Akira Kurosawa

THE FILMS OF AKIRA KUROSAWA

The iconoclastic filmmaker who put the Japanese CInema on the map is still going strong

By TOM SOTER

from DIVERSION, NOVEMBER 1991

Dubbed "Red Beard," he is a 19th-century Japanese doctor with an unusual approach.

"This girl is sick," he says gruffly to the 12-year-old patient's foster parent, a woman who runs a brothel. "I will take her."

"You will not!" screams the woman, who has been beating the girl for not doing her chores. "Help!"

Six or seven tough-looking characters turn up. "Who do you think you are?" cries one. "Sticking your nose where it's not wanted? Get out!"

Red Beard, a big man, strokes his beard slowly. "I'm a doctor. 1 come to see sick people." The toughs threaten him, but he is unfazed, warning them in turn: "You be careful, too. You'll kick off if you let the doctors at you. 1 won't kill you, but 1 might break a couple of arms and legs."

Suddenly, a fast-paced fight breaks out in which Dr. Red Beard uses karate and jujitsu to shatter limbs and crack skulls. When it's over, the medico examines the moaning victims, shaking his head. "Hmmm," he says to his assistant. "I'm afraid I went a bit too far. I should've been more careful. A doctor must not do such things."

Indeed. The scene is from Red Beard, director Akira Kurosawa's funny, fascinating, and moving film about physicians in a slum clinic who do whatever it takes to help their patients. It is typical of a filmmaker who often combines subtle humor with searing drama, and gripping social protest with hard-hitting action. His movies, ranging from dark parables of postnuclear destruction to gentle fantasies of family life, are all crafted with a style and sensibility uniquely his own. The 81-year-old Kurosawa is in the news these days because of Rhapsody in August,scheduled- for release next month, his 29th feature since 1943. It is his first film to star an American actor, Richard Gere, but what is most controversial is the subject: Rhapsody calls the atomic bombing of Nagasaki a terrorist act. "At one point or another," wrote The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, "there is something in it to offend everybody." Kurosawa began shaking people up in 1951 when he put the Japanese film industry on the map with Rashomon. Contrary to expectations, that 88-minute examination of the subjectivity of truth took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and established Kurosawa as a force in world,cinema.

Directors under the Influence
Since then, the director's effect on Hollywood has been as profound as Tinseltown's influence was on him: Filmmakers Howard Hawks, George Stevens, and John Ford may have . moved Kurosawa (who has adapted Shakespeare, Gorky, Dostoyevsky, and thriller writer Ed McBain), but he in tum inspired such directors as George Lucas (The Hidden Fortress became Star Wars); Sergio Leone (Yojimbo was remade as A Fistful of Dollars, the western that turned Clint Eastwood into a star); Martin Ritt (Rashomon became The Outrage, with Paul Newman); and John Sturges (The Seven Samurai was reborn as The Magnificent Seven with Steve McQueen); as well as screenwriter John Sayles (who used The Seven Samurai as the basis for the sci-fi film, Battle Beyond the Stars).

Born in 1910, the last of seven children, young Akira never dreamed of filmmaking. He loved American movies, especially such action-packed serials as Hurricane Hutch and The Iron Claw, but studied to be a painter. He found job prospects bleak, however, and later admitted, "I couldn't make a living that way .... Even a tube of red paint was usually too expensive for me." He studied calligraphy, swordsmanship, music, and theater. In 1935, desperate for work, he answered an ad for assistant directors at a local film studio. Told to write an essay on the deficiencies of, and possible cures for, the Japanese movie industry, he approached the task with the informed skepticism that would later become a hallmark of his films: "I thought to myself, if the defect is basic, how do you remedy it?"

Nonetheless, he wrote the essay and got the job, working on all facets of filmmaking, from set design anrl scripting to lighting and assistant directing. He loved it. "I was standing in the mountain pass," he recalled in his book Something Like An Autobiography, "and the view that opened up before me on the other side revealed a single, straight road." By 1943, after penning dozens of scripts, Kurosawa was ready to direct his first feature, Sanshiro Sugata, a remarkable debut that set the style and laid out the themes of much of his future work. The story depicts the spiritual and moral dilemmas of Sanshiro (Susumu Fujita) as he masters the art of judo. The visually striking climax, staged on a windswept, cloudy mountain, finds the young hero squaring off against the forces of darkness: a mustachioed character (Ryunosuke Tsukigata) who eschews traditional Japanese clothing for western-style suits.

East Meets West, Sort of
It was a jab at modernization, although Kurosawa always seemed to be ambivalent about both the East and the West. Fighting against complacency and corruption, but also respecting tradition, he quickly became a strange mixture of cultures, a man who took values, ideas, and techniques wherever he found them. During his youth, he once recalled, "everything came rushing in from abroad at an incredible rate. We all tried to absorb this as quickly as possible--western literature, painting, music, art. So it's all part of my makeup and comes to the surface very naturally."

That eclecticism helped him create a cinema that was typically Japanese in its concern for appearance, class, and tradition, but typically western in its obsessions with individuality and selfexpression. No wonder: Kurosawa's formative years as a filmmaker were postWorld War II, when a broken Japan was occupied by an American force promoting its own version of democracy.

The clash of cultural ideas led to arresting work: Stray Dog, about a young policeman (Toshiro Mifune) searching through a cross section of black-market Tokyo for his stolen gun; Rashomon, the visually stunning exploration of illusion; and Ikiru, a moving saga of a dying bureaucrat's (Takashi Shimura) search for meaning in life. All feature striking images, some that are impossible to forget: Throne of Blood's climax in which a forest moves and a man becomes a pincushion full of arrows; Ran's soundless montage of destruction, scored to woeful music; Ikiru's saddest, yet most life-affirming moment, when the dying Watanabe sits on a swing, watching the snow fall and sings the dirgelike, "Life Is Too Short. "

Although each movie is different, all are united by Kurosawa's favorite idea:the lonely hero fighting impossible odds or battling with himself and/or the illusions of the world in a quest for truth. The films, wrote Stephen Prince in The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, "caution against resignation in the face of social oppression and offer heroes whose rebelliousness is meant as a role model for the audience."

These Zen-like journeys of self reliance frequently involve an older figure and a novice because "I like unformed characters," the director noted in his autobiography. "This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself. In any case, it is in watching someone unformed enter the path to perfection _ that my fascination knows no bounds. For this reason, beginners often appear as main characters in my films."

Mifune Also Rises
Chief among them, from 1948 to 1965, was Toshiro Mifune, a volatile, versatile presence who became an international star under Kurosawa's tutelage. His considerable characters range has included the young police officer, racked by guilt in Stray Dog; the blustering, cowardly rapist in Rashomon; the proud, ambitious, and terrified killer in Throne of Blood; the heroic, Errol Flynn-style general of The Hidden Fortress; the good man, obsessed with revenge but destroyed by his own humanity in The Bad Sleep Well; and the toothpick-chewing, unshaven samuraifor-hire in Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

"Mifune can safely take credit for smashing, almost single-handedly, the passive/impassive mask of tragedy image of the Japanese that lingered in the West since the silent days of Sessue Hayakawa," claimed Carlos Clarens in the Village Voice in 1984. "Whether impossibly noble or bestial, the Japanese were misrepresented all along as barbaric people. Mifune played on the occidental viewer's untapped reserves of identification by showing his race as both humorous and highly emotional, and he accomplished this feat with a system of grunts and glowers that were language at its most communicative."

Humor is key in Kurosawa, because comedy often reveals character, which is another major ingredient in the director's work. Yojimbo is a black comedy of violence, as Mifune's mangy samurai-for-hire sets about destroying an evil town because, as he says, "Better if all these men were dead. Think about it." Dodes' ka-den, a film about the illusions that help slum dwellers stay alive, is only bearable because of its quirky touches of humor. And the epic Seven Samurai is endlessly enjoyable not for the brilliantly staged battle scenes in the rain, but for the marvelous range of its seven characters, from the sardonic samurai (Minoru Chiaki) who chops wood for a living ("It's a lot harder than killing enemies," he remarks) to the rambunctious farmer's son (Mifune) who wants to be a warrior but doesn't know how.

Mifune in The Quiet Duel.

The Seven Samurai, which examines, among other things, the futility of heroism, finds Kurosawa at his best. The plot is simple: A pathetic village of farmers hires seven unemployed samurai to defend them against forty brigands. But the depiction is wonderfully complex, a miniature that could be taken from life, as high drama quickly turns to comedy, then tragedy, then pathos, and then back into comedy again. Through it all, there is an underlying hope in man's humanity, in his ability to understand and overcome the obstacles he faces. ''The Kurosawa hero is distinguished by his perseverance, by his refusal to be defeated," noted Donald Richie in The Films of Akira Kurosawa. Indeed, there is no better example than Kurosawa himself: Beset by career obstacles in a Japan reluctant to fund his work, he survived a suicide attempt in 1971 and continued making movies, often with foreign cofinancing. And if his later films have become more bitter and less hopeful, it is perhaps because Kurosawa loves mankind too strongly and too well. "I want to question the way we are going. Are we right?" he asked in a 1980 television documentary, despairing at what we are becoming and at his inability to change us for the better.

"In times of the most intransigent apathy, his challenge seems too great, or perhaps too simple," wrote British film critic Derek Malcolm in 1986. "He asks us to better ourselves, not with material possessions but by defining what is right and then doing it, at whatever the cost."

Business Films

James Bond, corporate hero? Sean Connery and Lois Maxwell.

 

MANAGEMENT AND THE MOVIES

By TOM SOTER

from MANAGEMENT REVIEW, 1996

The Chase Manhattan Bank, eliminating 16 percent of its jobs over three years, claims it is replacing a “paternalistic organization” with a company that will “assist the employee by sharpening skills.” A woman who has lost her position after years at one firm observes, “It’s like growing up. There’s no more Santa Claus.”

A corporate raider defends what he does by noting, “Debt can be an asset. Debt tightens a company.” A man who has lost his job complains, “After 28 years at IBM, I was surplus...You don’t see it coming.”

Grim economic news from the corporate world? Well, yes, but not all of it is real. The first example is from The New York Times’ week-long “Downsizing of America” series in March 1996, while the second comes from two movies (Barbarians at the Gate, 1993, and Disclosure, 1995). But in both cases, the stories are telling the same tale: heartless management is out to get you, the helpless worker. So has it always been. So will it always be.

Or has it? The popular impression of management gleaned the movies seems to have been relentlessly negative. Corporate executives are back-stabbing, smarmy, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, dishonest, and amoral. And that’s on a good day.

“Capitalism has always had a bad image,” observed business columnist Robert Samuelson in a recent Newsweek story. “No system based on the profit motive (a.k.a. “greed”) is a crowd pleaser...the largest source of misunderstanding about capitalism is the belief that most companies don’t care about long-term relationships. They’re eager to fire workers, shut plants and ditch suppliers in an instant to improve profits. Human values recede before rampant ‘short-termism.’ As with most stereotypes, this one is often true and sometimes tragically so...”

That impression has also been fed by recent movies. Wall Street (1987) purportedly exposed the corrupt world of corporate takeovers and the inhuman nature of American businessmen, who were more interested in profits and the game of buying and selling than in people’s lives or in producing something useful. The film’s villain, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), is the epitome of that breed, the takeover king who intoxicates and then corrupts young commodities trader Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) with the aroma of power and all that it brings. “Greed is good,” Gekko says. “Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

Charlie Sheen (left) and Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

Barbarians at the Gate made the point just as effectively, and was also, purportedly, based on the actual buyout story of the R.J. Reynolds company in 1988. The TV-movie looks at the thrill of power and the greed, one-upmanship, and free-floating cash involved in such deals. It is business as game, the 20th Century way to prove manhood. It depicts a world where everyone cheats on everyone else and where a corporate raider admits he’s more interested in the macho stakes involved in acquiring a business than in its products. “It’s not the company,” he says. “It’s the credibility...I can’t just sit on the bench and let them play my game.”

Hollywood seems to be feeding popular impressions of businessmen as bad guys. But it isn’t quite that cut and dried. In fact, the image of management in the movies has undergone a curious evolution over the last 70 years, from hero to villain to something somewhere in between.

In the Beginning Was the Hero
In beginning, the businessman was not seen as inherently bad person. After all, as Calvin Coolidge observed, “the business of America is business.” In such early efforts at The Saphead (1920), Buster Keaton was shown as a naive innocent who saves his father’s business by becoming a Wall Street hero. And in American Madness (1932), Walter Huston plays Thomas Dickson, the head of a bank and also champion of the common man. As journalist Joseph McBride observed in Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, “Dickson believes in loaning money on character, or what he called ‘hunches,’ to small businessmen he trusts. ‘Jones is no risk,’ he says of one of them, ‘nor are the thousands of other Joneses throughout the country. It’s they who have built this nation to be the richest in the world, and it’s up to the banks to give them a break.’”

Dickson is a common sense financier (“The trouble with this country is that there’s too much hoarded cash,” he says. “I tell you, we’ve got to get the money in circulation before you’ll get this country back to prosperity”) and as such he fits the picture of benevolent businessman that dominated in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Dodsworth (1936), based on a Sinclair Lewis novel, found Walter Huston in a similar role as a sympathetic corporate leader who is, in the words of critic Jim Hitt, a “reserved and kindly manufacturer...[the movie] explored the possibility of whether a man could be a builder and also remain artistic and humane...”

In such films, business leaders knew how to take advantage of a good idea, and usually that put the smart business hero on the side of the little man. In Miracle on 34th Street (1947), corporate bigwig R.H. Macy allows his storefront Santa Claus to promote his competition and help his customers because it is a swell marketing ploy. And in My Man Godfrey (1936) the wealthy hero Godfrey (William Powell) is able to find work for the homeless by converting a useless city dump into a swank nightclub.

By the 1950s, the corporate hero was still doing good. Executive Suite (1954) is the best and most inspiring example. The boardroom drama depicts the competition for leadership in a major furniture manufacturing company after its charismatic leader suddenly dies. Who will guide the company? A visionary like Walling (William Holden) who loves the company for the great things it has done for ordinary people, or a bean-counter like Shaw (Frederic March) who is more concerned about returning maximum profit to the investors? Although Shaw’s view may be more dominant in the real-world ‘90s, Walling’s opinion is still more appealing.

“We have a bigger obligation than raising the dividend,” Walling says to the board. “We have an obligation to keep the company alive. Sometimes you have to use your profits for the growth of the company, not pay them all out in dividends to impress the stockholders with your management record...Turn your back on experimentation and you won’t have a tomorrow...The force behind a great company has to be more than the pride of one man, it has to be the pride of thousands. You can’t make men work for money alone. You starve their souls when you try it. And you can starve a company to death the same way.”

Similar issues are addressed in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956), showing how a great business leader must sacrifice his family – and his personal happiness – for the greater good of the company. He is the businessman as tragic hero. And even though the movie is generally positive about business, it does hint at deeper hypocrisy that exists.

“You offer qualified contradictory statements and watch your man’s face to see which pleases him,” Tom Rath (Gregory Peck) explains to his wife. “For instance, you can begin, ‘I think there are some wonderful things in this speech’ then you pause for a second or two. If that seems to make him happy, you go on...but if he looks a little startled on the word wonderful, then you switch and say, ‘But on the whole I don’t think it quite comes off.’ If you’ve been smart enough about it, you can wind up telling him exactly what he wants to hear. You’ve got to protect yourself.”

Clouds on the Horizon
Although generally positive until the late ‘50s, there were always a few clouds in filmdom’s sunny picture of the corporate world. From Germany, Fritz Lang’s silent science-fiction epic Metropolis (1926), took a negative view of the corporate-capitalist picture. In it, uniformed workers labor monotonously below ground, while the rich management types enjoy the fruits of those efforts in opulent surroundings. When the son of the “Master Industrialist” asks his dad about the inequity he is tersely rebuffed.

“It was their hands which built this city of ours, father,” says the youth. “But where are these hands in your scheme?”

“In their place,” replies the industrialist. “In the depths.”

Topaze (1933), based on a French novel, was just as negative, showing how the kindly, honest schoolteacher hero Auguste Topaze (John Barrymore) is corrupted by the unsavory practices of a corrupt business world. In fact, the movie was a precursor of the negative business images that would dominate in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The British-born Charlie Chaplin was perhaps the most cynical of all. His Modern Times (1936) depicted the dehumanizing effects of assembly-line work, while the even darker Monsieur Verdoux (1947) equates the cold-hearted businessman with the equally cold-hearted murderer.

