The Sheila Variations

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.

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.

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, by Robert Hare, the leading expert in psychopaths in, perhaps, the world. His name comes up all the time if you research psychopaths, which, uhm, I do. His book is fantastic, by the way, highly recommended - and certainly makes me think of two psychopaths I have known (I described the behavior of one of them here - uhm, Irony?). An interesting point that Hare makes, repeatedly, is the controversy around the term "psycho" and what it has come to mean in our culture, and why the preferred term (at least legalistically) is usually "sociopath" - because "psycho" has connotations of crazy, off-the-wall, going NUTS, and not being in control of your faculties. Psychopaths are always in control. They are not "insane", as "psycho" would have you think.

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 creates one of the most indelible portraits of a psychopath that I can think of - not in the delusional damaged Perry Smith, who may seem more openly "insane", with his visions of a great avenging bird, and his fantasies of scuba-diving for sunken treasure - he seems "nuts" - but, it is really Dick Hickock who is the textbook "psychopath". Cold, glib ("Matt, Matt, Matt, you're glib..."), deceitful, and charming as hell. Capote felt it when he was in his presence.

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.

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?

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."

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."

“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.

Go read the whole thing.

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.

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.

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.

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

Upcoming doc about John Cazale

Well, well, this is thrilling news. There's a new documentary called I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale, which had its debut at Sundance and should premiere on HBO. How thrilling. Interviews with all the people who knew this great actor from the 1970s who died way too young: John Savage, Meryl Streep (his girlfriend at the time), Robert DeNiro, Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino ... It's going to be incredible. How often does THIS happen? A great and beloved actor - who created parts that live on in the memory - but who passed away even before he hit his prime ... gets such a tribute? I am just so glad this is happening, and I can't wait to see it.

Jeremy has more thoughts..

Opacity is a virtue: Johnny Depp as John Dillinger

Or ... There Is No Rosebud.

We know a lot about John Dillinger. He was such a hunted man that his whereabouts are clocked on almost a minute-by-minute basis, and the police files are enormous. We know the kind of coat he wore, the cars he stole, we know what he ate, who he hung out with, his girl. We know that he could be graceful. People tell stories of how he would leap over the counters in banks with a slowness and beauty more like a dancer than a criminal. We know he let the regular civilians who happened to be in the banks when he robbed them keep their money - "that's yours" he would say. We know about his spectacular jail breaks, so ballsy that you can't believe it really happened that way. We know he loved movies. What else do we know. We know about how he was killed in the alley outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. We know about the cray-cray shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge, and how the crimes of John Dillinger was part of the impetus to create a Federal Bureau of Investigation. There are pictures of Dillinger posing in a buddy-buddy manner with cops, and his jailers. He was a celebrity. Feared, yes, but glamorized as well. The movies of the time reflected the consciousness that Dillinger was "out there" somewhere, and it's hard to say which came first: John Dillinger or the love affair American movies have always had with gangsters. His influence on popular culture was gigantic and, to some degree, invisible. Criminals are bad, right? They should be apprehended. But they also can have a wild lawless charm that the public finds captivating. Why else do we watch movies about criminals and even though we know they SHOULD be caught, we find ourselves rooting for them, and whispering in our heads, "Get out of there! The cops are after you!" Dillinger walked that line. People projected things onto him. It was the Great Depression. Crime was out of control. He robbed the rich (banks), and left the middle-class alone. He was conscious of his image, in a strange way. He didn't get involved in kidnapping or ransom, because he knew public opinion was against such crimes. But robbing banks? At a time in our country's history when banks had failed, plunging the nation into a Depression? There was a strange romance to it all. There's more we know. We know about the "lady in red", and we know that she actually didn't wear red. We know what movie he was going to see the night he was killed. We know the bare bones of his hard-scrabble childhood, a mother who died early, and a father who beat him. He was married, briefly, but he became a criminal early. Maybe it just seemed easier to him.

So there's a lot we know. But what does it explain? Does it reveal anything? What makes a John Dillinger? I'm reading a book right now about Stalin's earliest years in Georgia and Baku and Tiflis, and it's fascinating because even with all we know, a "Stalin(TM)" cannot be explained. There is not a smoking gun when it comes to the creation of a personality. Citizen Kane may have had a Rosebud but most of us do not. We are a mixed bag. We have inherent qualities and then our environment does the rest for us. Many people had hard-scrabble upbringings and a father who beat them and still they did not become John Dillinger. Maybe, even with his organizational skills and efficiency, he was essentially a lazy man. It was too hard to go straight. He had no sense of the future. How could he? It was all about the Now. But again, many people are lazy, and many people only have a sense of the present moment, and don't become one of the most wanted men in America.

If you know me, you know I am basically in love with the study of criminals - whether it be tyrannical despots, manipulative cult leaders or cunning serial killers. I, too, look for the Rosebud with these people. It is an irresistible quest. What IS it that makes someone an Idi Amin? Or a Ted Bundy? People who have too-easy answers for these questions, or people who are uninterested in the question itself, bore me. Is evil something that comes from the outside? Or is it inside? There were many brutal criminals surrounding Stalin in his early days. Borderline psychopaths. Most of them ended up rising to the top of Stalin's regime, because his sensibility required psychopathic individuals to follow him. But what was it in Stalin that made him who he was? I have shelves of books that attempt to answer that question. Some say it was his first wife's death that was the real Rosebud. Others say it was his inferiority complex, from his pockmarked face, short left arm, and the fact that he wasn't Russian. Who knows. It could be a mix of all of these things that created a perfect storm that left us with Stalin. Regardless, it is the study that is interesting to me, and I don't need to nail it down. Kind of like the raging argument that cropped up after the Sopranos finale, and the theories of what it meant, and what happened after, and did Tony die? It's not that I didn't find the conversation interesting. I did! It was fascinating! But my sensibility is such that I was comfortable hovering in between theories. I didn't need to nail it down in order to fully enjoy it. Tony died, Tony didn't die ... I like to swing the pendulum. The question is not meant to be answered beyond a reasonable doubt. Or, you can go that way if you like, but I think much is lost in the transfer.

Let's come back to Dillinger, and, specifically, Michael Mann's film Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger.

The best thing about it (and the thing that may frustrate other viewers) is that it does not attempt to explain John Dillinger, and it also seems perfectly willing to hover between multiple theories, letting all of them be true, in one way or another, so that you still are left with the essential mystery of what it is that creates such a hardened canny criminal. The film sticks to the facts, which means there is a certain lack of tension in the film, since we all know how it ends. Public Enemies is effective despite this. It doesn't purport to show "the softer side" of Dillinger (yuk), and it doesn't go for a Freudian analysis. "My daddy beat me, and that's why I'm so bad!" Michael Mann stays far far away from such simplistic thinking and the film is so much stronger for it. It could have been insufferable. John Dillinger, just the facts of him, is fascinating enough. You don't need to make anything up, you don't need to have a "take" on the man - which would, necessarily, end up being rather cliched: He was a celebrity, that's our take! He was a damaged little boy, that's our take! He yearned for a mother figure, that's our take. No. Michael Mann is right to stay away from such A to B storytelling. There is no "take". At least I didn't get one from the film. This doesn't appear to be "Michael Mann's Dillinger", although, of course it is. But Mann stays in the background. Just the facts, ma'am. He does not presume to up-end the man's psychology, he does not presume to say, 'You know what? HERE'S what I think was going on with him." He is smart to know that our guesses would be the LEAST interesting thing about the actual phenomenon of John Dillinger.

Johnny Depp, never the most open of actors, is perfect for this role, showcasing his natural charm (which always holds a little bit back - you never really see Johnny Depp gush or "work" people, he's subtler than that) and also his mystery. Depp isn't an open book, that's never been his thing as an actor. He came and spoke at my school and he was so boring I nearly fell asleep. Sweet, but a total snoozefest. He spoke in a shy monotone, was not particularly articulate, and while he was sweet and open with us, he didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He doesn't talk about acting in a self-important way, he is not only not eager to tell us how he created certain roles, but that kind of talk doesn't seem to be in his vocabulary at all. It doesn't need to be. His work is on the screen. Look THERE to get a clue as to who he might be. So here, he resists all of the pitfalls that are inherent in the regular biopics. He has found a great partner in this with his director, who, yes, can be a highly psychological storyteller - The Insider is a great intellectual thriller, but at the heart of it it is about the psychology of the whistleblower, and the psychology of the newsman. That's the real story. Michael Mann does not dilute the psychological aspect of his stories by trying to explain, and that's why his films are so good.

John Dillinger has a moment where he is picking up the coat-check girl Billie Frechette (played by Marion Cotillard) - he's seen what he wanted in her and he goes out to get it - with the same ruthless manner with which he targeted banks, yet softened with a gentleness he reserved for women. She is baffled by this man who is coming on so strong, and she says, "Who are you?", laughing a bit. He says, tight-lipped yet also easy, almost a throw away, "My mother died when I was young. My dad beat me. I like fast cars, movies, whiskey, baseball and you. What else do you need to know?" There it is. All of the exposition in his mouth, a throwaway line that tells all but explains nothing. (Also, I would be hard-pressed to resist a line like that. Just sayin'. You want an explanation of why women swooned over this murderer? There are clues everywhere, but Mann is right to put it in a thrown away moment, rather than anything more pointed or deliberate.) There are no flashbacks to his hard childhood, we do not see a sepia-toned little boy Dillinger weeping, "Don't hit me, Daddy! Don't hit me!" The movie does not attempt to play on our sentiments, does not try to open up our hearts to how hard it was for poor little Johnny. Nope. We start in medias res, with the crazy jailbreak, and from then on the film plays like a bat out of hell, not stopping for one second to cue the violins. The script gives the exposition to John in that come-on moment with Billie, and that's all we get. Looks like that's all she got too. John Dillinger sometimes introduced himself with, "I'm John Dillinger. I rob banks." That's about it. That's who the guy was. Depp does not play his line of exposition with one tiny remnant of self-pity. He tells it straight because he likes this girl and he wants to be straight with her. All in all, despite his criminal activity, Mann's Dillinger does not come off as a manipulative liar or conman. He is not Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, done in by his own voracious appetites and penchant for intrigue. Dillinger here is quiet, brutal, calm, and opaque.

Depp nails it.

There is an element to the film which is important (although not lingered on) and that is the fascination the public had with Dillinger. A mystique surrounded him, and there is an astonishing scene (apparently true) when Dillinger walks directly into the room in the police station labeled "DILLINGER SQUAD" and wanders around, looking at all the Wanted posters and clippings, and even walks up to a group of cops and detectives, huddled around a radio listening to a baseball game. He stares at them. Nobody notices. Then he says, "What's the score?" A couple of the guys turn, glance at him, give the score and turn back to the game. Dillinger has created his own miasma of invisibility, similar to how Marilyn Monroe used to be able to walk down the streets in New York without anyone knowing who she was. She could turn it on and off. This is a deliberate ability that only stars would have, because only stars know the value of invisibility. Most everyone else wants to be SEEN, at all costs. But there a group of cops, spending every waking hour hunting down Dillinger, look directly at him, casually, talk about the baseball game, and never realize that there in front of them is the man they have been looking for. Depp plays that scene with a fascinating mix of daring, arrogance, and calm. He KNOWS he is invisible, he can feel it. That, to me, was the clearest evidence in the film of his "celebrity" status, that he could consciously choose to be invisible in front of the very men who were looking for him. Just like Marilyn Monroe putting a head scarf over her blonde hair and having a cup of coffee in a mid-town diner at the height of her fame, with no one ever noticing her, and her name blinking in lights on a marquee right behind her.

Biopics can be tricky and controversial. The geeks of the subject matter covered by the biopic will never be satisfied ("it didn't happen like that"), and I can certainly go there myself. Just wait until someone decides to do a film about Alexander Hamilton! I am already angry and possessive just thinking about it! But a film is different than a history lesson (thank God), and some dramatic license is usually called for. There are times when a film crosses the line, and I suppose that line is different for different people. A Beautiful Mind crossed that line for me (multiple times)when it
1. suggested that love can cure severe mental illness
2. completely left out John Nash's open homosexuality
Obviously the story Ron Howard wanted to tell was that of love conquering this man's disability, and to some degree that IS in John Nash's story. His wife, by taking him back in and caring for him, allowed him the freedom of movement and mental space for him to continue his work. That was a great act of love. But in actuality, it was more out of pity and duty than what was portrayed in the film. She couldn't bear her husband to be homeless. She was more of a nursemaid than a soulmate. Again, not that that is not interesting - it IS interesting - but obviously not the story Howard wanted to tell. But I thought the choices made in that particular film were unconscionable, because the man was gay. Or at the very least ragingly bisexual. Everyone knew it. And Alicia knew it too. But still, she took him in. She cared for him. She helped make his work possible. Now THAT is a great love story, albeit way more complicated, but I just couldn't get past the huge THING that was being left out of the story being told. It seemed wrong. Not like rearranging events or converging characters for the purpose of keeping the story simple - these are compromises that are always made with biopics, those are fine - but I felt that there was something corrupt at the heart of the choices Howard made with A Beautiful Mind and it ruined it for me. I felt like the REAL story was far more interesting.

Here, with Public Enemies, Michael Mann avoids those traps by not worrying whatsoever that this is supposed to be a defense of John Dillinger. It's not supposed to be a defense. Mann doesn't think it is, and so he doesn't film it in a defensive manner. A Beautiful Mind, with some lovely acting mind you, felt defensive because it had something to hide. It was pulling a fast one on us. It overplayed its hand ("this is the greatest love story ever told!") because the filmmakers knew that there was a huge element not being shared. But Mann doesn't have a theory. He has a story to tell. It is two stories actually. The story of John Dillinger, and the story of Melvin Purvis (played beautifully by Christian Bale), the lawman in charge of bringing him to justice. And with taut spareness, and an almost elegiac sense of "what it was like", it doesn't deviate from those two stories. The two men are not defined by who they are and where they come from, they are defined solely by what they do. Another similarity to The Insider, as well as Michael Mann's other films. Dillinger robs banks. Purvis tries to catch Dillinger. Plenty there to keep us busy without getting all Freudian.

The love story between Dillinger and Frechette is told with refreshing simplicity but also (and herein lies its strength) with not a lot of detail. It's a sketch. I really liked that. It adds to the sense that these are people on the fringe of civilized society, with not a lot of time for niceties and backstory-sharing and courtship. They get right to the point. She hesitates. But there's something about how he hones in on her that takes her in. She's a lost soul, too. Again, this is not dwelled on or played up too much, but Billie Frechette was part Indian, grew up on a reservation, and had a lot of bitterness about the prejudice she had been shown in her life. Cotillard suggests this with one bitter line, when she comes clean about her Indian blood, in their first exchange. "Some men don't like that," she throws at him, like a gauntlet, daring him to flinch, or be grossed out by her tainted blood. He couldn't give less of a shit. He says, "I'm not most men." And that's that. Never mentioned again. But it's enough, it's sketched in enough, that we understand that she too comes from nothing, that she too has had a rough time of it, and whatever this man offers her - a fur coat, kindness, loyalty, tender sex - is enough for her to throw her regular life away. Makes total sense. And all we need is one line to do the entire job of their relationship. That's good filmmaking. Good acting, too.

There's one sex scene but it's handled just right. It was riveting. Mann did it as a montage, almost, just glimpses, fragments, not dwelling on his naked buttocks, or her naked breasts, he doesn't film it lovingly or romantically, he doesn't "walk us through it", which can be so deadly with sex scenes, since by now we've seen it all. Sex is not just sex. It's expressing the specific relationship between the two people - even if it's a one-night stand. Sex itself is always the same (with, naturally, variations), but the relationship is what is important, in terms of story. I guess I'm old fashioned that way, but I'm not talking about love, I'm talking about what sex itself expresses, and how that differs from couple to couple, depending on the context. Too often sex scenes become generic, thrown into the mix, and the actors involved suddenly cease being characters, with issues and human-ness and perhaps feelings about getting naked with another person ... they instantly become blue-lit gorgeous Olympic athletes, having the best sex known to man, making us all feel bad about ourselves. These sex scenes can be hot, I like looking at naked bodies as much as any person does, but in terms of story they can leave me cold. I think it's much hotter to still allow the characters to live, breathe, exist, in the context of sex. Don't Look Now, with one of the most graphic sex scenes I can think of, is a perfect example. For me, the reason it is so hot is not just because you see two naked bodies writhing around. It's hot because it comes out of the context of what that couple is going through at that time, which is a total HORROR, and they are trying to renew their marriage, and remember what the hell it is that they are doing with each other. THAT is why it is so hot. Betty Blue, which basically opens with a slamming-hot sex scene, is also in this category, because from the get-go we know everything we need to know about both people involved. It's HOW it's done, and that is no easy task, because naked bodies are distracting, in and of themselves. The Big Easy, which actually has no nakedness, has what I believe to be the hottest sex scene ever put on film (although I'm open to persuasion) - and they aren't even having sex. What is hot about it is that Ellen Barkin plays an uptight repressed woman who manages to suggest that she is in total DESPAIR about how repressed she is. And instead of suddenly letting loose when she finds herself in the arms of this hot dude she's really into (Dennis Quaid), and becoming a sex goddess and Olympic athlete of erotica, she is still that repressed bundle-of-nerves-and-sadness that we have come to know. She brings her SELF to the scene. She stops him, she freaks out, she wriggles away from him, she basically cannot deal with the unleashing of her sexual energy, it's too much for her, it brings her to tears. Marvelous stuff. I love it when a movie allows for that. It resists betraying the characters. Thank you.

And Public Enemies does not (unlike Beautiful Mind) overplay its hand, in terms of the relationship in the film, because it has nothing to hide. It doesn't try to make Billie Frechette the "rosebud", she is not a great lost love, she was not his last chance at civilization and normalcy - Mann resists simplistic interpretations altogether. John Dillinger was not a faithful kind of guy, and he consorted with prostitutes (one of whom ended up betraying him) and gun molls. He mainly lived in a male world. He dipped into the female world from time to time, obviously, but that was more often than not out of physical need than a burning desire to experience true love. But the relationship with Billie Frechette does stand out, in his life story, she is definitely important in the Dillinger lexicon, based on the mere fact that she went to jail for two years for him, and so the film is right to pluck her out of the sordid crowd, and make her "the girl" in the movie.

There's a jump cut to their sex scene. He invites her in to his apartment (obviously rented for him as a safe haven - "I've been staying here a while. About one day now," he says to her as he takes off his coat - he comes right out on their first "date" and tells her who he is and what he does, he is already a wanted man at that point, famous, but he doesn't play her, or try to fly under the radar), there are floozy women peeking out of other bedrooms, and the atmosphere between Dillinger and Frechette is tight, tense, and something's got to break. We don't get the seduction scene. We get the jumpcut. Mann does not satisfy our need for neatness, for linear storytelling. However they get into bed it doesn't matter. They get there. There is not a swelling soundtrack to cue the highly-trained audience, "Oh, look, they're falling in love." Love shmove. It's rougher than that. Not everyone is destined to have a "great love story". Sometimes one or two intimate moments of connection is all we get. And that's not just okay, it's just the way it is. Mann doesn't softpedal this fact. The scene is rather graphic, but not because we see body parts, we actually don't. It's graphic because it feels real. It's filmed in fragments, but unlike most other sex scenes the fragments we see is not thrusting butts, and glimpses of naked boobs or almost-glimpses of mon veneris ... the fragments we get are their faces, kissing, his hand near her mouth, her mouth on his fingers, tears on her face, her unshaved armpits (halleluia - a glimpse of reality, of the TIME in which this film took place), how nothing feels objectified, her body parts are not dwelled on, neither are his, things are happening too fast for that, his focus on her face as he, well, moves down offscreen (hm, where is he going?), then these are all interspersed with calm exhausted moments where they lie in each other's arms, still awake, but spent, brief moments of talk, and then back to the fragments of sex again. Through this, you get the sense of their primal connection. Those magical times when everything seems to stop - and yet at the same time, when you look back on it, all you can perceive are glimpses, sensory moments - his mouth on your wet cheek, his hands on your neck - and then, a breather, where you talk quietly as the sun rises out the window. It's a highly effective scene, not just because it's so different from so many other sex scenes, but because it, in maybe 20 seconds, tells us their bond, without ever having to resort to language. He doesn't just flip her over and fuck her (like Heath Ledger did to his wife in Brokeback Mountain, another wonderful sex scene - not because it's erotic - but because, again, it shows us the relationship, what goes on behind closed doors with this particular couple). He's into her. He connects. John Dillinger didn't connect with many. And perhaps his connection here is momentary, we guess that it is, because that's the kind of guy he is. But that doesn't stop the film from taking the time to just ... breathe for a second ... and show us these two people at this particular time.

Later, when Billie is suddenly arrested, right under Dillinger's nose, and he watches her being dragged away by the cops, he drives off, not sure where to go, what to do, and Depp, as he drives, suddenly breaks into tears. It's an amazing moment. We've seen almost zero recognizable emotion from this guy, and that is part of what makes this such a damn fine performance. He allows nothing human to get in the way of the story he and Mann are telling which is: Here is what John Dillinger did. But there are stories that he "cried like a baby" when Billie was arrested (she told it herself, he must have told it to her, and she eventually relayed it) - and so Mann and Depp show that, like they show everything else he did. He cries like a little kid, a bursting of sobs, wiping the snot off his nose, you feel his panic more than anything else. It's a storm breaking, a momentary lapse in Dillinger's cold world. I suppose it's unfair to keep imagining how this or that moment would have played with another director (say, Oliver Stone) or another actor. The moment of Dillinger bursting into sobs because his gun-moll part-Indian chickadee was arrested would have been lingered over with as much purpose as the sled Rosebud burning up in the fire at the end of Citizen Kane. The shot would have been highly subjective. But Mann remains objective. If I had to tally it up, I would say that the sex scene was, perhaps, the only really subjective scene in the film, because you feel you are in that bed with them. You lose your distance. But in the rest of Public Enemies, even with Dillinger bawling and wiping his nose, we remain distant. Objective. It's not an unfeeling film, far from it, and I actually liked Dillinger a lot. But my feelings about him were irrelevant to the film actually working. By that I mean, the film didn't NEED me to "see his side of things", or to "feel sorry" for what he had gone through as a boy. If Public Enemies had had a theory, or a thesis, that it needed me to buy into in order for the whole thing to work, I might have been annoyed. But it did not do that. No, it assumed that I came to the table with my own thoughts, feelings, and I'm a grown woman, I can make up my own mind about the guy.

Praise Jesus, a filmmaker that trusts me, that leaves space for me.

None of this would have been possible without the strange compelling opacity of Johnny Depp, in his portrayal of John Dillinger.

It takes not only a brave actor, but a very smart actor, to let some things remain a mystery. John Dillinger is not to be explained. He is to be examined and remembered. It is a time in American history that was important. He was important. What made him the way he is is certainly the least important and interesting part of the story and Johnny Depp understands that. And so what does he do in this movie? A great acting teacher of mine used to say to his students when we were lost in the middle of the scene, or trying to figure out "what to do" - he would say, "Just do what the character does." That's a start. A leap of faith. Nora dances a frantic tarantella to keep her husband Torvald from going to the mailbox. I played that part. I agonized over that scene. I turned myself inside out trying to "do" it. And then I remembered my acting teacher's words. Sheila, just do what the character does. Ibsen has written that Nora does a tarantella with ever-increasing abandon and panic. That is in the script. It cannot be denied, gotten away from, underplayed, or ignored. Don't worry so much about "how". Let go, and just do what the character does. It helps tremendously in those moments when you are stuck.

Johnny Depp does not worry about "how". He does not worry what we think of Dillinger, or how we judge him, what we "take away" from the film, what "message" it has. Those are for other more intellectual types to blather on about. Johnny Depp, here, just "does what the character does".

Easier said than done.

