FRES 1020, Fall 2008, Classic American Film
Wednesdays, 3:30-5:30 P.M.
Barry A. Palevitz, Professor Emeritus

REVISED SCHEDULE AND FILM SUMMARIES

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OF THE INFORMATION.

    During the semester we will view 12 classic American films. For our purposes, ‘classic is defined here as made before 1960 (one exception this semester). One of the films I’ve chosen (ALL ABOUT EVE) is included in the American Film Institute’s top 100 movies of the last 100 years. Some won Oscars in various categories. If we have time, we will discuss the films briefly after they’re shown, but definitely in more detail during two class discussion sessions. I will also maintain a class website on which I’ll post information about the films, stars, etc. You MUST read this website before class each week.

   This semester we’ll focus on the films of one of the greatest actresses of all time, Bette Davis. An two time Oscar winner (for DANGEROUS and JEZEBEL) and 11 time nominee, Ms. Davis was renowned for her dramatic impact, outstanding filmography and unmistakable persona. She was also the subject of a hit recording by Kim Carnes, ‘BETTE DAVIS EYES’, which topped the Billboard charts for NINE weeks in 1981. It earned record and song of the year Grammy honors . You can find the original song on You Tube. But the best thing to result from the song was renewed recognition of this great star by a new generation of film goers.

    Your job is to PAY ATTENTION: seriously watch the films, think about them and jot down your impressions. A notebook devoted to this class would be a good idea. Themes to watch out for include but are not limited to plot development, outstanding performances and directing, cinematography, comparisons between performances of the same star in more than one film, and personal responses. If you have trouble staying awake, consider dropping the course. I will talk to you if I see you nodding off. If you are not enthusiastic about films, and specifically these films, DROP THE CLASS NOW. I take these films seriously; I expect you to do so too.
    You MUST be available for all two hours of class (in one case, longer), since the films may run that long. There will be NO EXCEPTIONS, so please don’t plan on other commitments for any of the dates. If you can’t be in class all two hours, please consider dropping the course.
    You will be required to participate in class discussion -- your contribution in that regard will count towards your grade. You will turn in a paper at the end of the semester, totaling at least 1000 words, in which you explore a specific theme or subject in these films. I will provide more information on the paper later in the semester.
    You will be allowed ONE excused absence. A second absence will result in your being asked to drop class, except under extreme (and I mean extreme) circumstances. Please understand – since the seminar is about viewing films, missing class is unacceptable.
 
   Finally, to learn more about me, feel free to consult my personal website at: www.plantbio.uga.edu/~palevitz

Resources:
A lot of books are available on American cinema. You can find them in the library or at your favorite bookstore (e.g. UGA, Borders, Barnes and Noble). A great one I'm reading now is by film historian Nick Clooney (George's father and Rosemary's brother), THE MOVIES THAT CHANGED US. Written in 2002, it covers 20 films, from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) to THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915). Clooney offers wonderful, informed insights and reflections on the films and their times.
There are several available books about and by Bette Davis, as well as collections of her films on DVD. The main library has 22 listings under her name. Consult the UGA library, Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes and Noble etc. for more information.

You can also go to the Internet for more information on Bette Davis and films in general. Good sites include:
     Turner Classic Movies: www.turnerclassicmovies.com
     American Film Institute: www.afi.com
     Internet Movie Data Base: www.imdb.com
     American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:
          www.oscars.org/awardsdatabase/index.html
    The Golden Years: www.thegoldenyears.org
    Film critic Roger Ebert: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com
    NY Times database of past movie reviews: 
       http://movies.nytimes.com/ref/movies/reviews/index.html
    Filmsite: www.filmsite.org/

Academic Honesty: This course will be conducted in accordance with UGA policies regarding academic honesty. Each student is expected to do his or her own work on exams. I take this expectation VERY seriously. For additional information about expectations, procedures and penalties relevant to academic honesty, see the UGA website, www.uga.edu/honesty/.

