Ah, Wilderness!

Ah, Wilderness! (Clarence Brown, 1935) The 1933 Eugene O'Neill play adapted by the wife-husband team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who also wrote The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Diary of Anne Frank (play and adaptations). Just the collective writer credits is reason enough to watch the film, which (I've read in some film circles, incorrectly as it turns out) inspired the "Andy Hardy" series at M-G-M. 

 

"Inspired" as in as loose an interpretation of the term as possible. They're both about families and have Lionel Barrymore and Mickey Rooney in the credits. But, the "Hardy" series never dealt with alcoholism, sloth, and the revolutionary pangs of rebellion and first love that can raise the roof of any American domicile, until it is planed down to respectability (or some form of it). It may be the lightest of O'Neill's plays and so not threatening to the "American values" of M-G-M head Louis B. Mayer. But, the O'Neill name would have appealed to M-G-M production head Irving Thalberg (who had cut back activities after a 1932 heart attack) and his replacement David O. Selznick.

It's not all Currier and Ives at the Miller household in 1906 New England, where father Nat (Barrymore) is a newspaper publisher, sagely juggling the traumas, large and small, happening under his roof, with wife Essie (Spring Byington), children (in order of birth) Arthur (Frank Albertson), Richard (Eric Linden), Mildred (Bonita Granville), and youngest Tommy (Mickey Rooney) and Nat's brother Sid (Wallace Beery) and Essie's sister Lily (Aline MacMahon). Sid is living in his brother's house because he can't hold a job, largely due to his constant drinking. Lily is there out of charity for a spinster, which Sid would love to change, if not for her constant rejection due to his drinking and questionable past.

Then, there's Richard, about to graduate from High School and suffering the pangs of first love, two things that can puff out a guy's chest and mess with his head—as the saying goes "you can tell a Senior, but you can't tell him MUCH."*

With his mind swimming with Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, Marx and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, and mooning over the girl next door (Cecilia Parker), he thinks himself a man of the world, bound for Yale, and is itching to prove himself, when, frankly, he's still living under his father's roof and hasn't even kissed a girl (or "the" girl, as she's afraid of kissing). The influences and urges set him up to become a failure like his Uncle Sid—although Sid, for all his talk and self-conceit (and self-deception) does have his uses—so, the faltering steps the kid takes to manhood have to be monitored and negotiated.

That includes not citing Marxist tracts in his graduation speech, learning how to drive the family's Stanley Steamer, his passionate love letters to his girl, Muriel, which are intercepted by her father and found to contain passages from Swinburne, leading to the parent storming the Miller residence and threatening to cancel advertising in father's newspaper. Muriel is forced to write a farewell letter to which man-of-world Richard can only blurt "Geewhillickers!" and bust out in tears.

 

To say nothing of his getting roaring drunk and getting rolled by a floozy.

Growing up is tough. And one is reminded of that other dramaturge John Wayne who when assured that that the immaturity of an opponent is a temporary thing and "will learn" usually replied "...if he lives." Nobody learns anything getting killed in the process.

But, O'Neill—and Goodrich and Hackett—makes sure the kid survives long enough to go to Yale. It's a sweet movie, sometimes painful, but everything promises, if not happiness, continuity, and maybe an upward trajectory from the fates of so many in O'Neill's plays, whose foibles and self-delusions are given a light dusting of sugar in Ah, Wilderness!

 

* “You can tell a freshman by his silly, eager look / You can tell a sophomore ’cause he carries one less book / You can tell a junior by his fancy airs and such / You can tell a senior, but you can’t tell him much.”

Skidoo

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...and they don't get much more trashy than this one...

Skidoo (Otto Preminger, 1968) Legendarily off-kilter comedy by that "master" of comedy, Otto Preminger, who, in his effort to make a movie that was "with it" perpetrated a film so far without "it," that one wonders why nobody told him it might be a bad idea...for any director. 

 

It might have been because there wasn't anybody at Paramount Pictures who had the power or the industry knowledge to be credible to a movie veteran like Preminger. Paramount had been "acquired" by Gulf and Western in 1966 and its chairman Charles Bluhdorn had made his mark in auto parts, zinc mines and manufacturing and was furthering his mint-making by buying up properties and tinkering or selling them off. Preminger was making films for Paramount and was a "studio property" who'd had a history of making edgy films that would challenge taboo's, but whose recent films were considered both artistic and financial failures.

This did nothing for the fortunes of Paramount, which, if you look at the films being released in that period (before bringing on Robert Evans as head of production) betrays of a long line of losers with the odd hit—usually a foreign acquisition, like Alfie and films that might be interesting (Seconds) but didn't attract an audience. The industry itself was seeing a downturn in receipts with more color TV's in homes and a calcified audience that wasn't getting any younger. Preminger thought he had a solution—make a movie that would appeal to "the kids."

Retired hitman Tony Banks (Jackie Gleason) has his evening of television interrupted by a pair of mobsters, Hechy (Caesar Romero) and son Angie (Frankie Avalon), who have orders from their boss "God" (this will be revealed as Groucho Marx, his first film appearance in eleven years) to knock off "Blue Chips" Packard (Mickey Rooney) who is due to testify before a Senate committee on organized crime. Banks begs retirement, but when a buddy (Arnold Stang) is found dead, he goes along with the plot for the safety of his wife Flo (Carol Channing) and his daughter Darlene (Alexandra Hay).