It's one of my favorite performances of the year. Because it leaves so much unexplored, and so much of it is played between the lines. It resists interpretation. It is a fact. Like Dillinger was a FACT. Depp doesn't play an idea here. So many actors when they play gangsters are playing ideas, and many of those ideas actually originate in John Dillinger. Even back to the movies in the early 1930s, Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties, and all the other gangster flicks that continue on to the present day. Actors base their performances on either the memory of Dillinger, or the memory of James Cagney playing a Dillinger kind of guy. What is real anymore? Did the movies create John Dillinger? Did Dillinger create the modern-day iconic gangster? Chicken or egg?

Depp sidesteps this entirely. He does this by remaining opaque, and yet never less than compelling. A man of action. A man of appetite. He had no apparent grand theories about why he did what he did. Let other people assign the "Robin Hood" title to him (as they did). He didn't care. "I'm John Dillinger. I rob banks," he said.

He liked fast cars, whiskey, baseball, movies and nice clothes.

That's what the man said about himself. Why don't we just take him at his word and see where that leads us? It's more than enough to chew our teeth into. Why not just play THAT?

Depp does.

By playing it simply and opaquely, he leaves vast swathes of ground bare and open for me to contemplate, ponder. He lets the question remain a question. And so I will be thinking about his scene where he's wearing an invisibility-cloak in the Dillinger Squad Room for a long time to come.

It will stay with me.

Ease: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in "Morning Glory"

Some actors seem to believe that unless they SHOW all the work they have done, their job is meaningless. And if you don't congratulate them on all the work up there on the screen, they will most definitely remind you. "I worked with a Latvian lute-player for 8 months, and I also chopped off my pinkie toe, which really helped me get into the character."

This isn't a new phenomenon.

An interesting and frustrating aspect of this (if you let these things get to you) is that the actor who shows his work is more often appreciated and applauded than the dude who strolls around making it look easy. Cary Grant has no Academy Award. EASE is not congratulated. Or, that's an overstatement, because obviously Cary Grant was the biggest movie star in the world and didn't exactly suffer in obscurity. Measuring WORTH by Academy Awards is a ridiculous thing to do, although it is an interesting discussion - just in terms of the industry, how it works, and how it likes to see itself. But, you know, my favorites don't have Oscars. Jeff Bridges doesn't. (Not yet.)

But ease is something that has always been under-rated, because it doesn't make a show of itself, and it doesn't look to be congratulated or noticed. The more splashy parts, where people limp and wear buck-teeth and apprentice with Latvian pig-farmers to get into character, get the most attention, because they DEMAND the attention. And that's fine as well. Not placing a judgment on it. Many great performances are of the "splashy" variety. Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice.

I really love, however, the actors who stroll through their parts, making it look as natural as breathing.

Morning Glory, which gave Katharine Hepburn the first of her four Academy Awards, is really a vehicle for her. I've seen the performance criticized, and I can understand the criticisms, although I think Hepburn is actually doing more subtle work than she is given credit for here. This character is a broken woman. Although the film ends in triumph, it's mitigated by the fact that her monologue about how she is not afraid of "being a morning glory" is said to a washed-up actress, who is now a wardrobe mistress - a woman who had once been an up-and-coming star. Fame is fleeting. I don't believe that Eva Lovelace's fame is built to last - she is too fragile - she is not destined to be the next Ellen Terry or the next Sarah Bernhardt - Those women had thicker skins. Eva does not. I think she will end up as a wardrobe mistress, a forgotten "morning glory", and to me the ending is more ominous than happy, despite the swelling music. Hepburn, in my opinion, is NOT playing the triumph. She is playing the defiant belief in ONLY the moment - which is lovely, sure, but on deeper examination it is what will be her downfall. Anyway, the part is a showy part, with a naive open-faced beginning, a cautious and sad middle, interspersed with a big drunk scene at a party where she does not one but TWO Shakespearean monologues, and then a sudden rise-to-the-top ending. It is a full journey. It capitalizes on Hepburn's strengths - her somewhat mannered way of speaking (much more marked early in her career), her blinkered ambition, her intelligence (she could never play dumb, and when she tried she was terrible), her theatricality - and the vague sense of unreal-ness that Hepburn had back then, perfect for the playing an actress wannabe who lives primarily in a fantasy world. Hepburn was born to play such a part.

But why I do think it is a good performance is that she is playing the fantasy world, yes, but she gives us glimpses of her despair, her lost-ness, even in the moment of her greatest triumph. This woman is not going to be okay and Hepburn gives us that uneasy sense, without telegraphing it too strongly. First of all, she has fallen, and hard, for her manager - played by Adolphe Menjou, a kindly father figure who unfortunately takes advantage of her when she is in a vulnerable moment (and it's pretty blatant - she has obviously stayed the night), and from then on her heart is his. This is another way that Hepburn suggests her brokenness. Her essential brokenness. It is my feeling that Eva Lovelace STARTS the picture broken. She is not okay, although she talks a better game at the start, because she hasn't been wrecked by life yet. Delusions are a healthy thing, it helps you through the black nights, the aloneness. Eva still has all of that. But it is a shaky foundation, and with a couple of uneasy glances here, a couple of subtle hand gestures there, Hepburn shows us that scarcity from which Eva operates. Hepburn is over-doing it on all counts, Eva is a theatrical emotional showoff, and so it is a highly mannered performance (why it is criticized), but again, I think there's more going on there than is generally acknowledged.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. plays a New York playwright named Joe Sheridan who takes a shine to Eva Lovelace. He senses talent in her, but he's not sure if it can be used. He keeps bringing her up to his friend, the manager. "She's got something, don't you think?" Nobody agrees with him, really. Everyone thinks she's a bit cracked (as she is. I mean, when a young actress tells you in your first meeting that her goal in life is to eventually take her own life - onstage - you can be forgiven for thinking she's batty.) But Fairbanks isn't sure that there isn't something else there, a difference, a beauty that could be transformed into genius on the stage. He keeps her in mind. He does not forget her after their first meeting. Fairbanks, with ease and grace, plays multiple levels, though. He's not just an earnest "artist", looking for a muse for his next play. Not at all. He plays a nice guy, a sweet intelligent man, who has his own uphill battles to fight in his artistic journey. He's a success, but he actually does remember what it was like to be a total beginner, like Eva, and her hope and belief and enthusiasm touch him, touch him in a very deep place, that place where he remembers who he really is. He knows, or he can sense, that life is going to be tough for someone like Eva. He senses it from the first moment. That is why, months later, when they run into each other at a party, he says, "You know ... I worry about you sometimes." Even though they have virtually no contact. She comes into his mind from time to time, and he is concerned. He senses (unlike anyone else in the film, who either take advantage of her, or snicker at her theatrics) her fragility. He thinks it should be protected. Now that is a rare thing indeed. Fairbanks plays that type of man. A man who doesn't sneer at weakness, but worries about it. Wonders what he can do to help.

This is a deceptively simple part. Parts like these are a dime a dozen. The "nice" guy who loves the girl, but she's not interested in him, except as a friend. You want to shake Eva and say, "PLEASE consider Joe Sheridan and put that horrible Menjou out of your mind!" But you know, life isn't like that. The heart wants what it wants, sad to say. Fairbanks could have played the part as a milksop, a weak guy, a lapdog. He doesn't. He plays a truly nice man, and niceness is one of the hardest things to capture for an actor in the entire history of acting. Insanity? Piece of cake. Tragic sadness? Walk in the park compared to niceness. Fairbanks manages to show the essential character of this man - his sense of honor and niceness - without seeming weak or ineffectual, no easy task. He emerges as a friend, really the only friend that Eva's got in the shark-fest that is the theatre. He really does have her best interests at heart.

Naturally, though, there is more. He is also in love with her.

To play a man in love, who is also interested in the quality of life of his beloved, and to be concerned over her welfare and how she is treated ... this is not easy. Again, he could have mooned and sighed and pouted. He does none of these things. He seems like a good and serious playwright, who keeps his eye on the ball, in terms of his career, but he sees in her a freshness, a humor and fragility, a charming unselfawareness, that touches him. He loves her. It's that simple.

Let's get down to specifics.

How does Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. DO all of this?

Surprise, surprise, it's all about listening. What a shock. If you want to see what real listening looks like - take a look at his performance in Morning Glory. In his one-on-one scenes with Hepburn (the one at the party, in particular) - he listens to her with a sensitivity and subtlety that seems quite modern, from another movie, another acting style all together. Nobody else in the film is listening quite like he is. And that's right for the picture - he really is the only person with integrity, who really does SEE Eva. He stands out in that world already.

If you watch a lot of old movies you get used to the different acting style, the pre-"Method" style. You get used to the vaudeville voices and some of the schtick - and you not only get used to it, but you LOVE IT. Things changed in the late 40s and 50s, a true revolution in the craft of acting, and that old style has faded away. But thank goodness we still have a record of it in all of these old movies.

However, there are these strange out-of-time performers, people whose work never dates - never seems like another style - They are timeless. They not only would "fit in" now, but they would dominate now as they did then. Cary Grant. Bogart. Wayne. Cooper. Judy Garland. Barbara Stanwyck. They're strange birds. Outside of time. They came out of the same tradition as the great vaudevillian players of the time, they had the same training, the same context. But it doesn't matter. They are not nailed down, their "style" does not place them. Many great and wonderful actors (Ronald Coleman comes to mind, although there are so many more) are placed firmly within a specific acting tradition - the old-school style, the modulations of voice and gesture that dominated acting training for centuries until, well, Marlon Brando came along. There is nothing 'lesser' about their work. I love it too. But when you see someone like Gary Cooper or John Wayne in their early days - you know you're looking at something new, something different.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. has that in Morning Glory. When he smokes a cigarette, he doesn't have a theatrical attitude about it. He's just smoking a cigarette AS he's listening to Hepburn, conscientiously blowing the smoke away from her face. Totally normal naturalistic behavior. No schtick. When he listens, he listens. You can watch the responses and thoughts flicker over his face, even if he has no lines. This is the modern approach to acting. Fairbanks Jr. was already doing it back then. He's wonderful to watch because of this.

There's one moment he has in a scene with Menjou where he starts to laugh and he actually snorts while laughing. It's so real, so normal - not a studied "ha ha" (again, not to 'dis the acting greats of the past. But it is startling to see someone who actually seems INCAPABLE of "creating" anything on purpose. It all just looks like life, with this guy). Most of us snort from time to time when we really laugh. But actors back then didn't. He did. I love him for it! And I love that he seemed to slip into this really nothing part with a sensitive purpose, an understanding of where he might fit in, what his real role was in the STORY.

If we don't feel like Eva Lovelace is missing the boat by not choosing Joe Sheridan, then the picture will not work. We are aided in this by the casting of the manager - the rotund fatherly Menjou. If the manager was, say, Clark Gable, we'd have a very different picture. Fairbanks is so handsome here, so at ease in his own skin. It's fascinating (and part of the tension of the picture) that Eva is blind to him. Again, life is often like that.

But what I am really left with is Fairbanks' ability at creating a man who truly understands kindness. (Think of how, during her potentially embarrassing meltdown at the party when she decides to perform Juliet's balcony monologue for the entire party - and he, from his spot in the room, throws one of Romeo's lines up to her ... so she won't have to sit up there, pausing, waiting for a cue that will never come. See That's the kind of man Joe Sheridan is).

The best part of all of this is how easy he makes it all look.

He could have been insufferable. He is not. At the end, I ached for him. I ached for her, too, sensing the tough road ahead of her - triumph or no - but I really ached for him. Because she will always be the one that got away. And he must let her go. That's the gentlemanly thing to do, first of all, but it's also the right thing to do. He does not pout, or bemoan his fate. He just kisses her hand, lingering there, and walks out of the room. No self-pity, no martyr-ish walk.

He's a nice man. And he just lost.

And Fairbanks Jr. does it all with such a grace that we may not even notice how effective his performance really is.

Watching Morning Glory, I am reminded of one of my favorite passages from the first of Fairbanks' autobiographies, The Salad Days (review and excerpt here)

I did not aim to supplant or rival my father nor to outdo my grandfather as a business tycoon. I did believe, quite as a matter of fact, that I would be better at whatever I put my hand and heart to than most people and that any shortfall would be due as much to my own lack of interest as to anyone else's superiority. I wanted very much to be my own self, well clear of anyone's shadow, but I had no very specific goals in mind.

I have never lacked awareness of the diversity and potential of my talents. By the same token, I have never been burdened with the conceit that I was another Noel Coward or Chaplin or even a carbon copy of my father. I have, since maturity, known full well the limits of my capabilities (which I've never quite reached), the perversities of my personality, and precisely how much self-discipline I should, could, and would apply to get whatever I had to do done well. I may have exaggerated myself to other people, but I have rarely deceived myself. That is probably my only real virtue.

Reading that passage, it doesn't surprise me at all that such a man could so convincingly and with such great ease create true niceness onscreen.

Because it's the genuine article.

Bruce Davison: How to make a scene happen

Mitchell said to me once, "Bruce Davison is so good at making a scene happen. He is one of those actors who just knows what needs to take place in order for the scene itself to happen."

The best acting is all about listening. And the best actors know, above all else, how to listen. They also may know how to change their appearance, their walk, their accent ... but if an actor doesn't know how to listen, the rest of it won't mean jackshit. The greatest actors all have that in common: they listen. I believe that Humphrey Bogart made other actors seem more interesting because of how he listened to them. Cary Grant is always listening, even in the fastest most rat-a-tat scripts he did. He is not just listening politely as someone else speaks - of course not, because that's not like real life - he listens on a subterranean level, picking up on the slightest inflections and mood-changes of his scene partner. Watch him "listen" to Ingrid Bergman in the famous first scene of Notorious. It's a good example because the character, Devlin, is not, in general, a sensitive guy. He has an opinion about Alicia, she's a tramp and an alcoholic, but it is his job to get her to go to work, so he is sniffing her out. Meanwhile, he is playing up his drunkenness, so that she will feel more comfortable letting loose. But on that other level, that deeper level, watch Cary Grant's subtle shifts of expression during that scene, taking her in, taking in her behavior, her words, her mannerisms ... he is reading her. Now obviously because he is Cary Grant he is already riveting, but there is nothing like watching another actor listen. Not enough scripts and films allow for that. The best actors are no dummies and know that it is not the LINES that make the impression, it is what you DON'T say. That's why people like Grant, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, would sit down with a script before shooting and cut out as many lines as they possibly could. If you can say something with behavior and not words, that is best.

Much of "making a scene happen" has nothing to do with what you say, although that is part of it, and knowing your objective and all of that. But the hardest thing to do, one of the hardest things of all, is to listen. Especially if you have to sit and listen to someone else do a long monologue. It may feel like a soliloquy, as though it is the OTHER person's big moment, and that may be partly true - but if you, the actor, are not truly listening, then the monologue will fall flat. I wrote about that a bit in my piece about Dean Stockwell in Long Day's Journey Into Night. Edmund is a tough part. He's underwritten. He's important, of course, but most of the time - except for one or two big moments, he doesn't have much to do. His main job is to be the recipient of everyone else's five or six page monologues. This is one of the toughest jobs on earth. I have seen many a fine actor sunk by trying to play Edmund. The other parts, even with their wrenching journeys, are actually easier - because they are active. They are written that way. Edmund (written to be O'Neill's alter ego, of course) is passive. He doesn't have much to do. It is a great testament to Dean Stockwell's gift that he sensed what he needed in that part, he sensed the very thing that would save him from the pitfalls.

There is a show-stopping scene in the middle of Robert Altman's masterpiece Short Cuts, where Jack Lemmon, a ruin of a man who has not seen his son (played by Bruce Davison) in 30 years, shows up at the hospital, where Bruce Davison and his wife (played by Andie McDowall) stand vigil over their son who is in a coma. There has been no mention of a missing father up until this point. We really only get to know all of these characters in fragments, slices of life. We know that Davison is a successful news editor and television personality. We know he is married to a kind of nervous woman who calls him all the time at work (a situation which he treats with a mix of mild exasperation and humor). You get the sense that she is not really well, his wife. She can't make any decisions without her husband. She is a little bit lost. This is all subtle. Nothing is spoken outright. And we know he has a young son named Casey, who has a lot of allergies, and is completely pampered by his smothering mother. That's it.

When his father shows up, randomly, at the hospital, there is no context whatsoever for Bruce Davison to place him in. This man has not been in Davison's life for the majority of it, and he shows up now? When he and his wife are panicked about their son? Now he wants to be involved? Too late. But Davison is too much of a good person, a polite restrained man, to let his ruined father have it. He does have a terrific moment of panic, when his wife first informs him that his "father is here". He freaks, kind of crumpling over - not in anguish, but panic - the wires fizzling out, this is too much for him to handle. "What is he doing here??'

Again, we have no back story about the father. We are learning it in the moment.

Jack Lemmon and Bruce Davison go and sit in the hospital cafeteria, and here Lemmon has the long monologue where he describes what happened during one "unlucky day" during Davison's childhood, when Lemmon effed up, and his wife told him to leave. It's a sordid tale, and it's so wrong that it is told at this particular point in time. The time to come clean would have been 20 years ago, when your son was old enough to handle the story - not at this moment when Davison is hovering over his dying son, worried to pieces. The way Lemmon tells the tale makes it even worse. He "acts" it. With a relish. It's ghoulish, it's inappropriate. Lemmon (like he was so able to do in his later roles) plays a man rigidly and willfully unself-aware, behaving from a place of panic, self-preservation and a highly decayed sense of the charm he once had. The time to divulge this story is long past due, and nothing will change the damage he did so many years ago. That's true, yes, but added on top of that is the pressure-cooker situation that Davison is in, panicked about his son, trying to keep it together, trying to help his nervous incapable wife manage, trying to get the doctors to come clean ... trying to keep hoping ... and to have to sit there, and listen to a monologue from his long-absent father about what his father did on the crucial day of his own childhood when he was in the hospital, and to hear the actual events - and to have them not told with open contrition, or even acknowledging that "this is a bad bad time, but I have GOT to get this off my chest" ... it's almost more than anyone should have to bear. It's an intense scene. I remember watching it the first time and feeling the need to look away from Jack Lemmon as he went on and on and on. It was excruciating.

Jack Lemmon got most of the press, in regards to that scene, which really does stand out in the entire collage of the picture. In a tragic way, he really is the ONLY character who truly comes to terms with how much he has wasted his life. Everyone else still thinks that there is something to fight for, they still defend their positions, they think there is something more, and if they fight hard enough they will get over there. Lemmon's character is past that. His fight here is, yes, cruel (you should not bother the son you abandoned 30 years ago with your confession at this moment in time) and selfish, but it is actually a fight for redemption,however misguided, unlike everyone else in the room (with the exception of Lyle Lovett's baker, who does, by the end, attempt to do the right thing. Not to make himself feel better, but he actually remembers that there is such a thing as a moral code, and he must live by it if he is to have any chance at all). Everyone else in the film - the washed-up jazz singer ignoring her daughter's suicidal tendencies, the cackling disappointed-before-their-time awful sisters (played by Julianne Moore and Madeleine Stowe), the three guys fishing who decide to keep fishing even after they find a dead body in the water - everyone - is basically missing the entire point of why we are here on this planet. (These are based on Raymond Carver stories, after all. This is his stock-in-trade). These people are on autopilot and they only realize how precious it all is, everything they have been risking, when it is too late. Well, Jack Lemmon's character is on the other side of all of that. He has already paid that price. And here he is, awfully, a spectre from the past at the worst possible time, looking for absolution.

It is that terrible mixture of horror and pity that Jack Lemmon's monologue brings up.

I have heard it criticized. That it was "over-the-top". I'm not sure, sometimes, what people mean when they say something like "over-the-top" and I often wonder if it just means that it brought up something in them, the audience, that they found unbearably uncomfortable. It was "too much". I would not call his behavior here "over-the-top" although it is theatrical, as it is meant to be. This guy is so out of it, so clueless as to what is appropriate, that he thinks it will somehow HELP his grieving devastated adult son to act out the sordid tale from his past. He thinks that maybe, just maybe, they will be able to commiserate as men, over what it is like to see a woman's body naked for the first time. He is so without ANY clue whatsoever that it is excruciating to watch, but some people in life are like that. They are excruciatingly unaware, and if you have any sensitivity whatsoever it becomes painful to be with people like that. Because all you can see is their own blindness. It becomes a torment.

So.

We have Jack Lemmon's side of things. In many ways, it stands out because it is a tour de force, and this is not a movie of blatant tour de forces. It tips the balance of the film, as I believe it is meant to. For a moment, everything stops. There is actual talking and actual listening going on, and the irony is it is so terrible that you wish it would stop immediately.

There's a reason everyone talks about that scene. Only Lemmon would have played it that way. Imagine Gene Hackman in that part or Jack Nicholson or Robert Duvall, and they all would have been stunning as well - but they wouldn't have played it that way. That was all Jack Lemmon. The toe-curling embarrassment of watching an old broken man relive a moment of sexual passion from 30 years before. A moment that made a wreck of his entire life. He acts it out, he relives it, he lets himself go google-eyed with lust again, he defends his position, he pleads, he loses himself in the moment all over again ... Classic Lemmon.

There is no other scene like it in the film.

But I want to talk about Bruce Davison and HIS role in this show-stopper of a scene, because I haven't seen much said about it, and it is, again, as I have written so often about other actors, the SUPPORT player who really MAKES such a scene possible. It is hard to describe this dynamic to those who don't understand, and it is also rather disingenuous to just say, "Take my word for it." That's not good enough. All I can say is: nobody acts in a vacuum, even if the entire scene the actor plays is done mostly in closeup. It is how one is listened to that makes the difference, that can turn a moment of superb acting into something that is actually transcendent. Roger Ebert said, in regards to Ingrid Bergman's acting in Casablanca, that she "paints" Humphrey Bogart with her eyes, running her eyes up and down and sideways, all over his face, in a way that makes us believe he is the sexiest man on earth, the most deserving of love, the best man she has ever known, the only man she will ever really love. Bogart cannot create that on his own. Yes, he shows up as Bogart, and for us, with our memories of him and our expectations of him, we believe that she would love him, because, duh, he's Humphrey Bogart. But look at what she is doing in her moments with him, and she helped create him. He was not a true leading man before that. He skated near that territory in The Maltese Falcon, but suddenly, with Casablanca (and, by suddenly, I mean after over a decade of playing second-banana gangsters) he arrived. He was a leading man. He would never be anything else. She is a huge part of why that happened. She "paints" him with her eyes, using them as brushes, cutting wide swathes up and down over his features, and so ... we see him as she sees him. Essential. And it is often an ignored part of acting and what I would call star-power. Stars do not act in a vacuum. I mentioned James D'Arcy's small thrilling moment in the beginning of Master and Commander. Russell Crowe was doing a marvelous job on his side of the fence, but without the rest of the cast giving him, Aubrey, that power, and that reverence, the film wouldn't have worked. In that one moment of James D'Arcy's, his response to "Put us in that fog, Tom", half of Russell Crowe's job was done for him.

And THAT is what I am talking about.

Bruce Davison is not "just" listening to Jack Lemmon. Go back and watch that scene again. He has only a couple of lines of interruption: "It was a long time ago", "You can't smoke in here, Pop", "I don't remember much from that day ..." and they aren't substantive. He doesn't argue. He never says what he is feeling: "You come to me with this TODAY? You decide to reappear after 30 years TODAY?" His lines are casual. Surface-y. But, watching the scene closer, he has almost as much screen time as Jack Lemmon does. Altman did not just decide to place the camera on Jack Lemmon and let him just go, with the understanding that Davison was on the other side, listening. No, Altman - with his uncanny sense for things - knew that that would not work. It would have been gratuitous, a "star turn". It wouldn't have been right. The scene would have fallen flat. We need the reaction shots. We need to see Davison's reactions, we need to see his responses. We may ache for him to shut up Jack Lemmon, we may ache for him to reach across the table and throttle his father if only to shut his mouth - but we will be unsatisfied. Life is like that sometimes. We don't get what we need.

