FUNNY GIRL (1968)

Barbra Streisand’s relatively sparse film output, 21 films over four & a half decades, hardly measures up to her talent . . . or her potential.  Now, even her smash debut looks a bit threadbare, though a recent restoration brings out its shiny gloss.  (The ladies all look like they’ve had their hair done for that year’s Miami Beach Republican National Convention.)  The original B’way show librettist, Isobel Lennart, got stuck having to please producer Ray Stark, the real-life son-in-law to both leading characters, Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice and Nicky Arnstein, the mid-level crumbum conman she married.  And if Brice’s rise in the Follies was lightly fictionalized, her slightly sordid romance had to be completely re-imagined.  Well, re-imagined if you don’t know the plot & characters of SHOW BOAT and/or A STAR IS BORN: Offbeat female star with unconventional looks; glamorous but fading/emasculated husband; asexual guy pal; tough, but kindly producer; a shameful night-court appearance; even a ‘This is Mrs. Norman Maine’ moment.  Three or four numbers from the stage show can still thrill, not so much the showcase Follies numbers staged by dance director Herbert Ross, but the integrated set pieces director William Wyler kept a hand in.  'People;’ the ultra-dramatic ‘My Man’ finale; and most especially ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade,’ a blissed out end to the first act that’s Wyler’s tribute to Ernst Lubitsch who invented this sort of musical epiphany for Jeanette MacDonald on a moving train in MONTE CARLO/’30.  Some of the original Jules Styne/Bob Merrill score got swapped out for actual Brice specialty songs, including ‘I’d Rather Be Blue,’ co-written by Fanny’s next husband, Billy Rose!  Alas, in gaining ‘My Man’ for the climax, they lost the show’s own great torch song ‘The Music that Makes Me Dance.’ (Listen to a rare live B’way perf here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxWrfKiAxKI )

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  How times have changed.  Now, when Streisand opens the film by slyly looking at herself in the mirror and saying ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ we’re apt to agree.  If only she didn’t.

CONTEST:  Kay Medford as Mama Brice purposefully & repeatedly mispronounces something in this film. (A gag that goes missing on the French-language soundtrack.)  Spot the mispronunciation to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

DOUBLE-BILL:  The obvious double-bill is the follow-up, FUNNY LADY/’75, but it’s a bit of a stinker.  Why not try the real Fanny Brice.  Her first film, MY MAN/’28 has all her hit tunes, but this early Talkie only survives as a complete set of VitaPhone Synch-Discs, most of the visual element has been lost.  But you can get a pretty good idea of what she was about from THE GREAT ZIEGFELD/’36 where she sings a verse of ‘MY MAN’ on stage; and in ZIEGFELD FOLLIES/’45 where she applies her astonishing (and astonishingly physical) comedy technique to a not particularly amusing missing lottery ticket sketch.  These skits always date badly, but she’s something to see.  Completely exposed, working without a trace of vanity, the real Fanny Brice was thrillingly common.

FOLLOW THE FLEET (1936)

While arguing for the supremacy of TOP HAT/’35 vs SWING TIME/’36, Astaire & Rogers fans sometimes miss the pleasures of the film that came between. Not without some cause. Even by the slapdash narrative standards of the series, the story, gags & characterizations in this one barely make a ripple. Fred & Ginger are their usual delightful selves, this time in Working Class mode as ex-partners who almost got hitched. Now, he’s in the Navy & she’s working as a taxi-dancer when the fleet comes to town. Since they’re already a couple, they spend a lot of screen time getting the painfully uninteresting secondary couple together, Officer-in-Training Randolph Scott & Ginger’s Plain-Jane sister Harriet Hilliard (of OZZIE & HARRIET fame). But with an Irving Berlin score & dances that equal anything in the series, the earthbound script hardly matters. Especially so when Fred & Ginger decide to help their pals by putting on a show. A rehearsal scene, showing them hashing their way thru ‘I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket’ is a rare comedy dance that really raises laughs. (Also, right before the number, Fred limbers up at the piano, playing ‘live’ with a jivey spin Berlin must have marveled at.) Then, to a stunning Berlin lyric & melody for ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance,’ they step away from their own light romantic characters to reveal an emotional charge they never tapped elsewhere. As supremacy arguments go, this beautiful dance may be their ultimate masterpiece. And watch for brief bits from Betty Grable and a blond Lucille Ball who works up a couple of neat comic bits. (Don’t skip the Extras for some swell Big Band Jazz from Jimmie Lunceford & Co. These guys really swing!)

