VOLUME 17 - NUMBER 05 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1981

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 19811$2.00 COMMENT Meryl Streep in Karel Reisz's 'The French Lieutenant's Woman': p: 26

Filmways Pictures is proud to present Ian McKellen, winner of the 1981 Tony Award for best actor in the Broadway play '~adeus;' in his first starring film role as D.H. Lawrence in \"Priest of Love~' IA~D~El$fE~&EN JAti~~A~YkWc{\\N ST~LEYJ . SEEGER PRESENTS A CHRISTOPHER MILES FILM PRIEST OF LOVE AVA GARDNER PENELOPE KEITH JORGE RIVERO MAURIZIO MERLI JOHN GIELGUD SCREENPLAY BY A~ PLATER BASED ON 'THE PRIEST OF LOVE\" BY HARRY T. MOORE ~D THE LEITERS ~D WRITINGS OF D.H . LAWRENCE PRODUCED BY CHRISTOPHER MILES ~D ~DREW DONALLY DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER MILES IRI ~ World premiere in October ReleaSedby i l ICIN.MA II'A CINEMA 5 THEATRE ©MCMLXXXI BY ==~~~ lrd Ave. It 60th St. • Pll-0774-5

•Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society ofLincoln Center Volume 17, NumberS September-October 1981 _ _ _I_~ (\" t MGM is the once and future -king of The Pride ofMGM. 33 tion of United Artists (page 38). Jo- the movie jungle. After a decade in seph McBride and Todd McCarthy exile, the toniest studio in Old Holly- Wilder and Robert Aldrich , Ken talk about MGM's Rich and Famous wood is alive and clicking. Bernard Adam and John Badham, and studio with its director, grand old George Drew visits the new MGM (page 34) boss David Begelman. Seth Cagin Cukor (page 41), and its superb star, and the people making it hum : Billy reports on MGM's ambitious acquisi- Jacqueline Bisset (page 45). Reisz's 'Woman' .26 Kasdan's 'Heat' . .49 For years, filmmakers tried Body Heat is both a humid to turn John Fowles' The homage to film noir and a de- French Lieutenant's Woman, but film from a director with into a movie; now Harold a future. David Chute finds Pinter and Karel Reisz have. an assured narrative pres- Harlan Kennedy analyzes ence behind all that steamy the film (page 26), talks with sex (page 49), and Dan Reisz about the adaptation Yakir gets the goods from (page 27), and re-views the Lawrence Kasdan, raider of director's earlier films (p. 29). the noir empire (page 52). Also in this issue: Guilty Pleasures ............ 21 Independents............... 70 Novelist Scott Spencer, who wrote With Congress stanching the flow of Journals ................... 2 Endless Love, knows from obsession. grants, independent film is in trouble. Ann Beattie has fun at summer camp Here are eight from his movie youth. Amos Vogel declares it's time to fight; in Utah. Richard Corliss at the Cannes Bruce Conner tells Mitch Tuchman film festival. Gilbert Adair talks with F assbinder x 5.............. 59 it's time to bid a farewell to alms. two English filmmakers. Tom Allen Jail Bait, Martha, I Only Want You to finds a Disney World in Manhattan. Love Me, Satan's Brew, Women in New Books .................... 78 York-reappraised by George Morris. Vito Russo brings movie gays out of Movie Music ............... 13 The Celluloid Closet. By David Chute. From the glory days of Steiner and Industry .................. 66 Herrmann to today's schlock and Hard-core cleans up its act for women Bulletin Board.............. 80 Dolby. By Lawrence O'Toole. and the home box. By David Chute. Cover photo: courtesy United Artists. Editor: Richard Corliss. Senior Editor: Brooks Riley (on leave). Associate Editor: Anne Thompson. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield. Advertising and Circulation Manager: Tony lmpavido. Art Director: Elliot Schulman. Cover design: Michael Uris. Research Consultant: Mary Corliss. Executive Director, Film Sociery of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch . Second class postage paid at New York and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 1981 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved . The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. The publication of FILM COMMENT (ISSN 0015-120X) is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscription rates in the United States: $12 for six numbers $22 for twelve numbers. Elsewhere: $18 for six numbers, $34 for twelve numbers, payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Editorial, subscription , and back-issue correspondence: FILM COMMENT, 140 West Sixty-fifth Street, New York, N .Y. 10023 U.S.A.

ounlals Movie Futures in Utah, Cannes, and London; Disney's Past in N.Y. Ann Beattie the top painted with a scene of lieved that I would listen to someone from mountains and trees and wildflowers, who began sentences with: \"You can- while behind him were tall mountains, not.\" I not only listened , I took notes. Sundance aspen trees and scrub oak, and a haze of And when he left after a conference in yellow flowers. (Yes, somebody fell in the cabin I shared with Amy Robinson I wasn't the only one who was the pool. If you remember The Great and Jennifer Salt and her SV2-year-old amazed. Everybody loved the puppy; Gatsby well, it was a little too ironic that son Jonah (\"You can't leave crayons on Christopher Guest gave daily progress somebody also ran his car off the road, the rug because they're obstacles for the reports (he missed his parrot, back home which was narrow and wound up the ants, Jonah\"), I'd run upstairs and re- in L.A.) on the birds that had hatched in high mountain to Redford 's house). write my screenplay on the all-new, a nest in the eaves of his cottage; Greg- beautifully designed portable electric ory Nava and Anna Thomas found out But this gives the impression , typewriter I'd bought for the trip (a total that there were morels and other exotic wrongly, that it was one big party in bust; one of the cameramen, used t{) mushrooms growing in the woods, and dreamland. What we did was work, and packing things carefully, had to spend they told Frank Daniel , and pretty soon since it was the first year of the Institute, fifteen minutes figuring how to get the they were both picking mushrooms, we often worked under makeshift con- thing back in the case-turns out you drying them, and cooking with them . ditions-editing in hot buildings with have to hold it upside down and get it Many of the meetings took place on the no fans or air conditioners on 90 degree settled just so... }. grounds of Sundance Institute, Robert days, with another editing machine blar- Redford's attempt to bring independent ing right beside you-and took our plea- As best I can remember, Ire-wrote filmmakers into the Hollywood film sures, such as movie screenings, in a the screenplay three times in less than process, where the puppy frolicked and converted garage with folding chairs. I two weeks. Frank was a genius at zero- the grounds staff spent days planting don't think we cared: perhaps it was ing in on weaknesses, suggesting ways petunias on the banks of the stream. protein poisoning, but basically every- to make connections. I learned that you We'd sit in the hot sun, mountain rising body stayed in a good mood , satisfied can't have your characters say witty and behind us , blue skies with clouds that that we were doing good work and get- wonderful things to each other, because had a way of disappearing and appearing ting advice (the camp word for this was nobody will care. You have to show the again as they moved close to the moun- \"input\") from some of the finest profes- images they talk about, and then when tain. \"Watch me make that cloud disap- sionals: Caleb Deschanel , Robert Gei- the audience hears about them, they pear,\" Frank Daniel would smile, and ler, Laszlo Kovacs (who stayed longer will pay attention. Once, in frustration , I people would find themselves standing than he expected for two reasons: his said to Frank that screenwriters must beside Frank, staring at a cloud that did enthusiasm about some of the projects, make the assumption that the audience do strange things. anc! his admiration for a dentist in Provo came in and it was as if they were gassed who performed a root canal on him , in - you had to get their attention, quick. I had never been to camp when I was stages), Ivan Passer, Karl Malden, He nodded. He tapped his foot. Lit cig- a child, so I didn't know a lotofthe camp Waldo Salt, Bob Young, etc. arettes. Told anecdotes. I always wanted rules: eating contests, dinnertime gos- him around, because he was fascinating, sip, acting up at the end of a long hard My own personal heartthrob was but at the same time I wanted him gone day (Karl Malden, given a birthday Frank Daniel, whom I had met in the so I could run to the typewriter. cake, dug in with his hands and mashed winter, when those selected to be film- gooey pieces into several people's faces makers went out to Sundance for an in- • and then continued down the line). troductory and planning meeting. Frank Tourists would come by and ask people paced and smoked cigarettes as if he Flashback: I got into all this because who looked nothing like Robert Red- didn't have time to smoke them. His my friend Amy Robinson , actress and ford if they were Robert Redford. We, of enthusiasm about some of the details in producer, called one day and said she course, knew immediately when Red- Hitchcock's films made him jump out of had heard about a place called Sundance ford was there and when he was off on his chair, and he would hold out his Institute, and she would be interested in one of his fund-raising trips by whether empty palm like a magician and tell you directing a movie if I would write a or not the Porsche was parked outside about the appearance of a cigarette case screenplay. I was about as interested in the lodge. We certainly knew Robert early in a film and what later happened this as I was in most things that make up Redford was there when he threw a because of it, and I'd watch him as if he my life: alternate side of the street park- party and we found ourselves sitting were pulling rabbits out of hats. Frank ing, walking my dog, conversations around what might have been a movie Daniel is an intense man with great about where to get the best sushi in the set for The Great Gatsby, while a harpsi- knowledge and a great sense of humor. I most obscure restaurant, tuning into my chord player played the harpsichord- have a bad disposition (I taught college answering machine and hearing four for eight years) and would not have be- consecutive messages of a friend doing an imitation of Peter Sellers in an out- 2

Announcing the 1982 Edition The API Desk Diary Here is the desktop datebook that is per- A Special Almanac Section Daily Calendar Includes: fect for anyone involved in film and tele- identifies 1982 dates for international and Motion Picture Firsts vision-from top executive to avid domestic film festivals, awards events. in- Broadcast ing History viewer. dustry meetings. important conventions. Notable Birthdays It's a superb combination of hand- Throughout the 1982 AFI Desk Diary , • Anniversaries of Major Events design and usefulness . Organized you'll find a level of quality and practical- • Awards Events ity that will make it a del.ight to own, to use spreads. there is ample space and to give as gifts. Film Festivals Intlmpntc and notes. Significant Meetings and Conventions Elegantly hardbound , 8%\" x 10%\". events and historical 144 pages. Quantity Discounts available as well as still on request (,10 or more) . $14.00 AFI Member's \" • • • \\ \\ 1\\ '.... '1\\\\' ... ,.,t,1 ...... ' ... II \"'~ ,.,,1 I'''' ~ I ' ...... ,,, II 'r \" ---- JANUARY /i\"\"'\" \"';~;II \"11\\'\" - \"\\ ;0::.\" .::::::::::,':, .,s.:...:~~.!:::. \\ h , :;;:'7: ,\" -'\" ~ -I . r--------------------~------ Mail To : , : Please send me the following copies of the '- I 1982 AFI Desk Diary: II AFl Desk Diary The American Film Institute , 1 Qty. Total Amount John F. Kennedy Center -1 $- - - Washington , D.C. 20566 ...,, : _copies (a theAFlMemberPriceof $]5.50 tt-J ea. ($14.00 plus $1.50 postage & . -I handling) _ copies (it the lIoll-member price of $]7.45 $_ _ __ Name _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ ea. ($15.95 plu s $\\.50 postage & handling) _ copies sent outside U.S.A. and Can- $_ _ __ Add ress _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ ada . add internatio nal postage & handling City _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _~_ __ (jL $5.00 each State _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Zip _ _ _ __ _ Total Copies Amount Due $_ _ __ o Check enclosed for Amount Due payable to Telephone _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ The American Film Institute o Charge my 0 VISA 0 MASTERCHARGE o Pkase se nd me information about multiple order discounts Card no . _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ ( 10 or more cop ie s) . The 1982 AFI Desk Diary makes a Expires _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ hand some gift for friends. clients and assoc iates. Fe 0981 ------------------------------------- ~ --------------------------------~ 3

take from a movie I never saw to begin Heart Beat. Music by Jack Nietzsche. prize winner about the rise of Solidarity with. \"You can write a screenplay,\" Amy After the films (often someone who had in Poland, to scarf down the buffet at a said. She took care of the forms and been the cinematographer, or director, luncheon Sam threw at the Hotel du formalities . I eventually banged out or actor would talk and answer questions Cap (Johnny Carson stays there each what I thought was a screenplay, loosely afterwards), Jonah Greenberg and his June), I couldn't feel guilty. It was a based on a story about friendships be- pal Nicky Young would be the only ones choice between two regimes on the tween women called \"Learning To sacked out-the rest of us were full of precipice, and I figured Sam needed me Fall\" that had been published in Ms. , questions that never really said what we and the eighty other guests more than and Amy read it and came over and we were thinking (Can We Ever Do This?). Wajda and Walesa did. I needed Sam sat in my car~1 move my car every day One of the funniest moments of Sun- more, too: good food , good company, and sit there, so I won't be ticketed, my dance was when Ivan Passer, after the good day sunshine, one lingering look at dog napping in the back, other people screening of Cutter's Way, told a funny a mogul-lion in winter. A few days be- on the block cooking on the sidewalk story about how he got Jeff Bridges to fore, same place, Lord Grade, whose with their hibachi or just standing appear in the movie after Bridges' dog company produced more expensive around hoping the cops don't cruise bit one of the people who had gone bombs last year than Heaven's Gate put down the block-and she made some along with Passer to Bridges' house to together, announced to several hundred very good suggestions and I did some ask him to play a part, and after that he intimates: \"I'm still in pictures.\" Lew, retyping, and before I knew it I was just couldn't say no... and as he was at Sam, the rest of us, we're all still hanging buying Cutter's insect repellent, which the high point of this story, sitting ele- on. And every year at Cannes, we're all turned out to be unnecessary, and a gantly on a metal folding chair in a still in pictures. straw hat, and a typewriter that I could smouldering converted barn and hold- carry, and Amy and I were off to Salt ing a cigarette between thumb and first Jess Franco is movie industry. Is he Lake City, where a Sundance van met finger, Jonah, stretched beside him on a man or a conglomerate? With his finger us and took us to the Institute. The last the floor, began to snore loudly. up the pulse of the moviegoing public, song we heard at LaGuardia, on the Mu- and both eyes fixed on the main chance, zak, was \" Midnight Cowboy.\" The day The Real World did intrude, but not Franco is a one-man Bad Film of the I left, a friend borrowed my car to move too much: I got a letter from my grand- Month Club. Not many Franco pictures into a new apartment, once occupied by mother and was shocked to find out that make it to the U.S., but four of his films James Leo Herlihy, author of Midnight someone had fired at Queen Elizabeth. -flaccid German sexploiters, cheese- Cowboy. At Sundance, I met Waldo Salt, My friend at the Washington Post, Tom cake Spanish thrillers, and I think a who wrote the screenplay to Midnight Shales, sent me an MGM Tshirt. Some- species of Italian Western-graced the Cowboy. I mention this only because I one from one of the tabloids got hold of fringe of Cannes' free-for-all market. All Stephen Collins to see if he'd comment were mesmerizingly rotten, mantras of can tell you this: screenplays end , but on a woman he had dated in New York ineptness. But Jess (real name: Jesus) coincidences just keep coming. being seen out the night before with AI belongs at Cannes. Somewhere, he Pacino. For a month, we thought about found backers for his projects; some- • movies and about food . We talked about where, people-projectionists, tired movies and about food. I left fat, with censors, gentlemen with their hands Anyway: by the last week I found new cowboy boots, wondering if the pe- neatly folded under the newspapers- myself talking to my grandmother and tunias were going to take hold. When I are watching them. In Cannes there is a using the expression \"getting a deal,\" got back to New York and climbed the film for every taste; but the festival and when a scene was filmed in our stairs to my apartment, I found that the would not exist if there weren't many cabin with Jennifer Salt and Stephen ceiling had fallen down . Literally. films for no taste at all. Collins and the sound man went out to the balcony afterwards and held up a \"You think this is going to be a Isabelle Adjani is a movie festival. microphone that picked up the chirping movie?\" friends asked. I hope so. I have Used to be you could track a ll\\Iovie ac- of birds in the distance, I no longer never seen such committed people, tor's career by the ads in your local paper. thought of what he was doing as captur- such serious and (aLways when the situa- A Spencer Tracy, a Marcello Mas- ing the sounds of nature. I thought of it tion required it) sane people . To quote troianni, a Rondo Hatton movie was as \"ambient sound.\" F. Scott Fitzgerald: \"One should, for made, was released, played at a theater example, be able to see that things are near you. Today's stars go where the I learned what film students probably hopeless and yet be determined to make money is, but the pictures they make learn right away: that if you give a char- them otherwise.\" The people at Sun- often don't go anywhere. Who can name acter more than three consecutive lines dance care about movies that are not the last five films of Richard Burton, to speak, the character is going to sound run-of-the-mill. I daydream, on oppo- Elizabeth Taylor, Burt Lancaster, like Hamlet. Sitting around the video- site sides of the street. Donald Sutherland? Careers aren' t tape editing room, in fact, was another planned like battle campaigns any more; great inspiration to me: I got so bored Richard Corliss that I began to cross out line after line; from Cannes now actors work just to keep working, or Amy looked at me nervously. I think because they can't say no. So at Cannes that writers should have to do time in the Sam Arkoff is movie history. A each year you will find some European editing room , to see what trouble their quarter century running American Inter- star surfacing in three or four films , two characters' conversation causes. Many national Pictures, now trying to get or three of which may never be seen more characters would shrug or say Arkoff I. P. off the ground. Having some again. (Perhaps those are the ones di- \"Oh\" in the movies. I also began to look trouble doing same. So when I skipped rected by Jess Franco.) Past festivals at movies for the things that I never Andrzej Wajda's Man ofIron, the Cannes were inundated with the presences of thought about much before: Laszlo Delphine Seyrig, Michel Lonsdale, Mi- Kovacs' Edward Hopper lighting in 4

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chel Piccoli, Isabelle Huppert. This Gilbert Adair any assistance from the BFI, sold it to an year it was Isabelle Adjani - as the from London art et essai exhibitor in Paris). older woman in a little teenpic called Clara and the Men, as a lonely Parisienne David Puttnam is the British producer It's perhaps because both of them manipulated by Alan Bates and Maggie of Ken Russell's Mahler and Lizstoma- have been able to function in British Smith in Quartet, and as a schizophrenic nia, Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone and cinema only by reconciling the condi- who literally gives birth to her night- Midnight Express, Jacques Demy's The tions which they feel bound to impose mares in Andrzej Zulawski's Possession. Pied Piper, and Ridley Scott's The Duel- on the industry with the conditions This last was. the most entertaining, a lists. Following an unhappy spell in Hol- which it necessarily imposes on them slab of Gross Guignol with handsome lywood, he has lately returned to (hence an oblique resemblance to the underlighting, surrealist screaming fits, England-which must seem akin to re- heroes ofChariots ofFire) that I believed and a loathsome monster created by serving a berth on the Titanic after it it might be useful to record their respec- Carlon (Alien) Rambaldi. Most other strikes the iceberg--and the dual conse- tive voices (and languages). people thought Possession was the festi- cration of a Royal Command Perform- val's low point, and it's unlikely to be ance and official entry at this year's Puttnam: The nicest factor to have showing at your neighborhood triplex. Cannes Festival for his latest produc- emerged from my Hollywood experi- That's Cannes for you: two weeks of tion, Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire, ence is that for the first time I know I'm French postcards you can't mail home. based on two true stories about a pair of living here out of choice. Of course, I'm young athletes who accept to run for very much a self-starter, always have Ronald Reagan is the Hollywood Britain in the 1924 Olympics only on been working from ideas I've developed movie; Jimmy Carter is world cin- their own stubborn'terms. myself; it may be more demoralizing for ema. Hollywood is scavenging and a director in England waiting for scripts sauteing its genre past, just as the Since Hudson, like Parker and Scott, or treatments or books to arrive on his Reagan Administration is recycling is an ex-advertising man, it's not alto- desk and wondering why it isn't happen- Coolidgism. But the international SI,lC- gether surprising that his manipulative ing. I feel emotionally secure here, I feel cesses wade in Carter's humanist main- but unquestionably adroit and good- -and I never did in L.A.-that I can stream. Chariots of Fire, the British looking movie (as one might say that run my own life, my own business. A entry at Cannes, is a hymn to the human Rupert Brooke wrote \"good-looking,\" film, after all, is just an assemblage of spirit as if scored by Barry Manilow. rather than beautiful, verse) is less con- 10,000 details--details I'm capable of Beads on a Rosary is a tiny tableau of cerned to articulate its protagonists' mo- verifying only if they're British. senior-citizen discontent in modern Po- tives than to sell them. For all Chariots' land. The politics of Istvan Szabo's righteously assumed anti-Establishment When we were preparing Foxes and M ephisto, a large-scale, assured medita- stance, it was somehow characteristic of trying to cast a middle-class housewife tion on the role of the actor in society, the operation to find its scenarist, Colin from the Valley, with a certain back- were forthrightly anti-Nazi. Another Weiland, a self-styled \"rebel,\" line up in ground that was written into the part, I Hungarian film, The Witness, took a impeccable black tie and flounced white suddenly found I couldn't be sure if comically askew look at Socialist bu- shirt to meet the Queen Mum at the Sally Kellerman was that woman. And reaucracy in the Sixties. These are hon- above-mentioned Performance. Yet it yet when I saw Ian Charleson on the orable films,with good intentions. They would be churlish of me to deny that the stage ofPiaf, playing a French matelot of movie's spectacular climax, on the occa- all things, I instantly knew he was right had the bearing of modest women from sion I saw it, provoked from a West End for Chariots. In Hollywood, there's a good schools; one wanted to ply them audience a burst of applause quite as constant, pervasive and -what is really with cheap liquor and drop them off in spontaneous as laughter. dangerous-logical pressure to cast Nighttown. names. If you come up with the name On the other hand is Anna Ambrose, Ian Charleson, somebody will counter- Frank Ripploh is the movies' fu- who directed the medium-length suggest Robert Redford. And from a ture. Ripploh's Taxi to the John was the Phoelix under the problematic aegis of poolside position the argument has most engaging European film at the BFI Production Board (\"problem- merit--except that it's wrong. The trou- Cannes. (The best film from any coun- atic\" because of severe budgeting con- ble, too, is that if Bob Redford doesn't try, Michael Mann's Thief, has already straints, for which the BFI cannot be respond, we don't return to Ian Charle- been filed under Lost Causes.) In a way, blamed, as well as a dearth of informed son-the next logical step is, why not it's a TV movie: small, questioning, counsel, for which it can). In the circum- send it to Jimmy Caan. And so it goes. sweetly funny. It's also a gay porno film, stances, then, Phoelix constitutes a kind which those with an aversion to water of miracle, a prose poem (with that cu- Advertising is a wonderful grounding sports and rectal examinations would do rious form's intrinsic ungainliness-nei- for film, because it teaches you that if well to avoid. For $50,000, and with ther one thing nor the other, like a you can't see the product, you don't take nonprofessional actors (many appearing walking race) about three centuries of the photograph. It teaches you the im- as themselves), Ripploh has shown how male-promoted images of \"woman- portance of commercial reality-Mid- to make a \"people\" movie that is neither hood\" as encapsulated in the relation- night Express, for example, about which sentimental nor bitter, and how to incor- ship of an unemployed actress-cum- all kinds of issues were raised, maybe porate depictions of sex into a story stripper with tbe dandified old rightly so. One thing never said, though, about erratic human relationships. Taxi gentleman who becomes the unwitting is that if only the National Film Finance to the John will be at the New York Film subject of her fantasies. So far, its distri- Corporation had agreed to back it, we'd Festival, and then will open theatrically bution has remained extremely limited now have a viable film industry in this in selected U.S. cities. It will be inter- (though Ms. Ambrose herself, without country. Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz esting to see how this Taxi runs on our -we'd all be able to make pictures on own mean streets. its profits. Not that the criticisms didn't help. They helped me crystallize a 6

