This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.
Rosemary's Baby(Roman Polanski, 1968)Rosemary's Baby opens with this theme:* it's a lullaby, sung charmingly off-key by Mia Farrow, its star, but underscored with even more off-key, sometimes baleful accompaniment. And as this lullaby oozes out on the soundtrack, the image we see is of a line of New York apartments--not an unusual opening shot for the beginning of a movie, in fact, it's pretty much of a cliche.
And so is the opening situation--two young newly-weds-in-love house-shopping. We've seen it hundreds of times. It's an everyday occurrence. The apartment is lovely, the couple buys it, and everything is quite normal.
Until a new-found friend of Rosemary's commits suicide, and Rosemary's relationship with her eccentric neighbors turns rather familial, and a bizarre fate befalls the fellow who got her husband's job. Now, that it looks like success for them, they decide it's time to have a kid...and see, there's this chocolate mousse...
Well, I don't have to go any further for I'm sure the legend of Rosemary's Baby has preceded it.
But what separates Rosemary... from other gothics is the perverse outlook of its director, Roman Polanski. Yes, everything's normal, and it is that very normalcy that makes the intrusion of Demonic Forces so doubly terrifying. One can accept odd happenings on a dark and stormy night on a cliff-top castle, but on a sunny day in a New York apartment complex?**
It makes the horror so much more palpable to be surrounded by normalcy for it increases the possibility of something happening to you. And thus, Polanski places threats in such "normally" innocent and reassuring things as a chocolate mousse, or Ralph Bellamy (who had hawked aspirins for years on the tube) playing a "witch" doctor, if you'll excuse the pun.
It's an unorthodox approach to the Gothic Horror Story...at least it was in 1968, when it was released, and to paraphrase an ad for Polanski's latest film, The Tenant, "No one does it to you like Roman Polanski."***--not William Friedkin in The Exorcist, or Richard Donner in The Omen. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is head and shoulders...and horns, above them.
Broadcast on KCMU-FM on October 22 and 23, 1976
Still true, but, my God, after Polanski's conviction of child-rape, that's one hell of a movie tag-line on The Tenant! Polanski's arrest, trial and conviction would come later, two years after The Tenant was released, but it sure is the ultimate sick joke.
As for Rosemary's Baby, it still tops the lists of "Movies No Pregnant Woman Should Watch" and it still takes the prize as the best "Devil Walks Amongst Us" movie (sorry, Damien and Regan), and it's no small part due to Polanski's sick sense of humor—Orson Welles, in one of his conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, referred to him as "one of those morbid boys"—and his way of mixing the mundane and the sacrilegious.
The most entertaining parts of Rosemary are the elderly and uncomfortable neighbors—the "legacies" of the Bramford Hotel, and the best of them is sprightly Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her role. It resurrected Gordon's career, and she went on to star in a long list of films in her twilight years. But, there are others, like Patsy Kelly, Ralph Bellamy (the joke in his early roles was that he was always the dullest of leading men and Polanski makes full use of that reputation here), Elisha Cook, Jr. (a favorite of producer William Castle), Hope Summers, and Phil Leeds (he would end up a fixture on "Seinfeld"), all semi-familiar faces that, in other circumstances, might provide comfort, all part of a conspiracy to make an anti-domestic situation to welcome the Anti-Christ.
Add to it the presence of Mia Farrow, the urchin break-out star of TV's "Peyton Place" who'd just married...Frank Sinatra!...and had a quality that could charitably be called "odd." You're not sure if she's going crazy, has a pre-postpartum depression, or if something weird is actually going on, and it keeps audiences on a tightrope tension of sympathy for/suspicion of Rosemary, the yin and yang of our sympathies and cynicism. And, of course, Polanski (out of Ira Levin, who cloned Hitler and roboticized housewives in other thrillers) turns that into your worst nightmare.
Producer William Castle had a carnival-barker-showmanship to him, gimmicking customers into screenings of his goofy-creepy thrillers and horrors and after Hitchcock (inspired by Castle's box-office receipts and asking "what if someone good did it?") managed to best his efforts with Psycho, he wanted to do the Master of Suspense one better. With the solid story-ideas of Rosemary's Baby, head and tails above what he could conceive, he was able to get that much better and gain some industry clout, although he ultimately had to cede most of the creativity to Polanski, and his Paramount studio-bosses. He would always be a B-movie-maker, but Rosemary's Baby made him see the promised land of the A-list.
* Yeah, there's nothing wrong with your computer--there is no song. I usually backed my radio-reviews with an appropriate piece of music, and for this one, I used the actual theme on the soundtrack (that I recorded on cassette from a TV broadcast...I used to do that).