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'I'd love to kiss you but I just washed my hair.'   From, THE CABIN IN THE COTTON, 1932
'...don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars.'   From, NOW, VOYAGER, 1942
'Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night'. From, ALL ABOUT EVE, 1950


FILM SCHEDULE

Aug. 20.     COURSE INTRODUCTION.
                     STARDUST: THE BETTE DAVIS STORY
Aug. 27      PETRIFIED FOREST
Sept. 3        ALL ABOUT EVE
Sept. 10      LITTLE FOXES
Sept. 17.    PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX
Sept. 24      THE LETTER
Oct. 1         JEZEBEL

Oct. 8         DISCUSSION

Oct. 15       MISTER SKEFFINGTON
Oct. 22       THE CORN IS GREEN
Oct. 29       NOW, VOYAGER
Nov. 4        DARK VICTORY
Nov. 11      OF HUMAN BONDAGE
Nov. 18      POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES

Dec. 3         DISCUSSION

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FILM SUMMARIES


9/10. Released in 1941, THE LITTLE FOXES tells the story of a dysfunctional, avaricious Southern family. The main character, aristocratic Regina Hubbard Giddens, has two nasty brothers who are scheming to build a cotton mill. They need money, and hatch plans to get it from Horace, Regina’s sickly husband, whom she despises. B.D. soars in this role, especially when Horace suffers a fatal heart attack. She’s stellar, without uttering a word. Take note of an incredible supporting cast including Herbert Marshal, Teresa Wright, Richard Carlson and Dan Duryea. The film is based on a play by the legendary Lillian Hellman, who also did the screenplay, and it was directed by the great William Wyler. It was nominated for 9 Oscars. For a review of this film, go to:
www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=64058

9/3. ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) ‘is a realistic, dramatic depiction of show business and backstage life of Broadway and the New York theater’, according to filmsite.org. Picture the interplay between an aging actress (Margo Channing, played by B.D., and a young, aspiring one awestruck (Eve Harrington), played by Anne Baxter. Add an amazing assortment of other characters, like critics, playwrites, friends, etc., and you have an explosive mix of personalities, either supportive or at each other’s throats. For Bette Davis, many consider Margo her ‘signature role’ and crowning achievement. But the film soars with an incredible supporting cast of George Sanders, Gary Merrill B.D.’s husband to be), Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter and Hugh Marlowe. ALL ABOUT EVE set a record for the time. Again, according to filmsite.org, ‘It was nominated for fourteen awards - more than any other picture in Oscar history, until Titanic (1997) duplicated the same feat forty-seven years later. The film won six Oscars: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (George Sanders), Best Director (Joseph L. Mankiewicz), Best Screenplay (Joseph L. Mankiewicz), Best Sound Recording, and Best B/W Costume Design. Four actresses in the film were nominated (and all lost). It holds the record for the film with the most female acting nominees:

    * Best Actress (two) - Bette Davis and Anne Baxter
    * Best Supporting Actress (two) - Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter

The film was directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who also wrote the screenplay and won two Oscars for his work. George Sanders, one of the finest spoken actors in Hollywood history, received his due for this film.

Watch for: As Margo is about to climb a flight of stairs, she recites one of THE most famous lines in film history. Be on the lookout for it.

For a complete review, go to: www.filmsite.org/alla.html


9/24. NOW, VOYAGER is the quintessential 'weepy' or 'women’s' movie, but the label is definitely not a perjorative in this case. The film was released in 1942, and B.D. never gave a better performance, especially in the movie's beginning. Her portrayal of Charlotte Vale, ‘a mousy, dowdy and overweight, frustrated, mother-hating, virginal spinster early in the film is a remarkable acting achievement’, says filmsite.org. Davis is supported by an incredible cast including Claude Rains as psychiatrist Dr. Jaquith, who comes to the rescue; Gladys Cooper as her domineering mother; and Paul Henried as her lover ‘Jerry’ Durrance. As the film progresses, Charlotte emerges from  her cocoon like a butterfly, then contends with her mother in order to preserve her newfound life. The film takes some interesting turns, as Charlotte is united with her lover’s repressed daughter, and then with Jerry himself. Nominated for three Oscars, including Best Actress (Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Cooper), it won for Best Score (Max Steiner). A haunting melody by Steiner reoccurs throughout the film. NOW, VOYAGER also features several classic lines and scenes, especially at the end. BTW, if you’re curious, the film’s title comes from Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS:

    The Untold Want
    By Life and Land Ne'er Granted
    Now, Voyager
    Sail Thou Forth to Seek and Find

For more complete treatments of NOW, VOYAGER see:

www.filmsite.org/nowv.html
www.imdb.com/title/tt0035140/
www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=1922


BETTE DAVIS PICTURES:

BD1
BD2
BD3
An excellent collection of pix can be found at:
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/22/bfbette122.xml

For a B.D. tribute, biography, pix etc., go to www.classicmovies.org/articles/aa050700a.htm

The official B.D. website has lots and lots of info, including pix.
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Bette Davis centenary

The Telegraph (UK); 3/22/08
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/22/bfbette122.xml
[excellent collection of pix linked here]

If Bette Davis had lived to 100 she'd be as wicked and as funny as ever. Sheila Johnston reports

Bette Davis died at 81, not a bad age for one of Hollywood's heroic smokers. But she would have celebrated her 100th birthday on April 5, and it is delicious to imagine her ghost presiding over the festivities. Perhaps she would be sporting an outrageous, inappropriate dress, or a piratical eyepatch, like the vicious mother in The Celebration (1968).
    
Bette Davis in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)

She would most definitely be firing up a chain of cigarettes, as she plied the gathering with caustic wit and wisdom. The party would not be a picnic but it would certainly be animated, and all present would be well advised to fasten their seatbelts tight for a bumpy night.

For all the early attempts to pass her off as a bottle-blonde flapper, Davis was built for a complicated destiny. Back in 1935, one perceptive critic of Dangerous - for which she won her first Academy Award, as a destructive, alcoholic actress - thought the actress would "probably have been burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago. She gives the curious feeling of being charged with power which can find no ordinary outlet."

Davis won both her Oscars (the second was for Jezebel in 1938) early in her career. But there were eight more nominations to come, and she truly came into her prime in mature, neurotic roles. A tough broad, she displayed no interest in ingratiating herself, either on screen or in private life. "Until you're known in my profession as a monster, you're not a star," she maintained.

This was the actress of choice when it came to casting a Somerset Maugham über-bitch or a spoiled Southern belle, a power-crazed matriarch or a dowdy spinster. She made a meal of anything involving a washed-up actress: apart from Dangerous, two of her juiciest roles were in All About Eve (1950), as a middle-aged diva who battles a scheming young pretender, and in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), for which Davis decked herself out in pancake makeup and a fright wig of blonde ringlets to play a deranged former child star.
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Davis's brittle, mannered style fell from fashion in the post-Method acting era, and she became a camp icon. But her singular panache was rarely captured by the vulgar drag impersonators. She was fully prepared to look grotesque, as in Baby Jane, but she could also, on occasion, look glamorous: just this week, in The Sunday Telegraph, the French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel praised her (in All About Eve) as a model of chic sensuality.

This, after all, was the owner of the original "Bette Davis Eyes" celebrated in the pop song of that name, that pair of huge, bulbous, piercing, fabulous peepers; and, as the great costume designer Edith Head once observed, no one in the movies could drop a mink quite like she did.

Davis was also renowned for her sharp tongue. Howard Hughes, whom she claimed as a lover? Suffice it to say he was not Howard Huge. Marilyn Monroe? The original good time had by all. And it was best not to get her started on Joan Crawford, her arch-rival. Did they ever feud during the filming of Baby Jane? "No!" Davis exclaims in her entertaining, rambling 1987 memoir This 'N That - before embarking on a suite of sublimely bitchy aperçus on her co-star's boozing, her easy virtue, her pathetic vanity.

Crawford, we hear, owned three sizes of false boobs, and broke out the biggest ones for a scene in which Davis had to fall on her. "It was like falling on two footballs," she recalls.

Davis thrived in an era - the Thirties and, especially, the Forties - when Hollywood created an endless stream of mighty female characters. But, as she also recalled, "The golden years were hard work." The studios offered stability for contract players but also extracted their pound of flesh, and Davis fought for control: famously, she crossed swords in court with Warner Brothers in 1937 because she felt she wasn't receiving decent roles. She lost the case but was taken more seriously.

The actress suggested her own epitaph - "She did it the hard way" - and the core of her lasting allure, and the respect she commands, is our sense that she was no manufactured legend but battled tooth and nail for her success and survival.

In This 'N That - written after a stroke and a mastectomy - Davis writes about one of her prize possessions: a pillow embroidered with the motto "Old Age Ain't No Place for Sissies."

True. And Davis was no sissy. She was not above placing a "job wanted" ad in the early Sixties or taking on work in television, scorned by other old-school stars. In late life she played, above all, herself, in her one-woman stage shows and various memoirs. It was, very possibly, her greatest role.

