A Girl and a Gun

Three Who Passed

Ernest Lehman (1915-2005)

A writer who peaked, in terms of Hollywood success, during the late 1950s.  Most obits led with Lehman's script for Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1958), and truly the script was, along with Cary Grant, the best reason for watching the picture.  It's snappy, tart, just enough of a stretch to keep you smiling throughout (the guy throwing the knife in the UN, for an instance), and altogether satisfactory.  But I think his greatest effort was the year before, with Sweet Smell of Success, a superb movie.  Lehman had written the novel and was hired to direct, but illness put him down and Alexander Mackendrick stepped in--and gave a career effort.  Clifford Odets took on the script.  There aren't many--any?--better American pictures, a diamond-hard, unforgiving look at New York and the publicity business (in which Lehman had cut his teeth as a young man).

June Haver (1926-2005)

Cursed with the expectation that she would step in for Betty Grable when Grable lost a step or two, Haver never quite outgrew it.  But she was also condemned to a dreadful run of D level musicals in the middle and later 1940s; the only one I remember, Three Little Girls in Blue (1945), would by itself have been enough to drive the poor girl into a convent for a year, although it's generally argued that the unexpected and untimely death of a lover precipitated he decision.  Eventually, she emerged, put aside the label of "the pocket Grable," made a few more movies, married Fred MacMurray, and retired. 

Evan Hunter (1926-2005)

Easily the best known of the three, but not--and apparently this was a sore point with him--for any success in the movie world.  Oddly enough, Hunter started with a bang: his script for Blackboard Jungle (1955) had some sharp edges, although it turned mushy toward the end (probably a studio requirement).  Its historical significance is that it launched the careers of Vic Morrow, who was easily the best thing in the film, casting Glenn Ford and the young Sidney Poitier into the shadows, and Bill Haley, whose ""Rock Around the Clock" was the film's theme and went on to sell twenty-five million copies worldwide.  Hunter's greatest successes, critical and financial, came as Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct series, which like most series product found its stride after a few books, came up with fine story after fine story, and then became formulaic.  (This is heresy, I appreciate, but then that's how I see it.)  Oddly, Ed McBain's biggest cinematic triumph came when his King's Ransom novel was used by Akira Kurosawa to make one of the triumphant achievements of his career, High and Low (1963).  It remains one of the finest police procedurals (a term Hunter bitterly rejected) in film history.  At the same time, as Hunter, the writer was doing the script for Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), a film whose title I thought perfectly captured the ideal audience (as in "for the . . .").  I used to see Hunter from time to time browsing in Otto Penzler's Mysterious Book Shop on West 56th Street.  Hunter always insisted in interviews that he couldn't be bother reading the competition, which was inferior, but he certainly showed a warm interest in who was producing what. 

Anne Bancroft (1931-2005)

The obituaries of Anne Bancroft, who died yesterday at seventy-three, have mostly emphasized her rigorously independent, self-reliant streak, a woman who recognized reasonably young that if you took any of what the New York Times calls bull----, from anybody at any time, you had only yourself to blame.  Interestingly, although knowing almost nothing about her personally until these stories marking her death, that is the premier quality I would have identified in her as an actress.  Again and again, her characters staked out positions in her own terms, and struggle with maintaining them as the characters might, you could sense her inner strength and commitment.  Whether or not the character was conventionally sympathetic or not, you could not help but admire the resolve.

Obits have largely emphasized her peak years as the 1960s, and truly The Miracle Worker (1962) was stunning work, one of those rare Oscars that deserved the recognition; she was also extremely fine in The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and of course as the legendary Mrs. Robinson, immortalized by her own talent, Dustin Hoffman's skillful pose of bewilderment in the face of middle-aged lust (Bancroft was only thirty-six at the time), and Paul Simon's lyrics, in The Graduate (1967).  But if you overlook The Turning Point (1977) and especially 84 Charing Cross Road (1986), you're missing out on some of her best work.  I'm especially fond of the latter film, in part because she so faithfully translates (not copies, translates) the voice of Helen Hanff's book of the same title into the cinematic idiom.  I think the book is still in print, and if you love books and don't know it, get acquainted.

The depth and texture of Bancroft's best work makes a great deal of what passes for acting throughout the length of her career pale.  She was a dedicated artist with the talent to match her devotion to her work; not many of those around. 

What Do Producers Do?