Preston Sturges was among the first American screenwriter-directors to poke fun at the absurdity of business practices with Christmas in July (1940). In it, his protagonist Jimmy (Dick Powell) is tricked into thinking he has won a Maxford House Coffee slogan contest and a $25,000 prize. Even though his slogan is nonsensical (“If you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee, it’s the bunk”), his success convinces others that he is a genius and soon his boss has given him a promotion and wants him to come up with other slogans. In the movie, business is seen as a place where people are uncertain of their own ideas, fearful of breaking out from the assembly line of production or of ever being daring.

“I didn’t hang onto my father’s money by backing my own judgment,” explains the boss to Jimmy. “You know, I make mistakes every day...You see, I think your ideas are good because they sound good to me. But I know your ideas are good because you won this contest...over millions of aspirants...it’s what you might call commercial insurance, as when a horse wins the Derby, you back him for the Preakness.”

The Man in the White Suit (1951) was even darker, showing how management and labor were not benign at all but actively opposed to the common good. In the movie, they join forces to suppress an invention that would benefit all mankind.

Corruption Is Only the Beginning
Cinematically, things only got worse. As cold corporate thinking became more dominant in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a real world counter-culture began developing. Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1972) talked about “the betrayal of the American dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960s, and the way in which the State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man.” To Reich, the corporate state was “an immensely powerful machine, ordered...rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.”

To address the new audience, movies in the ‘60s began depicting the corporation and management as working not for the state but for its own selfish interests. The Apartment (1960) shows the corporate world as an amoral swamp, in which executives take advantage of employees under them. In this case, the moral nebbish, Baxter (Jack Lemmon), works his way to the top not by sleeping with others but by letting his superiors use his apartment as a night spot for their trysts with their secretaries. How to Succeed in Business Without Even Trying (1967) goes even further in its satire, by celebrating the amorality of its hero. To many, James Bond is the ultimate corporate hero (see box).

Other filmmakers were not so sanguine about what they saw as the evil of the executive suite. Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa skewered big business, elevating corrupt management practices to the level of tragedy in The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Here, the hero (Toshiro Mifune) is a good man who must become bad to destroy the evil executives. "I cannot hate enough," he says at one point; at another: "You can't catch evil men by lawful means." The movie is a dark parable about terrible times in which to destroy the bad you must become even worse. Kurosawa holds out little hope for love, for goodness, for any of the charitable feelings to win out. Underneath big business’s facade of gentility, manners, and respectability lie horror and decay.Akira Kurosawa (in hat) with Toshiro Mifune in The Bad Sleep Well.

The dehumanizing effect of the Corporate State became a popular staple of paranoid parables, both on the big screen and on television. Three Days of the Condor (1975) found the corporation as The Company (CIA), where no one could be trusted and paranoia is the way of life (see also The Trial, 1963; 1984, 1984; and Brazil, 1985). On television, The Prisoner (1967) found the hero’s name replaced by a number as Big Brother controlled his every move. More recently, the Corporate State pursues TV’s Nowhere Man, erasing his identity as easily as some would swat a fly.

Times They Are A’Changing
If Hollywood needs villains, business types have made easy targets. Corporate critics like Chrysler CEO Robert Eaton has charged that articles like the New York Times’ “Downsizing of America” and films like Wall Street could lead to the “demonizing of corporate America.” But he needn’t worry. The truth is that Hollywood has not really abandoned the pro-business stance it demonstrated in American Madness and Executive Suite. Instead, it has modified it, trying, as always, to have it both ways.

Today’s movies about management, though laced with a savvy cynicism, are ultimately positive about the system, arguing that good will win out. Disclosure and Wall Street both find many top businessmen corrupt, but demonstrate that street smarts and integrity will triumph. In Big (1988), the company president (Robert Loggia) is seen as savvy enough to understand that charts and graphs are not the answer; a company has to have heart, as well – and he recognizes a kindred soul in the hero (Tom Hanks). And in Local Hero (1983), the oil corporation’s leader (Burt Lancaster) is so sympathetic to environmental questions that he changes his plans to construct an oil refinery.

Even Other People’s Money (1991), ostensibly an indictment of the amoral tactics of buyout king Larry the Liquidator (Danny De Vito) eventually comes out on the side of business. Larry, despicable as he is to some, is also shown as a forward thinker: he studies the successful Japanese and speaks their language, loves to play the violin, and is a romantic misanthrope. In the end, the company he acquires is not liquidated at all but turned to a more productive – and profitable – line of work. Larry’s tactics are validated.

Certainly there are still corporate villains in film. The boss is not interested in business but self and sex in such movies as 9 to 5 (1980), The Secret of My Success (1987), and Working Girl (1988). But in all three films, the spunky heroes, through gumption, intuition, and hard work succeed in getting to the top, showing that skill, though initially ignored, will eventually be appreciated by the corporation. In Success, the young hero (Michael J. Fox) is admired because he is full of energy, takes bold steps, and also looks for unorthodox solutions. He is a good thinker, but not recognized as such by his stuffed shirt bosses. The movie shows how wrong they are. “You did more in two months than most people do in a lifetime,” one admirer tells him.

As Janine Jackson, in Extra magazine points out about media coverage of business and its practices, such movies underscore the commonly held conservative idea that “a person’s economic circumstances are mostly a matter of individual effort. This pervasive theme was stated at one point [in the New York Times series on downsizing] as ‘the lesson, heard again and again [is] that while government and business can do some things, in the end, workers have little to fall back on but themselves.’”

In fact, such business films often reflect the feelings expressed by a character in Christmas in July, when she explains to the hard-hearted businessman why he should give her fiance a chance at a corporate position: “He belongs in here because he thinks he belongs in here...He belongs in here because he thinks he has ideas. He belongs in here until he proves himself or fails, and then somebody else belongs in here until he proves himself or fails...It’s one thing to muff a chance when you get it...but it’s another thing never to have had a chance...”

And in Hollywood, dream capital of the world, every employee can get that chance, usually to great success. Sigh. Brooklyn Bridge, anyone?

JAMES BOND,
COMPANY MAN

James Bond may be a glamorous fantasy figure to some, but to others, he is just another corporate 9 to 5 man. As Drew Moniot observes in his introduction to my book Bond and Beyond: 007 and Other Special Agents (Image Press), Secret Agent 007 is actually “a servant, of sorts – a cog in the intricate machinery of [his superior] M’s espionage bureau.”

Moniot notes that Bond is an office worker: “Unlike such counterparts as Derek Flint or Matt Helm who appear to be independently wealthy playboys, James Bond has much in common with the average audience member. He holds down a 9 to 5 office job and is part of an organizational enterprise. He is a manipulated and exploited employee, whose existence has been reduced to the contents of a manila folder in a gray metal cabinet. Though Bond is occasionally called upon to carry out dangerous and exciting missions, the escape from the routine will be only temporary and he will eventually return to the routine within the offices of Universal Export (the corporate front for the British Secret Service).”

Concludes Moniot: “In the end, Bond does not really destroy the Corporate State itself. He himself is part of [it]...and at the end of each adventure he returns to assume his proper place within that organization.”

WHY HOLLYWOOD SAYS
YOU SHOULD FEAR THE BOSS

Afraid of the boss? According to Hollywood, you should be. After all, he can steal your ideas (Working Girl),
erase your identity (The Prisoner), frame you and fire you (Disclosure), use your home as his brothel (The Apartment), try to kill you (Three Days of the Condor).
Be afraid. Be very, very afraid...

A Christmas Carol

GREAT SCROOGES OF CHRISTMAS PAST

By TOM SOTER
from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, December 21, 1990

Who can say ''humbug'' to "A Christmas Carol"? Charles Dickens' enduring tale of goodness redeemed and greed transformed is one of the best-loved treasures of the holiday season. First issued in 1843 over the objections of a skeptical publisher, the story eventually inspired radio broadcasts, record albums, cartoons, and nearly a dozen films, the first released in 1908. Here are some of the best movie interpretations of Scrooge-and Tiny Tim, too.

A Christmas Carol (United, 1951) Scripted by a screenwriter with a love for Dickens' dialogue and a gift for adaptation (among his credits, The Wizard of Oz), this black-and-white British-made movie emphasized the psychological over the spiritual, adding new scenes that depict Scrooge as a complex, tragic Everyman so afraid of poverty that he betrays his kindly employer and abandons his fiancee. Alastair Sim (above, left) is the definitive Scrooge-amusing and frightening at the same time. And watch for The Avengers' Patrick Macnee in a small part as the young Marley. A+

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol (Paramount, 1962) A perennial TV favorite, this musical cartoon features the near-sighted Quincy Magoo (with Jim Backus' voice) as Scrooge. The charming Jule Styne-Bob Merrill tunes include ''I'm All Alone in the World'' and ''Razzleberry Dressing.'' Bob Cratchit, incidentally, is a George Jetson lookalike. B-

Scrooge (CBS/Fox, 1970) This top-notch family musical works wonderfully when it is faithful to the original tale and fails when it gets too cute. Lots of singing (tunes by Leslie Bricusse), dancing, and glossy good cheer, with a hammy turn as Scrooge by Albert Finney, who scrunches up his face a lot. B+

An American Christmas Carol (Vestron, 1979) Happy Days' Henry (the Fonz) Winkler is surprisingly effective as the miser at ages 22, 36, and 68 in an adaptation set in Depression-era New England. A thrilling reinterpretation that captures the spirit if not the letter of Dickens' original. A

Mickey's Christmas Carol (Disney, 1984) Post-Walt Disney at its best, with ^ fluid, colorful animation suggesting life on every frame. Always exciting to watch, even when the slapstick scenes deviate from the original, this Christmas Carol delightfully captures the magic, humor, and sense of wonder that are so much a part of both Dickens and Disney. A

Scrooged (Paramount, 1988) This underappreciated '80s update features Bill Murray as a heartless TV exec who learns the meaning of Christmas while casting a could-be-real network version of Dickens' story (the cast: Buddy Hackett as Scrooge and Olympic star Mary Lou Retton as a backflipping Tiny Tim). In a comic high point, the cynical Murray creates a hilariously misleading promo for his Carol that utilizes violent action clips and ominous narration: ''Acid rain. Drug addiction. International terrorism. Freeway killers. Now more than ever it is important to remember the true meaning of Christmas. Don't miss Scrooge. Your life might just depend on it.'' A+

Academy Awards

OSCAR NOMINATIONS
By TOM SOTER
from MOVIE TIMES, December 1995

Cary Grant never won an Oscar. Hollywood's consummate leading man is not alone, either: scores of great actors (Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo), directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee), and pictures (Grand Illusion, The Color Purple) have been ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at Oscar time, while some amazing oddities have taken the top prizes (who here remembers 1937's best picture, The Life of Emile Zola?)

Everyone loves to moan about the idiosyncratic winners and losers at Hollywood's annual gala of self-congratulation, the Oscar Award ceremonies. But there is a method to the madness: every January, nomination ballots go out to the 13 branches of the Academy. Its more than 4,755 members then nominate by branch (actors pick actors, writers choose writers), except in the case of best picture, which everyone selects. After that, a series of screenings of the nominated films is set up for voters.

Many Academy watchers say choices get skewed because the membership is by and large conservative, conventional, and sentimental, usually preferring costumed epics (Gandhi, The Last Emperor) to unsettling dramas (Five Easy Pieces, Apocalypse Now). But others claim the skewing goes deeper than that, since outside of documentaries, shorts, and foreign flicks, the Academy offers no guarantees that the voters have actually screened the movies they pick. If you think choosing movies without having seen them is odd, well, hey, welcome to Hollywood.

Alfred Hitchcock

Janet Leigh in Psycho.
THE MASTER OF SUSPENSE
Please put all kitchen knives out of sight. It's Alfred Hitchcock's birthday.

By TOM SOTER
from DIVERSION, FEBRUARY 1999

When I heard the news that Gus Van Sant, director of Good Will Hunting, was doing a shot-by-shot remake of Psycho (1960), I said, "But why?" Surely everyone has seen or knows of the classic horror movie, in which a young woman (Janet Leigh) drives to a motel and is brutally stabbed in the shower by the mother of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Only it isn't really his mother, you see...

Nonetheless, Van Sant is apparently on to something. When talking with Eva, my 17-year-old niece, about the latest Halloween movie in which Leigh appeared with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, I said, "Of course, you remember Janet Leigh from Psycho."

She didn't. Because she had never seen Psycho. Because she didn't watch "old, black-and-white movies."

Shocking - but, then, shocking is what Alfred Hitchcock, the directorial mastermind behind Psycho, was partly about: shocks, suspense, thrills, comedy, and, above all else, "pure cinema." And, as far as cinema goes, "Hitch" and his influence on modern moviemaking have been profound.

"How many appreciate that almost every innovation in the cinema - including the many trendy artifices of fashionable young directors in recent years, such as jump-cutting, overlapping sound, freeze frames, slowed-down action - was anticipated years earlier by Hitchcock?" asks George Perry in his book Hitchcock.

The director, who died nearly two decades ago, would have been 100 this year. Yet the rotund director with the macabre sense of humor seems to have never left. Like a character in one of his suspense thrillers, Hitch has seemingly defied death.

The peak of early Hitchcock.
Consider the evidence. In July 1998, there was a special laser disc box set of Psycho , full of extras; August followed with a Hitchcock postal stamp; October saw the first CD release of the newly recorded score to Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955); in November, ABC aired a TV remake of Rear Window (1954), starring Christopher Reeve; and in December, Gus Van Sant offered his retelling of Psycho; starring Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche.

And the wave shows no sign of abating. For Hitchcock's centenary year, Britain's BBC will mount a television tribute while New York University will present "Hitchcock: A Centennial Celebration" on October 13-17, 1999. That will coincide with the theatrical release of a restored Rear Window and a new Hitchcock biography by Patrick McGilligan. Finally, remakes are planned for 1999 and beyond of Spellbound (1945), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), and To Catch a Thief (1955).

For one so prominent now, the so-called "Master of Suspense" had a humble and unlikely beginning: he was born August 13 in Leytonstone, England, the son of a working-class green grocer. As a Catholic sent to a Jesuit school, the boy quickly learned two lessons which helped him in his later career: fear authority and be fascinated by the forbidden fruits of sin and sex.

The young man studied to be an engineer but eventually ended up designing title cards for the more glamorous world of silent movies. Entranced by filmmaking, Hitchcock worked on every job he could, learning about lighting, editing, set design, and script construction.

His first movie was shot in Germany in 1925, yet it was his third picture, The Lodger (1926) which made his reputation and helped define his later movies. Besides employing his favorite theme of the innocent man suspected of a heinous crime, the silent film showcased the 27-year-old director's dazzling technique.When the killer strikes, for instance, all the viewer sees are five images cut together in rapid succession: a girl screaming; a street woman looking up from her stoop; a cat jumping off a garbage can; a policeman running; and a masked figure walking into the fog. It is stunning in its simplicity - and as jarring as anything in Friday the 13th or Halloween.

Technique became a hallmark of Hitchcock, from a constantly roving camera in the legendary "one-take" movie Rope (1948), to his 78 edits in 45 seconds for the Psycho shower scene. "Hitchcock began his career as a director at the height of what he always called the Golden Age of film," explains William Rothman in Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. "The great directors of the German cinema...were achieving unprecedented expressive effects with camera movement, set design, and lighting...[French directors] were experimenting with subjective devices and other formal innovations...Hitchcock started with a clear sense of film's traditions and a conviction that film was an art."

"Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story," Hitchcock himself said in Hitchcock/Truffaut. "...The next factor is the technique of filmmaking, and in this connection, I am against virtuosity for its own sake. Technique should enrich the action. One doesn't set the camera at a certain angle just because the cameraman happens to be enthusiastic about that spot. The only thing that matters is whether the installation of the camera at a given angle is going to give the scene its maximum impact."

To that end, the director experimented with sound in Blackmail (1929), the first British talking picture. Here, he cleverly played with how characters hear things. A woman who has stabbed a man repeatedly notices the word "knife" in a breakfast conversation, and to show her growing sense of guilt, that is the only intelligible word Hitchcock ultimately lets the viewer hear, as the dialogue gradually turns into gibberish.

Beyond technical trickery, the director also added comedy to the suspense film, an unusual step in the '30s. The first of his great chase movies, The Thirty-Nine Steps, combined laughs and adventure in a style that was later appropriated by the James Bond pictures. It was a canny move: the comic touches - dark or otherwise - help make the more serious (and sometimes grisly) elements palatable while widening the scope of the director's appeal.

In fact, Hitchcock quickly realized that thrills and comedy alone were not enough to make a successful movie. It needed romance. So, while most of his films are nominally about suspense, they are also about lovers who discover the depth of their feelings through a hair-raising adventure. In Rear Window, the hero fears marriage to a beautiful woman with whom he is involved. Perversely, the dangers the couple face investigating a brutal killing is what finally brings them closer together.

