALONE are responsible.) But with Macbeth, he chops his way to the top, he is haunted by the leering Ghost of Banquo, he loses his marbles, and finally loses his own head, and nobody feels bad about it, because he's already murdered anyone who would give a shite, and they have a new King now, "long live the King of Scotland".
It is effed up, and I love it dearly.
Ellen Terry was fearful about approaching Lady Macbeth, in the same way that actors today are probably fearful about approaching Stanley Kowalski, due to the inevitable comparison. As I mentioned, Sarah Siddons made such a deep impact with her Lady Macbeth, and the "press" about it (William Hazlitt, I adore him, called her "tragedy personified") was so extensive that Terry knew she had to find her own way, her own interpretation. Even though that performance was a century in the past, the cultural impact of it was remembered. It became "the way" to play Lady Macbeth. So where did Ellen Terry start? She went back and researched Sarah Siddons, to try to see where that actress was coming from. Not to imitate, but to get an inkling of the approach. Smart, smart. Ellen Terry was a childlike soul (the word comes up again and again), and stagehands tell of seeing her, a woman in her 40s, climb up a rope backstage into the wings, and then slide down, laughing hysterically. This was who she was. How could she translate THAT (that which came naturally to her) into Lady M? She couldn't do it any other way.
Holyroyd describes her approach in his book:
'Lady Macbeth interests me beyond expression,' Ellen told Stephen Coleridge, '-- how much I fear will she will be beyond my expression!' Of what use would her celebrated charm, her gift for pathos, her natural vivacity, be in depicting the 'fiendlike queen'?...But what persuaded Irving to put on Macbeth, and gave Ellen guidance as to how she might find a new interpretation of her character, was an article, published on 12 August 1843, in the Westminster Review, which revealed Mrs. Siddons's private thoughts about the play.
That essay, by Sarah Siddons, entitled "Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth", is a fascinating detailed analysis of the play and Lady M's part in it. I have a copy of it in the indispensable book Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the World's Great Actors, Told in Thir Own Words
Siddons starts with:
In this astonishing creature one sees a woman in whose bosom the passion of ambition has almost obliterated all the characteristics of human nature; in whose composition are associated all the subjugating powers of intellect and all the charms and graces of personal beauty. You will probably not agree with me as to the character of that beauty; yet, perhaps, this difference of opinion will be entirely attributable to the difficulty of your imagination disengaging itself from that idea of the person of her representative which you have been so long accustomed to contemplate.
I can almost feel Ellen Terry's jolt of "a-ha, now THIS is something I understand" in reading that. Ellen Terry was rather vain. Or, let's say it another way: as an actress, she understood that one of the weapons in her arsenal was her beauty. It was an undeniable fact, and it served her well, and she was grateful for it. She knew it was important. To accept that Lady Macbeth was "beautiful", and not just a scheming murderer - that both could be true - must have given Terry a sense of the possibilities, and given her confidence, that yes, I can do this. I can use what I already HAVE.
Siddons goes on:
According to my notion, it is of that character which I believe is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, - fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile -Fair as the forms that, wove in Fancy's loom,
Float in light visions round the poet's head.Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honorable as Macbeth, to seduce him to brave all the dangers of the present and all the terrors of a future world ...
THIS is why I don't even need to have seen Siddons's Lady M to know that she was probably a hell of an actress. That is specific, and not only specific but PLAY-able. You cannot play an abstract, or an ideal. What is the character DO-ing?
Here is Siddons on the terrifying sleepwalking scene:
Behold her now, with wasted form, with wan and haggard countenance, her starry eyes glazed with the ever-burning fever of remorse, and on their lids the shadows of death. Her ever-restless spirit wanders in troubled dreams about her dismal apartment; and whether waking or asleep, the smell of innocent blood incessantly haunts her imagination...During this appalling scene, which, to my sense, is the most so of them all, the wretched creature, in imagination, acts over again the accumulated horrors of her whole conduct. These dreadful images, accompanied with the agitations they have induced, have obviously accelerated her untimely end; for in a few moments the tidings of her death are brought to her unhappy husband. It is conjectured that she died by her own hand. Too certain it is, that she dies, and makes no sign. I have now to account you for the weakness which I have, a few lines back, ascribed to Macbeth; and I am not quite without hope that the following observations will bear me out in this opinion. Please to observe, that he (I think pusillanimously, when I compare his conduct to her forebearance) has been continually pouring out his miseries to his wife. His heart has therefore been eased, from time to time, by unloading its weight of woe; while she, on the contrary, has perseveringly endured in silence the uttermost anguish of a wounded spirit.
Wow. Yes. Yes. The text supports this. "Unsex me here" is a private moment, her husband never ever gets wind of that struggle.
Siddons goes on:
Her feminine nature, her delicate structure, it is too evident, are soon overwhelmed by the enormous pressure of her crimes. yet it will be granted, that she gives proofs of a naturally higher toned mind than that of Macbeth. The different physical powers of the two sexes are finely delineated, in the different effects which their mutual crimes produce. Her frailer frame, and keener feelings, have now sunk under the struggle - his robust and less sensitive constitution has not only resisted it, but bears him on to deeper wickedness, and to experience the fatal fecundity of crime.
That twin thing again. The two parts made whole, in a terrifying way. A mirror image. One could not exist without the other.
Ellen Terry read Sarah Siddons's word and got fired up. She found her own backbone. She knew what to DO now. Here is Holroyd's description of that process:
What surprised Ellen as she read this essay was the revelation that Sarah Siddons had apparently seen Lady Macbeth as a 'fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fraile' woman ... This was very different from the virago she had portrayed onstage where Lady Macbeth's motivations appeared to spring from a hive of evil seething within her that destroyed her initially virtuous husband. In the theatre, Mrs. Siddons's Macbeth had been the tragedy of power used as a substitute for love - she overwhelmed Macbeth's intermittent sense of the emptiness behind his ambitions. But on the page Mrs. Siddons had written of Macbeth as a tragedy that evolved from a flaw in human nature.Why, then, Ellen asked herself, did Mrs Siddons 'write down one set of ideas upon the subject and carry out a totally different plan'? The answer must have been that she was a prisoner of her own solemn talent, an actress who, in Leigh Hunt's words, could 'overpower, astonish, afflict, but ... [whose] majestic presence and commanding features seemed to disregard love, as a trifle to which they cannot descend'. Ellen Terry possessed little of the stately genius of Sarah Siddons that had made her Joshua Reynolds's 'the Tragic Muse', but she had in a unique degree that 'trifle' of love and the potent web of charm that Sarah Siddons identified as being Lady Macbeth's essential qualities. Who would not murder for her husband? Ellen could understand such a question and perhaps achieve something that had eluded the legendary Sarah Siddons. Her Lady Macbeth 'pricks the sides' of her husband so that he will better attain his wonderful aspiration. She feels a joy in his presence and subdues everything to his dreams. Irving's acting version, which replaced the original twenty-nine scenes with nineteen, omitted Lady Macduff, leaving Lady Macbeth a more isolated figure like Macbeth himself. The two of them stand alone - and eventually stand apart from each other. Irving's Macbeth was 'a poet with his brain and a villain with his heart' who clothes his crimes in romantic glamour. His wife is deluded by this glamour until she sits 'wondering and frightened' as Ellen recorded, realising that Macbeth has 'no need of his wife now'.
Again, wow. That is a deeply thoughtful analysis. To ask "why" they do what they do is not excuse-making. It is essential for theatrical truth. This is not akin to "I ate Twinkies as a kid, and that's why I shot up my school". This is looking at something that has daunted scholars for centuries (why? why do they do what they do?) and making a stab at understanding. These are not superhuman beings sprung from the evil warlord Xenu's secret galaxy. They are human beings. Human beings do terrible things. Human beings sometimes do terrible things and have no remorse. Remorse in Macbeth is even more terrifying because it seems to work on a completely subliminal level. Lady Macbeth experiences remorse only when she is sleepwalking, and sees blood on her hands. And Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo at the dinner, and flips out, not knowing what is real and what is imagined. He is too far beyond the pale now to ask questions. There is indeed a point of no return.
Now Holroyd gets into the nuts and bolts of Ellen's process (and this is why the book is so good - it doesn't skimp on the MAGIC of the actor's process. That's what I want to know, and he does not disappoint). How does Ellen then take the revelation from Sarah Siddons's words and make it her own?
Never before had Ellen prepared for a role so comprehensively... Ellen filled two of the copies [of the play] with her copious notes, trawling through the text for illustrations of Lady Macbeth's feminine nature and its effect on her husband. 'I must try to do this: 2 years ago I could not even have tried,' she scribbled next to one of her speeches. In a letter to the playwright Alfred Calmour she wrote: 'I have been absorbed by Lady Mac... she is most feminine ... I mean to try at a true likeness, as it is within my means.' On the flyleaves of one copy of the play, she described Lady Macbeth as being 'full of womanliness' and 'capable of affection, adding: 'she loves her husband... and is half the time afraid whilst urging Macbeth not to be afraid as she loves a man. Women love men.'
There's that possibly emasculating idea that is certainly in the play and Lady M's speeches, how she preys on Macbeth's nervousness that he is not enough of a man. Not just to be a king, but enough of a man for HER. Classic. Good stuff Ellen.
[Irving] had cut the text by approximately 20 per cent. 'The murder of Baquo, I have cut out as the scene is superfluous,' he informed the designer Keeley Halswelle. But one important cut from the 1875 production he restored: the speech of the wounded sergeant in Act I, scene ii, which tells of Macbeth's extraordinary valour in vattle - a valour which forms a juxtaposition to his moral cowardice. As Elen observed in one of her annotations to the play, he was 'a man of great physical courage frightened at a mouse.' What this helped to define was the nature of Lady Macbeth's love for him not simply an admiration for his exploits in the field, but a sense of what he lacked and she could make good.
Fascinating. Ellen Terry here was not a young actress. She was in her 40s. She had been acting since she was 5, 6 years old. She knew who she was, she knew HOW to work, and here she was, faced with a challenge. Instead of trying to be what she was not (a scheming malicious evil woman), she instead saw Lady Macbeth as an aspect of her personality, the one she could understand: the loving wife of a husband who was not quite good enough for her, and if she just pushes him, he will be as glorious as he deserves to be, and she will reflect in that glow. Ellen Terry knew, in her bones, how to play that.
I love the following anecdote about Henry Irving trying to tell the composer of the score what he wanted. Thank you to whomever took note of that moment, because it is a perfect example of what collaboration means, and also how artists, when they are in a groove with one another, tend to understand the unspoken. Good artists, anyway. Kazan talks about how he never had to "tell" Brando anything. He'd start to say something, Brando would nod curtly, having filled in the rest, and would sometimes walk away, to let it percolate, to then just DO it. Irving telling the composer what he wanted, and the composer "getting" it is a beautiful example of this.
Macbeth opened at the end of 1888. The sonorous and supernatural music had been composed by Arthur Sullivan, who took his cue from Irving's various hummings and gestures. 'A drum, a drum, Macbeth will come,' Irving had suggested, adding that a trumpet too might be useful - anything of a stirring sort. Sullivan got the orchestra to play him what he had written. 'Will that do?' he asked. Irving insisted that it was 'very fine' - but absolutely useless. Sullivan then asked for further hints, and Irving began swaying his body sideways, beating the air and making inchoate vowel sounds. 'I think I understand,' Sullivan said and turned back to his score. Presently the orchestra struck up some passages again and Irving cried out: 'Splendid! Splendid! That's all I could have wished for.' Sullivan completed his score in three days, working through the last night.
Tears!!
Henry Irving and his Lyceum Theatre was known for its overwhelming scenery, its realism (when they did Faust, for example, Ellen and Henry had traveled to Germany to research the area and get ideas for the scenery - same thing here, Ellen and Henry had gone to Scotland to get ideas) went all out here for Macbeth.
The sumptuous scenery, lit by flashes of moonlight that appeared to penetrate the thickest of castle walls, represented the awful depths in which Macbeth was shrouded: wide, desolate Scottish heaths, gloomy court interiors, a mysterious withches' cavern lit by uncanny radiance, and then the vast battlefield over which, to roars off thunder, Irving manoeuvered his army of actors.He was fond of magnifying the sense of apprehension by 'leaving the stage in utter darkness,' the American actor Arnold Daly observed. Sometimes he would light a set with 'a solitary lamp or dull fire which may be in a room; while he has directed from the prompt place or the flies, a closely focussed calcium ... so that you can only see a lot of spectral figures without expression moving about the scene - and one ghostly face shining out of the darkness.'
Dear Arnold Daly, thank you for writing down your impressions. I truly feel like I can SEE it now.
Macbeth was his most somber production - the sets so extensively gloomy that hen an outdoor scene was played in bright daylight there was a shout of relief from the audience.
Where is my time machine. I resent its absence.
Holroyd describes the sense of anticipation growing in the audience to see this particular production. Ellen Terry was a star, let's not forget. So was Henry Irving. They had toured America. They had brought their productions around England, Ireland. Macbeth was THE ticket of the season.
Speculation and excitement had been rising in the weeks before the opening night and queues outside the theatre began forming at seven o'clock in the morning.
I think of myself, sleeping in the dirt, LITERALLY, in Central Park, to get a ticket to The Segull, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Klin (and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Christopher Walken, Marcia Gay Harden, you get the picture?) Tickets were free. You had to get in line. No other way. I had no strings to pull. So I got in line, slept in Central Park for the night, curled up in the dirt (staring around me at the tent-city that had cropped up with other ticket-buyers, people with Hibachis and camp chairs ... amazing). I HAD to see the show. Londoners in 1888 felt the same way about the Lyceum's Macbeth.
The reviews were actually mixed, but it had an impact on audiences that seemed to just grow over time (in a similar way to Sarah Siddons's Lady Macbeth). It's also similar to the fact that the original review of Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway did not call out Marlon Brando for special recognition. He was listed in with the rest of the cast as all being very good, and Jessica Tandy was really the one who was written about most extensively. Over time, the impact of that performance just grew, exponentially, but it was not immediately apparent - not even to Brando - what had happened and what it "meant" to the culture at large.
Holroyd writes:
Irving's ironic, semi-humourous speeches were peculiarly strong and, in recollection, Ellen Terry's interpretation of her role more memorable than it promised to be - the audience, as if hypnotised by her disordered figure, the haggard face, the straggling hair, had collectively seemed to hold its breath during the sleepwalking scene. It was not tragic acting but a masterpiece of pathos. 'There is more of pity than of terror in her end,' Ellen wrote. '... She dies of remorse.'
Perhaps this is debatable, but that's the best thing about it. It's HERS. However, there were those who did not like the new interpretation. Where was the evil? Where was the schemer they had all come to expect?
It occurs to me that all of this is reminiscent of my feeling when I saw Natasha Richardson (may she rest in peace) play Sally Bowles at the Roundabout production of Cabaret. I described that in full here, in my memorial piece for Richardson. Are certain roles NOT up for interpretation? Or is it just that the person who originally played it made such an impression that we cannot even imagine it done another way? Richardson literally wiped out the indelible impression made by Liza Minelli in Fosse's film. This isn't to say it was better. It was not. It was completely new, and fresh. She re-interpreted it. That took balls. That's the kind of thing I am talking about here. Richardson did not convince everyone, but she sure convinced me. She EARNED that. Best live performance I have ever seen.
Holroyd talks about some of the skepticism at the time about the new spin on Macbeth:
But was Macbeth really 'an Empire builder led astray by listening to bad advice from a parcel of witches who had lured him from his regimental duty'? Henry Labouchere could not resist poking fun at Ellen's soft-natured damsel who 'roars as gently as any sucking dove'. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that 'such a magnificent show as the new Macbeth has never been seen before.'
Ellen wrote a letter to her daughter about some of the controversy surrounding her "interpretation" and concluded:
Meanwhile, I shall not budge an inch in the reading of it, for that I know is right. Oh, it's fun, but it's precious hard work for I by no means make her a 'gentle lovable woman' as some of 'em say ... She was nothing of the sort, although she was not a fiend, and did love her husband.
I believe her.
Holroyd writes:
This love [that Lady M had for her husband] was the ingredient Irving had been seeking to give his production its originality. 'The great fact about Miss Terry's Lady Macbeth is its sex,' wrote a critic in the Star. 'It is redolent, pungent with the odeur de femme. Look how she rushes into her husband's arms, clinging, kissing, coaxing, and even her taunts, when his resolution begins to wane, are sugared with a loving smile.'