Ismail Merchant died in London today at age sixty-eight.  He was known as half of the Merchant-Ivory team that began making features in 1965 , although in fairness they were part of a triad: their many successes were unthinkable without writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.  Jhabvala provided scripts, Ivory put them on film, and Merchant . . . well, people are always asking what producers do, and his career answers the question--i.e. pretty much everything else.  Merchant was a businessman who paid attention to budget, box office (likely appeal, actual returns), marketing, the shape a picture was taking and how that fit with inescapable financial realities, distribution deals, union issues, keeping many sensitive egos from bad bruisings.  You get the idea.  He always had the mien of a warm, charming fellow, the polar opposite of a Zanuck or a Goldwyn, although I wouldn't have wanted to play cards with him for money.  Filmmakers don't thrive for forty years without a tough-minded producer in the mix.  He also cooked, in part because he loved to, in part because Ivory (his long-time life partner) didn't, and also because in the early days the crew needed to eat.  Years ago, he put out a little paperback cookbook of simplified Indian recipes; my own copy, the binding of which has evaporated and the pages of which are nearly all stuck together, is invaluable for those nights when I'm dying for the flavors of the subcontinent without two hours' investment in chopping and hacking. 

For years, perhaps beginning with The Europeans (1979), the Merchant-Ivory films, often based on novels by the likes of Henry James and E.M. Forster, were taken in this country as the acme of film culture.  Their work became like those television programs introduced by Alistair Cooke, whose very presence announced to American audiences that this was certified as culturally sound, with a distinguished literary pedigree, a production team not simply interested in making money on summer blockbusters, and accessible to middle-brow audiences with pretensions to intellectual achievement.  I'm not sure that this aura was something the team cultivated, although I'm also not sure they tried to escape or reject it.  Of their films in this vein, I thought A Room with a View (1985) and Howard's End (1992), both from Forster, were far and away their best work.  Of the earlier efforts, I liked Shakespeare Wallah (1965), with a smashing young Felicity Kendall.  Of the later "big" films, I found The Remains of the Day (1993) almost unwatchable, even less subtle than Ishiguro's novel, and with a badly miscast Emma Thompson.  I haven't watched A Room with a View since its release, and may again, but even if I don't, I've still got that cookbook, and Merchant always has my gratitude for it.

Hardy Perennial (1908-2005)

John Mills has always been there in my film-watching experience.  That began in earnest in the late 1940s when television came to southern California and the local stations filled air time with old movies, many of them British because rights were so cheap.  Mills seemed to be in them all, and seemed to be able to do anything in the bargain.  I remember in particular The Young Mr. Pitt (1942), Great Expectations (1946), and Scott of the Antarctic (1948), along with a considerable collection of British officers in WWII films.  My own personal favorite was his rich comic turn in The Wrong Box (1966).  He was a dedicated pro who never seemed to give less than his best in whatever the vehicle. 

Dan O'Herlihy (1919-2005)

Dan O'Herlihy had a large number of films but was not exactly a major presence.  This Irish actor may be best known in the US for his role as General Black in Fail Safe (1960), the man who nukes New York.  Well into his seventies, he gave an incisive version of Mr. Browne to John Huston's The Dead (1997).  But one role dominates all the others: his portrayal of the title character in Luis Buñuel's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954), for which he won an Oscar best actor nomination (the statue went to Brando for On the Waterfront).  O'Herlihy was on screen for the entire film and gave expanded to the idea of one actor "carrying" a picture.  And since it's ñuel, at a somewhat restrained but still imaginative level, it's a delight to watch.  Widely available on tape and DVD, it's worth a look.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

The news of Susan Sontag's death yesterday hit me with an unanticipated sense of personal loss. I did not realize that I had never begun to imagine a world without her forthright, insistent voice at a time when most public intellectuals have either gone silent or wanted to make certain they weren't annoying anyone important. Her curiosity, intellectual range, and fierce independence are irreplaceable, and the hunger to hear important truths about our lives and our world will be that much harder to satisfy. She had been a cancer patient off and on for some thirty years, so that her death by leukemia should perhaps not come as a great surprise; but I wasn't ready for it, and don't know how I would have prepared myself.

Sontag wrote on film, of course--her essay on Godard remains fresh and relevant--and even directed and wrote four films between 1969 and 1983. She also returned to her fictional vocation, set aside for a long time after Death Kit (1967), although I've always suspected that the special cachet that attaches to a novelist was something she prized, for all the plaudits showered upon her essays., which I think are her most valuable achievements. She was a cultural critic in the best sense, that is, one for whom culture was virtually all embracing: film, literature, photography, but also camp, illness, and politics. She always knew exactly what she thought and why, until she changed her mind. The obituary writers have had a grand old time charting her shifts of position (on European communism, Leni Riefenstahl, and on and on). I suspect such people feel far more comfortable with those who stake out one position and hold to it, facts, morality, and common sense to the contrary notwithstanding. Yes, I do have a prominent American politician in mind. The New York Times obituary seemed to take particular relish in devising a long list of adjectives variously applied to her by her supporters and her critics alike: I counted forty-two. This list, if accurate, would in all likelihood have been taken as a compliment by Sontag; she enjoyed stirring things up. But it also suggests a certain preference for people who don't divide, much less polarize, their audience, safe, "sane" people, people with a measured, balanced outlook, people . . . well, people like those who edit and write for the often hopelessly dull and boring New York Times.