"Within the world of a Hitchcock film," explains Rothman, "the nature and relationships of love, murder, sexuality, marriage...are at issue." Or as film director Francois Truffaut put it: "...in Hitchcock's cinema...to make love and to die are one and the same."

Hitchcock developed these themes in his formative, British-based years during the '30s. By the 1940s and 1950s, he was working in America. It was there that his movies became even richer and more complex, dealing with issues of love and trust (Notorious, 1946), homosexual longing (Strangers on a Train, 1951), transference of guilt (The Wrong Man, 1957), and obsessive, destructive passion (Vertigo, 1958).Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

Many argue that it was the Catholic in Hitchcock who introduced morality into the subtext of many of his greatest movies. Shadow of a Doubt (1943), to name just one, explores the ideas of evil disguised as innocence and innocence perverted by evil. Teresa Wright plays Charley, namesake of her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), who is a murderer wanted by the police. Charley's dilemma: does she turn in the man she has worshipped for years or let him go? It is a horrible choice since Uncle Charlie is charming, loving, and gracious - the perfect gentleman and the perfect embodiment of villainy.

By cloaking such themes in the thriller genre, Hitchcock ensured his popularity and also helped changed the way critics looked at suspense movies. A film like Silence of the Lambs could never have won an Oscar or have been treated seriously if Hitchcock hadn't led the way. Indeed: with Hitch, entertainment and art became one, as the director drew the viewers into a dreamily plausible world which quickly became a nightmare.

"I try to put in my films...what Poe put in his stories," Hitchcock said once, "a perfectly unbelievable story recounted to readers with such a hallucinatory logic that one has the impression that this same story can happen to you tomorrow."

As his image solidified during his career, Hitchcock never stepped too far out of character, disguising his important filmmaking aspirations behind the mask of a popular entertainer. Always the showman, Hitch was transformed into the most recognizable director in the world when he began offering droll introductions to the long-running Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series in 1957.

Nonetheless, the "Master of Suspense" moniker became a trap. The director soon became increasingly more worried about topping himself (he once quipped that the things which scared him the most were little children, policemen, high places, and the idea that "my next picture won't be as good as the last one"). Psycho may have been a financial smash, but after the relative failure of Marnie (1964), he didn't know where to go. Restricted by his image, fears, and studio from the kind of experimentation he had attempted in his prime, the director stagnated.

Yet the green grocer's son eventually had the last laugh. Once derided as a "simple" director of "thrillers," Alfred Hitchcock finally became much, much more. By the time of his death in 1980, he had been knighted, feted, and revered by younger filmmakers, critical institutions, and the public at large as a cinematic genius.

Since then, the word "Hitchcockian" has become an adjective to describe movies as varied as Seven, 12 Monkeys,,Reservoir Dogs, Carrie , Jaws, and Silence of the Lambs. Hitch's term "The MacGuffin" - to describe a meaningless plot device that starts the action rolling - has entered the popular lexicon. And, for many, his movies have become exemplars of what moviemaking is all about: passion, audience involvement, visual beauty, and technical virtuosity. Or, in a phrase, pure cinema.

"Hitchcock's most profound subject and achievement," critic David Thomson once wrote, "is the juxtaposition of sanity and insanity, of bourgeois ordinariness and criminal outrage...Hitchcock became a way of defining film."

Ben-Hur

BEN-HUR
THE "INTIMATE EPIC" TURNS 40

By TOM SOTER
from DIVERSION MAGAZINE, 1999

Here's a riddle: what 119-year-old novel by an obscure Civil War general became one of the greatest religious screen epics of all time? Hint: there's a breathtaking, nine-minute chariot race in which Academy Award-winner Charlton Heston not only drives his own team of stallions but also performs many of the astounding stunts, as well.

If you guessed Ben-Hur, you were right, and it's as good time as any to talk of Ben-Hur, because that cinematic opus is 40 this year. Yet age has not diminished the three-hour, 42-minute movie's most incredible achievement: these days, when special effects trickery rules, it is hard to believe that the justly famous chariot race, crashes and all, was actually staged in a giant Roman arena - one of the largest sets ever built - with real chariots, real horses, and real people.

But there is more. Ben-Hur took years of planning, over a full year of filming, and cost a then-unheard-of $15 million. What could have been a disaster was a roaring success. The drama broke box office records (grossing $80 million worldwide on its first release), saved its financially ailing studio, single-handedly revived a genre (Biblical epics became the rage for the next four years), and won a record 11 Academy Awards (matched only last year by another sweeping epic, 1997's Titanic). More recently, the movie was named to the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest American films of all time.

Yet Ben-Hur is remarkable for another reason: unlike other spectacles that came before it, the story is intimate, with an unusual protagonist among its diverse cast of characters: a complex, hate-filled hero bent on revenge, who is both admirable and deplorable.

The movie, set primarily in 33 A.D., is the tale of a Jewish prince, Judah Ben-Hur (Heston), and his boyhood friend, a Roman soldier named Messala (Stephen Boyd), who feud over the Romans' treatment of the Jews and eventually fight it out to the death in a chariot race. Like many epics, the saga is episodic: Judah is convicted of a crime he didn't commit; on his way to punishment, he meets Jesus; he then spends three years as a galley slave, fights in a mighty sea battle, becomes a Roman citizen and famous charioteer, takes on Messala, rescues his family from a leper colony, and witnesses the events leading up to the crucifixion of Christ.

The story is based on a novel by General Lew Wallace, a Civil War general, diplomat, and governor of New Mexico, who spent eight years writing what he subtitled a "Tale of the Christ" (novelist Gore Vidal once observed, however, that "it was not a tale of the Christ, at all. It was the tale of a Roman boy and a Jewish boy"). The massive novel eventually became a best-seller, reportedly selling 50,000 copies a year. "He was the spiritual father of the Hollywood Roman epic," says critic George MacDonald Fraser in The Hollywood History of the World, "and revived the popularity of the chariot race as mass entertainment."

The book was sold to the stage in 1899, with the highlights of the theatrical version being the contractual depiction of Christ as a shaft of light and a race featuring live horses. According to historian Jan Herman, "Judah and Messala drove horses and chariots across stage on a giant treadmill. A painted canvas backdrop rolled in the opposite direction behind them to set the illusion of laps being run." (Because it was live, Messala actually won once, although the actors pretended that he had lost.) The play ran for 20 years.

The first movie adaptation, made in 1907, was 15 minutes and unauthorized, using members of the Brooklyn Fire Department. The first official version was shot in 1925 by the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ramon Navarro starred as a wimpy Ben-Hur and a third of the epic was actually shot in Italy (a sea battle in the Mediterranean used full-sized galleys, one of which burst into uncontrolled flames). The most noteworthy sequence was, naturally, the chariot race, during which 100 horses reportedly died.

The 1925 Ben-Hur was a huge success, so much so that when a financially struggling MGM needed a savior in the mid-'50s, it looked no further than Wallace's novel. To shoot it, MGM rented the Cinecitta Studios in Rome. "It looked very much like an American studio," observes Heston in his autobiography, "which is not surprising: Mussolini had sent his son to Hollywood to get an idea of what a studio should be when he'd planned it in the thirties."

MGM chose William Wyler as director, an unlikely choice since he was best known for his character-based stories (Jezebel, These Three, Wuthering Heights, and The Best Years of Our Lives). But Wyler was just finishing a sweeping, yet intimate, Western called The Big Country, and producer Sam Zimbalist thought Wyler would bring the right touch. Zimbalist was looking for a thinking man's action story.

Wyler (who once quipped, "It takes a Jew to make a really good movie about Christ") picked his Ben-Hur from the cast of The Big Country: Charlton Heston (runners-up: Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, and Kirk Douglas). Heston was no stranger to epics, having starred as Moses in 1956's The Ten Commandments (he was mobbed on arriving in Rome with crowds chanting, "It is Moses!"). But he saw Judah as a more believable, complex individual.

The script, credited to Karl Tunberg, was actually heavily rewritten, first by Gore Vidal, and then, primarily, by British playwright Christopher Fry. Fry's "changes were seldom structural," recalls Heston in his memoirs, "but almost always stylistically crucial, such as changing, 'You didn't like the food?' to 'The meal did not please you?'...Every scene he touched was the better for it."

Vidal claims to have included a key subtextual ingredient that helps to explain Messala's burning hatred for Judah. "There is something emotional between these two, which is not stated and which blows the fuse in Messala," the writer tells Jan Herman in A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director William Wyler. "He is spurned [by Ben-Hur], so it's a love scene gone wrong."

The most spectacular sequence of all, the chariot race, was not crafted by any of them, however. It was choreographed by second unit director Andrew Marton and stunt coordinator Yakima Canutt. According to Herman, the chariot race was the most expensive footage in the movie. The $1 million sequence took five weeks to shoot over a three-month period. "Marton pre-shot the race with doubles and spliced the sequence together to make one continuous sequence," Herman reported. He then showed it to Heston and Boyd, asking them to recreate many of the sequences in close-up. For over a month, Heston spent at least two hours a day on track learning how to guide a chariot.

The most daring stunt was unplanned. Although Heston's chariot was supposed to leap over the wreckage of another chariot, an unexpected bounce caused stunt driver Joe Canutt to be flipped in the air and between the horses.

"I thought he was a dead man," says Heston in his autobiography. "The chariot weighed half a ton, with steel-rimmed wheels sure to cut him in half, or at least cripple him...He dropped the reins, grabbed the front of the chariot, turned and dropped to a handstand on the tongue behind the running team, then flung himself clear." A close-up shot was later filmed showing Heston climbing back into the moving chariot.

The race may have been difficult; but so was the rest of the movie. Herman notes that the company worked six days a week, with Wyler logging in 12 to 14 hours daily. "From the beginning, we knew it would be a tough shoot. So it by God was; I think the toughest I've ever done," recalls Heston, who did 16 takes of one line ("I'm a Jew") for his demanding director. The actor also spent days rowing in a hot ship's galley, leading Heston to quip: "I want to get back home, but I'm damned if I thought I'd be rowing all the way."

Actor Jack Hawkins, playing a Roman, was equally exhausted: "When we were working under the boiling Italian sun and the temperature was in the 90s, I had to wear almost 50 pounds of armor. How those sailors of ancient Rome ever stood up, much less fought a battle, I'll never know." Producer Sam Zimbalist, who had worked on the movie longer than anyone, died of a heart attack before the film's completion.

The movie did not stint on sets. According to Herman, the arena for the chariot race stretched across 18 backlot acres. There were 1,500-foot straightaways and a 10-foot high central island with four giant statues, each 30 feet high. "The arena was the largest set and single largest set built for a Hollywood picture," reports the writer, using a million pounds of plaster, 40,000 cubic feet of lumber, 250 miles of metal tubing, and 40,000 tons of white sand. A track of identical size was built next door to train the horses.

For all that spectacle, however, Ben-Hur ultimately succeeds because of its message. Unlike such campy epics as The Ten Commandments or The Robe (1951), the film's religious and historic events are merely trimmings to help focus the story on its theme, the danger of becoming what you hate.Ben-Hur, despite its many plotlines, is actually about two very simple issues: the transforming effect of hatred and the forgiving power of love. Its source novel, the play, and the earlier screen version were overtly religious. The 1959 Ben-Hur's is much more appealing, however, because its hero is no plaster saint, but a flawed, obsessed man. Although he is kept alive by his hatred of Messala, he is finally made whole by love. "Forgiveness is greater and love is more powerful than hatred," warns one character. And, whatever the age, whatever the audience, that message is universal. Of course, it also helps that Judah drives one mean chariot.

Directors as Actors

Orson Welles in The Third Man.WHEN AUTEURS ARE ACTORS

By TOM SOTER
from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, August 16, 1991

When director Orson Welles needed money to finish a movie, actor Orson Welles took over, helping to raise it by appearing in other filmmakers' pictures. When director-actor Woody Allen sought novelty, he starred in Paul Mazursky's Scenes From a Mall as a non-nebbish. Be it for pocket change or a change of pace, directors have often traded in their directorial hats for character costumes, sometimes with remarkable results.

ORSON WELLES in The Third Man (dir. Carol Reed, 1949, Media, B&W): Welles appears for only about 20 minutes all told, but his presence as the boyishly charming, ruthless Harry Lime dominates the style of this classic, which uses the kind of cinematic devices associated more with Welles (Citizen Kane) than with Carol Reed (Oliver!)-askew camera angles, deep focus, and shadowy figures. A

ERIC VON STROHEIM in Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder, 1950, Paramount, B& W): Wilder's piercing parable on the cult of celebrity is full of insight into the destructiveness of self-delusion. Von Stroheim plays the butler, Max, a former director whose silent stares and cryptic comments paint an unnerving picture of a man destroyed by an all-consuming love. A

JOHN HUSTON in Chinatown (dir. Roman Polanski, 1974, Paramount): Huston, whose presence links this 1970s film noir to his own dark thrillers of the '40s (The Maltese Falcon), is exquisitely cast as the personification of unstoppable evil. His folksy manner and craggy, weatherbeaten face veil a juggernaut of immorality that will stop at nothing to prevail. A

WOODY ALLEN in The Front (dir. Martin Ritt, 1976, RCA/Columbia): Allen essentially plays the character he created for himself in his own early films- a neurotic geek-only this time he's a geek who agrees to front scripts for blacklisted writers during the McCarthy era. Movingly, he finds his conscience. A-

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1977, RCA/Columbia): As in his other noteworthy performance (as a filmmaker plagued with problems in his own Day for Night, 1973), Truffaut brings a probing gaze, curiosity, and a director's authority to Claude Lacombe, a UFO scientist methodically searching for extraterrestrial life. B+

MARTIN SCORSESE in Dreams (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1990, Warner): Scorsese may seem a bizarre choice for Vincent Van Gogh, one of many characters in this collection of short, gloomy tales. But the gritty director of GoodFellas is the personification of Kurosawa's notion of the artist as obsessive perfectionist. Neurotically intense, fast-talking, and self- absorbed, he is driven by a powerful inner vision. B+

Posted Aug 16, 1991 | Published in issue #79 Aug 16, 1991

Dracula

Bela Lugosi as the definitive Dracula.

VAMPIRE REDUX

By TOM SOTER
from DIVERSION, OCTOBER 1994

The lid of the coffin creaks open. Slowly, ever so slowly, thin bony fingers grab the side of the box. Evil hangs in the air like cobwebs. Then, the lid comes up – and suddenly, an elegantly dressed man in tuxedo and flowing black cape is standing before us. His piercing eyes are red and his smile inviting, as he speaks with the silky manners of a well-heeled diplomat.

“Good evening,” he purrs in an oh-so-odd yet familiar accent. “I...am Dracula.” He smiles again, this time showing teeth. “I bid you welcome.”

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. The vampire is back. Not that he ever left. Since Bram Stoker introduced Dracula to the world in 1897, the undead count and his followers have literally refused to stay down, appearing in books, plays, radio programs, ballets, cartoons, comic strips, TV series, commercials, and, of course, movies. In November, Tom Cruise stars in a big-screen adaptation of Anne Rice's best-selling Interview with the Vampire, followed by A Vampire in Brooklyn, starring Eddie Murphy and possibly a big-screen sequel to BramStoker's Dracula (1992), reportedly about vampire-slayer Abraham Van Helsing.

Nearly a century after his first appearance in print, the count and his legions continue to fascinate. Indeed: at the Broadway opening of the play Dracula in 1977, a woman was overhead saying, “I’d rather spend one night with Dracula, dead, than the rest of my life with my husband, alive.”

Certainly Bram Stoker never dreamt that his creation would attain such popularity or immortality. But vampires touch a particular subconscious nerve. As Walter Kendrick noted in The Thrill of Fear, vampirism makes “the horror of death and dying...safe; it is turned into a celebration of being permanently alive, forever immune to decay.” Vampires are part of a long literary tradition (The Vampyre, 1819; Varney the Vampire, 1847) in which eroticism is closely associated with horror. In choosing vampirism, Stoker was also tapping into myths that had held power for centuries as explanations for plagues and other illnesses.

In the Victorian era, when Stoker was writing, the idea of vampires took on other meanings, as well. “To enter the castle of Dracula is to enter the Victorian mind, upstairs and downstairs, with all its sexual contradictions and complexities, hidden rooms, and closeted skeletons,”noted David J. Skal in Hollywood Gothic. "...Dracula read today is first and foremost the sexual fever-dream of a middle-class Victorian man, a frightened-dialogue between demonism and desire.”