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worry I was nursing as to whether I really extras in the scene, however, were ac- the first Mickey Mouse cartoon to one of wanted to continue producing films. I tors, not \"friends.\" Friends don't know the best Donald Ducks (Der Fuhrer's decided to go off and teach for a year- how to sit on a chair, they don't know Face) and from the first Silly Symphony to enable me to think it through-and how to walk across a room, they don't (The Skeleton Dance) to a masterful agit- the cynical aspect of it was, of course, even know how to hold their faces on prop mood piece like Education for that the film had made enough money to film. Oddly enough, the stripper herself Death. They are years of prodigious in- allow me to take a \"sabbatical.\" was not an actress, but I do find the novation that climax in Snow White and different layers of performance and non- the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, In one sense, that of being part of a performance in her rather interesting. Dumbo, and Bambi, which are so unique continuum, Ido feel a responsibility to in their five separate ways of solving the British cinema. And I have to own pub- We had a budget of 30,000 pounds problem of feature-length animation licly to such a responsibility because and a five-week shooting schedule, that they remain today bedevilling pres- only by perpetually playing that tune since we had to film in the old man's ences haunting their master's heirs and can we interest the government. As a apartment from midnight to 6 a. m. be- all subsequent challengers. They are slogan, it's important. Behind the slo- cause of traffic noises. But with such a years with a clean beginning and with a gan, however, the truth is that I'm self- low budget, you're obliged to use messy ending as Disney experienced his ish. I simply feel more secure with friends as crew members, who expect first reverses in morale (a traumatic stu- British subjects, and I think there are you on the one hand to be ultra-demo- dio strike) and materiel (a loss of over- lots worth filming. Basically, I want to cratic, on the other to be very autocratic. seas revenues and a shrinkage in see black taxi cabs on the screen instead You're constantly caught between being facilities during the war years). of yellow ones. That's silly, but it's also a friend and playing a director. essential: one of those 10,000 details. For obvious reasons, the glory years In some ways, I feel much closer to comprise the bulk of an extraordinary Ambrose: When you're in my posi- French cinema, though I recognize that exhibition that has been on display tion, you're happy enough that the BFI if India Song, say, had been made in throughout the summer at the Whitney distributes the film at all, as you don't English, with the Raj as its setting, it Museum in Manhattan. The Disney have the time or money to do the phon- probably wouldn't have worked. Here, Animations and Animators exhibit is, of ing yourself. But you'll never know if unfortunately, filmmaking is very black course, the occasion for all the accompa- they've done the job well or badly. Un- and white. If you've got a theme, it nying reflections in this column, and, for fortunately, I have the impression that seems you have to spell it out really all I know, for the conversion of hun- they can't talk about their product. heavily, without any pleasure in creating dreds of other born-again Disney fa- They would invariably refer to Phoelix, images around it. natics in the metropolitan area. The for example, as a \"nice little film,\" show, an original inspiration of video- which is very galling if you've been Phoelix is currently available for hir- and-film curator John G. Hanhardt, is struggling with rhyming images or a ing from the Museum of Modern Art. organized around a two-tiered approach: complex use of sound or a structure Chariots of Fire opens in New York in a standing exhibit in the form of a dark, based on Sade's novels, like masturba- September. winding, movie-house aisle that occu- tion fantasies which go on and on and pies most of the second floor of the whose climax is always deferred. Tom Allen Whitney and a daily showing of two dif- from New York ferent film programs that are changed on I could afford a production manager a weekly basis. The guiding genius be- for only three weeks, so I had to give her Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie in hind both the mounted artwork and the a shooting script which I dashed off in a 1928 was like a bang from a starter's programming has been Greg Ford, who single day, and I had to stick to it be- pistol, the true beginning of a film career was invited in as guest curator. Ford has cause everything was planned from that. that began on the run and then breath- exhaustively ransacked the vaults for And there was nobody at the BF! with lessly accelerated for the next fifteen original pencil sketches., colored cels, whom I could possibly have a discus- years. The long-distance runner was and sequence panels that illustrate the sion, no \"producer\" who was capable of also a bit of a Spartacus, a lone visionary studio's bravura innovations in move- criticizing what I was doing in a con- in the crowd who began with a brilliant ment, perspective, color, and cartoon- structive way. coup de grace and who was then driven personalities. Strategically placed to top his victories while recruiting from monitors with video-cassette loops The 1920s nightclub scene was shot a whole nation to swell his private army. even provide rare glimpses of pencil- in a meat factory, the only place I could Or, more to the point, Disney's first sketch animations that served as trial find where you wouldn't hear traffic (we fifteen years of dynamic growth were a runs for finished sketches. The mounted were using real sound). But the big prob- period that paralleled the nation's leap exhibits break down the anonymity of lem was that it had metal walls-it was from Coolidge's picket line in puttees to the early Disney cartoons for the first really just an enormous fridge-which Roosevelt's surging G.!. machine. time, showing an informed admiration made it awkward for the sound recordist; for the individual animators who made and it was seven feet high, which ruled The topic here is a film career as a them happen. out lighting from above. But it seemed unique phenomenon in the history of quite fitting as, in the Twenties and cinema. Disney sustained an arc of as- But the most charged excitement ac- Thirties, there were lots of clubs that cendancy that was twice as long as that companying Disney Animations and had to keep on the move after being of his only two real peers-D. W. Animators is conveyed by the films raided, they'd have to accept any kind of Griffith, 1908 to 1916, and Buster themselves, which have never before premises. I actually left the factory regu- Keaton, 1920 to 1927-men who made the trip from the Burbank archives lations up on the wall as a joke, but the stretched the nature of the medium and to the East Coast in such a vast array. So perfected their art on the job. The great few people who noticed merely said, Disney years, 1928 to 1943, stretch from \"You forgot to take them down!\" All the 8

782. Pub . price $30.00 e 1039. Pub. price $19.95 959. PUb. price $18.95 1105. PUb. price $22.95 1128. Pub. price $19.95 938. Pub . price $24 .95 Here's your ticket to the whole, wide world of movie magic. If you're a dedicated connoisseur of film , from the early silent movies movies. Broadway, radio, jazz and popular music of all kinds, sports, car- through the golden age of Hollywood and up to the present. then join the toons, comedians, cowboys and Americana. club - the Nostalgia Book Club. Join the Nostalgia Book Club and get 3 of these outstanding volumes for By simply joining the Nostalgia Book Club, you'll get three of the hanl1· only $4.99 plus a FREE bonus book. some volumes listed here for only $4.99, plus a bonus book FREE - a value up to $90.40! This exceptional introductory offer is our way of saying wei· More books to choose from: come to the club that brings you a wide selection of hard-to-get books on every aspect of the movies. 993. Hollywood: Land & Legend by Zelda Cini and Bob Crane Pub. price $19.95 In addition to comprehensive studio histories, intimate portraits of the stars and dazzling pictorial recreations of all the classic movies, the Nostal- 1115. All the Stars In Heaven : A Biography of gia Book Club takes you behind the scenes in Hollywood with a fascinating variety of books on the people who have created and produced your favorite Louis B. Mayer and MGM by Gary Carey PUb . price $18.50 films. You'll also find a generous sampling of expert film commentary from Pub . price $14.95 well-known critics like Charles Champlin and Roger Dooley. 1045. Who Played Who in the Movies by Roy Pickard As a member you 'll have access to all these outstanding film books and 1037. The Real Oscar: The Story by Peter Brown Pub. price $15.95 much more - most at 20% to 50% off publishers' prices: fact and photo- Behind The Academy Awards filled reference works for the most devoted trivia buffs,Hare LP records from the big band era *and a wide range of entertaining books on TV, 1040. The War, The West and The Wilderness by Kevin Brownlow Pub. price $27.50 1122. The Movies Grow Up: by Charles Champlin PUb. price $25.95 1940 through 1980 FREE Bonus Book- The Award Movies: A Complete Guide from A to Z (softcover) by Roy Pub. price $ P.O. Box 10654, Des Moines, Iowa 50336 •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• : Nostalgia Book Club P.O. Box 10654, Des Moines, Iowa 50336 .. 0 Please enroll me in the Nostalgia Book Club and send the three items I've indicated below plus my free bonus book. Bill It 3 .. meJust $4.99 plus postage and handling. I understand that as a member I'll receive 1S Club Bulletins a year. filled with news It books Plus .. of interest and current Club offerings. MY ONLY OBLIGATION is to buy three books or record albums over the next year at .... FREE for bonus $4.99 ... regular club prices. If I want th~ Main Selection. I will do nothing, it will be sent automatically. If I want one or more Alter- ...- \"?' nates - or no book at all- I will Indicate that on the reply form and return It bY the date specified. If I receive a Selection It .. without having 10 days to decide that I want it, I may return it at Club expense. A postage and handling charge is added to It It .. each shipment. I II II I !: Indicate bY number the 3 books you want: !014 : Name .. ~~ ~e ~ It book! :~ ! .. Prices somewhat higher in Canada and abroad. It ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 9

O H I O - - - -........ far, there have been a half-dozen pre- For every cul-de-sac encountered by Mickey cartoons and featurettes, Mickey's increased respectability and in UNIVERSITY enough to show Disney as a slick, ambi- gag routines getting repetitive, the Dis- PRESS/ tious, competitive talent in the silent ney team responds by inventing and SWALLOW PRESS era, and another half-dozen post-war refining a stable of performers, including cartoons and featurettes , enough to Donald Duck, Pluto, and Goofy, who BLAKE EDWARDS show a Disney challenge in the Forties can pinwheel a cartoon off in new direc- to the more critically acclaimed triumvi- tions and rehearse the subtle byplay of Peter Lehman and William Luhr rate of Warner Bros. , MGM , and UPA, personalities necessary to sustain ex- especially considering that Disney alone tended narratives. Almost simultane- This is the first book-length study occupied the high ground of animated ously with Steamboat Willie , Disney also features and extended shorts. opened the Silly Symphonies-Skeleton to appear on a director who occu- Dance track, an invaluable release valve The tremendous sense of arching, with virtually no set rules in which a pies a position of major importance crescendoing, and boom-or-bust Disney fable a month, a mood piece, or the most creativity, however, can be felt best in phantasmagorical creatures could be in contemporary filmmaking. This the 107 or so 1928-1943 cartoons chosen hatched. The two tracks-the soothing for the exhibition and in the first five continuity of comic stars and the Pan- work analyzes not only Edwards' features. Ford has ingeniously arranged dora's Box of artistic aspirations-liter- fifteen programs of about nine cartoons ally whipped each other into creative extremely successful Pink Panther each (with repeats) that are thematically frenzy through the Thirties until the unified to such animation generalities years of the feature-length animation ar- films and \"10\" but all of the more and/or specific Disney concerns as \" Dis- rived . A cinema of almost contiguous covery of Personality,\" \"Variations on privileged moments was invented: a than twenty films he has directed Mickey, \" \"Transfigurations,\" \"Star Ve- wisp of a story, strong characters, prodi- hicles,\" and \"Virtuoso Scenes.\" Pursu- gious supporting casts, exotic locales, since the mid-fifties. ing a through-line theme selected by and the compressed voltage of musical someone who has spent years studying comedy within a special-effects metier. 287 pages, 65 b & w photos, these films is a fascinating, all-senses-al- ert viewing game at grasping the unities There has never quite been a body of $18.95 c1oth/ $8.95 paper and polarities of young artists who were film comparable to Disney, 1928-1943. rewriting the rules of animation, but Certainly none still owned by the origi- THE MOVIES GROW UP, every program has an even more reveal- nal entity. None so concentrated in en- 1940-1980. Revised Edition ing adjunct built into its structure. Any ergy. None so resistant to aging and time that nine Disney cartoons from passing tastes. None with such intense Charles Champlin 1928 on are arranged in chronological entertainment value. Perhaps, none Foreword by Alfred Hitchcock sequence, they convey an amazing feel- that has reflected so accurately the ing of vaulting ambitions and technolog- American mythos. Much of it has been Traces the path of movies from ical breakthroughs. And everything hap- constantly recycled, especially in 16-milli- pened so fast. meter and in the Disney TV shows, but their peak of power in the late Steamboat Willie does begin with a the Whitney has been the first show re- 1940s through the revolutionary bang-instant magic that still works as ally to expose the scope of it. that whistling, jiving; roughly rounded , changes forced on the movies by black-sticked figure in medium shot be- I have the strongest gut feeling that if gins bouncing to a beat. Within two Disney were alive today there would be the emergence of television. En- years, a more streamlined Mickey in a a permanent exhibition showcase for cartoon like The Gorilla Mystery is al- the whole body of Disney films in every hanced by nearly 200 photos, it is a ready suburbanized and growing away major urban center in America. The from his original identity as a barnyard main attraction of each center would be book for those who grew up with prankster and rube gag man . By the a movie palace to top all movie palaces in time of The Band Concert in 1935, he is order to perpetuate the most enduring the movies, are fascinated by them, emoting in Technicolor with all stops out ritual ofgrowing up movie-wise in Amer- in the midst of expertly timed jokes and ica: exposing the young to the feature and love them still. motion against dazzling perspectives. By the 1938 The Brave Little Tailor and cartoon classics. The possibilities of 284 pages, iIIus., shortly thereafter in The Sorcerer's Ap- year-long showbiz attractions, scaled prentice, Mickey's strengths and liabili- down from the amusement parks to ur- $25.95 c1oth/ $12.95 paper ties as a national icon have been ban galleries, are limitless. The new tempered through hundreds of hands technologies of cassettes, study booths, At your bookstore. To order from and Walt Disney's creative veto power, and mini-theaters could make the cen- publisher, please add $1.25 postage and desperate efforts have been ters unfailingly attractive to buffs and and handling for first book, 25¢ for launched to give the bland little guy the scholars. The films are there in the best each additional book. MasterCard/ type of feisty supporting casts and epic- preserved archival collection in America. VISA credit cards are accepted. sized narrative contexts to help him over I only hope that lightning strikes twice the edge into the feature-film era. and that someone with Disney's vision OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS rises up among the corporate heirs and busts them all out. ~ Scott Quad 144-FC, Athens, Ohio 45701 10



Specialized Film Distribution for the 1980'. ~eN'1 ~e~eose for the Starring: Prof. Irwin Corey Jonathan Winters The Limeliters selected Mort Sahl The Kingston Trio Ronnie Schell Jackie Vernon 1981 New York Film Festival's \" Movies for Cynics\" Directed by Thomas A. Cohen Films of the New Australian New Wave American Cinema THE PLUMBER THE DAY ARER TRINITY Directed by Peter Weir J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb THE SINGER AND THE DANCER Directed by Jon Else Directed by Gillian Armstrong The Case of the HOMESDALE LEGLESS VETERAN: Directed by Peter Weir James Kutcher BACKROADS Directed by Howard Petrick Directed by THE ANIMATED ART OF Phillip Noyce BRUNO BOZZETTO A feature compilation of classic shorts opening soon in New York at the Public Theater cinema ventures Ken Stutz • 1569 Spruce Street • Berkeley, Ca!ifomia 94709 • (415) 843-8392 12

There's a deeper, older reason: movies motion opening sequence ofRaging Bull by Lawrence O'Toole began without sound and have generally without the Intermezzo from Cavaleria Films music is like a small lamp that you been considered a primarily visual art Rusticana to buttress its power on sen- place below the screen to warm it. form. Except in the case of musicals , sory and thematic levels. Imagine Bon- -Aaron Copland sound has played second fiddle. As long nie and Clyde without the witty thwack People don't go to the movies for aural gratification. When was the last time you as you could hear the dialogue, and of the banjo to heighten its ballad form. left a·theater and heard the conversation abuzz with references to the musical Gladys Cooper ringing a tea bell didn't The ablutions in Psycho denied Bernard score? Not lately? Thought so. Occa- sionally, very occasionally, there'll be sound like Marie Dressler sitting on a Herrmann's flayed violins. The Third talk about the use of sound-Altered States, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes cat, the quality of sound in a movie went Man without the zither. Back, Apocalypse Now, Close Encounters of the Third Kind-which is generally more or less unnoticed. In the same way that certain pop more a tribute to technological advance than tunesmithing. The song goes: \"We Though held in ill repute (the stand- songs have a knack for waking dormant love you, Dolby, 0 yes we do.\" ard criticism leveled against a piece of memories, movie scores often help in Admittedly, and deservedl y, John Williams is a name that surfaces fre- serious new music is \"It sounds like releasing the feelings we have about quently (as did Ennio Morricone's dur- ing the Dollar days with Sergio Leone); movie music, for God's sake!\"), movie movies. \"Le Tourbillon,\" Bassiak's Bernard Herrmann usually merits a mention or two in conjunction with scores serve the same purpose for a lot of stunning little air for Jeanne Moreau in Hitchcock and Welles, as does Max Steiner after reviving the revival house people that a madelaine did for Proust. A Jules and Jim (\"They make their ways in crowd who come out swooning over Now, Voyager or King Kong. As for the great many associations we have stored life's whirlpool of days, round and round rest, they seem to be so much traffic, tooting unheard horns. up about movies are brought back, in together bound\") acts as a catalyst: im- Movie music is rarely written about; quasi-Pavlovian fashion, by a phrase or ages have gathered around the sound looking for literature on the subject is something best left to the Snoop Sisters. two. Imagine, if you will, the slow- like moss. Lovers of La Strada can never Because a great many movie critics don't know a mezzo from a matzoh ball, music forget the repeated phrase on the cornet; is hardly ever mentioned in reviews. But it's not entirely the critics' fault that bet- it remains as haunting to them as it was ter music can be heard in elevators. to Zampano remembering the dead Gelsomina. Part of the instantly recog- nizable \"feel\" of a Fellini film derived from Nino Rota's music; in Fellini's lat- est, City of Women, Lujs Bacalov's score is touched by the ghostly hand of Rota. C O M M E N T Play Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Con- certo for the mommas and poppas who went in droves to the movies after World War II and fi ve will get you fifty they see Trevor Howard pressing Celia Johnson's shoulder at the train-station tea shop in BriefEncounter. Play Grieg's Piano Con- certo and it's Ann Todd ripping off The Seventh Veil while her Svengali, James Mason, watches balefull y. Come to think of it, play the Grieg and you can see every English lady pianist you could