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Whatever happened to Bette Davis?
While other femmes fatales mellowed into grande dames, she fell from vogue. Still, those eyes intrigue . . .

By Ty Burr
Boston Globe; March 30, 2008

Bette Davis turns 100 on Saturday.

You're saying, of course, that she would have turned 100 Saturday, since conclusive evidence exists that the legendary actress passed away 19 years ago at the age of 81. She's still here, though - looking around and muttering "What a dump." The unique personas hammered out by the stars of Hollywood's golden age don't just go away. Cary Grant still lives. Bogie is eternal. Kate and Audrey Hepburn instantly matter to anyone who comes upon them for the first time.

And Davis - she still spits fire and rakes her co-stars with those Gollum eyes, still breaks the rules and the stemware with the hauteur of a queen accepting her due. On Tuesday, Warner Home Video releases its third DVD box set devoted to the actress's films, a decent grab-bag in which nestles one forgotten, unholy jewel that goes to the heart of what Davis was about.

It's a relentless melodrama - an emotional gangster movie, really - called "In This Our Life," and even Davis didn't think much of it at the time. Made in 1942, between "The Man Who Came to Dinner" and "Now, Voyager" (the latter possibly her single best movie), "Life" casts the star as Stanley Timberlake, the sweet-voiced, black-hearted sister of Roy Timberlake (Olivia de Haviland). (What's with the men's names? If anyone knew, they've long since forgotten.)

Stanley steals her sister's husband (Dennis Morgan) and drives him to suicide. Stanley gets snockered and runs down a little girl with her car, pinning the blame on a saintly black man. Stanley cozies up to her perverted moneybags uncle (Charles Coburn) and, in an astonishing scene that must have singed 1942 eyeballs, hints she'll do anything to earn his favor.

Stanley is b-a-a-d, and no one could have played her better than the ruthless Ruth Elizabeth Davis, late of 22 Lewis Street in Newton, Massachusetts. "In This Our Life" was the second film directed by a young John Huston, and he later wrote, "There is something elemental about Bette - a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears. The studio was afraid of her - afraid of her demon. They confused it with overacting. Over their objections, I let the demon go."

As is fitting with a centenary, celebrations are afoot. Lowell, where Davis was born in 1908 (she later lived in Winchester, Newton, and the Berkshires before moving to New York City to study acting), is hosting a walking tour, a panel discussion, a cocktail party, and a Bette Davis look-alike contest, all on Wednesday. Cigarette holders required, presumably.

Another DVD box is coming from 20th Century Fox, not the source of her best work (that would be Warner Brothers, where the actress made 52 films in 18 years). And Turner Classic Movies will go all-Bette all Saturday, beginning at 6 a.m. with 1932's "Cabin in the Cotton" (the film in which she committed to celluloid the deathless line "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair") and ending 24 hours later with one of her worst movies, 1961's "Pocketful of Miracles."

For all the belated love, though, Davis remains the prickliest and most complex of classic-era stars. Katharine Hepburn, another of New England's eccentric movie products, spent her final decades in a glow of universal adoration, but Davis fought and swore and battled with directors to the very end. (Ask Larry Cohen, from whose 1989 "Wicked Stepmother" she rancorously bailed out.)

Ironically, those positions were reversed during the stars' heydays in the 1930s and 1940s. Until Spencer Tracy mellowed Hepburn's image, audiences and the film industry deemed her too arrogant for popular consumption. Davis, by contrast, may have struck terror into Jack Warner's heart with her demands for better roles and her contract-breaking flights to England (in 1936 the studio sued her and won), but she spoke the language of the ladies in the back row of the Bijou better than almost any other working actress of her time.

How? By acting out their own contradictions and throttled fantasies. To women whose options were generally limited to whatever men let them have, Davis was a combination martyr and avenging angel. Initially the prude in the rough-and-tumble Warners boys' club, she learned to give as good as she got. The nervy "Marked Woman" (1937), her first film after losing her court case, cast Davis as a "cafe hostess" (read: hooker) who turns against her gangster boss and walks into the sunset not with crusading D.A. Bogart but her sister ladies of the night.