Here it is:
** Ironically enough it's the high-end and rather exclusive Dakota building, standing in for the "Bramford." John Lennon would be shot in front of the Dakota a decade later.
*** EEE-Yikes!
Legendary producer-showman William Castle appears outside the telephone booth for a cameo.
Shane(George Stevens, 1953) George Stevens came back from World War II a changed man...and a changed director. As documented in Mark Harris' book "Five Came Back" and its subsequent documentary, Stevens had started his career a director of comedies, but, after the war, he became a different film-maker. His service in the Second World War was in the combat motion picture unit from 1944 to 1946, where he documented the landing at Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Paris and the uncovering of the horrors at the Dachau concentration camp, where he stated that he realized his function deepened from simple documentarian to collecting evidence of the greatest atrocities of the century. His footage was crucial in the post-war Nazi trials, but, he found no solace in the role he played. As he wrote to his first wife in 1945 "if it hadn't been for your
letters . . . there would have been nothing to think cheerfully about,
because you know that I find much [of] this difficult to believe in
fundamentally."
Coming back from the war, he co-founded Liberty Films with fellow Army Signal Corpsmen Frank Capra and William Wyler, but made no films for the fledgling production house and the company folded. He would not make another film until I Remember Mama (1948), a film that bore some resemblance to his own upbringing in America. Then, 1951's A Place in the Sun, a dark tale of a man's duplicity and fall from grace, won him an Academy Award for Best Director.
His follow-up film was far-afield from the subject matter that was associated with Stevens both pre-war and post-war—a Western that sharply demarcated right and wrong, almost naively making a world where good wins out over bad, without the complications and hollow justifications of an adult sensibility, Shane.
In the Jackson Hole Valley of the Grand Tetons, the family Starrett are homesteading in a wild area still trod by deer and elk. In fact, in one miraculous shot an elk frames an approaching stranger between its antlers. When Joe jr. (Brandon De Wilde), out stalking deer with his bullet-less rifle, spots the stranger coming onto their land, he alerts his Pa (Van Heflin), who is still trying to get rid of a stump he's been hacking away at for months. He and wife Marian (Jean Arthur) have been homesteadingin Jackson Hole for some time, but he is frequently being sabotaged by cattle baron Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), who claims the land as his for grazing rights and has made it a campaign to rid the valley of "squatters," by having his men (including Ben Johnson and John Dierkes) run roughshod over Starrett's and the other homesteaders' properties).
So, Joe Sr. isn't altogether welcoming, seeing a stranger enter his property. He tells the buckskin wearing newcomer (Alan Ladd), who is suspiciously vague about what he's dong there, to vamoose.
As bad luck would have it, before Shane can reach the fence, Ryker and his goons show up with news. It seems Ryker is going to be providing beef for the nearby reservation and he needs Starrett's land for them to graze. Joe refuses and things start to get testy, until, finally, Ryker starts making threats.
At which point, the stranger re-enters the scene and introduces himself as "a friend of Starrett's" and seeing how he's armed, too, Ryker backs off with a final warning to clear out or the Rykers will clear them out themselves. The stranger's intervention casts him in a different light to Starrett, and introductions are made.
The stranger's name is "Shane." Just "Shane." No indication if that's christian or surname. And, for his stance on behalf of Starrett's family he's invited to stay the night and have a meal, which he compliments as "an elegant dinner." Then, without any prompting, he goes out and works on cutting out that stump as a thanks. Starrett goes out to help and between the two of them, they're able to clear the stump at night-fall, a task that the homesteader had been working on weeks. Starrett asks if Shane wants to work there, as he most certainly seems to want to help.
So, who is Shane? He doesn't say where he came from, and as to where he's going? "Heading North—one place or 'nother. Some place I haven't been." Some place he isn't known is what he means. That would seem to be a contradiction as he's quiet. Polite. Keeps his counsel. Knows his place even if he doesn't have a place. He's rootless...in a community trying to establish them. He feels comfortable there, despite that, but never so comfortable that he can't be snapped out of it at the first sign of trouble. He doesn't make trouble, but he's seen enough to know trouble will almost certainly come to him as it seems to have come to him in the past.
He's twitchy. When little Joey pumps his unloaded rifle, Shane whips around, ready to draw down on him. He's haunted, probably because of his skill with a gun and having had to use it. And he's ridden into a situation where trouble could come from across the fence, ready to tear that fence down if it's in the way. Ryker is one of those breed of men who fought hard to establish his stake and will fight just as hard to keep things the way they were when there was no one else but him. He's not interested in community—he's all the community he needs—and he resents seeing what he thinks is his from being parceled out to newcomers. To "others."
