Hayden Panettiere Prestige Magazine 2008 Photoshoot
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
A Classic Western Tale, Part 2: 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
In 2007 the movie 3:10 to Yuma, first released fifty years earlier, was remade by director James Mangold with Christian Bale playing the rancher Dan Evans, the role played by Van Heflin in the original version, and Russell Crowe playing the outlaw Ben Wade, originally played by Glenn Ford. In remaking 3:10 to Yuma Mangold used most of the plot and much of the dialogue of the 1957 movie, which I wrote about last week. But he expanded the film by about half an hour (the original runs 92 minutes) by adding elements clearly intended to increase the movie's appeal to more modern and youthful audiences. To the original plot he added more, and more graphic, violence and more action.
In the original, once the exchange of the substitute for Wade has been effected we never see the gang again until the shoot-out finale. In the remake, Mangold follows the gang in a parallel story line while Wade is being transported to Contention. Among other things, they catch up with the stagecoach and burn it when they discover they have been tricked. The substitute inside is burned alive in the background while in the foreground the gang obliviously discuss their next move. In a very exciting sequence they pursue Evans and his party—which in this version includes Butterfield, the owner of the stagecoach line, and several others—to a railroad tunnel being blasted through a mountain. The posse dynamites the tunnel behind them, thus thwarting the outlaws but also killing several of the construction crew, who are largely Chinese. The gang does eventually catch up to Butterfield (Peter Fonda), whom they sadistically murder. The climactic walk to the train depot is staged as an intensely frenetic gun battle that goes on far longer than the comparatively brief one in the original and is far more elaborately staged and edited. So intense is the fusillade that it defies belief that Evans and Wade could survive it.
The result of these additions and expanded running time is that the section in the hotel room in Contention constitutes a much smaller proportion of the film. In narrative time, Evans and Wade spend only a little more than an hour there, whereas in the original they spend several hours in that hotel room. This shifts the focus of the film away from the psychological interplay between Wade and Evans and toward the action sequences of the journey and the extended shootout at the end. The scenes between Evans and Wade in the hotel room seem almost an afterthought rather than the centerpiece of the movie and in a way its raison d'être, as in the previous version.
Mangold also makes noticeable changes to the personalities of the characters. He makes the Wade character just a shade more ambiguous than in Daves's version. Wade, as played by Russell Crowe, is if anything even more noble and certainly less psychologically menacing than in Glenn Ford's interpretation. Crowe makes Wade seem almost like a nice fellow who just happens to be an outlaw. In the hotel room sequences he comes across as less openly manipulative than Ford, whose subtle but perceptible shifts in personality make him appear less sincere and less trustworthy than Crowe's Ben Wade.
Mangold makes the character of Dan Evans, played by Christian Bale, more complex than the relatively uncomplicated man Van Heflin played in the original. Evans has been given a more detailed background. He is now a wounded veteran of the Civil War who walks with a limp and expresses bitterness at the way the Army treated him after he received his war wound. Helfin's Dan Evans is an independent and self-contained man whose nature is not to rely on others. Bale's Dan Evans is an alienated man who has consciously isolated himself from others and deliberately chosen not to rely on anyone but himself. He is more determined, grim, and intense than the Evans of the original. At one point in the hotel room he tells Wade out of the blue, "I'm not a stubborn man," as if reading Wade's mind. Yet his controlled actions, his flat speech, his unchanging facial expression, in fact his entire demeanor, clearly telegraph that this is exactly what he is. He also talks at times about the need to create lawfulness in the frontier, to create and maintain order as a heritage for his sons, making him more of a disillusioned idealist than Heflin.
Mangold also significantly expands the roles of two supporting characters only sketchily defined in the Daves version. Evans's sons are older than in the previous version; they are now teenagers. And the older boy assumes the judgmental and rather condemnatory attitude toward Evans of the wife in the original. He sneaks after his father and Wade, showing up in Contention near the end, something the wife does in the 1957 version. This time he not only is present at the shoot-out but plays a crucial role in it.
In both versions of the movie, Wade's lieutenant in the gang is Charlie Prince. In the first version Prince is played by Richard Jaeckel and appears in only a handful of scenes. In the remake, though, Prince, now played by Ben Foster (Six Feet Under), has a much larger part. During the gang's pursuit of Evans and Wade it is Prince who commands the gang and plans its moves. He also has a much closer relationship with Wade. His loyalty to Wade is almost obsessive, and it is possible that Mangold is suggesting a homoerotic component to Prince's idolatrous devotion to his leader. Crowe, in any case, seems to regard Prince as a surrogate son, so that in a way Prince becomes an evil counterpart to Evans's son, a most intriguing addition to the original plot. In the new version Prince is without question a psychopath, and Foster is quite effective at conveying this element of the character.