It's even more sinister, if you think about it in that way. Kind of brilliant, actually, and daring. At the time, no other actress could have pulled it off but Ellen Terry. She inspired the next generation of actresses to be bold and yet thoughtful in their approaches to these classic roles. A couple of people who saw the performance when they were young credit it, and it alone, with making them want to go into the theatre. One young woman decided, almost on the spot, that she wanted to be an actress after watching Terry's Lady M, and did go on to some success with it in America. It had that kind of power.
Since this was, after all, 1888, we have no record of the performance, no film, no recording. We have the responses of audience members who wrote things down. We do have a lot of information, we just can't see it, or feel it, for ourselves.
John Singer Sargent wanted to paint her as Lady Macbeth, in the costume she wore. Terry was very very into her costumes. She knew what she wanted, and felt, often, that without a good costume, that flattered her, or if the colors were wrong, she couldn't play the part. The dress she wore for Lady Macbeth was designed by Alice Comyns- Carr, a bold almost pagan design, beautifully executed. Sargent wanted to paint her in that dress. Ellen Terry hesitated. This was before she knew that the play was a smash hit (it ran for 150 performances to sold-out houses the entire time). Sargent had seen her (maybe on opening night or a preview) and immediately knew he had to paint her in that dress. She was cautious, however, about having some glorious painting done of her in a role that might end up being a FLOP for her. However, once she realized it was a success, she said to Sargent, Go for it, and yes, you can paint me in my Lady M. dress.
The dress is described thus, by Alice Comyns Carr in her memoir:
[Mrs. Nettleship] bought the fine yarn for me in Bohemia - a twist of soft green silk and blue tinsel ... When the straight thirteenth-century dress with sweeping-sleeves was finished it hung beautifully, but we did not think that it was brilliant enough, so it was sewn all over with the real green beetle-wings, and a narrowborder in Celtic designs, worked out in rubies and diamonds, hemmed all the edges. To this was added a cloak of shot velvet in heather tones, upon which great griffons were embroidered with flame-colored tinsel ... [and] two long plaits twisted with gold hung to her knees.
To get her portrait painted by Sargent, Ellen would get dressed in this get-up at her house and travel by carriage, in that get-up, to Sargent's house. Oscar Wilde, who adored her as an actress, wrote two sonnets for her, saw her go by once in her Lady M dress on her way to Sargent's and wrote:
The street that on a wet and dreary morning has vouchsafed the vision of Lady Macbeth in full regalia magnificently seated in a four-wheeler can never again be as other streets: it must always be full of wonderful possibilities.
Sargent went back and forth about how he wanted to portray her, and finally decided to isolate her - have her body cut out the background entirely.
His portrait is the 19th century equivalent of being photographed by Herb Ritts or Annie Liebowitz. This is a star-making portrait, and caused a huge controversy by Victorian art critics who found it distasteful. The Saturday Review called it 'the best hated picture of the year'.
To my eye, looking at it over the span of a century-plus - I think it captures some of what Ellen Terry was going for in her interpretation of that part, and how vibrantly she succeeded. Yes, the pose is exquisite, and the colors just play up the disturbing quality of it all ... but for me, it's the look that Sargent was able to capture in her eyes.
Puts an ice-cube right down my spine, I can tell you that.
January 12, 2010
The way she looks at him
Near the end of Tender Mercies, Mac Sledge (played by Robert Duvall) plays with a new band of youngsters at a local dance, and it is his comeback, albeit a small one, but things have already started moving in the direction of him playing music again. It has been a long hard road for him, alcoholism, divorce, not being able to see his daughter for 20 years or so. He has married Rosa Lee, a young widow who runs a windy motel on a deserted highway. She has a young son. Her husband had been killed in Vietnam. Tess Harper plays Rosa. Watching the film yet again recently made me think deeply about Tess Harper (it was so nice to see her again, even in such a small part, in No Country For Old Men) - and how that film, as effective as Duvall is, wouldn't work without her. It is the opposite of a "star" performance. She IS that woman. She is a good Christian woman, struggling along on her own, trying to make the best of it, and Mac Sledge was not something she was looking for. But she takes him on, tormented past and all. It is a beautiful performance, one very dear to my heart. I just learned that this was one of my grandmother's favorite movies (my mom's mother), and that makes me just love it even more. I watched it, and I felt closer to my grandmother in my heart.
And at this country dance, with Robert Duvall on stage, singing and performing - Tess Harper sits at a table, with her son, watching. This is her first time seeing him perform. She looks up at him, and the camera keeps going to her through the scene. The scene is good because of all that has gone before, and how much we have come to care about Mac Sledge. Duvall lets him be complex, quiet, alone with his thoughts, suddenly frustrated, flawed ... this is a man who has to take ownership of the fact that the wreckage of his life is pretty much his own fault. No passing the buck. His devotion to Christ, and his new-found love for Rosa and her son, has certainly helped him do that. There may be no second acts in American life, but there can be redemption. Personal redemption.
Tess Harper's face, as she looks up at her husband singing, is (for me, in this latest viewing) the most moving part of the entire movie. She's not just beaming with pride, although there is that there as well. The expression on her face changes, subtly, each time we see her. Sometimes she seems to have gone quiet, still, with a pool of calmness in her - the very calmness that he was first drawn to. She can "take" him. She accepts him. He is who he is. She does not grasp him too hard. She welcomes his estranged daughter into her life. She doesn't want him getting too close to his ex-wife - she's human enough for that - but she takes the man as he stands.
And yet there he is, onstage, doing what he was born to do, and it is as though he has become MORE in her eyes. She sees his talent, his gift, and also the possibility that he may be about to accept it into his heart again. She doesn't cry, but Tess Harper's face is filled with ... well, I can't even label it.
Love. Pride. Strength. Acceptance. Excitement. And maybe even a little understandable vanity ... as in: That guy up there? That's my husband.
It knocked my socks off.
The dream in life for me, so often, is to have someone look at me like that. Love me like that. Wouldn't that be something.
But in this last viewing, it changed. It became even more powerful. What I felt was how much I want to look at someone like that. It isn't just about love. It is about admiring the work that they do, separately from you. This is why I have 100% of the time fallen in love with artists. It has caused me a lot of heartache, but also given me so much joy. There has got to be a balance there somewhere, although balance is not my strong suit.
Tess Harper's face captures it all in that last scene - and normally my focus has been on HIM when I watch that last scene. I had somehow missed the strength and power and beauty of what SHE is doing.
I love that my grandmother loved this movie.
December 21, 2009
Jeff Bridges: My manifesto
To say "at last" or "finally" in regards to his tour de force performance as washed-up country/western star Bad Blake in Crazy Heart would be to completely disregard how uniformly superb he has been from the very start of his career. There is no "at last" here, at least not to those of us who have been paying attention. He has been turning in detailed, powerful, diverse performances for DECADES. The fact that he is so amazing in Crazy Heart is not a surprise. He is ALWAYS amazing. See my thoughts on this phenomenal actor, the best American actor working today (and on ANY day) here. Hyperbole is too good for this man. To quote Bruce Reid, a commenter at HSD:
You're right about the inability to avoid hyperbole when it comes to Bridges; given his uniform excellence I thought it'd be easier to pick five bad performances and think about why they didn't work. Till I scanned his filmography and found, maybe, three.
Indeed. Like Meryl Streep, he has been consistently astonishing for his entire career. He also has rarely repeated himself. And it's not about tricks, with him. He's not trying to prove anything to anyone. He doesn't need to prove he's a great actor by putting on a limp, or a British accent. If the character limps, he limps so well that you can almost see the X-rays of the disjointed hip bones, it's that convincing. If he has to have an accent, or a mannerism to go with the character, it becomes so endemic to the performance that it is unthinkable without it. His range is breathtaking. I do not sense much of an ego, with Jeff Bridges, and that's probably why he's shamefully flown under the radar for so long (while his reviews are always excellent, he's more often than not ignored by the Academy). No nomination for Door in the Floor? Sorry, but that's ridiculous. It was the best performance that year. Some of his best work as well, which means it's better than anyone else's good work, because he's Jeff Bridges. I have a lot of thoughts about Bridges (again, go read my piece about him to see some of them), and also a lot of thoughts about ego and actors, but I'll save that for another post I'm working on. I'll touch on it briefly here.
The lack of ego in Jeff Bridges is, in part, why I think he is such an incredible chameleon. But I don't want to overstate this, because it's not 100% true that actors who are NOT chameleons are somehow lesser actors. Katharine Hepburn wasn't a chameleon. Angelina Jolie isn't a chameleon. John Wayne wasn't a chameleon. Also, having an EGO is not a bad thing for an actor (but again, I'll save that for the other post - argh, it keeps creeping in). Ego helps actors do extraordinary things at times, if utilized correctly. It makes movie stars. But Jeff Bridges is that rare thing: a chameleon AND a movie star. A movie star AND a man with no obvious ego. If you put some of his performances up side by side (and I'm just cherry-picking here, you could just go through his career and do this yourself) - it is hard to find the similarities between ANY of them, except for the fact that the same man played them all. The Dude in The Big Lebowski and Starman. Played by the same guy? The racist sweet lonely Turner Kendall in The Morning After and the befuddled macho vaguely dumb Vernon Hightower in the awesomely funny Nadine? Same guy? Jack Kelson in American Heart and Preston Tucker in Tucker? Obadaiah Stane in Iron Man and Jack Lucas in The Fisher King? Throw in there Richard Bone in Cutter's Way, the leather-pants-clad Lightfoot in the deeply bizarre and (as Mitchell has said) "offensive on so many levels" Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, his sea captain in White Squall, his creep-tastic serial killer in The Vanishing ... on and on and on and on. Mix and match as you like, the results will be the same. He is off the charts versatile. But even "versatile" doesn't quite cover it, because that seems to connote a "skill" (he can cry, he can laugh, he can play the guitar, he's versatile!) but it goes deeper than that.
I keep quoting myself in that other piece, and it's so obnoxious, but I can't help it. Shirley Maclaine spoke of working with Meryl Streep in Postcards from the Edge and her observation was that Streep "completely abdicates her own personality for that of the character's". This goes beyond SKILL as an actor. This is channeling. It is truly magic. Meryl Streep came and spoke at my school and she was quite inarticulate about acting, the greatest evidence (besides her work) that she is a genius. She got skittish about talking about the actual "hows" of it. Maybe talking about it would make it go away. Jeff Bridges obviously is a man out in the world who is things other than an actor. He is a husband, a father, a brother, an uncle ... he's a real guy with a real life, and he obviously has friends and family members who can say, "Oh, I know Jeff. Jeff is the type of guy who ...." But for us, out here in the movie darkness, we do not know who that is. He doesn't let us see that. He's in acting for another reason altogether. Maybe it's a personal catharsis for him, to inhabit other people. Maybe it's a way to satiate some curiosity, or some enduring questions about "what would it be like to ..." I suppose he is revealed, as good acting always reveals something - but the channeling mechanism, the strength of the character he is playing - is always the filter through which we SEE him. If you only saw him as The Dude, you'd probably think he was always like that, it seemed so natural, so real. But then if you only saw The Door in the Floor, or Bad Company, or The Fisher King - if those were your only "meetings" with Bridges, then you'd think he was like THAT. It's when you put them all together that you can see how truly extraordinary this man's talent is.
We all have many sides, many selves. Bridges knows how to "conduct" himself, as in - pointing to the oboe when he needs it, gesturing to the string section when that is what is called for - and he knows how to let all else subside. The humor that was in The Dude is totally submerged when he plays Bad Blake in Crazy Heart. Or Jack Baker in The Fabulous Baker Boys, one of the sour-est crankiest leading men in film history (second only to Cary Grant's Geoff Carter in Only Angels Have Wings). And so, with this give and take with his own innate qualities, Bridges is a maestro of his own talent. So many actors - very fine actors - can't even come close to doing that. He's on another level. I love how mysterious it is, and also how uninterested he appears to be in it. He does what he does. But again, he has nothing to prove.
I think one of the greatest performances ever given by an American actor is by Jeff Bridges in American Heart, and while it was a critical success, it obviously wasn't a commercial success. But there he was, giving his best work, blowing away every other actor on the playing field, in this tiny movie that played in art-houses, mainly. That's what I mean by lack of ego. However, the man does not lack ambition. He has been working by stealth. This again touches on my thoughts about ego, which I want to save, but here's a taste of it.
He has not "campaigned" for Oscars, not openly, he doesn't appear in movies where it's a done deal that he will be nominated. And when he does work that is so spectacular, like he does in The Door in the Floor, and it's not even nominated - he doesn't seem to crawl back to the trenches and start to scheme and plot that "next year will be the year". You can sense that kind of ambition in certain actors, and I don't fault them for it. Who doesn't want to be in good projects and try to get some respect from your peers? But when you can sense an "Oscar grab" in a performance, it's a turnoff for me. Bridges is always better than anyone else - like I said, hyperbole is too gentle for his talent - but he seems to do his thing, awesomely, every time, and then go back to Malibu, to have a Scotch on his deck, and hang out with his wife, and play guitar, and then, the next project comes along - whatever it is - and he goes back to work. There's not a visible campaign ANYWHERE. It is so rare as to be almost unthinkable. I am trying to think of an equivalent and am coming up empty. At least in terms of true movie stars of his particular wattage. He is not an indie favorite, he is not a best-kept secret, nothing like that. He is a giant motherfucking movie star. I can think of many actors on other tiers of the industry who are also consistently fantastic - Samantha Morton immediately comes to mind - but while she is certainly wildly successful, you can't really call her a "movie star". She's an actress, a successful and in-demand film actress, who, I think, puts many other movie stars to shame. She is amazing. But Jeff Bridges is a movie star with a capital M and a capital S. To be at his level, at his age, after the length of his career, and to not sense a "campaign" there ("I gotta have a comeback now", "THIS role I'll get my Oscar") is truly amazing. Unheard of. It takes an enormous lack of ego to be at his level and to not plan.
I don't want to simplify this, because he obviously picks his roles very very carefully. As Bruce Reid mentioned above, there are very few missteps in his career - and I don't believe that's an accident or coincidence. He PICKS. He CHOOSES. He is extremely smart. But his concerns in the choosing appear to be with the project itself, not what it can do for him, or how it can position himself. He appears (again, I have no idea) to be beyond those careerist concerns.
Maybe he's a bigger genius than I ever realized, than any of us realized, and this whole THING has been a plan. Maybe after Last Picture Show, when he was a pudgy-faced teenager, he thought to himself, "Let me just be good ... in every single thing I do ... and maybe when I'm in my late 50s ... it will suddenly be my time." It's strange to say that for me because I think that it's basically ALWAYS Jeff Bridges' time. He's my favorite living actor. I do not consider an Oscar statue to be the measure of an actor's worth. Cary Grant didn't win an Oscar. At least not for a particular role he played. Marisa Tomei has an Oscar for a role she could have played in her sleep. So that goes to show you how much MEANING it really has. Of course it has meaning, in terms of career, and opportunity, and being "in the history books forever", but besides that: who gives a shit? Those actors who appear NOT to give a shit are the ones who often are the last men standing. Jeff Bridges will be the last man standing. In many ways, he IS the last man standing. He is of the same generation as DeNiro, Pacino who dominated in the 70s and 80s, while Bridges? Not so much. Although, please, if I could NOT dominate in the 70s and 80s and have the level of success Bridges had? I would die a happy woman. But look at what has happened. The best work of DeNiro and Pacino is long in the past (so far. I live in hope). I will get into that in my ego/actor post. Bridges gives the sense, he always gives the sense, that his best work very well may be ahead of him.
He's a star. Yes. But before that, he is an actor. He approaches his career the way my friends do who are actors on a regional-theatre level, awesome actors all of them, none of them famous on a wide scale, although very well-known in their own communities. They get cast as Puck, or Nora in A Doll's House, or the Red Queen, or Eliza Doolittle - and they work their asses off, in a very specific and focused way, to do that particular play in that particular time. If the play calls for singing, they work like hell on the songs. If the play calls for an accent, they get a coach and work on the accent. These are the actors, true passionate and committed, that make up the industry. To find that same level of workmanship and selflessness in a movie star is amazing. People who are giant stars tend to get cautious. It makes sense. They have way more to lose than when they were young and hungry and eager to make their name. That much attention can make people clamp down, and try to just hold on to what they already have. Jeff Bridges, who never reached a kind of critical mass, never had an "iconic" part, that tapped into the zeitgeist, or was culturally explosive, avoided those issues. So he is hugely successful, yet he STILL doesn't have that much to lose. You can feel it in his work. He is not protective. He is not clamped-down. He is fearless. Even more so now. What happened to other actors is in reverse with him. The more successful and visible he has become, the more risks he has taken.
Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, as far as I'm concerned, is just in the continuum of his excellence. It is certainly one of his most memorable parts. Jeff Bridges is, it need not be said really, a stunningly handsome man. He is a born leading man. So to see him here, overweight, perpetually sweaty, with a strange gait that suggests serious health problems NOT being handled, is thrilling. There's one point when he leans in to kiss Maggie Gylennhall, and although she is drawn to him emotionally, she instinctively backs up, because, you know, of his breath. Cigarettes and booze. The man REEKS. Jeff Bridges creates this. I can smell his breath through the screen. He is sexy, but that's just because he still has the faded glow around him of success. Bad Blake was once a big country/western star. He drives around the Southwest in a beat-up truck, being holed up in ratty motels, playing one-night-only gigs at bowling alleys and ratty piano bars. It is a fall from grace. But America, this land of "no second acts", remembers its heroes, and Bad Blake is remembered. He will not be allowed a second act, but his first act will be extended, ad nauseum, until the man passes out anonymously in some alley in Durango. Bad Blake stands up on the tiny stages, hemmed in by his rent-a-bands, singing songs that are 30 years old, but you can see, by the beaming faces of the lovely people in attendance, that they remember. Hm, sound familiar? But Bad Blake is so far gone in his alcoholism that the love of the people that remains cannot touch him.
Bridges has an innate strain of cruelty in him that is in all of his parts (except, notably, Starman, where I imagine he, in his talent, "conducted" that strong strain in him to be silent), and if I could say that there was something he always does, in all parts, it would be that cruel streak. He expects a lot from people. He punishes them, emotionally, when they let him down. Think of Max in Fearless and how coldly he treats his wife because she didn't have the great gift of being in the plane crash with him. This is not affectation. This is true. This is vintage Bridges. Sorry, I know it's bad form to continually reference MYSELF, but I cover that in detail in the piece on HSD. Jeff Bridges never plays joiners. He plays solitary men. Sometimes the solitary nature of their character means they are visionaries: Seabiscuit, Tucker - and, to some degree, The Door in the Floor, although that has more of a tormented subtext to it. But more often than not, the solitary quality of his characters, leaves them in isolation - even when they find themselves in a romance. The Fisher King, The Fabulous Baker Boys. It's rare to find Jeff Bridges in a community-driven character. He's not a political organizer (funny, to think of his portrayal of The President in The Contender - think about how isolated that guy is, basically spending his time as President calling down bizarre food requests to the White House kitchen to see how they come up with it - he doesn't play the President as a passionate involved politician. He plays him as a weirdo loner.) He often plays weirdo loners. To be so convincing as a weirdo loner, and to look like he does, is again, almost historical in its rarity. Many people with the kind of beauty Bridges has often want to play against their beauty, in order to prove their acting chops. I get it. I do. Even though I'm not beautiful like that, I can understand the impulse. But Bridges, a magician of acting, a true channeler, is beyond all of that. He couldn't care less about any of that.
His performance in Crazy Heart is one of the most palpable portrayals I can think of what addiction is. I thought of Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas as I watched Bridges handle the need, the NEED, for a drink, and I also thought of Gena Rowlands in Opening Night, and how, at all moments when she is not drinking, she vibrates with need for a fix. It is never discussed or lingered over, but it is the OTHER character in that film. Unnamed, yet present. Bridges has moments that are breathtakingly sad, where you can feel his body kick in ... He may be having a lovely day, taking his new girlfriend and her son for a hot-air balloon ride, a beautiful day, right? But he can't be present. He can't. Because all he is present to is how much he can't wait to be alone and pour a drink. It's terrible. It makes you sick to watch. It takes great compassion and empathy to portray such a need. He does it without condescension or self-importance. It is a physical sensation, outside of any actor-ish needs, such as "Look at me having DTs." I myself felt sick watching Bridges maneuver through his life in Crazy Heart. In the middle of scenes, I would think, "Jesus, he's about due for a drink now, isn't he?" The addiction is so palpable, so present, that I couldn't forget about it, not for a second. Late in Crazy Heart, the alcoholism takes center stage, but the film isn't about that, not really. It's not a "clean up and watch how wonderful life is" kind of story. Bad Blake is too far gone for that. As he says to another character at one point, "I been drunk most of my life." There's a lot of wreckage. It can't be fixed. His life cannot be repaired.
Compared to last year's The Wrestler, Crazy Heart is not as bleak. There is more hope for humanity, and for the lost souls among us, in Crazy Heart. The Wrestler is ruthless, in typical Darron Aronofsky style. If there is hope anywhere, it will be crushed by Aronofsky! In some ways, my sensibility is more like Aronofsky's. I don't like easy endings. I don't relate at all to NEATness, which is why I love John Cassavetes' movies so much (speaking of Opening Night). I find neatness alienating, and I find a desire for neatness in plot and story to be even more alienating. So I relate to the bleakness of The Wreslter, because that seems pretty true to life to me. You don't always get what you want, and that's final. Crazy Heart's path is not the path of The Wrestler, and I haven't decided yet if the movie is stronger or weaker for that. I'm still pondering it. I can't tell what is MY need ("I wish the movie went like THIS") and what might be an actual flaw in the film.
Regardless. There is a giant bear of a performance going on by Bridges in Crazy Heart, and he is as good as he has ever been.
With him, that's saying a hell of a lot, but it's also just stating the obvious. As far as I'm concerned, Jeff Bridges has ALWAYS been as good as he's ever been. Which is the best.
My House Next Door piece on Bridges here.
December 19, 2009
Sissy Spacek in "Badlands": an analysis
Roger Ebert writes in his review of Terrence Malick's great film Badlands:
She claimed she was kidnapped and forced to go along with Starkweather. When they first were captured, he asked the deputies to leave her alone: "She didn't do nothing." Later, at his trial, he claimed she was the most trigger-happy person he ever knew, and was responsible for some of the killings. It is a case that is still not closed, although "Badlands" sees her as a child of vast simplicity who went along at first because she was flattered that he liked her: "I wasn't popular at school on account of having no personality and not being pretty."
Badlands is narrated by Holly, but we don't get much information from her. It's flat. Tired-out. There is no introspection in her. She appears to just be passively reacting to events. The accepted "narrative" of these two spree-killers is that Kit (played by Martin Sheen) was the real loose cannon, and she was just along for the ride because she loved him. Are they in the grand tradition of criminal pairings (like I talked about here)? Or are they something totally different? Kit is painted as the truly bad guy (albeit damaged and blunted by life), but what about her? What is it like to be her? How does she react to things? What is HER damage? Sissy Spacek (and Malick) work subversively here, leaving most of the script uneloquent on her reasoning, which makes her a pretty frightening character. I WANT to see her as "kidnapped", almost, but that's not the case. She participates, even in her ultimate passivity. Doing nothing is also participation, when you are on a killing spree. But her motives remain mysterious. You don't see evidence of a grand passion (the way you do in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, or even Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers - where it is obviously the alchemy of the two personalities that jumpstarts them) - you don't see her operating under any kind of NORMAL or recognizable motivation: love, yearning for a home, a partner - even flat-out boredom - none of those things seem to occur to this freckled flat-eyed teenager. In a way, it is Sissy Spacek's most creepy performance.
I just finished reading Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
It's a really good book, with many fascinating case studies (of "successful" psychopaths - meaning those who have never broken the law, a rare breed - because they fly under the radar, and yet they still destroy lives - and then the more garden-variety "unsuccessful" versions, filling up the prison population) - and Hare resists "diagnosing" people that he doesn't know. People come to him all the time with "is so and so a psychopath", and he can't say, without having studied the individual himself. Hannibal Lecter comes up a lot, as the modern-day version of what people think a "psychopath" is. He cautions against that limited interpretation, because you may miss what is going on right in front of you, because the person doesn't SEEM like a "psycho". One of the defining characteristics of a psychopath is "charm". It may be glib or superficial, but it can certainly work upon you, if you do not pick up on the other signals. Many of them are highly skilled in diffusing suspicion. Their emotions are shallow, they do not understand things such as love or empathy. Hare quotes psychologists J.H. Johns and H.C. Quay, who wrote famously that psychopaths "know the words but not the music".
Truman Capote in In Cold Blood
Many people who routinely work with people who score high on Hare's psychopath checklist report feeling a strange skin-crawling sensation when in the presence of these people. I have no statistics to back this up, but I would warrant a guess that that skin-crawling feeling (reported by multiple people, remember) has some evolutionary purpose. Something deep and survival-based. The feeling Rikki-Tikki-Tavi got when he made eye contact with the cobra, perhaps. Get away from this creature. Either kill it, or RUN.
Gavin de Becker talks about the "gift of fear". Fear like that tells us when something is wrong. Listen. It is a gift from millions of years of evolution. Take that, Kirk Cameron.
One of the best fictional portraits of a psychopath in the history of literature is Steinbeck's Cathy (even just the name gives me the creeps) in East of Eden. I was surprised that Hare did not reference it in his book, since he does use multiple examples from literature and film. Steinbeck, in his Biblical allegory, is certainly making a connection between psychopaths and the Devil. Cathy has the Devil in her. She is cool, calculated, gorgeous (the perfect smokescreen), and lies. Not just to get out of things. But she lies because she can. She lies indiscriminately (one of the defining characteristics of a psychopath). They lie so often that those listening to them, operating from their own assumptions of sanity, and how normal people behave, sometimes get caught up in it. We are not used to dealing with such creatures (thank God). They have a tendency to fool everyone: parole officers, prison officials, social workers ... They are masters of deception. And yet, often, people cannot put their finger on what is "off", what is wrong. Steinbeck in East of Eden writes:
Cathy was chewing a piece of meat, chewing with her front teeth. Samuel had never seen anyone chew that way before. And when she swallowed, her little tongue flicked around her lips. Samuel's mind repeated, "Something - something - can't find what it is. Something's wrong," and the silence hung on the table.
This is a textbook response to people like this, according to Hare: Something's "off". But what? What exactly is "wrong"? You can't point right at it, but you know it's there. A skin-crawling sensation the only indication that perhaps you are in the presence of something quite different from your garden-variety human being.
I wrote about Cathy here.
Steinbeck doesn't mince words. Here is how he introduces Cathy:
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.
There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.
As though nature concealed a trap, Cathy had from the first a face of innocence. Her hair was gold and lovely; wide-set hazel eyes with upper lids that drooped made her look mysteriously sleepy. Her nose was delicate and thin, and her cheekbones high and wide, sweeping down to a small chin so that her face was heart-shaped. Her mouth was well shaped and well lipped but abnormally small -- what used to be called a rosebud. Her ears were very little, without lobes, and they pressed so close to her head that even with her hair combed up they made no silhouette. They were thin flaps sealed against her head.
Cathy always had a child's figure even after she was grown, slender, delicate arms and hands -- tiny hands. Her breasts never developed much. Before her puberty the nipples turned inward. Her mother had to manipulate them out when they became painful in Cathy's tenth year. Her body was a boy's body, narrow-hipped, straight-legged, but her ankles were thin and straight without being slender. Her feet were small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs. She was a pretty child and she became a pretty woman. Her voice was huskily soft, and it could be so sweet as to be irresistible. But there must have been some steel cord in her throat, for Cathy's voice could cut like a file when she wished.
Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.
She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her. Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try and find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly. And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.
Cathy was different from other children in many ways, but one thing in particular set her apart. Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops. And this slavishness to the group normally extends into every game, every practice, social or otherwise. It is a protective coloration children utilize for their safety.
Cathy had none of this. She never conformed in dress or conduct. She wore whatever she wanted to. The result was that quite often other children imitated her.
As she grew older the group, the herd, which is any collection of children, began to sense what adults felt, that there was something foreign about Cathy. After a while only one person at a time associated with her. Groups of boys and girls avoided her as though she carried a nameless danger.
Cathy was a liar, but she did not lie the way most children do. Hers was no daydream lying, when the thing imagined is told and, to make it seem more real, told as real. That is just ordinary deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar -- if he is financially fortunate.
Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also -- either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.
Since Cathy was an only child her mother had no close contrast in the family. She thought all children were like her own. And since all parents are worriers she was convinced that all her friends had the same problems.
Cathy's father was not so sure. He operated a small tannery in a town in Massachusetts, which made a comfortable, careful living if he worked very hard. Mr. Ames came in contact with other children away from his home and he felt that Cathy was not like other children. It was a matter more felt than known. He was uneasy about his daughter but he could not have said why.
Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain.
It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some directions she was completely blind in others.
Back to Sissy Spacek in Badlands. In the middle of Without Conscience, which is basically a self-help book (How to Know If You are Dealing with a Psychopath, and How to Get the Hell Away From Them), Hare analyses the character of Holly in Badlands, from his perspective as a psychologist who has worked mainly in prisons. As he mentioned, he is not in the business of long-distance psychoanalyzing, but here, he shares a theory he has about the murderous duo portrayed in Badlands, and I found it startling and unusual. Something that isn't really in the preferred "narrative" of that particular film, which, as I mentioned, usually sees Kit as the leader, and Holly as the passive follower. Normally, I don't like film analysis such as this - which is trying to prove a specific point (that has nothing to do with the art of film-making). For example, a cultural conservative saying, "Such and such is a good movie because it presents core values that I agree with, and here's why ..." It's shallow and uninteresting, and more like an undergraduate thesis paper than actual film analysis. It is interested in things other than movies. But here, at least in Hare's thoughts on Badlands, I make an exception, because he takes the film at its word, first of all - and appears to be judging it as a work of art, not a case study. He sees its effectiveness, and also perceives an opportunity to illuminate the character of the elusive "psychopath", by talking about the film. He does it in such a manner that it really got my attention.
It's a way of looking at the characters of Kit and Holly (but especially Holly) that I have not seen spoken of before, in reviews of Badlands.
Check it out:
Terrence Malick's movie Badlands, loosely based on the killing career of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, is a chilling film fantasy with a coldly realistic core. The fantasy resides in the character of Kit Carruthers, whose irresistible charm and slick patter is absolutely consistent with the psychopathic profile but whose attachment to his girlfriend Holly runs too deep and strong to ring true. One might be tempted to dismiss this movie as the typical Hollywood romance of the psychopath with a heart of gold, but look again. Behind Kit sits Holly, strictly along for the ride. It takes a second viewing for the real case history to pop into the foreground: If Kit is the moviemaker's conception of a psychopath, Holly is the real thing, a true "other" brilliantly portrayed by Sissy Spacek as a talking mask.Two aspects of Holly's character exemplify and dramatize important aspects of the psychopathic personality. One is her emotional impoverishment and the clear sense she conveys of simply going through the motions of feeling deeply. One clue is the sometimes outrageous inappropriateness of her behavior. After Kit guns down her father before her eyes for objecting to his presence in Holly'w life, the fifteen-year-old youngster slaps Kit's face. Later she flops into a chair and complains of a headache; later still she flees with Kit on a cross-country killing spree after he sets fire to her house to conceal her father's body.
In another example, with several more murders to his name now, Kit lazily separates a terrified couple from their car at gunpoint and directs them out into an empty field. Casually, Holly falls into step with the frightened woman. "Hi," she says, in her flat, childish voice. "What will happen?" asks the woman, desperate for some understanding of what's going on. "Oh," answers Holly, "Kit says he feels like he just might explode. I feel like that myself sometimes. Don't you?" The scene ends with Kit locking the two in a root cellar in the middle of the field. Just about to walk away, he suddenly shoots into the cellar door. "Think I got 'em?" he asks, as if swatting at flies in the dark.
Perhaps the film's most subtle evidence of psychopathy comes through in Holly's narration of the film, delivered in a monotone and embellished with phrases drawn straight from the glossies telling young girls what they should feel. Holly speaks of the love she and Kit share, but the actress manages somehow to convey the notion that Holly has no experiential knowledge of the feelings she reports. If there was ever an example of "knowing the words but not the music," Spacek's character is it, giving viewers a firsthand experience of the odd sensation, the unnamable distrust and skin-crawling feeling, that many - lay people and professionals alike - report after their interactions with psychopaths.
There is a great great compliment to Spacek there, in the simple phrase: "the actress manages somehow to convey ..."
It is the "somehow" that contains the compliment. The great mystery of great acting. "Somehow". Who knows HOW she does it. It doesn't even matter how.
I think that is a fine analysis of the creepiness (and also deeply insightful nature) of Spacek's work in that film.