It's why the homesteaders are being harassed. Some have suffered enough intimidation that they're threatening to leave and it's only the entreaties of Starrett that keep them from leaving. Shane, himself, is on the receiving end of those taunts from one of Ryker's men, Calloway (Johnson), which ultimately leads to an old-fashioned bar-fight that wrecks the Grafton bar. Given the intervention of Shane into the struggle, Ryker brings in reinforcements, a sadistic gunfighter named Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), who takes a satisfied glee in gunning down anyone he can provoke into a fight.
For a Western of that era, Stevens ramped up the level of violence than what audiences were used to. His fights were messy affairs that were tightly edited to maximize the cuts and scrapes one associated with the usual dust-ups. And anyone seeing Shane remembers the shoot-outs where a bullet could propel a person backwards like they were yanked off their feet (which they were, due to some discrete cabling).In such a world it's no wonder that Marian Starrett tells her young son "Joey, don't get to liking Shane too much." There's always the possibility that a man such as Shane won't be sticking around for too long, whether riding out of town or being buried in the cemetery that overlooks the slip of a town. But, the kid can't really help himself. Shane is something of a mystery, not saying much, but giving the child the same level of attention as he does the father and the mother. That makes an impression on a kid. And his proficiency with his fists and his guns—all fascinating to little Joey—endears the man to the boy.*
Stevens is playing with Myth in Shane, and nowhere so boldly as in little Joey's hero-worship of the competent stranger, his version of a White Knight, who gives him a lesson in strength in restraint (something Joey doesn't quite comprehend) as well as the cold competency in "doing what has to be done." To standing up in the face of wickedness, not backing down, no matter the consequences, and fighting the good fight. At times, it's almost too much, with Stevens cutting back and forth between fights and Joey's wide-eyed reactions to the fireworks.
And it all comes to a head when, once the killing is done, Shane takes his leave, having brought resolution—but hardly peace—to Jackson Hole. The dirty work is done, and just as there was no place for a killer like Wilson, there isn't for Shane, either. And despite the child's entreaties, there is no going back...not from what you've done. And not from what you've seen. It's a weird scene, simultaneously a bit over the top, but also punches the gut on an emotional level. Even more so when you take in George Stevens' history in the war.
That ending resonates...and haunts. Not so much as a small child's plaintive pleas, but of the echoes embedded in them of a director who had seen the worst atrocities perpetrated by man, and, through that boy, implores the darkening wilderness for a world of forbearance and a return of the merely and simply decent.
In context, Shane is so much more than "a Western", and is heart-breaking. Fundamentally.
* And to the point, author Raymond Chandler (who'd written a couple of Ladd's noirish movies) had said this about Ladd some years earlier: "Ladd is hard, bitter and occasionally charming, but he is after all a small boy's idea of a tough guy."
Don't Bother To Knock(Roy Ward Baker, 1952)The McKinley Hotel in New York is apparently not what it used to be. For example, there's no baby-sitting service, and that vexes the Joneses (Lurene Tuttle and Jim Backus), who are attending a soiree in the joint's ballroom. But, elevator operator Eddie Forbes (Elisha Cook Jr.) has a neat solution: his niece, Nell (Marilyn Monroe) has just come into town and needs a job. Eddie asks her to look after the Jones' kid, Bunny (Donna Corcoran) and she shows up to look after the kid while Mom and Dad are downstairs.
That's all neat and tidy...seemingly. What isn't neat and tidy is the on-going non-relationship between Skyways airline pilot Jed Towers (Richard Widmark) and a singer employed at the hotel, Lyn Lesly (Anne Bancroft, in her screen debut). Lyn had sent Jed a "Dear John" letter ending their six month relationship, sending him into a tail-spin. He's checked into the McKinley to confront her about it and doesn't like it when she tells him that he doesn't "have an understanding heart." Of course, he doesn't understand, so he goes back to his room to sulk ("The female race is always cheesing up my life!").
Across the way is the Jones' apartment, where Nell is baby-sitting, and makes herself at home. That means different things to different people, but to Nell it means trying on Mrs. Jones' negligee and earrings, lipstick, and shpritzing the woman's perfume. It's clear that Nell may not be the best sitter that could have been hired, and might actually need a sitter herself, given her disregard for the personal property of the folks who hired her. Dolling herself up, whatever her reasons, is enough to attract the interest of Jed, who's nursing the earlier break-up and a bottle of whiskey.