Stoker, an Irish-born stage manager, had been writing for years before he concocted Dracula (original title: The Un-Dead) in 1897. The name for his villain came from 15th century Prince Vlad V of Wallachia, known as both Vlad the Impaler (because he impaled foes on stakes) and Dracula (Rumanian for “Son of the Devil”). The details of Dracula’s native Transylvania, which the author never visited, actually came from a guide book. The novel was an immediate success, but Stoker died before seeing what he had wrought. The first great vampire movie, Nosferatu (1922) was based on his book and set the creepy mood for future tales, but it was Dracula (1931) that laid out the traditions.

Poster for unauthorized film version.

It was here that we were first shown the vampire as a disarmingly suave creature of the night, quite unlike Stoker’s cadaverous old man with pointed ears, bad breath, and hairy palms. As played by Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi, 49, the “count glides across drawing rooms and crypts with equal aplomb; no charnel-house air clings to him,” Kendrick observed. “Lugosi attempted to evoke ideas of aristocratic corruption rather than the literal rot of the grave.”

Lugosi himself was a far cry from the creepy count. In private, he was quiet and soft-spoken, a man fond of good cigars, who longed to play comedy and wept when he heard Hungarian folk melodies. Nonetheless, the actor – who was hired only after Lon Chaney died and Chester Morris turned it down – effectively transformed himself into the eerie character.

In the process, however, he ruined his career. After Dracula, he was hired for nothing but ghouls. “Where once I had been the master of my professional destinies, with a repertoire embracing all kinds and types of men...I became Dracula’s puppet,” he lamented. “The shadowy figure of Dracula, more than any casting office, dictated the kinds of parts I played.” After countless vampire roles and even the indignity of a Las Vegas act in which he stepped out of a coffin, he died in poverty in 1956.

Lugosi’s film laid out other staples of the form, as well: the coffin in which the vampire must sleep during the day; the young woman who must be saved from becoming a vampire; the disbelief in vampires until women and children start dying, drained of blood; the idea that friends and family may be secret enemies, since vampires look normal until they strike; the mesmerizing power of the count, who can also appear as a bat or a wolf but cannot be reflected in a mirror.

(According to Skal, one tradition had a specific technical function: the stand-up collar long associated with Dracula was actually created for a stage production to hide the actor’s head when he stood with his back to the theater, allowing him to leave the cape behind and “disappear” down a trapdoor.)

It was also in Dracula that general audiences first became aware of the many ways to ward off or kill vampires (garlic, the cross, the stake in the heart, sunlight), and heard the lines that have since been much parodied (“I do not drink...wine”).

But such traditions soon needed changing, as success bred excess and vampire films appeared by the score in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Overexposure made the horror hackneyed, causing the vampire more damage than any ray of sunlight ever could. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) poked fun at his habits (Bud: “You make enough noise to wake up the dead.” Lou: “I don’t have to wake ‘em up. He’s up”), while TV’s The Munsters turned him into an old Jewish Grampa. One movie even included a title song that warbled, “My son, the vampire, will leave you pale. He drinks your blood because he doesn’t like ginger ale.” By Blood of Dracula (1957), the vamp had become camp, as a neurotic teenage girl finds herself transformed into a blood-sucker by her mad science teacher.

Hammer Films revived the character.

It took England’s Hammer Studios to save the count, pumping new blood into him by transforming the character into a sexy seducer, a James Bond with fangs, whom women eagerly embraced. With tall, athletic Christopher Lee as Dracula, the character became a ravenous creature of the night for whom women longed. “Dracula is tremendously sensual,” explained Hammer director Terence Fischer. “This is one of the great attractions of evil.”

Indeed, Horror of Dracula (1957), the initial film in Hammer’s series, explicitly lays out what was implicit in Stoker’s Victorian novel: the danger of giving in to sexual desires. It also offers blood-drenched chases, a wild fist-fight, and spectacular effects, including an ending in which the vampire, forced into the rising sun, explodes into dust. Critics were appalled (“This film disgusts the mind and repels the senses,” said one), but the movie made a mint and more quickly followed.

By the 1970s, however, the novelty of sex and violence had grown thin and some producers decided to try and make the vampire sympathetic. He was now shown as an angst-ridden character cursed by a compulsive disease, like alcoholism. TV's soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-71) transformed the undead sinner into near-saint, depicting its popular vampire star Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) as a heroic figure, separated by his disease from the woman he loved.

Others followed suit. In Blacula (1973), a centuries-old black vampire (William Marshall) is a noble figure, searching for love and carrying an incurable disease that forces him to kill or die. Such problems took on new meaning in the age of AIDS, and also in movies like The Hunger (1983), in which vampires are seen as seductive but lonely outcasts, frightening but frightened of being alone.

William Marshall starred as Blacula, a black vampire.

Even Chistopher Lee felt that Dracula had changed with the times. “I think he’s a very sad person,” observed the actor. “He’s not a hero, but an anti-hero in many ways. He has a tremendous ferocity and power, but he doesn't always have it under control.”

By the time of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire had becomea Byronic hero, a fanged Romeo searching for his Juliet among the bloodless corpses he leaves in his wake. “Above all, it is a love story between Dracula and Mina – souls reaching out through a universe of horror and pathos” claimed director Francis Ford Coppola at the time. “Doing justice to the complex character of Dracula was one of our main goals. He’s been portrayed as a monster or as a seducer, but knowing his biography made me think of him as a fallen angel.”

Such were the feelings of Anne Rice, whose Interview With A Vampire introduced a new generation of walking corpses. Stoker’s vampires, she said in Psychology Today, are “presented as close to animals. But I always saw them as angels...finely tuned imitations of human beings imbued with this evil spirit."

The groundwork for such a shift in perception had been laid by the suavely melancholy Frank Langella in Dracula (1979) and the courtly George Hamilton in the parody Love At First Bite(1979). In the latter movie, Hamilton’s romantic, old world values make him less a force of evil and more an oasis of sanity among the chaos that consumes the world.

Devil or angel, Dracula and his ilk will always hold an ambivalent, deep-rooted fascination for his audiences. Indeed, who can ever forget the thrill and the fear at seeing Lugosi’s voluminous cape engulfing one sleeping woman after another? Or feel the disgust and the excitement as Lee’s bloody mouth rises from his willing victim? Was there ever a nightmare more haunting than an attractiveƒ monster that attacks while you sleep? “Most monsters take and trample, Dracula alone seduces, courting before he kills,” Skal noted.

Gary Oldman as a romantic Dracula.

Nowhere is that ambivalence more clear than in the wryly amusing Lost Boys (1987), a funny yet scary twist on the vampire legend, in which vampires exist not in creepy Transylvania but in a hip beachfront community called Santa Carla. And it is the discovery of such hidden horrors in everyday life that makes even the worst vampire films unsettling.

“Dracula is attractive precisely because he represents the dark side of our own natures,” explained Leonard Wolf in Dracula: The Film and The Legend. “We live in an age that admires energy and power, and we know more about erotic fantasies than may be good for us. No wonder we look up in fear at Dracula.”

Will the undead count’s popularity ever abate? Probably not, for as √ Dracula screenwriter James V. Hart once observed:”Vampires offer a delectable alternative to the drudgery of mortal life and the promises of religion. They offer immortality here and now.”

Not to mention a good scare...

SIDEBAR NO. 1: DR. DRACULA

Dracula lives and in his latest incarnation, he's a neurologist. Published this past September, The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula (Hyperion) is an unusual take on the vampire mythos from an unusual source, first©time©novelist Roderick Anscombe, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He got the idea for the book while watching Bela Lugosi in the 1931 Dracula .

"What did it take to bite through a woman's neck to the carotid artery?" he recalls thinking. "I had been involved in head and neck surgery during my internship as a surgeon in London, and as I recalled the anatomy of the area around the sternmastoid muscle, it was clear to me that drawing blood would be a formidable task, even with fangs. And would the rookie vampire be prepared for the muscular gush of blood from the punctured artery, spurting over his face and clothes in an uncontrollable flow and filling his mouth almost to suffocation?"

Using such reality as his benchmark, Anscombe created a Dracula who was not a supernatural being, but a tortured soul driven by love and strange obsessions, an aristocrat obsessed with blood. "I wanted my Dracula to be a full human being," he notes.

To make a vivid murderer sympathetic is not easy, but the author had a leg up on the task: he had worked for two years as staff psychiatrist at a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. "I've had a couple of patients who have had the same relish for blood," he told Publisher's Weekly . "A number
of serial killers are interested in spilling blood or acquiring blood or seeing blood flow."

But he was also able to see the man behind the murderer, which ultimately helped him paint his realistic Dr. Dracula: "During breakfast, I would read the newspaper stories about a violent crime, and then go to the hospital and talk to the man who committed it. I was struck by the disparity between the public accounts and the humanity. I was aware that the murderer was just another human being."

SIDEBAR NO. 2: FILMS TO TAKE TO YOUR COFFIN

Nosferatu (1922). This silent film has some vivid expressionistic moments and a creepy central figure. Best line: "She has a lovely neck." (Republic, $24.95)

Dracula (1931). Languorous, stately version of the Stoker novel, with Lugosi as a suave, creepy count. (MCA, $14.95)

Spanish Dracula (1931). Same script, much-improved interpretation, shot at the same time on the same sets as the English-language version. Long-thought lost. (MCA, $14.95)

Dracula's Daughter (1936). Strange sequel to Dracula that picks up moments after the 1931 film ends. The hero of the story is a psychiatrist who tries the talking cure on Ms. Vampire. Bad
move. (MCA, $14.95)

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). A collection of vaudeville bits strung together, not helped by the sorry spectacle of the once©regal Lugosi acting as stooge to Bud and Lou. (MCA, $19.95)

Horror of Dracula (1957). The initial entry in the Christopher Lee Dracula movies. Bloody good show. The first vampire flick in color. (MCA, $19.95)

Dracula (1973). Dracula as Terminator in a TV-movie version that tries to be faithful to the Stoker novel but suffers from the miscasting of Jack Palance as Dracula, who plays the count as a rampaging engine of destruction. (MPI, $19.95)

Love at First Bite (1979). Amusing parody of the Dracula mythos, with George Hamilton successfully playing a suave Count with a Lugosi accent. (Warner, $19.95)

Dracula (1979). The count as tragic lover in a seductive version of the 1928 play. Laurence Olivier plays Van Helsing. (MCA, $19.95)

The Lost Boys (1987). A perverse Peter Pan story, in which they're blood-sucking vampires in sunny Santa Clara. (TK, $14.95)

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1993). The grand opera treatment, turning the vampire story into a tragic love story, along the lines of Romeo and Juliet. (Columbia, $19.95)

‘

Ealing Studios

THAT EALING FEELING

WHO EVER THOUGHT MURDER COULD BE SO FUNNY?

By TOM SOTER

from DIVERSION, APRIL 1996

Because his mother married beneath her social station in the proud, wealthy Ascoyne D’Ascoyne family, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) has been banished from the family’s inner circle and into poverty. Nonetheless, he is still ninth in line to inherit the dukedom – so he soon begins systematically murdering the eight relatives who stand in his way.

A grim drama about a dangerous psychopath? Hardly. It is the plot of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), one of the grandest of comedies of all time, in which murder is treated as casually as mustard on a sandwich. “He seemed a very pleasant fellow,” Mazzini notes about one of his intended victims, “and I regretted that our acquaintanceship must be so short.”

Kind Hearts is one of a handful of British comedies made over thirty years ago by Ealing Films, a small British studio that shot low-budget movies with a quasi-documentary look. And although Ealing went out of business in 1959, the company’s influence – particularly for what have become known as “The Ealing Comedies” – has been far-reaching. Such recent pictures as Get Shorty, Nuns on the Run, and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain all have a touch of Ealing about them.

The studio’s legacy was most noticeable in 1988’s  A Fish Called Wanda, a $200 million hit directed by former Ealing director Charles Crichton which starred John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Palin, and Kevin Kline. “You could call A Fish Called Wanda an Ealing comedy that’s been time-warped into a world recovering from the impact of Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” wrote the New York Times’ Benedict Nightingale. Now the Wanda cast is back in a follow-up film called Fierce Creatures, released on May 3. Ealing lives on.

But what exactly is an “Ealing” picture? The studio itself began in the 1920s and produced everything from weepy melodramas and costume dramas to tales of the supernatural (such as the classic Dead of Night, 1946), but to many, the company was defined by four comedies made between 1949 and 1955: Kind Hearts and Coronets,The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955). All starred Alec Guinness, and all featured an offbeat and at times darkly comic sensibility that was particularly British, but also particularly Ealing.

“These movies had an even-tempered, genteel nuttiness,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker magazine in 1988. “Even when they dealt with murder, as they frequently did, they maintained a placid and unsurprised tone – which was, of course, the source of most of the humor.”

Ealing comedies combined farce with good manners and death with good taste in their depiction of quirky battles against convention. “Everything about Ealing was defiantly small, and glorified the small at the expense of the big, the conventional, the pompous,” observed Peter Ustinov in Forever Ealing. The films, noted David Shipman in The Story of Cinema, are “insular...in the best sense, with a sharp eye for the foibles of the British.”

Each of the comedies involved eccentric individuals who pursued wild dreams of wealth, knowledge, or power. The Lavender Hill Mob, for instance, features a timid bank clerk (Guinness) putting together a daring robbery of the Bank of England. The Man in the White Suit paints an ironic portrait of labor and management combined against a naive inventor (Guinness) who has devised a fabric that never wears out – and would thus put both sides out of business.

The Ealing method, wrote George Perry in Forever Ealing, was to throw “a disparate group of people together in a situation of adversity [and show] how they cope.” That is the case in The Ladykillers, which finds an oddball gang of bank robbers (including Guinness and Peter Sellers), hiding out in an old lady’s rooming house, pretending to be an amateur chamber orchestra. (The movie is the chief inspiration for A Fish Called Wanda, another movie about a robbery and eccentric characters).When she gets wise to their scheme, they try to kill her – but end up killing each other instead. “Like all the Ealing comedies,” observed critic David Shipman, “its keynote is a coy irony.”

But it is Kind Hearts and Coronets, a black comedy with no equal, that is the greatest and perhaps most influential of Ealing’s output. The movie is both a satire of British snobbery and a celebration of it, with Dennis Price as the proud, arrogant, and murderous relation to the upper crust D’Ascoyne family. In the course of the story, one simultaneously admires and is appalled by Price, a Briton who is eminently proper, even in the way he kills.

The movie’s main tour de force comes in the casting of Alec Guinness as all eight victims. Whether he is playing the doddering priest, snobbish duke, fresh-faced photographer, or women’s rights advocate Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne, Guinness is superbly different – and comically brilliant – in each role. “I was invited to play four of the victims,” Guinness told the New York Times in 1984. “...I sent back a telegram that said, ‘I see no point in playing four parts. How about me playing eight?’ To my astonishment, they agreed.”

The movie is aided immeasurably by the wonderfully literate script, another Ealing quality. Director Robert Hamer admitted in 1952 that he wanted to make a movie that used “this English language, which I love, in a more varied and, to me, more interesting way that I had previously had the chance of doing in a film.” The movie’s elegant narration by Price is one of its many charms (“It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms”).

Guinness, who began in theater, had appeared in only a few films before 1949, most notably Oliver Twist (1948) as Fagin. “I longed to do absurd and clownish things,” he admitted in Who’s Who in Comedy. “Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel were my heroes.” Ealing gave him the chance to be both funny and a movie star, beginning with Kind Hearts. “There weren’t many sophisticated comedies then, certainly not black comedies,” he noted in 1984. “And I think Kind Hearts opened the gate to quite a lot of black comedy.”

In fact, the studio’s influence can clearly be seen in many later movies. For example, the casual way death is discussed in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry (1955), a farce about a corpse who keeps being buried and unburied, could come right out of Ealing: “After you’ve dug him up,” says the prim elderly woman about the body, “I’ll make you some hot chocolate.” Get Shorty (1995), too, could be a modern Ealing picture. The saga of a New Jersey gangster (John Travolta) mixing it up with eccentric stars, producers, and killers in Hollywood, the movie has the same blackly comedic look at life, death, and ambition that typified Ealing.

“The character of Ealing comedies could perhaps be described as realistic fantasy, with extravagantly fanciful events taking place in a meticulously believable setting,” wrote Perry in Forever Ealing. That quality can be seen in both Fierce Creatures and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995). In Fierce Creatures, the Wanda follow-up, a small, idyllic English zoo is taken over by a large multi-national corporation, and the story depicts the eccentrics versus the executives who try to change the zoo. Englishman is the whimsical tale of disparate Welsh town folk joining together in a wild quest: making a much-admired hill 1,000-feet high so that it will be listed on a surveyor’s map as a mountain.