The most significant changes of all are to the movie's conclusion, which has been substantially refashioned by Mangold. In the original Evans and Wade successfully make it to the train, and in the last scene Wade says confidently, "I've escaped from Yuma before." The ending of Mangold's film is far different and far more convoluted, full of twists and turns, false endings, and unexpected reversals. Characters who survived in the original version die in this one. Through this and other changes to the ending, curious and unforeseen thematic symmetries that were not present in the 1957 version occur. Violence and murder by one character are balanced by the renunciation of violence and revenge by another. The senseless loss of one life is balanced by the deliberate sacrifice of another. And in the end former enemies inspire personal transformation in each other and return to their former lives with a greater understanding of one another and an altered set of values.
Not many remakes compare as favorably to the original movie as this one. especially when essential parts that made the original so effective in the first place have been altered. James Mangold's remake of 3:10 to Yuma, though, manages to avoid many of the pitfalls inherent in remaking a near-classic movie. It succeeds in being an accomplished and exciting film in its own right while successfully adding many nuances to the source material. But as satisfying an experience as I found the remake, I ultimately prefer the original. I'm a strong believer in simplicity in storytelling combined with the suggestion of complexity in character and theme. Delmer Daves's version of 3:10 to Yuma—with its more compact structure, greater emphasis on psychology, more focused exploration of the interaction between Evans and Wade, and less ambiguous but still far from simplistic treatment of moral issues—is in the end the version for me.
In the original, once the exchange of the substitute for Wade has been effected we never see the gang again until the shoot-out finale. In the remake, Mangold follows the gang in a parallel story line while Wade is being transported to Contention. Among other things, they catch up with the stagecoach and burn it when they discover they have been tricked. The substitute inside is burned alive in the background while in the foreground the gang obliviously discuss their next move. In a very exciting sequence they pursue Evans and his party—which in this version includes Butterfield, the owner of the stagecoach line, and several others—to a railroad tunnel being blasted through a mountain. The posse dynamites the tunnel behind them, thus thwarting the outlaws but also killing several of the construction crew, who are largely Chinese. The gang does eventually catch up to Butterfield (Peter Fonda), whom they sadistically murder. The climactic walk to the train depot is staged as an intensely frenetic gun battle that goes on far longer than the comparatively brief one in the original and is far more elaborately staged and edited. So intense is the fusillade that it defies belief that Evans and Wade could survive it.The result of these additions and expanded running time is that the section in the hotel room in Contention constitutes a much smaller proportion of the film. In narrative time, Evans and Wade spend only a little more than an hour there, whereas in the original they spend several hours in that hotel room. This shifts the focus of the film away from the psychological interplay between Wade and Evans and toward the action sequences of the journey and the extended shootout at the end. The scenes between Evans and Wade in the hotel room seem almost an afterthought rather than the centerpiece of the movie and in a way its raison d'être, as in the previous version.
Mangold also makes noticeable changes to the personalities of the characters. He makes the Wade character just a shade more ambiguous than in Daves's version. Wade, as played by Russell Crowe, is if anything even more noble and certainly less psychologically menacing than in Glenn Ford's interpretation. Crowe makes Wade seem almost like a nice fellow who just happens to be an outlaw. In the hotel room sequences he comes across as less openly manipulative than Ford, whose subtle but perceptible shifts in personality make him appear less sincere and less trustworthy than Crowe's Ben Wade.
Mangold makes the character of Dan Evans, played by Christian Bale, more complex than the relatively uncomplicated man Van Heflin played in the original. Evans has been given a more detailed background. He is now a wounded veteran of the Civil War who walks with a limp and expresses bitterness at the way the Army treated him after he received his war wound. Helfin's Dan Evans is an independent and self-contained man whose nature is not to rely on others. Bale's Dan Evans is an alienated man who has consciously isolated himself from others and deliberately chosen not to rely on anyone but himself. He is more determined, grim, and intense than the Evans of the original. At one point in the hotel room he tells Wade out of the blue, "I'm not a stubborn man," as if reading Wade's mind. Yet his controlled actions, his flat speech, his unchanging facial expression, in fact his entire demeanor, clearly telegraph that this is exactly what he is. He also talks at times about the need to create lawfulness in the frontier, to create and maintain order as a heritage for his sons, making him more of a disillusioned idealist than Heflin.