When Nell catches him peeping, she draws the blinds, which only amuses Jed. This being the 1950's and Jed being a "man's man" pilot and all, he calls her up on the house phone and tries to talk his way over for a night-cap, but Nell, after initially being interested, hangs up on him.
Meanwhile Eddie (because he knows "her history") stops by to check up on her and is shocked to find her in Mrs. Jones' "things" and tells her that she has to put everything back—he's had his job 14 years and he doesn't want her to do anything to risk it. Besides, if she wants the finer things in life she should stop mooning over her dead boyfriend and move on. She changes, but when Eddie leaves, she puts everything back on.
Then, she calls Jed and invites him over.
Even though the film is 70 years old, we'll stop there for spoilers because it's the surprises that make Don't Bother To Knock an interesting see. Nell is such a mystery with hair-pin turns that you wonder what could possibly happen next...and then you get jolted again. "I can't figure you out! You're silk on one side and sandpaper on the other!" Jed yammers in frustration. The truth is he won't figure her out, even Nell can't figure herself out. She's stuck in a loop and all people can do is follow her down her rabbit-holes.
Which is why it's amazing that it's Marilyn Monroe playing Nell. Monroe performances you always take with a grain of salt—at least a grain of sympathy or empathy—and not to make a pun of it but she's graded on the curve, allowances are made. And just as frustrated directors found out the hard way, Monroe knew that the camera loved her and knew how to use it. The camera was the one thing in Hollywood she could trust. With the bar of excellence seemingly lowered, you come away more than a little impressed.
What had she done before? Cameo's basically. In The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, she'd had scenes where she made an impression when she was on the screen, which was minimally. And the parts called for sexy but not voraciously so. Her dramatic role in Fritz Lang's Clash By Night was small, but Don't Bother to Knock, despite its pulp origins and low budget was a huge...if somewhat daunting... role—play "crazy" but sympathetic.
And she's pretty amazing at it. Even with sympathy filters up, there's a lot of work here that tosses the control that she maintained in most of her performances and you're struck by how genuinely alarming it is. Even on-set Bancroft was impressed: "It was a remarkable experience. Because it was one of those very few
times in all my experiences in Hollywood when I felt that give and take
that can only happen when you are working with good actors. There was
just this scene of one woman seeing another woman who was helpless and
in pain, and [Marilyn] was helpless and in pain. It was so real, I
responded. I really reacted to her. She moved me so that tears came into
my eyes."
Almost immediately, she would use her energies for the artifice of star performances that would turn Elton John's "candle-in-the-wind" into kleig lights.
Gosh, it's still October. Guess I should dig up some old "Horror" reviews...
House on Haunted Hill(William Castle, 1959) It's your typical haunted house story with a particularly greedy and venal twist (enough so that it would make an interesting "reality" show*): a clutch of "swells" are invited to spend a night in a "ghoul" house—one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, no less—that has seen seven murders and is haunted by the restless spirits of the victims; whoever can stay in that mansion for one night will be rewarded $10,000, paid by the erudite (and eccentric) millionaire-host Frederick Loren (Vincent Price). The history of the house is verified by one of the guests, the paranoid and alcoholic Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr.) who babbles on about the strange goings-on and things that go bump, crash, splash and sizzle in the night. The architecture of the place is a little suspect—Wright, notwithstanding—secret rooms, disappearing doors, and a basement with an amenity no house should be without, a basement with a pit-bath of hydrochloric acid...handy if there's no recycling service.
The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid(Philip Kaufman, 1972) Genre-busting western (following two years after the similarly revisionist Little Big Man) by Philip Kaufman back in his wild indie days about the splintering of the Younger-James Gang, due to their most notorious crime, the theft of Northfield's First National Bank, "the biggest bank west of the Mississippi." Starring Cliff Robertson and produced by Robertson's production company, the film was obviously massaged as a vehicle for Robertson, if not for the fact that Robert Duvall makes the most of the weirder, more psychotic role of Jesse James, cutting through his scenes like a murderously sharp scythe through prairie wheat. By comparison, Robertson has the more central, but goonier role of Cole Younger—distractedly visionary outlaw cursed with an eye toward "wonderments" and other bright objects that tended to throw him off-task.