November 30, 2009
Boris Karloff: "shocked by unkindness and never less than polite"
This is my late addition to the spectacular Boris Karloff Blog-a-Thon going on at Frankensteinia. I have been losing myself in all of the links. Great stuff - make sure you head on over there and read. Keep scrolling!
Peter Bogdonavich wrote a gorgeous essay about working with Karloff in Targets (Karloff's last film) - and it's such a touching look at a man who took great pride in his work, had tremendous humility towards his vocation, and never once dissed the monster who made him famous. He felt lucky to have played that monster - even though it typecast him forever. He felt lucky to have the chance to work - whenever a job came along.
A couple of years ago, there was a "Boris Karloff Week" here in New York, celebrating the 75th anniversary of Frankenstein. I had a ball going to all the films at the Film Forum, and it was so wonderful to sit in the dark, staring up at the silver flickering screen, surrounded by movie buffs young and old, celebrating this wonderful beloved actor.
Here's an excerpt from the piece in the NY TImes about the retrospective:
But roles like that didn't come frequently for Boris Karloff, and he managed somehow to avoid being consumed by bitterness himself. In one of his last pictures, Peter Bogdanovich's "Targets," he plays an old horror star named Byron Orlok, who is finally, after years of increasingly terrible movies, preparing to hang up his monster suit. That's something Karloff never did: he worked to the end - which came in 1969, when he was 81 - and remained, to the end, a dutiful and uncomplaining ambassador of horror. A strange fate, perhaps, for an ordinary human being, but Karloff was an actor, with an actor's peculiar wisdom. You can feel, in the scrupulous craftsmanship and moving correctness he brought to even his most thankless parts, a kind of humble gratitude, a knowledge that he had, at least, managed to dodge the worst horror of his profession.
A couple months ago, I wrote a post about the "Boris Karloff bowling scene" in Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks. I submit it again, here, for the Boris Karloff Blog-a-Thon.
It's a wonderful sequence, spare and violent, ominous and yet elegant - not one shot too many, a perfect mix of mess (the sound of the bowling alley mixed with the crowd with the strange eerie whistling going on over it - the whistle that we now know means some bad shit is going to go down) and clarity. You don't need to say too much or do too much to create an entire event. Story, story, story. Those old-time movie directors, secret auteurs though they all may have been (and I believe they were), never spoke in terms of art, although they obviously made art. They all talk in terms of STORY. Even down to the philosophy of the closeup, which Howard Hawks was quite eloquent about. There aren't many closeups in his films. A closeup really meant something back then. Yes, it is the most efficient way to shoot a scene sometimes, but it's not always the best, in terms of emotion. If you hold your closeups back, and use them sparingly, then they really have some impact. The first closeup of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby comes almost 20 minutes into the picture. It's the first closeup of anyone in the picture. Unheard of today, especially for a star of Hepburn's magnitude. But when it first comes, that shot is meant to be subjective, or, editorial - it almost reads as an aside to the audience, like in the days of Shakespeare. You rarely see that kind of spareness with closeups nowadays, because a lot of film directors come from the television world, which is the world of closeups (and it makes sense there, with the small screen, and the limited format) - but it's really wonderful to get into the groove of the old pictures, and realize how much they tell, without either banging you over the head with it, or leaving too much to the imagination so that the event becomes murky. In Scarface, Hawks gets it all just right.
Yes, the film is violent in an almost documentary fashion. But Hawks had a lot of fun here, with themes and motifs and symbols. The film is so full of X-es that I eventually stopped looking for them. They are in shadow on the wall, an X on Ann Dvorak's back made by her dress straps, and more. It's a motif that works on mutliple levels. It could be a cross (the shadows from the windows), which adds a troubling layer of potential martyrdom and noble suffering to the picture, and to the depiction of Tony. But here's Hawks to Peter Bogdanovich on all of those X'es:
In the papers, in those days, they'd print pictures of where murders occurred and they always wrote "X marks the spot where the corpse was." So we used Xs all through the film. When anyone connected with the picture thought up some way of using an X, I'd give him a bonus.
The theme is visible in the props, costumes, lighting design and motif of the film, but not in the dialogue at all. It works on you, as opposed to insisting itself on you.
And here, in the bowling scene, Hawks manages to get an "X" in the middle of the action, hidden, totally in context, so it works on multiple levels. He just bowled a strike. X means strike. But we also know what else it means, and so we know his days (even seconds) are numbered. X is about to mark his corpose. It reminds us of what is really going on. Brilliant.
The Boris-Karloff-bowling scene in Scarface is a masterpiece of storytelling, just in terms of the shots chosen for this short scene. There are about 15 shots all told. That's all you need. You don't need to do too much else as a director - at least not if you are confident of the EVENT you are trying to portray.
A director needs a collaborator in the actor to pull a scene like that off.
You couldn't ask for a better collaborator than Mr. Boris Karloff.
Bogdanovich writes:
Through four decades during his lifetime, and now more than thirty years later, the name Boris Karloff has not only identified a star actor, but conjured up a certain sort of character as well, a very particular representative image. The identification certainly began with the sensation of Frankenstein, but this was deepened through the years by equally intense, brilliant performances in horror movies that most often were less than inspired. Yet he brought the same concentration and sense of responsibility to things like The Haunted Strangler (1958) as he did to more complicated roles in films like John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934); or, on the Broadway stage, with wickedly funny self-parody in Arsenic and Old Lace in the forties, or in the fifties with children's story-book menace as Captain Hook in Peter Pan and with poetic realism as the Dauphin to Julie Harris' Joan of Arc in Jean Giraudoux's The Lark -- a beautiful performance I was fortunate to see - and for which he received a Tony nomination. In 1966, his superb narration for the brilliant Chuck Jones feature cartoon of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas helped to make that work an abiding classic.Considering the majority of the movies in which he was cast (about 140 in all, including 40 silents, starting as an extra in 1916), it is not so remarkable that he almost always transcended his vehicles; but that audiences the world over still treasured him after so much screen junk is unique. They knew that Karloff's star presence in even the worst of these gave them a measure of his consdiderable talent, grace and wit. Therein, of course, was the great irony of his horror image: it was absolutely nothing like the man, any more than the sinister-sounding stage name which William Henry Pratt chose for himself, the surname Karloff by itself sending chills up the collective spine throughout the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. It still does.
Yet the audience also knew in some way that this consummate beyond-evil heavy was actually a tasteful, knowledgeable British gentleman -- shocked by unkindness and never less than polite -- with a sense of humor about himself and his roles, and only genuine gratitude to the public for their long-lasting affection. It was one of the reasons he kept working right through his eighty-first year. He was just an actor, he would say, who had been lucky enough to find a particular place on the screen and, as long as people wanted him, what right did he have to retire?
October 18, 2009
Happy belated birthday, Monty
Kim Morgan reminds me that yesterday was the birthday of Montgomery Clift. Her essay is not to be missed. But I could say that about every one of her posts.
Kim writes:
Clift’s eyes held secrets, and not merely the secrets we know about after discovering his real life. There’s more to Clift than hiding homosexuality, there’s pain and romance and passion and hopelessness mixed with bursts of happiness that will never grow towards contentment. For a man so beautiful, his inherent existential angst almost seems perverse. But it also draws us to him -- we want to help Monty Clift, and I have a feeling, no matter what that man did, I would forgive him anything, even if he’d surely become one of the most unreliable presences in your life. In movies, he’s the man who’d promise to do anything for sad-eyed sister Marilyn in The Misfits, but, in the end, he probably wouldn’t stay. Though I love their chemistry in that picture, and their bond feels real and strong (and apparently, off screen, they understood one another), you know his cowboy was too damaged, too self destructive to take care of anybody but himself.
I am haunted by him, as most of us who love him are. He is unsettling. His beauty is disturbing, and it makes me wish he had done more Tennessee Williams, because there is something corrupt behind that beauty, something that brings with it a whiff of death. Because beauty like that is something people want to cling to, be close to, but when it goes, what then? So many of Williams' male characters have that stud-on-his-way-out decay, and he just got more and more clear about that the longer he wrote. Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth is this type of man (excerpt here), an early version of it. Later, Williams became more explicit in his feelings about such a person; for example, in the wonderful The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (excerpt here.) Young Clift would have been incredible in the role of Christopher Flanders (even the name gives a chill, with its evocation of "Flanders Fields", and the famous poem written with the same title. Death. Poppies blooming over the death fields.) Christopher Flanders shows up on that Mediterranean mountaintop, and he is the harbinger of death. He has made a career out of showing up at such moments, and comforting rich lonely women, as they make the transition towards death. It is a bad bad sign if Flanders knocks on your door. The original NY Times review described the character as:
a handsome, pallid young [man] with a dead heart
Clift was born to play such parts. His beauty was an uneasy thing. Perhaps it was uneasy because he had so much to hide. He did not inhabit his own skin comfortably. He twitched, he gleamed, he thought deeply ... we don't expect men with such spectacular beauty to behave the way he did. His most unselfconscious performance was in his debut, Howard Hawks' Red River, with John Wayne. To go back and watch him there is to witness someone who is BORN to be an actor. It's unlike any other part he played, although the damaged wild mama's boy cowboy he played in The Misfits is sort of an inversion of it. It's amazing to think that at the time of Red River, he wasn't an equestrian, he had no experience with ranch life, or riding ... but you would never know that. Clift understood his job there, immersed himself in preparation, so by the time he stalked onto the screen, facing off with John Wayne, boy was ready.
That part was not ABOUT his beauty. It was something casual, he just happened to look like that. But then in something like A Place in the Sun, and his luscious unsettling pairing with Elizabeth Taylor, his beauty takes center stage. Shelley Winters, his whining put-upon girlfriend, could never climb the ladder with him, because she didn't look right. He is a conniving ruthless person in that film, and his beauty is the smokescreen that hides his true nature. An ugly man would never have gotten away with any of that. This is a disturbing truth, and many don't want to face it. It seems unfair. It IS unfair. Clift WORKS with his beauty in that film, without preening or mugging. The reason it works so well on those who meet him in Place in the Sun is that none of it SEEMS deliberate. His beauty is a web, entangling anyone who meets him.
This is why I say Clift would have been so good in Williams' plays. He did play the psychiatrist in Suddenly Last Summer, but he was very ill at that point, he needed the work. Clift's essence is so right for Williams' more decadent works, with beautiful young men strolling through the play, leaving wreckage and death behind them. Very uneasy stuff.
Beauty like that goes hand in hand with mortality. Very few authors have been able to capture that sort of dichotomy, especially when it comes to male beauty. Thomas Mann did with Death in Venice. Oscar Wilde did, with Dorian Gray. Patricia Highsmith, perhaps, captured it best in The Talented Mr. Ripley, with the character of Dickey. Dickey is so attractive, so appealing, that he must die, and Ripley wants to step into his identity. Clift, even as a young man, had that torment beneath him, the knowledge that beauty is not all there is, but if the beauty left him, what would he do without it? It did not sit well with him. The fact that he did, indeed, "lose" his beauty (although I think that's not entirely the case) had to have felt, to him, like his worst nightmare, coming to fruition. Not to mention the fact that an actor's face is his most precious commodity, and Clift always had a malleable sensitive face. To lose the muscle-movement in one side of your face? To lose the ability to show what is going on in your heart in your eye? What would he do without his face?
The thought of Clift has always made me sad, as thankful as I am for his wonderful performances in Red River, Place in the Sun, The Misfits, Judgment at Nuremberg and others. It was, all in all, a short career, and he died a relatively young man. He raced to the bottom.
Here is my essay on Patricia Bosworth's marvelous biography of him, a must-read for movie fans.
In honor of Montgomery Clift's birthday, I am re-posting below the big compilation of quotes I put together for the Clift Blog-a-Thon a couple of years ago.
He really was one of a kind.
John Huston:
He was mysterious. He always held something back.
Montgomery Clift:
One must know a bad performance to know a good one. You can't be middle-of-the-road about it, just as you can't be middle-of-the-road about life. I mean, you can't say about Hitler, I can take him or leave him. Well, I can't be middle-of-the-road about a performance, especially my own. I feel that if I can vomit at seeing a bad performance, I'm ahead of the game.
Excerpt from Peter Bogdonavich's Who the Hell's In it:
Clift had been a kind of unacknowledged leader. His performances in Howard Hawks' Red River (his first movie, though Fred Zinneman's The Search was released earlier), in William Wyler's The Heiress, in George Stevens' A Place in the Sun, heralded a new acting style. It came to be known, inaccurately, as the Method. After Clift came Brando, and after Brando, James Dean. Clift was the purest, the least mannered of these actors, perhaps the most sensitive, certainly the most poetic. He was also remarkably beautiful. Over eight years he acted in eight films, became a teenage heartthrob as well as a popular star with older audiences. He was nominated for Best Actor Oscars three times in six years and should have won each time. He gave at least four performances - in Red River, in A Place in the Sun, in I Confess and in Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity - that remain among the finest anyone has given in the movies.
Howard Hawks:
He worked -- he really worked hard.
Excerpt from Peter Bogdonavich's Who the Hell's In it:
Here it was about eight years after Clift had acted in it, and I Confess was on the screen; I was standing in the back of the theater watching. About halfway through, I saw Clift come up the aisle, slumped over, weaving a little. At the back, he lit a cigarette and turned to look at the screen again. I came up and said I worked there. He was polite. I said I liked the picture and asked if he did.The huge image on the screen at that moment of his pre-accident beauty must have seemed to mock him. He turned away and looked at me sadly. "It's ... hard, you know." He said it slowly, hesitantly, a little slurred. "It's very ... hard," he said. I nodded. He looked back at the screen.
A few steps away was a "request book" [Dan] Talbot had set up for his patrons. It was a large lined ledger in which audiences were encouraged (by sign and trailer) to write down what movies they would like to see. I told Clift about the book and said I wanted to show him something. He followed me over, puffing his cigarette absently. I leafed through the book quickly and found the page on which I had noticed a couple days before that someone had scrawled in large red letters: "ANYTHING WITH MONTGOMERY CLIFT!"
The actor stared down at the page for several moments. 'That's very ... nice," he said, and continued to look down. "That's ... very nice," he said again, and I realized he was crying. He put his arm around me unsteadily and thanked me for showing it to him. Then he turned and walked back down the aisle to his seat.
When the picture was over, he and Mrs. [Walter] Huston came out of the theater. I was standing outside. He waved to me gently and they got back into the Rolls-Royce and it was driven away. He made only two films more before he died five years later at the age of forty-six - a lost poet from Omaha, Nebraska, the most romantic and touching actor of his generation.
Excerpt from Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films, by Jeff Young
Why did you cast Montgomery Clift [in "Wild River"]?He wasn't my choice. I wish I had been able to cast someone more masculine, someone stronger would have been better. It's hard to cast an intellectual. I would have preferred Brando, but then I always prefer Brando. He was unavailable, so I kept postponing the picture and postponing it, tryiing to find somebody I liked. I liked Montgomery Clift personally, but he was in very bad shape. He had had an auto accidnet going down the hill from Liz Taylor's house. He was banged up. His face was almost a different face. He was also very shaky and on liquor and drugs, just quivering with doubt. It was a tough, tough thing to deal with. He was also unmasculine, which hurt the love story. I think I could have done better, but I didn't know with whom. I still don't know.
Brooks Clift [Monty's brother]:
Psychologically we couldn't seem to take the memories [of our childhood] so we forgot. But at the same time we were obsessed with our childhood. We'd refer to it among ourselves, but only among ourselves. Part of each of us desperately wanted to remember our past and when we couldn't it was frustrating. It caused us to weep, when we were drunk enough, when some minor detail from our past was released. Monty once said the smell of boot polish reminded him of winter when he was a boy. He would get hysterical over the smell of boot polish.
Patricia Collinge, actress, starring in Dame Nature on Broadway with Clift in 1938:
He'd invent bits of business or character details that were sometimes offbeat or strange. I'm still reminded of Camus's phrase 'create dangerously' when I think of Monty's acting, because he was starting to make unorthodox acting choices even then.There is one long speech in the play when Monty as Andre tries to explain to his father how his loneliness and unhappiness had forced him to seek affection from an equally lonely girl.
Monty's performance was heart-rending. It was so quiet and sincere that it seemed almost untheatrical, except underneath the controlled tone was an absolutely compelling sense of torment.
Friend Bill Le Massena:
Monty had this glorious instinctive talent bursting out of him and Mr. Lunt recognized it and helped him focus and cultivate it. He kept asking Monty questions about his part - specific questions - he helped him develop an inner life for the character by using elements of himself. Like Lunt, Monty was a natural actor, a born mimic. He never needed or wanted to hide bhind a fake mustache or accent. He used his inner self.