Mangold also significantly expands the roles of two supporting characters only sketchily defined in the Daves version. Evans's sons are older than in the previous version; they are now teenagers. And the older boy assumes the judgmental and rather condemnatory attitude toward Evans of the wife in the original. He sneaks after his father and Wade, showing up in Contention near the end, something the wife does in the 1957 version. This time he not only is present at the shoot-out but plays a crucial role in it.
In both versions of the movie, Wade's lieutenant in the gang is Charlie Prince. In the first version Prince is played by Richard Jaeckel and appears in only a handful of scenes. In the remake, though, Prince, now played by Ben Foster (Six Feet Under), has a much larger part. During the gang's pursuit of Evans and Wade it is Prince who commands the gang and plans its moves. He also has a much closer relationship with Wade. His loyalty to Wade is almost obsessive, and it is possible that Mangold is suggesting a homoerotic component to Prince's idolatrous devotion to his leader. Crowe, in any case, seems to regard Prince as a surrogate son, so that in a way Prince becomes an evil counterpart to Evans's son, a most intriguing addition to the original plot. In the new version Prince is without question a psychopath, and Foster is quite effective at conveying this element of the character.
The most significant changes of all are to the movie's conclusion, which has been substantially refashioned by Mangold. In the original Evans and Wade successfully make it to the train, and in the last scene Wade says confidently, "I've escaped from Yuma before." The ending of Mangold's film is far different and far more convoluted, full of twists and turns, false endings, and unexpected reversals. Characters who survived in the original version die in this one. Through this and other changes to the ending, curious and unforeseen thematic symmetries that were not present in the 1957 version occur. Violence and murder by one character are balanced by the renunciation of violence and revenge by another. The senseless loss of one life is balanced by the deliberate sacrifice of another. And in the end former enemies inspire personal transformation in each other and return to their former lives with a greater understanding of one another and an altered set of values.
Not many remakes compare as favorably to the original movie as this one. especially when essential parts that made the original so effective in the first place have been altered. James Mangold's remake of 3:10 to Yuma, though, manages to avoid many of the pitfalls inherent in remaking a near-classic movie. It succeeds in being an accomplished and exciting film in its own right while successfully adding many nuances to the source material. But as satisfying an experience as I found the remake, I ultimately prefer the original. I'm a strong believer in simplicity in storytelling combined with the suggestion of complexity in character and theme. Delmer Daves's version of 3:10 to Yuma—with its more compact structure, greater emphasis on psychology, more focused exploration of the interaction between Evans and Wade, and less ambiguous but still far from simplistic treatment of moral issues—is in the end the version for me.
Monday, August 18, 2008
A Classic Western Tale, Part 1: 3:10 to Yuma (1957)
The directing career of Delmer Daves lasted more than twenty years, from 1943 to 1965. The first movie he directed was the WW II submarine picture Destination Tokyo (1943). Other directing credits include several Westerns in the late 50's, a series of good-looking but slick and almost camp soap operas starring Troy Donahue (beginning with A Summer Place) in the early 60's, and the far-fetched film noir Dark Passage, starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Agnes Moorehead, released in 1947. Earlier in his career he contributed to a number of screenplays for Warner Brothers, including the musicals Dames and Flirtation Walk (both 1934) and the gangster melodrama Petrified Forest (1936). His most notable writing contribution was to Leo McCarey's delightful sentimental romance Love Affair (1939).
Daves's directing career was dismissed by Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema as one of "stylistic conviction in an intellectual vacuum." However, one Western Daves made in mid-career, 3:10 to Yuma (1957), based on a story by Elmore Leonard, belies this assessment. Tightly structured and psychologically probing, it stands as one of the best Westerns ever made. In the movie Van Heflin plays Dan Evans, a homesteader and cattle rancher who lives with his wife and two young sons in Arizona. While out with his sons one day looking for a missing herd of cattle, Evans finds that the cattle have been "borrowed" by outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) and his gang of outlaws to use as a diversion while holding up a stagecoach carrying gold.
When Wade is later captured in a nearby town, Evans, an expert marksman, is offered a reward of $200 to make sure that Wade is delivered to the train that will take him to the prison in Yuma, where he will be jailed until he stands trial. Evans agrees because he desperately needs the money to buy water for his cattle, for there has been a drought in the region for several years and Evans is in real danger of losing his herd and his ranch, everything he has worked to get. To conceal their plans from Wade's gang, his captors stage an elaborate ruse, in which Wade is secretly removed from the stagecoach transporting him, and another man is substituted for him while his gang looks on from a distance. Wade is then hidden out at Evans's ranch until he can be transferred at night to the nearby town of Contention to wait for the train to Yuma the next afternoon. This plan requires Evans and Wade to spend several hours, most of them alone, secreted in a hotel room in Contention until the train arrives. During this part of the movie—and this section occupies roughly the entire second half of the film—Wade uses all of his considerably persuasive psychological skills to pressure Evans to let him escape. Evans resists and does eventually succeed in delivering his adversary to the train, as thunder rumbles in the distance and rain begins at last to fall.