But here, in this moment with his father, Davison doesn't need anything from him. He has buried his past a long time ago. If he feels anything towards his dad, it is annoyance and embarrassment. He doesn't yearn to pay him back, or tell him what he thought of him. Because of his own circumstances (his young son in a coma), he just doesn't care. This most crucial moment of Jack Lemmon's character's life - the moment of long-deferred absolution - is, ultimately, meaningless. It's too late.

Davison does not, however, play apathy. He starts off the scene with a sort of tight-lipped endurance. The situation is unbearable ANYway, with his son, and he doesn't have the emotional energy to say to his father, "Look, you're not welcome here. Go away." So they sit at a cafeteria table. Lemmon is jabbering a mile a minute. He keeps forgetting Davison's son's name. Davison, with a subtle closing of his eyes, showing his exhaustion, corrects his father, "Casey. My son's name is Casey." He can't go off on his dad, he can't rip into him ... he at least knows that this is not the time and the place. Davison has a bowl of cereal in front of him, and as the scene commences, he starts to cut up a banana into the bowl, occasionally (but only occasionally) looking up at his father, who keeps yammering on. Notice how often Davison DOESN'T look at Lemmon. How he waits until the last second before actually laying eyes on him. He tries to cut up the banana, he tries to focus on the task at hand, but - as though it's a horrible magnet across the table - his eyes start to drag up to look. Davison is meticulous in his listening. It never looks studied or practiced, don't get me wrong, but he is meticulous in understanding the exact and precise vibe that Altman needs in this scene (harking back to Mitchell's comment that opens this post), and so he brings it to life, with no fanfare, expecting (most probably) that his work would be mostly ignored. Or, kinder term, taken for granted. Because it's Jack Lemmon's scene, right? Because he has all the lines, right?

But like the great actors I mentioned earlier in the post, Davison knows, in his DNA, that it is not what you say that necessarily is important. It is how you respond, react, listen.

Yes, Jack Lemmon's monologue is a tour de force.

Would not be possible without Davison's equal tour de force of listening.

Davison's veneer slowly begins to crack, as he starts to realize where his father's story is going. It's almost unbelievable to him. You can feel his growing incomprehension as the story unfolds. But it's a multi-leveled incomprehension and that is why it is so good - masterful, I would say. A lesser actor would have just played the incomprehension of how his father could have betrayed the family way back then. He would have decided to play, "I cannot believe that on a day when I was in the hospital as a kid, you decided to screw around with my aunt - your wife's sister - I can't believe you would do that!" But no, Davison is too damn good for such an on-the-nose uninteresting approach. Yes, there is that, but that is the least of his incomprehension. What is even more incomprehensible to this sensitive man is that his father would be choosing to bombard him with this sordid sorry-ass story NOW. This is much tougher to play, much more difficult to nail, and Davison does so in spades. HE is 50% of the reason why that scene is so excruciating to watch, and it was just my bad the first time around for thinking it was all Jack Lemmon. No. Without Davison's growing horror and bafflement, he is truly speechless as the scene goes on, Jack Lemmon's monologue would not have the impact that it does.

Altman knew that which is why Davison gets so much screen time, his reaction shots taking up most of the scene. John Ford knew that John Wayne was one of the best "reactors" in the business, and so when he used Wayne, yes, he involved him in all of the things Wayne is typically known for: action, blunt morality, gruff humor, horse-riding, fighting the bad guys, etc. But I believe that without Ford's understanding that it was Wayne's reactions to things that elevated him into greatness - John Wayne would not be the icon that he is. One of the greatest moments ever played by an American actor in the history of American film is the famous close-up in The Searchers, when Wayne looks at the weeping women in the police station. (As Wayne said to Peter Bogdanovich once, with a typical mixture of humilty and pride, "That was a helluva shot.") Not a word is said. No lines are given to explain that character's response to what he is looking at. And it is not made clear, in the end, which is the best thing about it. I have had deep conversations with friends about what exactly John Wayne was thinking and feeling in that moment. Interpretations differ. That is the power of acting without words. Language makes things literal, but the cinema is not a literal medium. Davison's silent reaction shots to Lemmon's monologue are as powerful, as wrenching, as the disgusting tale we get with Lemmon's language.

Davison's sensation of feeling trapped begins to escalate. Early on, he stops cutting up the banana. He's lost his appetite.

The camera, with each reaction shot, moves in closer. We start with a series of two-shots. Lemmon in the foreground, Davison looking at him, and the reverse. Then, slowly, Altman starts to move in, on both sides. It is a highly symmetrical scene, in how it is filmed. It's not all closeups on Lemmon, with medium shots on Davison, which would be a clue as to how Altman wants us to think about it. No, it's equal. The camera moves closer to Lemmon, so then it must move closer to Davison. By the end, we are in deep alternating closeups with the two actors, and the sense of claustrophobia has become undeniable. Both for Lemmon, who just wants to be forgiven, dammit, he just wants his son to see how it was for him, and to let him off the hook please! And also for Davison, who already feels like he should be back by his son's side, who is already in a state of bewildered annoyance and confusion at his father's mere presence at this late date ... not to mention the fact that his father has chosen NOW to come clean about cheating on his mother while he lay in a hospital bed. Neither character can escape: Altman's camera makes sure of that.

Davison works this meticulously.

He doesn't give too much away too soon. He plays the scene like a violin. He knows exactly what to do. I do not know his process, it's not for me to know. I don't know if he's like Holly Hunter - who says that she has created emotional graphs for scenes she plays - charting it out beforehand, the peaks and valleys. Or if he decides nothing. Just sits down across from another actor and, like James Cagney said, "tells the truth". I don't know. All I know is is that it appears completely natural, a natural progression from tightly-coiled politeness to a jittery bottled-up agony of repression. He saves it, saves it for the closeup. When it comes, you want to hide your eyes. Up until then, in the medium shots, we get a series of fantastic reaction shots from Davison, never hitting a false note, never histrionic, never ever revealing that what he is ACTUALLY doing is playing a scene with another actor. You never catch Davison acting. He's seamless. It is all he can do to keep it together here. He starts to lose control of his impulses. He takes his glasses off, rubs his eyes. He looks off around the room at one point, quickly, almost as though he is looking for someone to save him. All interspersed with terrible slow moments when, the magnet drags him forward, and he cannot help but drag his eyes up, slowly, avoiding it, avoiding it ... to look directly at his father.

This is a master at work.

I first became aware of Bruce Davison when I saw Long-Time Companion with Mitchell, and honestly, I've never quite recovered fully from that film, and I'm glad I haven't. He is the keystone to that film, the calm quiet center. You just wish you could have a friend like him. You wish that you would be so lucky to have him as a mate, to take care of you when you are old and sick. He is so good, and there's a scene near the end (anyone who has seen the film will know what I am talking about, and Mitchell, I know that you are crying right now just thinking about it) where he changes the diaper of the man who has been his long-time companion, a man who has been his partner in life for decades, now ravaged by AIDS. Davison has already won our good-will by this point in the film, his work is done. He doesn't need to do anything in that scene except do exactly what that character would do, and the audience will need to be mopped up off the floor. He plays it with no fanfare, he does not want to be congratulated, he is not self-conscious in any way. Because when you find yourself in that situation, you do what needs to be done. Even a year before, you would have found it unimaginable that you could have ever have borne it, that it would be too awful. But human beings are amazing creatures when they love. We are capable of great miracles. That's what that scene is about. Love made manifest in a context of death and tragedy. His behavior here, quiet and still and gentle and completely unselfimportant, burns with transcendent fire.

How does he do it.

Jack Lemmon, a great actor himself, was lucky - lucky - that Bruce Davison was the actor sitting across the table from him in the scene in Short Cuts. He couldn't have created that alone. He needed an equal partner in order to "make the scene happen".

Go back and watch it again. In my mind, acting doesn't get any better than what Bruce Davison does in that scene.

"Lock the doors. Judith's lost her equilibrium."

I love to hear Rita Hayworth get her well-deserved props as a capable and wonderful actress.

She was a newbie (pretty much) when she appeared as Judith, the wife of the hated flier MacPherson, in Only Angels Have Wings, but she's terrific in the part. The part is deceptively simple, but once you analyze it in terms of the script and how it is written, you can see that there are pitfalls everywhere, none of which Hayworth falls into. You totally believe that she would be "the one" who came closest to winning Geoff's heart (played by Cary Grant at his cranky best) - not because she's gorgeous and bodacious - or not only because of that - but because she treats him with an egalitarian calmness that I imagine he would find relaxing and suitable for his particular temperament. No girlie histrionics for him.

And then, in the scene when she does lose it - and she's staggering around behind the bar looking for the corkscrew - and he finally lets her have it, about how selfish she is being with her husband - finally dunking her head in the water to sober her up
- she finally realizes: Yes, he's right - I AM only thinking of myself ...

She plays a good woman in that film, a woman who would be a good mate, a perfect wife and partner, and she is also capable of critical thinking - even when it involves her own faults - and in that scene she is able to take a step back and realize: "Wait a second. The problem here is ME." How often do movie goddesses ever get to have a moment of realization like that?

Imagine how that role could have been played, the cliche it could have been. Hayworth, new to dramatic parts at that time in her career, is more than up for the task.

Apparently, she had a hard time bringing herself to tears in her final scene, so Hawks, ever the practical man, made her come in from the rain for that final confrontation, so her face would be all wet - which basically gives the impression of tears, and lets Hayworth off the hook of having to bring tears to her eyes. Producing tears is obviously something actors may worry about, and she certainly did - but if you have the Impression of tears, then what does it matter if they come organically or not? Hawks got that, and he helped Hayworth to get that too - and it's a very effective scene, and I couldn't care less if she the actress was actually crying or not.

Highly under-rated actress. Yes, beloved as a sex bomb and babe - but under-rated indeed as an actress with some CHOPS.

Clip from Only Angels Have Wings below - when Cary Grant gives her a dousing of water and a harsh talking-to. The scene comes at the 8 minute mark.

François Truffaut on Sgt. J.J. Sefton in Stalag 17

This is, perhaps, the best analysis of that character, played by William Holden, that I have ever read.

Sefton is intelligent; that's why he acts as he does. For the first time in films the philosophy of the solitary man is elaborated; this film is an apologia for individualism. (Certainly, the solitary man has been a theme in films, as with Charlie Chaplin and many other comedians. But he has usually been an inept person whose only desire was to fit into society.) Sefton is alone because he wants to be alone. He has the qualities of leadership, and everything would tend to establish him as the barracks' trusted leader. After the deception has been uncovered by Sefton himself, and the leader the man trusted has been unmasked and convicted, we may wonder if Sefton escapes in order to avoid being named to take his place, knowing his fellow prisoners would do exactly that, both to exonerate themselves and because they finally recognize him as their only possible leader.

What's sure is that Sefton escapes to get away from the companions whom he despises rather than from a regime he has come to terms with and guards he's been able to bend to his needs.

Sefton needs those whom he despises to despise him in turn. If he remains, he will be a hero - a role he rejects no matter what the cost. Having lost his moral solitude, he hastens to regain it by becoming an escapee, with all the risk that entails.

The rest of Truffaut's essay on Stalag 17, especially his thoughts on the danger of majorities, is well worth looking at. But Sefton is one of my favorite fictional characters ever, borne out of a sincere and unshakable cynicism. It is this cynicism I think makes him great, and something that I think many people miss in him. They assign hidden altruism and heroism to him, because that is what they need from him - but remember his last line of the film, remember it - and I would suggest that you don't look at that line as Sefton being your typical tough-guy making a joke in order to hide the fact that he is deeply moved at the goodbye moment. No. I would suggest that you take him at his word. He never wants to see any of those men again. He means what he says. He would cross the street if he saw them. But he doesn't say the line with viciousness, he says it with a little grin, and a cocky look on his face.

Terrific moment because of all of those contradictory (and confronting) levels.

"Sefton is alone because he wants to be alone."

Sefton is akin to Rick in Casablanca saying "I stick my neck out for nobody", only Rick has a long (albeit secret and somewhat shady) past of running guns for people on the "right" side of the ongoing worldwide conflict. You get the sense, through a comment here, a comment there, that once upon a time he really was involved in the fight, he was committed enough to the fight of the little guy against tyranny that he risked his own neck, time and time again. He doesn't make a big deal about it, but it's there in his character, and we know that it is there. He can tell us "I stick my neck out for nobody" as much as he wants, but he obviously has convictions. Sefton has none, except that he might as well participate in the flourishing wartime black market, because why not - and also that he is innocent of what the bastards in his barracks accuse him of. Take away Rick's secret political convictions, and you will find a deeply cynical man. But Sefton really doesn't stick his neck out for no one. You'd never catch him running guns for freedom fighters or the political underground in France, no way, not unless he could make a buck off of it.

Great great character, and fascinating analysis by Truffaut.

-- From The Films In My Life, by François Truffaut

François Truffaut on Michel Simon:

Watching Michel Simon, moviegoers have always felt that they were not just watching an actor play a role, but watching the actor himself. His best roles were double roles: Boudu [in Boudu sauvé des eaux] is both a vagrant and a child discovering life; Pére Jules in Vigo's L'Atalante is a frustrated barge captain and a refined collector; Irwin Molyneux, the businessman of Drôle de Drame, secretly writes bloody novels; and to come back to [Jean] Renoir, Maurice Legrand in La Chienne is an insignificant and docile cashier but also, without knowing it, a great painter. I am persuaded that filmmakers entrusted Simon with these difficult double roles - which he always played magnificently even when the films were weak - because they felt that this great actor incarnated life and the secret of life. Jean Renoir was the first to make this truth evident. When Michel Simon acts for us, we penetrate to the core of the human heart.

-- From The Films In My Life, by François Truffaut

Icon

The only tribute you need to read.

"She got the idea all right."

Martha Vickers, a young pretty actress, was damn unforgettable and creepy as the sociopathic thumb-sucking nymphomaniac in The Big Sleep. How on earth did THAT get by the censors??

There's a really cute story about her and the filming of The Big Sleep - I came across it first, I think, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. But the anecdote also shows up in a couple of Bogart biographies - the story was told by multiple people - all of whom witnessed it, so I guess we can assume that something along these lines occurred. I just love everyone involved in the following anecdote. I love it for the kindness shown to her, but also that it really does reveal the mystery of what is called "acting". You don't just need to draw from your own experiences. That is a misunderstanding of what acting is - and you can definitely see it when certain actors attempt Shakespeare, and what they do is try to drag, oh, King Lear down to THEIR level, where it can be understood by them. How can I "relate" to Macbeth? How about I try to just imagine what it was like for HIM? This is obviously way easier said than done, but this anecdote about Martha Vickers is a small slice of life showing that you don't need to just draw on what you yourself have experienced. If you have an imagination, you can play anything.

Good for her for just going with it. She could have been mortified, humiliated, and damaged. But first of all - these big macho guys all treated her quite nicely, despite the obvious, uhm, fact of her inexperience ... they did not shame her ... and second of all ... she obviously just listened, took it in, "took the coaching", and went forth and played that part to the best of her ability. She's terrific.

So here it is:

Howard Hawks had an idea for one of the scenes - where Marlowe (Bogart) comes into the house, and finds Vickers sitting, all dressed up in the empty house - drugged out, sexed up, in the aftermath of some sexual event. Marlowe can immediately tell that obviously some kind of porno photo shoot had been going on. And Marlowe comes upon her, she is high on drugs, and completely out of it. Anyway, Hawks had an idea for this scene (which ended up not making it into the movie - no wonder, with the censorship of the day!): He wanted Vickers to simulate an orgasm, as she sat there, looking up at Bogart. He wanted her to be in that quivery zone where you basically don't even need physical contact to "get there" - he wanted her to be the kind of woman who lives in that state.

So Hawks asked her to do so. He gave her this piece of direction in front of Bogart, Regis Toomey (who plays the DA - wonderful stolid character actor), and a couple of other people, members of the crew, etc. You know, moviemaking has a mystique about it but there is also a no-nonsense quality to it that I find refreshing.

Hawks said, "Sweetheart, what we want here is for you to simulate that you're having an orgasm."

Martha Vickers asked, "What's an orgasm?"

Nobody spoke. Nobody knew what to do. They all just stood there, awkward as hell, stunned to silence. Hawks, Bogart, and Toomey - grown men - standing there with a teenage actress - who was asking them (in all innocence) what an orgasm was. Dead silence. Hawks called a 10-minute break. (hahahaha) I mean - what else could you do? Hawks then pulled Toomey aside and asked Toomey to please go and "explain to Miss Vickers what an orgasm is". I love that Howard Hawks, supposedly the most macho guy in the universe, couldn't bring himself to go explain it to her - he had to have someone else go do it.

Toomey, who apparently was a good-natured fellow, married with a bunch of kids, the product of a strict Irish Catholic upbringing, gamely went over to Martha and explained to her what an orgasm was. (Wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that one.)

Toomey said later to Bogart, "The girl didn't know anything. I asked, 'Are you a virgin?' 'Uh yes.' 'Do you know what an orgasm is? Mr. Hawks wants you to be having an orgasm here.' 'No, I don't know what it is.' 'You don't know what an orgasm is?' 'No.' And so, dammit, I explained to her what an orgasm was. And she got the idea all right. Howard liked the scene very much."

"She got the idea all right."

Bless you, Martha Vickers! And bless you, Regis Toomey!

After that, it became a huge joke amongst the three men.

Hawks would say to Toomey, "If I ever have to explain an orgasm to anyone again, I am calling on you." And Bogie would laugh and laugh like a madman.

Clip from The Big Sleep below, of the scene in question. Seriously: this young actress who led a protected innocent life - gives a HELL of a performance.

Brave.

Essence

Pretty faces.

Kay Francis as a platinum blonde!

Some of my faves there. Sylvia Sidney, too. They're all so individual, aren't they? You would never mistake Clara Bow for Barbara Stanwyck. It would be impossible.

There can be a sameness to the up-and-coming starlets today - because creating a specific persona is not what is in vogue now. What is in vogue now is versatility: I'm a gorgeous young starlet, yet watch me play a limping Inuit from the 15th century! Now watch me play a rumpled itinerant fruit-picker from 1935! Now watch me play a jacked-up crack addict in Seattle!

Awesome! Great! But WHO exactly ARE you?

No reason to be angry at the trend of today (more on this theme here) ... it's just a trend. Like any other trend, it will pass. I find it more interesting that that is what is in vogue now, as annoying as I sometimes find it. The thought seems to be: If you are an actress, then you should be able to play everything. A silly-putty nose and CGI can fill in the gaps in your work. But you can see in the results of this kind of work (phone call for Cate Blanchett) - not everyone can play everything, nor SHOULD everyone. There is something to be said for knowing what your essence is - and playing THAT. Those actors still exist. Mickey Rourke. Gene Hackman. Ewan McGregor (when he's used well). Gena Rowlands. Susan Sarandon. Jeff Bridges. Actually, I'd put Angelina Jolie on that list. Kurt Russell. I wrote a bit about this "essence" thing in my review of Ben Marley in The Cold Reader. Anyone can learn a dialect. There are tutors for that. But there are no tutors to help you understand and bring out your own essence. You either have it or you don't.

So looking at compilation of pretty faces from the past, what I am most struck by is each woman's individual essence. You would never mistake one for the other. It's like a fingerprint. Wholly itself, a snowflake unlike any of its sisters. A mark made by one particular hand in indelible ink.

Wonderful performance

I've been looking for a quote from the actor in question - where he talks about the breakthrough he experienced in playing this part - but I have yet to find it. It's in a book I have - one of thousands, which I can't locate.

When I find it, I will post.

In the meantime: wonderful performance. Seen in the context of the rest of his career, it is nothing short of remarkable.

Uhm ... Tallulah?

How you doing?

You need to ... talk about anything? Or ... are you all set?

Because frankly I'm a little concerned.

The eyes have it.

I find myself unable to look away from them.

Gena Rowlands, in Opening Night:

That first entrance in "Stagecoach"

Girish's fascinating post about "narrative synthesis" includes a discussion of John Wayne's first appearance in John Ford's Stagecoach, one of my favorite "first appearances" of all time.

Make sure to read the whole thing, but Girish writes:

John Wayne's first appearance in the film, unusual because it takes us by surprise, forsaking Ford's customary style for a second by dollying in for a close-up, the camera not even able to maintain perfect focus as it lunges forward.

It is that slight flaw - the camera blurring out for a bit because it moves in too fast - that truly makes this one of the most memorable moments in American cinema.

Not to mention the fact that John Wayne was not yet a movie star when he made Stagecoach, although he had been working in films for quite some time by that point. Stagecoach was his breakout, and seriously - with his first appearance in the film, it is not hard to understand why.

If I tried to break down what he was doing in these 2.5 seconds, I could probably write 20 pages about what I see. But ultimately, what he is doing is simple, open, unbelabored, and free. It doesn't look like work, it doesn't look planned. It looks real.

What he had as an older man in his later roles, he has here, before he was even known, before his "persona" was set.

His essence could not be killed, manipulated, or cheapened. And (most interesting to me) it was there from the beginning. It didn't NEED stardom to bring it out. He had it already. He happened to become a star, but here he is - in his first appearance in Stagecoach, not a star yet ... and it is all there already. Everything that would carry him through his long career. His personality, his machismo, his handsomeness, his unselfconsciousness with gesture (nobody beats John Wayne in that department- nobody), and then - with that last little spontaneous change of expression as the camera pulls right into his face - the vulnerability. It still has the power to take my breath away, what he does in that last second. Like - what?

He had a gift for this stuff. He knew (on some level beyond words, I'm sure) in that moment: "Okay, the camera is at point-blank range now - so don't keep the face closed, don't act, but also don't hold back, open open open it up ... "

Whoosh - open, sesame.

It's a gut-level understanding of what a closeup is. Watch how he does it.

And it is the vulnerability that makes John Wayne the slam-dunk that he is. Without it, those moments we love so much (the closeup in the trading post in The Searchers, the last moment in The Searchers with his arm crossed over his chest - uhm, the whole effing performance in The Searchers) would not be possible. The toughness, the stoicism, the man-of-action, the bold gestures ... all of those things are essential to explaining his appeal. But that small glitch of vulnerability, humanity - that comes at the very end of that first closeup in The Stagecoach - still surprises me, and still makes me think: Who the hell is this guy? I want to see more.

With that particular blend of qualities, he was (or "is" - because doesn't he still seem so alive? Look at that little breath he takes there at the end) as rare as they come.

The closeup in Stagecoach always reminds me of this beautiful paragraph from Peter Bogdonavich's book Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors, in the essay on John Wayne:

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.

First appearance in Stagecoach below. It's subtitled - but I chose it because it hones in on the closeup itself - the moment I'm talking about. One of my favorite moments in American cinema and it lasts maybe 2 seconds long. That's all it takes.

John Garfield

You ask why?

Boy rocks the house, that's why.

His debut in Four Daughters is one of those moments in American cinema - a sea-change - a new kind of acting coming to the forefront ... the full fruition of it being Marlon Brando in Streetcar in 1951 - but Four Daughters was in 1938. He is shockingly modern. He would fit in to any movie today, about the crumply rugged unshaven anti-hero. John Garfield strolls into that movie, unselfconscious, without any of that old-school gesture-y vaudeville style (not to knock it - it's just different) - and he is an emissary from the future. He is what will come. He's not even the lead, and the movie doesn't quite recover from his absence. (My review of this terribly under-rated and very difficult to find film here.)

UPDATE: Found the clip of his entrance to Four Daughters on Youtube. Exciting! Added the clip below. Tell me this guy isn't a movie star. He's an unknown when he enters, an unknown actor, but he sure as hell doesn't act like one. He's a star.

If you ever see that it's on anywhere, I highly recommend it, if for Garfield's debut alone. I go into his career in that link as well, something I'm very familiar with, due to my long-standing passion about the Group Theatre (an ensemble company in the 30s, which produced, oh, you know, lightweights like Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Franchot Tone, to name a few).