care to recall (with the exception of Mary li ved when silents reigned serene and ing \"This is the South and the smell of Astor in The Great Lie). Take away \"As were concertized as the Napoleon had magnolia blossoms .\" Briel employed fa- Time Goes By\" from Bogart and Berg- been. And then I thought of why movie miliar American folk tunes with which man and you have onlv beating hearts music has never had a chance. an audience already had highly emo- and cannon fire. tional associations that could be easily The first thing the movies did was to elicited. Thev added an urgency to a Some small lamp , all that stuff. A cur- make an audience hear with its eyes. mute mode that did everything in its sory look at older movies (say a week at This new creature, a Kongish manifesta- power to speak. To say that Briel's music New York's Theatre 80 St. Mark's with tion from the faraway reaches of the was a conduit for older musical traditions enough time in between to eat and technological and esthetic imagination, isn't to denigrate it, merely to point up a change underwear) would show that came to be known immediately as the tradition already established in popular movie music did a lot of the warming moving picture, so new and kinetic that theater. It was from there that movie Copland refers to. In any number of it needed no fanfare other than the in- music took its lead into the talkies. scenes, music can be-was-a wig for a delible sensory impression it made . bald soprano. There was a time, too , However, the memory and continuation Well into the Twenties, an overture when studio movie s had their own of vaudeville warranted the added at- such as Tchaikovsky's 1812, or music traction oflive performance, particularly from Aida or Martha, served as an aperi- \"look\": Steiner at music, to which the public had become tif for the main course. The 1927 New g Korngold (and 'Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.' -Joan Crawford to Trog, in Trog later Steiner) at Warner's, Herbert Sto- quite comfortably conditioned. Going to York premIere of Stark Love used the thart at MGM, Franz Waxman at Uni- a moving picture meant, in the real music from La Boheme to herald its versal. But now there's no \" look\" or sense, going to see and hear a show. poignant tale; Robert Flaherty's Moana \"sound.\" No longer is there the warm availed itself of the more evocative and handshake of music that led you into an Since moving pictures were always ac- accessible qualities of Beethoven's emotion. companied by a number of dive rtisse- Moonlight Sonata. The Dark Angel with ments ranging from organ recitals to Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman got One of the mos t exhilarating experi- juggling to \"danseuses\" such as Doris rolling with \"Depuis Ie jour\" from Vinton demonstrating the art of toe Louise sung by one Kitty McLaughlin. ences in recent memory was watching- dancing, there was no overwhelming de- Whenever the main attraction arrived and hearing-Abel Gance's Napoleon in mand for movie composers. There were during these showcases the music ac- the jewel-encrusted setting of Radio more than enough organists and piano companying it was familiar and, if not City Music Hall with an audience that players around and eager for work; when that, the kind that could easily ambush had happily regressed to childhood. The they did, they chaperoned the flickering the emotions. genuine oohs and ahhs during the snow- images on the screen with whatever se- ball sequence, the gasps accompanying lections they deemed appropriate, be it While borrowed , movie music was those still-incredible pendulum shots at a folk tune or a highly idiosyncratic ren- nonetheless bewitching-as bewitching the National Convention crosscut with dition of Brahms. And the movie-going as Carmine Coppola's use of the Sym- the hero struggling to survive a storm at public, much like Queen Victoria, phonie Fantastique for Napoleon, albeit sea, and the outbursts of applause didn't know (and probably didn't care) this time around more thematically so- throughout were in no small way abetted what Brahms were. phisticated than in olden days . Berlioz, by the great swell of Carmine Coppola's with his penchant for the big, bombas- musical score. Though it had enough When the movies began to bust their tic, and booming, would have approved. musical riches within its frames , Napo- britches, and D .W. Griffith saw the pos- Like Wagner, who wrote for the movies leon demanded the raiment of stirring sibilities of film and the paths of glory to before they were invented, Berlioz sounds, and Coppola delivered. which they led , movie music graduated might have been happy at the studios tG to the state of full score. Joseph Carl find a visual scale to match his musical The Radio City Music Hall showings Briel's scores for Griffith's The Birth of a scope, one he could never hope to of NapoLeon were an exotic example of Nation and Intolerance were surely an achieve in a theater. Puccini wrote won- size buttressed by sound. These were advance in the form , though basically a derful movie scores; some say Tosca is not puny images and the Berliozian form of adaptation. A lot of dark, rum- the best movie score ever written. We strength of the orchestration, Marsel- bling chords to usher the news of the also have Puccini (and David Belasco) to Laise and all, gave it the added dimen- Civil War, a little doo-da , doo-da during thank for the first epic western, La Fan- sion of grandeur. I thought then how happier moments , polite arpeggios say- marvelous it must have been to have 14

ciulla Del West, where Minnie and Mr. called The Secret of the BLue Room used was their eagerness to employ every Johnson ride off into the sunset at the the score of Swan Lake throughout. As available resource an orchestra could end~nly seven vears after The Great movie music flew into the Forties, that provide--everything but an oven timer. Train Robbe/y. ingenuousness was still to be found: when Bette Davis and Mary Astor meet They had faces then , true , but they The direction movie music took was and have a few choice words for each had symphonic weight supporting them dictated by the origins of movies them- other in The Great Lie, Max Steiner had too. Movies announced themselves like selves. The embryo was a soundless, the love music from Tristan and Isolde royalty and the Steiners and Korngolds visual manifestation. As the child grew, swelling behind them. As Davis herself did their damnedest to have Fate knock it discovered the complexity of sound , said later on to the producer in All About on the door. There were heavenly cho- adapting to an already extensive, sophis- Eve: \"Max, you old, sly puss.\" ruses, Zeus-like sighs from strings, ticated world of music. It saw first and belching brass, farting woodwinds, then began to hear music already made. But this is caviling. With a little help weeping pianos, and saucy percussion. from the dead (and some pressure from With this crowd behind it, a movie could Several years ago David Beard, a si- the living in the form of studio heads), go crazy. lent movie accompanist and owner of the movie composers of the Thirties and Cine Books in Toronto, told me about Forties (including Max) kept Copland's And they did, they did. Korngold, the his personal oasis while growing up in a lamp burning in the window at all times, Viennese prodigy who had already com- small town in the Australian outback. and it glowed and glowed and it illumi- posed two operas, brought to Warner The silents, shown once a week at the nated a golden age. Bros. class and dedication , turning their Soldiers' Memorial Hall, had the great adventure pictures into epic sonic expe- fortune to be accompanied by The My point is that cynicism may well riences. Korngold wrote only twenty Gloom Chasers. The Gloom Chasers have been a deterrent to producing good scores for the movies, but he never were a trio: a piano player, another man movie music in the last several decades. wrote a poor one. The Errol Flynn ex- on accordion and drums, and a lady vio- With cynicism comes a lack of care. The travaganzas-The Sea Hawk , Captain linist. I thought of The Gloom Chasers silents and early talkies went full throttle Blood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and as I watched and heard Napoleon at Ra- with material already at their disposal; Essex, The Adventures of Robin Hood- dio City with 6,000 other enthralled appearing foolish was a chance they might not have been all that they are souls. I thought of how modern movie took. And they paved the way for musi- without Korngold. You can hear the sails music, technically advanced and argua- cians who, in the Thirties and Forties, billowing and the high seas churning bly more original, hardly ever matched held down good jobs and were unafraid bigger waves in his scores for The Sea that experience. Norma Desmond of their own excesses. Hawk and Captain Blood. Korngold's might have said that you need silver score for King's Row, an example of the 'Gee! This'll make Beethoven. ' -Walt Disney, having adapted the Pastoral Symphony to Fantasia sounds for the silver screen-and that The old MGM slogan-\"More stars palatable grandiose, demonstrates a de- the silver screen and its music demand than there are in heaven\"-may well sire to achieve the movie's first mandate: simple hearts. have been true; to say there were more to be larger than life . Korngold seemed harps in Hollywood than in heaven to know what the movies were: opera for They had simple hearts then, in the would be more to the point. When the days of the silents. With the luxury of so studios began employing staff musi- everybody. How the new spate of ad- much license to cull from musical his- cians, the let-'er-rip school of musical venture movies, say Clash of the Titans, tory's vast library, silent movie accompa- composition rapidly asserted itself. could have used him, though one must nists must have gone bitch-in-heat-wild Steiner, Korngold, Alfred Newman, be grateful that Steven Spielberg has in their day. Beard remembers modern Franz Waxman, and the dread Dimitri Korngold's successor, John Williams, to silent accompanists who did: one who, Tiomkin all applied themselves assidu- add more flesh to his fantasies. (You can during a scene in Pudovkin's Mother ously at the studios to covering up the hear the opening fanfare from King's where four soldiers are smoking cigarets, dead air that could often cripple pic- Row returned to life in Williams' Star plays \"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes\"; an- tures. What characterized the work of Wars.) other who favors Miss Lillian traipsing these golden boys was a religious belief through the snow in Way Down East with in the power of music to stir up emo- Romantic longing reached an apogee \"Baby, It's Cold Outside.\" As it toddled tions. What differentiated them from with Max Steiner who, throwing con- into the Thirties, movie music never the majority of movie composers today science to the winds, purloined and lost its ingenuousness: a horror talkie made no bones about it. Perhaps the best approximation of Steiner's music 15

'Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.' -Noel Coward's Private Lives can be fou In nne Steiner's and Korngold's contribu- ratch involved a violinist playing four tions, as distinctly different as they variations on \"Pop Goes the Weasel\" last line in Alice Adams, which he also were, can be lumped together as the which he then mixed on one track to get Annapurna of movie music. E verest was a sound no earthly violinist could have scored: \"Gee whiz!!!\" His stairway to scaled during the Forties with the work rendered. of Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa, heaven via 101 strings was rapturously and Franz Waxman. Citizen Kane shook Above all , movies require a height- up the movies; Herrmann's Xanadu-rich ened impressionism that \"pure\" music right, especially for his Bette Davis score pointed to a new direction for mu- seldom does . In Double Indemnity, sic in the movies. Perhaps the greatest Rozsa harnessed the sensations of anxi- movies. It was music that wanted the screen composer (unless you wish to ety, put hawks in flight in Knights of the count Prokofieff's efforts for Eisen- Round Table , presented Don Birnam moon and the stars both. stein's Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Ter- with a bat and a mouse in The Lost Week- rible), Herrmann brought ceaseless end, and, in the Spellbound dream se- Though Walt thought he was going to inventiun and a staggering sensuality to quence, painted a sonic picture of a the films he touched. Psycho has my mind falling apart like cake crumbling. bring back Beethoven with Fantasia, it vote as the best film score. Scored for Franz Waxman led us up the tenebrous strings only, it's a sister to Schoenberg's path to Manderley in Rebecca and lifted was actually Max who brought him Transfigured Night , with grislier over- the veils in Norma Desmond's mind in tones and a further range of coloration. Sunset Boulevard. Those veils waft back. \"Tara's Theme\" from Gone With Hardly any horror score since has not throughou t the score, tempting poor old been dramaticall y influenced by it. Norma back to the silver screen and into The Wind is taken from a phrase in the winding corridors of psychosis. Spanning nearly forty years, Herr- Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata. (Nor was mann's oeuvre deserves a book all to Forties movies , with Steiner, Korn- itself. A thwarted \"serious\" composer gold , Herrmann, Rozsa, and Waxman all Steiner the only creative plagiarist: (like Korngold , like Rozsa) , he pro- in their mature periods, were the result duced a cantata (Moby Dick) , an opera of excited ears and imaginations. The Tammy is right outofSibelius's Fifth Sym- (Wuthering Heights) , a symphony, blithe ingenuous tradition was tempered, but chamber pieces, and several song cy- not too much. And they weren' t lazy phony, John Williams loudly invoked cles. It wasn' t that these works were scores either: often, today, when the negligible; they just didn't match up to credits roll at the end and you see \"Mu- Stravinsky for the shark attacks in Jaws , the work he did for Welles , Hitchcock, sical Score by Joseph Wolfgang Gunch,\" Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, or you want to ask, \"What musical score?\" Mahler gave us \"I'll Be Seeing You,\" Ray Harryhausen. The turn-of-the-cen- In the Forties, every empty pocket tury Ame,'icana he evoked in The seemed to be filled: the small lamp was Chopin \"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, \" Magnificent Ambersons is no less fresh kept burning. Movie music had the en- and affecting than the highly percussive thusiasm of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Puccini \"Have Yourself A Merry Little approximation of the wheels turning in- her candle. The Fifties, however, side Travis Bickle's head in Taxi Driver. wouldn't dream of such things as Joan Christmas,\" and so on.) Following Mar- Crawford listening to John Garfield play- The whirring, irresolute scores (music ing a violin transcription of Wagner's tha Graham's dictum that it's important as mystery) for Hitchcock have given Liebestod (it was actually Isaac Stern) way to the dripping-sink sounds for con- and going to meet her maker in the At- who you steal from, Steiner went to the temporary thrillers. Herrmann could lantic-perfect suicide music. Or Ingrid never resist musical wit: when a taran- Bergman in Gaslight singing a snippet of best. And be that as it may, he was often tula made its way toward Susan Hay- Lucia's Mad Scene. Or the black chorus ward in White Witch Doctor, he caught accompanying the convicts on the way witty about it: in The Informer, which the creature's gait by using a serpentina, to church movies near the end of Sul- a long, tubular instrument that sounds livan's Travels. And, speaking ofSturges, dealt with a physical giant of a man, he like an ailing bassoon. Once , searching who can forget Rossini's sped-up rumi- for an electronic effect, he taped tele- nations accompanying Rex Harrison's keeps supplying quotations from graph lines at four in the morning. In All inept attempt to do away with Linda That Money Can Buy, his music for Mr. Darnell in Unfaithfully Yours? (\"Nobody Wagner's Das Rheingold-the music for the two giants, Fasolt and Fafner. What stopped Steiner from being a mere swooning grave robber was his re- markable versatility and prolific out- put-306 movie scores. He careered through virtually every genre: the west- ern (The Searchers), film noir (The Big Sleep , Pursued), tearjerkers (Dark Vic- tory) , marvelous melodrama (Casa- blanca, Mildred Pierce), epics (Helen of Troy) , comedies (Arsenic and Old Lace), and countless adventures. Alfred New- man at Fox took the lead from Steiner, and though he devoted most of his ef- forts to adapting musicals, a tempered Steiner can be heard in him, particularly in Wuthering Heights and The Song of Bernadette. (For those who refuse to be- lieve a devout Christian inhabits them, they should listen to Newman's music as Bernadette sees \"the beautiful lady\" in the grotto, or to Victor Young's music for Ingrid Bergman as she fries in Joan of Arc. ) 16

The film newsletter that delivers a UNIQUE service in UNIQUE digest form timely for anyone interested information concerning the in motion pictures: who, what, when and where of major current and forth- featuring ... coming motion pictures. REVIEWS by RICHARD GERTNER Easy to read and convenient In-depth reviews. Since the DIGEST carries no to file for ready reference, the advertising, its sole responsibility is to its DlGEST's four pages are mailed readers when our reviewer rates a film. in a standard first class en- velope every other Friday so CREDITS Major production- credits. Stars and feature that it's in your mailbox Monday players, MPPA rating, running time, and morning - 25 times a year. release date. n MOTION PICTURE FILM BUYERS' RATING IFoduct~~t Chart illustrating how theatre operators rate from EX (excellent) to PR (poor) films on the basis of their box office performance. FEATURE RELEASE SCHEDULE Periodic information on forthcoming pictures with credits and month of release. NOW SHOOTING A column providiing information on pictures currently in production. RELEASE CHART and REVIEW INDEX Periodic index that lists in what issue and on what page the review you want appears. A great time-saver. TOP BOX-OFFICE STARS Quigley's exclusive annual poll of the 25 top money-making stars of the year. MAGIC SHADOWS will be sent to yOu :: J'I\\J.\\Gt S~t).\\DO'/VS absolutely free of charge when you by MARTIN QUIGLEY JR. become a new subscriber to MOTION The Story PICTURE PRODUCT DIGEST. of the Origins This bool~ traces that trail down This is an exclusive and limited of Motion Pictures through the centuries, bringing offer. MAGIC SHADOWS is not available in bookstores and only as long as our to light the untiring effort that supply lasts. was mode to satisfy mankind's ~ TO become a subscriber fill in your name and address on the Business Reply craving for the ability to create card . Cut it out and mail. living pictures and thus reveals the story of the development of the mechanics of this great medium of expression of the modern world . 17

Donaggio Domani mann, Donaggio would love to score a handles Handel like you handle Han- love story-the kind of movie that del ,\" says the swooning pri va te detec- Pino Donaggio, 39, is the man being could go stratospheric with strings. But tive to him in that one. \"And your talked up as the heir apparent to he's not rankled by working in the Delius! Delirious!\") Bernard Herrmann. Though he came thriller-horror genre, and he claims to late to the movies after a successful have found a musician's best friend in Apart from the estimable efforts by songwriting career in his native Italy De Palma. \" De Palma always leaves Herrmann , Alex North, and Frank (remember \"You Don't Have To Say plenry of space for you. He knows the Skinner (he did some lovely stuff for You Love Me\"?), there isn ' t another importance of music in film . Unlike Douglas Sirk), the Fifties were the utter new movie composer on the scene many other directors, he doesn't just scutters-a musical Enderby Land . We who, in the mind s of many, shows so offer you twenty-second spaces to fill got Dimitri Tiomkin and the fatuous much promise. The achievements, al- in.\" According to Donaggio, who was thud of High Noon, hokey Biblical bom- ready, are not mean: Don't Look Now, putting the final frissons into Blow Out bast with Richard Burton fondling Carrie, Home Movies, Dressed To Kill, when we talked (with producer George Christ's Robe, and the insidious begin- The Howling, The Fan ,and, most re- Litto's wife Jacquie servi ng as transla- nings of television's influence. We were cently, Blow Out . When Brian De tor), he has kept his style in Blow Out , introduced to the humorous bassoon. Palma was making Carrie and looking but says that \"it's more rh ythmical , and Movie music became formulaic. for another Herrmann, he sea rched the score doesn't fully explode until Europe for Donaggio, who had already the end.\" De Palma acknowledges it It wasn't that movie music of the composed a Herrm annesque score for as Donaggio's best work. Thirties, say, wasn't formulaic, but the Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. (Roeg, composers seemed to believe in it; cer- who knew of Donaggio, passed him in Dickinson in Dressed to Kill . tainly they made it believable. Movie a gondola one day in Venice and, \"IfHome Movies had been a success, music in the Fifties became unrelent- struck by the coincidence of meeting a I would probably be scoring a lot of ingly mimetic, aping the action on the composer while his film still needed comedies. IfI were to write for a classi- screen with the tentative zeal of the ap- scoring, felt it an omen.) Thanks to cal audience, it would be much differ- prentice. It held back, careful to be Roeg and De Palma, Donaggio has ent from what I'm doing right now. It become ty pecast as horror-thriller mu- would be more avant-garde, like Berio smaller-than-larger-than-Iife. sical mave rick. It hasn' t hurt him artis- or Stockhausen, who I think will be ticall y. considered as great as Wagner in •Movie music is noise. twenty yea rs. Students won't be study- Donaggio's sleekly sensual, witty, ing Bernard Herrmann ; they' ll be -Sir Thomas Beecham creepy scores are good evidence that studying Schoenberg, whom he took Beecham , whom Sturges parodied so the horror-thriller genre is the most from to compose Psycho. \" affectionately in Unfaithfully Yours, amenable to music. Music has no trou- Meanwhile, nicer thoughts dance would have congratulated himself as a ble screaming, or breathing heavi ly. \" If playfully around the notion of a love seer had he listened through the Six- you see a thriller without music, \" says story scored by Pino Donaggio. From ties. Anyone preferring \" Tara's Donaggio, \"you don't have the sus- one form of obsession to the next . .. Theme\" (and Beethoven) to \"Lara's pense. Often in thrillers it's the music Theme\" (and the balalaika) will find that makes people jump out of their -L.OT the Sixties as tuneless as the Fifties. seats. I try to create an atmosphere There was Mancini and his unassuming with strings. They're always moving. lyricism and there were John Barry's Herrmann always warned the audi- scores for the Bond pictures that lent a ence; I like to deceive them by relax- similar continuity to movie-going that ing them. \" (Actually, this is not true in Steiner's did for the Davis pictures. But the second Psycho murder. Screaming the torpid tones of television were al- violins begin just a second before the ready infiltrating most commercial screaming violence. ) American product. The \"white noise\" of movie music was being born, and The shower music for Angie Dickin- sound became the eunuch to King Ki- son's lathering-up in Dressed To Kill is a nesIs. fine example. \"Originally it was In Europe, however, a style was be- sweeter and softer, but more compli- ing forged. Nino Rota was providing cated harmonically. I decided to make Fellini with scores that were un- it less complicated, in that way not abashedly lyrical. But the most trail- clueing in the audience.\" A believer in blazing stylist to emerge was Ennio inspiration rather than a more mathe- Morricone. Morricone's excursions into matical approach (\"Morricone's point the electronic mode-wire-strung of view is technical and I don' t agree sound-was assertive in a way most with it\"), he took off to the mountains scores had never been. In the Leone for a week to think about the Dressed Dollar movies, the music served to am- To Kill shower scene. \"I kept thinking plify the silence that surrounded the about Angie Dickinson soaping herself characters like a shroud. Its twisting, and it just came to me.\" Voila . repetitive nature carried in it the sound of loneliness-the gnashing of notes for Trained on the violin, as was Herr- the gnashing of teeth-and seemed to isolate the figure in the frame from the world he moved around in. Alternately, 18