The idea is to have Banks smuggled into the same prison as Packard and then whack him—or "kiss him" in the mob parlance used in the film. He is incarcerated with Leech (Michael Constantine) a psychopath and "The Professor" (Austin Pendleton) a technical wizard arrested for draft-dodging. Meanwhile, Darlene's new boyfriend Stash (John Phillip Law) and his gang of "hippies" are being hassled by the police for their anti-establishment ways and Flo, being a bit of a free spirit herself, helps them from being arrested for living in the streets and invites them into her home.

Tony already has guilt feelings about whacking "Blue Chips" but when he mistakenly takes a tab of acid provided by The Professor, he gives up on the idea and instead tries to find a way of breaking out—involving lacing all of the food in the prison with LSD and escaping by makeshift balloon when everybody is high as kites.

The movie's heart might be in the right place, but it's mind is utterly lost. Maybe they were thinking they were making an all-out all-star comedy like It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World—a favorite of writer Mark Evanier, and who takes the opportunity to trash Skidoo every time it comes out of hiding. Sure, there are grudging pleasures: it features performances by the Big Three Batman TV villains with Romero, Frank Gorshin and Burgess Meredith, all acting, as does everyone in the film,in a manner that would charitably called "broad." Small parts with Richard Kiel and Slim Pickens. The notion that they filmed part of it on John Wayne's yacht. The score by Nilsson is harmless—he sings the End Credits—but it's not exactly good, either.

Nor is the film by any stretch of the imagination, even stretched pharmaceutically. There are sequences—a musical number with dancing garbage cans for instance—that are so badly thought out and executed that it is doppler-shifted into inscrutability in post. There is a cold-sweat chill of desperation over the whole enterprise. Sometimes even that can be cruelly funny. But not here. Even the casting of grizzled—if professional—veterans can't remove the stink of mercenary pandering and witless and dull-edged stabs at satire.

It's a mess. And not a funny one. Not even the knowledge of incompetence—as with the films of Ed Wood—can save it. One can only look at it with the hope that the bottom of the barrel has been reached. But even that hope gives no comfort. 

 

Bad trip, dude. 

King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day here.

King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein (aka The Big Bankroll) (Joseph M. Newman, 1961) In the early 1960's, "the Roaring 20's" was a big deal. "The Untouchables" was on TV and there was even a series called..."The Roaring 20's." It seemed to break up the glut of westerns, gumshoes, and family-comedies—as well as the Kefauver Hearings—that saturated small screens in the 1950's.  

Amidst all this, there were a spate of low-budget movies that also looked back at those days, but it was not what you would call a trend. Mickey Rooney starred as "Baby Face" Nelson. Rod Steiger as Al Capone. Charles Bronson as "Machine Gun" Kelly. There was Studs Lonigan. Just before this film was The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.

And at the tail end of the cycle was King of the Roaring 20's: The Story of Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was featured in Legs Diamond. Nicknamed "The Brain", he is credited with putting the "organized" into organized crime, turning the scatter-shot "wild west" approach of mobstering into a business model of bankrolling potential racketeering schemes (but just be advised to check your receipts). I suppose at the end of the film-cycle, after finishing all the tommy-gun action, they had to include the accountants. You're not done until you do the paperwork.

KOTR2:TSOAR (geez, even the abbreviation is too long!) follows Rothstein's rise  in turn of the century New York as a troublesome kid-grifter (played by Jimmy Baird), giving the local police guff and his upright, serious father (Joseph Schildkraut) so much tsuris for not applying his mathematical gifts to rabbinical studies like his older brother. Rothstein (eventually played by David Janssen) would rather calculate odds and gamble, and eventually, partnering first with a neighborhood pal (Mickey Rooney) on booking centers and poker networks and then with "Big Tim" O'Brien (Jack Carson) on casinos and bigger game.

The film is a little vague on what made Rothstein so successful, other than a careful sizing up of the percentages, making sure that he got his cut and finding strategies that would either undercut the pay-out to his partners or negotiate deals that would have lucrative rewards to himself if his partners screwed up and have to sell out.

One such long con is the eventual prosecution of a tarnished cop (Dan O'Herlihy) who always made sure Rothstein got nicked from boyhood on. The obsession—at least in Jo Swerling's treatment (his last credit)—would prove to be his undoing, as well as a long-held desire to win a poker game with a royal flush. Everything else is as spur-of-the-moment as a dice-roll, and with as much attention as that requires, such as selling out his friends and a "fair-weather" marriage to a chorus girl (Dianne Foster).

That would take somebody extraordinarily charismatic to pull off, and the saddest thing about King of the Roaring 20's is that David Janssen, fine as an actor as he could be, is incapable of doing it. Always an interior kind of actor—as he proved in his long stretch as TV's "The Fugitive"—Janssen is more than capable of luring the audience in and winning their respect if not sympathy, without resorting to theatrics. But here the role is so repellant than no amount of casual inscrutability provokes any interest. And his lack of remorse—or much of anything beyond surface cool—inspires nothing but our own indifference. The audience reflects the performance.