This synopsis sounds like a relatively straightforward plot of a righteous man resisting the blandishments of a villain and being rewarded for it. But in its details 3:10 to Yuma is far more complex than this synopsis would indicate. The first intimation that the morality of the tale is not as simple as it seems comes during the stage holdup. Instead of attempting any kind of intervention, Evans and his sons observe passively from a nearby hillside. Evans is not about to risk dangerous heroics for devotion to any abstract notion of justice, even after the stagecoach driver has been coldly murdered by the gang. Practicality trumps idealism. When Evans's wife hears of this she is clearly displeased with what she sees as behavior bordering on cowardice, but his choice of non-intervention doesn't seem to disturb Evans at all.
Later, the supposed villain of the story, Ben Wade, turns out to be a far more complex and ambiguous character than in the conventional Western. He is no Robin Hood. His criminal motivation is strictly for his own gain, and his anti-social behavior is without moral compunction. But he seems at times to be almost a gentleman outlaw with a veneer of gracious nobility and a genuine respect for the feelings of others. Nowhere is this more evident than during the evening he spends with Evans and his family while waiting for darkness to fall so that the two men can leave for Contention. Most of this time is spent at the dinner table. As in the films of John Ford, the act of dining with others is steeped in the humanistic symbolism of civilization and fellowship. During the meal Wade's behavior is subdued, polite, and considerate, the very opposite of villainous. He tolerates with amused equanimity the taunts of the younger son, who is chided by his parents for being impolite. When the boy observes that Wade has begun eating before his mother has said grace, she tells her son it is discourteous to impose one's beliefs on others, whereupon Wade stops eating and invites her to say grace anyway. During this entire sequence it is clear that Wade is captivated by the easy intimacy and civility of the family.
The next day in the hotel room in Contention, it is Evans's turn to reveal unexpected subtleties of character during the intensive psychological cat-and-mouse game Wade plays with him there. As the clock ticks closer to 3:10 (shades of High Noon?) Wade begins to revert to his coolly manipulative villainy, exerting every inducement in his arsenal in his attempts to persuade Evans to let him escape. First he tries outright bribery, offering Evans far more money than he has already been promised. But Evans, having admitted that he accepted the job only for the money, is nonetheless not a greedy man. Next Wade appeals to Evans's feelings for his wife, and by implication to his sexual urges, by tempting him with all the things he could buy for his wife with the money. But Evans is a family man for whom love suffices. Even the promise of wealth for his sons fails to entice him. Finally, Wade tries an appeal to Evans's sense of self-preservation, by pointing out that his gang is certain to attempt to rescue him and that Evans stands little chance against a dozen or so outlaws. This tactic again fails, not because of nobility on Evans's part, but because he has accepted a job and is determined to honor his contract, even though by this point he has been released from his contract and offered his payment anyway by the owner of the stage line who hired him.
By the time Evans and Wade must leave for the train station, Wade's gang has arrived, and to get to the station they must run the armed gauntlet of the outlaws. This would seem a doomed undertaking, but again Wade's moral ambivalence kicks in and after initially resisting Evans's tactics to hurry him along, Wade begins to co-operate and willingly runs along with Evans. It is clear that somewhere along the way Wade has developed a respect for Evans, not because of any nobility or idealism in Evans, but in recognition of the man's simple decency, his transparent and modest ambitions, his lack of ego, and a skill at problem-solving that in Wade expresses itself as self-serving, criminal guile.
A fraternal bond has occurred between the two men, for each has come to find in the other qualities that he can recognize and admire. Evans was never a hero, but he is in the end an ordinary man with some heroic traits. And Wade is not the thorough villain he at first appeared, but has found within himself some measure of respect for the ordinary life and values of Evans.
Next week I will be writing about director James Mangold's 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma.
Daves's directing career was dismissed by Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema as one of "stylistic conviction in an intellectual vacuum." However, one Western Daves made in mid-career, 3:10 to Yuma (1957), based on a story by Elmore Leonard, belies this assessment. Tightly structured and psychologically probing, it stands as one of the best Westerns ever made. In the movie Van Heflin plays Dan Evans, a homesteader and cattle rancher who lives with his wife and two young sons in Arizona. While out with his sons one day looking for a missing herd of cattle, Evans finds that the cattle have been "borrowed" by outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) and his gang of outlaws to use as a diversion while holding up a stagecoach carrying gold.