Garfield, hounded by the HUAC, was harassed into an early grave, something that I mourn, even though - you know - it has nothing to do with me - because I don't believe he had "the" role yet. The one we all would remember, the thing that would make him immortal. He had been good in things - he's usually good - he was the only good thing in Gentleman's Agreement (well, besides Dean Stockwell, of course, who strolls away with every scene ... acting poor stiff Gregory Peck off the screen), he was smoldering and terrific in Postman Always Rings Twice. The role would come. I totally believe it would have come.

Let's not forget that he was first choice to play Stanley Kowalski on Broadway (he turned the part down). Clifford Odets wrote many roles just for "Julie", and it's just one of those terribly sad what-ifs in Hollywood.

He was so good. A palpably masculine and strong leading man, unselfconsciously sexy - no preening - and - very important, I think - a certain ethnic stamp on him which gives him a different kind of authenticity in the world of golden boy leading men in which he operated. He seems like New York. You can tell he is local. So many stars seem to come from nowhere. They have indeterminate accents - they have worked hard to get rid of their local ones, Southern, New York, Midwest, whatever - to flatten it out into that mid-Atlantic cadence favored by news anchors everywhere. John Garfield could never be from anywhere other than New York. He still has the stink of the street on him. You can feel the rattle of the subway, the taste of the corned beef sandwich, the glitz, the gleam, the filth ... and to have all of that in 1938 is no small thing. It came naturally to him.

Four Daughters is most interesting to watch because it is the new acting style up against the old. Two totally different worlds. Now I am not a Method acting snot. I couldn't care less about how you get there, and there is much in the old-school style that is wonderful and precious. There is nothing like a scene played immaculately and perfectly by Ronald Coleman. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, basically. He's exquisite. But John Garfield has a mess about him. He smokes, and even his cigarettes look hand-rolled. He lets long pauses happen between lines, he smirks and sneers ... and everyone is off-balance just by being in his presence. That "style" of acting is so in vogue now that it is hard to remember what a revolution it really was, and in Four Daughters you can see the whole thing - side by side with the old-school. The daughters are all wonderful, the other characters ... nobody's a stinker, it's not like Garfield is the only "good" thing in it.

But he is definitely something new, make no mistake.

Some photos below.

I love him, and I am basically bummed at what won't be and what will never be. He was terrific.

I have officially lost it

I was talking with Joe about Oliver (of course), and we were laughing at how we're partners-in-crime in this obsession. It's so enjoyable to talk to another obsessive.

And so, in line with that, Ron Moody has suddenly been on my mind (because yeah, that's normal.)

I have been thinking about Ron Moody. Ron Moody was huge in my childhood. Not as huge as John Denver or Lance Kerwin, it is true, but it was close. Of course he has a credit list from here to Woonsocket, but to me, he's always just Fagin, that's it. I can't see him as anything else.

Since I have been thinking about Ron Moody, I remembered yet another highwater-mark in my obviously deprived childhood (where I spent most of my time hovering over the TV Guide looking for re-runs of Orphan Train and Skyward). It was a Christmas movie starring Benji.

You know. Benji.

Maybe you have to be a certain age to remember Benji. Benji was huge. He was no Rin Tin Tin, it is true, he was no Lassie, but he was close.

And in 1978, Benji - with some of the cast members of the original hugely successful Benji movie (which my parents had taken us to) - had his very own Christmas movie. As a matter of fact, what are the odds, the movie is called Benji's Very Own Christmas Story. All I remember about it is this:

Benji and his sidekicks travel to a magical icy land where Kris Kringle is real. And ...

That's where my brain stops.

I do remember there was a cast of thousands, as well as musical numbers, and Ron freakin' Moody played Kris Kringle. I was only a tomboy pipsqueak when the Christmas movie came out, but I was already deep into Oliver obsession at that point, and could recite to you Ron Moody's resume, if asked. Sadly, no one ever asked. I'm still waiting.

But it was so much fun for me as a kid to see this actor, whom I only knew from one part, live it up in this other part, and I remember there was one giant production number, with Kris Kringle skipping through his ... village? workshop? torture chamber of death? "It puts the Benji in the basket?" I have no idea ... with crowds of people thronging behind him and they are all singing about ... Christmas? Wrapping paper? Scandinavian coke-whores? ... no idea ... but I LOVED the number as a child, and, true to form, huddled up against the television screen with a tape recorder, so I could capture it.

I clearly should have been in an institution.

I suppose I could look at it in a positive way. VCRs were far in our family's future. I was way ahead of the curve.

And so, yes, what of it, I used to turn on my tape recording of this number from BENJI'S VERY OWNCHRISTMAS STORY (for God's SAKE), and act it out in my room, pretending I was in the movie, or in the world of the movie at LEAST, or maybe that a role was added - for a small freckled tomboy of a SIDEKICK for Ron Moody ... and I would be so engrossed in all of this that I wouldn't hear my mother calling me to dinner.

Anyway, I hadn't thought about Ron Moody and Benji in years, until the last couple of days, and so a quick click on Amazon made me see that yes, unbelievably, Benji's Very Own Christmas Story is available on DVD (excuse me. And Skyward is not? That's bullshit, people. I'm dead serious), and you can purchase it for $5.99.

Naturally I bought it immediately.

I need to watch that big-ass musical number again and try to imagine my way back into my child-self and remember what the fuss was about.

It seems vitally important for some reason.

This is for Mitchell

Because I enjoy making Mitchell cry.

Ledger

I didn't like Dark Knight. I thought it was a mess. I didn't like individual elements and I didn't like the whole either. It's not that I didn't "get it", or that I was "afraid" of its implications. The fanboys have been rabid dogs about criticism of their baby, so I know all their arguments. No, it's not that I quivered in my seat afraid of what I was actually seeing, and its power, and therefore have to "attack" it. And I'm not attacking it, anyway. I just didn't like the movie, boys, chillax. More than anything, I felt it was incompetent. That was the weirdest thing about it, for me. A day after I saw it I could barely remember it. I've loved all the Batman films, so this was strange to me. But whatever, it's a movie, you can't win 'em all.

However, Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker is one of those rare rare things ... what I would call a "performance for the ages". I knew the second I saw the first scene with him in it that he was as good as everyone had been saying, and even better. The second you saw him, you couldn't imagine anyone else in the part (even though we have seen many many actors play that part). He took it to another level. A vision of apocalyptic chaos, with something truly great underneath it: a philosophy. This was a man devoted to chaos, yes, but what made him truly frightening was the thought behind it. He knew what he was doing. He wasn't a giggling lunatic rubbing his hands in glee (although he did that, too). He was a calculating thinker. That was where the fear came from, for me. It is difficult to suggest such a thing when you have that crazy makeup on your face, and you are required to say these "ba-dum-ching" pun-filled lines, which could add up to the impression that you think everything is a big "joke". What was extraordinary about the performance, and it has stayed with me, was that yes, he thought it all was a big joke, and no, he found none of it funny. There wasn't a shred of compassion in him, he was of a Ted Bundy-like nature - a cold-blooded killer, who not only enjoyed death and destruction, but enjoyed making people squirm beforehand.

I have been watching Heath Ledger for a long time. He had an interesting trajectory. With Knight's Tale, the marketing component for that movie took over the entire experience. It was one of the most promoted movies I can remember. I was sick of it before it hit the screens. And who was that blonde hottie and why am I supposed to care? It was overkill. But then I saw the movie, and it was a lot of fun, and he was adorable in it. A real hunk, you know?

The bossy insistence of the marketing campaign did not seem to affect his career. He seemed to choose carefully what he would do next. The next film he appeared in was the low-key three-person Monster's Ball. I couldn't believe it was the same guy, first of all. He was wonderful in that movie. Heartbreaking and taciturn - a throwback to male movie actors of old. There was something stoic about him, but he managed to suggest the deep wells of loneliness in this guy. It was a very touching performance. That was when I got excited about Heath Ledger. I felt I was looking at a true talent, as opposed to what the Knight's Tale marketing team wanted me to see: the Next Best Hot Thing. He was more than that.

Now he was somebody to really watch.

Lords of Dogtown was the next film I clicked into with Ledger - I hadn't seen Four Feathers, or Brothers Grimm, and in Lords of Dogtown, he is nearly unrecognizable to what I had seen before. There's almost a Dude-esque quality to his look here, all California beard and sunglasses, and the comparison to Jeff Bridges is deliberate. Jeff Bridges is my favorite living actor, and one of the things that Bridges, handsome, masculine, and without a doubt a movie star, can do is disappear. Like nobody else. This is not the current fetish of accents, weird walks, and "chameleon" tricks, which I find facile and ultimately shallow. Today I play a German-Latvian witch doctor, tomorrow I play a steel magnolia from Alabama with a cleft palate, and the next day I play the imperious Queen of Siberia in 300 A.D. Look at my skill!! It is what is being congratulated now, in acting, and acting - as a craft - goes through phases and developments just like any other craft. The days of big star PERSONAE are gone, where people like Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, et al, brought their star power to whatever role they did, always recognizably themselves, but marvelous to watch. No tricks. Nowadays, it is something else that is recognized as "good acting", and I have feelings and opinions about that, but whatever, it's the trend.

But Jeff Bridges disappears. These are not tricks, these are not skills. Whatever work he does (unlike most of the people being celebrated for this kind of stuff today) is completely invisible. His transformation is total. He submerges his personality entirely and something else emerges. Who knows how he does it. How is irrelevant. I mention Bridges because it is rare that a man that handsome has a career like the one he has. His sex appeal is undeniable, and obviously in his prime he played roles that capitalized on that - Against All Odds, Jagged Edge, Fabulous Baker Boys. But what he was actually doing in those parts was always way more subtle than your basic beefcake hottie fucking the gorgeous movie actress. I go into that in the piece I linked to above (especially in my comments on Fabulous Baker Boys).

When I saw Heath Ledger in Lords of Dogtown I was completely delighted by him. An old-fashioned word, but a propos. I just enjoyed him so much. Who was that guy? Not just the character, but HIM. He seemed to really get a kick out of acting, and not only that, but he had great skill. Skill that was (as I mentioned above) relatively invisible. He submerged himself, in all his young golden-boy handsomeness, into whatever part he was playing. There seemed to be very little ego in him. The JOB was the thing for him, not the celebrity or the sex symbol thing. That's rare. The pressure had been on him from the beginning to fit into a certain pigeonhole - hot new young actor - and the choices he made continuously bucked against that. Good for him. Knight's Tale, as cute as it was, could have ruined him. But he (and I am imagining he got a lot of advice telling him what to do, what to choose, what to play) did what he wanted. He took it down a notch. He got everyone's attention, with the billboards on every bus for Knight's Tale, and then immediately following, he took his career in a quieter more independent path. I thought that was really cool. Brave.

Then came the juggernaut that was Brokeback Mountain. I had a lot of feelings about that one going in, due to my love of the short story (I wrote about that here). I don't think its an exaggeration to say that that was one of the greatest short stories I have read in the last twenty years. It knocked my socks off. I read it when it first came out, in The New Yorker, and it almost made me nervous, as things usually do when I realize I am in the presence of not just greatness, but something mythic, something truly important. I felt that way when I read Mary Gaitskill for the first time. It's a rare sensation. That story came out in 1997, but my admiration for it was still vibrating through me when the movie came out. And although Ang Lee was at the helm (I thought that was a good, if not obvious choice), and I liked both Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger - I got nervous. What would they do to it? I feel a sense of ownership towards that story, in the same way I do towards all works of literature that pierce me to my core. It took me years to see John Huston's "The Dead", because I felt I just couldn't bear to see it outside of my own head. (I loved the movie, by the way). I refused to see The Shipping News, because the second I heard they cast Kevin Spacey as Quoyle I realized which way the wind was blowing, what interpretation they were going to put on it, and I thought: Not on my fucking watch. I won't see that movie on principle. If they had cast John C. Reilly, I would have gone to see it, even though I would still have been nervous about what they had done to that precious book I love so much.

So I had all of that going in. Parts of Brokeback Mountain, the story, were with me word for word. I reread it before seeing the movie, trying to strengthen myself. Even if the movie was bad, it still wouldn't touch the story!

Watching that film was an odd and incredibly emotional experience for me. First of all, the story is 30 pages long. How do you make a two-hour movie of that? Well. They took entire parts of it word for word, first of all. They didn't change a damn thing, in terms of what those two men said to each other. And what they did add (details of Jack's marriage to the Texas rodeo queen, fleshing out what is suggested in the story) was just right. I felt they honored the original work, especially in how those two actors played the scenes. What the story manages to convey in 30 pages is nothing less than breathtaking. You feel like you have been sucker-punched by the last line. What Ledger and Gyllenhall played here was twofold: the stoic unreflective nature of both of these men. They are like the animals they watch over. They bear it (in Ledger's best line - "we just got to stand it.") But they also play that this, out of nowhere, is love. It's awful. It's truly awful. There is nowhere to put such love, it fits in with no kind of life, and there are no options out of it. "We just got to stand it." Both of them NAIL that very difficult balance throughout the film. It is that that gives the story its power (well, and Proulx's off-the-charts writing), and without it, you'd just have a prurient fuck-fest. The context surrounding these men is as important as their love. Ang Lee directed that with delicacy, I thought, and sensitivity, not being too on the nose. There is the scene at Thanksgiving where Gyllenhall has to keep getting up to turn off the television, and his wife's father keeps getting up to turn it back on. It's a wonderful scene, truly tense and awful, evocative of the entire life of humiliation and emasculation this guy has experienced. It's enraging. (This is one of the scenes that is NOT in the book, but it just goes to show you the adaptation was spectacular).

For me, it was Ledger's movie, through and through.

As I wrote in my piece about him when he passed away:

It is one of the more visceral performances of recent memory. You could smell the nicotine on the edges of his fingers, you could smell his sweat. This was not a man who spoke much, felt comfortable speaking ... and any time he did open his mouth to speak, it was as though the vocal cords took a while to realize: "Oh ... we're doing this now? We're talking?"

Jim Emerson wrote about Ledger's portrayal of Ennis:

Rare is the performance that can honestly be called a "revelation," but that's what it felt like to watch Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain." Not only did he bring iconic life and nuance to the existential loneliness of Ennis Del Mar, a taciturn but complex (and conflicted) character, but for such mature work to spring from the teen-idol star of "10 Things I Hate About You" and "A Knight's Tale" was... well, revelatory itself -- the astonishing revelation of a suddenly, fully developed actor who, in the superficial juvenile parts he'd played previously, had given little indication he was capable of such moving depth and clarity. Ledger emerged as if from a cocoon, gleaming with promise and flexing his wings.

The performance was revelatory in a lot of ways. It was revelatory in what he was able to suggest, with very few lines, it was revelatory in its raw passion and silent suffering, and it was revelatory about manhood, in general. I mentioned it being a "throwback", and these are some of the things I have said before when I've written about Rourke, or Jeff Bridges, or Russell Crowe.

Brokeback Mountain relies on the cinematography of the gorgeous haunting landscape, as well as the sound of the wind whistling through almost every scene. You can feel the coldness of the mugs of coffee in their hands, and the scratch of the cold logs they sit on. The script is spare, and that is right. But none of it would have worked without Ledger's quiet suffering stoic presence. It was not a put-on, it was not contrived. I did not feel that he lived now, for example. Heath Ledger was obviously an early 21st century man, that's his time and place ... but in Brokeback Mountain, no way on EARTH was that guy "now". He does this with no tricks, no disguise.

The strangest thing about this is that when you saw him in interviews, and in person, he's really just a gangly skinny little guy. I was always amazed by how slight he seemed in person. That picture of him skateboarding at the top of this post makes him look like a teenager, not fully grown up yet.

But he seemed much bigger in Brokeback Mountain. Not because of weight gain or anything artificial (he might have had a bit of padding there at the end, to suggest middle age). His size came from his presence, and that is really what I mean when I talk about him being a "throwback". The old-time movie stars, creating personae that they would play in every movie, were huge because of their presence. Humphrey Bogart was a pipsqueak who had to stand on a damn BOX in his love scenes with Ingrid Bergman so that he seemed taller. But who had a bigger presence than that guy? And he didn't have to manufacture it, or pump it up. All he had to do was show up. He plays chess in the first time we see him in Casablanca, the camera moves up from the board, and there he is.

Pow. Gets you right in the gut.

Heath Ledger, with every squinting suffering quiet moment in Brokeback Mountain, has the power of the old movie stars. Jake Gyllenhall, although wonderful as well, does not. He has a bit more of a stretch to seem middle-aged (although he does a nice job - you can see the work, but it's okay, it's an okay job) - and he also has to play a character who is more chatty, restless, and emotional. He does all of that.

But it's Ledger's movie. The misery he endures, without a complaint, quiet, gritting his teeth, turning his wife over when he fucks her so he can't see her face, leaning against the trailer wall, head down ... not saying much, not revealing much ... but God, revealing everything. Marvelous. If our hearts don't break for him, then none of it will work. Jack is more of a wild-card. We don't worry as much about him, for some reason, even though he is the one more willing to flirt with danger. Ledger shows the heart of his character, a heart cracked open by love, something he almost resents and wishes would go the hell back where it came from.

It is an iconic performance, referencing us back to the giants of movie stars back then ... when the power of your presence was what made you a star. It is also an amazingly generous performance. He did not protect himself. He turned it all inside out, so we could see.

I had been watching him for a while. I was strangely proud of him for that performance. I felt to myself, watching it, "Wow. Holy fuck. Good for you, dude. Good for you."

Taken in context with the rest of his roles, it was obvious that we were looking at a giant talent.

The kind of talent I find lacking in today's current trend - of more showy actor-y parts (and nothing against many of those performances - I do love a lot of them ... it's just that I have a fondness for the other kind of acting). Ledger has presence. Which again, was so funny, because he almost had NO presence in person. But that's just the mark of his talent. His weirdness and passion and suffering went into his work. He didn't wear it on his sleeve as a regular man.

Before The Dark Knight came out, some stills had been released, and some photographs taken while filming.

The images were startling, terrifying. What the hell was going on with Heath Ledger? It was amazing to see, and I know for me it got my hopes up to see the movie. Jack Nicholson as The Joker made an indelible impression, what a wacky performance, but suddenly, with one backstage view of Ledger filming the movie, all that was swept away. He looked demonic. Not just because of the makeup, but because of the dead cobra-light in his eyes. It was powerful. This character had obviously infiltrated him. You could see it in those stills.

I know he had problems during filming. He was insomniac, and he made a couple of mentions about how playing The Joker had disturbed him, made him manic (small wonder). His exhaustion shows in the role. Not that he seems tired, on the contrary, but that he seems on edge, at the end of his rope, with the manic clarity that sometimes comes when you can't go to sleep, and it's suddenly 3 in the morning, and you have to get up at 6:30 a.m., and all kinds of horrible thoughts start catapulting through your mind, about the world, your life, your disappointments, your lost dreams. I've had those moments. He doesn't just nail such an energy, he plays it from the inside out.

It is a deeply unsettling performance. For me, it tipped the balance of the whole movie. Again, the fanboys have an answer for everything, and shriek, "BUT THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT." I don't think so.

Regardless, he is not just riveting - but inevitable, awful, relentless, with not a shred of conscience. We are so used to seeing "villains" onscreen, who are supposed to embody these anti-social things, but really just come off as cliched. The closest comparison to what Ledger did in Dark Knight is Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, although, thinking about it more, I would say that Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter is also close to what Ledger was getting at here. You do not reason with these men. You do not reason with a cobra. You kill the cobra. That's your only option. There are forces of anarchy on the planet, and it is best to recognize them for what they are, not rationalize them away, or try to "understand". The thing is: if you truly understand, then you know what you must do: obliterate that force as quickly as possible. Understanding does not always mean empathy. Sometimes it means resolve.

Heath Ledger is out of this world in that movie. He, as an actor, obviously tapped into something so primal and real that it made it down into his cellular structure. You cannot see an actor there - and with a part like The Joker, that is so difficult! It's all artifice and jokey lines. But he is truly frightening, especially when he gets quiet and "thoughtful".

The thing that is so great about his performance, so above-and-beyond anything else that is in that movie, is that it has a chilly inner logic to it, and that's the worst part of all. If The Joker just thrived on chaos, then we could perhaps condescend to him, like he's a silly (albeit dangerous) child, who needs a Time Out, and desperately. But Ledger is playing a man with a philosophy of life, far far stronger than those on the "right" side, who spout vague platitudes about justice and order, but who can't even come close to the level of belief that The Joker has in chaos.

He trumps everything.

Ledger, in a slamdunk, is not just acting here, he is embodying an idea - and boy, the pitfalls to be didactic and obvious are everywhere. He avoids all of them. His moments of grief, when tears stream down his face, are grotesque, commedia dell arte gone deeply satanic. The mask is so complete that he has internalized it. There is no differentiation between the face and the man.

How he accomplished all of this I will never know, but I chalk it up to his giant talent, which was already on display, and his power of imagination. What an imagination. He could dream his way into that? What else could this man do?

And so I sit here today, and I just find it odd and sad that he is gone.

A young man.

But he's left an impressive (albeit too short) body of work. I mourn now what I won't get to see. I mourn what won't be.

He was the real deal.

A young slim man in a hoodie skateboarding through Brooklyn.

Katharine Hepburn: Her work ethic, her courage.

This is an old piece that I wrote for House Next Door, but I have a lot of new readers, and I can't seem to write much these days ... so perhaps you all would enjoy it.

Katharine Hepburn: 5 for the day.

The magnificent Agnes Moorehead

An in-depth appreciation of Agnes Moorhead (shame on me for forgetting to put her on my list) - and a great interview with Charles Tranberg, the author of I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead . Not to be missed. Here is a juicy excerpt.

[Moorehead] had actually recalled years later meeting a very precocious Orson Welles as a boy at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. When she began working with Orson something kept nagging at her–where have I seen him before. Welles was very young still–only in his early twenties and then when thumbing through LIFE magazine she saw a picture of Orson as a child and knew then that was the boy she had once met years before at the Waldorf-Astoria. Himan Brown told me how Aggie and Orson had met later on. Aggie was doing “The Gumps” in New York and the program which was on just before “The Gumps” was this young man with a wonderful voice reciting poetry–it was Orson Welles! Orson would watch “The Gumps” and was fascinated by Aggie. He later said many times that he considered her the best actor he had ever worked with. But he knew that when he launched the mercury theater that he wanted her to be part of it–and she was–the most prominent female member of the Mercury players. It only made sense that when Welles went to Hollywood and made “Citizen Kane” that he would find a part for Aggie. He did as Kane’s mother. It was a small part of only five minutes in length but it was one of the most memorable sequences in the picture and anguished performance as a mother giving up her son because she realized that she and his father couldn’t give him the kind of life he deserved is one of the best in the film.

(The full scene can be seen here)

I also very much liked this comment from Moira, the interviewer:

In reading some of the comments by Aggie’s colleagues about her working methods in building a character, they seem to indicate that she was quite meticulous and specific about her detailed characterizations though she was, as Welles pointed out in an interview once, very willing to accept direction. I’ve noticed that in films such as The Stratton Story, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes and Johnny Belinda, when she plays sympathetic farm women, she is constantly working to do something very specific in a scene, tightening the jars on some fruit that have just been canned, knitting, baking bread, or fingering the scarf that Belinda has come home with after her visit with the doctor. She often does this in such a way that she is also making a non-verbal commentary on the action, and telling more about her character than the words of the script indicates about her concerns, attitudes and the action.

Yes, yes, and YES. Easier said than done.

Definitely go read the whole thing.

20 Favorite Actresses: part 2

If I had to choose, here are my favorite performances of my 20 choices - the performance may not be what they are most famous for, but that's no matter.