Nancy Walker, on Monty's love of music and singing:
He could never carry a tune, but, my God, did he believe in the lyrics!
Montgomery Clift on Alfred Lunt, his mentor and acting inspiration:
Alfred taught me how to select. Acting is an accumulation of subtle details. And the details of Alfred Lunt's performances were like the observations of a great novelist - like Samuel Butler or Marcel Proust.
Ned Smith on seeing Clift in a revival of Our Town in 1944:
It was the first time I realized Monty was such a special actor. He had a moment at the end of the play where he jumps over a series of imaginary rain puddles - it was quite extraordinary the way he did it.
Herman Shumlin, directed Monty in Lillian Hellmann's The Searching Wind:
Monty belonged on the stage. There are certain actors who walk out in front of an audience and they belong there. You believed him the instant he spoke a line.
Tennessee Williams [who saw Monty onstage in Mexican Mural and said it was one of the most remarkable performances he had ever seen:
Monty loved being in awe of people. He seemed to look on all the arts - dance, music, and theater - as if they were great mysteries. I never knew him well because I wasn't sexually attracted to him but I know one thing - his major impulse was to be an artist. Monty disliked me because I was so open about being gay and he wasn't.
Montgomery Clift:
I watched myself in Red River and I knew I was going to be famous, so I decided I would get drunk anonymously one last time.
Excerpt from Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift:
The essential Clift character tended to be a loner, outside the mainstream, isolated - intense but always struggling against conformity, and within that framework Monty's range was extraordinary; his characters were by turn extroverted, withdrawn, articulate, or monosyllabic, assertive, passive.He was a great believer in the psychological gesture, the physical manifestation of an emotion. It could be expressed in a look - how he stares into Shelley Winters' face before he kills her in A Place in the Sun, the sidelong glance of astonishment and desire when he sees Elizabeth Taylor for the first time in Place, the way he phones his mother in The Misfits, as if he's just been slugged; in his greatest performances Monty personified, rather than impersonated, character.
Photographer Richard Avedon on seeing him in The Search:
The minute Monty came on the screen I cried because he was so realistic and honest and I was deeply touched. He seems to be creating a new kind of acting - almost documentary in approach. It has the style of reportage.
Excerpt from Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift:
When Kevin [McCarthy] was rehearsing Romeo for CBS' "Omnibus" and he was having trouble with the death scene, "I asked Monty to help me and we worked one entire night in our living room with Gussie playing the dead Juliet, Monty playing Romeo. He was agonizingly brilliant," Kevin says. "He seemed totally assured in his conception of the character. His Romeo was impetuous, romantic, fumbling with words as he expressed his love for Juliet. He also brought a physicality, an athleticism to the role. His entire body seemed part of the work. And then there was this power - this originality behind the concept. He played young love so intensely, so truthfully."They rehearsed till five in the morning: after Gussie staggered off to bed Monty went over the scene for the last time using a pillow as Juliet. "I remember he covered it with passionate kisses, then rocked it back and forth in his arms like a baby."
Note given to Monty by a handwriting analyst who had taken a look at a page in one of Monty's notebook and seen his writing:
"You're the most disturbed man I've ever seen - you'll die young."
Hollywood press agent who knew Clift in the late 40s:
Right off he was labeled an outsider. The minute you refuse to play the game in Hollywood exactly as they want it, and that means totally giving up your body and your soul and your guts to becoming a STAR, you become an outsider. The minute you have integrity - which is what Monty had - you are an outsider. The minute you refuse to sell yourself as a commodity, a product, the agent and producers and directors who literally feed off talent call you an outsider, and it is much harder to survive. Hollywood couldn't have cared less that Monty preferred to live in New York and disapproved of the pap about himself in fan magazines. To survive being a star in Hollywood like Humphrey Bogart or Gary Cooper, you have to be sensitive and ruthless, humble and arrogant. Monty was sensitive. Period.
Monty to Elizabeth Taylor after finishing a scene in Place in the Sun - he had gotten so into it that he was drenched in sweat:
That's the worst part about acting. Your body doesn't know you're acting. It sweats and makes adrenalin just as though your emotions were real.
Richard Burton:
Monty, like Garbo and Brando, had the extraordinary facility of giving you a sense of danger. You were never quite sure whether he would blow his lines or explode.
Monty's friend Ned Smith:
He talked about meeting Laurence Olivier, whom he was very impressed with - he thought he was absolutely wonderful. He talked about Marlene Dietrich, and he was very specific about her comeback in Las Begas, which he'd gone to, and the dress she had on - all the spangles which seemed stuck to her body - and he did an imitation, he mimed the dress. He talked about how Dietrich and Ernest Hemingway had come over to the brownstone and how Hemingway was a transcendent bore, he seemed so self-important. He talked about Vivien Leigh and how hard she was on Laurence Olivier: 'She is very neurotic and very nervous, and she holds her teacup like this,' and he imitated Vivien Leigh and the gesture was totally effeminate and it distressed me greatly. He talked no more about doing many things in his life - broadening his life - he talked only about 'I have my work to do and this and that.' He took singing lessons; he went to the gym; he had to go to the dentist's. He talked about the movie African Queen and he said, 'I can't stand the way Katharine Hepburn plays the part.' He said, 'When she pours gin overboard she doesn't do it right.' I said, 'What do you mean? I thought that was a terrific scene, one of the greatest scenes I've ever seen in a movie,' and he answered, 'Terrible job.' He spoke a lot about From Here to Eternity and Frank Sinatra, who he thought would be great for the part of Maggio ... I wanted to tell him about my experiences - I had been to Spain and lived there and learned the language and had been turned upside down by the experience. But, well, there were things about Monty now that I'd been sensing about him that made me uneasy ... Still it was so pleasant knowing him, and I felt I could help him ... That's not the right way to put it. I felt I was still very much part of his life ...
Francois Truffaut:
Monty was truly remarkable. Throughout the picture [I Confess], his attitude as well as his expression is consistent. He has an air of dignity at all times. It's only through his eyes that we see his bewilderment at all the things that are happening to him.
Clift on Prewitt, the character he played in From Here to Eternity:
Prew is a limited guy with an unlimited spirit, an inarticulate man, never a 'word' man ... Good dialogue simply isn't enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character. It's behavior - it's what's going on behind the lines.
Fred Zinnemann, director of From Here to Eternity:
Monty was so intense about being Prewitt he raised the level of the other actors. He cared so much they started caring.
Burt Lancaster:
He approached the script like a scientist. I've never seen anyone so meticulous.
Jack Larson on how Clift would cut his lines, slashing his script up - so that he would have less and less to say in each scene (all the greats did that - Bogart, Wayne, Grant ... They didn't hoard their lines, they CUT them, knowing that it was better, in films, to say less - to let your face and your behavior tell the scene):
He worked out all sorts of broken speeches for himself. In that long scene with Donna Reed [in From Here to Eternity], where he explains why he can no longer box, he must have worked over a single speech for at least twenty-four hours straight Finally he came up with the sentence, 'And then I hit him - and he couldn't see any more.' He said that he couldn't use the word blind because it didn't mean anything to him, but the word 'see' did.
James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity and drinking buddy of Clift:
I told him [Clift] I felt cut off from a lot of experience being a writer, working by myself so much,a nd he said actors were cut off too. 'Except you writers don't need to hear the sond of applause,' he said. I said, 'What the hell are you talking?' and he stares at me with those funny blazing eyes of his and then he starts laughing that crazy-sounding laugh.Monty had a special kind of pain, a pain he could not release. He had a tragedy hanging over his head like a big black comic-strip cloud. It was so distinct you could almost see it. I never heard him talk about himself personally.
Fred Zinnemann:
His drinking was more deadly than Spencer Tracy's. Drunk or sober, Spencer knew who he was, but when Monty drank he seemed to lose his identity and melt before your eyes.
Excerpt from Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift:
The day Monty played that death scene [in From Here to Eternity] a lot of people on the set cried. He played it as if he knew the murder of Fatso had been to no avail - that he had to die. It was inevitable. "How he evoked that feeling I don't know," said James Jones, who watched the scene being shot, "but he ran into his death like someone running into a gigantic tidal wave. His face was gaunt - tense, chalk white - he looked as if he'd had the guts pulled out of him, then he rolls over on the grass and Zinnemann calls cut! And someone says, "Prew's dead," in a hushed voice.
Karl Malden on why Monty's performances were often undervalued:
Because he always becomes part of the warp and woof of a script. So much so that his artistry wasn't always appreciated. If you watch him in From Here to Eternity, he completely immerses himself in the character and situation of Prewitt, so much so that he actually sinnks into the flesh of the story.
Andrew Sarris, film critic:
You could place Yul Brynner but you couldn't place Clift. On screen Montgomery Clift was a chameleon - furtive. In every movie he seemed to be looking for himself.
Friend Jack Larson:
It didn't matter what sex you were. If Monty really liked you - man or woman you ultimately went to bed with him. If he liked you, he couldn't keep his hands off you - touching - caressing - hugging - he was very physical and very, very affectionate. And of course he was always passing out with you and then you were undressing him and putting him to bed and finally you were ending up in bed with him too.
Bill Gunn:
I've never known anyone who liked being in front of a camera as much as Monty. He was the same way in front of a mirror - never ashamed; he enjoyed looking at his reflection. He was like a woman in this regard. He could stare for minutes on end at his image unselfconscious - totally relaxed.
Montgomery Clift:
James Dean's death had a profound effect on me. The instant I heard about it, I vomited. I don't know why.
Montgomery Clift called Elizabeth Taylor (his best friend, his soulmate) "Bessie Mae":
You know how it is when you love somebody terribly but you can't describe why? That's how I love Bessie Mae.
Excerpt from Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift:
Monty was so concerned with the weaknesses in the Raintree script he harried [director Edward] Dmytryk with suggestions and changes he'd stayed up half the night thinking up. A burly man with cold eyes and an abrupt manner, Dmytryk had his own problems. He had made forty-seven movies, among them Crossfire and Caine Mutiny, but he was a former member of the Hollywood Ten who had gone to jail, then recanted to save his career."Monty and I met as often as possible for drinks or lunch. I agreed to listen to his suggestions. He was obviously a great actor - very inventive. But I sometimes felt he worried things to death, little things."
He recalled his preparation for a "flash" scene - a scene lasting no more than a second or two on the screen - the scene called for Monty to enter the room and see his baby for the first time. Monty practiced opening and closing the door countless times; he tried it abruptly, tentatively, fearfully, joyfully, excitedly, all to find the one entrance which would convey exactly the emotion he wanted.
Adele Morales Mailer:
At parties, most of the time he was drunk. Most of us were too. He was a good kisser--I can tell you that. Certainly, he was interested in women. He may have been bi. God, he was tortured. He was driven. You felt an underlying sadness. Even without knowing anything about him. Some people you know without knowing anything about them.
Donna Reed:
"I had never worked with any actor like him; to watch him was incredible and memorable. He had a talent and a side to our profession I had never seen before, just superb."
Excerpt from Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift. Kevin McCarthy on the tragic car accident that ruined Clift's face and almost killed him. They had all been at a party at Liz Taylor's, up on a hill. Then it was time to go. Kevin got in his car, Monty got in his car - behind Kevin's - and they took off down the drive.
Suddenly I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw that Monty's car was coming much too close to my car. I got the idea he was going to play one of his practical jokes - he was going to give my car a little nudge. He never did bump my car, but I had the feeling he might, so I put my foot on the gas and went a little faster. Monty's car seemed to be almost on top of me. I wondered if he was having a blackout. I got frightened and spurted ahead so he wouldn't bump me. We both made the first turn but the next one was treacherous. We were careening now, swerving, and screeching through the darkness. Behind me I saw Monty's carlights weave from one side of the road to the other and then I heard a terrible crash.A cloud of dust appeared in my rearview mirror. I stopped and ran back. Monty's car was crumpled like an accordion against a telephone pole. The motor was running like hell. I could smell gas. I managed to reach in the window and turn off the ignition, but it was so dark I couldn't see inside the car. I didn't know where Monty was. He seemed to have disappeared.
I ran and drove my car back and shone the headlights into Monty's car. Then I saw him curled under the dahsboard. He'd been pushed there by the force of the crash. His face was torn away - a bloody pulp. I thought he was dead.
I drove back to Elizabeth's shaking like a leaf and pounded on the door. "There's been a terrible accident!" I yelled, "I don't know whether Monty's dead or alive - get an ambulance quick!" Mike Wilding and I both tried to keep Elizabeth from coming down to the car with us but she fought us off like a tiger. "No! No! I'm going to Monty!" she screamed, and she raced down the hill.
She was like Mother Courage. Monty's car was so crushed you couldn't open the front door, so Liz got through the back door and crawled over the seat. Then she crouched down and cradled Monty's head in her lap. He gave a little moan. Then he started to choke. He pantomimed weakly to his neck. Some of his teeth had been knocked out and his two front teeth were lodged in his throat. I'll never forget what Liz did. She stuck her fingers down his throat and she pulled those teeth. Otherwise he would have choked to death.
Jack Larson:
When I first saw him [after the accident], I almost went into shock but I think I hid it because he said, "I don't look too different, do I, mon vieux?" I think he was teasing me. He wanted the truth him and I assured him no, no you don't. Of course, he looked completely different. His mouth was twisted. A nerve had been severed in his left cheek so that the left side of his face was practically immobile - frozen. His nose, that perfect nose!, was bent - crooked - out of shape. He looked stuffed, that's the only way I can put it - the only feature that remained the same were his eyes - they were still brilliant and glittering and they stared right through you, but they were now brim full of pain.
Excerpt from Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift - from 1956 - Clift has had his accident, and now barely leaves the house. Black drapes over the windows. He has gone into hiding for months.
Just before he left Hollywood to go back to New York in late November, a man drove up to the house and informed Monty that "Marlon Brando want to talk to you seriously and in private about something. Are you agreeable?" Monty said sure, tell him to come on over, and the man drove off.No more than ten minutes later another car drove up and out stepped Marlon Brando. Dressed in work clothes, he was scowling as he approached the house. He'd had his eyebrows shaved off for the role he was then filming: Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon.
Monty came out to meet him; then the two men went into the house and conferred in the living room for about an hour.
[Jack] Larson, since he was going to drive Monty into the doctor's later that afternoon, waited by the pool. From his vantage point he could see the actors pacing about the living room, then sitting down opposite each other at a table in the foyer. An hour later Brando strode out, got into his car, and disappeared down the hill.
Larson didn't ask questions, but later, on the way to the doctor's, Monty told him what had been said. Apparently Brando had been hearing all sorts of stories about Monty destroying himself with pills and booze. Brando wanted to communicate something: Monty must stop this shit. He must take care of himself not only for himself but for Marlon Brando.
"Then he got into this rap about competition - the healthy competition that should exist between actorrs - that existed, say, between a Laurence Olivier and a John Gielgud, between a Richard Burton, then, and a Paul Scofield. These men challenge each other, he said. Now, didn't Monty know the only actor in America who interested Brando was Monty? Didn't he realize they had always challenged each other, maddened each other, intrigued each other, ever since they started their careers? Brando said the year he'd been nominated for Streetcar Monty had been nominated for Place in the Sun. 'I went to Place in the Sun hoping you wouldn't be as good as you were supposed to be, but you were even better, and I thought, hell, Monty should get that award.' And Monty answered, 'I thought the same thing! I saw you in Streetcar praying you'd be lousy - and at the end I thought Marlon deserves the Oscar.' Brando said, 'In a way, I hate you. I've always hated you because I want to be better than you, but you're better than me - you're my touchstone, my challenge, and I want you and I to go on challenging each other ... and I thought you would until you started this foolishness ...'"
Monty seemed surprised Brando would take the trouble to come over and talk. He seemed quite moved. 'I don't think either Marlon or I are imitators, which is why I guess we respect each other. Maybe because we both have delusions of grandeur."
Monty, on his role in The Young Lions:
With all the accoutrements and mannerisms I'm trying for the essence of something. Acting is an accumulation of subtleties - like shaking the ash from a cigarette when a character is supposed to be completely absorbed in a conversation.
Excerpt from Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift
During filming [of The Young Lions], Monty became friendly with Dean Martin and did everything he could to help the singer in his first dramatic role, just as he had with Sinatra in Eternity. They would run lines together; when he saw Martin was nervous he would break him up. During a party sequence he hid under a pianno on the set and tickled Martin's leg until he had a laughing fit. Inn the evenings, they would go off and have drinking contests. Martin nicknamed him "Spider" because of the extravagant gestures he used when he talked.
