Love in the Afternoon (1957)

Love in the Afternoon (Billy Wilder, 1957) Light Billy Wilder film from the effervescent days when he was directing Audrey Hepburn at the start of her career.

This one had me smiling immediately with Maurice Chevalier's opening narration—"Zis is the city, Paris France"—echoing Jack Webb's "Dragnet" opening. Chevalier plays a private detective, Claude Chavasse, specializing in "matrimonial work," and lately the case-work has been dominated by one subject, American millionaire Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper), who is cutting a wide swath through the world's female population, both married and unmarried divisions. The work has turned Chavasse into a cynic about the paths of love—he's gumshoed too many of them—in marked contrast to his daughter, Ariane (Hepburn), a cello player (hold that image in your head for a moment), still wide-eyed at the prospect of romance, and fascinated with her father's work, something he does his utmost to discourage.

When she gets wind that a cuckolded husband (John McGiver, hyperventilating amusingly in fine comic fashion) plans on breaking in on his wife's tryst to ventilate Flannagan, she steps in from the balcony to insert herself into the situation. This leads inevitably (in the movies, at least) to an affair between the elder lothario and the young ingenue, one that she manipulates by trying to talk a competitive game in conquests. The situation is ripe with comic possibilities, which Wilder exploits every chance he gets, even using Flannagan's moving musical accompaniment (the final assault is preceded by a four piece rendition of "Fascination").

Much has been made of Cooper's age in the film, and it is an issue. Cary Grant was supposed to be Flannagan (Wilder had been trying to entice Grant into one of his films for years) but when a deal wasn't reached,* Cooper, who at 56 was Grant's senior by three years, was hired. Cooper is an odd fit, as opposed to younger men like, say, Gregory Peck (as in Roman Holiday) or William Holden (in Sabrina), but Wilder works around it, initially, keeping Coop' in shadow to emphasize his "mystery man" status, and Cooper's early performance is, interestingly, boyish and somewhat immature.

And that's the point. Flannagan is a man-child, used to getting everything he wants. And Ariane has her choice between younger men—immature and unsophisticated—and Flannagan—sophisticated but immature. All it takes for him to grow up is a level of commitment, something he's avoided his whole life by having a train to catch. Both character arcs feel complete and satisfying, even though it is the "7-10 split" of May-December romances, and one feels a little creepy watching them make out.

And a little guilty, in the same way that it was tough to watch the denouement of Wilder's Sabrina. Okay, it's charming that she likes the old guy, but if he really was thinking this through, with all this new-found maturity, wouldn't he be thinking about her, and what she has to look forward to in a life with him (which can be summed up in one word..."short")?

And then, one considers Wilder, and the blithe, darkly cavalier sensibility that he brought to the movies, moral though his stand-point might be. One can imagine Wilder, the guy who ended Some Like It Hot with "Nobody's perfect," with a similar tag for this movie: "Aren't you concerned about the age difference?"  "If she dies, she dies..."

*  At this point, Grant was getting concerned about his age and being paired with young actresses ("robbing the cradle, again" is how James Stewart summarized the situation late in his career), but his misgivings must have subsided enough to co-star with Hepburn in Charade for Stanley Donen six years later.

Olde Review: Midnight Cowboy

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 snarky, clueless kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This particular one is a companion piece to the review of The Sound of Trumpets broadcast on KCMU-FM.


Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) Midnight Cowboy is a film that has been vastly over-rated over the years. So has its director, John Schlesinger. I haven't seen one film of his that has been consistent—content-wise, or quality. Admittedly, Schlesinger does do some great things in his films. but never for long, and that goes for Far from the Madding Crowd, Darling, his marathon sequence in Visions of Eight, and especially last year's The Day of the Locust. Schlesinger couldn't even pull off a simple thriller like Marathon Man without laying it over with unnecessary cross-cutting and lead-balloon pretensions.

The problem? Schlesinger is a cold director and this coldness of attitude combined with a certain heavy-handedness in technique bring movement, but not life, to the subject matter. Add to this Schlesinger's off-and-on fascination with grotesques—as in Midnight Cowboy—and the situation is nearly impossible.

Midnight Cowboy begins well enough, with a rather multi-layered shot of an empty drive-in movie screen overlapped by the sound of thundering hooves. But not from the screen. From a nearby corral. Joe Buck is leaving the farm to go to New York; putting himself out to stud, so to speak. And Joe Buck's bus-trip to New York is very enjoyable with the exception of some coy flashbacks. But once the Big Apple has been reached, Schlesinger begins to feel the need to be...satirical. And his satire has all the subtlety of a brick through a window, as opposed to the subtlety of The Sound of Trumpets.

Jon Voight gives a fine performance. Dustin Hoffman is all right (but his limp keeps changing, and Schlesinger keeps drawing attention to it!) But, above all, the best thing about Midnight Cowboy is the music for the film by John Barry, whose scores include those for the James Bond films and Born Free. His music provided the best satire, the most feeling, and the best humor in the film. One of these days, I'm going to have to do a tribute to him.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM December 5th and 6th, 1976

That last bit referred to film score tributes, basically three minutes in length, that I did for the station. Barry's died in 2011, his last score being for the Michael Apted film Enigma. He didn't score the whole of Midnight Cowboy but he supervised the music, picking and producing the songs, and writing bits and pieces of score that worked gang-busters in the film. If you want something of a tribute, you can find it here: John Barry.

Frequently, when typing up these elderly reviews from a kid I can't even remember being, I've always resisted the urge to change them, edit them, correct them—but I don't. Or I've wished I could go back in time to tell this little twerp what exactly is wrong with his opinion, and I felt that urge this time when I started reading the review. After all, 1) Schlesinger did settle down and do some good things later in his career, and 2) Midnight Cowboy remains to this day the only X-rated film to win the Best Picture Oscar, and 3) it's still considered a "classic." I may not like it, but the Wisdom of the Tribe has spoken and one shouldn't discount it, no matter how "blinkerdly pig-ignorant" it might be (thanks to Monty Python for the phrase).

But, have you sat through it lately? I mean, sat through all of it? Midnight Cowboy is a mess, jobbing about from one bit to another, and all the parts that are endlessly played on clip shows ("I'm walkin' heyah!," the final bus ride, Joe Buck's walk through the crowded streets of New York, including satire alert-satire alert the guy who's been assaulted (presumably) lying in the street and everybody's walkin' to the tune of "Everybody's Talkin'"—written by Fred Neil, sung by Nilsson—right by him and....that's about it), those are the parts that people remember and inform their opinion about the whole of the film. Maybe, just maybe, people have a better opinion of the film because they're expected to. It's a counter-culture classic, after all, like Easy Rider (and we all know what a masterpiece that is! sarcasm alert) Reading through this review, I went from "You're being too harsh" to "Yeah, point taken." The things that bug me about Midnight Cowboy are the same things that bugged me then, and it had to do with direction, inconsistency, and just the gosh-awful look of some of those sequences, not to mention a tone-deafness that came, possibly, from Schlesinger, a Brit, observing the terrain of New York and wanting to emphasize it more for the folks back home. It's like Schlesinger took Mike Nichols' bag of tricks from The Graduate and decided to use them poorly. 

I'm surprised it won Best Picture, actually.

What was nominated for Best Picture that year? Anne of the Thousand Days, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hello, Dolly, and Z. 

.............well, given those choices, maybe I'm not surprised it won, then (though Z is a good film).