When Wade is later captured in a nearby town, Evans, an expert marksman, is offered a reward of $200 to make sure that Wade is delivered to the train that will take him to the prison in Yuma, where he will be jailed until he stands trial. Evans agrees because he desperately needs the money to buy water for his cattle, for there has been a drought in the region for several years and Evans is in real danger of losing his herd and his ranch, everything he has worked to get. To conceal their plans from Wade's gang, his captors stage an elaborate ruse, in which Wade is secretly removed from the stagecoach transporting him, and another man is substituted for him while his gang looks on from a distance. Wade is then hidden out at Evans's ranch until he can be transferred at night to the nearby town of Contention to wait for the train to Yuma the next afternoon. This plan requires Evans and Wade to spend several hours, most of them alone, secreted in a hotel room in Contention until the train arrives. During this part of the movie—and this section occupies roughly the entire second half of the film—Wade uses all of his considerably persuasive psychological skills to pressure Evans to let him escape. Evans resists and does eventually succeed in delivering his adversary to the train, as thunder rumbles in the distance and rain begins at last to fall.This synopsis sounds like a relatively straightforward plot of a righteous man resisting the blandishments of a villain and being rewarded for it. But in its details 3:10 to Yuma is far more complex than this synopsis would indicate. The first intimation that the morality of the tale is not as simple as it seems comes during the stage holdup. Instead of attempting any kind of intervention, Evans and his sons observe passively from a nearby hillside. Evans is not about to risk dangerous heroics for devotion to any abstract notion of justice, even after the stagecoach driver has been coldly murdered by the gang. Practicality trumps idealism. When Evans's wife hears of this she is clearly displeased with what she sees as behavior bordering on cowardice, but his choice of non-intervention doesn't seem to disturb Evans at all.
Later, the supposed villain of the story, Ben Wade, turns out to be a far more complex and ambiguous character than in the conventional Western. He is no Robin Hood. His criminal motivation is strictly for his own gain, and his anti-social behavior is without moral compunction. But he seems at times to be almost a gentleman outlaw with a veneer of gracious nobility and a genuine respect for the feelings of others. Nowhere is this more evident than during the evening he spends with Evans and his family while waiting for darkness to fall so that the two men can leave for Contention. Most of this time is spent at the dinner table. As in the films of John Ford, the act of dining with others is steeped in the humanistic symbolism of civilization and fellowship. During the meal Wade's behavior is subdued, polite, and considerate, the very opposite of villainous. He tolerates with amused equanimity the taunts of the younger son, who is chided by his parents for being impolite. When the boy observes that Wade has begun eating before his mother has said grace, she tells her son it is discourteous to impose one's beliefs on others, whereupon Wade stops eating and invites her to say grace anyway. During this entire sequence it is clear that Wade is captivated by the easy intimacy and civility of the family.
The next day in the hotel room in Contention, it is Evans's turn to reveal unexpected subtleties of character during the intensive psychological cat-and-mouse game Wade plays with him there. As the clock ticks closer to 3:10 (shades of High Noon?) Wade begins to revert to his coolly manipulative villainy, exerting every inducement in his arsenal in his attempts to persuade Evans to let him escape. First he tries outright bribery, offering Evans far more money than he has already been promised. But Evans, having admitted that he accepted the job only for the money, is nonetheless not a greedy man. Next Wade appeals to Evans's feelings for his wife, and by implication to his sexual urges, by tempting him with all the things he could buy for his wife with the money. But Evans is a family man for whom love suffices. Even the promise of wealth for his sons fails to entice him. Finally, Wade tries an appeal to Evans's sense of self-preservation, by pointing out that his gang is certain to attempt to rescue him and that Evans stands little chance against a dozen or so outlaws. This tactic again fails, not because of nobility on Evans's part, but because he has accepted a job and is determined to honor his contract, even though by this point he has been released from his contract and offered his payment anyway by the owner of the stage line who hired him.
By the time Evans and Wade must leave for the train station, Wade's gang has arrived, and to get to the station they must run the armed gauntlet of the outlaws. This would seem a doomed undertaking, but again Wade's moral ambivalence kicks in and after initially resisting Evans's tactics to hurry him along, Wade begins to co-operate and willingly runs along with Evans. It is clear that somewhere along the way Wade has developed a respect for Evans, not because of any nobility or idealism in Evans, but in recognition of the man's simple decency, his transparent and modest ambitions, his lack of ego, and a skill at problem-solving that in Wade expresses itself as self-serving, criminal guile.