Nancy Walker (one of his dearest and staunchest friends):
Monty and I never played roles with each other, or let's say, hardly ever - and we didnt' wear masks. Speaking of masks, I used to tell Monty if you hadn't been in the car crash you'd just be another aging pretty face. I liked his face better after the accident: his strength shone through ...People wouldn't let him be strong. He'd been raised to believe he was weak. I used to get so mad at his secretary. We'd be going out to dinner, and she'd say, 'Now you be sure Monty eats,' and I'd snap, 'Isn't that what you're supposed to do when you go out to dinner?' and she'd cluck, 'But poor Monty is so frail - cha-cha-cha,' and I'd say, 'You are crazy. Monty is as strong as an ox.' He had arms like iron - hands like a musician ... whenever I got bugged, I'd phone him and I'd say, 'I need you. I don't care whether you need me, I need you,' and he'd cry, 'Nanny, what is it? Tell me!; He needed to be needed.
Monty on Noah, the part he played in The Young Lions:
Noah was the best performance of my life. I couldn't have given more of myself. I'll never be able to do it again. Never.
Bill Kellin, actor:
But as anguished as Monty was, and I sometimes felt there was an actual physical presence hovering in the room that he was terrified of - when he acted a scene it was sculpted forever. There was a solidness about the work - a rocklike quality. There was nothing casual about his acting. If he had genius it was that he revealed himself so totally as an actor - he stripped himself naked. He hid his real life - nobody was as mysterious or remote as Monty except I guess to a few friends. But in his acting he revealed himself as powerfully as a scream.
Excerpt from Method Actors by Steve Vineberg:
The love scenes in A Place in the Sun are justly famous. When Angela wanders into the pool room and discovers George, retreating from a party where he knows no one and feels out of place, he relaxes his face and accepts the stronger force of her extraordinary beuaty like a happily defeated warrior. She's affected too - by his inability to keep his feelings concealed. (George makes immediate erotic contact with both the women characters in the film: the factory drudge, Alice, played by Shelley Winters, whom he has an affair with and gets pregnant, and the socialite, Angela, who enters his life after he's already become involved with Alice.) Love shatters George. He confesses hisl ove to Angela as if he were confessing murder, running on fast, feverishly, in a desperate, choked voice, his smile pulled in one direction by rapture and in another by agony ... For Clft, sexual conflict is always bound up with spiritual conflict. The realm of the spirit was the arena where the actors of Clift's generation fought their most feverish battles; following in John Garfield's footsteps but moving beyond him, they also deined themselves by a brooding, unresolvable sexuality. Clift inhabits both these areas simulatneously, heralding the arrival of a new breed of actor.
Excerpt from Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift - on his small wrenching part in Judgment at Nuremberg:
He got two weeks at the Bel Air Hotel plus two first-class plane tickets for himself and Giles. Before leaving for the Coast that April he packed his little photograph of Kafka and he told Nancy Walker he was going to get a "very bad haircut". "Monty believed the poor slob he was playing would get a special haircut before testifying against war criminals."He spent the first day rehearsing with Spencer Tracy at Revue Studios in Hollywood. They rehearsed on a complete replica of the Nuremberg courtroom, built on rollers so the cameras could move in at any angle. Monty's scene, which ran seven minutes, was to be done mostly in close-up. He was worried about remembering his lines.
When time came to shoot the sequence he panicked - and he fluffed in take after take. Finally Tracy ambled over and said, "Fuck the lines - just play to me." Kramer recalled, "Spencer was the greatest reactor in the business. Monty did play to him, and the words poured out of his mouth - the results were shattering."
He spoke in a whisper, full of terror and unhealed suffering; his eyes were like those of a ten-year-old child. He recited his entire story to Tracy very simply, only rising to hysteria when he held out a photograph of his mother who'd been murdered in a concentration camp.
As soon as the highly charged scene was over, Tracy ran from the judges' bench, threw his arms around him, and praised him in glowing terms for his powerful, sensitive playing; he was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his performance.
Alfred Hitchcock:
Montgomery Clift always looked as though he had the angel of death walking along beside him.
Frank Taylor:
Monty and Marilyn [Monroe] were psychic twins. They were on the same wavelength. They recognized disaster in each other's faces and giggled about it.
And after all of this, I think I will end with a quote from Mr. Clift himself.
Here is a snippet from an interview Montgomery Clift gave during the filming of The Misfits (more here) - this is an excerpt from The Making of the misfits by James Goode, a journalist who was there as they filmed the movie:
"I wish I were more thin-skinned. The problem is to remain sensitive to all kinds of things wihtout letting them pull you down. Now, take this - the fact that someone drops a book of matches at a time when he most wants not to seem ill at ease. To a normal person that is not a terribly moving talent, but to an actor in films, such a thing maybe perhaps changes the whole relationship to the girl that dropped the matches. The only line I know of that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'Holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold the magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with a situation. If it were a mirror we would have no art. Essence is a wonderful word. Miller has written the essence of Roslyn. You'd be bored to death if it were a mirror. Take the line in the script, 'Who did this to me? The ambulance did it.' Magnifying the essential things that liberate the imagination and enable one to identify - when one has those qualities, they are fabulous gifts. Take a pause, for example. That I call a magnification. I wouldn't call it a mirror. The magnifying glass has been misused totally, but in this picture it has been put to the use of capturing what possibly is flitting in and out of someone's mind and one person's relationship to another and another, and that's what's fascinating."
October 9, 2009
Acting Notebook
A transcription of the notes I kept during one of my semesters in grad school. There were multi-pronged projects going on - and I kept myself organized by labeling them in the notebook. I had the dreaded "PD Unit", which met for HOURS every Friday - it was the Playwriting/Directors unit, where projects were developed. And of course the actors had to be present as well. Collaboration. My PD Unit was run by my mentor, Sam Schacht, one of the dearest men to ever walk the face of the earth. He was vulgar, blunt, and brilliant. And occasionally transcendent. I was also taking a Shakespeare class, labeled as "Classics", taught by a wonderful man (rest his soul) named Doug Moston. I have written about him before. I was also in rehearsal for multiple projects - one of them was called Gertrude Down, a new play which had come out of the PD Unit. I was also in rehearsal for another new play called German Lullaby. The last project I was in was Arthur Miller's After the Fall, which ended up being my thesis project. I was also attending the twice-weekly sessions at the Actors Studio, crouched in my chair in the dark balcony, watching and learning and soaking it in. So days were spent racing around, talking in different accents, proclaiming things out in verse, and then sitting for HOURS in the PD Unit as some piece struggled to come to life. Much of this is chicken-scratch, and much may be incomprehensible, but I am so glad I kept these notebooks. I can feel the creativity at work here. Being in the zone. Also, some of the comments make me laugh out loud to this day. Nothing like being in a room full of actors, directors, and playwrights to up the comedy factor tenfold. These people were FUNNY. Things often tend to get funny when the stakes are very high, as they were for all of us. Work is work, it is important, but the process itself can often descend into absurdity. These notebooks show that mix. The deep questions being asked, the demands being made, and then the complete LUNACY of spending 100% of your time with creative people who are all working their asses off.
Follow along if you can.
PD Unit
Hello Out There - Sam: "2 damaged people find a moment of magic."
11/6 Classics
Rent: Rob Roy - study Tim Roth. His manners. Negotiating status.
11/11 Classics
"hidden direction" in Shakespeare's verse
Hamlet's speech to the players: Live by it.
What is your intention?
To get onto the stage, dear boy. - Sir John Gielgud
"instinctive apprehension of situations" - on Elizabethan actors
1st scene in Merchant - "Ham it up a bit"
"Theatre is nature highly organized." - Ben Kingsley
11/11 PD Unit
"The PD ... boring or otherwise ..." - Sam
"While she's making all this $ on a soap opera, she can do her creepy parts off-Broadway." - Sam
"Don't try to pull yourself together. Fall apart." - Sam to K.
"I feel like a two-bit whore. Next!" - Sam
11/13 Classics
My monologue: don't lie! Keep it simple. Let it go. Plow right through the list - don't linger. Get it out.
Beware of parallel choices, in terms of preparation.
Doug on Ernie Martin: "He ran Actors Studio West with so much love" -
Stimulus - response
Method: create the stimulus - not the response. Pavlov's Dogs, etc.
Doug on inner thought processes of actors: "I'm not a good actor ... I can't create ... my mom and dad will withhold love ..."
Create a situation where you do what the character does.
Doug: "I don't think Polonius ever speaks in prose. He was born speaking in verse. He probably cried in verse."
Doug, on engraving of William Shakespeare: "I mean, this guy looks like a dork."
"We made out inappropriately ... and then he had a moment ..." - Leslie, on Ophelia's speech about Hamlet attacking her
11/13 German Lullaby rehearsal
How long has Polly been gone?
How overdue is she?
It's 3 a.m.
Something's wrong and I know it.
Anxiety.
Smoking?
11/18 Classics
We speak in sound bytes and subtext.
Doug: "Get into a state where you release all of who you are so that control is not an issue."
Doug: "That's the risk. That's the job."
Doug: "Do everything you're scared to do. Go crazy!"
Over-acting is doing more than you feel.
Doug, on failed love: "You may be able to deal with it better, but you don't get over it. You have a hole in your heart forever."
11/18 PD Unit
After the Fall - just relax. Speak. Don't do more than you feel. Be open.
11/20 Classics
"Shakespeare scares you? Why should you teach yourself to run from these things?" - Doug
Incorporate rhetoric into truthful behavior.
If you get the thoughts right, you'll start doing what the character does.
Balanchine's favorite dancers were the ones who spun into walls. Not so careful, not so aware of where they were.
Robin Williams/Jim Carrey - fearless. Moment to moment. Literally second to second expressing what is in their heads.
"Gentle! God! You can call me anything but don't call me gentle!" - John describing a fellow spear-carrier's improvisation during a production of Julius Caesar - they all called him the "Gentle God guy"
11/25 Classics
Doug: "So how was that for you?"
Eileen: "I had fun ... for a change."
!! Always make the choice that the character is as smart as you or smarter. You may be playing an idiot - but he is negotiating life to the best of his facilities.
Every character has a hidden agenda or secret. Meryl Street in Bridges of Madison County - her secret was she never loved her husband. Make the secret as a conscious choice - and then let it do its work. Use this in As You Like It. I love him. I'm a woman.
"I just gotta get thru the scene." - Al Pacino
"What's it about?" - Doug to Amanda, on her book called Trusting God
"It's about herb gardens." - Amanda
11/25 Macbeth
Try the speech like a telegram - look for only the operative words
What are the most important words to get across the message
11/25 PD Unit
"I don't think it's self-indulgent unless it's self-indulgent." - Sam on crying in stage
Loss. Immediate sensory responses?
WTC bombing.
"Tom?"
"Never mind."
K. says that everything is a "double-edged sword". Let's count how many times he says "double-edged sword" in the next 3 hours.
"If she's peeing loudly, that's a beer-drinkin' woman." - Tom
Eileen: "I know that women are bad lays, too."
"Are you a spy from Juilliard?" - Sam to Brenda
Sam: "The 'chink in the armor' is not a racial slur ..."
Lesley began throwing paper airplanes at Christine. Everyone is falling apart.
Acting in film:
Think loud.
Talk low.
Sam: "Every scene is Fight or Fuck. Make a choice. Do you want to fight the person you're in the scene with? Or do you want to fuck them? Fight or fuck. Choose."
"You were doing some oddly inappropriate emotional work ..." - Sam to Tom
"in the hallowed halls of ivy ..." - Sam
12/2 PD Unit
"I'm totally confused from an organizational point of view." - Sam
"Totally uninhibited. No apologies. Go." - Sam
Liz: "Every woman in this room has gotten their period --"
Sam: "I don't want that kind of talk here."
12/4 Classics
Tell the truth.
If you're awkward, give it to the audience with no more or no less than what you feel.
Parenthetical: think of it as an aside
Doug: "Sometimes physicalizing it dissipates the impulse to express it in complex long sentences."
John: "Should I talk about all of my fears before I start?"
Heaven stands in for God (somtimes) - check the edited editions to see what the consensus was
Let the verse direct you
Words at end of lines (with no punctuation): to be punched, accented, but keep going. The operative words at end of line
Mary had a little lamb whose
fleece was white as snow ...
12/4 PD Unit
"Do you want to speak, Richard, or are you just breathing?" - Sam
Brenda told Sam that she is a soprano. Sam said, "I don't care what you call yourself, your high notes stink."
"Life is short. Keep moving." - Sam
Brenda: "Should I use my body?"
Sam: "If you don't use it, I will."
Sam on Method acting: "I'm flopping around honestly in my moments."
Sam: "The punchline is 'The cocksuckers are throwing paper clips' - so you can work your way backwards from there."
I am so sick at heart today for some reason. I hurt all over. My heart hurts. I want to get out of here
12/9 Classics
"It came and went ... but it kept going." - Leslie
Cover yourself with the choices you made.
Everything is useful.
Leslie and Amanda - Juliet and the Nurse
obstacles in the scene. "Peter, stay at gate."
"Where is your mother?"
"saying goodbye" - Leslie
Tom "To be or not to be"
musical notes.
1st line: The actor knows his action from the 1st line, 11 beats
Question (capitalized): That is the Quest-ion. Search.
Whether 'tis - contractions are rhetorical figures of speech
Tom: "I'm like racin' ahead on this shit."
Tom: "So should I take it back to the same tired part of the thing?"
Doug: Sublimate means to take your pain, and to make it sublime.
"The demon is smiling because it's being exposed." - Doug to G.
12/9 PD Unit
If you really go after your objective, that takes care of the pacing.
"If you 2 ever decide to start a theatre company ... count me in." - Sam
"Go out, say the line, and get the hell off." - Sam
"They need you to go Ping when it comes up." - Sam on playing the triangle in a huge orchestra
Have you read about Jack Nicholson on the Terms of Endearment set?
"If Alaska is germane to your piece ..." - Leslie
12/9 Macbeth
Gene: "Don't take anything for granted when you're fucking with witches."
12/11 Classics
Taming of the Shrew - Doug told me after I stole his heart. Hugged me after class. "And you ... you stole my heart."
12/11 PD Unit
"I hate it when I don't get jokes." - Elena
There's something weird going on today.
Cosmology. Meryl Streep in House of Spirits
Sam: "Trust yourself. Don't be conservative. Go out on a limb."
Kara: "There's something almost superior to people who are spiritually intact."
Sam: "It's always a mistake for an actor to fight his own instrument. It is like a violin saying, 'I wish I was a piano.'"
"Get Strasberg out of your ass and think about somebody else for a second!" - Sam
"You can't be like - 'I'm not ready for the moment to end' ..." - Sam on being in Les Miz
12/12 Gertrude Down rehearsal
warehouse
outskirts of huge metropolis
Blade Runner
Morning After
Glengarry Glen Ross
Reservoir Dogs
Gertrude: knowledge.
How do you get to Gertrude? The little piece of paper from Gertrude means you're set
Vix: like Michael Madsen. Cool She is the only character who speaks correctly, with proper grammar.
The allegiance of thieves
Territory. Struggle for power
Aggression - get what you want
Lenny's a loose cannon
Chain of command:
Gertrude
|
Her crew
______________________
|
Vix
|
Beadie
|
Huff
|
Lenny
|
Dimples
Vix: am I gay?
"I took an oath" ??
Huff deliverws the plans
Margharitte: who is she?
12/16 PD Unit
"Is that that long-lost play by Chekhov?" - Sam
"I'm a little afraid of my boss." - Barbara
Hamlet to the players: Do not saw the air.
12/16 Gertrude Down
Margheritte: did she used to be one of us? Are we missing someone?
I want to break the patterns of my life.
The library: do we normally meet in the library? Leaving messages in books, periodicals? Is Gertrude a librarian?
Whatever my relationship is with Margheritte (lovers?) - it determines how I see Beadie
After the Fall: Notes
Center of attention
Light seems to come from her
She glows
She laughs in the center of her circle of light and love
She looks like an ordinary girl - became American dream girl - she had to dream herself up
Champagne, silver coloring
She feels the image - lives it. I become my own fantasy
Restless and alive
The Misfits: across breakfast table from Clark Gable. She looks at him and says, "You really like me, don't you?"
Walks like a cat in a new house
She is possessable - men sense it
a wild spirit -
like meringue - alabaster -
Innocent. "Here was a girl you'd think would be super aware of guys coming onto her - and she went right past that into another space - far more childlike and interesting."