Morricone's music for Elio Petri's Inves- the use of Wagner is desperately Discomania tigation ofa Citizen Above Suspicion can needed. Now that John Boorman got it be looked upon as a form of sonic edit- right in Excalibur (Wagner's protean A superb discography of movie mu- ing: the mesmeric rhythm pushes the music employed as a seduction into the sic would be as long as Barry Lyndon plot along like a Vorkapich montage. landscape of myth), let's leave it to Bay- shown in slow motion to an audience reuth. And that goddam Ride ofthe Val- on Quaaludes. The best I can do is Mimicked throughout the Seventies kyries-how potent music can be refer you to a book by Tony Thomas when movies began to move faster to cheapened! We got it during the village (an invaluable aid), Music For The catch up with the speedier sensory strafing in Apocalypse Now, when those Movies (A.S. Barnes), which has an in- circus of the times, Morricone seemed poor people got shot Babi Yar-style in clusive discography covering recorded to fade away after finishing his great Seven Beauties, when the Red Sea was movie music up to 1973. score for Bertolucci's 1900, where Fas- about to be parted in The Ten Command- cism could be heard in the insinuating ments, and when the helicopter got Here is a desert-island selection of . oboes and bassoons, then in the rum- loose in the drugstore in All Night Long. soundtracks: records I would not part bling dissonance in the piano. Hope Moviemakers should have retired the with for love or money. sprung from the strings on the socialist piece after D. W. Griffith used it for the side, and whatever one's reaction to this Ku Klux Klan ride in The Birth of a 1. Charles Gerhardt's RCA series of politically was, it was nevertheless mu- Nation. classic film scores. They include Music sically stunning. Then Morricone From John Williams' Close Encounters scored The Island and used Richard The trend of using the classics as a of the Third Kind and Star Wars (RCA Strauss's EinHeldenleben as a means for shoulder to lean on has become terribly AGLl-3650); Spellbound: The Classic Peter Benchley's pirates to board a tacky because few filmmakers are in Film Scores of Miklos Rozsa (ARLl- ship, God help us all. An apostle of communion with the mysterious 0911); Sunset Boulevard: The Classic Morricone did, however, arrive in the reaches of music. Werner Herzog is Film Scores of Franz Waxman (AGL1- person of John Carpenter, whose Mor- one: the opening bars of Das Rheingold 3783); Now, Voyager: The Classic Film ricone-cum-Steve Reich score for- Hal- have seldom exerted a power and pull Scores of Max Steiner (ARLl-0136); loween promised treats to come. What as they did when Jonathan Harker ap- The Sea Hawk: The Classic Film Scores came, however, was Escape from New proached Nosferatu's castle. R. W. of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. All are York, in which Carpenter mixed Morri- Fassbinder is another: you are referred conducted by Gerhardt with the Na- cone with Bette Midler's entrance mu- to Beethoven's Grosse Fugue during the tional Philharmonic Orchestra. sic in The Rose. Snake Plissken long promenade between mother and deserved better. son in In a Year of 13 Moons, but are 2. Psycho by Bernard Herrmann warned against the conclusion of Liti (Unicorn; RHS 336). Morricone's profound influence on Marleen. A few other filmmakers share the direction of movie music (i.e., the an understanding of musical reach: 3. The Black Stallion by Carmine score as a means of propelling plot and Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Philip Coppola (United Artists Records; establishing motifs that would have Kaufman (The Wanderers), John Schles- LOO-1040). . taken a longer time to create visually) inger (the farewell trio from Mozart's was matched by Stanley Kubrick. Ku- Cosi Fan Tutte while Peter Finch has a 4. Kagemusha by Schinichuro Ikebe brick's musical sense has always been consolation drink at the end of Sunday, (Denon; AX-7238). A Japanese press- trotted out in his defense: he knows his Bloody Sunday), Bertrand Blier (Mo- ing and magnificently done. music and has provided the masses with zart's Clarinet Concerto in Get Out Your a whiff of the classics. It strikes me that Handkerchiefs), and Arthur Penn (banjo 5. State of Siege by Mikis Kubrick's is a score-by-numbers ap- in Bonnie and Clyde, Bach's Partita For Theodorakis (CBS; 70079). Another proach, though. Remove Richard and Solo Violin in Night Moves). magnificent Japanese pressing. Johann Strauss from 2001, Rossini and Ludwig Van from A Clockwork Orange, Just think of it: the quoted musical 6. The Stunt Man by Dominic Fron- and heave Handel out of Barry Lyndon legacy left us in the Seventies includes tiere (20th-Century Fox Records; and you're still confronted with the Tchaikovsky, Liszt, and Mahler in the T-626). Why? Because it makes me empty image, pristine though it may Great-Com posers-and-Their-Groins feel so fucking good. be. The music is an exaggeration, series from Ken Russell. (But your TV rather than an enhancement, of the film on Delius! Delicious!) An equally 7. 1900 by Ennio Morricone (RCA; image. And for those who thought the fatuous trend in the last few years has TBL1-1221) Not as well-known as his use of the William Tell overture in the been the co-opting of the baroque to scores for Leone, but his best. multiple-fuck sequence ofA Clockwork support the frissons of the new family- Orange so damnably clever and fresh, feud movies such as Kramer vs . Kramer S. Rota: Toutes Les Musiques De they can be referred to the W. C. Fields and Ordinary People. Kramer and its Films De Fellini (Polydor; 2392 084) Million Dollar Legs, where Rossini's on- \"But I'm still his mo~my\" felicities Includes selections from all his Fellini ion-up-the-ass strings fueled the major availed itself of Vivaldi's mandolins; films except Orchestra Rehearsal. domo around Klopstockia. Alan AIda relied on his Four Seasons for -you got it-The Four Seasons; and 9. Alexander Nevsky by Serge One must be grudgingly grateful, I Ordinary People dragged out that new Prokofieff (Deutsche Grilmmophon; suppose, for Kubrick's giving good mu- old warhorse, Pachelbel's Kanon in D 2531 202; Claudio Abbado conducting) sic a name, if not a good name. Mean- Major. The musical message is that and Ivan The Terrible (Angel; SB-3851; while, during the Seventies and to this we're about to come in contact with Riccardo Muti conducting). very day, directors caught wind of the civility and taste. And we do, we do. technique. That's why a moratorium on 10. La Fanciulla Del West by Giacomo Puccini (DG; 3 discs; 2709 078; Zubin Mehta conducting). The best movie score written for a western that wasn't a movie. -L.O'T. 19

\"A fresh~ When the Pachelbel Kanon is played tion, and Spielberg joins it to a shot important over a shot of a rolling wheatfield in toward the stars. That's essentially critical study.\" Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. where Bette Davis, Paul Hendreid, and the effect is without exploitation .When Max Steiner left off in Now. Voyager- -Library Journal Redford uses the Kanon he's saying headed toward the moon and the stars \"This is a story about. .. and sit back with a heavenly choir behind it. The and listen. \" Just recently, the skeletal, derivative Films of The begin-the-baroque sensibility scores that have been so much a part of even hit Nicolas Roeg last year in Bad the Seventies have flowered somewhat. Carl-Theodor Timing and the Kanon was used to senti- Philipe Sarde's score for Tess is unafraid Dreyer mentalize Theresa Russell and Art Gar- to accompany the heroine wherevershe funkel meeting on a bridge. A fine goes. There's exhilarating Brucknerian by David Bordwell composer such as Georges Delerue has bravado in Alex North's Dragonslayer. even sentimentalized his gifts for (He kept Who's Afraid ofVirginia Woolf? 251 pages, 130 photographs chamber composition in The Last from turning into a cockfight with his $29.50 cloth, $11.95 paperback Metro. True Confessions. and A Little melancholy theme for George and Mar- Romance . for which he won an Oscar. tha that kept surfacing to remind the At bookstores Now that was good timing. audience that they were, inde~d, hu- man.) There may be a new Georges University of It's difficult to talk about original Delerue residing in Carl Davis: his California scores composed during the Seventies; sco re for The French Lieutenant's Woman Press most are like the same joke told over is unafraid to match Sarah Woodruff and over, and the good ones, such as mystery for mystery and ache for ache. Berkeley 94720 Dominic Frontiere's for The Stunt Man (The score recalls Delerue, at his best, or Mikis Theodorakis's for State of in the opening of Julia.) Bill Conti's From The Jazz. Singer l Siege do not reflect an ongoing oeuvre \"Gonna Fly Now\" from Rocky. a hand- To The Jan Singer2 but rather some brilliant response to maiden of disco, has at least progressed isolated material. Right at the start of to the stirring anthem from Victory. Every Hollywood the Seventies Francis Lai nipped ro- even if you do hear it in a vacuum. Pino musical mantic music in the bud with his score Donaggio seems to be the inheritor of ever made for Love Story; from that time onward, Bernard Herrmann's mantle; but, as tender boy-and-girl relationships were Blow Out suggests, he need not be that . . . described, assessed, presented , rather as a debutante eager. John Corigliano's elegantly eerie and might be, by the quasi-melodic tinkling sounds for Altered States. sirenic though of ivory keys. It used to be Zing went the they may be, can't always be distin- Includes 1,344 films strings ofmy heart; now it's Ting goes the guished from the sound-effects man's -each one illustrat- keys ofmy piano. work. The same would seem to apply to Miklos Rozsa's efforts for Eye of the ed with photos- John Williams made a valiant but sty- Needle. Dolby may be doing the musi- plus credits and mied attempt at a truly lush romantic cal dramatists in . awards. 5 in- score for Dracula . but never pursued dexes. Over the main theme. Yet Williams is one of A risk of sounding reactionary is run 450 pages. the last romantics left. The smoky clari- with the plaint of \"Things ain't what nets haven't wafted away from The Fury they used to be, \" but that seems to be Siu 91,4 \" \" 12)/. '~ and the march can still be heard from the missing link In movie scores right $30.00. now al your 1941 . (His score for Raiders of the Lost now: few risks are being run. Given the bookstore I or send Ark is, like the movie, wonderful but new so nic advances being made , cbeck or money or· unmemorable.) The acme of Williams' there's no earthly reason why a movie art was reached in Close Encounters of composer can't take advantage of it. If a der 10 Crown Pub- the Third Kind. perhaps the most joyo us rebirth is on its way, then well and Usb..... 0 ... Park movie about music ever made. Know- good. But is it really? Alex North isn't Ave.• N.Y.• N.Y. ing th at music is a final frontier of sorts, prolific; Corigliano is a \"serious\" musi- Williams was charged to outdo himself cian; Carl Davis I don't know about; lOOI6. Ple..e (he admits it was the most difficult and the oldsters such as Rozsa, Morri- add 52.35 posl- score to write). The score for Close En- cone, and Delerue seem to have hit a age and baD· counters is as much a comment on mu- slump. With movies going back to an sic as it is on the movie itself: the older aesthetic to discover what an au- d1ing cballe. famous musical dialogue between the dience wants (just look back at this past 1. AI Jobon. computer and the Mother Ship is a summer), perhaps musicians will travel 1927 blithe commentary on music as a uni- back the same road. Modern music versal language. Toward the film's cli- hasn't had much of a sense of its own THE HOLUWOOD max the music announces itself and history for a long time. Nobody's sug- builds to an infuriated hive of bees; gesting a total regression-merely an MUSICALIby CUVE HIRSCHHORN but, as it progresses with the aid of afil investigation of what once moved Foreword by GENE KELLY de voce choir, each note has an aura people. ~~~ around it. The piece is without resolu- ..._ _ _ CRO*N 20

leasurescott spencers guilty plea rescott spencers guilty by Scott Spencer foundl y and irrevocably com promised . whom I felt wiser and stronger than . But Cagney continues to exhort his brother it was his hands that kept me pinned in The first time I saw City for Con- to finish the sy mphony while he him self my seat as I repeatedly tried to flee the quest I was ten years old. I was home hammers his way to the top of the fi ght theater; it was on the South Side of Chi- sick from school and my mother had game-and looks through Variety for cago and it was called The Avalon. My taken the day off to stay with me. We sat mentions of hi s departed love. Finally, friend was neve r weaker than me again, in the so-called library of our little fi ve- Cagney is blinded in th e ring and Arthur and I still try and see The HorrorofDrac- room house-e ve ryo ne else in our Kennedy debuts in Ca rn egie Hall. Cag= ula when it surfaces-now and then on neighborhood of identical row houses ney-who wants to be useful and pull TV, once in a dri ve-in in New Hamp- called that room the dining room-and his own weight-is se llin g newspapers shire. It is astonishing how right all the watche'd the movie on our small , beige near 57th Street and li stening to his details are in this film: Christopher Lee's Admiral. Of all the things my family phys ically intimidating monster, his ele- excelled in, emotional abandon was not brother's debut on the radio. His gance, the casual, hip hang of his inci- one, yet by the film's end my mother \"lamps\" aren' t entirely burned out, sors, the mu sic, the decor, the judicious and I were quite literally sobbing in each however, because through the thick , (but by no means stingy) use of blood , other's arms. heartbreaking distortion he ca n see a and the nearly unbearable, unironic aura penitent, ashen, trembling, but, most of suspense and fright. Director Terence Anatole Litvak's City for Conquest importantly, an arriven Ann Sheridan. Fisher brings a lushness to the film and a (1940) remains for me not only the flag We hear the Symphony-with its block commitment to the story that can marking one of childhood's tenderest chords racing up and down the piano and awaken yo ur profound terror-as op- plots but also the pinnacle of the old- its violins swooping in angelic harmony posed to the rather neurotic, surfacey fashioned Hollywood melodrama-in -and the sound of it goes at one's heart terror of other horror films. It has the which friendship, loyalty, ambition , cor- like a dog at a hooked rug. By the time texture and grace of a fairy tale and the ruption, betrayal, bravery, and love were Cagney murmurs one of the movie's tag dark, brooding, vertiginous pull of an as available to each and every character lines- \" You'll always be my girl\"- opera. Somehow or other, the filmma- as irony is today. The city for conquest you' re so lucky to have a mother to col- kers got the idea that no one had ever was, naturally, New York-the New lapse upon. And luckier still if you're not made a Dracula film before and no one York we Midwestern romantics still be- too far gone to feel her tears, too. would again: there is a singularity and lieve in. This was the city of open hy- confidence here that make this film drants and selfless immigrants, of yo ung • a classic. It reduces-utterl y-every composers in tenements , of cool cock- other horror film I' ve seen. tails and perfect waiters, and pale gang- I think movie makers have only got- sters with faces like fish. OK. Jimmy ten the Dracula legend right once, and • Cagney quits his job as a teamster when that was in a Christopher Lee-Peter he discovers his knack for bOXing can Cushing film called The Horror of The Other (1972) isn' t reall y a horror give him a way of supporting his brother Dracula (1958). ] saw it-the first time film; it's about death and childhood. (Arthur Kennedy), who is writing a Sym- -when I was ten or eleven. I was in a And it's about the spaciousness and phony of the City-a Gershwinesque neighborhood theater with a friend aloneness of the Midwest. It is one of rhapsody to the. slums, the Rive r, Fifth those films I see over and over. Like all Avenue, the Statue of Liberty, etc.. of my favorite movies, it treats its mate- Cagney's girlfriend (Ann Sheridan) is a rial as if it had never been photographed \"dancer,\" and every weekend she and before. The boy who plays the twins is Cagney knock them dead at the neigh- chubby, sinister, helpless, seductive- borhood dances. She wants to be a pro, the perfect, precocious farmboy, with a however, which in those days meant do- severed finger in the pocket of his inno- ing the foxtrot or tango on the stage or in cent brown shorts. The scenes of him supperclubs-but elaborately, with a talking to his hallucinated twin-his piercing belief in style, in twirling skirts, avenging, implacable other-combine in sudden stops, meaningful glances, terror with heartbreak. You actually the world utterly upside-down. She is cringe in sympathy. And the scene in moved in upon by Anthony Quinn , who which the boy, with the help of his mys- promises her the world and gives her the tical grandmother, projects his own back of his hand. Still, she is too much a mind into a crow and then experiences a naive neighborhood girl to do much dizzying, swooping, balletic airborne about it and she goes along with Quinn tour of the farm and all of the lush, -with her name a sixth the size of his somber lands around it, remains for me and all the billings and her honor pro- one of the mad and brilliant moments of film: director Robert Mulligan tears you from your chair and turns you into some- 21

thing frightening and majestic, plunges (1957), was his second film, and the sock hop. The last (and, for me, ever- lasting) image in the movie is Elvis, in you into an experience you never other, Change of Habit (1969), was his jeans and denim jacket, singing in the aisles of a smal1 theater. His last gyration thought possible. The Other shows us last story film. Loving You presents Elvis -with the music slowing suddenly to a kind of sensual drawl-is one of his clas- how our greatest fears and our most ex- at his handsomest, and it is the best of sic gestures, borrowed from strippers and preachers. He rotates his right arm travagant hopes live within us, locked in his rock and rol1 movies, made before his around and around like a large, slow pro- peller and each time his hand passes his a secret, enduring embrace. projected image began to change into hip, his right knee turns inward at an • the loggy, ironical prisoner of such excruciating forty-five degree angle. When TV stations and movie theaters movies as Viva Las Vegas. Loving You has In Change of Habit, Elvis plays a have retrospectives of Elvis Presley's the best of al1 of his movies' music tracks ghetto doctor. It is truly astonishing to me that this film doesn't have an audi- films they almost invariably exclude my -none of the country pieties ofLove Me ence. It has some decent, rock-and- rol1ish songs-what a relief after the two favorites. The first, Loving You Tender, and none of the brassy produc- somnambulistic flops that preceded it- tion numbers of such good Elvis films as and Elvis plays opposite to Mary Tyler r------------------, Moore. Mary and two other Catholic Sis- ters are in an urban ghetto, having left King Creole and Jailhouse Rock. His their habits (you know what I mean) back at the nunnery. The idea is for moves are the best-the raunchiest-in them to blend more meaningfully into the community, and to facilitate the all- Loving You. There you can stil1 see the important blending they also keep it a original Elvis: the weird, inspired amal- that they are nuns. They have a Elvis Presley gam of carny sideshow, blues bar, and \\ 1. Chris Udvarnoky in The Other. 2. James Cagney in City for Conquest. 3. Wild Strawberries. 4. Lizabeth Scott and Elvis Presley in Loving You. 5. Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smel1 of Success. 6. Christopher Lee in The Horror of Dracula. 22

falls in love with Mary Tyler Moore , right of the ticket window. The poster RTS never knowing that she is already \"mar- showed a hand-colored Barbara Nichols, ried.\" Finally, the filmmakers found a looking vulnerable, brassy, and plain- Soundtracks rival equal to Elvis: God. tive , saying-to whom? to ... me?- \"What do you think I am , a bowl offruit, Our Forte Summer ends and it's time to go back a tangerine, something to peel in a min- to the nunnery but Mary is disturbed: ute?\" I saw the movie as soon as possible Exclusive Soundtrack Selections couldn't she be more effective if she and I've been watching it regularly ever And Limited Editions! were to become a true part of the every- since. The Sweet Smell of Success is one day world arid, also, marry Elvis Presley? of those movies that taught me what the Over a QUARTER-MILLION LP'S She bids goodbye to Elvis-telling him, world is really like-and if it happens stocked: In-Print and Out-of-Print, an I think, that she is a nun-and Elvis, that the world of that movie is not utterly array of imports, highly-desired reis- rather shaken , to say the least, returns to valid and important, then I have yet to sues, and original casts (on and off his job as a kind of pomaded missionary learn it. There is a tone of voice in that Broadway). in the world of the American poor. film-an urgency, a bitterness-that speaks exactly to me. Burt Lancaster We offer the finest service The end of the movie is an explosion plays a frighteningly powerful gossip available- monthly auctions by mail of excess-it is so loopy, so grand, that columnist with such a mixture of tragic (rare, unique tities), the only monthly you have to believe that the filmmakers scorn and helpless (forbidden) love that Filmusic Newsletter \"Music Gazette\" themselves fell in love with the story every wisecrack, every bit of cruelty - exclusive interviews, investment they were telling. It is an old-fashioned, goes directly to the center of feeling. pointers, new release information and probably not altogether thought-out film Behind his placid, powerful face is such much more. -but I wonder if it could be made to- an icy mountain of self-denial and day. Mary comes back to the ghetto after thwarted passion that even his blinks For YOUR copy of our extensive having spent some long nights trying to can break your heart. Burt Lancaster catalog, a sample of \"Music Gazette\" decide what her future will be. She goes taught us the honor of defeat, the soar- ($2 value), and monthly auction, to a church where Elvis is singing-a ing romance of unhappiness, the poetry Please Remit $ 1.00 TODAY TO: benefit for his clinic. She steals in unde- of riding in your feelings as in a tightly tected and takes a pew. We watch Elvis sealed ship and staying calm inside that RTS. Dept. 18E singing-rather sexily-through Mary's ship as it slowly sinks. increasingly secular eyes and then the P.O. Box 687 film ascends to true myth and madness. • Costa Mesa, California 92627 We begin cutting from Elvis's face to an image ofthe crucifix. Elvis. Jesus. Elvis. Perhaps my guiltiest of all pleasures, COLLECTOR'S CATALOG Jesus. A quick shot of Mary trying to however, is the swooning, self-pitying NO.2 NOW AVAILABLE make up her mind. Elvis. Jesus. Elvis. pleasure I take in Wild Strawberries Jesus. Elvis. Elvis. Closer and closer of (1957). I realize it is supposed to be an ONLY $3.00 Elvis Elvis Elvis. How much braver and \"art film\" and perhaps it is-though I how much more incandescent than John rather doubt it. But to me it is the ulti- Original Lennon's casual and ironic assertion that mate soap opera, a kind of flat-footed the Beatles were more popular than Christmas Carol that appeals to nothing Posters Jesus. In Change of Habit, the film- more lofty than fear of death and a need makers prove that even a saint, even a to be thought well of by others. To sit rare Catholic, even a nun, when faced with sniffling through Wild Strawberries is the choice, would choose Elvis over the something I could do at a matinee, lobby cards Man on the cross. alone. The chocolate almonds melt in my hands as I sit there staring blearily at CoUections Bought. Sold. Traded • the pretty pictures, crying as if at my 12 - 6 p.m. Tuesdays - Saturdays own funeral. I immediately go home The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and call someone I used to love. There (415) 776-9988 is such a good picture-so brilliantly was a time when I could even have said I 1488 vaUejo St.. San Francisco. CA..94109 written, so perfectly acted and directed was calling because I'd just seen Wild -that I don't think it truly qualifies as a Strawberries, but that's been impossible Guilty Pleasure. I include it here, how- for quite a while. Now I just say vague ever, only because I've seen it too many and melancholy things over the phone times. (When you watch a movie over and let it go at that. Then I hang up, and over, you are seeing it ritualistically: open a can of soup, and drink vodka you are no longer really involved in the with it. movie as it lives on the surface of the celluloid but in something the movie Wild Strawberries is a terrific exercise triggers off in yourself.) My first aware- in self-regard: it so encourages us to love ness of the picture was outside of the our own faults , our own meannesses, our Chicago Theater, where they still had own selfishness and fear of contact, that stage shows. Sweet had just opened and I we are absolutely correct in feeling was standing under the marquee of the guilty for liking it. The next time I go to theater, without the money to go in. I see it, I'm going to wear a bag over my was staring at the poster and at the stills head. displayed under glass to the left and the 23