I saw her in autumn 2002 when she shared the stage of the 92 Street Y in New York with W.G. Sebald, the brilliant German writer who lived the postwar years in England and who died senselessly in an automobile accident a few months after their joint appearance. She read an essay on, of all people--the woman who had read everything worth reading from Baudrillard and Barthes and all those knotty Europeans who scare off American readers--Richard Halliburton, the dashing adventurer who wrote books about swimming the Hellespont and other feats of derring-do, books with titles like The Royal Road to Romance, staples of my early teen years. During the question period, someone inevitably raised the short remarks she published in The New Yorker a week or so after 9/11 which caused her no end of grief from dull-witted detractors. Essentially, she had argued that it was pointless to talk about a war against "evil," since that meant a struggle with no possible end to it, since evil will always be with us, and no identifiable target, since evil was amorphous and took many forms, often impossible to define. She suggested that the terrorists were in fact reacting to things the United States did, policies and actions and definable attitudes. This was not to say that the US had brought the attacks on itself, but rather that there were prescriptions we might discuss and consider as a response. That evening, Sontag still seemed genuinely astonished at the venom and rage her remarks inspired. I hope, in recent months, she took a little solace in the fact that several analysts have begun to consider the "war on terror" as not one of "good" versus "evil," not as proceeding from cultural roots, from implacable religious fanaticism, but rather from behavioral sources--our support of Israel and its consequences for the Palestinians, our policies in the Middle East, and so forth. For more on this subject, see the thoughtful and informative piece by Jonathan Raban in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books.

Sontag is one of those authors endlessly re-readable, and everything, I believe, is in print. In addition, I heartily recommend the compact little study put out earlier this year by Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, a book that sheds considerable light on the two subjects and on the task of criticism itself.

Philippe de Broca (1933-2004)

He was born with the rather impressive name of Philippe Claude Alex de Broca de Ferrussac, suggesting a couple of lineages of nobility, and turned to filmmaking as a young man, apprenticing with Chabrol and Truffaut.  He began directing his own work in 1960, and with two international hits—That Man from Rio (1964) and King of Hearts (1966)—appeared poised to claim a place at the top of the heap.  For some reason, he never quite made it there.  His films frequently did well at the box office (and he directed more than thirty for theatrical release, another handful for French television), and he wasn’t hard to like.  He was a master of action-comedy, and his scenes seemed to fizzle effervescently with little effort.  His touch was light but sure.  He didn’t get much US distribution, which is a pity, because his work could be enjoyed anywhere on the face of the earth.  His 1997 film Le Bossu (The Hunchback) only got to New York in 2002, with the customarily sensitive and thoughtful American title, On Guard!  Go figure.  But it was a terrific comic swashbuckler with Daniel Auteil, and it played here for about as long as it’s taken you to read this paragraph.  A DVD has recently become available, and Netflix has it.  His last film, Viper in the Fist, opened in Paris at the end of October, just after I left, and I understand it’s done great business, so it might even make it to the States in our lifetime.

Howard Keel (1919-2004)

It is, I concede, time to pull myself out of my post-election funk and face up to the fact that I harbor the richest contempt for something like sixty million of my fellow citizens.  (How’s that for healing?)  Howard Keel’s death at eighty-five adds a little to the misery.  Keel was in movies and television from the late 1940s until recently, but he hit his stride between 1950 and 1954, adding a great deal of energy and personality to some Hollywood musicals that, except for the last one, might have been forgotten without him.  He provided some stability to the overcaffeinated Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun (1950), was about the only lead who could carry a tune in Showboat (1951), paired well with Doris Day in Calamity Jane (1953), gave some star presence to Kiss me Kate (1953), where the supporting parts and chorus were the most interesting, and didn’t distract from Michael Kidd’s inspired choreography in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).  The fact that Gordon MacRae and not Keel was given the male lead in Oklahoma (1955) and Carousel (1956) helped doom both to sodden obscurity.  His career didn’t exactly die when musicals went terminal, but these were his glory years, hard not to enjoy.