Modest
I'd rather be a symbol for SEX than some of the other things people are symbols for
Orphan.
Sex is not a dirty word to her - it is others who make it dirty. By itself, it is the purest thing in the world.
She was able to walk into a crowded room and spot anyone who had spent time in orphanages. "Do you like me?" in the eyes - an appeal out of bottomless loneliness
PD Unit
I love how Sam interrupts scenes.
Sam: "So I saw that you had such ecstatic oneness with the part that you were barely in the room with us."
Sam: "The scene lays a royal egg. And I'm thinking: This is not what Stanislavski had in mind."
After the Fall: Notes
Her footprints on a beach are a straight line - this throws pelvis in motion.
Only understands literal truth. Nuance and irony are lost on her.
Raped
Sense of humor collapses when painful images come up
Ludicrously provocative in how she dresses.
ee cummings poem: laughs in thoroughly unaffected way at "it's spring!" - lame balloon man - naive wonder
Surrounded by darkness
She senses she is doomed
She never had the right to her own sadness
No faith
Sees all men as boys with needs for her to fulfill - she just stands aside observing herself
Frigid sexually. No orgasms.
Men = their need
She is incapable of condemning other people
Has no common sense
She knows that men only want happy girls.
She likes old men. Aged men evoke in her an intense awareness of her own power - it turns to pity, love - this is security
Yawning terror
unrelenting uncertainty
can't rest or sleep - addicted to pills, bourbon
adores children and old people - everybody else is dangerous and have to be disarmed by her sexuality
Given power over others by mysterious common consent - no one knows why
quick to laugh
she demands a hero
crazy nobility
uncanny instinct for threat - no reserves to withstand it
Botticelli's Venus
doesn't believe in her own innocence
cursed by her mother
Remember how she listens in Bus Stop
After the Fall: Notes
Quentin's quest for connection to his own life
Tenuousness of human connection
Suddenly - after being loved - you can be thrown into the street - abolished
Play is in the form of a confession
Maggie: seeming truth-bearer
Quentin: constricted, mind-bound - looks to her for the revival of his life
Miller searching for a form that would unearth the dynamics of denial
Unstated question in Camus' book: not how to live with a bad conscience - but how to find out why one went to another's rescue - only to help in his defeat by collaborating in obscuring reality
Camus' The Fall:
about trouble with women - but this is overshadowed by the male narrator's concentration on ethics
How can one ever judge another person once one has committed the act of indifference to a stranger's call for help?
The play: stream of consciousness, abrupt disappearances, verges on montage
Survivor Guilt
After the Fall: Fact Sheet
I work at the switchboard of a law firm in NY
They don't allow dogs where I live. Is it a hotel? SRO?
I don't have a refrigerator
Just bought a phonograph - paying in installments - I only have one record (what record is it?)
"They laugh. I'm a joke to them." They/Them: Men
"I had about 10 or 20 records in Washington but my friend got sick and I had to leave." What does that mean? Washington? What's that about?
Judge Cruise - dying - I tried to say goodbye - Family offered me $1000 - Alexander the chauffeur drove me out to his grave
I left Judge a couple times, but he didn't want me to leave
Used to demonstrate hair preparations in department stores
Sent to conventions - supposed to entertain businessmen - (call girl)
I sleep in the park when it's hot in my room
Quentin: "She's quite stupid, silly kid. She said some ridiculous things. But she wasn't defending anything, or accusing - she was just there, like a tree or a cat."
Quentin: "It would have been easy to make love to her."
Never graduated high school
I like poetry
In the top 3 as a singer
Being courted by a prince - met him at El Morocco
"went up" to see my father - where's up?
My father left when I was 18 months - said I wasn't his
Christening a submarine in Groton shipyard - public appearances
I go to an analyst
Mother used to get dressed in the closet (modest() and smoke in there. She was very moral. She tried to kill me once with a pillow on my face cause I would turn out bad because of her
Masseurs say I have a good back
I disguise myself when I go out
My fake name: Miss None. Like nothing. "I can never remember a fake name, so I just have to think of nothing and that's me."
Sex: "I was with a lot of men, but I never got anything for it. It was like charity, see. My analyst said I gave to those in need. Whereas, I'm not an institution ..."
"She was chewed and spat out by a long line of grinning men."
"You seem to think you owe people whatever they demand."
The worst thing I ever did: I slept with 2 men on the same day. I am haunted by this.
Cream puffs, birthday dress, apples
Tried to die long before I met Quentin
"I been killed by a lot of people. Some couldn't hardly spell."
Who is Frank?
Transition Idea:
2nd scene: Bathrobe lying on mattress
Flowers
Drink/glasses - one drink already poured
I walk out of first scene
"Little Girl Blue" plays
I am in the new set - lights dim - I want to be a sort of silhouette
Take off shoes - unbutton dress - take off dress - take off bra - put on robe - tie robe - drink from drink already poured - sit on bed - Quentin enters
White terricloth robe with hotel insignia - too big - it's important that my pajamas be too big - obviously belonging to a man
Need: 50s bra. Half-slip. Or maybe full slip? Like Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
Notes from Mitchell:
Trust Sheila's innocence. Don't try to show her innocence. Trust that it is already there. She is you already. She's you without your edge.
1/7/98 After the Fall
Is Quentin different? What about him is different? What is Quentin? Not who?
Why did mom get dressed in the closet? Shame, rigid, repressed - or ashamed of smoking?
Where is my mother now?
Refrigerator references: I have no refrigerator in the first scene, and 2 freezers in the second scene
What is the relationship with my agent? I'm obviously sleeping with him. Or blowjobs in return for professional protection and career management.
Focus on Quentin. Full focus. Do not get distracted by my own stuff. Eyes always on him. Soak him up
Her line of logic - like a child.
Dog - refrigerator.
It makes perfect sense to me
Page 5: "Why, they going to fire me now?"
Open book. "How could I keep a dog?" (Come on, you know my life!)
Who is Judge Cruze?
"NOW" - in the moment impulsive
Conscious afterwards (Scuse me about my hair ...)
2nd scene: What is frightening me?
I call Quentin - not expecting him to answer - it is midnight. I ask him Can you come over? Why?
The mother story: what is the logic of it? She is "absorbed in her own connections" - what is that about?
Does Maggie know she is smart?
"You're like a god" - what do I mean by this?
My entire life has happened because of him - why?
"You're very moral" he says to me. No one has ever said that to me before.
What do I want from him in this scene?
"They laughed" - it is a stab in the chest (Betty the Loon) - where is my self-esteem?
She is not philosophical about herself.
"I hate the taste" - what do I love about the effect of alcohol? Be specific. Why do I bring it up? How much have I had before this? Is it a martini?
What would other men in this situation do to me? How would they behave as opposed to Q?
Am I testing him at all?
I respect him for not making a pass at me - but do I feel rejected too?
What role dow sex play in my life? What do I get out of it?
1/9/98 After the Fall
1st scene: What usually happens in this sort of situation - talking to strange men? It's not happening her. This surprises me. Who is this man?
--Dirt from Judge's grave - why?
--What is the relationship with Alexander? Give him a blowjob so that he will take me to the grave
-- Why did I leave the judge a couple of times?
2nd scene: Try to use sex to make my panic go away
Panic attack
Need for physical contact - it makes the bad stuff go away - sex is the only remedy
Drunkenness - don't forget she's drunk
p. 9: "What did you mean - it gave you a satisfaction?"
-- where does that come from?
-- It's a clear shift in thought - a gear shift
p. 11 "I don't know anybody like that" - cover up disappointment - he won't be staying with me. I did call someone, asshole! I called you!
Would you open the closet door? Everything stripped away.
Do I normally spend my time with men ignoring my fears so I can alleviate theirs?
It's okay for you to be a man with me, Quentin
2nd scene: If this scene didn't happen, what would I be doing?
My agent is in Jamaica - am I in his house? Who usually deals with my loneliness and depression and where are they now? Why don't I call my analyst? Is he in California? Or is Quentin the last person I called? What would have happened if he didn't answer?
1st scene: What am I doing in the park? Does it have to do with Judge Cruze's family?
Dirt: Have I been carrying it around with me for a while? Did I just come back from the grave?
1/12/98 Gertrude Down
Don't look for approval from anyone
Bank heist
-- Beadie is in the middle of telling the story
You have to have arrogance to survive in this world
Down the rope - close to Gertrude - Knowledge - Power
Vix: Narcissist. Self-involved. It's all about me.
I'm late to the meeting. Why am I late?
We are all operating on different levels of knowlege - Secrets - Everything has meaning
Don't get distracted. Be like a lion staring at an unaware zebra.
1/13/98 Actors Studio Session
Estelle Parsons moderating
1st scene: director Pete Masterson
Tom and Kelly
Okay, what is happening in this scene? Is this an improv? What is the objective?
Acting on your impuluses only is not acting. Remember John Strasberg. I'm just seeing impulse going on.
Relationship?
Her gum?
Pete: letting the actors explore the scene. This is beginning work.
God, you really just have to be so honest up there. Don't pull your punches - don't defend - talk about your choices
How do you effectively say what you worked on.
Arthur Penn's here too.
How to talk about your work without just talking about the plot, or explaining the script.
Estelle: "You talk about him, you talk about the play ... what about you?"
*What did you work on today?*
Just answer the ?
I feel like she judges the character. I feel like she thinks the character is stupid.
Estelle: "A lot of the work was very general."
Harvey Keitel is moderating on Jan. 27
2nd scene - improv
He belches. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Belch. "You motherfucker."
"You're a fuckin' fruitcake, you know that?"
"Whatsa matter, guru?"
"You don't know, Mr. Skirt Man, what I'm gonna do to you."
"Let's see what it does to me. Don't impose. And I really succeeded in that."
"I did not trust my own quiet. I didn't trust that I didn't want to speak."
Arthur Penn: "That was so intensely joyful to watch. I could have stayed here for days. I could have had sandwiches brought in."
I am in love with him!!
Now that is an actor.
"My character has a problem."
"Well, I've been known to make weak chocies."
"Well, when you put it that way ......" Laughter. "Always nice talking wtih you, Arthur."
If you try to avoid cliches ... you go into Cliche-Land.
1/14/98 After the Fall: Notes
I've always wanted people to see me, the real person
You know why I make fun of myself? So I'll do it before they do. That way it's not so bad, doesn't hurt so much. It's either commit suicide or laugh.
Gemini
hold nothing back.
"She personalized the whole world."
Monroe freaked out once about eating a chicken - started weeping: "It had a mother." Intense identification with animals.
No shame
She could be so subverient and helpless and yet she wound up dominating everyone
Her life was like a war zone.
She was parasitic. Take take take take. Demand. Live off the juice of others.
She's a good liar.
Life is balck and white - all or nothing - life is intense. She never forgets, and never forgives.
Obsessed with finding Freudian theories for everything.
countless abortions
rapes
no self-consciousness about her body
not a material girl
* What would happen if she allowed herself to be strong? Could anyone tolerate it?
2nd scene: "I have to initiate relationships. With men it's hands off. They don't know what the hell to do with me. After they get me, they don't know what to do either."
She has the psychology of a loving woman who has been treated like a whore her whole life
Help Help Help
I feel life coming closer
When all I want is to die
I saw a star slide down the sky,
blinding the North as it went by,
too burning and too quick to hold,
too lovely to be bought or sold,
good only to make wishes on
and then forever to be gone.
1/18/98 Gertrude Down
Gautier wardrobe, maybe?
Men's suits tailored for women
Elastica
1/20/98 Classics
"Rules are designed to minimize thinking." - Doug
Concentration is a barometer. It's God's way of telling you you didn't make a strong enough choice.
Don't apply yourself to the task if it's not working. Change the task.
After the Fall: Mitchell's notes
"See what happens if you do one rehearsal just as Sheila."
"This is a woman who hasn't learned not to play the subtext."
-- dresses too sexy for office
-- lays it too much on the line
"You open yourself up for attack if you play the subtext."
Think about me, and my role at Lounge Ax with P.: that line I was afraid to cross of being perceived as a joke, a bimbo, a whore. Paranoid about how I was perceived. Am I a joke? What are people saying about P. and me? I have to be in control of that - of how I am perceived - so make a joke out of myself before others can. The point is is that I am in on the joke.
"Men are at the mercy of her sexuality - and so is she."
1/20/98 PD Unit
"And if you're a talented prick, who needs you?" - Sam
You aren't only emotionally connected in naturalism
Lee Strasberg: "Your trump card is always the disaster that's befalling you in the moment."
September 29, 2009
“For this stunt, hire a woman dressed entirely in black mourning, complete with veil, and have her visit the local newspapers. . .
... and ask permission to go through their files for stories and pictures of [Rudolph] Valentino. Instruct her to be as mysterious as possible."
-- Quote from Paramount Picture's press booklet to theatre owners, encouraging them to hire their own "Ladies in Black"
And so they did, although this was kept hush-hush for years. It was part of the legend. Who was this "Lady in Black" who showed up every year on the anniversary of Valentino's death?? A brilliant publicity ploy, if you think about it.
If you are not familiar with the Lady in Black, here's a good summing-up by Suzidoll over at Movie Morlocks, although when you're talking about Rudolph Valentino, there is always more to discover. The myths, the fantasies, the legends ... It feels like ancient history.
Valentino's sexuality was "questioned" from the start. There were probably some issues there, but perhaps it was also unsettling to see a man be so openly emotional, and in touch with his sexual side, and that those qualities are seen as distinctly feminine (a pox on all their houses). There was also the bit about his "foreignness" - his "exotic" face and all of that. He was classically "The Other" and was cast as such. Regardless, there is an anecdote about Valentino that I find quite moving. It's listed on the IMDB page of his trivia, as well as in the couple of books I have about Valentino. It is a spit in the eye to those who think masculinity should only take one form, and who mistakenly believe that those who are not physically rugged are "weak", or not tough.
A few months before Valentino's death, a Chicago newspaper columnist attacked his masculinity in print, referring to him as a "pink powder puff." A lawsuit was pending when Valentino was fatally stricken. One of his last questions to his doctor was, "Well, doctor, and do I now act like a 'pink powder puff'?" His doctor reportedly replied, "No, sir. You have been very brave. Braver than most."
His untimely death caused a worldwide uproar, but you can read all about that in that post.
And if you can, try to track down some of Valentino's movies. There are people who are film buffs who have never seen one of his movies. It was very difficult for years to even get your hands on one of them, but now with Netflix, that is taken care of (at least to some degree). I have yet to see any of them on the big screen. He is exaggerated, yes, and it takes some getting used to. But why I love it is that it is a glimpse of "how things used to be", in terms of acting and film acting. Women swooned in the aisles. Women were in a frantic state of sexual ecstasy just watching this guy. Rather than snicker and make fun, it's a fascinating glimpse at how things change, but also how things stay the same. He is a part of the fabric of Hollywood, and the development of early 20th culture (not to mention the culture of FAME - which was unheard of at that time, at least at that level. Motion pictures changed everything, in terms of instant recognizability).
Suzidoll writes:
Valentino’s films are the most obvious of romantic melodramas, and the acting style is broad and expressive, even for silent films, which is definitely out of vogue for contemporary audiences. Despite the time-bound nature of the genre and acting style, Valentino is magnetic onscreen, making him a timeless icon of sexuality. There’s an energy and verve to his performances that make his costars forgettable. His charisma transcends the corny exaggerated eye gestures and nostril flaring associated with his star image. And, his magnetism is apparent without benefit of his voice. Valentino died a year before The Jazz Singer issued in talkies, forever relegating silent films to a distant past. It occurred to me that I have never heard his voice.
September 21, 2009
Wonderboy, what is the secret of your power?
Because I can't get enough of Tenacious D, and of this song in particular (clip below). It is on eternal repeat. "Wonderboy". My neighbors must be like, "Wow, so glad that chick moved in. So glad I get to hear Tenacious D 24/7 ever since she moved in." Is there anything more ridiculous, more self-parodying, more This is Spinal Tap, than this song? And yet they COMMIT like CRAZY to it - knowing that it is parody, knowing that it is ridiculous ... they fill it with heart and humor ... that may be too subtle for some sensibilities ... but I tell you, it hits me right in the sweet spot.
"He can kill a YAK from 200 yards away ... WITH MIND BULLETS ..."
And yet Jack Black's performance, in and of itself, is magnificent. Magnificent. There's not one part of himself that is removed from it, or detached. It's not snarky. It's a TRIBUTE. A tribute to the grandiose rock bands like Led Zeppelin that inspire him.