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of a magic, unreachable Past, that has gone with costume-drama versions of classic literature in recent decades, and he Czech with alJ those Seventies movies (from Picnic at Hanging Rock to Bound for Glory) in which temps perdu unfolded in a golden-misty haze, as if the past were a irector's Woman Brunnhilde's rock surrounded by cloud and fire where none but the brave or foolhardy should venture. The French Lieutenant's Woman storms Brunnhilde's rock like a galloping army of modern-day Siegfrieds. It tells us that by Harlan Kennedy Between, and the line-plucked by Past and Present are not separate moun- screenwriter Harold Pinter from L.P. tain-peaks, let alone separate countries, \"The past is a foreign country ... \" said Hartley's novel-popped into instant but closely interlocked terrains. If there voice-off Michael Redgrave in his rueful currency, like a proverb that had been was ever a true meeting of minds, it's tremolo at the beginning of The Go- always with us. It hit dead-center the that between John Fowles, the English languid-elegiac romanticism, the sense author who penned the 1968 bestseller that dismantled Victorian romanticism even as it exploited it, and Karel Reisz, the Czech-born British director whose clear-eyed and eclectic films are fasci- nated by the immediacy and connecta- bility of Experience regardless of the barriers of time and culture. Reisz has his own romanticism, which is to believe in the crazed glory of those men or women who defy the spurious Relative and Particular-the pressures of their own age or society, the strictures of moral or artistic or sexual convention -to live the truthful Absolute. Reisz's heroes or heroines (and he nearly always spins his films round the centrifugal point of one individual) are gut existen- tialists-whether it's Albert Finney kicking against the puritan-provincial pricks of North-country British life in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, David Warner as madcap Morgan in de- murely Swinging London, or Vanessa Redgrave dancing into rebellious im- mortality in Isadora. In The French Lieutenant's Woman- whose heroine is yet another timeless loner stuck down in a despotically partic- ular time- he's brought off just about the best film of his career. Fowles' book, written as a pastiche Victorian novel, is really a perfect Reisz story: a 400-page tug of wills between the particular and the eternal, the perishable and the en- during, set in 1860's England. Its hero- ine is a young lady of tarnished reputa- tion, whose brief bygone \"affair\" with a washed-ashore French naval officer has driven her into moral purdah in the sea- side town where she lives. Now she is an • ex-governess with little money and a large air of sad mystery as she gazes out to sea from the town's snaking jetty, Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman. waiting for her lover's return. Fowles makes fascinatingly unclear to 26

us at first whether our mystery heroine Director Karel Reisz with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep ever really fwd this affair of the heart, let alone consummated it. What matters is distrait quietude, in a kind of exterior- vety textures and softened bursts of that she wears its memory like a c1ose- ized interior monologue. It's a perform- light), there's never complete repose, al- hugged cloak of shame-half-tragic, ance, at once living and marmoreal , ways a tiny questioning itch of modern- half-defiant-in primly puritanical En- that's litrle short of stunning. (And no ism. Conversely in the modern gland, and that she pulls into her American actress since Anne Bancroft in sequences, Anna is not an immacu- charmed magnetic circle of sin the The Pumpkin Eater has better mastered lately-conceived feminist striding stri- story's other major character, an idle-rich an English accent.) As Anna, the dently into the Eighties but a woman young man with a penchant for palaen- movie's star, she's flightier, brisker, whose sexual and spiritual evolution has tology, who throws over his English-rose more modern and animate, but she's been seen and presaged by us, like stria- fiancee to pursue this Woman of Sad perceivably the same character under tions in a rock, in the story of her \"ances- Shame through the long streets and the cloak, merely displaced by time and tor.\" It's no coincidence that the pastime years of Victorian England. space and manners. of the story's hero is fossil-hunting, or that the story's setting is Lyme Regis, a Fowles spins his 1860's yarn with a In both stories, furthermore , she's fac- geologist's haven of stratified cliff and deliberate 1960's hindsight. He sprin- ing the same dilemmas of love and fossilized riches on England's Southwest kles the pages with references to Marx choice. As Sarah she has the French coastline. The French Lieutenant's and Manchester, to modern science, Lieutenant in her consoling-admonish- Woman is about the way the Past and its modern medicine, modern political the- ing romantic background; as Anna she accretions are impacted in the Present, ory. His late-twentieth-century beam has a French lover, David. But as both and how modern freedoms rise on strata shone on the nineteenth century works Sarah and Anna, she's also bearing a of bygone tyrannies. like a color spotlight, letting features torch for woman's individuality-for common to both times keep their own woman's ability and need to set the con- Karel Reisz interviewed hue, but picking out in a new color the tours of her own life, not have them by Harlan Kennedy differences: the highly formalized mo- dictated by society at large or men in rality, the religious dogmas (stiffening particular. (Or, in Victorian times , by the Born in Czechoslovakia in 1926, Karel then at the early rumblings of Datwin- ever-present threat of a slide into prosti- Reisz emigrated to England with his ism), the social gulf between rich and tution.) At different points in both sto- parents in 1938 and after education at poor, the moral gulf between the saved ries the heroine up and leaves the hero to Cambridge set about scaling the cellu- and the fallen. create a space of her own-temporary or loid bastions of the British film industry. permanent-in which to change and In the Fifties he edited the film maga- Reisz and screenwriter Harold Pinter grow, to nourish her sense of self. zine Sequence with Lindsay Anderson; (once again spring-cleaning for the had a spell as program director of the screen a literary period romance) have If Reisz's movie sounds in summary National Film Theatre; wrote the still- found a startlingly lucid and ingenious like Kramer vs. Kramer meets Middle- standard textbook Techniques ofFilm Ed- answer to Fowles' analytic seesawings march, that's partly what it is. But the iting ; and made his first two movies , between Now and Then: intercutting wonder of the film is that it's never a both documentaries, under the banner the Victorian plot with a modern story. A mere facile juggling of trendy modern of Britain's \"Free Cinema\" movement c1apperboard pokes out in front of the themes and halcyon period settings. -Momma Don't Allow (1956), co-di- camera ·in the very first scene, set on the The brief eruption of the c1apperboard rected with Tony Richardson, and We jetty of Lyme Regis , and we soon dis- in the first scene is like a pea placed Are The Lambeth Boys (1959). cover that star Meryl Streep plays both under the movie's mattress. However Sarah, the French Lieutenant's Woman, soft and yielding the Victorian images I met Reisz at his London home. En- and Anna, the American actress playing seem (painted as much as lensed by sconced amid the cheerful beiges and her in a modern film of the novel. Co- Freddie Francis, with grape-dark vel- star Jeremy Irons plays both Charles, the enamored palaeontologist, and Mike, the film's lead actor. Stepping out of period, these two are entwined in an off-camera love-affair which runs through Reisz's movie in little breaka- way sequences, as a subtle, symbiotic, never-quite-parallel correlative to the \"fictional\" one. The resulting movie, which might have been a mere costume-classics em- balming of Fowles' period story-Mas- terpiece Theater goes fossil-hunting- becomes instead a fugal tour de force setting off vivid vibrations between to- day and yesterday. Meryl Streep gives us Victorian Sarah as a human tableau vi- vant: a russet-haired , pre-Raphaelite lady whose words and feelings are squeezed out through a pale mask of 27

ordered dishevelment of his study- of Sarah. John Fowles told me that be- opens the film actually came very late in book-lined walls, leather chairs, two fore he began writing the novel, the the filming process. We had decided that wooden tables at which he and Harold thing he started with, the fist notion he if we started with a Victorian story which Pinter had thrashed out the screenplay had was of a woman walking away and then suddenly cut to a modern one, the for The French Lieutenant's Woman- looking back at him. That's very ger- audience would be very confused. If, on Reisz talked with scholarly, resonant de- mane; it's at the center of how to per- the other hand, we just have some little liberation mixed in with sudden flashes ceive the character of Sarah. question mark hovering at the begin- of throwaway humor. His slow speech, ning of the Victorian story, then the tran- pouncing on words with gong-like em- When Harold Pinter and I began our sitions would later become more phasis when he hits the meaning he conversations about the script, we saw acceptable. The use of the c1apperboard wants, reminds one that he wasn't born very early that we couldn't do it without is the only place in the film where we use into the English language and still has having some kind of modern compo- an illusion-and-reality contrast. The in- qualms about getting it right. Unneces- nent. Equally, we couldn't have the au- tercutting device isn't about film and life sary, as this interview proves. thor talking to the audience which is the or illusion and reality. It's simply a way of way it's done in the novel. So we came to showing two parallel love stories. -H.K. the conclusion that creating an artifact What were the problems in tackling a and sharing the idea of that artifact with Five of your seven feature films, up to novel with as many different strands of the audience was basic to the telling of and including The French Lieutenant's literary reference and self-analysis as The this story. So we tried to find a filmic, not Woman, have been based on plays or French Lieutenant's Woman? What an equivalent-you can't find an equiv- novels. How much do the pre-existing con- movie structure did you find to translate alent-but a filmic notion that would tours ofthe work-and afeeling ofrespon- these things to the screen? give us this double view. And slowly, by sibility to the author-set a limit on your We tried to make a film that works as a trial and error, we arrived at this particu- imagination? Or do you feel you can be as narrative-one with a rattling good yarn free as with an original story? at its center-but at the same time we Streep and Irons as Anna and Mike, the wanted to subject the audience's per- modern-day actors That's the hardy perennial: Do you ception of that yarn to doubt. We're have to be faithful to the novel? My challenging them by saying, \"Look, lar sort of Pirandello-ish device: when answer is no. You don't have to be faith- we're making a fiction here-are you you have any sequence which leads into ful to anything, you have to make a vari- coming with us or not? And what do you the next you have all the residue of feel- ation on the themes of the novel which, think about it?\" We're colluding with ings that remain and you bring these a., is a film, not a filmed novel, and b., is them. When we took on a structure of with you into the new sequence. In our a film in which you can put your feelings that kind, then the ambiguities arising film, the feelings from the Victorian and your associations. By making the from it became the meaning. Some- story carry over into the modern, the movie, you don't change the novel; it times we cut abruptly, at others not. But modern into the Victorian. continues to exist! The whole business through the careful spacing and pacing of being faithful is a nonsensical aim. A Now it's true that people are going to novel is capable of taking you inside a ofthese intercuts, I hope that by the end be a little bit thrown at the beginning of person; it gives you their speculations, of the film the two stories are sliding the film just as they were in the book. I their feelings, their historic associations through smoothly and that the audience remember feeling very irritated the first and so on. That's something that movies doesn't really separate the two se- time I read the book when suddenly can only hint at. But the moment you've quences. Henry Moore is mentioned. But once accepted that fact, then the whole no- you accept the device, it becomes part of tion of being faithful becomes meaning- How did you decide to run a period and the charm of the book and part of its less because in cinema you have to a modern story in parallel? quality. substitute something filmic-Surprise, surprise!-for the things you can't do. In the book John Fowles has his two You introduce yourfilm with the modern You can't just leave yourself with the continuities: the Victorian plot, and his device of a clapperboard introducing a things that are left, the fag-end of what own comments on the nature of Victo- period scene. the medium can absorb. And the mo- rian fiction, on the differences between ment you realize that, you're out of the Victorian values and our own. He talks Yes. The c1apperboard idea which business of translating and you're into about the connection between fiction the business of making it mean what you and reality, poetry and reality, and so on. want it to mean. He has also placed his strong yarn at the center of it, but he keeps going away If you think about the really good from it and talking about Marx and screen adaptations-The Grapes of Hardy and Henry Moore, subjecting his Wrath for example-you'll discover that story to the skepticism of hindsight. it's wildly different from the novel. Not When asked why he did this-and it's only wildly different in events, but in always an awful question to be asked!- the way it distributes its sympathies. one of the things he said was that he And Good Luck, say I. The new fellow never wanted to write a period book as has got to have his freedom. such. He wanted to write a modern book using the period as a metaphor. • The thing that tempted me about The Visually, the Victorian sequences have a French Lieutenant's Woman in the first very different feel from the modern- place was the story-it really has a beau- richer, more composed. Were you and tiful line-and, of course, the character Freddie Francis looking for a deliberate 28

Minute Reisz: Six Earlier Films Will in James Toback's script of a uni- versity teacher (James Caan) with a Saturday Night and Sunday plot. The best of Reisz's Sixties films is yen for gambling who becomes in debt Morning (1960). Baptizing Albert a reminder that the loner-hero need to the Mafia who in turn make him an Finney into stardom, Reisz's first fea- not always be a sardonic sourpuss or an offer he can't refuse. Except that he ture had a chalky humor and sketched embattled apostate. Warner's Morgan can and does. a soddenly sullen and sardonic picture is a Holy Innocent: Prince Mishkin at of working-class Britain \"oop North.\" the dawn of Swinging London. The fascination of gambling is pure Finney was the magnetic working- existentialism-an acte gratuit with no class slob living off his lazy-fertile wit Isadora (1968). Vanessa Redgrave moral referents, no social or spiritual and chewing out irreverence at all who swanned into an American accent and endorsement beyond the destiny-de- gathered round to hear him. an attempt at Terpsichore in this bio- ciding thrill of a moment-and it pic of dancer Isadora Duncan. A few seems the best form of self-expression Like its fellow films in the British years after Ken Russell had used the Reisz has yet found for one of his loner- Kitchen Sink movement, SN & SM is same subject to make the best of his heroes. It's an activity in which the faithful to the point of servility to its BBC mini-features, Reisz came a bit certainties of mathematics meet the literary source (Alan Sillitoe's novel). unstuck with this awesome lady, who uncertainties of chance in head-on col- But already Reisz is flexing here his on this film's evidence seems to have lision. For Dostoevsky gambling was uncanny empathy-powers as a director been part Eurythmic genius, part foot- as romantic and destructive as love or of actors. Finney is a brooding, sour- stomping giant nymph toga'd in the murder; for Reisz and Toback it voweled Hamlet of the factory-floor; living-room curtains. Reisz follows Isa- defines the paradox-tragedy of a man Rachel Roberts is his sad-sack biddy of dora's zigzagging life of talent, tantrum who sets out determinedly owing no his mistress, taking the gin-and-hot- debt to ethical conventions or social bath course to an abortive abortion . Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. pressure, and ends by being leaned on And already the outsider-hero, kicking and self-publicizing eccentricity with in the heaviest way by the heaviest against all socially-dictated notions of intelligent seriousness, like the head-- mob available. Will he crumble, or will virtue and propriety, is emerging as a down sleuth-for-truth he is, and be- he continue serene on his now-proba- key Reisz protagonist. comes progressively, circuitously lost. bly-fatal crazy loner's way? Caan's abil- Even with the time-chopping gesture ity to be both mean and nervous, dith- Night Must Fall (1964). Thud. It of a framing section (Isadora old and ering and deadly, finds a perfect role. fell. Reisz brought Finney to the raddled and hunted by Death in a red screen again in this updated account of Bugatti) from which the main film is a Who'll Stop The Rain? (1978). Emlyn Williams' fustian stage thriller flashback, the treatment is too penny- Vietnam, drug culture, and an overplus about a psychopathic murderer. What plain and linear, the ellipses too tenta- of preachy cynicism about the death of interested Reisz was clearly the figure tive, the emotions too on-cue and the American dream. When Reisz isn't of the scapegoat loner again, rejecting formulary. hitting the mark, he can stumble into social grace in favor of some dim, pretentiousness. There's a foggy pall dumb, unflinching form of self- Redgrave is a trouper; one admires of allegoric solemnity over this tale of a fulfillment. But the creaky contrivings the toujours-game attempts to dance Vietnam vet (Nick Nolte) who smug- of Williams' head-in-a-hatbox shocker herself into a Duncan frenzy. But gles heroin back to America for an army overpower all subtler resonances. there's little rhythmic grace or natural friend only to find that the friend's wife pliancy in her body (her face carries all and appointed recipient (Tuesday Morgan (1966). Enter Vanessa her responsiveness, and sometimes Weld) can't pay him. Off Weld and Redgrave. To her, David Warner. Two her gawky-shrugging shoulders) and Nolte go, CIA men and underworld of British acting's brightest neophytes the dances seldom soar-they're ga- mobsters at their heels, to find a time flitted into movie view for the first time lumph, spring, galumph. out of the American nightmare and to in this simian-surreal comedy-again hold off, on a hilltop hideout, the from a pre-existiQg \"literary\" source, The Gambler (1974). The Godfa- world's besieging heavies. David Mercer's TV play-about a ther meets Dostoevsky's Theory of the young man with a sweet-and-saintly Robert Stone's novel The Dog Sol- penchant for social disruption. Warner diers came out in 1974, when both is Morgan, the \"Suitable Case for Vietnam and the drug culture were Treatment,\" and Redgrave is his ex- red-hot topics; it's a passionately cyni- wife, whose remarrying plans are con- cal, coherent book. Reisz and screen- stantly sabotaged by her lunatic writer Judith Rascoe have softened ex-spouse. the characters and made the story seem at once contrived and confusing. The With Warner and Redgrave it was a film's messages are too pompous, ap- case of one glamour-kissed anorexic plique. They don't grow from a story meeting another: tall, flaxen-haired, with its own rhythm and inner compul- and wind-waved, they lanked loftily sion. And Nolte is a cut-rate, disap- across the screen like characters from pointing Reisz hero: less a loner in an unsqueezed CinemaScope film . search of his own special grace than a This loopy disproportion beautifully smuggler-of-fortune who's gotten spread out to the rest of the film, and caught with his hands in the till. Reisz's realist precision as a director was the perfect foil to an ever-dottier -H.K. 29

contrast between the two periods? he is cold and over-secure and conde- also fluent and expressive, never stilted. Yes. In the Victorian scenes we very scending. He works on privilege rather Did you and Pinter work on that together, than on feeling. But I don't think he's a as well as the overall structure? consciously went for an academic kind bad man; he's simply a product of his of lighting, the sort of high definition time. Now, to find actors who can em- All the dialogue is Harold's-and of that you see in Victorian paintings. We body that sort of gentlemanly principle course, John Fowles' since we borrowed used front light and side light-a pre- in the 1980's is quite difficult. These are from the novel. Harold and I would sit in Impressionist kind oflight-to paint the values that are not very much prized this room and talk about the scenes and object. We had our own shorthand motto these days. And quite right that they the shape and at a certain point he'd go for this: \"Constable, not Monet. \" So the aren't! Actors today want to play their away and do a draft. I think there were film uses unfashionable front-light most roles rougher. But it's important in this six or seven full drafts of the screenplay. of the time. But the modern portion is lit case that the audience believe that We'd read it, act it out, see which more softly with reflected light and the Charles is a gentleman. scenes, which dialogue passages worked edges of the images are less sharp. and which didn't. The turning-point of the film, one feels, Did you storyboard yourfilm? is the \"confession\" Sarah makes to Char- Did you change the words once you No. I try very hard when I'm filming les when they meet on the Undercliff, the were into the shooting? to make the set-ups and the moves arise Garden-of-Eden wilderness on the coast organically out of the actors' move- by Lyme Regis. She gives a detailed, sen- Harold has the reputation of being ments. So I start with rehearsals, both suous account ofher affair with the French before the film and on the day of shoot- Lieutenant, and after she has spoken a very, very difficult about changing lines ing. Then, when I've got the actors shift has taken place between them . Nei- during the filming. His attitude is sim- moving naturally, I work out the camera ther character is quite the same again. ply, \"I'm available. If you want to moves with the operator and the camera- change the lines, talk to me about it. Do man. So the basic strokes come out of Ernestina and Charles in Lyme Regis . it with me.\" To me, that seems more the text and the actors' feelings and intu- than reasonable. So the answer to your itions. There's nothing as useful as a The feel of that speech is substan- question is yes, but not in<;liscriminately. good actor's itch to move! tially different in the film from the Actors, particularly in America, have Meryl Streep is a brave and surprising novel. Partly, it's a story she is making won the freedom to change dialogue at choicefor the part ofSarah-an American up for herself while looking back at us will, which I think is dangerous. The actress plunked down in Dorset, tackling a over her shoulder-at us and Charles- principle is right, but it has an unfortu- very English, and English-Victorian, role . to see what effect it's having. For she is nate side effect; often changes are made Well, Meryl is a classically trained ac- definitely trying to seduce Charles with before the imagination is fully called tress, and an artist of great imagination. the story; the fact that it is later proved into play to make the written dialogue She's played on the stage, she's played not to be true is irrelevant. She talks of a work. The fact that you can't find a line in films, she's played in Shakespeare. moment, a time in her life when she easily on the first or second rehearsal What more could you want? For me , the freely responded to her feelings. She doesn't mean that the lines are bad. One crucial first moment in deciding to do talks of her experiences being exciting, must try to make the written stuff work the film occurred with the notion of mar- proper, and she gives voice to a lot of before changing it-and then one should rying the part and Meryl. I felt it needed things that Charles has felt but wouldn't feel free to change it. an actress with the sort of imagination to feel free to express. So one thing that work beyond naturalism, to work in a happens in that scene is that he's con- • more operatic way. And I feel that, in fronted with an open avowal of love and terms of the modern-old pattern that we sex-something very un-Victorian that In your early films-your first three fea- have in the film, it's a great advantage is outside his normal role. And , of tures, for instance, and the two films for that she's American. It strengthens that course, it changes him. the British Free Cinema movement which sense of sharing with the audience that was very strong on verite realism-you we're making a fiction. The other thing The Victorian dialogue is convincingly made a name for favoring location shoot- about it-and this is why John Fowles in period throughout the movie, and yet it's ing and scarcely ever stepping inside a was so pleased about her-is that Sarah studio. What was the mixture in The is an outsider in her society, and, Meryl French Lieutenant's Woman? being the only non-English actress In the movie, that's somehow a plus. The exteriors were location, the inte- And Jeremy Irons, as Charles? riors were all built at London's Twicken- I'd come across Jeremy in a television ham Studios. Mrs. Poulteney's play that Harold Pinter did: an adapta- drawing-room , Mrs. Tranter's house- tion of an Irish novel called Langrishe Go that's all studio. In the old days I used to Down, in which Jeremy played a very think it immoral to work in the studio. I unsympathetic German artist-a really very much don't think that now. In predatory, ugly character. But I thought Who' ll Stop The Rain? we found a house he did it wonderfully and so I tested in Berkeley and filmed all the exteriors on location, and then we constructed a him. You know, the story from Charles's matching shell in the studio in which we point of view is, let's say, the Sentimen- built an apartment and so on. tal Education of an English Gentleman. Sarah leads him to his own feelings in a But when you're dealing with a Victo- sense, for at the beginning of the story rian subject, what you can find very much influences what you shoot. For instance, in the novel, Mr. Freeman- that's the father of Charles's fiancee- runs a big department store in London's Oxford Street and he's part of that ex- 30

panding Victorian commercial opti- Schoenberg on the cutting copy; the no- AWARD-WINNING FEATURE FILMS mism. But we thought the only way we tion being that it's romantic nineteenth- NOW AVAILABLE IN 16MM could make that work on screen was to century music on the point of turning recreate Oxford Street. Well, to recreate modern romantic music just going disso- \" A GRAND MASTERPIECE . . . a work Oxford Street is an impossibility, so we nant, astringent, and sour. When Carl of supeme art.\"-N.Y. Post looked around for a location we could Davis came on to the film to compose use and build on. And we found it in a the score,the Schoenberg was dropped. r tANNE~JURY little sidewater of the Thames which has But the flavor was in our ears; it was the PRIZE Victorian warehouses. By building sets starting point for the manner of the mu- DIRECTED BY NIKITA MIKHAlKOV into the location we were able to create a sic. And we did something that I've world on a scale commensurate with that never done before. Carl had a cassette 1981 Victorian sense of expansionism. So we recorder standing on his piano-and ACADEMY AWARD changed our character's job to fit the set. while looking up at the screen, as in the We made him an importer of teas and silent movie days , he played where the WINNER spices. Now of course, if you have a images of the film took him and out of boring professorial writer with you , that that came ideas and themes. The com- Best Foreign Film is impossible todo. ButJohn Fowlesjust position of the score was done using these tapes as references. I found it a FUNNIEST, felt, \"Go ahead. Do what you want. I'd thrilling experience to see the score be- TENDEREST much rather have a good Thames than a ing born. LOVE STORY OF THE YEAR bad Oxford Street. ' For me, the great thing about a film is The music in the film is very eclectic- to allow everyone to make their contri- everything from high-romantic to quasi- bution and to keep the process fluid. dissonant and afair number of\"quotes\" as The process of adaptation is a free well: some direct, as in the Mozan piano process and the process of rehearsal is a sonata at the end, others hinted, like the free process and the process of shooting celio-growl accompanying Sarah's sea- is a free process. The thing keeps chang- gazing, that's a close echo ofthe Act Three ing. And if the people working on the prelude to Tristan. film have a little bit of regard for each other, it shouldn't be competitive or au- It was John Bloom, our editor, who thoritarian. It should be-all good film- chose the Mozart for the cutting copy. We came to love it and ultimately to feel making should be-organic. ® that it was essential. We also had bits of \"SUPERB\"-New York Magazine DIRECTED BY FRANCIS MANKIEWICZ 1980 ACADEMY AWARD WINNER Best Feoture Documentary Ira Wohl's AND RELIGIOUS DISCIPLINE \" Amozingly seductive \" - Los A ngeles T1II1e} Free 16mm/ 35mm Rental Catalog 01 Contemporary And Classic Works of Art Upon Request IFEX FILMS 159 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 (212) 582-4318 31