Gena Rowlands: Opening Night
Barbara Stanwyck: Ball of Fire
Sissy Spacek: Badlands
Isabelle Adjani: Camille Claudel
Catherine O'Hara: Waiting for Guffman
Rosalind Russell: His Girl Friday
Hedye Tehrani: Half Moon
Marilyn Monroe: Don't Bother To Knock
Madeline Kahn: What's Up, Doc?
Ingrid Bergman: Notorious
Diane Keaton: Something's Gotta Give
Rachel McAdams: Slings and Arrows, season 1
Carole Lombard: My Man Godfrey
Sanaa Lathan: Love and Basketball
Joanne Woodward: Sybil
Julie Christie: Shampoo
Charlotte Rampling: Night Porter
Kate Winslet: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Meryl Streep: Postcards From the Edge
Maggie Cheung: Actress

and the 21st:

Jean Arthur: Only Angels Have Wings

The "Byron from Brooklyn"

There is a new biography out about Marlon Brando, the "Byron from Brooklyn") (even though he was from Nebraska): Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando, by Stefan Kanfer.

Review of the new book here.

I've been dying to read the book and have already flipped through most of it, while standing up, various times at Barnes & Noble. Hopefully, it will counteract the petty bullshit that was Peter Manso's biography (my rant about that here)

20 Favorite Actresses

Where does my heart lie? The meme going around now is 20 favorite actresses. Please go here to see the compilation of links as well as Nathaniel's choices.

I had a hard time with the "all time" part of things because I am obviously not an "all-time" kind of girl ... However, it was fun (and difficult) to narrow the list down. Surprisingly difficult. I didn't worry about the count, just went about choosing my girls and finding photos and when I went to tally up I had over 30.

Regardless. Here is where it stands, at this moment in time.

20 of my favorite actresses in no particular order:

Love these women:

Gena Rowlands, Barbara Stanwyck, Sissy Spacek, Isabelle Adjani, Catherine O'Hara, Rosalind Russell, Hedye Tehrani, Marilyn Monroe, Madeline Kahn, Ingrid Bergman, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Carole Lombard, Sanaa Lathan, Joanne Woodward, Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling, Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep and Maggie Cheung.

And can't I please add just one more??

Jean Arthur.

But what about Bette and Joan and Agnes Moorehead and Christine Lahti? What about Patricia Arquette and Lili Taylor? What about Katharine Hepburn? What about Judy Davis?

Let it be, Sheila, let it be.

Other lists:

My New Plaid Pants Emma Thompson - argh - how could I forget her??

J.D.'s list

El Gringo Argh - Holly Hunter!!

Nick's Picks some of my favorites there too

Peter Lovin' the love for Maggie.

Glenn's list

Flickhead's most awesome list leading off with Adjani

Jeremy's list - great images

Ivan's list - I am in love with his. Let's hear it for Jean Arthur

CelineJulie's list

Ed's list makes me wish I could add to mine, although we do have a lot of overlap

Ted's list - some of my favorites there too! That picture of Maggie Smith and Emma Thompson made my day.

Cullen's list He has included Jennifer Coolidge which is enough to make me love him forever

Here is Alex's awesome list

I love Tommy's list - lots of funny ladies, who I think sometimes get short shrift, totally unfairly!

Here is Jonathan's list - he focuses on character actors. Great stuff.

Brad Davis: Raw

Brad Davis gives one of the greatest-of-all-time leading man performances in Sybil, as Richard Loomis, the single dad living across the apartment alley from Sybil. Iconic.

In 1959 The Bolshoi Ballet came to New York for the first time. John Martin, the NY Times dance critic had this to say about their performances:

The impact of the Bolshoi has been overwhelming. And it will be something of a calamity if we ever allow ourselves to recover.

Well, Brad Davis' impact on me as Richard Loomis was (and still is) overwhelming and it, too, would be a calamity if I ever recovered. I remember sitting once with Mitchell in some public place, of course, and I casually threw the name "Richard Loomis" into whatever point I was making, and Mitchell spontaneously burst into tears. "You can't just spring Richard Loomis on me like that," Mitchell sobbed. "I need time to prepare."

I am hard pressed to think of a more gentle charming and effective performance than Brad Davis in Sybil. It could have been terrible, schmaltzy. A single dad who puts on mime makeup at night and does street performance? Horrible. But my God, is he good. Without him, the film would not be as effective (although Joanne Woodward and Sally Field and of course the magnificent Charles Lane can't be discounted). I cannot imagine any other actor in that part. Nope. Cannot be done. Marvelous work.

His performance as Billy Hayes in Midnight Express shows his versatility, although there is always, in Davis, an underlying sweetness and vulnerability. He is not hard, although his body is the lean pit-bull body of a compulsive athlete. His soul is soft, his emotions accessible ... He's like James Dean but without the neuroticism. He is a man, a good-looking man, he could never play ugly (his face reminds me of Michael's, my Michael's) - but he is able to suggest 100s of subtle emotions with no words, rage, helplessness, love, shame, fear ... He is one of the most fearless of actors. I miss him to this day. His involvement in gay projects was frowned upon back then, it was thought he was wrecking his career. And in a way, his advisers were right - because his career never really bounced back from Querelle (love that movie) and all of his stage work with gay playwrights. The gay vibe was against him, despite his spectacular acting. Retarded. It's a shame - so much about Brad Davis is a fucking shame.

I saw Midnight Express when I was in high school and it seared me to the bone. I also saw Sybil in high school and fell madly in love with Richard Loomis. As in: the man haunted my dreams, even more than Jake Ryan did. I wanted a Richard Loomis. If I could meet a Richard Loomis, I felt that my life might turn out okay.

His work in Midnight Express is intense from the first moment and never lets up. The opening sequence in the airport in Istanbul is nervewracking. He is so panicked and freaked out that we, the audience, are. We want to tell him to wipe the sweat off his face, take off the creepy sunglasses ... but Billy Hayes was reckless, stupid, and couldn't hide his emotions if you paid him. At least that's how Brad Davis plays it. In the film he is called upon to show humor, grief, rage, physical pain, softness, vulnerability, and it is one of the most physical of parts. He has to leap and fight and writhe on the floor. Brad Davis' body, and his athleticism, is one of his finest assets. He was not a careful actor. He was not a buff dude who spent hours in the gym. (Or who knows, maybe he was - I'm talking about his film persona now). He is a man with a natural grace and beauty, and his strength is used carefully. He is a slight man, wiry and thin, but when he is crossed or angry he can unleash a cyclone. He throws himself into the physical scenes in the same way that William Holden did in his best roles - another great athlete/actor (I wrote about that aspect of Holden here). It is not about showing strength, or throwing a punch that will land and crush your opponent. It is not about displaying your perfection, your muscles, your alpha male personality. It is about being able to throw your body into the fray, with no fear, with trust that it will come out the way you want it to come out ... and also with a dancer's knowledge of how and when to let go. When to keep your control and when to lose it. Brad Davis knew all of that in his bones.

When he beats up the horrible Rifki in the prison - I have moments thinking, "Jesus, Brad, don't hurt yourself." The physical reality is so unpredictable there that you have no idea what will happen next. Fights aren't, in general, neat, with two guys basically SPARRING. This is a messy chaotic scene, and Davis loses himself in it, doing whatever he needs to do to torture Rifki. He's knocking sinks over, slamming his hands on pipes - Davis does not protect himself physically. He throws himself into the requirements of the scene. It ends, of course, with him biting out Rifki's tongue and spitting it out into the air, then writhing around, covered in blood, laughing and screaming and talking to himself, still whirled up in the chaos of his moment. It is one of the truly great mad-man moments in all of cinema. Not once do I feel him "acting". Not once do I feel him aware of the camera and yet - even in the midst of all that is going on in that last blood-soaked moment - Brad Davis the actor is aware that the camera is moving in closer and - just when the camera hits its final resting point - Davis' thrashing stops and he stays still, chest heaving, staring off into the distance, as if trying to remember who he used to be. That's an actor in control of what he is doing, even in the midst of being out of control. He knows when to let it go so the camera can catch the final revelation. It is all done in one take. That is up to Brad Davis to make that flow and work. He has to go from thrashing and laughing and licking up the blood on his lips - to quiet and stern and horrified. He does so without once calling attention to a big actor moment.

He is fantastic.

One of the raw-est performances in American cinema. The movie has its cheesy elements (I do not like the music, and I wish the gay relationship had been handled with a little more grit and reality and not so much soft-focus ... it's a lovely moment but the movie kind of cops out with it, treating it in almost a music-video fashion) ... but Brad Davis is riveting.

A great performance.

It is Richard Loomis I will always love Brad Davis for, but he is unforgettable here as well. Raw.

Carole Lombard Double feature

last night at the Film Forum.

8 p.m.:

9:45 p.m.:

It did my heart good to see that both shows were sold out. The line was down the block, and last night was a pretty bitter windy night, so to see the throngs huddled up in front of the Film Forum for a Carole Lombard double feature gave me hope for humanity! The old things do not have to die, or suffer in obscurity. They can LIVE forever! I had gotten to the box office as early as I could and scored two tickets, for me and Jen. We met up at a wine bar around the corner, and had some bruschetta and some wine, crammed in in the tiny joint, a buffer of warmth against the cold. Then, tickets clutched in gloved hands, we walked over to the theatre to start our double feature. I've seen both films (although never on the big screen) and Jen had seen neither so I was SO EXCITED for her to experience them. I was lucky enough to score ourselves spots in line close to the front, and just in time, too because people were POURING into that line from every direction. There was an altercation in line. A rowdy group of 22 (or so) year-old boys were behind us, and one dropped his soda and it splashed all over my calves. They all burst out laughing. No apology, nothing. Jen said to them, "An apology is in order." The guy looked at me and said, "I did apologize." Okay, sociopath, how can you say that with a straight face? I said, "Morons." and turned away. Graceful, Sheila, good work!! So basically we were in a fight with people in line. I hate it when that happens. Sorry, boys, it ain't my fault you weren't raised right and don't know how to say, "Oh my gosh, miss, I'm sorry!" It's called good manners. You should try it some time. But we all moved on, and it didn't ruin our night. Jen was getting hot about it, angry, and I was like, "Jen, these people will NOT ruin this night for me!" She stopped, and said, "Okay. Got it. You're right." And then we all were fine.

The place was packed. Sold out. Again: so exciting! Carole Lombard is not forgotten! Or who knows, maybe some of those people had never heard of her before, and this was their first taste of it. That's exciting, too!

The movies just HIT. They WORK. People were HOWLING with laughter at John Barrymore ("I close the iron door on you!" LIke - what??) ... but the real star of the night was My Man Godfrey, which started, after a 10 minute break, at 9:45. What a movie!!

It starts out strong and never lets up.

William Powell is a movie star of the highest order. From the first second you see him in that city dump, with his 5 o'clock shadow, and the intensity of his eyes, you can't look away from him. He does his close-ups the way actors of today do close-ups. He is timeless. He does not have a "style" of acting, he does not come across as old-school ... he comes across as nothing short of real. Not to mention sexy, and powerful and deep. Of course we are supposed to be seeing him through Carole Lombard's wacky eyes from the beginning and she falls in love with him instantly - and so we do, too. Powell plays that perfectly. This is a man with secrets, with regrets ... but we don't know what they are until long into the picture. But he's playing it from the start. God, isn't he something else? MARVELOUS actor. He's got sex appeal, too. It's those eyes.

Carole Lombard basically falls apart over the course of the movie. She is just so into him and she doesn't know how to behave because of it. But there she is, her eyes following him across the room, just DYING because she loves him so much. It's so touching but also so funny. Even in the scenes where she is not the focus, you can see her in the background, trembling with repressed feeling, staring longingly at William Powell. She just plays it so right. She does not sacrifice reality for the comedy - and yet she is never less than 100% HYSTERICAL. In their one-on-one scenes, she can barely concentrate on what he is saying because she is too taken up with drinking him in with her eyes. You want to slap her out of it. FOCUS, Irene ... FOCUS. But she can't! She's in love!

My Man Godfrey perfectly captures the sort of manic-family genre that was so popular in the 1930s, with scripts like The Man Who Came to Dinner and Philadelphia Story and You Can't Take It With You. EVERYONE is insane in these scripts. The family is made up of a bunch of lunatics and eccentrics, and they all wheel through their large houses, following through on every impulse, pursuing their myriad obsessions ... creating a cacaphony of lunacy and hilarity. You can't get a moment to think in such a household. There isn't time. People run in and out of rooms, they suddenly stop and make inappropriately sincere and insane comments, they ruminate on the meaning of life and then immediately skip off to lunch ... and this is all happening with multiple people at the same time. My Man Godfrey is a runaway train of NOISE and dialogue that never lets up. It is relentless.

The audience at the Film Forum last night (yes, obnoxious 22 year olds and all) were HOWLING with laughter from start to finish.

Jen and I at one point were pretty much writhing in our seats (and the seats are really really thin at the Film Forum, none of this super-size seating ... so once you're there, you're kind of trapped, like it's an airline seat) ... tears streaming down our face ... particularly because of Carlo, the "protege", played by the "mad Russian" Mischa Auer, who lives in the house with the family. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. A melancholic and yet manic Italian, who does an ape impression that goes on for what feels like 10 minutes - it gets to the point where everyone in the room is screaming and talking at once, and in the background, you can see Carlo, STILL GOING, being an ape all over the parlor, leaping up and grabbing onto two doors and hanging there in the middle ... as the rest of the scene goes on around him. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life and I found it difficult to recover. I was still laughing about him three scenes later, it kept coming back to me, and I would find myself in tears all over again. We LOVED Carlo. I mean, come on, who doesn't love Carlo?

A brilliant movie, with not one weak note ... featuring strong performances from everyone. Everyone is at the top of their game.

But in the center of it circle William Powell, with his strong serious face, and Carole Lombard, with her undone-by-love stare ... and it's one of the greatest romances on the screen.

Beautiful night. One of those nights when the city itself - meaning New York - seems to have a sense of camaraderie. We were all in it together, there at the Film Forum, for our double feature ... and we, for that brief couple of hours in time, became one. I love nights like that.

The whole movie is on Youtube - and the Carlo scene can be seen in the clip below - at around the 2:30 mark.

I am still laughing.

A 50-year marriage: "Laughter and lust"

3 photos (below the jump) from the extensive Vanity Fair slideshow made up of photos from Patricia Bosworth's personal collection. Patricia Bosworth is a playwright and author, longtime member of the Actors Studio, and biographer of Montgomery Clift - excerpt of her magnificent here). There are two images in particular that really struck me: the one of Newman and Woodward putting their handprints in the cement outside of Grauman's ... You can see how the faces around them are vaguely serious, maybe even bureaucratic ... but the two of them are howling with laughter. It almost seems to be a private moment. Speaking of private moments: the second image in the slideshow I love with the passion of a burning supernova - is the two of them dancing together at home. Goofballs. But look at the fun they're having!

Bosworth's article about Newman in Vanity Fair can be read here. Small excerpt:

The first time I saw Paul Newman he was dancing with Marilyn Monroe. It was the summer of 1959 at a noisy Actors Studio party in New York’s Greenwich Village. I had just passed my audition and was being introduced to everyone as a new member by the Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford, one of the Studio’s heads.

Nobody was paying me much attention—understandably, since they were all watching a barefoot Marilyn, in a skintight black dress, undulate around the living room with Newman, lithe and sinewy in chinos and T-shirt.

They seemed to be dancing with such rapture; they both kept changing rhythms and sometimes they walk-stepped to the beat. They didn’t dance for very long—maybe three minutes—but what a hot, pulsing three minutes it was! They broke apart, Marilyn gave a giggle and a curtsy, and Newman bowed and moved directly past me through the crowd to get a beer.

Speaking of the Actors Studio, there is also a link in the slideshow to one of my favorite pictures of Newman ever (it's one that shows up in many of the books I have at home) - the one of him in class at the Actors Studio, 1955.

Advice:

"If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you."

-- Paul Newman

"It's their rink, it's their ice, and it's their fuckin' town. But tonight we got our fans with us!"

Kim Morgan, in her typically great way, remembers Slap Shot.

A pure sports film, Slap Shot encompasses all aspects of the game: It’s about the team, it's about the coaches, it's about the towns, it's about the politics and, with almost transcendent gusto, it's about the dirt. Hilariously vicious dirt that boasts some of cinema’s most toxic lines -- lines I can’t repeat here. And it boasts the greatest use of that Maxine Nightingale song -- a tune that shouldn't be allowed in any other motion picture ever again. I can only picture cold busses, booze, rust brown flairs, Newman's fur trimmed leather jackets and Strother Martin while hearing this song -- and that's how it should be.

David Edelstein shows ...

... yet again ... why he is one of my favorite writers out there.

Newman didn't use those eyes promiscuously, as jeepers-creepers peepers. He hooded them, slit them, closed them tightly in pain. When open, they were sky blue with a milky haze. You could get lost in them; you could also see that he was sometimes lost behind them. Trim, smooth, chiseled, pretty, Newman was physically our most wide-open movie star, yet on one level he was also our most unfathomable.

Paul Newman as "Hud"

Read Edelstein's whole piece.

Indelible Ink: Paul Newman

My tribute is now up at House Next Door.

Life's a hustle

It's been a long day. To tell you the truth, I feel a little bit drained, and beaten up. Exhausted, yet kind of nervy and alert. My worst possible combination.

So I'm going to watch:

Tribute not up yet. We're working on it ...

I have immersed myself in Newman tributes today (including this one - with which I have a personal connection ... not to mention the fact that Newman's hot salsa is the only kind of salsa I buy). It makes me crazy to see so many of these movies again. I haven't seen Cool Hand Luke (according to the barflies in Cheers "the sweatiest movie ever made") in years ... or Butch Cassidy or Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (a personal favorite, as excruciating as it is). So I pulled out The Hustler tonight. Not only is Newman in it, but Jackie Gleason is one of my favorite people to ever walk the planet. Humphrey Bogart said that acting (good acting) should be "six feet back in the eyes". No matter what Gleason did - comedy, drama, farce, or variety shows - it was "six feet back in the eyes". He just makes me happy, that's all. To know he existed. He seems rather impossible, doesn't he? But there he is, a force of nature. I walk by his semi-silly statue every day outside of Port Authority in Times Square, and while I look upon it as kind of like the Rocky statue (like: let's not pretend it's Michelangelo's David, mkay?) - it still makes me happy to see it. Because it's a daily reminder that such impossible creatures as himself did actually walk the damn planet.

The Verdict - "Maybe, maybe …"

Marvelous appreciation of one small moment in The Verdict by Stephen Metcalf.

But the scene I kept coming back to sets up the whole film. It's hardly noticeable. Newman is intent on bedding a fellow barfly played by Charlotte Rampling. He buys her dinner the night before voir dire, and for the first time in the film, we come up close to Newman's face. The deep-set mask of middle-aged failure softens. Watch Newman here, ye who would be actors; study him. Where does this come from? "See, the jury believes. The jury wants to believe." The lines are almost inconsequential. But Newman is giving us evidence that Galvin is still alive. "It is something to see. I have to go down there tomorrow and pick out 12 of them. All of them—all their lives—say, 'It's a sham, it's rigged, you can't fight city hall. But when they step into that jury box … you just barely see it in their eyes. Maybe, maybe …" Rampling leans imperceptibly forward. "Maybe what?" And Newman exhales—just a little—putting a lifetime of defeat into that exhale, and suddenly Frank Galvin is talking about himself. "Maybe I could do something right."

To tide us over ....

... until my tribute goes up on House Next Door.

East of Eden screentest

James Dean: "Kiss me."
Paul Newman: "Can't here."

Paul Newman screentested for the role of Aron, James Dean's goody-two-shoes older brother in East of Eden. Dean was already cast. Newman was up-and-coming, trying to find his spot in the increasingly huge shadow cast by Marlon Brando (and in certain photos he looks uncannily like Brando). Needless to say, Newman was not cast in East of Eden - but here's the screentest.

I find the dynamic fascinating to watch. And Newman's laugh - that sort of devilish masculine laugh - was something he wasn't asked to use in his acting for, oh, the first 15 years of his career. He was in the 1950s tradition: the angst-y Method-y emoting school of acting - which is all well and good, but it wasn't his thing. I mean, it was - in that his work always has a disciplined and focused sense of character and motivation - and his creation of physical stimuli (drunkenness, his broken foot in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or heat - Long Hot Summer, Cat) is 100% in the Method tradition. But that laugh ... that laugh of a bad boy up to no good, but he's so charming about it you forgive him everything ... that is HIM ... and it wasn't until the 60s and 70s that he got a chance to really let loose. No more angst. Just cool (sometimes icy) guys, with rakish rebellious personalities sans angst. These guys weren't rebellious in the 1950s tradition, of Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild Ones ... the lone angry individual against an establishment interested in convention above all else. These guys were rebellious in a more free-wheeling cocky way, guys who fucked, drank, drove fast, swore, ate voraciously, burped, connived, charmed, manipulated ... He played men who were true to their own natures. It took him a while to find that dynamic, and to find the roles that would let him express it ... believe me, it was there in his earliest roles - but the style of acting was different, and the expectations put on him were different.

He would never be "another Brando". He didn't need to be.

Just being Paul Newman ended up being more than enough.

Newlyweds

20 some-odd years ago, I ripped a page out of some magazine which had a photo of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward on it. It's a photo of them when they were newlyweds. I think I was sitting in a dentist's waiting office when I saw the photo and I grabbed it then and there. I still have it. It is STILL taped to the inside of my closet door - and has been, in whatever apartment I live in, wherever I have hung my hat over the years ... It's just an image I adore, there is something indefinable about it ... calming, logical, comfortable ... I just like the two of them so much, too ... so this obviously staged yet still somehow natural and breezy morning-at-home shot has a feel of reality to it, of a caught moment.

I am shocked I was able to find it online - it took some digging, but there it was.

I'm working on a larger tribute piece for Paul Newman right now - for this actor who will be sorely missed - not just by me, but - judging from the 50 pages of comments at the BBC site - from fans around the world. He was truly loved.

Rest in peace. And my thoughts go to his wife, his kids, his friends, his colleagues ... everyone who knew him.

And so let's look back at them then ... just married ... two young actors starting out together.

I have looked at this photo so often and so deeply that I feel I can smell the eggs he is cooking. I want her pants. I love that kitchen. The photo still speaks to me. It's not static. It's a world. It's alive. I can hear the clatter of the pan of the stove. I can feel the affection between them, yet look at how they are separated - doing different things. It's an atypical kind of shot ... rather remarkable. Not just because it's him who is cooking ... but just the attitudes of both of them ... their connection and yet their separate-ness.

It's one of those photos that cajoles you to join it ... and then makes you envious that you are not there ...

And, for me, it keeps telling a story. Maybe that's why I like to have it around.

Recently, Paul Newman was asked the secret to his long marriage. He gave what I consider to be the best answer I have ever heard on that particular topic: "Laughter and lust."

Interesting that the word "love" didn't show up at all. Laughter and lust. My kind of guy.

Rest in peace.

The Books: "A Lotus Grows In the Mud" (Goldie Hawn)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

A Lotus Grows in the Mud, by Goldie Hawn

I have Annika to thank for making me pick up this lovely book. I want to give it to all my friends - mainly my women friends, because so much of what she has to say is her perspective on being a woman, and negotiating career/family/kids/romance ... but there is much to satisfy anyone here, anyone who is a fan of her work. But for me, the real gold of this book (and you can tell by the unconventional title that she chose) - is her more philosophical sections, where things in her career dovetailed with things in her "real" life ... or where her romances went sour, and she tried to figure it all out ... or issues with her father, or being a child ... It's a deeply honest and beautiful book. Not all that well-written, I suppose, but it is so genuine that that just does not matter. It feels to me like she wrote every word, and that she thought about every word. She has something to share. It's not just about what she has learned, but what she feels she has to pass on, as a woman with experience and some mileage in the highest echelons of Hollywood. This book put me into a trance, almost. It made me go inward. I felt reflected in it, I felt "seen", and I also felt an acute sadness and loneliness that I am where I am right now. But her book made that all seem okay. She's all about the mess, she's all about the journey itself ... nothing is too neat, and she always (to me, anyway) seems to be fully alive - whether she's giving an award at an awards show, or chatting on the red carpet ... She just seems like a person. Now what is it about her - the go-go dancing flower child of the 60s - that could survive, and so well, in such a cutthroat atmosphere as Hollywood? That is the surprise of her story. That is what makes her unique. So many other little go-go dancing flower children made 1 or 2 movies that fit into the mood of the time ... and that was it. Not her. Look at the longevity. It's remarkable. I loved the book.