I maintain my wild-card position, that Jack Black is a future Oscar winner. At the very LEAST a nominee. All it would take is the right PART. Someone utilize this man. He has already been utilized quite well. High Fidelity - it seems like that part was written for him, and I get the feeling that Jack Black is a master at "making something his own". When he's not used well, he can get general, but that is true of a lot of highly talented actors. He's specific. School of Rock tapped into that specificity as well. As far as I'm concerned, he can do it all.
If "they" just let him.
Or if Jack Black lets himself.
That's the danger with a talent like his. He reminds me of Jack Nicholson. This is a good thing. His own survival instinct is his best ally. He won't BE manipulated. He has the same mischievous spirit, the humor that cannot be tamped down ... he refuses sentiment. He just can't do it. It's not that he WON'T cheapen himself that way. It's that he CAN'T. Neither can Nicholson. His talent helps him wriggle out of tight spots that conventional directors place him in.
I'll tell you why I think he is a future Oscar winner, and it has to do with one moment he had in the movie Shallow Hal. Scorn if you must, but realize, in the midst of your scorn, that you may be wrong. In fact you probably are. If there's anything I know about myself, it's that I have a damn good eye. I recognize truth. I can see phoniness of behavior from 5 miles away. In a social situation and in a film. Now "phoniness" in acting is not always malevolent (as it is in real life). Sometimes "phoniness" in acting comes from a variety of factors: the actor is over his/her head, the direction is terrible, the script is bad ... an actor does not act alone. It is, in its very nature, a collaborative act. Regardless of the reason (and I am all about the reasons), I can clock it immediately. "Phony." "Not real." "Not coming from a truthful place." Many major movie stars cheapen their gift - they can't help it, or they just feel that that is what is required of them to be a star, or (worse) they can't see that that is even what they are doing. They cheapen it by being pressured into being sentimental, cliched, by acting like someone other than who they are. If there is one selling point of the old studio system (and there were many) it's that actors rarely were forced into roles that were against who they actually were. The trend now in acting is "versatility". I find it to be a trend that rewards facile talent, rather than deep talent. If you can do an accent, and have a putty bulbous nose, and limp, and are able to embody a Siberian ice princess circa 4 a.d., then you have "talent". I don't scorn skill like that if it's true skill, and not just a gimmick. But if you look at the Bogarts, the Cagneys, the Stanwycks, the Grants ... they were not rewarded for their "versatility". Cagney didn't play things that went completely AGAINST who he was, thinking that THAT would prove he really had talent. Being able to do accents, and walks, and gestures is skill - and there are some who are highly skilled mimics, so skilled that it actually approaches channeling (phone call for Meryl Streep ... ) ... but "essence" acting (as I call it) is out of style now. An actor who understands his own ESSENCE and can bring it to the screen. Mickey Rourke is an essence actor. So is Jack Black. It's old-school, what they do.
Back to the moment that convinced me that not only is Jack Black talented (obviously) but he has what it takes to sucker-punch an audience in the way that is required to be an Oscar contender. Not to take away from the work he has already done. An Oscar is not the measure of an actor's worth. Cary Grant hasn't won an Oscar. Neither has Gena Rowlands. Or Mickey Rourke. It's meaningless. These people are untouchable.
When I say "Oscar-contender" here with someone like Jack Black, I am really talking about his potential to move an audience (uhm, like Wonderboy does), and to take a specific experience and make it wholly universal. And to do that, alongside his manic comic sensibility, is so rare as to be almost unheard of. So many comedic actors slide into schmaltz when they attempt drama. Comedy requires us to LIKE the comic, but acting has different requirements. Many comics fail in that transfer, because they still need to be liked. Even with Black's abrasiveness, his ability to capture truly unenlightened and yet self-righteous individuals, it's kind of impossible NOT to like him. He's already got that in the bag.
In Shallow Hal he plays a dude named Hal who is, well, shallow. Naturally. The guy looks like Jack Black, yet he seems to feel that he is entitled to a supermodel as a girlfriend. He has a warped sense of himself, which goes hand in hand with a disgust for women who are less than perfect. If he's with a "dog" then what would that say about him? He's rather an awful person. Through various magical moments (one involving an encounter with Tony Robbins), Hal becomes literally unable to NOT see inner beauty. He sees what he believes to be a beautiful babe walking down the street, he hits on her, and is amazed that she responds. His friends are horrified, because we see what THEY see ... the girl has a snaggle tooth, or she's chubby, she has straggly hair ... but he can't see that. He looks around and sees beauty everywhere, beauty that is responsive to HIM. He starts to date the most fabulous girl he has ever met - played (wonderfully, actually, and I'm not a fan) by Gwyneth Paltrow. We know that she is obese, we see her reflections in the windows and mirrors, but HE sees a lithe gorgeous Gwyneth. I was turned off by the ad campaign for the film ("hahaha look at the fat girl ..." etc.) but when I finally saw the film I realized how subversive and pointed its commentary actually was. The best part of Paltrow's performance is that she doesn't play, in any way shape or form, a victim. A sad fat girl. No, she is an extrovert. A fabulous girl, who has a lot of interests, and dreams (outside of finding a mate), who knows who she is, knows her limitations, but really enjoys life. She has opinions about things, she's passionate and funny, and Jack Black (thinking she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow) cannot believe his luck. She likes him? And she looks like THAT? You can see the setup here. I mean, remember the title. What happens to us when we judge people on their looks? When we stay "shallow"? How much do we miss by judging a book by its cover?
The moment in this movie that gave me my "a-ha" moment in terms of Black's ability as a dramatic actor is as good a moment as any heavy-hitting dramatic actor has ever had in any Oscar-contending film. Paltrow's character volunteers in what we later learn is the burn unit of a children's hospital. But we don't know what these kids are in there for at first, because we see them through Jack Black's characters eyes. They are precious perfect little unflawed beings. Paltrow, unlike most fat characters in film, has a LIFE. She has good parents, and a lot of dreams. She's not immediately love-struck by Jack Black in a desperate way. She knows that she has to "vet" him, like any woman has to do with any potential mate in her life. How does he feel about family? How does he feel about kids? Who is he? What does he want? These are important questions any woman has to ask when considering a man as her mate ... and Paltrow, by taking him to the burn unit, is doing that. How will he handle this? Will he cringe from the kids? (But again, the audience, seeing the film through his eyes, are in the dark. We don't know why these kids are in the hospital. They may be sick, but they don't LOOK sick). Jack Black's character, still in the magical dreamspace, doesn't know that what he is seeing is INNER beauty, freely plays with these kids, picking them up, and kissing them, naturally being a beautiful companion with them. Would he have cringed if he had been able to perceive their deformities, their scars, their burns?
Later in the film, the "veil" is ripped from his eyes. The magic is gone. He now knows that his girlfriend is obese, that she DOESN'T look like Gwyneth Paltrow. He does not behave honorably. He blows her off in the worst most cowardly way possible. But he feels terribly about it. He starts to pursue Paltrow again, to apologize, he has broken her heart, she won't answer the phone. He's desperate. He goes to the hospital, to see if he can catch her during one of her shifts. As he wanders around, a little girl calls out to him. She recognizes him from when he visited with Paltrow. Black looks at her. Confused.
We see what he sees.
A tiny 8 or 9 year old girl whose entire face has been burned off. She has a few strands of hair on her head. But we know who it is. He doesn't know yet, but we do.
She says to him, "My name is Sally [whatever her name is] - don't you remember me?"
It is in this moment that the light dawns over Jack Black's face. He realizes what has happened to him. Not only does he realize what he has done to the Paltrow character, but he realizes what he has done to every single person he has ever met. Even precious little beings like this burned little girl.
He can't hide what is happening with him. Everything goes soft and tender. He squats down onto her level, and she comes to him, and they hug. His heart is breaking. His tenderness is beautiful. His voice is loving and soft - "Hi, Sally ... hi, beautiful ..." but he's playing so much more there. Grief is there for him, grief at all of the time he has wasted not seeing people. In his "former life", he might have missed out on this beautiful little human being, because of her burned face. He would have only seen that. And what a tragedy.
Not just for "shallow Hal", but for all of us.
It's my favorite moment of Jack Black's acting. Ever. There's a primal gentleness in him there that seems to me to be wholly natural, nothing forced, and he is brave enough to give us a good close look at his essence. No hiding. He can't do it.
You show me an actor who could have played that moment better, without sliding into sugary sentimentality. Nicholson could do it. Bridges could do it. Cagney could do it. That's the realm we're in with Black.
Whatever he does, you can be damn sure it won't be FACILE.
Or PHONY.
He is incapable of it.
In that vein, let's just enjoy Tenacious D, helping us to rise above the "mucky-muck."
Also: boy can SING.
September 16, 2009
Happy birthday to Lauren Bacall
"He's the ugliest handsome man I've ever seen."-- Lauren Bacall on Humphrey Bogart
When Lauren Bacall was 17, she modeled for a season for the designers on 7th Avenue. By her own admission, she was not very good at it. Here is what she said, when she came to do a seminar at my school:
"I was flat-chested and very skinny. The clothes of that time just didn't look good on me."
If you think of how female body-types go in and out of fashion, you can see that she is quite right, as gorgeous as she is. Her body-type is actually "in" now. But the clothes didn't hang right on her shoulders, she had slim hips, etc. Not at all right for the time.
However - she happened to meet a man during this time who arranged an introduction with Diana Vreeland, legendary fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar at the time.
Diana Vreeland, who was a bit of a visionary, actually - saw something in the teenage "Betty". Now it is obvious that Vreeland saw what it was in her that would captivate an audience. She saw the "star" - the star that was already there.
So Vreeland put Betty Bacall on the cover of Harper's Bazaar.
Bacall stands in front of a huge Red Cross sign. She has a flat blank face, she stares straight at the camera - there is nothing coy about her. Her skin is pale, her lips are bright red. She doesn't look like what models looked like in that time period. She looks like what models look like now. There is a very clear identity on her face - you can see her personality - which models didn't quite have at that time. Think of the runway models now - how they stalk right at you - with this flat blank "Yeah, this is who I am" stare. That was what Bacall looked like on that cover.
The Harper's Bazaar cover was, as Bacall described it, "the twist of fate that changed my life forever".
Slim Hawks, Howard Hawks' wife, saw the cover and showed it to her husband, saying: "What about this girl?" Howard Hawks had been looking for a project. He was a Svengali, he wanted to create a certain type of woman for movies. He (according to Bacall) had a fantasy about women, and a fantasy about how they should be on screen. He had never seen it before (the quality he was looking for was "insolence" - not "toughness" but "insolence"), and he wanted to find his muse for this particular rare female dynamic. As a result of Lauren Bacall's Harper's Bazaar cover, Howard Hawks called this skinny teenager out to Hollywood to put her under his own personal contract, to develop projects for her - the first being To Have and Have Not - starring (of course) Humphrey Bogart. Her performance in that film has got to go down in history as one of the greatest and most startling film debuts of all time.
Also, you know, there was the little thing of that romance that began on that film.
But before all that came along - Hawks was very careful about her. He wanted her to maintain a sense of mystery and power. She was not just another starlet. He wanted to orchestrate her career- which he ended up doing - brilliantly.
Bacall came and talked at my school, and told a very funny story about those early days, when Hawks was "holding her back", trying to find the right project (and co-star) for her. Bacall said:
"Hawks said to me, 'I have a feeling that you would be great in a movie with either Cary Grant ... or Humphrey Bogart.' And I thought to myself, 'Ooooooh, Cary Grant! That sounds like a good idea!!"
She told us that she had spent the majority of her life "quaking in fear". Hard to imagine, but true. At every step along the way, she had huge obstacles to overcome - of fear, shyness, self-confidence problems ... She was terrified to meet Diana Vreeland. She was terrified of modeling. She was terrified to meet Howard Hawks. She was terrified of what would happen to her after Bogie died. She was terrified to star in "Applause" on Broadway - the musical version of All About Eve (she ended up winning the first of two Tonys by the way). She is ruled by fear.
Her stage fright is debilitating (always has been) and she trembles uncontrollably. Her head shakes (she mentions becoming aware of it on her first day of shooting To Have and Have Not) ... her hand trembles ... it is beyond her control. The "tricks" she performs on herself, to just allow herself to be up there in front of people (head down, chin down, arm down ... ) - are extraordinary, I admire the smart-ness of her coping skills very much ... but lots of people have coping skills and don't become PHENOMS at the age of 19. Her "coping skills" (head down, chin down, look up while head is down so head doesn't shake, arm down, cross one arm over the other) - all of that stuff became her "look", her persona, what she was famous for.
Amazing! What began as a way to stop her head from shaking - became her "trademark".
Bacall is smart. She's not just smart as an actress, but she has the other kind of smarts: smarts about herself. And the choices she made only made her seem stronger, more specific, more herself. None of those invented gestures come off as studied, or stiff. It looks like Lauren Bacall is just one cool dame, who doesn't NEED a lot of extraneous movement. When really it all began as a way to deal with nervousness. I love that!
"I am always associated with [Bogart] in people's minds - 'the greatest love story ever told.' You can't get away from that. He'd never believe it, of course... It's great that he's still appreciated by so many, because he's worth it. He was a very special human being, Bogart."
The famous cover, the "twist of fate" below the fold.
Happy birthday, Betty Bacall.
August 29, 2009
Speaking of favorite actors: Let's misbehave!
Christopher Walken in his show-stopping number in Pennies From Heaven.
I love how the cinematography here is old-school dance cinematography, from the days of Astaire and Rogers and Cyd Charisse and all of those awesome old dance scenes. Full body. No tricks here. (Richard Gere in Chicago, I'm lookin' at you!) No cutting to different body parts, a la Flash Dance, to make it seem like the dancer is actually doing the dancing, when in actuality it's a double. I know Gere did the dancing in Chicago - it's the cinematography I have a problem with. It protected him and his lack of skill. Whereas here: This is all Walken. You can't fake this. Full body shots.
Walken got his start on Broadway, as a child, in musicals. His background was musical comedy (which is fascinating to me, considering his reputation as a heavy-hitter actor in 1970s and 80s tough dramas). Walken came and spoke at my school and he talked a lot about his affinity for musical comedies, and how he tries to incorporate an "homage" to that legacy in any role he plays, regardless of whether it is appropriate or not. For example, in his searing performance in At Close Range (one of my favorites of his) - he has a moment where he walks away from the camera and he does a small dance-step, which has nothing to do with anything that the character would ACTUALLY do - Walken was laughing as he told the story. Why would that guy do a mini jig as he walked away? No reason, except that Walken was playing him. So funny, so brilliant. I love people who do what they want to do. The audience will not think, "Oh, there's Walken paying INAPPROPRIATE tribute to his roots as a song and a dance man," because is it even common knowledge that Walken WAS a song and dance man?? No, they will think, "Okay, I am terrified of that man doing a jig ... because he seems unpredictable and not of this world."
Walken spoke eloquently of how "outside" of things he felt. That normal life is not for him, was never for him, because he grew up as a child of the theatre, from a very young age. It sets you apart. He didn't play on the playground. He spent his days in tap class. It makes you a weirdo. And that sense of "otherness" is what contributed to his giant talent in films like The Dead Zone, Deer Hunter, True Romance - the list goes on and on. If you didn't know his background, you might think that it was just his looks - the strange kind of heavy-lidded eyes, and blankness behind them - that was the source of his eerieness. But no. It is because he grew up as a child actor.
So much fun to see him here in 1981, 3 years after Deer Hunter, for God's sake, let it all hang out, let us see who he REALLY is.
August 28, 2009
20 favorite actors
Joining the fun that's been going on, and to quote Nathaniel who started this whole thing: "In no particular order and extremely subject to change." For example: where the hell is Robert Mitchum? And William H. Macy? And Sean Penn and Dennis Quaid? And Brad Davis? Not to mention Claude Rains and Dustin Hoffman. Argh. But whatever, I will let this list stand for today. (This is a companion piece to 20 Favorite Actresses).
Here we go.
The 20 favorite men.
1. Mickey Rourke
2. Cary Grant
3. Richard Widmark
4. John Wayne
5. Jeff Bridges
6. Jack Nicholson
7. Thomas Mitchell
8. Gene Hackman
9. Dean Stockwell
10. Russell Crowe
11. Humphrey Bogart
12. Kurt Russell
13. George Sanders
14. Robert Duvall
15. Marlon Brando
16. Paul Newman
17. Johnny Depp
18. Gary Cooper
19. James Cagney
20. Ewan McGregor