Ealing-style movies include farcical elements, and often a slightly dark, iconoclastic tone. Clockwise (1985), an adventure of comic anarchy, shows how the best-laid plans can go ridiculously awry because of the comic obtuseness of the lead character (John Cleese). Similarly, Nuns on the Run (1990), about two inept gunmen on the lam (Eric Idle, Robbie Coltrane), hiding out as nuns in a convent, is both silly and gently satirical in the best Ealing manner. “Con men sell life insurance,” says one of the gangsters, “the church sells after-life insurance.”

Above all, Ealing movies and their successors take a polite, civilized attitude towards the absurd, the unusual, and the outlandish. The Missionary (1982) offers Michael Palin as a shy, well-meaning missionary to London’s prostitutes who becomes a howling success because of his sexual prowess. The story is done with a light touch, and Palin makes the retiring priest both innocent and wise, a worthy successor to characters played by Guinness. The movie also features a butler who constantly gets lost escorting guests in a multi-roomed mansion (“He really is the most disastrous butler,” observes his employer, who nonetheless admits that he cannot fire him because “he’s been here for 25 years”).

Ealing movies and their offspring are about comic movie-making at its best, a cinema where civilized cruelty is commonplace and comic invention top-notch. Indeed, the films are wonderful because they are so wonderfully dark. “Comedy that doesn’t have [a cruel] streak is essentially mediocre, safe, and uninteresting,” John Cleese observed in a Cleese Encounters, a biography in which he linked A Fish Called Wanda to the tradition of Ealing. “The question then, is it really cruel? ...When Tom is run over by Jerry on a steamroller you laugh, but you don’t think, ‘God, that poor cat must have suffered dreadfully.’ ...Intelligent people understand that they can laugh at an idea that would not be funny in real life.”

Godzilla

GODZILLA ROARS
AGAIN

By TOM SOTER

from DIVERSION, 1998

He destroyed Tokyo, fought a giant worm and a skyscraper-sized chicken, and he’s got bad (as in radioactive) breath you wouldn’t believe. We’re talking, of course, about Godzilla, the meanest monster this side of King Kong and the star of nearly two dozen Japanese science fiction flicks. And the reason anyone should care is because old snake eyes will be back this summer in Godzilla, an American-made extravaganza starring Matthew Broderick and a whole passel of special effects wizards, in which the big guy totals New York.

TriStar Pictures has a lot riding on their new Godzilla, but the studio also has a lot to build on. Believe it or not, Godzilla has a world-wide cult following: over 6,000 internet sites in Japanese, English, Dutch, and other languages (with web page names like “Bob’s Godzilla Shrine” and “Son of Barry’s Temple of Godzilla”); fan magazines (like G-Fan, as in Godzilla-Fan); and even a new, scholarly tome from McFarland Press about his exploits: A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series.

Godzilla has also appeared in comic books, cartoon series, commercials (most recently for Nike), CDs, toys, and some unusual gimmicks (instead of hearing music while you wait, a Godzilla-shaped telephone answering machine offers the sounds of Japanese people screaming in terror as Godzilla roars). Besides the TriStar movie, the character is also slated to appear in a new syndicated cartoon series starting in the fall of 1998.

When he was created in 1954, no one thought that the dinosaur with a difference would be so popular. Indeed, Godzilla was to be a one-shot, an exploitation of monster movies that explored the nuclear threat. He was the creation of four men: director Ishiro Honda, a colleague of famed director Akira Kurosawa, screenwriter Shigeru Kayama, Toho Studios producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, and special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya.

Tanaka wanted to cash in on what was then a popular cinematic trend: radiation-created monsters. Them! (1954), for instance, featured giant ants that had been created by atomic bomb testing. Combining elements of King Kong (1933) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the team cooked up the idea of a prehistoric monster from the deep who has been mutated and awoken by hydrogen bomb tests.

The name for the creature was “Gojira” (pronounced GO-dzee-la), which was a combination of the English word gorilla and the Japanese word for whale (kujira). The behemoth, a mutant dinosaur, would stand 400 feet tall with incendiary, radioactive breath which could melt objects up to 500 feet away. The special effects were well done, especially the charcoal gray two-piece rubber monster suit that was stuffed with bamboo and urethane foam. The actor inside could open and close the mouth, while the tail was manipulated by wires. Composer Akira Ifukube created Godzilla’s distinctive roar by rubbing a leather glove across a contrabass and applying an echo to the recording.

While the effects were impressive, what made Godzilla resonate was its message. After visiting Hiroshima in 1946, director Honda had became fascinated by the threat of nuclear holocaust. “When I directed that film,” he said once, “...there was a heavy atmosphere – a fear the Earth was already coming to an end. That became my basis.” Indeed, as David Kalat points out in his critical history of the Godzilla series, “Honda saw an opportunity to make radiation visible...[he] saw his monster as a narrative device to discuss the terror of the nuclear age. This intelligent, sensitive approach gave Toho’s Gojira a depth few monster-on-the-loose films have.”

Raymond Burr was inserted into the U.S. version.

Set in Tokyo a mere eight years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japanese cities, the movie has a sense of doom and foreboding that continues until the closing shot. Even the first sign of Godzilla in the opening sequence is like a bomb blast: a mysterious blinding light is followed by a fire storm of destruction.

The film takes a somber, almost documentary-like approach, focusing on characters and moral issues. The central figures are a paleontologist who believes Godzilla should be studied not hunted; a bitter, war-scarred scientist who holds a terrible invention that could destroy the monster; and a young couple in love but torn apart by the horrors they are witnessing. The reclusive scientist becomes the pivotal figure: a man of principle whose discovery could save humanity, but at a terrible cost. Using his invention could lead to a new and very deadly arms race, one of the issues of the story. The last speech in the movie is a grim warning. “I cannot believe we have destroyed the last of the Godzillas,” laments the paleontologist. “If we continue H-bomb testing, other creatures like Godzilla will doubtless appear again somewhere in the world.”

Godzilla was a huge success, both in Japan and abroad. In 1956, it turned up in an Americanized version as Godzilla: King of Monsters. The complex moral issues were eliminated, however, replaced by heavy-handed narration and scenes with a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr as a reporter.

The movie’s popularity (in either form) led to more Japanese monster movies, all involving giant creatures. One of the most significant was Mothra (1961), about a giant worm. The difference between Mothra and Godzilla was personality. Whereas Godzilla lived to destroy, Mothra was a sympathetic monster – an anomaly in the ‘50s when films presented such creatures as unthinking terrors that had to be killed.

King Kong vs Godzilla (1963), which added humor to the mix, began a pattern that continued for most of the series. Godzilla would be paired with other monsters as they fought over the fate of the world. He also developed a distinct personality. As the series developed, the creature became intelligent and could be found winking at the camera, waving to the humans, and even doting over a cute son who blew smoke rings.

His adventures became increasingly more silly and bizarre, as spies, space aliens, and industrialists all took turns as villains controlling the evil monsters. Godzilla himself lived on Monster Island, where he spent the time wrestling other monsters until he was called for help. He would usually battle against overwhelming odds and then walk off into the water, roaring a goodbye like some grotesque version of The Lone Ranger.

The plots became incomprehensible and interchangeable, with Tokyo and other Japanese cities being destroyed every other year. By the time of Godzilla’s Revenge (1969), Godzilla had become a role model for young children. Gone were the nuclear angst and somber tone of the original. The colorful adventures were campy, cartoon-like, and absurd, especially in their dubbed American versions, which often used ridiculously inappropriate voices and inane dialogue for many of the characters (Scientist 1: “This metal can only be space titanium.” No. 2: “Space titanium! You mean it’s from outer space?”).

After the movies hit their creative and economic nadir in the mid-’70s, Toho ended the series. The studio then licensed the character for toys, comics, games, and T-shirts, and even an animated Saturday morning American TV series (in which Godzilla had a wacky nephew named Godzooky). He we finally revived in 1984, with a film that once again raised the issue of nuclear power, and painted Godzilla as a tragic symbol. (The U.S. version downplayed these themes and again added Raymond Burr.) A new, more serious series of Godzilla movies began.

In 1992, TriStar picked up the rights to the character. Various scripts and directors were linked to the much-delayed project before producer/writer Dean Devlin and director/writer Roland Emmerich, the team that had crafted Independence Day, came on board in 1996. Unfortunately, their version of the monster – at least based on an draft of the script – has more in common with the cliches of 1950s “big bug” flicks than it does with the original Gojira.

“What we are trying to do with Godzilla [is reinvent] him as though there was no previous one,” claimed Devlin in a Los Angeles Times interview. “We went for a completely different look, not slightly different, but totally different...We want to give birth to the whole legend again. We want to start at the very beginning and reintroduce Godzilla.”

The creature in the first-draft script has been given new abilities. “Because of the limitations of technology, the Godzilla of the other films is this lumbering Frankenstein,” claimed Devlin.  “We’ve got this agile, quick, scary wild creature and suddenly all the possibilities opened up and what you could do in a film seemed really endless.”

Transplanted to New York City, the American Godzilla involves handsome scientist Nick Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick), a radiation specialist who is called in when a fishing boat is destroyed off the Atoll Islands in French Polynesia. In a homage to the original, the script starts with a storm and even has a Japanese cook crazed by the incident incoherently mumbling “Gojira, Gojira.”

From there, it’s a duplication of every classic sci-fi movie cliche. The characters include an aspiring reporter who is a former love interest of Nick’s; a comical TV cameraman; a nasty TV reporter; a blowhard mayor; and a no-nonsense general. The movie has its share of destruction – the Flatiron Building, various subway stations, Planet Hollywood – and cheap gags (the mayor says he’s reduced crime moments before Godzilla makes his first appearance). It also imitates sequences from Aliens (1986) and The Birds (1963).

When Godzilla is finally introduced in this new script, he is a far cry from his Toho days: smaller (he can hide in subway tunnels) and faster on his feet, the monster leaps buildings and lacks radioactive breath. Some of this may change by the the movie hits the screen, however. Although TriStar is keeping mum, there is some indication that the monster’s size has grown since the early scripts, otherwise the movie’s catchy slogan, “Size Does Matter,” makes little sense.

Nonetheless, in this new version the Japanese subtext seems to be gone: Godzilla is no longer the Bomb, just a byproduct of it – created by French nuclear testing, to boot. The hero warns everyone that a new species of Godzillas could overrun the earth, but naturally no one takes him seriously, until it turns out that this Godzilla has laid over 200 eggs in Madison Square Garden.

The film promises to be exciting but unless the script has been changed drastically during filming, it also looks to be very disappointing because it is just another “kill-the-monsters flick,” lacking the moral debate and high symbolism of the original. Yet millions of dollars have been spent on it – and millions will probably be made.

Still, Godzilla and his special message will undoubtedly endure. For the creature is more than a monster. He is a fiercely resonating idea. “Nature has a way sometimes of reminding man just how small he is,” observes a character in Godzilla 1985. “She occasionally throws up the terrible offsprings of our pride and carelessness to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla. The reckless ambitions of man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences. For now, Godzilla, that strangely innocent and tragic monster, has gone to earth. Whether he returns or not or is never again seen by human eyes, the things he has taught us remain.”

Hunt for Red October

ABOARD THE SUPERSTAR SUBS
By TOM SOTER

from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, March 2, 1990

Capt. Marko Ramius (Sean Connery) presides over the Red October, a new top- secret Soviet sub that runs fast, silent, and deep, carrying a payload of missiles that could wipe out a dozen cities in a flash. Ramius' domain is the dark-hued control room, where large consoles are alive with dozens of dials, gauges, luminous screens, and scopes glowing green, yellow, and soft white. Nearby in the icy depths lurks the Dallas, an American attack submarine. CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) and Capt. Bart Mancuso (Scott Glenn) look over a sonar operator's shoulder at a bank of computer screens, trying to pinpoint the Red October's exact location. Miles away, another Soviet sub-a more compact attack vessel-races across the North Atlantic toward them, and the cat-and-mouse drama begins in The Hunt for Red October, the big-budget thriller that opens this week.

Much of the drama unfolds aboard these three subs, and their interiors look great-clean, sleek, ultra high-tech. But after you see the movie, the question arises: Are they real? Is this what the inside of a state-of-the-art nuclear sub actually looks like? Well-yes and no. Getting the right look and feel for Red October required the cooperation of the U.S. Navy. And luckily for the filmmakers, the military's ecent experience with Hollywood eased the way. ''Top Gun did well as a recruitment tool (for pilots),'' says James H. Patton Jr., a retired Navy sub commander who consulted on Red October. ''But it probably hurt the submarine force (because) we compete for the same kids.'' The Navy wanted a promotion vehicle to call its own, notes Capt. Michael T. Sherman, director of the Navy Office of Information West.

''The problem with submarines, though, is that when the public sees them, they are tied to a pier. We do a good job at sea, but we can't take the public out there.''

But the Navy could take the film's production team out to sea, and they did. Production designer Terence Marsh, art director Dianne Wager, and set director Mickey S. Michaels, along with other production crew and cast members, climbed on board during scheduled sub maneuvers to get a feel for the real thing. One look around two U.S. subs-a Los Angeles class (like the Dallas) and a larger Ohio class-was enough to convince Marsh that some alterations were going to be necessary for Red October. It turns out that the inside of a modern sub looks more like something out of a World War II picture-cluttered, greasy, designed more for action and access than for show. ''It didn't look 1980s high-tech,'' says Marsh. ''And what looks right to the audience is right, we always say. And if it doesn't look right to the audience, it isn't right.''

So, a few changes were made. Working from military research books, defense- industry manuals, and pictures that the Navy let them take after covering the top-secret stuff, like speed gauges and depth gauges, Marsh's production team took the basic elements of a real sub's control room, rearranged them, and dressed them up for the movie. ''It got a much slicker look,'' he says. In one case, the Navy's own sense of drama helped. A real sub's control room- ''the con''-is bathed in a red light to focus the crew's attention on the tasks at hand. Elements of that lighting scheme were used in the film. Connery: from Russia with love.

Creating the look of the Red October and the other Soviet sub, the Konovalov, called for a bit of guesswork. ''We had no basic invitations to visit the Russians, but we had references,'' Marsh says. ''We knew we couldn't be far wrong if we based our design on common knowledge, then added our own touches of 'Evil Empire,''' like an ominous black-and-chrome color scheme. The final result is striking. The ships' interiors definitely look like super-subs should. One report has it that a member of the Navy brass took a tour of the set, realized that some elements looked too accurate, and immediately reported the entire production crew to the FBI-apparently unaware that the military had been cooperating all along. The Navy declines to comment on the matter. Not surprisingly, the film's sub consultants don't have much to say about the accuracy of the film's look in general. When pressed, Patton cites the military community's code regarding U.S. nuclear capabilities: ''Don't confirm. Don't deny. Do not attest to validity.''

OK, what about the sub chase scenes? Are they realistic? "I can't tell you how deep subs go," Sherman says. "That's classified. The official Navy position is 'in excess of 400 feet.' So when (the movie sub) goes down 1,200 feet, that's Hollywood. But it is credible." One thing that's definitely not credible is the Red October's periscope. In order to differentiate between the "cons" of the U.S. and Soviet subs, the production team wanted a recessed area for the Soviet ship's periscope. "I advised them that technically this was unlikely," says Patton, because the sub would have to go into shallower water to up periscope. "They listened, but they went ahead anyway because they wanted this visual effect." But wait a minute. How can these U.S. Navy guys be sure that this isn't what the inside of a Russian sub looks like? How do they know? Have they ever seen one? "I have no knowledge of the inside of a Russian sub," says Sherman. "I have no knowledge of the inside of a Russian sub," says Patton.

Kirk Alyn

UP, UP, AND AWAY

By TOM SOTER
from VIDEO, 1992

Kirk Alyn claims to be "about 100," but there's no doubt about the age of his one-time alter ego. Superman is 54 and still going strong. So is Alyn, the first-ever Man of Steel in the 1948 serial Superman."When I walked into the producer's office for the audition,"recalls Alyn, now retired and living somewhere in California, "the DC comics fellas said, 'He looks just like Clark Kent!'" Superman's secret identity. Producer Sam Katzman asked Alyn to take off his shirt. The well-built actor complied and was signed without a screen test.