A fraternal bond has occurred between the two men, for each has come to find in the other qualities that he can recognize and admire. Evans was never a hero, but he is in the end an ordinary man with some heroic traits. And Wade is not the thorough villain he at first appeared, but has found within himself some measure of respect for the ordinary life and values of Evans.
Next week I will be writing about director James Mangold's 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Thelma Ritter: The Greatest Character Actress
In 1947 a 42-year old unknown actress from Brooklyn who had trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts but had appeared in only minor stage and radio parts made her first movie. The role was uncredited and she appeared in a brief scene near the beginning of the movie. In that scene she played the mother of a fractious child who cannot find the Christmas present her boy wants at Macy's and is directed by the department store Santa Claus to a competing store. The scene was devised to highlight the integrity of the possibly delusional elderly man playing Santa Claus (who calls himself Kris Kringle) and to advance the plot by placing his job in jeopardy. The Santa was played by the great character actor Edmund Gwenn in the role of a lifetime that would earn him the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. But it was the unknown actress who dominated the scene, effortlessly stealing it from its intended focus and creating an unforgettable impression. The movie was, of course, the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street and the actress was Thelma Ritter.The tiny role also did a great deal to set the screen persona that Ritter would, with only minor variations, later turn into a twenty-year-long career. As the mother in Miracle on 34th Street Ritter immediately made a strong impression as an outspoken, determined, confident woman who tolerates no nonsense and is in full control of herself and the situation. What was the origin of these basic qualities that seemed to emerge in nearly every character she played? Was it an intentionally created image, either by her agents or by the actress herself? Was it an example of studio typecasting (most of her early pictures, including Miracle on 34th Street, were 20th Century-Fox productions)? Was it the conscious or unconscious projection of traits she actually possessed? Nobody can say for certain. What one can say is that the "Thelma Ritter character" in a movie is typified by certain elements that don't vary a great deal no matter what the role or the context.
Thelma Ritter is always candid. Completely lacking in pretense, she is the plain-speaking, straight-spoken voice of reason. She is the person who keeps things grounded in reality when willful blindness to reality threatens to send the situation out of control. She is the one who tries to keep things down-to-earth when flights of fancy seem about to overcome normally reasonable and practical people.
As Stella, James Stewart's nurse in Rear Window, it is Ritter who repeatedly warns Stewart of the folly of his pastime of spying on his neighbors. She is the oracle predicting the danger in allowing a seemingly harmless way to while away the hours spent confined to a wheelchair to become an uncontrollable obsession, of allowing wanton curiosity to metamorphose into voyeurism. When outright warnings don't work, she attempts to redirect Stewart's attention by counseling him to marry his girlfriend (Grace Kelly) instead and inject some stability into his peripatetic life as a news photographer. But after Stewart ignores her advice in both areas, Ritter willingly jumps right in to help him out of the trouble he has brought upon himself and literally bails Kelly out of the criminal charges she faces because of Stewart's obsessive behavior.
Thelma Ritter is always wise. But her wisdom is not of the intellectual variety and certainly not learned in any formal institution of education. She has instead acquired her wisdom as the result of innate intelligence, copious experience, and perceptive observation. She has the self-taught ability to penetrate beneath the surface of life and perceive its underlying reality. She is a self-trained psychologist with a thorough knowledge of human behavior and motivation.
In All About Eve, in which she plays Margo Channing's maid Birdie, herself a retired stage performer, she is the only one who is immediately suspicious of Eve Harrington, the seemingly adoring acolyte and protégée of the great actress. Everyone else accepts Eve's tale of her sad past and her idolatrous attitude toward Margo without question. Only Ritter openly expresses dubiety about Eve's motives, realizing that her harmless exterior actually conceals a devious and scheming nature.
Thelma Ritter is highly opinionated but rarely judgmental. She doesn't condemn anyone for honest failings, weakness, or bad decision-making. She knows that human beings are by nature flawed creatures, and she is enough of a realist to know how difficult it is for people to recognize and transcend their own shortcomings. As long as they are honest (or at least honestly self-deluded), she accepts others for what they are. It is pretense and dishonesty that she abhors. And she can detect and gauge insincerity like a Geiger counter measuring radioactivity.
In The Mating Season (a delightful romantic comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen that deserves to be better known) Ritter plays the mother of a loving but social-climbing son who is a junior executive engaged to a rich socialite. The owner of a money-losing hamburger stand, Ritter sells up without telling her son and travels to the town where he lives to surprise him. As soon as she arrives she can tell that he is apprehensive about the impression his unsophisticated, working-class mother will make on his fiancée, his employer, and his new social set. She doesn't seem to resent this, for although she knows that money and status have nothing to do with a person's worth, she knows enough about the world to accept that they are important to her son's social and career prospects. Later when the son's new wife innocently mistakes Ritter for her new cook, Ritter goes along with the mistake and persuades her reluctant son to join her in the deception. She genuinely likes her daughter-in-law, a naive and guileless young woman, and does all she can to help her manage the household, a task clearly beyond the bride's experience and capability.