The world is on the cusp of change—one of those "wonderments" is a steam-powered organ that proves to be both a blessing and a curse to the Younger-James Gang's ability to fight authority, rob banks, and line their pockets in the process. Jesse can't be bothered with "wonderments;" they get in the way of his "visions" for their exploits, which come upon him in nearly incomprehensible rants. Cole, however, always wonders how the outskirts of the Industrial Revolution can make their burgling business a little easier (he sports a brine-soaked leather vest to protect him from bullets).* Pretty soon, they'll move from banks to trains and the stakes will get that much higher. But for the moment, their targets are stationary, and their tactics not unknown to today's white-collar criminals.**
That it was also the beginning of the end for the gang, with Northfield's populace turning on the bandits during the course of the prolonged robbery, ending their "Robin Hood" reputations, and leaving a couple of the gang dead in the street, shot by civilians. The romance with the criminals would go on (so long as they were dead and not stealing town-folks' money anymore) in fictional pulps (and Cole Younger would survive and go on the lecture circuit...yes, really), but the West changed around them as so many of these "sunset" Westerns of the 70's were showing, making them legends...and you have to past your prime (or dead) to be that. Kaufman's take on it is intermittently fun, long on ideas, but short on entertainment.
* Jesse could be seen as the evangelical, and Cole the scientific , world-views. No wonder they broke up. Jesse died 2 1/2 weeks before Charles Darwin died. ** Before the raid, they prime the pump by encouraging stories of the bank's safety, driving up deposits to ensure they make away with a huge haul. They could work for Enron!
This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a bit of a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.
This Saturday's films in 130 Kane Are Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks and Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
One-Eyed Jacks(Marlon Brando, 1961)This one's something of an oddity--it's the only film directed by the greatest "method" actor, Marlon Brando. But what you will see on the screen is really not the film that Brando made. You see, it's one of those stories where nothing really works right. Brando and a number of script-writers worked on the screenplay for a couple of years. Stanley Kubrick was signed to direct and pulled out.* Then, Brando decided to direct it himself and shot a quarter of a million feet of film over a six month period at a cost of five million dollars. Supposedly, there was about 35 hours of film to edit down to a watchable size. Brando's cut was five hours long, but with some noticeable studio shooting, plot summaries were accomplished and got it down to its current two hours and twenty minutes. So it isn't totally Brando's concept.
What is there in those two hours and twenty minutes? A superbly acted film, based on a script that at times is intriguing and at times is dull cliche. It's a very weird movie. It's weird, but it does show that Brando certainly had an artistic eye for shots, camera angles, sequences that sometimes take the breath away. You'll also see excellent performances from a cast of Brando, Karl Malden (before TV neutered him),**Katy Jurado, Slim Pickens, Pina Pellicer, Elisha Cook, and Ben Johnson..especially Ben Johnson.
Johnson first worked for John Ford in his westerns and evolved into more than a great actor, but one of those genuine screen presences working in film today. When Johnson and another screen presence, Brando, play off each other in a scene, sparks fly across the screen. Those sparks were expected to fly between Brando and Jack Nicholson in The Missouri Breaks, and never appeared. To see these two greats square off is one of the joys I had watching this film, and also, this film contains my favorite epithet in all of cinema....
"Get up, you scum-suckin' pig!"
They just don't write 'em like they used to.
Broadcast on KCMU-FM on November 19th and 20th, 1975
Or over-write them. The parts that you can glean from the current cut of One Eyed Jacks (and no one is rushing to restore the full length version, certainly not Paramount Studios, although Criterion did do a restoration for Blu-Ray that was supervised by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg) suggest an idiosyncratic western with a gritty, grimy feel, which would have made it unique in the western-glut that was happening across theater and television screens across America. Brando's fights were inelegant, and people looked like they got hurt. But the film is a cliche about Authority Figures and Oedipal Conflicts--Karl Malden plays a once-friend-turned-lawman named..."Dad." At one point, Brando's character is whipped in the street before a crowd of on-lookers, and if that doesn't convince you he's a Christ-figure, his tied, outstretched arms just might. Ulp! It starts to get so thick with things like that, you need hip-waders out in that desert.
* Kubrick says he quit because Brando was wasting a lot of time, and really wanted to direct it himself, so he moved on to a more worthwhile project.
Rosemary's Baby opens with this theme:* it's a lullaby, sung charmingly off-key by Mia Farrow, its star, but underscored with even more off-key, sometimes baleful accompaniment. And as this lullaby oozes out on the soundtrack, the image we see is of a line of New York apartments--not an unusual opening shot for the beginning of a movie, in fact, it's pretty much of a cliche. 
Rosemary's Baby opens with this theme:* it's a lullaby, sung charmingly off-key by Mia Farrow, its star, but underscored with even more off-key, sometimes baleful accompaniment. And as this lullaby oozes out on the soundtrack, the image we see is of a line of New York apartments--not an unusual opening shot for the beginning of a movie, in fact, it's pretty much of a cliche. 
Well, I don't have to go any further for I'm sure the legend of Rosemary's Baby has preceded it. 
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