I am not often in a gentle mood ... and by gentle I mean: being kind and loving to myself, forgiving, open ... I am a much harsher person, and I cut myself on my own sharp edges. Annika reported that this book had made her cry - and she had also done a big Goldie Hawn Festival on her site ... so on a whim one day I picked it up. I have always adored Goldie Hawn - I have a long history with her ... which I'll get to in a minute. Hawn doesn't seem concerned with "how" she should be writing her book. It's not quite chronological. She has tiny chapters in between the bigger chapters with anecdotes pulled out of her life - people she's met, things her father said to her that really made an impact - little stories and life lessons. She doesn't start with "I was born a cold dark day", she barely writes it in a linear fashion ... she does tell a story, it's not just "Here's how awesome I am, look at all my wisdom, let me talk in milk-drenched platitudes AT you ..." Maybe a more cynical reader would see the book that way, but I didn't at all. It really struck a nerve with me. It's one of those books I am actually grateful to have read. It didn't just provide me with insight into Goldie Hawn's journey (which is interesting in and of itself - I've always been a fan) ... it helped me see deeper into my own life. She's so gentle. And like I said, being gentle with myself is almost uncharacteristic for me. My friend David said to me once, "You are a lethal companion to yourself," and he is right. I am a harsh taskmaster, and I cut myself ZERO slack. Even when I should be more kind. I am kind to others, and I do my best to have compassion, but for the most part - I reserve NONE of that for myself. I'm with Annika: parts of her book made me cry. I would put it down after certain sections and find myself crying, my head in my hands, letting the tears come, trying not to judge them (what I do is I immediately search myself for "self-pity" when I cry ... which can be good, because nobody likes someone who is self-pitying ... but sometimes you just need to have a good cry.) Sometimes you need to 'allow' yourself to feel sad about things that are unfair, things you ahve lost ... sometimes you need to let yourself off the hook and not be so ROUGH on yourself. I've talked before about the people who are obsessed with others who "whine". It doesn't matter what your complaint is. If you DARE to shed a tear about your own plight, you're "whining". You're gang-banged, and you shed a couple of tears about it - and people say you are "whining". This is a toxic attitude for me - perhaps because I have a little bit of that myself, I hate whiners ... but when it is taken to the next level, it can be truly dangerous for me. It means I cut myself off from feeling things. This is the kind of voice that is in my own head, and while, yes, it has also helped me to be an upstanding citizen, and aware of my responsibility to work well with others and not be an energy vampire. Being on the watch for "whining" can be good - but all the time? That means you live in a harsh unforgiving world where you can never mess up, you can never give yourself a moment - just a moment - to feel bad, to bemoan your fate, to honestly say, "You know what? This SUCKS." I prefer to have friends who have a bit more give in them .. they help me balance out my own starkness. They help me be loving to myself. They help me to stop and smell the roses.

I just re-read what I wrote, and it occurs to me that my response - the fact that I am writing about myself and not Goldie Hawn - is perhaps a great compliment to the book. And I think that that was Hawn's goal. She writes a lot about her relationships with men, and men in general. She has some unconventional attitudes, ones that reflect my own ... and she writes about it in such a loving thoughtful way ... it never comes off as proselytizing. Much in her relationship with Kurt Russell has to do with constantly letting him go. Freedom is a big deal to her. The two of them have each other, they are a true team ... but he's a wild boy, and she's a bit wild herself ... and neither of them feel the need to stay joined at the hip. They take vacations separately (something I will definitely do when I am in a couple - I'm so independent and I need a ton of solitude just to stay balanced. Charles and Anne Lindbergh always took one vacation a year separately. They did things together as a family - but then there was one vacation where she went her way, he went his ... They did not enjoy the same things for leisure time, and it took a while of struggling - of her mainly being unhappy and not doing what she wanted to do - before the couple worked it out - and so Anne would go sit in a shack on the beach for a week and write in her journal and take long walks, things her husband found unbelievably boring, and he would go climb around lava pools in Hawaii ... and then they would come back together. Monogamy can be stifling (to some people). Hawn feels that way, too. She doesn't believe that human beings are naturally monogamous - and that her relationship requires a lot of breathing space to continue to work. I love her attitude. It's very comforting to me ... because I've said things like "monogamy can be stifling" before and it is as though I have said, "I enjoy boiling little puppies." Goldie Hawn has made her own way, and it seems to me that she has come to a point in her life where her choices make sense to her. I mean, you see pictures of the two of them, or you see them together at awards shows - and there's a glow there.

In the book she writes that one of the things she and Russell like to do is to get on their bikes, no plan, no map, nothing, and just go ... for hours ... letting themselves get totally lost ... maybe stopping for a swim, getting back on, sometimes being lost for hours ... letting it go. To me, it's a nice metaphor for life itself - that it is the journey that is the most important.

Goldie Hawn describes her earliest years in New York, when she got jobs as a go-go dancer. She would show up at random bars, there would be basically a box in a corner of the bar - she would stand on the box, and go-go dance for the customers. This led to some pretty sketchy situations, and she was a true innocent. At least in terms of experience. But she also had a good head on her shoulders, and two parents who had raised her right ... so she wasn't one of those little waifs who get lost in the Big City with no home to go to ... She lay in her apartment, with cockroaches racing across the wall (she could hear them clicking all through the night - so gross), tears streaming down her face, but she also could call her mother and tell her how frustrated she was, or scared ... and her mother would give her advice. Hawn is a family kind of person.

I have always been a huge fan of her acting. I first became aware of her in her heyday - with movies like Foul Play (God, I LOVE that movie), and Seems Like Old Times (adore it!) and Private Benjamin - which was, in a career of many turning points, a huge turning point. Hawn was Executive Producer. She is a pioneer. The clout that she had after Private Benjamin (not just because the movie was a smash hit and she got nominated for Best Actress - but because of her producer experience) was massive. Now the woman already had an Oscar, she won one early on in her career for Cactus Flower:

She had had a diverse resume - television and movies and TV specials ... she was a beloved American star, but "Executive Producers" were mainly men. This was an unprecedented deal. It was so exciting, at the time. There is a glass ceiling, make no mistake - but much less so now, and part of it is because of Hawn's breakthrough in that arena ... it was a big cultural moment; women in Hollywood, blah blah blah ... and the fact that the film was so successful in every possible way - really opened the doors for other women.

Because of her blonde cutesy attitude, she was often underestimated (also, because of her dance background) - but very early on there were a couple of key people who saw something in her - perhaps a kookiness, a true comedienne was in there ... and so she got a leg-up over the others. And things began to happen. It was (and still is, I guess) a rather messy career. That's one of the reasons I like it. I still feel her in there. She doesn't seem overly managed - she never has. And a film like Seems Like Old Times - put her where she needed to be - it's kind of a throwback to the screwballs of the 1930s, and if there's anyone who I think would "fit" back then, it would be Hawn. She is so. so. funny. But she also can be touching, vulnerable, angry, embarrassingly dizzy (her saying to Eileen Brennan in Private Benjamin: "See, I did join the army, but I joined a different army. I joined the one with the condos and the private rooms." She says that ridiculous line without breaking a smile, without winking to us the humor ... It's just so damn funny.)

She's a lovely actress, someone I truly admire, and my only regret is that we don't see more of her. She's due for a Diane Keaton-esque role, a la Something's Got to Give. I would love to see her come back out into the forefront, where I think she belongs. I'm also pleased for her that her book was so successful.

Like I mentioned earlier: when I read it, I was in a gentle mood ... or perhaps it helped put me into a gentle mood. It made me think about my own life, the angels I have met - those who helped me, believed in me ... and how such people are always with me. It made me think about my boyfriends, and what I want from a man, my dreams, basically ... and it made me really think about my own role in all of this ... how important perspective is. Crucial. It is not often just what happens to us in life - but how we choose to interpret it - that makes the difference. Hawn is a person who needs a lot of quiet alone time, sitting and writing in her journal. It helps her equilibrium. I related to that as well. I love her, what can I say.

The following excerpt doesn't have anything to do with her career, but it does show the feel of the book, its point of view and attitude ... and it's really why I cherish the book.

I'm so glad I read it. I've given it to a couple of girlfriends as gifts ... I pick it up and leaf through the pages and feel, again, a gentleness of mood come over me. Don't be so hard on yourself, Sheila. Try to be a little more kind to yourself. Look at your motives, take the time to ask the questions ... be rigorous with yourself, but don't be unkind.

Here is the excerpt. Goldie Hawn is maybe 18, 19 years old ... she is living in New York City, working as a go-go dancer, and kind of scared all the time. She's still just a teenager ... her parents trust her, and have faith in her ... but she is not sure if she will be okay. Her go-go dancing has brought her to some pretty sketchy venues. What will it all be for? I just love the story she tells here, and how she tells it.

EXCERPT FROM A Lotus Grows in the Mud, by Goldie Hawn

Talking to my mother on the telephone later that night, I am in my kitchen making a piece of toast. "I dunno, Mom," I say, pulling a plate from the cupboard as I rest the telephone in the crook of my neck, "maybe I should just come home. I mean, New York is great and everything and I love my new apartment, but I think maybe it's time to come home."

Watching the toaster to make sure it doesn't burn the bread, all of a sudden the lights go out and the line goes dead. The toaster glows red but then fades. "Mom? Mom? Mom? Are you there? What happened?"

It is pitch-black. Putting down the telephone, I peer out the window and gasp when i see not a single light in any of the windows across the street. Only the car headlights illuminate the street. Feeling my way to the cupboard under the sink, I retrieve a flashlight and wander through my apartment and into the hallway. All my neighbors are standing around.

"What happened? Why did all the lights go out?"

"We dunno. Do you have lights?"

"No. Is there a fire? Did something happen?"

"Looks like the whole block's out. I can't see a light on anywhere."

"Oh my God, the elevator! Is someone stuck in there? I can hear shouting."

I run downstairs to the lobby and find Ernie the doorman lighting a candle.

"Ernie, what happened?"

"Looks like a blackout. The whole of New York is out. It's inky out there."

"I think someone's stuck in the elevator," I told him.

"I know. I just called the fire department."

I walk out into the street and look around in wonder. I have never been in a blackout before. Looking up, I realize that the Empire State Building is in darkness, something I have never seen before.

Wandering back into the lobby, I see Ernie has been joined by others from our building. They are listening to a transistor radio. "What's going on?" I ask.

"It's a massive blackout, honey," a woman tells me. "It's affected the whole northeast coast, right up into Canada. They reckon there are thirty million people in the dark."

"Oh no! Do you mean there are people trapped in buildings?"

"Yes, honey, right up in the Empire State Building."

"Oh my God!" I cry, my hand to my mouth. "I told two strangers to go up there tonight."

"And on the subway," Ernie pipes in, his ear to the radio.

"None of the stoplights are working, so the traffic's at a standstill," a man I don't know tells me.

I go out into the street again, craning my neck to look up at all the buildings shrouded in darkness. Everyone seems so calm. The people who live in my building are all talking to each other for the first time. Jilly's is crammed with strangers sitting around candles, talking and sharing and connecting. Nobody can get home, so they have just stopped where they are. It feels like we are on the safest island in the world, and all of man's foibles, all our anxieties, aggressions and fears, have melted away for one night.

"Isn't this awesome?" I tell Eddie, the dry cleaner.

"Sure is, Goldie. I've lived here all my life and I ain't seen nothing like this."

"Isn't that old Mrs. Krokovitch?" I say with surprise, pointing to a grey-haired woman standing talking to someone else across the street.

"Oh my God, you're right!" he says. "She hasn't unlocked that front door of her apartment in ten years. Wow, this night is really something!"

I run back up to my apartment to find my roommates drifting in from their auditions or from Phil Black's dance class. They are half giddy and half hysterical.

"Did you see the moon?" asks Anita.

"I know," says Susan. "I've never seen it so big."

"And how about the stars?" says Roberta. "It feels like I've never seen them before."

We run around and light the candles as more and more friends arrive on our doorstep. "Okay, I guess the party's at our house!" I laugh as I bring some glasses in from the kitchen.

"Well, you're the only people we know who live in a three-story walk-up!" Eddie cries, holding up a bottle of scotch as he waltzes in.

We finish lighting the candles, relishing their flickering light. Someone strums on a guitar and another rolls a joint. My front door is wide open, and, suddenly, standing there are the two guys I met in the dry cleaner's earlier this morning.

"Hi, Goldie! Sorry to crash this party," they say in unison.

"Hi! Oh, thank God you're okay! Come on in, this is great. I thought you might be stuck at the Empire State."

"We didn't get there yet," one says. "And 888 Eighth Avenue was the only address we knew in the whole city!"

"Welcome!" I say, and happily fix them a drink.

Other friends and strangers arrive with bottles of liquor or tins of food. People empty their refrigerators, and they bring transistor radios so we can listen to some music. We create our very own nightclub - partying together by the golden glow of candlelight.

I stay up all night, chatting and laughing with my two new friends. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, we share joy and friendship, touching and laughing and telling our secrets. We have no judgment, no history. We are just three people, united in the moment and enjoying the freedom of it. They don't push themselves on me, or try to take advantage. We have a closeness and an honesty that completely restores my faith in humanity.

At dawn, I eventually crash. I wake to find these two guys I have only just met sleeping on my pillow. My apartment is littered with people still making love or staring out the window, marveling at the tentative first light of morning. Reaching out, I switch off the table lamp, which tells me the power is back on. The blackout is over; the moment has passed. But this beautiful, magical experience, this perfect night, will forever mark my heart.

The Books: "My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor" (Alec Guinness)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor, by Alec Guinness

I know some people were disappointed by this book because there doesn't seem to be much in it. It's just a year in the life of Alec Guinness, his diary entries from his 82nd year. So not much is going on. He has lunches with old friends, he goes to mass and writes about the sermons (he was a devout Catholic), he and his wife enjoy their pets ... sometimes he goes in to London for public appearances ... he comments on the news a little bit ... So I think some people felt the book to be a little thin.

I loved it. I love to read people's diaries, though - it's one of my favorite kinds of books ... and when you read someone's diary, you have to let go of looking for a narrative. You have to succumb to the everyday ups and downs we all experience, that may seem random, or chaotic. It's interesting to me that Guinness chose to publish a book this way ... with such an incredible career, I would love to hear more about it (from his perspective) - his working life, how he worked on a part, his experiences with different directors, all that - but this is not the book for that. I guess I knew that going in, so I wasn't disappointed.

My Name Escapes Me is also honest, in a really refreshing way. Guinness obviously just handed over his diaries as they were ... and let the not-so-flattering stuff remain. Or - it's not that it's not flattering, it's that it's so honest about himself it sometimes is like a punch in the stomach. "How I regret myself so often," he writes. He writes about his Catholic faith, the masses, his contemplations on Holy Days. He seems to really be hard on himself at times (he's rude to a woman sitting next to him in church for whatever reason and he is so upset about his behavior he has to write about it later in his diary: "I feel like I ruined Palm Sunday for both of us.") I love that kind of honesty. Wow.

So while I would love to read, you know, a real biography of the man - this is a quiet intellectually satisfying read ... and you get glimpses of who Alec Guinness was as an actor. He's not sure if he will ever act again (at the time of this diary) - but there are moments when thoughts about it start percolating up again. It's like he can't help it. Someone mentions to him a possible opportunity - not even concrete yet - and he can't help it: his imagination starts to go. That's the kind of excerpt I chose. I like to see how it's not even a question of the opportunity being real or not ... that's the whole thing when you're an actor. You have to prepare for an audition and you have to want it. It takes time. You can't just throw it together. I just like how automatic it is for him here in this excerpt ... showing that he has lived his entire life in service to this craft, and there are some things that just come, you don't have to work at it. He has been an actor long enough that he knows the questions to ask about the part (to ask to himself, I mean ... investigative questions) ... and his curiosity is alive and well.

Alec Guinness gave what I feel is one of the best performances by a male actor in the history of cinema in Bridge on the River Kwai. I'd put it up there with any of Brando's greatest moments. And I just love in the excerpt below, how ... even despite himself .... his imagination starts going. He has no other choice.

Look at how he imagines himself into that part. Look at how DETAILED it is. Look at how before-sleep mental meanderings can be some of the most essential work that an actor does. John Strasberg (son of Lee Strasberg) told us in his classes, "Always leave room for dreams. Create a dream-space around the character. Inhabit your own dream."

This is the kind of thing Strasberg was talking about.

EXCERPT FROM My Name Escapes Me, by Alec Guinness

Sunday 19 November

Holy Communion was brought to the house this morning for M. There is always a special good feeling about this; a particular domestic blessing. I was scared the dogs would be unwelcoming with loud barks but they were absolutely quiet.

Yesterday evening Keith Baxter for dinner, who bravely risked my attempt at an Irish stew. It was O.K., but hadn't enough white pepper. Always difficult to know what to drink with it. Whiskey, for preference, I think, but I didn't offer that as Keith was to drive home. So we settled for champagne throughout the evening and it worked admirably. Not what you could call Potato Famine fare.

Keith asked me what my reaction would be if offered Friar Laurence in a production of Romeo he is thinking of. I said, which is sadly true, that I'd be fearful of being able to learn so many lines; also that the long speech the Friar has at the end, when he tells the assembled cast and the audience all that they have witntessed in the past two hours, is very tedious. I have seen weary actors trying to look interested and astonished at all the revelations and failing desperately. However, after I had gone to bed I had one of my somewhat insane fancies.

In a half-awake state I saw Fr. L. dressed correctly (for once) as a Franciscan, entering with his cowl pulled over his head. According to the lines it is first light, pre sun-up, and he is alone. He might appear as a rather sinister figure - Death perhaps, with a pruning knife instead of a scythe. He carries, of course, his osier basket of wild flowers and herbs. He starts with the rather pretty speech, in rhyming couplets, about the good and baleful properties of various flowers (and curiously enough, of stones) before he is joined by Romeo. He doesn't see Romeo to begin with but, picking up a flower, says, 'Within the infant rind of this weak flower / Poison hath residence and medicine power.' The speech ends with the words, 'Full soon the canker death eats up that plant,' and Romeo says, 'Good morrow, father!' Laurence acknowledges this with a blessing, 'Benedicte.' That is the moment, I think, when he should throw back his cowl and appear as the ordinary man he is. (I have written to Keith suggesting half a dozen actors who would be revealed satisfactorily, rather than me.) There is more to the part than I had realized.

In today's Observer is a large photograph of a youngish man wearing pyjamas and looking sleepy. No explanation. After some thought I realized it was a still of me in the film of Priestley's Last Holiday.

A few days ago, somewhere, there was an equally large photo from the dismaying A Passage to India. Again it was me, in Hindu garb, and underneath it said it me as Aziz. Not at all. Aziz was played by the admirable, young, handsome Indian actor Victor Banerjee. It seems the only press photographs we can rely on are of the Princess of Wales in gym work-out clothes. Aziz, of course, is a Muslim.

Wednesday 22 November

To London yesterday for a day and a night. Matthew came down to hold the fort here. Bank, a haircut, household shopping. Lunched alone at Wilton's, wolfing an excellent Sole Colbert.

In early evening to a friend's flat where I made my long overdue confession to a holy ad illuminating priest. It was a memorable experience which gently sponged away all my recent irascibility, anxieties and spiritual turmoil. Perhaps kneeling at a dining-room table is more relaxing than the upright coffin of an elaborately carved confessional. It would be good to think that from now on I shall spread only sweetness, light and understanding, but I fear I know myself too well. The bad habits of a lifetime, when tackled head on, seem only to bend, not break.

Dined with Alan B. National Gallery talk and wonderment over the palace drama which has riven the nation - in my opinion into the knowing and observant quarter of the population on one side, and the moist-eyed lovers of popular entertainment on the other. It is a series that is likely to run and run.

Thursday 23 November

A grey day. I have been thinking about Friar Laurence; or, rather, not about Fr. L. in particular but more to do with the prescience Shakespeare shows in some of the plays. Is it deliberate, accidental or wholly unconscious? Probably just the way his mind worked. In Macbeth, of course, it is deliberate. The first encounter with the witches contains an evil prophecy; their appearance brings to the surface his vaulting ambition, which possibly he hasn't fully recognized until then.

In Antony and Cleopatra, at the beginning of the play, the Soothsayer tells Charmian's future by reading her hand. He says, 'You shall outlive the lady whom you serve.' Charmian's comment on that is, 'O excellent! I love long life better than figs.' At the end of the play the Clown brings Cleopatra a basket of figs in which are nestled the asps which will kill her, and a few minutes later will kill Charmian.

I like to think the same actor played the Soothsayer and the Clown. It would make a good double, as well as working on the audience's unconscious memory of figs and death.

The Books: "It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here" (Charles Grodin)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here, by Charles Grodin

I consider this to be required reading for young actors.

It's so good on so many levels, but particularly good for young unknown full-of-hope actors. It's not just an autobiography. It's not even a How-To book, because if anyone has had an unconventional and, at times, very difficult career, it is Charles Grodin. But it is a Must-Read. I think definitely for actors it's a must-read - but anyone interested in the business, and how it works (not how it appears to work, but how it actually works) - should also read it as well. The ups and downs, the callous decisions, the annoying co-stars (I love the chapter entitled "Breakthrough: I don't accept an apology from Anthony Quinn") - the craft itself - working on the SELF, as an actor must do ... at the same time that you are trying to survive in a pretty brutal business. The book addressees all of these issues like no other. I think it should be handed out to actors in scene classes, or put on "suggested reading" lists of freshman-level acting classes. I read it from the cloister of college, where I was highly successful, and the thought of taking that out into the real world was exciting ... but scary, too. Grodin's book, on some level, says back to young actors, "Yeah. You should be scared. Toughen up, toots. Harsh world out there." But it doesn't JUST have a cynical tone to it (which is a huge turn-off) - it also is an honest look at his own journey, finding his way, leaping at opportunity when it knocked - but also missing some key opportunities for such and such reasons. Grodin also is notorious for his temper, and obviously his sense of humor - which often got him into trouble, when someone didn't get the joke. But he wasn't afraid to be disliked ... that's one thing ... and yet at the same time, he NEEDED to be liked, in order to get his projects done. The classic dichotomy.

Grodin doesn't just describe his own experiences - he then turns each one into a little "teaching moment" (sorry, don't really like the Oprah terminology but in this case it can't be helped) ... Moments in your life where you realize, through the mess and chaos, there are actually are lessons to be learned - but God, sometimes isn't it difficult to figure out what the hell lesson it is?? Grodin shows that there is a choice involved. You can choose a lesson that empowers you, or you can choose one that makes you bitter and self-righteous. Sometimes Grodin chooses one, sometimes the other - as we all do ... and he is unafraid to call a spade a spade. There are people who were unkind to him starting out. Not even big-wigs at the time - just your basic casting agents, agents in general ... saying horrible things right to your face with the utmost carelessness: "We're looking for someone sexier ..." Whatever, things that go right for the jugular. How do you keep your confidence up in the face of that?? It takes some serious mental maneuvering ... it really does. You have to decide to make sense of it, rather than be victimized by it.