When the daughter-in-law's domineering and flighty mother, played with drollery and quite convincing pettiness by Miriam Hopkins, shows up and attempts to seize control of the newlyweds and their household, Ritter recognizes a phony through and through. Here is a wicked mother-in-law motivated by self-interest and the desire to control her daughter's life for her own advantage. And unlike her daughter, Hopkins is condescending and bossy to Ritter. The battle lines for control of the newlyweds are drawn, but with Ritter's ability to deflect falsity and to direct genuine good will in others, the outcome is never in doubt.
Ritter is always selfless. She cares about others more than about herself and always puts their welfare before her own interests. Perhaps this helps explain why she usually seemed to play a character at the service of others—a maid, housekeeper, nurse, or cook—for she is a born helper. Reliability is essential to her nature; she never lets anybody down. And she is always protective of her charges, urging them in the right direction, giving them sage advice, and protecting them from themselves and others.
Ritter had perhaps the largest role of her career in The Model and the Marriage Broker. Although billed third, she is in every way the star of the movie. For once she is the prime mover in the plot, not a wise-cracking bystander whose function is to comment on the characters and action while they make it happen. In this George Cukor-directed movie, she plays the middle-aged owner of a marriage bureau. A self-employed small-business owner she may be, but even in her profession she devotes herself to helping others.
Unhappy in love herself in youth, she specializes in matchmaking for the hopeless and pathetic, exactly those most in need of her services. She departs from this pattern when she decides to find a mate for an attractive young model foolishly wasting her time on a married man. After many complications and misunderstandings, Ritter finally uses her skills to sort out and fix several relationships beset with problems, including the model's and that of the woman who stole her own husband from her years ago. In this case her selflessness pays off when she even succeeds in reviving her own dormant love life.
But Ritter's greatest professional triumph came in what is possibly her least typical role, a dramatic part in the cynical thriller Pickup on South Street. In a movie that is masterfully directed by Samuel Fuller and full of accomplished performances, including arguably the best ever by Richard Widmark, it is Ritter who in a supporting role creates what is for me the most indelible moments in a great film. She plays Moe, a down-and-out character just a step away from being a bag lady. Moe is a small-time street peddler and police informant. When the police want to locate a pickpocket (Widmark) who has stolen top-secret microfilm destined for spies from the purse of the villain's girlfriend, they go to Moe to find him.
Unfortunately, the villain (played with real menace by Richard Kiley) also goes to Moe for the same information. But Ritter has promised Widmark she will not betray him, and Ritter always honors her promises, even if she must die to keep her word. Ritter's demeanor during this encounter is a marvel. Completely gone is the typical Ritter resolve. Here she is a woman exhausted from a long and difficult life, a resigned woman who knows what lies in store for her and also knows that any opposition will be futile. She simply lies on the bed in her shabby rented room and offers no resistance as Kiley takes out his pistol. She looks in the other direction and waits for the inevitable to happen. The panning camera follows her gaze until she is out of the frame, and as a phonograph plays in the background we hear a single shot. In unexpectedly playing against type and appearing in a film quite different from her usual fare, Ritter transcended her own image and fashioned an unforgettable performance that seems all the more remarkable when considered in the context of her entire body of screen work.
Thelma Ritter received six Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress but never won. She did occasional work on television and continued to make a handful of feature films in the 1960's. But the heyday of her career was the 1950's. There has never been a character actress quite like her. She was one of those rare performers who are truly one of a kind, with an identifiable style and screen persona that nobody else can touch. For me she will always be the greatest character actress of all time.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
William Faulkner is one of the great American writers of the twentieth century. So it is not surprising that from the early days of sound pictures, his works have attracted the attention of moviemakers. One of the earliest pictures adapted from his work was The Story of Temple Drake (1933), from his novel Sanctuary. In 1949 Clarence Brown directed the film version of Faulkner's just-published novel Intruder in the Dust, a superb picture, among the best American films from that year that I've seen. In the 1950's and 60's Faulkner again attracted the attention of prominent directors: Douglas Sirk (The Tarnished Angels, 1958, adapted from Pylon), Martin Ritt (The Long, Hot Summer, 1958, and The Sound and the Fury, 1959), Tony Richardson (Sanctuary, 1961, a remake of The Story of Temple Drake), Mark Rydell (The Reivers, 1969, from Faulkner's recently published posthumous novel). An excellent version of "Barn Burning," the short story that forms part of the plot of The Long, Hot Summer, was adapted by Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird) and filmed in 1980 as a short feature for the PBS series The American Short Story, with Tommy Lee Jones as the sociopathic Abner Snopes.It is well known that Faulkner lived in California and worked as a studio screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1930's and 40's. (One of the characters in Barton Fink is said to have been based on Faulkner.) He worked on many screenplays (sometimes uncredited), notably two for Howard Hawks, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). As a writer of prose fiction, Faulkner was unconventional and often experimental, and his style was at times quite cinematic. A good example is the short story "Dry September," published in 1932 in his first collection of stories. Its plot is fragmented into short scenes with sudden shifts in place and time, some separate sections even occurring simultaneously in the cross-cutting technique of cinema, in contrast to the linear and continuous plot of the typical short story.