She lived out daydreams of life's unfairness (the spoiled rich girl dying of a brain tumor in "Dark Victory"), of the consequences of headstrong behavior (her Oscar-winning spoiled belle in "Jezebel," wearing a red dress to an all-white ball and losing fiance Henry Fonda to the scandal), of being too spoiled and selfish (the vain cluck of a wife in "Mr. Skeffington").

Her films were about female power first denied, then breaking through in a sensory overload of goodness or scalding villainy. "Now, Voyager," one of the great wish-fulfillment melodramas in all of cinema, casts Davis as Charlotte Vale - "one of the Boston Vales" - who transforms with the help of a benevolent psychiatrist (Claude Rains) from mother-oppressed ugly duckling to clear-eyed woman of the world, accepting the stars when she can't have the moon.

On the flip side is the upper-class Leslie Crosbie in "The Letter" (1940), who coldly guns her lover down as soon as the opening credits are over, then assumes a wronged-woman pose the rest of the film carefully dismantles. What kinds of power does a woman want? What kinds can she hope for? How does the difference between the two warp her? Every Bette Davis film asks these questions, even 1950's "All About Eve," in which Broadway star Margot Channing has it all while understanding it can all be taken from her in an instant.

This is the arena of neurosis; Bette Davis was a neurotic actress. Yet overacting was only one weapon in her arsenal. Watch any of her movies, especially the Warners movies, and you'll be struck by how often Davis underplays to the point of doing nothing. She makes subtlety seem gripping because the tension - expressed as a sense of imminent emotional explosion - is always there.

After the tentativeness of her first few films, Davis found her style in a clipped, off-kilter vocal delivery and an edgy physical presence, and she grew increasingly skilled at playing women who project a shaky false front. The famous Bette Davis gaze - the downcast eyes rising halfway, falling, then rising to stare the other actor full in the face - is a trick used by the actress to give her characters away. Through it we see the manipulativeness of women who think manipulation is their only choice. As it sometimes is.

Even when a Davis character is on firmer ground, she's fascinating to watch because she's always second-guessing the men. There's a moment in "Marked Woman" when the "cafe hostess" is sassing her mobster pimp (Eduardo Ciannelli) and Davis flashes a mean, electric little smile - the bravura of a woman talking as tough as she can get away with. It's gone in a second but the message lingers: Don't you dare underestimate me.

After World War II, Davis left Warners and her career foundered. She made two classics, "Eve" and the outrageous "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962), and a long run of less-than-stellar outings. Her professional jealousies got the better of her, and her fourth marriage, to actor Gary Merrill, fizzled. Instead of an institution, like Hepburn, she became camp, fodder for gay parodies that fondly but crudely colored outside the lines she drew. Unlike her "Baby Jane" co-star and putative rival Joan Crawford, Davis got the joke. That still didn't make it easy to swallow.

Yet in her prime there was no star as demanding or as watchable - none who drew the line so far out in the sand and explored the consequences. "In This Our Life" ends, marvelously, with Davis pushing the gas pedal to the floor and soaring into the unknown, leaving the dump that is Warner Brothers, Hollywood, our fallen world, far behind.

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a Bette Davis quote from the film "Cabin in the Cotton" was inaccurate in a story in Sunday's Movies section. The line was, "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair."

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Spielberg saves Bette Davis Oscar

LA Times; 12/21/02

Steven Spielberg has rescued another Oscar from the auction block.

The director-producer paid $180,000, not including fees and taxes, to buy Bette Davis’ best actress Oscar for the 1935 movie “Dangerous,” spokesman Marvin Levy said. It was auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York last Saturday.

Spielberg will donate the Oscar to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “It’s part of preserving film history,” Levy said.

Spielberg, himself a multiple Academy Award winner, bought and donated two other Oscars that were being sold privately. He paid $578,000 last year for Davis’ Oscar for the 1938 movie “Jezebel,” and $607,500 in 1996 for Clark Gable’s best-actor Oscar for 1934’s “It Happened One Night.”
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Spielberg Returns Bette Davis Oscar® to Academy

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 7/20/01

Beverly Hills, CA - For the second time in five years, Steven Spielberg has purchased an Oscar® statuette at auction and returned it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this time with Bette Davis' 1938 Best Actress Academy Award for "Jezebel."

Academy President Robert Rehme said today that Steven Spielberg has presented Bette Davis' Oscar, which he purchased at a Christie's auction yesterday morning (7/19), to the Academy Foundation.