The fast-paced serial was almost as effortless, with Alyn flying via wires and animation, facing bombs, bad guys, and speeding trains. "The director had been a silent movie stuntman and he wouldn't ask me to do anything he couldn't do himself. I figured if he could do it at his age, so could I." The super star's biggest headaches were a 90-miles-per-hour train that nearly creamed him and a smoke bomb that fell down his shirt while he was flying.

The action was non-stop and so were the crowds. Alyn starred in a sequel, Atom Man vs Superman. "I liked that better," he says. "They ironed out the special effects work and had a better heavy. Atom Man could blow the universe up. That made for a better picture."

Alyn declined to work in the 1951-57 TV series and George Reeves got the part. He saw one-and-a-half episodes and the first Christopher Reeve movie (in which he had a small part) but wasn't impressed. "George Reeves played George Reeves. He didn't give any characterization at all. Chris was great, but I didn't think much of the script. They say it cost $40 million, but where the hell was it?"

The actor, who in his pre-Superman days appeared on Broadway and in films with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, still gets fan mail about the Man of Steel. "Why is Superman so popular?" he asks. "Because he's an awfully nice guy, that's why."

Kisses

A KISS IS STILL A KISS

By TOM SOTER
from NOSTALGIA, 1991

KISSES. Edited by Lena Tabori.

If, as someone once noted, a girl never kissed a man she didn't intend to marry, then we wouldn't have Kisses, an elegant new picture book for lovers of lovers. Primarily utilizing dialogue and photographs from films of the '30s and '40s – the greatest era of the romantic screen clench – Kisses is for those whowant their romance preserved forever, like some precious sweet. They will not be disappointed: here are Scarlett and Rhett, Nick and Nora, Romeo and Juliet, even Tarzan and Jane. Here, too, are passions and promises, deceits and desires, commitment and compassion. Here is Garbo intoxicating her suitors, Mickey Rooney twirling around Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor melting the will of Richard
Burton ("I will never be free of you," he says in a line from Cleopatra). Here is life, as filtered through the cinema.

Kisses is – dare I say it? – a labor of love. Compiled by Lena Tabori (the daughter of Viveca Lindfors, Ronald Reagan's on-screen lover in Night Unto Night), the volume is divided into three sections ("Innocence," "Passion," "Commitment") and a coda ("Forever") that range from the refreshingly familiar
(Gone With the Wind, Casablanca) to the delightfully obscure (Baby Take a Bow, Bombshell). The quotes offer comedy ("When did you first start having heart trouble?" "From the first moment I met you."), drama ("Forget you? Not while I live...not if I die."), and high©flown romance ("This face that haunts me, drugs me...these hands that were designed for a thousand pleasures...these lips...were they meant to speak of love or grocery lists?"), while the photos offer magic: Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, about to kiss at the completion of a dance in An American in Paris; Chaplin and Paulette Goodard walking into the sunset of Modern Times; Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn "sucking face" in On Golden Pond. Yes, a kiss is still a kiss – and these Kisses are forever. Sigh.

Preston Sturges

Sturges in 1941. THE GREAT MOMENT

from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, 1990

No one, living or dead, has ever been quite like Preston Sturges. No filmmaker has had his knack for combining literate, witty dialogue with outrageous pratfalls or his magical ability to balance the comic with the dramatic, the sentimental with the cynical, the naive with the knowing.

Nothing about Sturges or his films could have been predicted from his early life — he had been a stage manager, an Air Force flier, a songwriter, the manager of a cosmetics firm, and the creator of a kiss-proof lipstick. After a decade penning film scripts, he broke new ground as a writer-director at a time when the industry required that you be one or the other. The Great McGinty, his 1940 directorial debut, won him an Oscar for Best Screenplay and began a remarkable burst of seven brilliant comedies produced between 1940 and 1944.

Yet from 1945 until his death in 1959, he shot only four more pictures — every one a box-office disappointment. He died unable to pay his hotel bill, scribbling away at a memoir he wanted to call The Events Leading Up to My Death (recently released as Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges). His life could have been a story out of one of his films.

Sturges' movies were remarkable for wartime Hollywood because they mercilessly mocked a host of sacred cows: marriage, the military, the advertising industry. Hail the Conquering Hero, finally released on videotape after being unavailable even to revival theater patrons, is one of the writer-director's best. It deals with a poor schnook named Woodrow Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), who is bullied into posing as a decorated Marine and then finds himself caught in a web of ever-increasing deceptions with nightmarish repercussions. Bracken is wonderfully manic, sputtering, stuttering, and yet strangely appealing. He is well supported — and almost overshadowed — by Sturges' brilliant stock company, including William Demarest as Sergeant Heffelfinger, a seasoned soldier with a slightly warped but practical view of life, and Al Bridge as an utterly cynical political boss.Collected screenplays.

They are a marvelous group of characters — and character is what makes Sturges' films so delightful, even when he doesn't quite hit the mark. That's the case with The Great Moment, in which the master of cynicism and slapstick goes sentimental. A longtime pet project, the film is Sturges' account of 19th-century dentist W.T.G. Morton's advocacy of anesthesia.

Much of the film is given over to pedantic speeches about serving humanity (''It won't hurt anymore, now or ever again!''). Joel McCrea, one of Sturges' favorite leading men, who died last month, is the virtuous Morton, battling conservative doctor types who'd rather see people suffer than try something new. You'd think that the man who savagely skewered hero worship in Hail the Conquering Hero would have had a field day with pompous doctors, but Sturges seems too taken by his protagonist to see clearly. As Morton, McCrea is priggish, self-righteous, and humorless — which is probably a good way to describe much of the movie as well. Hero: A+; Moment: C-

Posted Nov 16, 1990

Tarzan Returns

Him Tarzan: Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan.

 

By Tom Soter

from DIVERSION, 1997

A vivid flash of lighting broke from the billowing black clouds above. Thunder crashed and boomed...Leaping to his feet, Tarzan placed a foot upon the carcass of his kill and, raising his face to the heavens, gave voice to the victory cry of the bull-ape.

Faintly to the ears of marching men came the hideous scream... “What the devil was that?” demanded Zveri.

“It sounded like a panther,” said Colt.

“That was no panther,” said Kitembo. “It was the cry of a bull-ape who has made a kill, or -

“Or what?” demanded Zveri.

Kitembo looked fearfully in the direction from which the sound had come. “Let us get away from here,” he said.

It is a classic moment from a classic adventure novel,Tarzan and the City of Gold (1933): hokey, heroic, and wonderfully exciting as Tarzan of the Apes instills fear in the wicked and hope in the downtrodden – and gives his readers a grand old time.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, the ex-pencil-sharpener salesman who created Tarzan, knew that his wild child was hokum – "[An ape-man] would probably have B.O., halitosis, and athlete's foot, plus a most abominable disposition," he once remarked – but Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, struck a public chord anyway. Burroughs (who died in 1950) got only $700 for the first Tarzan tale in 1912 but then reaped millions from 24 sequels, countless comic strips, radio shows, plays, and the world's longest-running movie series.

Now his heirs are set to reap a further bonanza as the vine-swinging ape man continues to come on strong in what could only be described as a mini-boomlet: a nationally syndicated TV series; a new animated musical movie from Disney, with songs by Phil Collins, set for a 1998 release; a Tarzan live action feature in development by Fox Family Films; 15 volumes of color Tarzan comic strips from the 1940s (Flying Buttress Books); and Tarzan: The Lost Adventure (Dark Horse Books), the first new Tarzan novel in 30 years (it is based on an unfinished manuscript by Burroughs).

Yet it almost wasn’t so. Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs’ third novel, was rejected by 11 publishers, and the author almost chalked up the tale as another in a long string of failures. Burroughs, widely known as ERB, was 36 when he started writing and had failed at every job he attempted. As critic Rodney Needham observed in a 1977 London Times story, “during the first 35 years of his life, [ERB’s] mundane circumstances were a train of uncertainties, failures, and impoverished desperations...”

He was a cowhand, gold prospector, railway policeman, time-keeper at a construction site, door-to-door salesman, and the operator of a pencil sharpener sales company. Finally, in desperation, he turned his daydreams into fantastic novels of African lords and Martian princesses. “I was not writing because of any urge to write nor for any particular love of writing,” he once admitted. “I was writing because I had a wife and two babies.”

Tarzan of the Apes tells of how a young baby, orphaned at birth in the jungle, is raised by an advanced form of great apes. Tarzan (early names: Zantan, Tublat Zan) was inspired by the myth of Romulus and Remus and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books. But he was also born out of a vivid Victorian era fantasy: that a white man, abandoned in a jungle could become a super-powerful “Natural Man,” the lord of his domain.

Burroughs, wrote Richard Lupoff in Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, had "boundless faith in the ability of man to live up to a heritage, to rise above environment, and improve himself so as to achieve the great destiny of humanity rather than the miserable fate of his surroundings." Yet Tarzan was not just any man: he was of noble blood, son of Lord Greystoke. 

 

The ape man may have had sociological underpinnings, but above all else, his adventures (and those of ERB’s 91 other stories of Mars, Venus, and a world at the earth’s core) are alluring for their fast-paced action, fantastic settings, and breathless romance. After Tarzan rescues Jane for the first time, for example, ERB’s style becomes pure (and delightful) pulp fiction: “[Civilization dropped away from Jane and] it was a primeval woman who sprang forward with outstretched arms toward the primeval man who had fought for her and won her. And Tarzan? He did what no red-blooded man needs lessons in doing. He took his woman in his arms and smothered her upturned, panting lips with kisses.”

By 1917, movie-makers were knocking on Burroughs’ door. Beefy ex-stuntman Elmo Lincoln shot to fame in Tarzan of the Apes (1918), tackling lions, snakes, and monkeys with the gusto of a circus performer. Balding, he wore a ridiculous mop, and his portly Jane (Enid Markey) led ERB to eliminate the character ("After seeing [Markey], I was very glad to kill [Jane]").

Since then, 19 actors have donned the loincloth. The most famous is Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympic swimming star who won 52 national championships and broke 67 world records. Many call the near-mute Weissmuller the definitive Tarzan, and, in his premier outing Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), he is certainly powerful, handsome, and savagely sexy.

“As opposed to some other screen Tarzans, he did not appear muscle-bound and was able to move about in a loose, cat-like manner,” critic Randy Belhmer noted in Films in Review. “There were other subtle touches of an animal nature – the wariness, the quick turning of the head, and the catching of a scent...” He also warbles the famous Tarzan victory cry: a distinctive yodel combining Weissmuller’s own voice with a hyena’s yowl played backwards, a camel’s bleat, the pluck of a violin string, and a soprano’s high-C.

Weissmuller played Tarzan for 16 years, helping the ape man’s fame while hurting the character’s reputation. He portrayed the jungle lord as an inarticulate muscle man (his dialogue consisted of short words or phrases and the all-purpose “jungle” word “umgawa” which meant “get up,” “go away,” “go for help,” “let’s go”). By contrast, ERB’s Tarzan spoke several languages fluently and was as at home in a tuxedo as he was battling lions. In fact, it was this dichotomy that made Burroughs’ jungle man so intriguing – and which was often missing in screen adaptations.

Hollywood’s version transformed ERB's sophisticated jungle lord into a primitive boy toy, a hunk with no brains ("Me Tarzan") but a lot of brawn, who quite literally sweeps city gal Jane Parker off her feet. After all, who could resist a guy that wrestles lions before breakfast, outswims alligators after lunch, and then rides elephants into the sunset?

Most of the tinseltown jungle adventures from the 1930s through the 1950s are formula films reusing plot elements and stock footage with joyful abandon. Almost all involve white explorers intruding on Tarzan's jungle heaven, usually in search of hidden treasure. Against the ape man's wishes, Jane – or some other person– tries to help them, and by the end, everyone is usually captured by savages who begin elaborate tortures until Tarzan arrives with a flock of elephants to save the day.

The best of this lot is Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942), which cleverly inverts the formula by having the ape man play intruder in New York ("stone jungle"). Before the story ends, Tarzan has made monkeys out of cops and robbers alike, leaping across the city's rooftops and off the Brooklyn Bridge with a breathtaking, Olympian ease. There are also wry moments of social commentary (Tarzan, on visiting a night club: "Smell like Swahili swamp. Why men stay here?" Jane: "It's called having a good time").

The format was eventually modified. In Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), the ape man had become a James Bond-style hero and by 1984, he was getting the prestige treatment with the $46 million Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. Greystoke presents an existential Tarzan searching for his identity. The first half is the most effective rendition of the jungle man's origin ever seen. That sequence – with nary a word spoken – is endlessly fascinating, and Christopher Lambert makes a superb Tarzan. Where the whole conceit falls apart, however, is when director Hugh Hudson plays social commentator, abandoning Burroughs so that his hero can be defeated by the civilization he tries to master. Hudson, preferring a wimpish wild child to ERB's unconquerable fantasy figure, turns up his nose at society – and, finally, at Tarzan himself.

Before Bond: Sean Connery in Tarzan's Greatest Adventure.

“Tarzan: The Epic Adventures,” the new TV series, rectifies all that, returning to Tarzan’s literary – and fantasy-heroic roots, presenting Tarzan as a savage but intelligent hero, a man part of but not overcome by two worlds. The $25 million show, shot in South Africa, captures the flavor of Burroughs’ original tales, with ex-California surfer Joe Lara as an articulate, no-nonsense Tarzan discovering lost civilizations and facing fantastic foes. But above all else, it preserves the essence of what makes the ape man a timeless figure: the allure of the wild and the attraction of justice triumphing over evil.

“Although adventure and morality can still be had in America today, they rarely come in tandem anymore,” George McWhorter, curator of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Memorial Collection at the University of Louisville, explained in Cinefantastique magazine. “But Tarzan is always there waiting to be discovered by a new generation or rediscovered by the old. He is a composite of the best qualities inherent in the human race, which is the secret of his longevity...Beyond that, Tarzan is a highly moral hero, a character who has a clear sense of right and wrong. As for Tarzan’s relevance to the 1990s, or any other time slot, he remains the epitome of virtue, strength, and intellect, a perfect pop-media hero.”

 

 

TARZAN OF THE MOVIES

 By Tom Soter
from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Edgar Rice Burroughs, the ex-pencil-sharpener salesman who created Tarzan of the Apes, knew his wild child was hokum -- "[An ape-man] would probably have B.O., Halitosis, and Athlete's Foot, plus a most abominable disposition" -- but Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, struck a public chord, anyway. Burroughs (who died in 1950) got only $700 for the first Tarzan tale, begun in December 1911 and published in 1912, but he then reaped millions from 24 sequels, countless comic strips, radio shows, plays, and the world's longestrunning movie series. On June 16, 1916, the author signed his first film deal, and by 1932, when Johnny Weissmuller began a 16-year reign, the apeman was one of cinema's top-grossing film stars. ERB's back-to-nature fantasy shows no sign of abating, either: although 18 actors have already swung the vines, a 19th is at work on a new American TV series for the fall.

TARZAN OF THE APES (1918)/THE ADVENTURES OF TARZAN (1921) Beefy ex-stuntman Elmo Lincoln, who shot to fame in the first and disappeared after the second, offers the apeman as noble wrestler, tackling lions, snakes, and monkeys with the gusto of a circus hawker. Balding, he wears a ridiculous mop, and his Jane (Enid Markey) led ERB to knock off the character ("After seeing [Markey], I was very glad to kill [Jane]"). Nonetheless, both movies depict Tarzan as ERB wrote him: a half-savage enigma in a perfect jungle paradise.

Tarzan the best: Gordon Scott in Tarzan's Greatest Adventure.

TARZAN THE APE MAN (1932) -- Some call the near-mute Weissmuller the definitive Tarzan, and in his premier outing, he is certainly powerful, handsome, and, savagely sexy. Exciting, with some great vine-swinging, MGM'sversion made ERB's sophisticated jungle lord into a primitive boy toy, a hunk with no brains ("Me Tarzan") but a lot of brawn, who quite literally sweeps city gal Jane Parker (Maureen O'Sullivan) off her feet. Who could resist a guy that wrestles lions before breakfast, outswims alligators after lunch, and then rides elephants into the sunset? Weissmuller, who lost much of his panache as the series plodded on, continued in the role until he became too chubby for the vines.

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN (1935) -- This 12-chapter serial, with ERB himself as co-producer, is one of the few entries to depict Tarzan as an articulate English lord. The Guatemala-lensed flick is also vintage Burroughs: fast-paced nonsense about sinister spies, a priceless Mayan statue, and a savage, secret civilization. The acting stinks and so does the dialogue ("You will indeed have to be clever and very alert"), but star Herman Brix is pretty nifty in the trees.