1rIHIlE IFIIILM §CO)(OIIIE1rlY C(J)IF ILIIMCOC(J)J1M COlEM1rIEIIR §JEllD1rIEMllBlEIIR ~@ = C(J)C01rC(J)llBIEIIR nn9 n®~n AILIICOlE 1rllTILILJY IHIAILIL IpIF-eensct-ilvoas-lep$-ost-ers--f-or -----19-th N-ew-Y-ork-Fil-m ---------~I This poster designed spe- I Please make check or money order payable to : Mail this coupon to: I cially for the Film Festival by I The Film Society of Lincoln Center The Film Society I David Hockney measures I 27 x39 inches, reproduced I Name Of Lincoln Center on high quality paper, costs 140 West 65th Street I $30 including postage and handling. I Address Zip New York City 10023 I City/State 32 I DayTime Phone _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ l Please allow six weeks for delivery. I

• ectl•o• n 33

by Bernard Drew cath Thweetheart now?\" But the foun- ones, they're pretty exciting.\" tain had disappeared along with Gable Maybe the past is not so much a for- and Loos. In their place were cowboy • eign country as a fogbound one, consist- actors there starlets and producers, none ing of acres of forgetfulness punctuated of whom I recognized. So here I am again at MGM with five by the sharp silhouette of an image that pictures in production on the lot, an- has somehow impressed itself on the It took nearly another twenty years for other to go the following week in Lon- memory and remained there forever. don, still another in San Francisco, one me to visit MGM again. This time, the shooting in the South Pacific, and a So I am five years old again and my studio was in the toiler. Because it was couple of lower budget ones on location. parents have taken me to the Loew's producing no more than about four pic- I stroll around the lot, past the Gable Paradise-the circuit's Bronx flagship tures a year, it had closed its exchanges Building, the Crawford Building, the with first-run movies, a seven-act stage across the country and United Artists Tracy Building, and the Garland Build- show, and a ceilingful of stars that had been assigned the task of distribut- ing, my head swirling with MGM's past, moved in endless orbit to some point ing MGM movies. The huge sound although at every corner, I'm ducking beyond Fordham Road-and I am see- stages, if used at all, were rented out to masses of people, trucks, cranes, and ing a movie called Possessed, starring other companies; Dino De Laurentiis small buses, all very much a part of Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. I re- was shooting Paramount's King Kong MGM's busy present. member little of Possessed but the cli- there. On one stage, I saw a huge me- max, in which Clark Gable wins the chanical hand; on another, a leg; on a The first person I meet is Sam Marx, gubernatorial election and stands at the third, a long papier mache snake; and on the story editor in the Mayer-Thalberg convention dais as cheers and confetti the fourth, the hold of a ship. MGM, years, who put it all down in his book, rain down on him. Cut to Joan smiling too, seemed a cardboard creature with Mayer and Thalberg. A genial, vigorous through her tears. Wasn't she always? no head and little future. man younger than his years, Marx was brought back by studio president David The movie is over and the stage show So, early this year when Dick Kahn, Begelman to go through MGM's masses is on. The star is Jackie Cooper, a few Senior Vice President in Charge of of unproduced material, over 400 titles years older than I, whose recent movie World Marketing at MGM, called and in all, to see if any of them might be Skippy was the first I was allowed to said, \"You haven't been here in a while. adapted to the screen or TV today. attend. Much farther down on the bill Come out and see the beehive ofactivity was a new actress MGM had signed, a here. You won't recognize it,\" I accepted Seated in his office in the Thalberg distant mass of yellow white hair and the invitation. \"Of course it isn't the old Building, Marx says, \"You can't imagine scarIet bee-sting lips-Jean Harlow. She days,\" Dick had said. \"But for new what a treasury we have here. Twelve sang Sophie Tucker's \"Some of These stories by Sinclair Lewis, stories by John Days\" and a popular love song, \"Take Me in Your Arms. \" MGM's current slate ofdirectors Twenty years later, I set foot in that little boy's favorite studio. By the mid- Fifties Irving Thalberg was long dead and Louis B. Mayer was gone. So were most of the old stars. There was still a certain amount of activity at the studio. Gene Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, and Robert Taylor were working there, but for the most part, producing for televi- sion had become the studio's major sta- ple. There was no sense of glamour about it. You'd walk past the sound stages and not really believe that Grand Hotel, CamiLLe, and The Philadelphia Story had been filmed there. I even looked for the fountain that was supposed to stand outside the Writers Building-where Anita Loos, while writing a Jean Harlow movie, hap- pened to glance out the window and saw Clark Gable rinsing his teeth in the fountain. He grinned up toothlessly at her and asked, \"How do you like Ameri- 34

P. Marquand, Moss Hart, Mary Roberts directing Rich and Famous. He directed aimed at the 1981 market-if anybody Rinehart, Ellery Queen, and of course, some of the best pictures ever made. knows what the 1981 market is. Mildred Cram's Forever. They spent a Know what Billy Wilder, who's also here million dollars for scripts on it ever since preparing Buddy Buddy, said? 'Michael • they bought it for Janet Gaynor in 1935, Cimino still hasn't learned what George and still, it's never been made. When Cukor forgot in 1911.' I am taken to the stage where John David Begelman told me he loved Kra- mer vs. Kramer. I pointed out that in \"I will never know how this company Badham is filming Whose Life Is It Any- 1932. we had a similar story called survived from the Mayer-Thalberg days way? from Brian Clark's London and Bridge vs. Bridge. Irving Thalberg called to the Begelman administration-the Broadway hit, which starred first Tom them matinee stories, which meant that Aubreys, the Polks, and some of the Conti and then Mary Tyler Moore. they were for women. Women could al- others. Do you know that one head of Richard Dreyfuss is starring as the para- ways bring men to a movie but men the studio saw the music manuscripts of lyzed sculptor who fights for the right to couldn't always bring women. the work that we had done here-Cole turn off his life support apparatus. Porter, Irving Berlin, Herb Stothart- \"I live in the present,\" Marx states, and he ordered everything destroyed ex- Dreyfuss lies in his hospital bed, sur- \"but 1 can't help looking back. We had cept for the last five years? rounded by a series of other rooms with glorious days here, my friend. I'd get a other patients and a large corridor out- memo from Thalberg, saying, 'I want \"And those wonderful stills from all side, containing a nurse's station. Hunt Stromberg to make four sophisti- the old pictures that are so important Badham tells me that most of the people cated comedies, Harry Rapf, three tear now for all the MGM retrospectives that seen behind Dreyfuss' room will not be jerkers,' and you pushed buttons and are going on now. Well, one executive heard, but it will give the audience a out came Garbo, Crawford, Shearer, ordered all of them burnt, but fortu- sense of life going on beyond the room. Harlow, Beery, Dressler, Gable, the nately Dore Freeman, whom Joan Barrymores, Loy, Powell, Tracy, and Crawford brought in here in the early \"As three-fourths of the movie still you'd use them in every conceivable Thirties because he was such a fan of takes place in Dreyfuss' room,\" Badham permutation and combination. hers, sneaked in one night with a van, explains, \"our production designer, took all the stills out and saved them. Gene Callahan, created an entire hospi- \"You'd press another set of buttons tal with a world of action transpiring and out came Cedric Gibbons' sets, \"And you will never forget the dis- through the glass windows. Since you Adrian's gowns, Sid Guilaroff's coif- graceful auctioning off ofthe costumes? can't get away from the bed, it's difficult fures, Jack Dawn's makeup. We'd cover Well, somehow we survived. And there to find new things to do in order to sus- 20,000 stories a year in this office. You'd isn't a doubt in my mind that MGM is tain audience interest.\" make five, six pictures a year in the time going to be the biggest and most presti- it takes to get one rolling today. gious studio again. \" The scene they are rehearsing is actu- ally a combination of two scenes. In the \"Everybody worked all the time then While Sam Marx searches for bridges first, the doctor, played by Christine and it came out not ~nly as quantity but between 1931 and 1981, the productions Lahti, returns from Dreyfuss' studio quality. George Cukor is back here again shooting on the lot are a mixed bag, set with a piece of his sculpture-after Mi- in different times and places, but all chelangelo's hand of God giving life to 'II...~: Adam from the Sistene Chapel. The SU~ S CUN~'~CHA\" second was written by playwright Brian ~ Clark expressly for the movie. It is as close to a love scene between the doctor take their chairs for a picture on the lot. and her patient as the movie ever gets. Lahti begins by accusing Dreyfuss of enjoying his agony. He then stops his barrage of sarcastic quips, and settles down to a tender communion with her. There have been three or four re- hearsals of this long and difficult scene and as many actual takes and I whisper to Badham, during a break, that I have never noticed the scene played exactly the same way twice. \"Christine is of the improvisational school,\" Badham explains, \"and Rich- ard will fool around with the lines but generally, in the end, zeroes in on the same line. You can't make the best use of an actor like Richard unless you allow him to contribute. Besides, his deal with Begelman was that he shares decisions about casting, and has collaborative rights on the script.\" At this point, Richard Dreyfuss comes over to ask Badham a question. He no- tices me from the corner of his eye and immediately stops talking, going into an elaborate dumb show, using his hands as 3S

he speaks in sign language to Badham, for me, even work in it. Pennies from Heaven which had begun who immediately introduces us. Drey- \"Ofcourse, this isn't like the old days. rehearsals only the day before. fuss stops his Johnny Belinda-in-drag performance for a moment, to say, Certain things about it were dazzling: This has been called \"a highly sy- \"How do you do. It's nice to meet you\" the camera department, the story de- lized, unprecedented film extravaganza before resuming his sign language. partment, the fashions-those Adrian that blends music and drama into an gowns-everything was the best then. eventful motion picture\" and is based on \"Are you trying to say, Richard, that But there's a remnant of that left here at and Americanized from Dennis Potter's you will not speak in front of the me- Metro. Look at this set. This is as fine as BBC television series. Directed by Her- dia?\" Badham asks wi.th a smile. any Cedric Gibbons turned out. These bert Ross, it concerns a song sheet sales- are just simply not the years of the per- man in the grim Chicago of 1934, who Dreyfuss grins and nods his head up sonality cult. In the old days, everyone escapes from his sordid life into the and down several times, and then he had more individuality which we uti- world of the popular songs of the period sealS himself on a couch and buries his lized. Garbo, Crawford, Hepburn, where everyone is rich and famous, or head behind a large newspaper. Shearer, were unique. They were not hopes to be. Steve Martin is playing this interchangeable. I look around now and role opposite Bernadette Peters, who • I see gifts in people today that if properly plays a teacher who becomes a prostitute fostered, they could really blossom, but and the love of Martin's life. The unit publicist tells me that Rich there are no studios anymore to do that and Famous is from an original screen- for them, nobody to give them a sense of Herb Ross comes rushing by, whis- play by Gerald Ayres. In fact, it's an continuity so they might grow. \" pers that his next project will involve adaptation of an old (1943) Broadway hit Gian-Carlo Menotti, and vanishes into -like so many of the films George Cu- As Cukor departs, Gerald Ayres, au- the shadows to join Martin. kor made at MGM thirty, forty, and fifty thor of the screenplay, sits down and years ago. I find Ken Adam, the film's produc- Now Cukor is 81, and during a break Richard Dreyfuss and Janet Eilber Steve Martin and dancers in Pennies From Heaven. in Whose Life Is It Anyway? on the set (an exact reproduction of the tells me the relationship between his tion designer as well as associate pro- Algonquin Hotel lobby), I repeat to him script and John Van Druten's play Old ducer. The last time I saw Adam was in what Sam Marx had said about the no- Acquaintance. \"Essentially, we use the Venice, where he was designing Moon- sweat button-pushing of the old days. same characters and situations,\" he ad- raker, as he has most of the James Bond mits, \"but our agreement stated that we movies and innumerable others includ- \"That's bullshit,\" Cukor snaps. \"We were not to use any of the dialogue or ing Dr. Strange/ove and Bany Lyndon. never pushed buttons. We simply had actual scenes of Old Acquaintance. But the best actors, technicians, and artists I'm happy to say that I'm not plagiariz- \"What are you doing in Hollywood?\" in the business. But even in those days, ing Turning Point, which was a direct I greet him and he laughs. I never made four, five pictures a year as plagiarization of Old Acquaintance. I some other directors-and good ones- wrote Rich and Famous four years ago \"Actually, I'm not finding it too un- did. I would make one, at the most two, before Turning Point was even made. Bill pleasant here,\" he concedes. \"The at- pictures a year, and MGM never pushed Allyn hired me to do a remake of Old mosphere here at MGM is very friendly. me into a movie I didn't want to do. Acquaintance when he was at Universal, It's got a family atmosphere like myoid but because of the restrictions on the home studio at Pinewood. Some studios \"I'm enjoying this one very much. I property, we had to appear not to be are like factories. Thank God this isn't don't know if I have the vitality I once using any part of it. It was a 'Catch 22' one of them. had, but I'm still here and glad of it. I'm situation. And so while the plot ele- aware of the pictures I've made, but I ments are all the same, all the scenes ·are \"The hero of PenniesfromHeaven es- don't want to be sentimental about the different. Got it?\" capes from the Depression by instilling past and say those days were better than himself into the world oflyrics of various these. It's a different world and one is • actual songs of the period-Arthur wrong to rail at the present because Tracy's 'Pennies from Heaven,' Bing you've got to live in it, and fortunately On the following day, I visit the set of Crosby's 'Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?', the Boswell Sisters' 'It's a 36

Girl,' Rudy Vallee's 'Life is just a Bowl (Oward it becoming a full studio again. I total of twenty-eight minutes,\" Wilder of Cherries,' Fred Astaire's 'Lee's Face just regret how the whole thing dis- announces. \" But he made more money the Music and Dance,' and a few O(hers. solved by selling off the props and an than Clark Gable did in his entire career. \"This is nO( like someone singing a when jim Aubrey was hired (0 supervise I can't underscand the studios' paying so song to you. Ie's a (Ocally different tech- the graves here. much (0 actors and then complaining nique we're using, not at all like the \" In the mid-Thirties, studios had a about it. If you think caviar is too expen- conventions of the old musicals.\" personality. You could recognize an sive, eat herring. Handing me some of the large sheers MGM movie from a Paramount movie \"And there's all this talk now about of his designs, Adam goes on: \"As you from a Warner's movie. That's gone. Ie's cable, cassettes, videotapes. I think it's can see, on a realistic level, I've had (0 all goulash, now, right, Izzy? all exaggerated . Unless it's educational create a series of scark sers. For inspira- \"Every time you saw white living or pornographic, I wouldn't have a cas- tion, I've used Reginald Marsh and rooms, white beds, white decor, you sette in my house. Izzy?\" O(her anists of the Ashcan School. We've knew it was an MGM movie. It's like \"The old group who scarted the busi- had to build virtually half of Chicago at the hotels now. It doesn't matter ness wanted (0 make pictures to get the studio. whether you're in Paris or Istanbul, class,\" Diamond says. \"Today these \"Then for the fancasy-Herb doesn't you're in the same place. Pride is gone, men all come from Harvard and already like the word 'fantasy,' so let's say confusion is rampant. People who are in have class, so they' re only interested in heightened reality, in those scenes eve- power (Oday and make the decisions making enough money to serve cocaine rything becomes vulgar and grotesque. couldn't be my second assistant. to their guests. \" These sers are expressionistic and pre- . \"On the plus side, there is a push (0 \"Maybe you shouldn't say that, Izzy,\" dominating in shades of red. This huge come back. It's nO( all mercenary. There Wilder worries. Then he shrugs. set, for instance, is Hooker Street or is enough confidence from Begelman \"Tell me about Buddy Buddy,\" I urge. \"This is Izzy and my twelfth picture together, \" Wilder says, \" our seventh with jack and founh with Walter. Buddy Buddy was originally a French farce, A Pain in the A . . . directed by Molinaro, who did La Cage aux Folies . Ie scarred Lino Ventura and jacques Brei and I think it played in New York for five days. \"Our version is quite different, very Americanized and we loved doing it. It's set in a hotel where jack has come to persuade his wife (0 leave a sex clinic. She's fallen in love with the head of it. jack's neighbor in the hotel is Walter, who plays a hired assassin. All right?\" \"All right,\" I laugh. \"I got it.\" \"If you are an experi~nced director (Oday,\" he resumes his aria, \"you are Wilder with Lemmon and Matthau on the set of Buddy Buddy. old-fashioned. If you don't know where to put the camera, you are a revolution- Under the EI. and Frank Rosenfelt to leave us alone ary nouvelle vague cinematic genius. \"You see, all the realistic props be- and not breathe down our backs. \"The only things that seem to do well come transformed. This roadhouse bar \"In the old days at Paramount, you today are garbage. You pile up cars in a becomes a lurid stage. Some of the made movies that occupied all of your wreck. However, as those pictures are transformation will be sweeping, and a time. Now ninety-five percent of your keeping the companies alive and per- few, for reasons of economy, will be al- time is occupied with making deals. By mitting them to subsidize our pictures, I tered, essentially, by lighting.\" the time you actually scart the movie, suppose I shouldn't complain. But I As I move to leave, Adam says, \"I like you feel you've completed it when you complain. it here. I wouldn't mind scaying on.\" haven't even begun.\" \"At universities I ask the kids what • Wilder brandishes The Hollywood Re- they want (0 be. They all say, 'Direc- Billy Wilder is preparing Buddy Buddy porter and says, \"It says here Stir Crazy (Ors.' And I say that unless you're pos- with Walter Matthau and jack Lemmon made $53,000,000 in two minutes, but sessed by it or have rich parents, forget co-scarring for him once again. you talk (0 the studios, they're still in the it. You have (0 either be a stunt man or a \"I have not been in this studio for red, right, Izzy?\" lawyer or a special effects expert for forry-two years, ever since I wrote Ninot- \"It's the same in the book business,\" them to even allow you into the studio. chka in 1939,\" Wilder says. \"And my Diamond nods. \"The conglomerates Talent has nothing (0 do with it. Izzy?\" writing partner, Izzy Diamond, was a have taken them over too. If it isn't Irv- \"I had a kid ask me, 'Is construction junior writer here in 1942. They've been ing Wallace or Sidney Sheldon , forget it. imporcant anymore in writing?' \" Dia- renting out so much of their studio space All they care about is the bottom line.\" mond interpolates. to ourside people that now they have (0 \"Marlon Brando in his last three pic- \"No more Act One, Act Two, Act find studio space ourside for their own tures-Apocalypse Now, Superman ,and Three,\" Wilder says mournfully. \"Your pictures. But there seems to be a drive The Formula-was on the screen for a only hope is that Pauline Kael will read a 37