CORIOLANUS (2011)

Ralph Fiennes grabs Shakespeare by the short & curlies and hoists his last (and least well-known) Roman tragedy into today’s world, amid a modern conflict like Bosnia. As actor & director, he shoots the public scenes like BBC or CNN news coverage, and the private scenes with hand-held fervor, holding back as much as possible on the pomp. It’s clever, it ‘works,’ but decades of this sort of contemporizing makes the basic concept look nearly as old-fashioned as togas, tights & tilted sets. (Here’s CORIOLANUS FOR DUMMIES: Roman general returns in triumph but can’t quite stoop low enough to please the Tribunes or the famished hoi polloi. (Oops!, that's Greek. How 'bout 'the famished rabble?') Expecting kudos & a consulship, he finds himself reviled & exiled. Hardened to the point of cracking, he now joins the enemy and makes ready to attack Rome itself when his patrician mother begs him to make peace. And we all know what happens to the peacemakers.) Most of the cast are Shakespeare savvy, though Gerard Butler’s enemy commander puts out the occasional blank stare, but Fiennes reads Coriolanus as a Pride-Goeth-Before-a-Fall figure when it’s the man’s unwavering integrity that probably does him in. Well, that . . and listening to his mother! That’d be Vanessa Redgrave who pulls out the same dead-eyed, icy stare that Ethel Barrymore once owned. But the best perf comes from Brian Cox as Menenius, the close aide who grows irrelevant, a favorite Shakespearean type. Think of, say, Buckingham in RICHARD III. Did Will write these scene stealers for himself to play? Flawed as it is, the remarkable (and remarkably current) play still manages to come across and is worth a look. (NOTE: Just a reminder about our Family Friendly rating.  It's not necessarily meant to be taken for Kid Friendly, but as truly Family Friendly. As in, something that might work for the whole family.  A high-schooler stuck with a bad bit of Shakespeare might find this newsy approach fresh; and it certainly lends itself to a current events type of discussion.  That kind of Family Friendly.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Back in ‘79, Morgan Freeman did Coriolanus for The New York Shakespeare Festival. The production was taped (for television?), but was it ever shown?

SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT (1946)

There’s a neat gimmick at the center of this film noir*, but Joseph Mankiewicz had just added directing to his long CV as producer/writer, and doesn’t yet have the control to get past the plot holes or integrate the assortment of acting styles he gets from an uneven cast. John Hodiak is merely colorless as the WWII vet, suffering from amnesia and trying to find out who he is, but debuting Nancy Guild, a Veronica Lake/Gene Tierney type, is amateurish as the sweet young thing who believes in him. The rest of the cast (Richard Conte, Lloyd Nolan, a highly theatrical Fritz Kortner) is more colorful, but might as well be in separate pics. The plot, something about a missing briefcase of Nazi cash, isn’t especially clear, but that’s not much of a problem. Spic-n-span plot development isn’t what we need from a noir, just the momentum to get swept up in a cloistered atmosphere of danger, suspense & fatalistic romance. Elements Mankiewicz would put together next year in a different kind of noir, a romantic noir, and his first masterpiece, THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR/’47.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Apparently, DARK CITY/’98, a graphic novel adaptation, shares more than the usual noir story components with this title. Follow the IMDb link below for details.  (NOTE - Spoilers in the link message.)http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038965/board/nest/189901678

THE VIKINGS (1958)