TARZAN'S REVENGE (1938) -- With a face (and whistle) like Harpo Marx's, Olympic swimmer Glenn Morris is the oddest Tarzan of all: animal doctor, playful lover, and all-around terrible actor. Aimed at tots, the story has cute critters, dull "action" scenes, and a simple-minded band of white explorers that includes future gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Even such dumb entries have their moments, however: when the apeman and his mate sleep under a moonlit sky, ERB's dream is seen at its most ideal: no words, no worries, just monkey love. The title is a mystery.

TARZAN AND THE TRAPPERS (1958) -- Gordon Scott made the best Tarzan films ever (Tarzan's Greatest Adventure and Tarzan the Magnificent, neither on tape), butthis one, a motley collection of three TV pilots that never sold, is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Watch for suburban Jane (Eva Brent) ironing a loincloth. The film has the usual collection of evil whites, intruding on a jungle paradise of savage natives (actually members of Harlem basketball teams).

TARZAN THE APE MAN (1981) This Bo Derek vanity vehicle, directed by her husband John with "arty" slow-motion action scenes, led the ERB estate to sue, and no wonder: Milos O'Keefe plays the Jungle Lord as Dumb Jock Sex Object, while Little Bo Peek offers Jane as semi-nude tomboy, fond of clingy, wet clothes and inane dialogue and competing with her gin-soaked father (Richard Harris), a sensualist who yells things like "Do you feel the fear? Fear is intoxicating." Director Derek undercuts any possible thrills by shooting every action scene in "arty" slow motion, preferring to concentrate on his singletalented wife.

GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES (1984) The existential Tarzan: Lord Greystoke searches for his identity (Man? Beast? Closet yuppie?) in what is often called the definitive Tarzan flick. It isn't, but the first half is the most effective rendition of the jungle-man's origin ever seen, as the orphaned baby Greystoke is adopted and raised by a tribe of great apes. That sequence -- with nary a word spoken -- is endlessly fascinating, and Christopher Lambert makes a superb Tarzan. Where the whole conceit falls apart, though, is when director Hugh Hudson plays social commentator, abandoning Burroughs so that his hero can be defeated by the civilization he tries to master. Hudson, preferring a wimpish wild child to ERB's fantasy figure, turns up his nose at society -- and, finally, at Tarzan himself.

Terminator 2 CGI

THE TRICKS OF TERMINATOR 2

By TOM SOTER
from VIDEO, 1991

In the complex old days, if you wanted King Kong to climb a building, you had two choices, neither 100 percent realistic: stop©motion (painstaking hand©animation of a tiny model, one frame at a time); or cel-animated cartoons (filming hundreds of hand©drawn illustrations off of plastic "cels").

Now, there's a third, more effective alternative, as anyone who saw Terminator 2: Judgement Day
could tell you: CGI, or Computer Generated Imagery. The work in the film, out this Christmas on video, was dazzling – a brilliant combination of old and new techniques that made audiences actually believe the
unbelievable.

"Our computer animation department tripled in size for that film," notes Jill Jurkowitz, spokeswoman for Industrial Light & Magic, which handled the CGI end of the job (produced on a large budget and tight schedule, the producers used a combination of CGI, models, and masks supplied by ILM, Fantasy II, 4-Ward Productions, and makeup maven Stan Winston).

The ILM sequences found the evil terminator (Robert Patrick) slithering through a barred window; having his head split in two by a shotgun blast; walking out of a flaming inferno; and literally coming to pieces in a final fiery moment. Jurkowitz claims the most difficult effect was a sequence in which the evil terminator pours himself into a helicopter seat and then reconstitutes himself as person. "We had to match dialogue and motion," she says, "which can be especially tricky."

Yet little is simple where CGI is concerned. For any body metamorphosis (or "morphing" effect), a technician must give the computer the first frame in the transformation and the final result; the machine will then figure out how to fill in the transitional frames so that the first form mutates fluidly into the last.

Specifically, that means creating mathematically defined three-dimensional computer models for all the characters or sets, then making an on-screen wireframe display of the model. That model is run through tests for fluidity, and is then "rendered," often the longest process. At that point, surface texture, color, lighting, shadows, and reflections are added (to get it right, hours can be spent on a single frame). Digital compositing is employed to combine the figure with the background scenes that had already been filmed. The finished sequence is electronically transferred back onto film, a frame at a time.

"What we did took a lot of labor," claims Jurkowitz, who reports that 35 ILM technicians worked for a year to craft just 50 shots. That's less than five minutes of screen time, which reportedly cost $6.4 million. Expensive? Yes. And the sweetest irony? No one noticed. Well, hey, that's what magic is all about, isn't it?

Uncredited Appearances

Alec Guinness in Star Wars: credit-less for sequels?

CREDIT REPORT

By TOM SOTER
from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, May 10, 1991

Entirely aside from the question of why Havana is such a startlingly poor film, the big surprise of the movie is Raul Julia-not his performance, but the fact that he's on-screen at all. Julia's name never appeared in the movie's opening credits or on its ads or posters. It makes you wonder what other surprise performances are hidden in movies on the video-store shelves. Here are some of the most intriguing appearances ever to go uncredited.

* Glenda Jackson in The Boyfriend (1971, MGM/UA) Jackson plays the brittle star of a terrible Jazz Age musical who misses her chance at stardom when a visiting Hollywood director sees-and selects-her understudy (Twiggy) for a film. Ken Russell's pastiche of all the worst excesses of kitschy director Busby Berkeley puts Jackson's acting skills to a most severe test: She has to weep visibly over Twiggy's ''brilliant'' performance. B-

* Robert Duvall in The Conversation (1974, Paramount) Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul, a wiretapper in Francis Ford Coppola's atmospheric parable about modern alienation. Duvall turns up in the key role of the Director, a man who hires Caul to get information on his unfaithful wife. Like most of the characters in the story, he is a cipher, tense and potentially menacing, a mysterious figure who may or may not be planning a murder. A

Peter Boyle (left) and Gene Hackman.* Gene Hackman in Young Frankenstein (1974, CBS/Fox) As the blind hermit Harold who prays for a ''friend'' and gets a monster (Peter Boyle) instead, Hackman delivers a marvelous parody of the sincere blind man in Bride of Frankenstein. The film's best moment is the famous soup scene: Unable to see his guest's bowl, Harold pours scalding hot soup in the monster's lap. A

* Elizabeth Taylor in Winter Kills (1979, Nelson) Almost everyone ends up dead in this crazy conspiracy comedy based on the assassination of President Kennedy. Taylor appears in a silent, voiced- over sequence as Lola Comante, a Washington hostess who supplies bedmates for the President and acts as a catalyst for his assassination. B-

* Jack Nicholson in Broadcast News (1987, CBS/Fox) Nicholson plays a veteran TV news anchor who is one part reputation and nine parts automaton. As a drugged-out media father figure who wields great power but has nothing to say, Nicholson personifies the movie's point: TV news is sometimes as empty as its creators. A

* Alec Guinness in The Empire Strikes Back (1980, CBS/Fox) and Return of the Jedi (1983, CBS/Fox) Although killed off in Star Wars, Guinness returns as the ghost of Obi Wan-Kenobi in both sequels. He was reportedly paid a fortune for the brief turns, but series creator George Lucas felt his guiding voice (''The force be with you'') was crucial to hero Luke Skywalker's transformation into a Jedi knight, rather than a mere Obi Wannabe. The Empire Strikes Back: A Return of the Jedi: B

Posted May 10, 1991 | Published in issue #65 May 10, 1991

War Movies

Best war series ever: Rick Jason (left) and Vic Morrow in Combat!BACK TO THE FRONT LINES
By TOM SOTER
from MOVIE TIMES, 1999

War movies are back. The success of Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan, has almost singlehandedly revived a once-popular genre. Ever since All Quiet on the Western Front nabbed an Oscar as Best Picture in 1930, war pictures have allowed audiences and critics to have their blood and deplore it, too. The most popular battle flicks – The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Longest Day (1962), The Guns of Navarone (1964), Patton (1970) – show “guts and glory” heroism, as ordinary people overcome extraordinary circumstances. And for moralists, the films have an added bonus: they offer bloody action as an excuse to rail against the ugliness and depravity of armed conflict.

Some say that such pictures fell on hard times because of an anti-Vietnam backlash. But now, the war is back. This December, director Terence Malick offers The Thin Red Line, his take on the Pacific conflict. That will be followed by U-571 and Thunder Below, two submarine stories; Combat!, with Bruce Willis, from the hit ‘60s TV series; and With Wings of Eagles, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It’s no surprise that WWII is the conflagration of choice in all these films: unlike the enemies in Vietnam, the Nazis were clearly evil and the issues much simpler. Or, as a film student once put it, “World War II? Wasn’t that the war fought in black and white?”

Laurel & Hardy

from DlVERSlON • JANUARY 1994  

In the 1938 film Block-Heads, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy play war buddies who haven't seen each other in 20 years. When they meet, Stan is in a wheelchair he's found, with one leg tucked comfortably beneath him. When Ollie sees his old friend, he thinks he's lost a leg. The wheelchair's real owner arrives, and Ollie graciously offers to carry Stan. After huffing and puffing for what seems an eternity, the fat man finally notices his mistake. He does a double take, then says, "Why didn't you tell me you had two legs?"

"You didn't ask me." As Ollie whacks him, Stan mutters to himself, "Well, I've always had them."

Welcome to the world of Laurel and Hardy. If misunderstandings are the food and drink of comedy, then Stan and Ollie are the grand chefs. Who else would get jobs in a horn factory testing horns (Saps at Sea, 1940) or trade a barbershop for a gold-colored brick labeled GOLD (Oliver the Eighth, 1934)? What other actors would dare to play their own children (Brats, 1930), brothers (Our Relations, 1936), and wives (Twice Two, 1933)? And who but Laurel and Hardy could build a 30-minute Academy Award-winning film out of a single incident: carrying a piano up 131 steps?

Partners in Comedy
Sixty-two years after that Oscar-winning short, The Music Box, Stan and Ollie still reign as the crown princes of chaotic comedy. Their detractors may call them lowbrow, but their supporters are legion, ranging from the Sons of the Desert, an international appreciation society, to such fans as Marcel Marceau. Fellow comic Lou Costello called them "the funniest comedy team in the world." To define what makes them so popular is, really, to define humor itself: "They made the world laugh," said Danny Kaye when presenting a special Academy Award to Laurel in 1960, "because in them, we kind of saw ourselves: ridiculous, frustrated, up to our necks in trouble but nevertheless ourselves."

Indeed, Laurel and Hardy were the everymen who influenced generations of comedians: from the nitwit schemes-and enduring friendship-of Jackie Gleason and Art Carney on "The Honeymooners" to the pratfalls of Dick Van Dyke and the spaced-out innocence of Chevy Chase. Before Hardy, fat men were comic villains; without him, where would the affable actor John Goodman be?

"They knew how to slide over a banana peel, how to make reality absurd," wrote Marcel Marceau in an introduction to the picture book Laurel & Hardy. "They are the black and white of life. They evoke our own absurdities, which make us laugh instead of cry; they remind us that if life is a tragedy for men who think, it is a comedy for those who feel."

Vaudeville Origins
Stan Laurel was born in England in 1890, the son of a vaudeville theater operator and sometime playwright. He made his acting debut in 1906 in a touring production of Sleeping Beauty and soon emigrated to the United States, where he played vaudeville from 1914 to 1922 (at one point sharing a bill with Charlie Chaplin). He drifted into films in 1917, writing gags, directing shorts, and appearing in over 60 movies. He played everything from a brash lover to a dimwitted servant; yet, as one observer noted, "He was one of the unfunniest comedians around."

What changed him was Oliver Norvell Hardy. Known to everyone as Babe (reportedly because of his baby face), Hardy was born in Georgia in 1892. He hoped to become an attorney, but ended up as a theater operator. Like Laurel, he fell into movies, appearing in some 100 comedies between 1914 and 1917, usually as the heavy. He first met Laurel while playing a villain in The Lucky Dog (1919), but it wasn't until Duck Soup (1927) that the two became a bona fide team.

It was a happenstance pairing, one of many that occurred at the Hal Roach Studio, where the duo made its greatest films. Although Laurel was wary-he saw himself primarily as a director and gag writer-Hardy, studio boss Hal Roach, and director Leo McCarey embraced the union. "They seemed to fit so well together," remarked McCarey, " ... not only because they were such contrasting figures but also because they seemed to have this solid instinct that only topflight comedians have of the reality underlying a gag."

Begun in the era of silent films, the partnership was initially built on physical humor but later relied on character. Stan, the skinny one with the look of a lost child, was dumb ("I heard the ocean's infatuated with sharks," he remarked in The Live Ghost, 1934), while Ollie, the fat man with the self-important air, was smart ... but not really ("Not infatuated-he means infuriated!"). The team created character traits that became reassuringly familiar. Stan would cry in a babyish high pitch during a crisis, and he could also perform bizarre feats of magic, such as igniting his thumb in Way Out West (1937) or making a pipe out of his hand in Block-Heads. Ollie did a "tie-twiddle" routine (he would wiggle his tie in a flutter, laughing nervously at the same time) when one of them made a faux pas, and he was frequently found looking into the camera in exasperation when Stan did or said something particularly stupid.

The duo always tried to help each other, yet they always botched things up. In the brilliantly inventive Helpmates (1932), for instance, they simultaneously wreck and clean Ollie's house before the arrival of his bossy wife (a typically domineering shrew). Ollie leaves Stan alone near the end, and when he returns, his home has burned down-except for a door, its frame, and an overstuffed chair. Stan weeps guiltily, but Ollie sits down, resigned. "Well," Stan observes with deadpan understatement, "I guess there's nothing else I can do."

Stan may be dumb ("You can't turn blood into a stone," he remarks in a typically mangled aphorism from 1934's March of the Wooden Soldiers), but it is Ollie who always bears the brunt of his stupidity. It is, after all, Ollie who pours milk in his own ear when Stan hands him a glass of milk instead of the phone receiver ("Excuse me, please, my ear is full of milk," he says calmly) in Going Bye-Bye! (1934). And it is Ollie who puts his head through a drawer, slips on a rolling pin, falls off the roof, and blows himself up. "In submitting endlessly to disaster," wrote movie critic David Thomson, author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film, "he took upon himself the mantle of suffering that has always earned more laughs than haplessness. The belly laughs of Laurel and Hardy movies usually greet Hardy, or more precisely his being confounded by Laurel's simpleton destructiveness. Their films indicate that presence is sometimes as creative as ideas."

In fact, Laurel and Hardy would not be as endearing if they did not have that strong, sympathetic presence. Their pratfalls may have been legion, but their hearts were always pure. "Once in a while, someone will ask me where Stan and I dreamed up the characters we play in the movies," remarked Hardy in 1954. "They seem to think that these two fellows aren't like anybody else. I know they're dumber than anybody else, but there are plenty of Laurels and Hardys in the world .... The dumb, dumb guy who never has anything bad happen to him and the smart, smart guy who's dumber than the dumb guy, only he doesn't know it."

Gift of Gag
In real life, though, Laurel and Hardy was a smoothly running operation, able to take a five-page outline and improvise highly constructed gags that were shot in one take. "Gags developed as we were working," recalled director George Marshall. "We did have a script," offered Laurel in 1959, "but it didn't consist of the routines and gags. It outlined the basic story idea and was just a plan for us to follow."

Nonetheless, a lot of thought was given to what would happen. Working with a team of "gag men" at his home and on the set, Laurel was the genius behind the twosome, supervising the directing and editing, and also crafting the scripts. Those stories place the men in some bizarre situations: as mousetrap salesmen in Switzerland (Stan to Ollie in Swiss Miss, 1938: "I thought there'd be more mice here than anywhere .... Don't they make more cheese here?"); as sawmill workers who slice their own car in half (Busy Bodies, 1933); as a phony master and two servants (Stan plays both maid and butler to Ollie's millionaire in Another Fine Mess, 1930); and as Foreign Legionnaires trying to forget a woman (The Flying Deuces, 1939, in which Ollie is dissuaded from suicide when a Foreign Legionnaire remarks, "There are plenty more fish in the sea," to which Stan replies, "He's not in love with a fish!").

It was a creative paradise, but it didn't last. "We should have stayed in the short-film category," Laurel said. "We do best when we use a simple basic story and then work out all the comedy that's there .... We didn't want to go into feature films in the first place."

The men abandoned their successful 20-minute shorts in the mid1930s to make longer, more meandering tales. Their real decline came, however, when they left the nurturing arms of the Hal Roach Studio. Moving to Twentieth Century Fox and MGM in search of greater freedom, they instead found creative hell. Forced to rehash old material or perform feeble jokes, they soon quit in disgust and turned, instead, to the stage. They successfully toured England in the 1950s.