Muscle for the Future deeper meaning into it.\" The purchase of United Artists by product in the United States. MGM • * * * * * *MGM is a potentially great Hollywood hasn't exactly been a slouch in the TV All the Marbles is a comedy about two union , pairing Hollywood's only big department-its current hit show is women wrestlers being propelled by their Runyonesque manager, Peter distributor without a studio lot with its CHiPS-but the acquisition of UA cer- Falk, from a series ofsmall time bouts to the main chance of stardom. only major studio that has not had its tainly makes the company a more for- Robert Aldrich is directing in a ring own distribution network since the in- midable competitor as an integrated where two attractive women are at- tempting strangleholds, throwing each dustry's last realignment following producer and marketer of audio-visual other down to the ground, and generally behaving in a manner that their mothers World War II. entertainment. didn't teach them. MGM was traditionally the Holly- Those of us who are hopelessly ad- \"This is an out-and-out commercial movie,\" says the director ofThe Big Knife wood giant, of course, and it's partly dicted to celluloid can take heart not and Twilight's Last Gleaming. \"No mes- sages, just a comedy.\" He knocks on sentiment that wants to perceive it~ only in MGM's expanded production wood. \"We bought a story about lady wrestlers and we stole the whole psy- resurgence as a return to glory days. slate, but in their decision to allow chological drive and ending from Abe Polonsky's Body and Soul. But in that But sentiment is not without its busi- United Artists to endure as a produc- picture, Garfield wins. ness value as David Begelman- tion company in its own right. There is \"What Polonsky said in Body and Soul was that the biggest damage you can MGM's aggressive President and evidently a widespread belief that UA's Aldrich's All The Marbles. Chief Operating Officer for the past lackluster performance in the past suffer is the loss ofself-esteem and a fall eighteen months-was well aware three years has been due at least in part from grace. The struggle to regain that esteem will fuel any plot. You don't even when he revved up the studio's pro- to insensitive ownership by the Tran- have to win. The last line in The Longest Yard was 'And then came the game.' duction slate from four pictures a year same rica Corporation. And in the last thirty-five minutes, the game came and it proved the point. to fourteen in 1982. There's more than The expectation is that under Rocky was Body and Soul except that an Italian fighter wins, and in the original, a a hint of MGM tradition in Pennies MGM's benevolent guidance, UA will Jewish fighter loses. From Heaven, Rich and Famous, and ante up with ten to fifteen films a year. \"We have here two girls and a man- ager of questionable credentials. All Buddy Buddy, for instance, and we've According to MGM Chairman and three have already fallen from grace and they struggle to redeem their self- had every indication that the stylistic Chief Executive Officer Frank Rosen- esteem. Hopefully, it will take two funny hours to happen. attributes of factory-made entertain- felt, the present UA distribution orga- \"We made the decision to take ac- ment could be the way of the future. nization \"will be able to handle the tresses and tum them into wrestlers in- stead of vice-versa. If we were right, it The success or failure of Francis Cop- theatrical release of both MGM's ex- will make the picture. Those girls up there pummeling the hell out of each pola's One from the Heart will be an panded production schedule and other are Vicki Frederick, a dancer who was in A Chorus Line and did a number of interesting omen in this regard. United Artists's full release program of On the other hand, hedging your pictures without any significant in- bet, you'd want to gamble along with crease in distribution overhead\" which conventional wisdom that the ancillary \"should result in a significant reduction markets are where tomorrow's action of the per picture distribution over- will be centered. The video and cable head of the films released.\" TV revolution, the exploitation of clas- The UA executive told me optimis- sics in the archives, the specialized tically, \"We'll be the General Motors of handling of \"difficult\" films , foreign the movie industry.\" Although the sales, God knows what else-all are combined company will have assets of supposed to dwarf the traditional the- over $1 billion and will handle upwards atrical market any day now. A recent of thirty films a year, there are potential tremor in Hollywood's current crisis clouds on the horizon. The massive was set off when too many new inves- debt MGM had to incur to purchase tors in town expected too much of UA will be difficult to service at a time these ancillary markets-they thought of high interest rates and a sagging their downside was better protected stock market. And MGM's COlltract than it was-but the smart operators with Cinema International Corpora- are still hanging in there. tion for overseas distribution runs Among the smartest has been through 1983. A codicil in the contract United Artists, whose recent success states thatMGM subsidiaries must dis- with the \"specialized\" distribution of tribute through CIC, but UA's highly Cutter's Way was only the most publi- regarded foreign distribution network cized instance of its profitable activity is one of the company's strongest as- in non-theatrical areas . One reason sets, presumably what MGM sought in VA's Division ofTV, Video and Special buying UA in the first place. MGM Markets is successful is that it is spokesmen say that they simply don't know yet how the question of foreign headed by Nathaniel Kwit, Jr. , who distribution will be resolved. All in all, it is too early to tell whether the Lion may be the David Begelman of the will be roaring, growling, or whimper- ancillaries. Another reason is that UA owns a fabulous and a well-organized library-including many MGM titles ing this time next year. and all of Warner's pre-1948-and is the largest distributor of repertory -SETHCAGIN 38

shows with Bob Fosse, and Laurene than I thought it would be,\" he con- refugee from the Bath Light Opera Landon, a Canadian girl who is an ath- cedes. \"On balance, I enjoy it, though Company and because of a number of lete and model. the first time out is rough . Cannery Row situations, including losing my job, I get is episodic, actually, a series of the idea of turning her into Count Victor \"I hope this is going to be a fun pic- vignettes. It was not until I read Sweet Grazinsky, Europe's greatest female im- ture, not a Big Knife, but then I thought Thursday that I got my narrative line personator. I teach her to sing pop tunes The Emperor of the North was a fun pic- from the love story between Doc, a ma- by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse ture, but nobody saw it, so maybe I was rine biologist played by Nick Nolte, and and I say, 'Remember, you ' re a drag wrong. I'm not so sure what a fun picture Susie, the young hooker played by queen. Shoulders, tons of shoulders!' is anymore, just as I no longer know Debra Winger. The movie mixes that On her opening night, James Garner what fun is, at least in this town. There's with the flavor of Cannery Row.\" comes into the picture. He's a Chicago no working class any more in the indus- gangster, club owner, everything you try. Every grip owns two or three apart- Everyone on the lot has been talking were in Chicago in 1935. She's doing ments. It's just a job now for everybody. about the extraordinary set designed by this Le Jazz Hot number and Jim is They leave the set, go to the bank, and production designer Richard Mac- smitten. On her final bow, she takes off then go home. No fun anymore. Let's Donald on the hugeStage 30. Ward says, her wig and suddenly Victor is standing hope this one will be.\" \"Our first instinct was to shoot in Monte- there. Jim begins to doubt his instincts. rey itself, but it's all gone now. It's all He couldn't be that wrong and in love • discos and plastic fishermen, and the with VictorNictoria no matter what it merchants there were impossible to deal turns out to be, or could he? I won't tell The next day I catch up with David S. with. MacDonald thought he could you any more. Does it end happily or Ward, who has been on location all week build a Cannery Row that was more at- unhappily and for whom? Let's borrow shooting a baseball game at Terminal mospheric than anything we could find that old line, 'Loved her, hated him.' \" Island for a scene in Cannery Row, which in actuality, and he did. It's hard to show he has adapted from John Steinbeck's the look of sunlight on a stage, but this is • picaresque tales of Monterey. He is a stylized film and so the exact look making his directorial debut. doesn't matter. We created a false hori- Robert Preston in VictorNictoria. zon by hanging thousands of little strips Winger and Nolte in Cannery Row. of mylar ove'r the tank. By lighting, and Frank E.Rosenfelt, Chairman and agitating them with wind machines, we Chief Executive Officer of MGM Film Ward, now 35, was in his mid-twen- had the effect of water shimmering to Company and memb~r of the Board of ties when he wrote The Sting, which gar- the horizon-and it's a beautiful effect. Directors of its sister and now separated nered seven Oscars. In the intervening We shot eighty percent of the film on company, Grand Hotels Inc., looks and years, other Ward projects were in the that set-very unusual these days, un- acts as far from a Hollywood punjab as works, but Cannery Row will be the first less you're Francis Coppola.\" one can. A warm, genial man who seem- to bear his name since The Sting in 1973. ingly still can't get used to his exalted • station, he remains a human example of \"Once Cannery Row entered my life, the somewhat inhuman representatives it took four-and-a-half years before Mi- I find Robert Preston in a highly ebul- of the conglomerates who have taken chael Phillips and I could get someone lient mood fresh from his success as the over so much of business. to finance it. Every time I'd be about to boozy doctor who has a shot for every- start something else, there'd be sudden thing from happiness to healing venereal As I am ushered into his office on the interest somewhere in Cannery and I'd disease in Blake Edwards' 5.0.8. Pres- last day of my visit, Rosenfelt informs give up the other job and then the deal ton is in even finer fettle over VictorlVic- me gleefully that this spacious suite was on Cannery would fall through. So I toria, which he has just made for MGM: once Louis B. Mayer's sanctum sanc- finally made a deal with Marty Bregman, again under Edwards' auteurship and torum. Conspiratorially, he goes to a wall and two days later David Begelman said starring Edwards' wife, Julie Andrews. where a hidden elevator door suddenly that MGM would do Cannery Row. opens. \"This is where the girls came up Marty's been kind enough to wait until As for the controversy over S.O.B., without being seen by anybody,\" he Cannery is all completed. \" Preston couldn't be happier. \"So don't confides. \"If these leather walls could love me, Middle America,\" he shrugs. talk, what they would say!\" \"How are you enjoying the experi- ence of being a director?\" I ask. \"It's funny that considering all the years that Blake Edwards and I have \"It's both more thrilling and agonizing been in this business,\" Preston remarks, \"our paths had never crossed until now. During the shooting of S.O.B., Blake told me the story outline of VictorlVicto- ria. I didn't know at the time that it had been a German film made in the early Thirties with Renate Muller and later remade as an English one with Jessie Matthews, First a Girl-Then a Boy. But I'm sure that there's very little left of either one in Blake's screenplay. \"Blake's ideas about offbeat casting thrill me. Guess what he cast me as in VictorlVictoria? A blatantly tres gaie ho- mosexual in the Paris of 1935. She's a 39

I ask Rosenfelt about conditions in and non-theatrical business. When I be- came head of the company in 1973, this '~ most impressive Hollywood in general and MGM in par- place was a morgue. You'd see three peo- ticular. Speaking like a lawyer, he says ple in the commissary, and I began to work.\" carefully, \"The film business is under- call the Marty Ransohoffs of the busi- going some uneasiness now which I ness to rent space and they came -Jean Flrstenberg. think is unjustified. This 11UlLaise ema- through. They helped to get us started Director. nates from several sources. One, last again and I had this operation going summer's pictures didn't do as well as nicely with four ofour own pictures each The American year. But nicely wasn't enough. I Film Institute wanted to move ahead meaningfully. expected. Two, the networks have an- \"The talk now is that audiences are disappearing, but they're going to Stir nounced that they won't go on paying Crazy. It's obvious that at this time, se- rious movies have no audience but what they have been paying for the mindless entertainments do. I was as proud of Fame as anything that MGM rights to first run features. Three, has ever done. It had energy, style, but audiences did not come to it. Overseas, Heaven's Gate. But this hysteria is pre- it'll do three times as much as it did here. They want The Blue Lagoon these days, mature, I think. not serious films.\" \"We're putting our money up where At this point, David Begelman walks in. He is darkly handsome, tall, highly our mouth is. We have nine pictures articulate, intelligent. He could be a first cousin to Bob Evans and Dan Melnick, before the cameras now. We haven't had and while these three are different, they come close to being a collective, nine pictures going at one time since the present-day Irving Thalberg. Forties. In addition to the pictures Speaking of his own position as Presi- dent and Chief Operating Officer of filmed on the sets you saw, we have MGM Films, Begelman says, \"Frank made it quite clear that he had made a David A. Cook Shoot the Moon starting in San Francisco decision to bring MGM back to fine pro- Emory University next week. Alan Parker, who directed duction in a form that matches present Midnight Express and our own Fame is times, and to become involved with dis- \"A bold, comprehensive, and readable directing this from a screenplay by Bo tribution ourselves, which we hadn't world film history, drawing on the new Goldman, with Albert Finney, Diane been for several years. Audiences are research of the past ten years.\" telling us today that they want affirm- ative movies, not seriousness. So there- -Ernest Callenbach, Editor, Keaton, and Karen Allen in the cast. A fore the guidelines we utilize in Film Quarterly Stranger is Watching is being filmed in choosing a movie for production today is-is this film, when fully realized, go- As an introduction to cinema history New York by Sean Cunningham, who ing to cause people to say, 'Hey, that's for today's film student, A HISTORY something we want to see?' It pertains to OF NARRATIVE FILM is unmatched in made Friday the J3th, and Diner is being comedy, drama, and musicals, but the its comprehensiveness • the depth of touchstone for us is something people filmed in Baltimore by Barry Levinson, will want come to. Otherwise, we're sorry, we'll have to pass. who wrote it. . \"We're denied the right, these days, its analysis of films, directors, and \"We have Poltergeist in production, to make films that please just us, so movements • its skillful presentation which Steven Spielberg is executive instead we're making films that satisfy a of aesthetics and technology· its producing, in addition to having a hand popular need. The films don't belong to discussions of historical and cultural in the screenplay, and Tobe Hooper is us, they belong to the audience. We influences on cinematic art • its up-to- directing. Mel Brooks is producing My have to either anticipate the audience's date, responsible scholarship • and its appetite, or create an audience appetite. And that is,where we stand right now.\" 1,242 iUustrations. Favorite Year for us; Richard Benjamin I suppose this should disconcert me, • Discusses in detail the career of every will direct and Peter 0' Toole will star. but I recall that in 1931 MGM movies important film-maker. were made for the contemporary audi- Franklin J. Schaffner will direct Yes, ence, too. May the next generation re- member the MGM films of their Giorgio with Luciano Pavarotti. I think childhood as fondly as I recall those mat- inees and evenings in Paradise. ~!.~ • Examines in unprecedented depth that's quite a bit of activity.\" three groundbreaking films-The I ask what has made MGM make Birth of a Nation, Battleship such an unprecedented move into major Potemkin, and Citizen Kane. production, just when the other com- • Offers discussions of every significant panies are cutting down and stripping movement, trend, and national cin- budgets on future films. ema, including some barely touched \"We've had a profound change in phi- on in other film histories. losophy,\" Rosenfelt says slowly. \"We • Presents in easily comprehensible de- came to realize that while we were inte- tail every major advance in film theory grated with the hotel business in one and technology. company, that the industry would never \" ...should establish itself as the stan- recognize us as anything but a hotel dard one-volume text for students, business which made an occasional teachers, and others interested in this movie. But in the last year, after we pervasive and influential cultural separated the movie company from the form.\"-Ronald Gottesman, Univer- hotel company, we've become the first sity of Southern California stop in town. Making David Begelman Available in cloth for $24.95 in all President and Chief Operating Officer bookstores. Available in paper for of MGM Films last May was not the $15.95 in all college bookstores. easiest choice I've ever had to make, but I know now it was the right choice. xxiii + 621 pages \"The business today is not only the- W. w. NORTON & NortonD aters but cassettes, syndication, disks, pay cable, network television, 16mm, COMPANY, INC., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 40

Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergenjlank director George Cukor on the set of Rich and Famous. wars, with Bergen giving delicious (if ance, which was filmed by Vincent Sher- George Cukor interviewed somewhat erratic) comic relief as her man in 1943 for Warner Bros. with Davis by Joseph Me Bride and best friend and literary rival, a wacky and Miriam Hopkins. First-time film- \\t Todd McCarthy Roman candle of a part. maker Allyn, a former actor and TV pro- The last decade has been an uneven ducer, developed the property with The director who since 1933 has but still remarkably fertile creative per- screenwriter Gerald Ayres (producer of exemplified the best of MGM is back on iod for Cukor. He made one of his mas- Cisco Pike and The Last Detail, writer of the lot. George Cukor's Rich and Fa- terpieces, Love Among the Ruins (his first Foxes) , who updated the material to de- mous, a very au courant comedy drama movie for television, in 1975) and a visu- pict the changes in American women's about two female novelists played by ally opul~nt black comedy, TraveLs With lives over four time periods: 1959, 1969, Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen, My Aunt (1972), as well as the more rou- 1975, and 1981 , but essentially hewed is his twenty-second picture for the stu- tine TV movie The Corn is Green (1976) closely to the plot dynamics of the origi- dio (not including Gone With the Wind), and the best-forgotten Russian-Ameri-. nal. Cukor resists drawing comparisons and at 82 he is the oldest man ever en- can co-production The BLue Bird (1976). between the characters and real-life lit- trusted with a major studio feature film. But he had not filmed in Hollywood erary figures, but Allyn compares the In his distinguished career of more than since taking over the reins of Justine Bisset character (played by Davis in the fifty years, the indefatigably upbeat Cu- from Joseph Strick in 1968. On Rich and original) with Joyce Carol Oates or Joan kor, who likes to call himself a \"survi- Famous, Cukor was also a last-minute Didion, and Bergen's character (the vor,\" has outlasted such colleagues as replacement. He might not have be- Hopkins role) with Jacqueline Susann or Charles Chaplin (77 when he made his come involved at all had it not been for Judith Krantz, the author of a string of last film), Alfred Hitchcock (76), and last year's Screen Actors Guild strike, trashy best-sellers. Jean Renoir (75). Lovers of classical cin- which shut down the production on July With only a month's preparation, Cu- ema are gratified that the new Holly- 18, 1980, after four days of filming in kor got the film rolling again on Novem- wood has somehow managed to find New York City under director Robert ber 10. Most of the cast remained the j room not only for Cukor but also for Billy Mulligan. Mulligan's approach clashed same (Cukor's only addition was Matt Wilder (75), who was making Buddy with that of producer William Allyn and Lattanzi in the role of Bisset's 18-year- Buddy for MGM at the same time, John Bisset, whose Jacquet company made old street pick-up), but Don Peterman Huston (75), busy across town on Annie the film for MGM. Studio chief David replaced Adam Holender on camera and for Columbia, and Samuel Fuller (69), Begelman is given credit for suggesting John F. Burnett came on as editor in cracking his whip on White Dog at Para- that Cukor be brought in to take charge place of William Reynolds. Cukor and mount. Cukor's creative energy is of the floundering prod uction. production designer Fred Harpman re- unflagging, and in Rich and Famous he designed the picture but inherited sets has evoked a great performance from Cukor's third remake in a row (and undertaken when Mulligan was still in Bisset as a bold but emotionally tor- second from a Bette Davis vehicle), Rich charge, including a meticulous studio mented survivor of the modern sexual and Famous is a modernized version of recreation of the Algonquin Hotel lobby, John van Druten's play OLd Acquaint- 41

and the ersatz winter footage Mulligan (\"very well staged, \" was his verdict). can't remain inflexible. You have to had shot during the summer was redone He served us coffee from a silver tray watch yourself, and watch the whole at- by Cukor on snowy locations after the and began talking about his latest, and mosphere. first of the year. we hope not his last, film. Even though the sex scenes are quite Cukor's set was an unusually civilized -J.McB. and T. McC. frank. you chose to shoot them discreetly. and well-organized creative workshop, as you' ve aLways done. You don't believe in with the elderly director quietly but Cukor: I read the script of Rich and expLicit sex scenes or nudity. firmly in command. He spent much of Famous and I thought, \"Oh, dear, this is his time sitting in his chair, continuing amusing, isn't it?\" So I undertook to do You can get all the effects you want his long-standing practice of huddling the picture, and I was happy to do it. I without any of that. It's a question of intimately with his actress, out of ear- was absolutely charmed by the script. taste. Also, I think it's against comedy, shot of interlopers. Some friction was you see, if you're going to huff and puff evident between Cukor and Bisset, as Did you work with GeraLd Ayres much and roll around. Nudity is against the the accompanying interviews with both during the shooting? comedy. I remember when they said you can't have both feet on the bed, and actress [see page 4S 1 and director A little, but he really wrote it. I'm not all that nonsense. But I tell you, it had a the kind of director who writes with the kind of discipline that was good. Now it confirm, but he enjoyed a warm relation- writer. No, I'm very grateful, and I ap- doesn't matter, you can do any goddam ship with Bergen, conversing animat- preciate having a gifted writer. If I re- thing you want, and not always to the edly, cracking jokes, and even grappling spect the script, I leave it alone. advantage of the picture. playfully. It is remarkable that the per- sonality clash between Cukor and Bisset Had you seen the previous fiLm version • did not work to the detriment of the ofOld Acquaintance? film, but may actually have enhanced Is there any of Robert Mulligan's foot- the tensions underlying her deeply felt That was on the heavy side. I didn't age left in the film? characterization, which emotionally think it was very well done. But he's changed the whole thing. He makes it I don't think so. Not that Mulligan really funny, and much more naughty. didn't shoot the scenes particularly well, Meg Ryan with screen mother Bisset and Bergen go at it in Rich and Famous. Candice Bergen. dominates the film, despite Cukor's John van Druten was a skillful play- but there were little changes made. You repLaced another director on Jus- preference for Bergen and his stated in- wright, but to me he was rather stodgy tine, but in that case they had shot Longer tentions to keep the film light and comi- and old-fashioned. It was all rather lady- and you were forced to use some of their footage. cal. like ano very nice, you know. That's a long, sad story. This is very We interviewed Cukor at his home in The Language in Rich and Famous is different. I like this. It all went quite smoothly. These are expert people, and July, after the film's successful first more risque than you've, ever had before. if somebody's at the head of it who knows what the hell he's doing, there sneak preview. Cukor's home, in which That's the fashion. I'm perfectly com- doesn't have to be any confusion. he has lived since the Thirties, is a se- fortable with it. I'm not prudish. I'm not How did you decide to use a littLe-known cameraman. Don Peterman? cluded paradise above the rabble ofSun- easily shocked. The assistant director suggested him, set Boulevard, crammed with glorious The script deals with women's lives in a and I saw his work. He had done fashion commercials. He was experienced and photographic mementos of his (mostly very modern way, such as in Jacqueline very gifted. female) friends and collaborators, from Bisset's affair with a younger man, Hart His natural bent was toward glamour Lighting? Katharine Hepburn (\"To George- Bochner. Not really. It is glamorous. It's a com- Everything-Kate\") to Joan Crawford I think that's rather original. You can edy, a civilized comedy, a pretty com- edy, and it should be played lightly. (\"A great actor, a better director-So make it as impertinent as you like. Also, This is not a deep one, but funny. much devotion, Joan-The marriage she can't help thinking it's unbecoming. So you Like to take a chance with some- offer is still good\"). After we were al- He's 22 years old. A respectable woman lowed to inspect his photos, his in- would not have done that before, and scribed volumes from literary friends, now they do. Not only people like that, and his dozens of modern paintings and but a great many perfectly ordinary sculptures, Cukor's secretary of thirty- women are much more adventurous. six years, Irene, showed us to an art deco salon, which Cukor entered after watch- It's refreshing that you are so open and ing the British Royal Wedding on TV responsive to changes in sociaL mores. You must move yourself. You just 42