In 1996, Spielberg anonymously purchased Clark Gable's 1934 Oscar for "It Happened One Night" to protect it from further commercial exploitation, commenting that he could think of "no better sanctuary for Gable's only Oscar than the Motion Picture Academy."

Yesterday morning he similarly rescued Bette Davis' second Oscar.

"For Steven to do this once was breathtaking," Rehme said, "but for him to do it again is unbelievable. It is a noble and extremely generous act."

"The Academy Award is a highly-respected honor within the film community," he added. "It is not just a trophy handed out on a televised show or another piece of movie memorabilia. It has a deep-seated significance to those who win it and those of us who make our living in the industry don't like to think of it as an item that might end up on the mantel of someone who hadn't earned it."

Academy Executive Administrator Ric Robertson said that the Academy does not expect to be able to entirely prevent the commercial exploitation of early Oscar statuettes. "The first one to be auctioned was in 1949 and in response we instituted the 'Winners Agreement' that is now standard," Robertson said.

In the agreement, which must be signed by Oscar winners before their name will be engraved on the statuette, winners agree "not to sell or otherwise dispose of" the Oscar statuette without first offering to sell it to the Academy for a dollar.

Robertson said the Academy will continue to object to the sale of Oscar statuettes and will "throw legal impediments in the way at every opportunity."

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1939: THE GREATEST YEAR IN FILM

Most film buffs and historians insist that 1939 was the greatest year in the history of Hollywood.
Here is a sample of the films that came out that year:

The Wizard of Oz
Gone with the Wind
Ninotchka
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
Babes In Arms
Beau Geste
Dark Victory
Drums Along the Mohawk
The Four Feathers
Gunga Din
Gulliver's Travels
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Of Mice and Men
Stagecoach
Stanley And Livingstone
Wuthering Heights

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FILM NEWS, REVIEWS, ESSAYS AND NOTES

One Take on TROPIC THUNDER
Ode to Kim Novak

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August 13, 2008; NY Times
War May Be Hell, but Hollywood Is Even Worse

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Despite what you may have read lately, the biggest target of ridicule in “Tropic Thunder,” a flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry, is not the mentally retarded. Rather, the true targets of this extreme comedy’s free-flowing contempt are the stars, makers, brokers, miscellaneous supplicants and even die-hard fans of the movies, who are all portrayed as challenged in some fashion: intellectually, ethically, aesthetically, sartorially, chemically, longitudinally, you name it.

“Tropic Thunder” was directed by one of its stars, Ben Stiller, a professional offender and sometimes very funny man who also shares the movie’s writing credits with Etan Cohen and the actor Justin Theroux (missing in on-screen action here). Over the past decade or so Mr. Stiller has carved out a lucrative niche in the comedy of humiliation, his and everyone else’s. Though this is familiar comic turf (the joke has to be on somebody), he has made it a particular specialty by playing variations on the emasculated patsy — the guy with the penis literally stuck in his zipper in “There’s Something About Mary” and figuratively caught in other roles — who either triumphs over adversity or violently succumbs to it.

The joke is most definitely on, at least initially, Tugg Speedman, the preening, hard-bodied, soft-minded action star Mr. Stiller plays with such intimate knowing in “Tropic Thunder.” A blockbuster sensation who has maxed out the audience’s love with too many sequels and one misbegotten attempt to bait Oscar with a weepie called “Simple Jack,” in which he played a bucktoothed retarded man, Tugg is hoping to resuscitate his career by going gung-ho and grunt in a Vietnam War movie also called “Tropic Thunder.” With his co-stars — notably Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, an awards-laden Australian, and Jack Black as Jeff Portnoy, a comic partial to fat suits and flatulence — Tugg is headed, yup, into the heartless darkness.

That’s old territory for Mr. Stiller, whose most triumphant excursion into comedy’s dark places remains “The Cable Guy,” a scabrous, much-maligned 1996 riff on mass culture with Jim Carrey at his creepy greatest. “Tropic Thunder” is far slicker than “The Cable Guy” and, given the new film’s obviously lavish budget (the aerial shots alone could bankroll the next Sundance slate), understandably more eager to please.

Mr. Stiller has to seduce the audience he once skewered, which he tries to do by giving it Bruckheimer-size pyrotechnics (the lead actors go AWOL in the jungle) and crude laughs wrung from a host of human frailties. But ever the maximalist, he doesn’t just slice and dice his characters and their weaknesses; he tears them limb from limb, blowing both to smithereens.