It's too bad because the cast is flush with good character actors—Rooney, O'Herlihy, William Demarest, Keenan Wynn, Diana Dors (in a "blink-and-you'll-miss-her" role), and, one of my favorites, Jack Carson in his last role before his death. But, they're circling around an empty suit, and there's not even enough venom in Janssen's performance to inspire that he get his just desserts, which occurs in a contrivance that's too "on-the-nose." All the way around, the movie's just a bad bet.

The Black Stallion (1979)

The Black Stallion (Carroll Ballard, 1979) Francis Ford Coppola began his desire to film literary classics in the 1990's, not with Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' but with this children's classic, never before filmed. For the director was hired one of Coppola's USC Mafia, Carroll Ballard, a documentary-maker whose eye for construction, framing, and telling a story with images and music and attention to sound would all be used to their full effect in this tall tale of a boy and his horse. 

What is so exciting about The Black Stallion is that so much of it is done not with dialog (the taut, sparse script is by E.T. scribe Melissa Mathison as well as The Journey of Natty Gann writer Jeanne Rosenberg and "Lonesome Dove" scripter Bill Wittliff), but with sumptuous images (cinematography achieved by the very brilliant Caleb Deschanel) that are long on atmosphere and detail and conceived from interesting angles that provide a curious view of the world, that evoke the sense of being a child's point-of-view, where everything is a chance at discovery*

The talent in front of the camera is great, too. The burden of the piece falls on young Kelly Reno, probably chosen for his ability as an equestrian, rather than his acting skills. But even there, he communicates such a fresh "kid-ness" that seems unstudied and unreserved. Terri Garr plays another of the "thankless" Mom-roles she was typecast in during the '80's. But two performances stand out--one from a newcomer, and the other from a movie-"lifer."

Hoyt Axton had done a few television appearances and made a good living as a singer-songwriter when he came to The Black Stallion. He also had a voice so full of bass that it seemed like it was merely an echo of the rumble emanating from his barrel-chest. His role as young Alec's father has one scene that is all-Axton, literally--where he tells his son a bed-time story about the horse he won in a poker game and the horse of myth that was allegedly its forebear. Axton performs the scene staring straight into the camera lens, but the effect it has on audiences is electrifying--he's telling the story to us. It was probably unnerving for the performer to have the camera right under his nose, but Axton powers through it, filling the frame, and putting us in the position of that boy. For those few minutes, his father is his entire world.

The other amazing work is by, of all people, Mickey Rooney, as a down-on-his-luck horse trainer to whom "The Black" seems to be drawn. Of course, Rooney's background includes playing the trainer of National Velvet at an early age, he could have played this role in his sleep if he wanted to. But Rooney takes his M-G-M schooling and leavens it with an almost "method" interiorization to create an enduring, memorable portrait of a trainer gone to pasture who has a miracle land in his lap. His work melds seamlessly with Ballard's "observer" style, and the role made people take notice of him ("Oh yeah, he was good, wasn't he?") and rescued him from a life of dinner theater and "Love Boat" appearances. Rooney is amazing in it.

But it's Ballard's show, as invisible as he is in it. The backbone of the movie, which buys all sorts of cinematic good will is the 30 minute long idyll of the boy and the mysterious horse that becomes his quest and his companion in his castaway existence. Wordless and buoyed by Carmine Coppola's themes (imaginatively and meticulously arranged by an uncredited Shirley Walker), it is at points charming, terrifying and poetic. Once off the island Ballard makes the most of a more conventional narrative style, and though he comes close--particularly in one of the best, and most pilfered horse-racing sequences in movies--he has a hard time trying to match the beauty of that island sequence.

But here's how good The Black Stallion is. I went to see it on its opening night, sitting in the back of the theater to avoid the vocal anarchy of an audience filled with children. After a little bit of rumble as the movie got going, the kids didn't make a peep, didn't get bored, didn't make endless trips to the bathroom, and stayed glued to their seats, their eyes glued to the screen. And they stayed that way through the entire End Credits that played over unused footage from that island sequence, only making a disappointed "Awww.." when the house-lights came up. That truly is, as the movie says, a "miracle horse."

Looking at it again, of course the kids responded to it. This world is full of new sights taken from an angle a kid might want to explore, the boy--Alec--doesn't say much, making him a character that doesn't betray what he knows, so you have to watch him. He is thrown into a scary situation where he learns to fend for himself, and he becomes a devoted friend and care-taker to a powerful animal. He is what every kid wants to be--an adult who has passed childhood behind and can do what he pleases. What kid wouldn't love a movie like this?

And what adult, either?

The Black Stallion is one of the best movies I've ever seen.

* And I'd be remiss not to point out the contributions of sound editor Alan Splet, who became best known for his work with David Lynch. His comprehensive recordings of horses let you know the emotions of "The Black" at every point in the film. Incredible work.

Bob Peak preliminary idea for The Black Stallion poster.