Grodin doesn't come off like he has an ax to grind, or like "look how mean everyone was to me - yet I STILL made it!!" ... It's an honest look at the brutality of the business - and how people can say the most outrageous things and you have to somehow just survive it. Like the story he tells about the party celebrating the fact that the Broadway smash hit Same Time Next Year - which Grodin starred in with Ellen Burstyn - had been bought up by a producer and was going to be made into a movie - and Grodin asked the playwright's wife why the playwright wasn't there, and she replied blithely, "Oh, he's off meeting with Actor X who we are really hoping will play your part in the movie." !!! Unbelievable. Grodin reports this story, and it was years ago, but he obviously never forgot it ... He forgives the playwright's wife for her callousness (which he did not believe was malicious, just unthinking) ... but says he still, to this day, kind of "ducks" when he sees her, afraid of whatever zinger she might throw his way. Grodin reports these stories honestly, you can still feel the emotion behind it - he's not all Zen about these things and that's one of the refreshing (and most human) things about this book. He also behaves in an unexpected way - and sometimes it pays off, sometimes it backfires ... but there are great lessons in all of that for any young actor. Grodin admits that his humor sometimes doesn't go over well ... but then there are people like Mike Nichols who say of Grodin, "He's the funniest man I've ever met." (Grodin was actually cast as Benjamin in The Graduate, but it ended up not happening - Grodin blowing that opportunity for various reasons. Grodin, forever afterwards, was always nervous whenever he saw Dustin Hoffman, even if Hoffman was just walking on the beach. Grodin always believed that any sighting of Hoffman anywhere meant that Grodin was about to be fired.)

So. Who are you going to believe? Which interpretation do you go with? Or can you be okay with the fact that some people just won't "get" you? Grodin's entire career seems to have been about that. Some people will "get" you, others won't ... you have to keep working anyway.

The title of the book comes from an anecdote during the filming of the disastrous 11 Harrowhouse. Grodin's career had exploded (in a good way) with The Heartbreak Kid, directed by Elaine May.

I don't think Grodin got one bad review for that film. He says that people still come up to him on the street and talk to him about that movie. Anyone who asks him for an autograph, even now, still say, "I loved you in The Heartbreak Kid ..." So awesome, right? He hit the big time! Yay! But this is why this book is so important: the next movie he did was a movie called 11 Harrowhouse and it very nearly killed his career for good. You would have thought he would have the pick of the crop ... but no, things dried up immediately. To quote Heidi Klum, "One day you're in, the next day you're out." But anyway, the title of the book comes from an experience he had during filming 11 Harrowhouse. Just a year before, Grodin had become a big star, a hot new actor, desirable, wanted, praised.

Candy Bergen and I were filming the movie 11 Harrowhouse in a castle outside London. We were sitting in a room off the main hall where the cameras were being set up. After a few minutes an Englishwoman appeared. I don't know who she was, but she acted as though she had a duchess-or-something title. She said, "Did someone ask you to wait in here?" "No," we answered, a bit taken aback. She responded: "Well, it would be so nice if you weren't here."

A master of the anecdote, the ba-dum-ching of any given story ... Grodin turns these mainly unpleasant memories into "teaching moments", as well as a revealing memoir about his own development. We learn sometimes by watching others. There is no such thing as a done deal. Grodin thought he had it in the bag with The Heartbreak Kid and while that film will probably be what he is remembered for (that and Midnight Run) - that's not all there is. There were TV specials (including a highly controversial one with Simon & Garfunkel), late-show appearances (he was notorious), directing, plays ... Grodin figured out early on that he would not be happy just as an actor. The point was to stay in the business, by any means possible.

The book is quite funny, and there were times it made me laugh out loud. Any young actor, too, will recognize himself ... in the descriptions of the early days of Grodin's career in New York, taking classes with Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen, and trying to get cast in something - the whole obsession with headshots ("Did you get your pictures?" "I'm getting my pictures...." "I like my pictures." "Can I see your pictures?") is just so dead on ... so universal ... and there are also moments where Grodin makes mistakes (many many moments) - like the time he disagreed with a bit of Roman Polanski's direction during the filming of Rosemary's Baby. Or the time he refused to accept Anthony Quinn's bullshit (in my opinion) apology. The time he almost got into a fistfight, defending Marlo Thomas' honor and reputation from a heckler who told her she should be "ashamed" of herself and that her father "would be ashamed".

I liked the VOICE of the book, too. It's cynical, sure, but there is a lot of warmth there, too.

It's an act of generosity, this book ... and I am grateful I read it when I did in my life. It was a dash of cold water, in many respects - but at the same time, Grodin doesn't condescend, he doesn't roll his eyes at someone who wants to "do this" as a career - He's not a know-it-all. He makes fun of himself (his stories of working with Robert DeNiro are HYSTERICAL) - but he's also interested in passing on what he has learned.

I found this book to be invaluable at a time when I really really needed it.

A must-read.

The excerpt below has to do with Grodin's experience directing Lovers and Other Strangers on Broadway in 1968.

EXCERPT FROM It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here, by Charles Grodin

As much as I feel for the actors' discomfort in auditioning, the people putting on the project have so much time and effort invested in it that these auditions become necessary to try to avoid making mistakes. The exception to this, of course, is if you're hiring someone to do something that everyone involved has seen him do before. I say "everyone" because in most plays everyone has cast approval - writer, director, producer, and, sometimes, the star. It's not that easy to get everyone to agree on anyone. I believe that casting is everything, and if you don't have the right actors, all the writing and directing in the world won't do it for a play. Fine comedy actors, in my opinion, must be as good at serious acting (reality) as they are at comedy. Because of those demands, this is a relatively small group of people.

Lily Tomlin (who has won a Best Actress award on Broadway) likes to tell the story of her audition for me. When she finished, I asked her if she'd ever acted before. She was crushed, she said, and ran to a phone booth to tell a friend how terrible she must have been. I always remind her that the reason I asked her that was because she had been recommended to me by the director of a musical review (Sandy Devlin, the musical stager from Hooray) she was in, and I thought she was a musical performer, even though I thought she gave a good acting audition. But, whatever my rationale, I inadvertently was as insensitive to Lily as others had been to me.

In any event, we ended up with a magnificent cast.

Eventually, the first day of rehearsal finally came for the play, which was called Lovers and Other Strangers. There were a lot of people gathered on the stage that day: ten members of the cast, many of whom had distinguished themselves in other Broadway shows; four or five understudies covering all the parts - also excellent people, any of whom could play the parts they understudied unusually well; of course, the writers, Renee and Joe; Renee's mother, Mrs. Frieda Wechsler; the producer, Stephanie Sills; top scenic costume and lighting designers; highly experienced stage managers; a number of assistants - a lot of people. I started to welcome everyone, and suddenly was acutely aware that all eyes were on me. I wanted to tell them how excited we were to have them all, and how I saw the play and all that, but I realized I was very, very nervous. I had learned how to deal with rejection but now I had to learn to deal with having authority - which also, unexpectedly, was nerve-racking. I had auditioned and approved every single member of the cast, but now, sitting there in front of all of them, I realized that many in the company were older and more experienced than I was. My directing experience consisted of one show that had run three weeks. (I couldn't go around telling that costumes-were-stolen story to everyone I met.) As soon as I realized my voice was shaking, I shifted gears and switched my speech to a short introduction of Renee's mother, Mrs. Frieda Wechsler, a short, extraordinarily warm woman with a lisp and a lot of guts, who always enjoyed making a statement. Mrs. Wechsler basically said how happy we were to have everyone there and how we all felt that, with hard work, we could have a success - pretty much what I would have said if I could have spoken.

Lovers and Other Strangers dealt with love, romance, and marriage. I don't know if it was life imitating art, or what, but as soon as this company got together, all kinds of romances broke out. I gave notes after each rehearsal. Sometimes one of the performers would be able to leave early because I had said all I had to say to him. His lover would sit there fidgeting, looking furiously at me to give her notes and let her get the hell out of there and into the arms of love. All the romances were topped by Renee and Joe calling me to a private meeting one day to tell me they were expecting.

We opened in the fifteen-hundred-seat Fisher Theater in Detroit to rave reviews and sellout business. It was a complete triumph. The papers were raving about Renee and Joe, and even me. Renee's mother told some of the movie people from Hollywood who had descended on us in Detroit that we wanted five hundred thousand dollars for the movie rights. When they looked faint, she whipped out a rave review from Variety and read the entire thing to them as they stood and nodded and looked increasingly nervous.

The road to Broadway was not entirely smooth. It was concluded at some point prior to the Broadway opening that one of the young women in the cast should be replaced. I was the only one against it, yet it was considered my job, as director, to tell the young woman. It seems unfair now; I should have said to the others: "You want to fire her? You tell her." I didn't want the job. But some kind of tradition was being followed, I guess. When I did walk over to the actress, it took me so long to get to the point that she thought we were just having an idle chat. As I got closer to saying what I had to say, I started to develop chest pains, which turned out to be tension. I had to lie down. She got me a glass of water, and as she was trying to calm me, I told her she was fired. It was doubly difficult for me because I couldn't tell her how much I disagreed with the decision and how good I thought she was. I thought that would be disloyal to the others. I know she felt like lying down herself, but she kept applying cold compresses. Two days later, the whole section that the young, talented actress had been in was cut from the show, and two additional actors had to be let go. But it was certainly easier to be dropped from the show because the scenes you were in were cut. Personally, I don't believe in firings unless it significantly affects the show. And I'd venture to say that more than the overwhelming majority of the time it doesn't. This time it didn't.

We finished our highly successful run in Detroit and prepared to move to Broadway. The stage of the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York was considerably smaller than the stage of the Fisher Theater in Detroit. When we moved the scenery to the Brooks Atkinson, it seemed that our four large sets would come rolling in and out on tracks that were awfully close together. I went to the head stagehand and said, "Are you sure there's no chance at all that these sets could sway a bit, and one coming in quickly could hit one going out quickly?" He stared at me as though that was the dumbest question he'd ever heard. When I persisted, saying, "Forgive me, it's my first Broadway show, and I just don't know about this," he said, "Kid, I've been in this business thirty-five years. Trust me." Always being an optimist, I did. When we started to preview, the sets regularly crashed into each other. Starting right there, until the present, I became kind of an optimistic skeptic.

When we opened on Broadway we got the biggest laughs I'd ever heard in the theater; they were like thunderclaps. In spite of that, the play received mixed notices. The New York Times loved it, which is supposed to be enough; but there was a certain amount of vitriol on the other side. The phrase "Neanderthal theater" sticks in my mind. The play was bold and maybe a little ahead of its time in the sexual-humor department. So, alongside the people screaming with laughter, there was a certain group heading up the aisles in the middle of the evening. The questionable sexual dialogue - and that's all it was: dialogue - represented far less than 1 percent of the play. The biggest laugh of the evening came when a woman turned to her husband in bed and asked demandingly: "Are you gonna make love to me or not?!" The man thinks a second and says, "I owe you one." It was the biggest laugh, and also a line that offended a lot of people. It neither made me laugh nor offended me. I was a much bigger fan of Renee and Joe's nonsexual humor, which was 99 percent of the play.

Business was in trouble from the start. We'd had the theater on what's called an interim booking, meaning another play was booked into the theater six weeks after us (my old friend Dustin Hoffman in a play called Jimmy Shine);and since we had the money to move it (it would have cost twenty-five thousand dollars), we felt we should. The movie rights had been sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Today, that would be equal to a million dollars. The writers got 60 percent of that, and the production 40 percent, which meant that the production had a hundred thousand dollars from the movie sale. Business increased from the first week to the sixth week by 150 percent. We had tried everything to keep going. The actors went around to the various ticket brokers and asked them to do what they could to steer people to the show since the brokers had liked it. I spoke to other producers who had loved the show in an effort to get them to take it over. Joe Bologna and I would stand in front of the theater where our Times review was blown up and comment, as though we were passersby: "I hear it's very good." A few people overheard us and bought tickets. Renee and Joe rounded up about fifty relatives and gave them money to buy tickets. They formed a line. We said to our general manager: "Look, we've got a line!" But Renee and Joe ran out of relatives before that plan could work. None of our plans worked. Heartbreakingly to all of us, the play was allowed to close when our six-week booking was up.

I felt very strongly that the producers should have spent the twenty-five thousand dollars and moved Lovers and Other Strangers to another theater. We had more than doubled our business from the first to the sixth week, we had a rave review from The New York Times, and, most significantly, the show, overall, was loved by the audience and had great word of mouth. A lot of people felt that if it had moved it could have run for two years. Its longevity possibilities, I believe, were proved in that it still is being performed regularly, some twenty years later, all over the country in amateur and stock companies.

Those people responsible for the money always feel they have total control and owe no explanation to anyone, even though in this case most of the money was raised, of course, by a series of backers' auditions performed by Renee, Joe and me. I've always resented this autocratic attitude of "money people". I think that when people work very hard for the better part of a year for little money, they are owed every chance and consideration. While, conceivably, by trying to go on running, money may be lost, work and effort going down the drain to me is worth more than money. The producers had actually wanted to close the play sooner, but I did some figuring, and got Renee and Joe to join with me (against the advice of their business manager) to indemnify the producers against any losses they might incur to finish out the six weeks. We would be responsible for any losses, and also share any profits. We ended up making eleven thousand dollars in profits for the remaining weeks. Recently, I was at a gathering, and one of the producers (a nonvisible one at the time of the play who had raised less than half the money and been influential in persuading Stephanie Sills to close the show) came up to me, introduced himself, and said: "I put up the money for Lovers and Other Strangers." I controlled myself for a moment, and the politest response I could come up with was, "Well, not all of it." He seemed taken aback. I wonder what he would have felt if I'd told him what I really thought of him.

I've always been proud of the successful movie that was made out of the play and of how the play continues to be done regularly all over the country to this day, and probably will for the rest of our lives.

In praise of Sanaa Lathan

Wonderful actress. Fluid, emotional, easy on the eye, funny, deep, unconventional in some of her responses, she creates characters - and very specifically - she does not repeat herself - and you also don't catch her working. It looks easy. I've been a fan for some time (my writeup of Love and Basketball is here). I saw Something New last night and fell in love with it, and with her specifically. She's the kind of actress your heart goes out to. You want her to succeed. You want her to be happy. This is the kind of thing all great romantic female leads have - from Irene Dunne to Marilyn Monroe to Kate Winslet. You worry about these people a little bit - they don't seem self-sufficient, not completely anyway ... and so your heart goes out to them, you hope for them, you invest. It's a rare kind of contract between an audience and an actress ... and not all romantic female leads can pull it off. I think it's somewhat intuitive ... it's a thing that cannot be taught. Whether or not you agree with my choices of female romantic leads is not really the point. The point is that when you are an actress in a romantic film, and you are the lead, it is crucial that the audience want what you want, that they leap into the action (in their hearts) and root for you ... as though it were a sports film. Sanaa Lathan has always had that, and I will look forward to seeing her work for years to come. I'd like to see her hit the big-time, although her last couple of years have been pretty damn spectacular, what with movies and a Broadway hit ... She's a damn fine actress. The character in Love and Basketball, the fiery-tempered tomboy, is nothing like the uptight vaguely sad and yet driven career woman she creates in Something New. Not the same person. I love to watch her work. Her face, even with that scar on her right cheek, maybe even because of the scar, is made for the movies. It's a very beautiful face, but human, open, itself. Emotions are not strived for, or sought after ... they are experienced organically. You don't catch her pushing. Ever. She goes through the gamut of emotions in Something New, and although the movie itself has some issues (mainly with the direction) - the acting, across the board, is a delight. But it's Lathan's movie, and I'm happy for her.

I'm a fan.

What can I say, I'm invested.

Romance

In keeping with the book excerpt today.

I love this photo so much.

One of my "happy place" posts was about Carole Lombard. Love that lady. So did he. Gable did eventually marry again (twice, actually!), but he had it put in his will that he would be buried beside Lombard. Thankfully, his last wife, Kay Williams, was apparently a sensitive (and sensible) lady who totally "got it", knew that Lombard had been the love of his life, and whatevs. Clark would be buried where he wanted to be buried. And that was beside Lombard.

Their faces here. Yum!!

The Books: "Clark Gable: A Biography" (Warren Harris)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Clark Gable: A Biography, by Warren Harris

Warren Harris also wrote a book about the romance of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable (she famously said once, "Lord knows I love Clark, but he's the worst lay in town ..." Ha!) ... and so now Harris has taken all of that former research and honed in on Gable. Within 1 or 2 pages, I felt a familiar pang of disappointment, realizing that despite the nice matte-cover, the well-done production of the book - it wasn't written well. It's amateur hour. I am not aware of a big serious biography out there about Clark Gable, and I had hopes for this one. But nope. He uses the word "umpteenth", for example. Time and place, Harris. Time and place. This isn't supposed to be the rantings of a fanboy. Put your "umpteenth" away. He describes conversations as though he were there. At one point he says, "Gable blanched" at some bad news. That's a description. You can't do that. You weren't there. Unless it's a quote from someone else, you can't say "Gable blanched". Or, you CAN, but then you certainly lose MY trust as a reader. You're making shit up, sir. He also reports rumors. "Rumor has it that ..." No, no, no. Joan Crawford very well may have had an abortion due to getting pregnant by Gable, or a few abortions, who knows, but don't set it up with "rumor has it ..." Do your legwork, Mr. Harris. That's your job. Get quotes from people to confirm or deny. Don't just repeat the rumor. Bad form. It's kind of a bummer, because I really wanted to like the book. I liked the information, but I didn't appreciate the writing at all. It didn't make me MAD like Peter Manso's axe-to-grind style, it's relatively harmless, and hell, I can enjoy a good fangirl ranting with the best of them (Cooper's Women, anyone?) - but this book was packaged to look like something else. Unlike Cooper's Women, it has pretensions. It doesn't hold up.

Gable's origins are a little bit unknown - many of the details lost - even his birth certificate is wrong. I think he was even listed as a girl. And the date and time were wrong. It's indicative of the difficulties in putting together a picture of Clark Gable's childhood. He had a lot of sadness as a boy - his mother died, there was some wrangling over religion - the two sides of the family fighting over baptisms and the like, and Clark Gable (which probably wasn't his real name at the time) got a little bit lost in the shuffle. He seems to have been a mixed bag. He was great with cars and machines, loved working on them. He had ears that stuck out to here. He was shy.

Gable actually got his start in stock companies - he had no experience, he was a teenager, and needed to make some money. He learned his craft on his feet. He didn't even know it was a craft, until he encountered some pretty damn fine actors in stock ... who showed him the way. Or he learned by observing. As he filled in, and started to grow into his tallness (although his ears always stuck out) - women started to take notice. There are a couple of quotes in the book from colleagues and directors - basically saying that his sex appeal couldn't be denied - he walked onstage and you could FEEL the reaction in the audience. (Which makes Carole Lombard's quote about him not being a good lay even more interesting. He had grown up basically sleeping with prostitutes, that was his experience ... and Lombard understood that, she had had plenty of sex, she knew he was no good, but that he was a good man and that he loved her.) He was never quite the same after her untimely death.

But back to his sex appeal: It was electric, and visceral - what went on between Gable and an audience (particularly a female audience) - and it was only a matter of time before Hollywood beckoned.

The stories about Gone With the Wind are well-known, the stuff of legend, so I thought I'd pick an excerpt having to do with something a little bit earlier in Gable's career - either Red Dust with Jean Harlow (her husband of, what, one day? killed himself while filming Red Dust, or maybe just after wrap) or It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert, one of my favorite movies of all time. Ironically, the Best Picture From the Outside In series is going on now - (that's where two film critics and writers "screen and compare two best pictures from either end of Oscar's 80 year timeline until eventually we meet in the middle in the 1960s several months from now") - great idea, right? I've been really loving it. So the latest installment is It Happened One Night, Oscar- winner in 1934 and A Beautiful Mind, Oscar-winner in 2001. Quite a jarring contrast, no? I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who was annoyed by Beautiful Mind but that's another post entirely. I LOVED reading the thoughts about It Happened One Night, and so I pulled out the book today and knew I had to choose an excerpt dealing with the filming of that classic.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Clark Gable: A Biography, by Warren Harris

A Hollywood legend claims that Louis B. Mayer loaned Clark Gable to minor-league Columbia Pictures as punishment for the problems he caused during Dancing Lady, but that's not true. Between his illnesses and his suspended salary, Gable had been "punished" enough. It was simply a business deal that benefited both studios. MGM had no project of its own ready for Gable, and it also earned $500 per week by charging Columbia $2,500 instead of the $2,000 he received at home.

Undercapitalized Columbia couldn't afford a large contract roster like MGM, so president Harry Cohn was always borrowing stars for the "A" releases that he produced to upgrade the studio's image as a factory for cheap programmers and short subjects. While borrowing Gable for Night Bus, Cohn also took MGM's Barrymore for Twentieth Century. From Paramount he obtained Claudette Colbert for Gable's costar and Carole Lombard for Barrymore's.

To Gable personally, going to work at Columbia probably seemed like punishment after the posh comforts of MGM. He remembered the small sstudio in drab central Hollywood from his struggling actor days. He used to frequent the nearby intersection of Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, known as "Gower Gulch" because shoestring producers came there daily to hire extras and bit players for westerns.

According to Frank Capra, who would be his director for the four weeks of the Columbia loan-out, Gable had to fortify himself with booze before he could face reporting to the studio. When Gable arrived for a script conference, he called him "Mishter" Capra and said, "I've always wanted to visit Siberia, but why does it smell so bad? And why ain't you wearing a parka?"

Infuriated, Capra said, "Mr. Gable, you and I are supposed to make a picture together. Shall I tell you the story, or would you rather read the script yourself?"

"Buddy, I don't give a shit what you do with it," Gable replied.

Capra saw that Gable was too intoxicated to reason with, so he simply handed him the script and escorted him to the door. As he left, Gable started singing the old saloon favorite "My Gal Sal".

Once he'd sobered up and read Night Bus, Gable decided that it wasn't any worse than some of his MGM scripts. Ironically, the original short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams had once been optioned by MGM after it was first published in Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine, but when the studio decided to pass, Harry Cohn purchased it for five thousand dollars for Capra and scriptwriter-partner Robert Riskin.

Due to a recent flurry of bus movies, including MGM's Fugitive Lovers and Universal's Cross Country Cruise, Cohn ordered Capra and Riskin to find a more provocative title. The It in It Happened One Night could really stand for almost anything, although the neuter pronoun had been widely used as a euphemism for sex since the Middle Ages.

Retaining only the shell of the original short story, Robert Riskin wrote a script that started or at least perfected the genre known as screwball comedy. A hot-tempered newspaper reporter, just fired for impertinence while on assignment in Miami, heads back to New York by bus to find a new job. Sitting next to him and traveling incognito is the runaway, spoiled-bitch daughter of a millionaire. Daddy has posted a ten-thousand-dollar reward for her return, so it's not long before the reporter recognizes her and realizes his good luck. Besides collecting the reward money, he can also write a juicy story about her and sell it to the highest bidder. To make sure that others don't recognize her, he persuades her to leave the bus and to travel the rest of the way to New York by hitchhiking on the back roads.

Much of the script was left open to suit the improvisational style of Frank Capra, who had learned the ropes by creating visual gags for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett slapstick two-reelers and who had done his first feature directing the silent comedy star Harry Langdon. Since joining Columbia in 1928, Capra had directed nineteen comedies and/or dramas. From his first collaboration with writer Riskin on The Miracle Woman in 1931, his films had become increasingly laced with social comment that championed the ordinary citizen and moral goodness.

Gable had met Claudette Colbert during his Broadway period; she was an established stage star by the time of his debut in Machinal. He also knew that she was a lesbian in a sham marriage with gay actor-director Norman Foster, so he never tried to make a pass or to entice her into the temporary dressing suite that Columbia gave him.

"Clark had a ball making the film," Frank Capra remembered. "He was playing himself, and maybe for the only time in his career. That clowing, boyish, roguish he-man was Gable. He was shy, but a lot of fun with people he knew. He was very sensitive about those goddamned ears, but he made jokes about them. After a shot, he'd ask, 'What'd they get - an ear?' He didn't look like anyone else. It was not only physical. He had mannerisms that were all his own: ways of standing, smoking, and a great flair for clothes. Whatever came natural to him, I let him do it."

"Gable, I believe, idolized Capra," said the director's longtime sound mixer, Edward Bernds. "Gable's initial hostility was gone by the time we started, which was with a night scene at the Greyhound bus depot in downtown Los Angeles. Gable very quickly became friendly with the crew. I think he found that with Capra, picture making could be fun."