body once in a while. has some suggestions, I welcome them, You'd also say when the camera rolled, Yes, I do. They took a chance on me. but they can't run the show. \"At a brisk clip, ladies.\" • In the old days actresses like Garbo had Oh, yes, they're all inclined to slow a similar kind ofpower, didn't they? down. It requires a gift to get on with it. In Hollywood, or in the literary world, There are very few people who have a have you known a relationship like the one Yes, but there was also good manners. natural gift for that. Katharine Hepburn between the two women in thefilm? You deferred; she deferred. It was very has. I don' t like it if it drags , especially a civilized. I would find it very difficult to comedy. It's up to you, the director, to Not really. Other than just a couple of be under the thumb of the actress. make the whole atmosphere. actresses. No, I think that was van Oru- ten's phantasmagoria. Did you have much trouble like that on • thisfilm? The casting of the two female leads is A scene people are sure to find provoca- almost against type. Jacqueline Bisset has Occasional little touches here and tive is the ending, where the two women been identified with glamour roles, but she there. But you know, you work hours are alone on New Year's Eve, drinking plays the more serious ofthe two novelists, and hours a day, so occasionally some- wine in front of a fireplace, and they kiss while Candice Bergen, a writer in real life, thing is a little awkward, but there was each other. It crystallizes the theme of the plays a morefrivolous character. no impasse. If the text is good, you can picture: the men in the story come and go, work. I don't like carping and behaving but the women'sfriendship endures. Yes, she is intelligent, and she plays a badly. Not that I'm sweet, but it's no dummy in this. Certainly Candice gives goddam good. Yes, that's rather touching. It's roman- a brilliant performance. I like the cast- tic and truthful. I think friendship is ing. It gives a freshness and originality. Did you rehearse much before you be- very, very important. We all appear at ganshooting? our best in a good friendship. Bisset's galiant but self-destructive character recalls others in your work, such No. It really wasn't all that difficult to It certainly means a lot in your life. as Norman Main in A Star is Born or play. I did rehearse, and we talked a lot. Yes. All these ladies. All these la- Garbo in Camille. She gives a very strik- It depends very much on the person. dies ... ing performance. You make an atmosphere with experi- Bergen and Bisset's New Year's toast. Bisset and Bochner in love in Rich and Famous. It's all due to the writing. She's very enced people. good, but the writing is very good. The One of the challenges for you and the . There's something teasing about the other one is a scream. She tickled me. women kissing, because you wonder... two actresses unequal is that they portray Bergen's growth as an actress in recent Are they lesbians? That's meant to years has been impressive. the characters in four different time per- be. iods. How do you direct actresses to play Oh, yes, and this is a very good part. younger than they are? What did you tell the actresses when This is an eccentric. Because she was they did the scene? pretty, she always had to play lovely, sad I tell them to hold their breath. ladies. She said her father told her to They also have to age. Bergen has a They were scared to be thought to be play comedy, but they gave her these grown-up daughter by the end ofthe film. lesbians. And they're not,. surely. What pretty, dull parts. This is really funny Yes, but she doesn't act like a steady did I tell them? It should be done with a and good material. I don't think you can mother. light touch. That's the trick of doing be funny unless the material is funny. Some changes of time can be indicated things. I don't think you're supposed to with make-up and hairstyles. take the kiss very seriously. Bisset was responsible for gening the A certain amount. Not so much, re- film underway. ally. As long as it's perfectly natural. It's • not an accurate thing. Just to give the Apparently. That was before my day. impression. At first, they had a lot of Rich and Famous is the twenty-second She's very anxious. Also, she has to be make-up on, hairdressing and all that. I film you've made for MGM. held down, because she doesn't know don't think that goes for light comedy. the whole goddam thing. She can't run If you trust the actors, you let them Really? Well, they weren't alllulus. the show. She thinks she can. She'll find internalize the changes? How would you compare today's MGM out it's not all that easy. I think that Well, yes. And if it's heavy going, you with MGM in the past? producing this picture is a sop to her. say, \"Come on, let's get on with it. \" I think what worked in those days She's intelligent, but she's not really the We heard you say that many times. does not work now. I find it very sympa- producer of the picture. Anybody who thetic there. I always have. Not that everything has been peaches and joy. There's quite a resurgence going on there today. 43

I hope they sustain it. Now, appar- Your recent films contain some of the in your first movie for television, Love ently, everybody's got a lot of money, or most striking uses of long takes in your Among the Ruins, with Hepburn and they can raise money. career. There were several splendid ones Laurence Olivier. The last time you workedfor MGM, ten Maggie Smith and Cukor discuss It depends on if the actor has the years ago on Travels With My Aunt, Travels With My Aunt. capability of doing it. And also on the things were not so good there. style of the thing. If the actor can do it and if it suits the piece, then it's good. Ten years agol wasn't as good. Others can't sustain it. I like to do it. I Why did Hepburn withdraw from think it Rows. Olivier and Kate Hep- Travels With My Aunt? burn can do long, sustained scenes and They behaved badly with her. They do them perfectly naturally. It's not were shits. Metro. Mr. Whoever-It- only that the scenes are long, but you Was-Then [James Aubrey]. They make them more real, more truthful, thought she was running things. She less acted. behaved impeccably, but they were just stupid. Petty. Idiotic. I wanted to Olivier's performance in Love Among leave, but she said, \"Don't you dare the Ruins was the finest he has given in a leave... It was a funny, lovely picture. reentfilm. Perhaps your use oflong takes With that film, and in your other work helped him to develop the character. over the past ten years, your visual style has been getting increasingly opulent and Maybe that, and also Hepburn is a sumptuous. most accomplished actress, and they're If I live long enough ... very generous with each other. We were Are you conscious of cutting loose lucky. He and I had never worked to- more and more? gether before. But I was a great friend I'm just more experienced. Also, of Vivien Leigh, and he was a friend of there's a fellow who works with me as mine. His agent made some an art director, Fred Harpman, who is difficulties. All the normal bullshit. very talented. I like to work with peo- There was a question of billing. His ple who are very good visually. agent said, \"Naturally he'll get first bill- Does he do what your color consultant ing.\" It was awfully silly. She was very George Hoyningen-Huene used to do for determined not to be difficult. She you until his death in 1969? A different kind of thing. Hoy- said, \"Look here, in America I'll have ningen-Huene was a wonderful help to me. He was very subtle. first billing, and in England he will.\" Is Harpman mainly concerned with de- She doesn't care. She's generous. She's cor? so sure of herself. With everything. The setting, the camera.)t.'.s a combination of every- How did you become invoLved in it? thing. He should get more credit than A play broker, an agent, Audrey he gets. When I took over on Rich and Wood, came upon this play by James Famous, there already was a production Costigan. She brought it to Hepburn. It designer [Jan Scott], but Harpman had was written originally for Alfred Lunt an awful lot to do with it. There's a New and Lynne Fontanne to do on televi- Year's Eve party which is brilliantly sion, but he was ill. done. The decor, the way it's designed, Did you try to accommodate your the way it's dressed, the way it works. shooting style to television? The director has something to do with I asked them, and they said, \"Just do that. We do it together. it the way you would in a movie... How does the cameraman fit in? They talk. And we talk to see how it The shooting scheduLes are shorter on will work. TV movies. What about camera placement? I have something to do with that. You They push you as much as they can, have to know what you're doing. But but these people can do it very well. I'm not that involved in the technical things. I'm much more involved in the You didn't employ as many long takes human things. in your second TV movie with Hepburn, You stage scenes so beautifully, there's The Corn is Green. only one place for the camera to go. That's the correct way to do it. If you No, because the scenes were not that have to fuss around and photograph long, and also there was a young man things from this angle or that, there's who was not very experienced [Ian Say- something wrong. nor]. She helped him a great deal. I wonder what happened to him. He was an awfully talented boy. • A theme which has preoccupied you in your recent work is unrequited romantic love. In Love Among the Ruins, Olivier loved Hepburn for forty years from afar, and in Travels With My Aunt Maggie 44

Jacqueline Bisset on 'Rich and Famous' \"You're pretty tireless. \" He's feisty as hell. But you don 't want to be the one I think a lot of American films de- him , and you can pick up on that. He he's yelling at, because you feel it. sexualize women. They make them really got me worried at one point. He sexy but they gloss you ove r. I'm bored kept saying, \"Very funny, very funny. \" Was it hardfor you deaLing with him in with gloss. Let them be natural. I'm I thought, \"Does he really think this is not talking about the all-American nat- two capacities, as actress and producer? ural look, but earthiness; I'm talking Jacqueline Bisset in about letting the guts come out in the Rich and Famous. He's used to getting his own way. face. I've been much better used in that funny?\" And then he'd say, Europe. This film for me is as Euro- \"Hmmm. Hokey. Hokey, but funny. We had a couple of scuffles, but they pean a part as I could find. There are Print.\" Hokey? What the hell is that?! things in it where I allowed myself not But it's his way. Sometimes \"hokey\" were not serious ones. He got very to let anybody get in there, between and \"funny\" can mean tantalizing, me and the camera. slightly off-beat, maybe. It threw me angry with me one day, two or three for a loop in the beginning, but then I Why was Robert Mulligan replaced as started to know that if he said \"Hokey, weeks into the shooting. I was trying to but funny,\" we were in good shape. director by George Cukor? Was Cukor's age any problem? cover something, and he doesn't like Bill Allyn [the producer] and I got He kept up. We tried to protect him: he liked to have a little sleep at lunch, to film coverage; he likes to do things together two years ago in October. We he came a little bit later than usual, and had an idea about a certain look for the he didn't work too late. But we got a in two-shots quite a lot. The marks had picture, and though I'm not against the normal day's work. Sometimes I would cameraman that we. had [Adam Holen- stay after and run through things with changed and I was now back to camera der], I just felt he was the wrong one Fred Harpman and Candy. George for our film. It was rather more dramatic said to me one day, \"God, you'd like to where I was supposed to be profile. I lighting that I felt we should have. stay here all night, wouldn't you? Candy and I had to go through a You're tireless.\" I was very pleased, knew they were going to have to come twenty-year span and needed a little because I was thinking about him, help at times , especially in winter. round on me if we didn't cover that There was some arguing about light- ing. I said, \"We can't look like old bags moment, and I stopped and said that before our time.\" And in a comedy, dark lighting can really spoil the pic- there was a mistake. He went crazy. ture. I stuck to my guns, and when Cukor came in and looked at the stuff, He went absolutely crazy. I was just he felt it wasn't right for the concept of the film either. We took a chance on trying to avoid making him do the [cinematographer] Don Peterman and he managed to get a lot of character other shot which he didn't want to do. I without over-diffusing us. felt completely right about the whole How did the change in directors affect thing, and he misunderstood. It got your performances? Candy and I were very prepared. slightly out of hand. But I have a real When we came to the first rehearsal admiration for him. There's something with Bob Mulligan, we were already in character. We had a fantastic first read- in him that's very gentle, very decent. ing. I kept thinking, \"God, are we ever going to get this back?\" In rehearsal, He's got a good nose for falseness. He Bob was extremely open to his charac- ters. Then he would be very closed . doesn't miss a thing. Mr. Cukor is much more constant in How did you feel about the kissing personality. He didn't over-direct. He left us a lot of freedom in places. Cer- scene at the end ofthe picture? tain places he was very particular about, the timing and stuff, but there I didn't want to kiss her on the were scenes where he hardly said any- thing at all. There were places where I mouth. Knowing the way the public is, would have liked to have been allowed to play it with more depth. The pace they could say, \"Oh, that was the works for the movie overall in a come- dic sense, but at times I felt there were point, they were two dykes. \" Candy moments that I would have played a little more internally. and I both felt that it was a friendship But there's a great joie de vivre in kiss. They do love each other. Basi- cally, that's all they've got left. Though I think Liz [Bisset's character] is still ready to try again. [After seeing the film at a private screening with Cukor, Katharine Hepburn said, \"If I had done that scene, I would have taken her by the shoulders, pulled her to- ward me, and really kissed her.\"] What was the scene the studio wanted to cut after the preview? There was a discussion of a sexy scene with the young boy [Matt Lat- tanzi]. Some of them were bothered by that scene because they liked my char- acter and didn't know why she'd pick up a young guy. He picks her up, re- ally. I said, \"God, don't cut that scene, that's what the film is about. She does things like this. She's full of self-loath- ing and she has to be humiliated. \" Sometimes people are unsympathetic. Maybe I like being unsympathetic, I don't know. [MGM executives] David Chasman and Begelman said, \"We've got a good film, let's not correct it into a flop.\" -J. MeB. & T. MeC. 45

TANAM PRESS Smith spent her life pining away for Rob- ert Stephens. Is there anything that drew FASSBINDER you to this theme? A monograph on the filmmaker, Rainer Werner fassbinder. No, no, I think that was funny. Ro- Included in the volume arc essays by Peter lden, Yaak Kar- bert Stephens was a cad. That was sunke, Ruth McCormick, Wilfried Wiegand, and Wolfram charming. There were a lot of plays that Schutte; an interview with the filmmaker by W il fried Wie- I did before, serious plays, that now I gand; an extensive filmography with synopses of all films; think are funny. and 90 photographs. 256pagcs. 5 ~~.\\ 8 ' \" How do you feel about The Blue Bird paperback (smyt he-sell'n) $8. 95. harclcoI'cr $ I 6.95 in retrospect? A I'ailablc October 15. Well, I did the best I could. We tried. If it didn't work, it didn't work. It was a APPARATUS hopeless thing to be in. It was too fuck- ing sweet. I'm remembering all these A collection of writings on the cinematographic apparatus. things which I had safely forgotten! The subject is approached from the point of view of critica l analysis and also from the point of view of film practice. In- What happened to Vicki, the film you cluded in the volume are works by: Bertrand Augst, Roland were going to make with Faye Dunaway Barthes, Jean-Louis Baudry, Theresa Hak Kyung.Cha, Maya several years ago about the nineteenth- Deren, Christian Metz, Jean-Marie Straub / Daniele H uillet. century feminist Victoria Woodhull? Marc Vernet and Dziga Vertov . Edited by Theresa Hak Kyung Chao That was an unfortunate thing. 4 16 pages. 5 ' c x 8 ~: James Costigan wrote an extremely paperback (smythe-sewn) 59.95. 1JardcoI\"Cr 518.95 good script, and I thought it would have made a bang-up picture, but the pro- A l 'ailabJc NOI'elll ber 15. ducer [George Barrie], for various rea- sons best known to him, didn't. He had OF WALKING ON ICE Werner Herzog to pay me off. \"At the end of November 1974, German filmmaker Werner What about the character excited you? Herzog had received word that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill She had a sister, and together the two in Paris and on the verge of dying. Determined not to \"per- of them were so funny. They were real mit her death,\" he decided to walk from Munich to Paris, adventuresses. believing that she would stay alive if he came on foot. Of Vicki sounds like the kind of role Hep- 'Va/king in Ice is Herzog's journal of his walk, which was to burn could have played in her youth. turn into a 22-day-long agony of mind and body . Herzog has Yes, except that it was a little more woven a canvas of surrea l imagery punctured by fragment s of sluttish than Kate would play. Kate's ordinary events and flashbacks. Herzog himself appears as a too intelligent. kind of Beekettian anti-hero who, walking through mud, Victoria Woodhull was the first woman hail, and snowstorm ('the Lower Orders ' ), 'stumbles forward who ranfor president ofthe U.S. in the darkness' ('the Great Calamity'); he becomes loneliness But that was just nothing. She also in a universe filled with 'Nothing . .. the Yawning Black Void,' did a lot of fucking. They were a bad with the 'Grotesque ... crowding everywhere on this earth.' lot, the two of these girls. This excellent translation is suitable for readers at all academ - What did you think of the character of ic le vels .\"-CHOICE George Cukor in the TV miniseries Mov- 96 pages. 5 x 8 iola? He was a dummy, wasn't he? A nice paperback 5-4.95, hardcovcr S10.95 man, but a dummy, always running around after whoever the boss was, say- SCREENPLAYS Werner Herzog ing, \"Oh yes, yes.\" He was the shits! Do you see a lot ofcu\"ent pictures? This volume contains the original treatment s, narrative texts. Yes, I do, not as many as I should. for the films, Aguirre, the Wrach of God and EI 'cry Alan fo r They're very stimulating. When I see a Himself and God Against All: and a record of the dialogue talented picture, that's a thrill. I'm all from the film, Land of Silence and Darkness. for the young people who like to see 208 pages. 5 x 8 movies. I'm a real movie fan as well. paperback $5.95. hardcol'er 5 I 1.95 But not a mad movie fan. What films have stimulated you in the ORDERING INFOIU\\IA TION: ac1cln:ss lIlail orders to Lilli/ill lastfew years? Press -40 White St. N\\'C N\\' 10013; catalog prices illclude shipping I've always liked Paul Morrissey's and postage : N \\ ' rcsiclcllh aelel 8 '\" u'o ti/X; send paYIIl ell t ill the (orlll pictures. He's very gifted. I don't think o( check or money order. he's a man who has got his just deserts. And he was cheated out of a lot of his 46 money. He's not a shrewd customer. He's not hard-boiled. You're a member ofthe Motion Picture Academy Foreign Film Committee,

which gives a luncheon every yearfor the 't1&. 11\"' '8t...8atl...1 foreign directors. 't...., •• •s What's very touching about that is that for the most part, the foreign direc- tII.laail•• tors are absolutely thrilled to meet these old directors. Names they've The latest and best of international animation from all over the world. A .sixteen·film package including heard since they were very young. I Cannes Film Festival Winner. HARPYA from Belgium; Academy Award Nominees DREAM DOLL (from think that's very, very nice. Britain} and IT'S SO NICE TO HAVE A WOLF AROUND .THE HOUSE (from the US}; Annecy Film Festival Grand·Prix Winner. APRES LA VIE (from the National Film Board of Canada} . You have a sense of history. You don't A fe~ture·length program available for rental from : live in the past, but you revere it. 4530 18th Street You must revere the past. You must San Francisco. Calif. 94114 have a sense of proportion. (415} 863-6100 When Hepburn visits with you, do you look at ofthe films you made together? COLLECTOR SWEATSHIRTS No, but she looks at them. She has all the pictures, and she has a brother-in- AND TEES law who has a projection room. I don't FOR like to look at the pictures. They always disappoint me. MOVIE LOVERS Do you and Hepburn have any more Tee·Shlft of th e Month BYE BYE films you'd like to do together? Full-color on white - exclusive tee from Carlos Diegues' enchanting new film, a No, I wish we did. But suddenly carnaval of color. they may turn up. ,h.rr.n.: \" Long live Ih. young Mullt. All-cotton designer silkscreened tees. Cocteau Any other projects you have in mind? (navY or black); Hitchcock (wheat or black); Rath· Yes, I have one. Sophia Loren would Cinema, lor po...sa., 'h. my.- bonee's Sherlock Holmes (3 colors on tan); The love to do Anna Karenina for TV. She ,.,1., 01 • dr.em end .1I0w, the Stunt Man (6 colors on white); Happy Birthday came here to talk about it. I'm very Garbo (navy) ; Skating Chaplin (5 colors on yellow interested. She'd be lovely in it. And unr••llo become' , ••1,\" or white). Also avail. but not illustrated: Phantom Vronsky is a very good character. Tol- - Je.n CoCI•• u 01 the Opera (2 colors on wheat or white) ; 7th Seal stoy ain't a bad writer. So far they have (navy on It. blue or silver on black). 5(34-36), said no. They probably thought it was M(38-40), L(42-44) , XL(46·48), $8.95. Sweatshirts: old hat. But I haven't really tried yet. (white or black only), $14.95. Unisex French-cut Any theatricalfilm projects? po/yeotton tees: 5(30-32), M(34-36) , L(38-40), XL No. You make plans and they don't (42·44) , $9.95 Add 75c/ehlrt POlt. & hdlg. ($1 .50 happen. I'll just wipe this out of my Canada) 3 or more - add SOC/shirt. Cal. res . add hair, and then we'll see what happens. 6% tax. Wholesale inquiries invited . Something interesting should turn up. How did you feel when Daily Variety LITERA·TEE SHIRT CO. Dept. FC 5 Box ran a story last year saying you were the oldest man ever to direct a major feature film? I'm very thrilled! But it really didn't make all that much difference. As one gets older, you slow down and you get slightly gaga. But I don't feel that at the moment. You have no thoughts ofretirement? No, no. I don't see why people do it if they're well and they're not gaga. I don't know why they would want to. Maybe they haven't got the vitality. You have to have an awful lot of strength to go through a movie. How did you find this experience? Tough. Tough. But I did it. Happily. The late films of great directors often are among their best work. Really? Not only yours, but Ford's and Bu- iiuei's, for example. Oh, they're wonderful directors. Older directors seem to have a kind of··· Wisdom?~ 47

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