And he does it with gusto, especially during the hyperviolent opening movie-set war scene in which body parts go flying, and one actor-soldier attempts to keep his innards from spilling out of his stomach wound. Though this bit is played for obvious laughs and is intentionally phony-looking (the soldier looks as if he had been hit with a big pot of cassoulet rather than mortar), the scene skews more yucky than yukky because Mr. Stiller has so little sense of modulation. He isn’t content simply to decapitate a character, the way, say, Graham Chapman hacked limbs in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”; he also has to play with the stringy bits hanging from the bloodied neck. Mr. Stiller doesn’t kill jokes: he stomps them to death.

That’s how he ends up blowing what might have been the film’s sharpest scene, involving Kirk’s explanation for why Tugg’s performance as a retarded man in “Simple Jack” doomed his chances for an Oscar, an elucidation that includes a clever taxonomy of all the ways it’s permissible to play intellectually challenged in Hollywood (“Forrest Gump” is statuette-worthy, though not “I Am Sam”) and a grindingly unfunny repetition of the word retard. If Mr. Downey — who at this point in his career apparently can do no wrong, even in blackface — can’t make this bit work, it’s because the bit is unworkable. The pomposity of the Oscars is the hook, but it’s the word retard that provides the squirm.

There’s a lot of bait-and-switch throughout “Tropic Thunder,” including its use of blackface, which, along with the promiscuous deployment of the word retard, has earned it much of its advance publicity. Though Mr. Downey’s character, who has undergone a skin-darkening procedure to play his part, has been cut from moldy Fred Williamson cloth, he’s also the most recognizably human character in a lampoon rife with caricatures. One of those is played by an actual black man, Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, a rap entrepreneur who peddles an energy drink called Booty Sweat and is mainly around to mock Kirk’s impersonation, which is the filmmakers’ way of having their chocolate cake and eating it too.

What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface. Hands down the most noxious character in “Tropic Thunder” is Les Grossman, the producer of the movie-within-a-movie, who’s played by an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise under a thick scum of makeup and latex. Heavily and heavy-handedly coded as Jewish, the character is murderous, repellent and fascinating, a grotesque from his swollen fingers to the heavy gold dollar sign nestled on his yeti-furred chest. At one time Mr. Stiller wanted to adapt Budd Schulberg’s brutal satire about a Hollywood hustler, “What Makes Sammy Run?,” to the screen, a long dormant and now perhaps lost project that haunts this otherwise safe film like a wrathful ghost.

“Tropic Thunder” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Extreme carnage and language.

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August 17, 2008, NY Times

Giving Kim Novak Her Due
Stanley Fish

Even these days, when it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between a general-release motion picture and soft pornography, two of the most erotic moments one can find on film feature no nudity and bodies just touching.

Both are ‘50s movies. The first, the 1951 “A Place in the Sun,” pairs a ravishing 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor with Montgomery Clift. In a scene where the two are dancing and declaring their love for each other, Taylor sets up a rendezvous. “I’ll pick you up outside the factory,” she tells Clift; and then she breathes into his ear: “You’ll be my pickup.” Moments later the emotional intensity is raised even higher when Clift exclaims, “If I could only tell you how much I love you. If I could only tell you all.” In response, she draws him closer and in a voice that could ignite fires implores him, “Tell mamma, tell mamma all.”

“Sexy” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

In the second movie, 1955’s “Picnic,” the sparks fly between Kim Novak, then 22, and William Holden. Again the context is a dance, although it would be more accurately characterized as a mating ritual. To the music of George Duning’s and Morris Stoloff’s brilliant arrangement of “It Must have Been Moonglow,” a radiant Novak, clapping her hands in rhythm, sways down a bank toward Holden, who then joins her in a dance of such sensuality that the observers can only gape, each betraying the emotion he or she involuntarily feels — envy, nostalgia, frustration, longing, wonder.

“Picnic” was not one of the films shown last Tuesday when Turner Classic Movies devoted a day to Novak, a recognition some might think she does not deserve. They would be wrong.

Novak was the top box office star three years running in the ‘50s. Still, she is not usually mentioned in the same breath with the other major actresses of the period — Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner. She was not earthy like Gardner or icy like Kelly or Rubensesque like Monroe or raunchy like Jane Russell or perky like Doris Day. She was something that has gone out of fashion and even become suspect in an era of feminist strictures: she was the object of a voyeuristic male gaze.