The story builds to a scene where Gable and Colbert must share overnight accommodation in a one-room tourist cabin. Colbert's actual reluctance to undress in front of the cameras gave Capra the idea for the "Walls of Jericho", a blanket hung from the ceiling to divide her bed from Gable's. While undressing behind the blanket, she drapes some of her clothes and undies on it, which turned out sexier than if she'd actually revealed herself.

As Gable stripes down in the same scene, he removes his shirt and has nothing on underneath. In real life he never wore undershirts, so he didn't want to be bothered with one for the film. Capra went along with i.

During the filming of the "Jericho" scene, Gable and Capra pulled a prank on Colbert. The director called her over to Gable's side of the curtain with "We've got a slight problem here. Clark wants to know what can be done about it." When she came around, Colbert found Gable under the bedcovers, smirking, with a large bulge rising from his crotch line. He'd taken a prop kitchen utensil and positioned it under the blanket.

"Awww!" Colbert laughed. "You guys!"

In his handling of Gable, Capra erased the dividing line between hero and comic. He gave Gable routines that were usually reserved for slapstick comedians. Gable teaches Colbert how to dunk a doughnut and also how to thumb a ride. She does him one better by sticking out a shapely gam and getting a passing car to stop immediately. The audience could laugh at the hero as well as admire him.

The thirty-six-day filming ended just before Christmas and cost $325,000. "Clark and I left wondering how the movie would be received," Claudette Colbert recalled. "It was right in the middle of the Depression. People needed fantasy, they needed splendor and glamour, and Hollywood gave it to them. And here we were, looking a little seedy and riding on our bus."

The Books: "The Salad Days" (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Salad Days, by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

The first of his two autobiographies, The Salad Days takes us up to 1941. His second book has to do with his extraordinary experiences during WWII, and I have not read it, but I very much want to. The Salad Days is a self-portrait of a charming, intelligent, honest man ... not all that ambitious, but born to Hollywood royalty, and learning his craft as he went. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was not the swashbuckling giant that his father, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was, but he was tremendously handsome, and had a nice career. (A long one, too.) He played small roles, starting out in the silent era, and then graduated to supporting parts. Meanwhile, he was married to Joan Crawford (or "Billie", as he called her) and focusing mainly on his personal life, and negotiating the sometimes difficult relationship with his famous father and his young stepmother, cinema giant Mary Pickford. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Mary Pickford were really our first major movie stars - and in a way, just because of the time and the place, they were more famous than anyone had been on earth, ever. At least in terms of being instantly recognizable, due to this new-fangled medium called the "motion picture". Stardom was able to jump a notch in power, a couple of notches ... so that these people, who lived in that time, has worldwide cache of a level that the stars in past generations couldn't have even dreamed of. I mean, Ellen Terry was a huge stage actress - does anyone outside of theatre buffs know her name now? (Here's a quote from her, and some photos, for those who are interested.) We know John Wilkes Booth's name, but not because of his acting! Could you pick Eleanora Duse out of a lineup? These people were huge stars of the stage. But with motion pictures, actors joined the realm of the pharaohs, and they lived accordingly. Much of the money they made was not taxed (at that time), so the lifestyles were even more extraordinary than they are now. It was the Wild West of filmmaking. Pioneer spirit. Excess. Only one or two huge stars. They were a different breed.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. grew up with his mother (who had gotten sole custody when she and Fairbanks, Sr. divorced), and his father had gone on to the greatest success possible in Hollywood, marrying America's sweetheart Mary Pickford. Fairbanks, Jr. was famous as a child, merely because of who his father was. Fairbanks and Pickford lived in a giant mansion and I suppose the name of the mansion reveals that the whole socalled currentday trend of calling famous couples as a blend of their two names (Brangelina, etc.) is nothing new. They lived in a mansion called Pickfair.

Based on nothing but his last name, Fairbanks was given a contract, and he started making pictures. It had to have been difficult, to have a father who was the most famous actor in the world - well, him and Charlie Chaplin (who was also his business partner). Fairbanks (Sr.), Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and DW Griffith formed United Artists in 1919, an extraordinary act of business acumen - and that studio flourished until it was brought down by the debacle of Heaven's Gate in 1980. The history of that particular studio, and its collapse, is one of the saddest in Hollywood (a book was written about it: Final Cut : Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists - an incredible book). What a loss. But Douglas Fairbanks and his colleagues had created it to get more creative control, first of all, and also to control the distribution of their films. Brilliant. They were far-seeing people. They were not just in it for the momentary flash of glory. These people saw the future - which was in distribution (and still is today) and did what they could to get some control. It's so rare to find artists who are also excellent businessmen/women ... and those four were.

But, sadly, here I am talking about Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. when this post is about JUNIOR'S book! Typical. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. had to deal with that his whole life. He even shared his father's name! How could he ever compete?

The most charming thing about Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (and I mean charming in the best most true sense of that word) is that he did NOT try to compete. He liked the good life, yes. But he liked it for the right reasons. He enjoyed nice things. He had a great sense of aesthetics, not just in how he dressed and behaved, but in how one should live his life. The Salad Days describes a world that no longer exists. A world of ocean liners, and white linen suits, and cocktails before dinner, and elegant manners, and a kind of bemused acceptance of the foibles of others. He was a gentleman to his core. He was married to Joan Crawford (the marriage did not last) but years and years later, when Mommie Dearest, the smear book to end all smear books, came out, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was quick to say how biased it was, and that was not the Joan Crawford HE knew. He was old-school. You are a gentleman. You do not bitch and moan about the ladies in your life. You treat your wife with kindness, and perhaps she exasperates you, and perhaps you do not understand why she has to have an entire room filled with bottles of moisturizer, but you do not make yourself undignified and unmanly by bitching, and you do not speak of her with contempt. You do not speak of anyone with contempt ... that's what good manners means. It is more important to comport yourself with dignity and grace, and try to have a little compassion, even for someone who might have hurt you, betrayed you, whatever. He stood up for her, in the crazy aftermath of that book's release, and I think that's pretty classy.

They were a young couple together. Glowing and beautiful. This is one of my favorite photos of them. It might be one of my favorite photos ever.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was in Gunga Din with Cary Grant, and it was one of his most successful pictures. Grant offered him the part (Grant was another one of those rare actors with an acute business sense) ... Grant had admired Douglas Fairbanks Senior tremendously and had modeled much of his own behavior after him. The casual bon vivant glow, the easy grace, the immaculate wardrobe, the commitment to physical fitness, all of that ... he had seen in Douglas Fairbanks Sr. something he wanted to emulate, something he - a poverty-struck Cockney boy - was not born to. He had to imitate it (which is one of the most extraordinary things about Grant: his entire thing was a persona created out of wholecloth ... but it seems completely natural. He seriously has no peers). But anyway, due to his great regard for Fairbanks Jr.'s father (who died in 1939 - the same year Gunga Din came out) - he thought it would be wonderful to act with the son. The ridiculous results are one for the ages. Fairbanks, Jr. did not have the silent-screen swashbuckling melodrama of the father. But he did have a spectacular body, a rakish energy, and he was pretty much up for anything. Is there anything more fun than watching those three guys race around India and Afghanistan in Gunga Din??

Fairbanks, Jr. had a wonderful time on that picture, was very proud of it - and remained friends with Cary Grant until the day he died.

Check it out. Here are the two old friends with then-president and former acting colleague Ronald Reagan.

Amazing. The sweep of 20th century motion pictures embodied by two white-haired gents.

The Salad Days is an entertaining, gentle read ... He has no illusions about himself, and yet you also realize, as you read it, that you are in the presence of a thoughtful intelligent person, a man who is able to tell his own story without seeming gaga about his own life, an honest gentleman. In white linen and bucks. Ready to put on his swimming trunks and do a perfect dive into the blue swimming pool. A cocktail on the nearby table. A glimpse of an America - pre World War II - that is gone for good. A time-machine this book is.

It's not just wonderful for the show-biz anecdotes, but because it's really nice to hang out with him for a while. He's a lovely companion, a trustworthy guide.

Here's an excerpt involving his wife "Billie" and other matters.

EXCERPT FROM The Salad Days, by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Neither Billie nor I had much opportunity to settle down in the conventional sense; we both worked too hard and hectically. Never, before or since, have I known any other professional who expended more personal energy on self-improvement courses and on her relations with her fans and the press as did the girl known as Joan Crawford. With one or two really dear friends from Kansas City, she kept up a loyal handwritten correspondence. But if she decided that some particular fan was consistently ardent and devoted enough, or if someone in the studio made a voluntary slave of himself for her (as some certainly did), they were favored by her frequent thoughtfulness and extravagant generosity.

Inclined as she was to exaggerate in so many ways, Billie went about physical fitness in typical fashion. She went to dance classes (when not filming) once or twice a week, took swimming lessons and daily exercises and massage. The cubes of ice she rubbed over her body were always as handy as her face creams and cosmetics. She did not have a notable sense of humor, and was memorably indignant when anyone pulled one of her famous legs about this routine.

She had a chosen few favorites among the members of the press with whom she shared confidences, knowing just how far they would go in printing them. Sometimes her pet fan-magazine writers submitted their articles in advance so that she could amend them if she chose. She paid fake-friendly obeisance to Louella Parsons, the shrewd and vengeful syndicated movie columnist for the then-great Hearst chain of newspapers. But then so did most of Hollywood, including me.

"Lolly" Parsons had been a friend of Marion Davies in Chicago, long before Marion had gone to New York and found her most loyal and magnanimous patron, the press titan William Randolph Hearst himself. Everyone - and no contrary voices were ever raised - loved Marion personally, although her films never quite caught on. She was delicious, irreverent, and generous. There were some who liked Hearst and some who admired him, but almost everyone feared him. His power in those days can hardly be believed in these. I recall my father once asking him, "Tell me, W.R." - as he was called by those who knew him - "now that you've got your own film company for Marion, and your own newsreels are shown everywhere, why don't you concentrate your energies more on motion pictures? That way you can have a worldwide public, instead of just the city-to-city fame that comes from journalism."

Hearst thought a moment and then, in his high, piping voice (so strange coming from that towering giant of a man), answered, "Well, Dough, I have thought about it but I've decided against it. Movies aren't that powerful, really. Why, you know, you can crush a man with journalism but you can't with motion pictures."

When Orson Welles made Citizen Kane, the brilliant, fictional story of Hearst, he was virtually blackballed from the American film world his talent graced so well.

Warner Brothers, once a quickie company and now nouveau-riche because of their successful pioneering investment in sound movies, took over First National (and me with it, of course). My total credits for that work year of 1929 amounted to six pictures. As indifferent as the Crawford pictures had been, mine were several notches lower. MGM at least mounted their trash well. Warner Brothers didn't; most were just mediocre. I did make one picture that, though not very good, may be of some interest to movie buffs. It was called The Forward Pass and it was a football story, with myself as the quarterback hero and Loretta ("Gretch") Young as the heroine. It so happened that I was a fervent fan of the USC Varsity Football team and felt no honor could be greater than to be allowed to watch practice or visit a fraternity house. Many directors and producers who were also fans did what they could to help the USC athletes get summer jobs to help pay their tuition (that should indicate how long ago all this was). And that was how we happened to hire the whole USC football team to be the "school team" in The Forward Pass. Most of them were nice fellows who were unimpressed by movie people. When the cameraman began to shoot, the players thought it great fun to rush through my so-called protective linemen and, instead of letting me run with the ball or pass as rehearsed, to crash into me, set me down hard on my backside, pile up on top of me, and then apologize. The director, Eddie Cline, was in on their joke and thought it fun too. So did everyone, except me. It was summer, it was hot, and I was not prepared for such rough going. But I knew if I so much as cried, "Ouch!" I'd never hear - or feel - the end of it.

Two of the fellows on the team were friends of mine, one a quarterback, Marshall Duffield, and the other a huge guard, named Marion Michael "Duke" Morrison. Three years later, I got Morrison a job in another picture of mine called The Life of Jimmy Dolan in which he was to have one spoken line, perhaps his first. As one of my fight trainers, he came in while my gloves were being tied on, slapped me on the back, and said, "You okay, boss?" I nodded and he exited. Morrison decided to stay in films, but under the name John Wayne.

It is impossible for me to recapture the degree of happiness or compatibility that existed between Billie and me that first year or so. I should say we were both sufficiently imaginative so that, inasmuch as we firmly decided we would "damn well be happy..." we were. This is not to suggest, however, that we were content - which is, of course, a more important state of mind and more impervious to passing influences.

There are accounts that after our marriage the atmosphere at Pickfair reverted to the marked chill Billie had caught the year before. It was said she was tense and unhappy whenever we went up there and that I had been neglectful of her when my father asked me to join him and his friends for a game of "DOUG" or a steaming first, meeting her at the house later.

Dad and Mary had been away again (he was beginning to make occasional trips alone) but had now returned. He was deep into the production of The Iron Mask, a sequel to The Three Muskateers, with another chance to play D'Artagnan.

I admit there was a discernible coolness emanating from "the Big House on the Hill" and invitations were few. Indeed, I myself was rarely relaxed there. I often felt I was "on sufferance" and I do remember Billie being occasionally uncomfortable about it. But as the outside world was not aware of this, she did not seem to take it with any real seriousness. There was certainly no outright unpleasantness between my father and me, but there was no great warmth either. Some said that Dad's fetish of youth made the reality of my marriage to a spectacular young star a disturbing factor. He and I hardly ever discussed personal or family matters. Nor did he seem to know or care much about my professional progress. Usually our conversation was limited to sports and the news.

It may well be that I have up to now been a shade too "understanding" of my father's variable feelings toward me. Perhaps, in balance, I have been too impatient with my mother's overdemonstrative devotion. Probably, because Dad had been my "hero of heroes", I overlooked many slights and rebuffs noted by others just because I didn't want to think they had happened.

Putting myself in Dad's shoes, I could see that, despite Mary's poise as wife and hostess and her shrewd business acumen, he preferred her public image of a little girl. Dad had created a child-bride for himself. He was always a very jealous man, and Mary and her world were the principal targets of that jealousy. He never let her sit next to anyone else but him at any dinner table. Nor could she dance with anyone else. He had built his career on a vision of himself as the ever-young champion. I belonged to him reluctantly - biologically, if not financially or emotionally. But I was by now physically bigger than he and becoming fairly well known to a new generation, so he couldn't exactly shake me off, or hide me.

Dad was never overtly unkind or unfair. Only rarely did he openly show anger or irritation - and then, with cause. He tried hard to be a conventional father but just couldn't quite bring it off.

He could not have enjoyed hearing Billie's frequent talk about having children. In fact, I never quite believed her. She often claimed she had had two miscarriages, but I had done some medical snooping that indicated nothing of the sort had happened. As she frequently voiced her fears that child-bearing might affect her figure, I suspect that was the real reason she never had children or her own. I was still too young to give it much thought. There was plenty of time for fatherhood and I was certainly not averse to it.

Nevertheless, the hint of a grandchild in the offing would not have been warmly welcomed by my father at that time - nor, I suspect, by Mary either. They enjoyed a status in the world's imagination that is totally inconceivable and incomparable by today's standards, and it was their serious business to keep it that way. I may have been uncomfortable in the private role of an unwitting threat to all of that, but I never realized the full extent of my influence on their lives until I heard family talk of it many years later.

In 1929, Billie made four pictures and none quite measured up to the best of the six she had made the year before. Our Modern Maidens (the one I was in too) was the most successful, though Untamed, late in the year, brought a splendid young actor, fresh from New York theater, as her leading man. Robert Montgomery and I became great companions and would share many agreeable adventures over the next dozen years. In order to get better stories and better parts, Billie carried on as hard a battle with the front office as she could without getting into trouble. She was too much in awe of Garbo to be jealous of her, but she made no bones of her jealousy of Norma Shearer, who was unquestionably given most of the plums. Since Norma was the wife of Irving Thalberg, boss of production, there was little Billie could do except grouse and protest, discreetly, to the press.

I have read that Billie tried to work single-mindedly at her career but found it difficult because of my insistence on a more "social life". Though reluctant to dispute the views of a revered person who no longer can rebut my rebuttal, I must say that that is so much rubbish. Billie let nothing stop her admirable though humorless dedication to professional advancement. It was useless to remind her that such other star actresses as Mary, Garbo, Gish, Hayes, Fontaine, or those younger ones who came later, like Hepburn, Leigh, and Davis, hardly ever bothered to curry favor with producers, directors, critics, columnists, or groups of fans. They learned their trade thoroughly, allowed their personalities full professional exposure, exploited their best qualities, and generally stayed away from all the circuising. Billie Cassin lacked some of the natural magic of some of her peers. Yet by dint of bloody-minded determination, intelligence, and guts, she invented Joan Crawford - and in that guise she stood proudly as an accepted equal to the best of all the others.

Although I doubt if she ever heard of Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater or "the Method", she was one of a group of motion picture actors who really believed that to play a happy scene once must first get into a truly happy mood. For instance, she could not believe that Lynn Fontaine might feel physically dreadful yet be able to perform high comedy with supreme and subtle wit. Nor could she believe that a great actress like Helen Hayes could consciously reduce audiences to uncontrollable tears while she thought about having a juicy steak sandwich after the performance. Joan relied more than most silent movie actresses on the "mood music" created by a small two- or three-man combo that was, in those days, a regular part of a company's production crew. Her great saucer eyes could spill over with tears at the first chord of "Humoresque" or whatever sad incident she chose to think of at that moment. She was so very canny about the great size of her eyes that not only did her makeup carefully exploit them but in a picture she almost always tried to hold her head down and look up so that they looked even larger.

The Books: "Are You Anybody?: An Actor's Life" (Bradford Dillman)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Are You Anybody?: An Actor's Life, by Bradford Dillman

One of the side effects of being obsessed with Dean Stockwell is that you suddenly find yourself needing (yes, needing) to buy the autobiography of Bradford Dillman, who starred with Stockwell in 1959's Compulsion (a movie I wrote about here) - just in case Stockwell was mentioned Dillman and Stockwell were not friends. As a matter of fact, they didn't get along. Stockwell had done the play on Broadway with Roddy McDowall (post about that here) - and McDowall was not asked to do the film (not because he wasn't good, but because the studio had a contractual obligation to Dillman, so they put HIM in the project) - and apparently Stockwell was, how you say, less than gracious to this interloper!! (In a beautiful moment of dovetailing narratives, McDowall, years and years later, would play a part on Quantum Leap in the final season ... when Al is threatened, by a moment in his past, to no longer be in charage of the project in the future ... and suddenly Roddy McDowall shows up to help Sam Beckett - played by Scott Bakula - and Bakula is like, "Where's Al???")

But is a small connection between Stockwell and Dillman any reason to buy an entire book, Sheila?? Well, yes, it is. Obsession follows its own pathways. Just find a used copy on Amazon for 20 cents and grab that sucker up.

I think Compulsion is terrific (not perfect, but a terrific psychological thriller, quite daring in the context of its day) - and while I think Stockwell far outshines Dillman (who does a lot of maniacal laughing - "indicating" that he is crazy) - somehow the pair ends up working. There's a scene where Orson Welles interviews the two boys after they have been arrested. Stockwell is chain-smoking, pacing in the small cell - but it's not "actor" pacing. It's not cliche. He is pacing because he has so much nervous energy that he must move. He's cranky. Welles asks questions that seem to imply that Stockwell's character might, uhm, not be into girls (it's 1959, so it's subtle and coded ..."No girls?") ... and Stockwell is sliced open, psychologically, in that moment. Meanwhile, sitting over on the windowsill, is Dillman, at first cocky and assured, and you can already feel how the boys are separating ... Dillman's character leaving Stockwell's out to dry. "Sure, I've got alibis ..." croons Dillman. So while some of Dillman's work here seems "showy" to me, and unnecessarily so, it ends up working for the character. He's also a "showoff" - that's his whole thing. He's a big phony, a liar, a con artist, and a manipulator. One of those Ivy League boys who had everything handed to them ... and so, because things were so easy, he ends up having contempt for the whole world. Dillman really does play that well. I think Stockwell is riveting, however ... and acts Dillman off the screen.

(If you haven't seen Compulsion, I highly recommend it.)

I bought Dillman's autobiography on this slim-pickins basis. But it's actually a hoot. I loved it.

Dillman has 3 kids, was married to the same woman for 40 years (an actress - who passed away a couple of years ago), and - very much like his character in Compulsion was being bred for upper-class greatness when he horrified his family by deciding he wanted to be an actor. Like so many other people at that time (early to mid 50s) he gravitated towards the Actors Studio. That was the place to be. It was the kind of work that everyone wanted to do now. Everyone wanted to be Brando. It seemed like if you took 1 or 2 classes with Lee Strasberg, perhaps you could BE Brando?? No? Maybe?? But it was also a place to study, to get serious about your craft outside of the public glare, to stretch yourself, etc. etc. Dillman was no dummy. He knew it was the place to be.

He had his big break on Broadway, where he appeared as Eugene Tyrone in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (a very famous production, with Jason Robards and Fredric March). Another weird Stockwell connection: when the play was finally filmed, Dean Stockwell played Eugene, the role Bradford Dillman had originated on Broadway. Ouch. But regardless, that was a big big moment for Dillman - in 1956 - being in this huge hit show, that won accolades left and right, prizes, literary and theatrical - the production was a sensation. Fredric March (who played James Tyrone) took Dillman under his wing a bit, mentoring him, teaching him about the business. And Dillman's career was off and running.

He was being groomed for stardom - but as so often happens in this life - he didn't quite make it. His "star" slipped very quickly. He had been in big important projects, and then a couple of years later ... not so much ... However, Dillman kept working, and was involved in some pretty cool films (look him up!) as well as appearing in guest spots on every television show known to man. He had a recurring role on Falcon Crest, for example. Dillman's career was LONG. I love guys like Bradford Dillman. They're the ones who were "disappointed", by perhaps not becoming as famous as their peers ... but who kept at it. I know so many people like that, and it's truly inspiring to me. Stockwell was one of them for many years. He has famous as a child, famous as a young man - and then dropped so completely off the radar as a man in his 30s and 40s that he finally moved to Taos and got his real estate license. Couldn't make a living. He didn't count on David Lynch resurrecting his career, and he didn't count on being more famous at the age of 50 than he ever was as a little kid. Love that! Dillman remained good-looking and dapper, perfect for shows like Murder She Wrote and Love Boat, and despite his good looks there was always something a little bit ... sketch about him ... which worked in his favor. It worked in his favor early in his career (that character in Compulsion is the epitome of "sketch") and it worked in his favor later. He could play the dashing shallow man accused of murdering his wife, and you thought, yeah, that guy probably did it, and he'll probably get away with it. You can have a nice career playing things like that!

Now let's talk about his book. There probably isn't one serious word in it. Sometimes it feels like he's writing a How-To book for young actors. He dispenses advice on how to deal with criticism, or how to concentrate on a busy movie set ... and yet at the same time, it's NOT an advice book, it's also just a long compilation of funny anecdotes about his famous co-stars ... So it's a mixed bag. But some of his anecdotes are so hysterical ... and you still get the sense that Dillman was like, "Can you believe how lucky I was that I got to work with so-and-so???" Not in an obnoxious way, but like a little kid gets excited. I find that kind of non-seriousness very refreshing, and also, as I've mentioned, I'm a sucker for an awesome anecdote.

For example, he recounts this famous anecdote, one of my favorites in Hollywood lore:

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."

Now why Dillman is relating this anecdote that has nothing to do with him is unclear to me. The book is full of stuff like that. It seems to me that he is relaying the story because it pleases him, and I don't know, seems like a good enough reason to me.

So although there is little to no Stockwell in Dillman's book, I had a lot of fun reading it. You'll see why in the CHATTY excerpt below.

First of all, he relates one of my favorite anecdotes ever about Robert Mitchum, and he also relates a story about Orson Welles. Neither Stockwell nor Dillman had good things to say about Welles' behavior (his acting is another story) ... by that point in his life, Welles was a big mess in terms of his personal life, could only work on certain days on the month because he couldn't be in America for longer than that time due to tax problems ... so he would sweep in, be a total nightmare, sweep out, l