Pillaging rarely looked like so much fun as in this period adventure tale with Kirk Douglas & Tony Curtis giving battle as friend & foe against dastardly Brits while vying for the affections of Janet Leigh.* Richard Fleischer keeps the action moving and manages to untangle a tricky narrative structure that needs three or four prologues before we get to the main story. (The opening is extra nifty, a limited-animation lecture from the UPA studio, that sketches out a potted Viking history intoned by Orson Welles. And don’t skip the end credits, done in the same spirited manner.) As Papa Viking, Ernest Borgnine isn’t the most convincing fellow on screen, but he throws himself into the stunts & swordplay with gusto. And though Fleischer makes the action look unusually scary with a death-defying castle-keep duel for Tony & Kirk and some terrifying trained hawks in full attack mode, the film never loses its strong comic edge which has the advantage of keeping Kirk from taking things (including himself) too seriously.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Generating plenty o’ heat, Leigh & Curtis easily disprove the old Hollywood canard about real-life married couples lacking on-screen sexual chemistry.

DOUBLE-BILL: Lenser Jack Cardiff not only brought his A game to the film, but enjoyed the experience enough to direct a close-follow up, THE LONG SHIPS/’64, with Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier and a tone that ups the ante from this film’s comic edge to near goofy.

ROMEO AND JULIET (1936)

Norma Shearer had a test-run on Juliet, doing the balcony scene with John Gilbert’s Romeo back in THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929. The pairing didn’t amount to much, but it must have made a lasting impression on her husband, studio honcho Irving Thalberg, who went all out on this love-letter/vanity production. (It was part of a long-term plan to wean Norma off her sexy sophisticate roles and reinvent her as the ‘First Lady of the Screen!’ Hence, her move toward stage-tested vehicles originated by legit stars like Gertrude Lawrence, Lynn Fontanne & Kit Cornell, B’way’s Juliet in 1934.) Naturally, the film was assigned to George Cukor, new to Shakespeare, but the resident stage-to-screen specialist, and noted ‘Ladies Director.’ It’s wildly over-produced, large-scaled & dreadfully tasteful, and its never had much of a reputation. But, on its own terms, it’s better than you may recall. Thalberg really did go all out, physically it’s both gorgeous & gargantuan (note the multiple credits for famed London-based designer Oliver Messel), but you keep expecting some stately grand opera to break out, LA GIOCONDA or LES HUGUENOTS. (Or maybe PIQUE DAME to go along with all the Tchaikovsky on the soundtrack.) The whole cast is twice as old as they should be. Well, maybe not twice as old . . . more like thrice as old!; and the text heavily trimmed to allow for plenty of dance & pageantry in the 2-hr running time. But the old-fashioned, well-mannered speaking style has its charms compared to the bland realism & whispering speech patterns of today. If only the players rose above mere adequacy. The film only comes fully to life with the rude vitality of John Barrymore’s Mercutio & Edna May Oliver’s Nurse. (Barrymore looks completely debauched in his first scene*, less so later. But he spent an entire day insisting that one line about Romeo went ‘He speaketh not; he sleepeth not; he pisseth not.’) Along with Basil Rathbone’s Tybalt**, these two troopers are the only cast members unfazed by the boundaries of taste or refinement. Bless them.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Barrymore was living in a sanatorium during the shoot, trying to dry-out after his 1934 breakdown. You can see the ghastly place re-imagined by Cukor in his version of A STAR IS BORN/’54. It’s the scene where studio head Charles Bickford visits James Mason to offer a small role. OR: Cast your own Hollywood Juliet by auditioning the 18 yr-old Olivia de Havilland as she plays Hermia in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM/’35.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: **Rathbone had good cause to be loose on the set, he'd been Romeo to Kit Cornell’s Juliet on B’way. (And the 19 yr-old Orson Welles was Tybalt!) Meanwhile, poor Leslie Howard, charming, but cool to the touch as Romeo here, doubled down on Shakespeare in ‘36 with a B’way Hamlet that flopped against John Gielgud’s.

THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR (1975)

With its tiny budget, and even tinier imagination, this Grade Z Post-Apocalypse tale never finds its groove. Glum, but hardly serious, it imagines New York City in 2012, a place of scavenging savages who roam the streetscape, and a small group of elite survivors whose rooftop garden hold rare hybrid plants with their promise of a new beginning for mankind . . . if we can only keep those tomatoes on the vine! Robert Clouse, a cult director of Martial Arts pics (ENTER THE DRAGON/’73) must have known his script was too sobersided for its own good, more SOYLENT GREEN/’73 than PLANET OF THE APES/’68, and without a Charlton Heston-sized budget. So, Yul Brynner, fresh off a surprise hit with his robotic gunfighter in WESTWORLD/’73, got tapped. But without that film’s comic edge, Yul was stiffer than ever, and the action scenes flatfooted. The film’s biggest mystery is the participation of Max Von Sydow. He’d just finished the super-classy thriller THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR/’75 and then gets booked into this crummy vehicle? Maybe his agent thought it was the end of the world?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For a neat twist on Post-Apocalypse NYC pics, it’s hard to beat the formal storytelling stylings of John Carpenter near his best in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK/’81.

CAMELOT (1967)

Jack Warner’s final film at his home studio was this immense, lumbering musical that didn’t please anyone. He’d bet big (and won big) on Lerner & Loewe’s MY FAIR LADY/’64, but this show had been nothing but trouble. (See Alan Jay Lerner’s ON THE STREET WHERE I LIVE.) Hiring film-phobic Joshua Logan to direct only made things worse and, while the film has some lovely things in it, none of the pieces go together. It’s a stylistic nightmare right from the start when Richard Harris’s pasty-faced Arthur sings his intro song between finicky jump-cuts while Vanessa Redgrave’s Guinevere grooms a fur coat right out of Carnaby Street. At least, the ridiculously handsome Franco Nero gets a dashing number as Lancelot, riding in stages from France to Camelot to the verses of C’EST MOI. It’s the film’s one happy moment, a lively glance from Lerner-the-lyricist toward his favorite film musical, LOVE ME TONIGHT/’32 from Rodgers & Hart and helmer Rouben Mamoulian. That’s the director who might have pulled this off, instead we get the inert film staging of Josh Logan. You don’t expect Logan to find shots for a jousting tournament or a ride to the rescue, but even a musical roll-in-the-hay like ‘The Lusty Month of May’ leaves his poor editor helplessly repeating shots of forced merriment.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The legend of King Arthur has been filmed often, if not particularly well. Those with a tolerance for Wagner, Flower Power, magic & communes should try John Boorman’s EXCALIBUR/’81.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: As mentioned above, Lerner’s B’way memoir is a treat.

BLUEBEARD (1972)

Richard Burton hit the classics in ‘72 with a film of Dylan Thomas’s radio play, UNDER MILK WOOD, a forgotten Faustian fable from Peter Ustinov, HAMMERSMITH IS OUT, and this odd take on Bluebeard, that legendary ladykiller. The films were all disasters, but this one, a late effort from vet Hollywood helmer Edward Dmytryk, isn’t bad in the way you expect. The Hungarian-based production is surprisingly lux, handsomely shot by Gabor Pogany, and the tale fits nicely into its Old Europe/Fascist ‘30s setting. But the script plays out like a check list of aristocratic rue, with an unvaried pace and uninventive murders. Dmytryk seems out of his element, unable to lighten Burton’s ghoulish purring or deathmask demeanor. Some of the international crew of wives show a bit of spunk (unlike the impotent Bluebeard) and lots of bare breasts (which repel him); alas the most screen time goes to Joey Heatherton, inept as his last wife. (Raquel Welch looks yummy as a highly experienced nun, but her big confession only makes you hark back to Stanwyck’s similar tell-all in THE LADY EVE/’41.) As told here, it all boils down to sexual inadequacy, an explanation that feels . . . er, inadequate. WARNING: This film contains Wild Game Hunt footage.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Edgar Ulmer’s BLUEBEARD/’44, with John Carradine & some memorable puppets is effective zero-budget fare, and there’s the similarly themed THE HONEY POT/’67, Joe Mankiewicz’s failed VOLPONE update. That leaves Chaplin’s MONSIEUR VERDOUX/’47, itself a disconcerting mix of brilliance & heavy-handed dramatics. Maybe it’s best stay in Hungary with a CD of Bartok’s great one-act opera, BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE. Try Bernard Haitink on EMI with Anne-Sophie von Otter & John Tomlinson. Close your eyes to watch.