This is true of her first movie with a speaking role, 1954’s “Pushover,” a film noir in the “Double Indemnity” mode featuring, along with Novak, Fred MacMurray, E.G. Marshall, Philip Carey and Dorothy Malone. (In her best work, Novak is often surrounded by powerful co-stars, and to her credit she plays off them, not against them.) Malone could do a sultry turn of her own (“Warlock,” “Written on the Wind”), but she is no match for Novak. MacMurray plays a cop assigned to ingratiate himself with her in the hope that she will lead him to her gangster boyfriend. But, as TCM host Robert Osborne observed, one look at Novak and he’s lost. When he’s not watching her, the camera is, for the plot consists largely of a surveillance operation; a team of detectives spends endless hours looking at Novak through binoculars, as do we. It is voyeurism from a distance, and emphasizes her status as a glittering something beheld from afar.

This of course is what Jimmy Stewart does for much of the first part of “Vertigo.” Hired by a friend to monitor her activities, he follows Novak (Judy pretending to be Madeleine) from place to place, and in one extended scene stares at her as she stares at a portrait of a woman in a museum. What he doesn’t know is that the object of his desire is a confection, a fantasy created by his employer who has made her up to look like the wife he plans to kill.

When the scheme succeeds and the Stewart character believes her to be dead, he falls into a depression until he spots a young girl who bears a physical resemblance to his lost love, but is nothing like her. Rather than being refined, austere and aloof, she is coarse, over-made-up, even common. In what remains of the movie he works at turning her into the simulacrum of his beloved (he strips off her make up and then applies his own), transforming her from an all-too-flesh-and-blood woman into an ever more abstract representation of an image — itself an illusion — that lives only in his memory. When the last stage of the reconstruction is complete, his restored love emerges as if from a mist — this is a close-up that actually distances — and he is once again happy to have an object to look at rather than an actual human being who has weaknesses and needs.

The characters Novak plays know and resent the fact that those who pursue them are drawn only to their surfaces and have no idea of, or interest in, what lies beneath. Betty in “Middle of the Night,” Madge in “Picnic,” Lona in “Pushover,” Linda in “Pal Joey,” Molly in “The Man with the Golden Arm,” Polly the Pistol in “Kiss Me Stupid,” Judy in “Vertigo” — all are the prisoners of their beauty and its effect. One critic speaks of Novak’s “passive carnality.” Her characters draw men in, but not willfully. That is not who they are or what they want, although no one cares to know.

Madge in “Picnic” complains of being the “pretty one.” Betty in “Middle of the Night” yearns to be just a housewife. Polly in “Kiss Me, Stupid” lives out her real fantasy — domesticity — for a single night. Judy in “Vertigo” begs, “Can’t you just love me for who I am?” Gillian in “Bell Book and Candle” longs to be a human and not a seductive witch. Molly in “The Man with the Golden Arm” wants nothing more than to stand by her man. Even Mildred in “Of Human Bondage” projects a vulnerability that seems more genuine than the sexual voraciousness she seems driven to display.

Of the men who become entangled with the child-women Novak repeatedly portrays, only Jerry in “Middle of the Night” (played in a towering performance by Fredric March) gets it right when he says that despite the provocative and voluptuous appearance, Betty is really a little girl, insecure and in need of someone who will protect her.

It is possible that the men who directed her — Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Joshua Logan, Richard Quine, Delbert Mann — saw her in the same way and made her into a projection of their fantasies. She seems to think so. The Washington Post writer Tom Shales asked (in 1996) if the women she played were “reluctant sex symbols” and if she were one too. In response, she recalled Joshua Logan’s remarking that in “Picnic” she played Madge “like she was wearing a crown of thorns”; and, she adds, Madge’s “looks were definitely a handicap and it was that way for me…too… You could really get lost in that kind of image.”

At any rate, “that kind of image” — of the inwardly fragile beauty dependent on the men who wish only to possess her — was no longer what the movie-going public was looking for after the early ‘60s, and that model of female behavior has not come into favor again (although Scarlett Johansson comes close to reviving it in some of her movies, especially Woody Allen’s “Match Point”). But however retrograde it may be, that role was performed to perfection by Kim Novak, who, after all these years, can still break your heart.

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