Hardy, who was married twice, died in 1957, while Laurel, who had four wives, died in 1965. They were friends to the end, as true to each other in life as they had been onscreen. "Laurel and Hardy was really a love story-one of the greatest there ever was," remarked Dick Van Dyke, who delivered the eulogy at Laurel's funeral. "I think the basis for their longevity in films was that they obviously loved each other very much."

Although both the cinematic and real worlds could batter them down, shatter their hopes, and destroy their schemes, they never gave up. As long as they had each other, they could turn adversity into pleasure simply by breaking into the silly, amazingly poignant dances found in many of their movies.

"Good-bye, Ollie!" cries a weeping Laurel when he is about to be executed at the conclusion of Bonnie Scotland (1935).

"Good-bye, Stannie! I'll see you later!" Hardy calls out.

"I'll be waitin' for you when you get to heaven!"

"How will I know you?"

''I'll be waitin' at the gate and I'll have on wings and a harp in me hand!"

"Well, so will all the rest of the angels!"

"I'll keep me hat on; then you'll know me!"

No matter what happens, everyone will always know Laurel and Hardy.

 

SONS OF THE DESERT
Not long before Stan Laurel's death, his biographer, John McCabe, approached the comic with the idea of a Laurel and Hardy appreciation society. Dubbed Sons of the Desert (after the lodge that Stan and Ollie belong to in that film), the group is organized into local branches known as Tents, which are named after Laurel and Hardy movies. The group, with more than 100 Tents worldwide, organizes annual conventions to screen films, exchange information, and practice high jinks. According to McCabe, the organization is "devoted to serving serious purposes in a highly unserious way." Its Laurelpenned motto is "Two minds without a single thought." For more information contact Sons of the Desert; Box 1358; Brookline, MA 02146

 

MORE STAN AND OLLIE
SHORT FILMS
On tape, the best source for shorts is Video Treasures' "Laurel and Hardy Classic Collection," ten tapes ($9.95 each) with three or four 20- or 30-minute shorts apiece. Video Yesteryear has issued four compilations ($24.95 each) of Laurel's silent, solo material called "Stan Without Ollie," as well as "A Few Moments with Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy" ($9.95), featuring the only color short the team ever did. MGM/UA Home Video has released a 1965 documentary, Laurel and Hardy's Laughing 20's ($19.95), with excerpts from their silent work. Cabin Fever's 18 colorized classics on video include Men 0' War, Brats, and Another Fine Mess ($9.95 each).

FEATURES
Pack Up Your Troubles (1932). In the team's second feature, Stan and Ollie search for the father of a deceased army buddy named Eddie Smith so they can deliver his orphaned child to the family. There are some great gags, such as when the two go through the phone book asking hundreds of Smiths, "Are you Eddie's father?" (Video Treasures, $9.95).

Sons of the Desert (1933). This movie has terrific physical gags, some sidesplitting non sequiturs (Stan to Ollie: "You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead"), and endearing silliness ("What's my temperature?" asks Ollie, not realizing Stan has used a barometer. Stan: "Wet and windy"). Widely considered their best feature (Video Treasures, $9.95).

The Devil's Brother (1933). The comedy team's reworking of the classic operetta Fra Diavolo (MGM/UA, $19.95).

March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934). A personal favorite of Laurel's, this fable (originally titled Babes in Toyland) is perhaps the team's most popular picture. Colorized (GoodTimes, $19.95).

Bonnie Scotland (1935). Some charming dance numbers highlight an uneven tale in which Stan and Ollie go to Scotland to claim an inheritance but end up in India (MGM/UA, $19.95).

Pick a Star (1937). A cameo appearance (MGM/UA, $19.95).

Way Out West (1937). One of their best, as the team goes west. Colorized (Video Treasures, $9.95).

Swiss Miss (1938). This film includes a charming lover's serenade, as Ollie sings "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" while Stan accompanies him on a tuba (Video Treasures, $9.95).

The Flying Deuces (1939). Stan and Ollie in the Foreign Legion. Don't miss the classic fade-out (GoodTimes, $14.95).

A Chump at Oxford (1940). This is the film that Graham Greene said was "more agreeable than Chaplin's; their clowning is purer; they aren't out to better an unbetterable world; they've never wanted to play Hamlet" (Video Treasures, $9.95).

Saps at Sea (1940). Stan to Ollie: "You can fool the doctor some of the time, but you can't fool the doctor part of the time, because you'd only be fooling yourself all of the time" (Video Treasures, $9.95).

Great Guns (1941). One of their dreadful last nine films, over which they had no say (CBS/Fox, $29.98).

Air Raid Wardens (1943). Bad (MGM/UA, $19.95).

Nothing but Trouble (1944). Worse (MGM/UA, $19.95).

The Bullfighters (1945). Not bad but not top-notch (CBS/Fox, $29.98).

Utopia (1952). Stan was sick at the time this French-Italian coproduction was made, and he looks terrible. The boys try hard, but it is a sorry fade-out on a lovely duo (Video Yesteryear, $29.95).

BOOKS
The best biography of the team is Randy Skretvedt's Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies (Moonstone Press, $14.95). John McCabe's Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy (Plume, $7.95), written with the cooperation of Stan Laurel, has some interesting insights as well.

Michael Agee

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy

THE COUSIN ALSO RISES

By TOM SOTER
from VIDEO MAGAZINE, 1992

Michael Agee is obsessed. "It's unbelievable to me that no one takes care of this crap," he says in the gruff manner of a Hemingway hero. Yet Hemingway never created a character like Agee, cousin of screenwriter James (The African Queen) Agee, formerly a CBS-TV newsman, cameraman, editor and buddy of director Frank Capra, and currently a self-described "archivist and musical historian" who runs The Nostalgia Archive out of his Los Angeles home.

His current obsession is Laurel and Hardy. If Agee has anything to say about it, the comic pair will be appearing in pristine new versions of their earliest silent work – much of it not seen for decades – on a 16-volume laser disc collection from Image Entertainment that will include their first film together, Lucky Dog (1917), as well as a hitherto lost early pairing, Duck Soup (1927), in which the team created their comic personas.

The August release of the initial volume has not come easy – it has involved battles over rights and film quality – but then nothing has for the 43-year-old Agee, who covered (and then wrote a book on) the Mai Lai Massacre Court-Martial of Lt. William Calley in 1971 before moving to TV news. In 1972, he began his life as a jack-of-many trades: technical director, tape operator, telecine technician, film editor, and camera operator. "It's why I can take these films apart and restore them, because I did all those jobs," he says now. "I was doing everything myself. I wanted to know it all."

That quest led him to Capra, director of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and that in turn took him to Capra cronies William Hornbeck, an editor who began his career in 1913, and Joseph Walker, a cinematographer who invented the zoom lens. It also convinced him to start Hollywood Video Enterprises, the first West Coast company offering mass duplication of Betamax and VHS tapes. "There was company called the Nostalgia Merchant releasing old films on 16-millimeter; I convinced them there was a market for videotape and began doing the transfers for them."

In 1984, he founded the video division of Hal Roach Studios, overseeing and championing colorization as a way to restore classic films and keep them in the public's eye. "If things don't change, they die," he notes. "All the complaints about colorization are crap. The guy who is 75 years old complains about colorization, but the guy who is 18 won't watch it if it's black and white. It's not the medium, it's the message."

But his biggest challenge came in 1986, when King World Productions cancelled a $10 million agreement with Roach to syndicate the Laurel and Hardy film library, maintaining that it was so decomposed as to be unusable. Calling King World "weasels," he personally sifted through one and half million feet of decaying nitrate film stock and three months later produced pristine master videotapes and a successful TV show. The 26-episode series earned over $5 million in its 1986-89 release. There was a serious side effect, however: Agee contracted silver nitrate poisoning from the decomposing film and was sick for three months. He shrugs it off with a typical tough guy remark: "Hey, somebody had to do it. Those guys are geniuses – I just love their films, and it's disgusting the way they've been kept."

Patti LuPone

LuPone in Les Miserables.

DON'T CRY FOR ME
For Patti LuPone, Italian-American success story, life goes on.

By TOM SOTER

for IL CAFFE, 1991

Patti LuPone likes to take chances. Trained as a singer and dancer, she planned to pursue an operatic career. But when she failed her singing audition at New York's Julliard, she turned right around and applied for entry in the school's new drama department. She got in, and four years later, was one of only 14 (out of 36) students who graduated.

Twenty years on, she is still taking chances. In 1989, she jumped from the theater to television to co-star in an unlikely weekly ABC-TV series, Life Goes On . As Libby Thatcher, she is a former singer who gave up a successful career to care for her son, a child with Down Syndrome. The series, now in its third year, went on to introduce another recurring character, atypical for TV: the boyfriend of Libby's daughter, a young man carrying the AIDS virus.

Unusual? Yes, but so is LuPone, a third-generation Italian-American who has essayed everything from dictator's wife in Broadway's Evita to detective's suburban sister in the film Witness; from tubercular street singer in the London company of Les Miserablesto president's wife in the TV-movie,LBJ: The Early Years. "Being Italian has helped me because I have this immediate release of emotion," notes the actress, who lives in California. "That can get in your way because this country is pretty whitebread. I've always felt my career should be in Europe. I look very European. My style of performance is more European than it is American: it's raw and big and emotional."

"There's something about Patti's abandon," observed Howard McGillin, one of her co-stars in Broadway's Anything Goes, in 1988. "She's not exactly what I'd call a cerebral actress. I mean, she's very bright and she certainly has a lot of technique behind her. But she really is completely uninhibited and throws herself into the performance with abandon. Patti is a kind of brassy dame. There's this rebellious streak in her a mile wide."

That streak goes back nearly 40 years, to 1953, when LuPone took her first dance lesson. The youngest of three children growing up in New York's Northport, Long Island, Patti was the only daughter of Orlando Joseph LuPone, a school principal, and Angela Louise ("Patti") LuPone, a graduate library administrator. Her mother was an opera buff – LuPone is also the great-grandniece of the famous Italian soprano Adelina Patti – and her father apparently liked tap dancing. While principal of Ocean Avenue Elementary School, LuPone senior introduced an extracurricular dance program. The four-year-old Patti suddenly discovered her niche. "I was tap dancing," she recalls, "and I fell in love with the audience, and that was that."

LuPone loved performing. In high school, she sang in the concert choir and madrigal group, played tuba in the marching band and cello in the school orchestra, and even sang and danced in South Pacific. While taking private voice and piano lessons, she also developed a dance act with her twin brothers, Robert and William. Dubbed The LuPone Trio, it competed at benefits around town.

Through it all, she was reminded sporadically of her Italian heritage. "My grandmother LuPone used to bake fresh bread every day, and my grandma Patti, we would just say, 'Pizza,' and she'd make a pizza. It was wonderful," she says. "My father's side of the family was from the Ubruzzi region, and my mother's side of the family is from Palermo, but we didn't talk about it a lot. When my parents were growing up in America, it wasn't cool to be Italian. So everybody strove to be American. And so the language was not taught to us. I'm upset by it. I wish I had learned the dialect they were speaking. But it was a time in America where it wasn't cool to be Italian." Nonetheless, she adds, with one of her frequent laughs, "I became more Italian than my mom. I'm proud of my heritage, and I just think it's in the body. You can't really deny it."

She had her share of personal trouble: her parents separated when she was 12, and the three children stayed with their mother, who encouraged them in their career choices. Robert became an actor (he originated the role of Zach in Broadway's A Chorus Line) and William a high school librarian. "My mother's never been a stage mother, but she never discouraged us," remarks Patti. "And we wouldn't have had it [if she tried to discourage us]. That was a way of life for us."

LuPone studied at Julliard with the actor John Houseman,‘ whose teaching regimen included 13-hour, six-day weeks. Her Sicilian nature often got her into trouble outside of class. "She was rebellious," recalled her brother, Robert, in 1988. "[When we were growing up,] she would be climbing out the window at 3 A.M. to sing and dance down the middle of Main Street." Houseman, in fact, reportedly placed LuPone on probation with the remark, "You do more acting in the corridors than in the classroom!"

Yet she was soon part of the Julliard Acting Company (later simply dubbed The Acting Company), which spent three years (48 weeks a year) touring America with workshops, classes, and a repertoire of 18 plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, and others. "I knew I would be able to make it on the musical stage," she notes now, "but I wanted to be able to maintain, so I studied acting."

From there, she played Off-Broadway and Broadway. She garnered good notices ("unusually sweet and vulnerable," wrote Clive Barnes; "a comic actress with enormous personal flair," observed Mel Gussow) and even a Tony nomination in 1976 for The Robber Bridegroom, in which she co-starred with Kevin Kline, reportedly her lover for seven years.

She finally hit the big time with Evita. She was an unlikely choice for the part of Evita Peron, the part-Italian wife of Argentinean dictator Juan Peron. "Because of that role, everybody thinks I'm six feet tall, blonde – and a fascist!" notes the five-foot-two brunette with another laugh. "It took a long time to break that image, although it's a great image to have." She got the part on the basis of two songs ("Don't Cry for Me‘ Argentina" and "Rainbow High"), which she sang so powerfully that some listeners reportedly cried. "Being Italian-American and having that kind of raw power helped me. Absolutely."

LuPone as the unlikely heroine in Evita.

She won the Tony for the part in 1980, but has had her share of ups and downs since: a series of less-than-memorable movie parts, a cabaret act, some notable Broadway successes (Anything Goes ) and flops (a revival of Oliver! as the prostitute Nancy), and the prestigious Olivier Award for her role in the London production of Les Miserables. "I don't think she's ruled by her head," said the producer Hal Prince once. "I don't think after the great success of Evita she said, 'Now this is my next step, and I must have this publicity agent, and this is whom I must meet.' I think she went off helter-skelter and didn't work it all out. And you know what? That's kind of winning."

Curiously, it was during a trip to Italy that things started to make sense once more to Patti LuPone. On location for the RAI-TV film Sicilian in Sicily, the actress found herself driving her car on a Sicilian road and thinking, "'It makes sense being here. Mentally. Emotionally.' It was all so beautiful. Everything about it struck me. And I suddenly connected to it all. The struggle – growing up part-Sicilian in America – the feelings I've had. I really can't describe it. Being there in Sicily, it just made sense."

Soon after, she was a hit in Anything Goes, and then began her long run as Libby on Life Goes On. The character started as "Middle American whitebread," but soon turned into pure Patti – an Italian-American with hidden fire who raises a family in the face of life's adversities. "My character is Italian," she says, adding with a chuckle: "It didn't start out that way, but it was kind of hard to deny it after a while." Her Italian "parents" have also appeared, as has her "cousin" Gabriella from Sicily, also played by LuPone.

"Playing Gabriella was much lighter and a lot of fun," she recalls. "It was the first time I really got to use my acting muscles again. I mean television is shorthand acting. It doesn't really challenge you that much. And I got to play two parts."

In the story, Gabriella, an Italian actress, comes to audition for an American TV show and disrupts the Thatcher family. "Libby sees that the two of them were basically the same when they were growing up, when they knew each other in Italy, but now they've changed," explains LuPone. "She had decided that she wanted to be a mother of a family and Gabriella became a performer in Italy. And she had a lot of life, a lot of spunk, and Libby envies her cousin. But then she realizes that her cousin really doesn't have anything in her life, that she doesn't have a family, that Gabby's selfish, that she keeps running away."

No one would say that about LuPone, who married cameraman Matt Johnston in 1988 and had her first child, Joshua Luke, in 1990. "Being Italian is very important to me," admits the actress, who says she has relatives in Italy but has never met them. "My favorite film for years has been Cinema Paradiso. What a film! You know, the Italian temperament is so appealing – and that kid's love for movies!"

LuPone's own love of things Italian extends to novels: she has just finished reading Cry to Heaven, a story set in Eighteenth Century Italy. "It's wonderful book, and makes the country so appealing. I would love to go all over Italy! When I was making A Sicilian in Sicily for RAI, we spent two weeks in Sicily, which was a mind-blower. It was so beautiful. So beautiful. When I go back, I'd like to go up the Almazzi coast. I'd like to go back there and make films."

LuPone pays little attention to the changing role of Italians in the media, feeling that in Hollywood, Italians can play Greeks (Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin), Hispanics can play Italians (Andy Garcia in The Untouchables), and Anthony Quinn can play anyone. "God bless Quinn! I just saw him the other night in Viva Zapata. He was great – and you know, I don't think it matters what the nationality is when it comes to the role. If you're an actor, it's your job – and your joy – to be able to play all sorts of different parts. I'm Italian but I can play anything. And I have."