In 1972 the movie that Leonard Maltin has called "the best-ever screen presentation of [Faulkner's] work," Tomorrow, based on a short story and scripted by Horton Foote, was released to excellent reviews but little other attention. I've wanted to see this movie since it was first released, but I never had the opportunity until it was recently shown on the Turner Classic Movies channel. I can now confirm that the critical kudos the film received on its initial release was well deserved.
The director of Tomorrow was Joseph Anthony, who directed six feature films beginning with The Rainmaker (1956), with Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster. Tomorrow was his last movie and his least typical. Filmed by a crew of unknowns on location in Mississippi in black-and-white and not even in stereo or widescreen, it looks and feels nothing like the slick studio fare that Anthony had previously directed, but more like what today would be called an independent production. The only performer in the movie who is well known today is Robert Duvall. A veteran of dozens of television shows and a handful of small roles in films, he was not well known for his movie work at the time. (The Godfather was released the same year.) The only major movie in which he had had an important role was MASH, in which he plays the despicable Major Frank Burns. Duvall had played the lead in George Lucas's first feature, the science fiction movie THX 1138, but this was a low-budget production expanded from a short feature Lucas had made as a film student at USC and was not widely released, despite good reviews and high praise for Duvall's performance.
Other members of the cast of Tomorrow are obscure performers and in some cases appear to be non-professionals who worked in this one film only. Nonetheless the performances in the movie, by professionals and non-professionals alike, are uniformly first-rate—understated, restrained, and absolutely convincing. And Duvall's performance—with his thick Southern accent and his voice lower, more nasal, and more constricted in the throat than his normal speaking voice—is so natural that it blends unobtrusively with those of the other actors.
In both its visuals and plot Tomorrow vividly depicts Faulkner's dark view of the rural South, with the region's poverty and its casual brutality born of ignorance and of social and economic frustration. The movie begins with an act of violence. Outside a modest house at night a young couple are getting into the young man's car to elope when suddenly the girl's father bursts out of the house with a rifle. The young man aims a pistol at him but is shot dead before he can fire. The scene shifts to the jury room of the local courthouse, where the jury are deliberating the fate of the father, who has stood trial for murder. The jurors seem to agree that the victim was a scoundrel and petty criminal and that when he raised his pistol, the accused man was justified in shooting first. They seem ready to vote for a quick acquittal. But one juror, Jackson Fentry (Robert Duvall, in what is reportedly his favorite role), obstinately declares that he will never vote not guilty, and the trial results in a hung jury. The accused man has not been found guilty, but neither has he been exonerated.
The movie then flashes back a number of years to tell the story of Fentry and how he came to this stubborn and entirely symbolic decision. At this point Fentry, an uneducated Mississippi farmer, has just left his father's farm to become the winter caretaker at an isolated seasonal sawmill. On Christmas Eve, as he is leaving to visit his father for the holiday, he finds an unconscious pregnant woman collapsed in his woodpile. Fentry, a gentle, laconic man, rouses the woman, whose name he finds out is Sarah, and takes her back to the shabby cabin where he is temporarily living.
Canceling his plans to visit his father, Fentry invites Sarah (excellently played by Olga Bellin, who flawlessly projects the character's sweetness, passivity, and enervation) to stay until she is stronger and devotes himself to caring for her. Sarah reluctantly agrees to stay just until she feels better. During the next weeks a deep attachment grows between the two and Fentry persuades her to stay until the baby is born. He discovers that Sarah has been disowned by her father and brothers for marrying a man of whom they disapprove, and that her husband deserted her as soon as he learned she was pregnant. Although they share the small cabin, their relationship is never sexual. But it is clear that the two slowly come to love each other.Fentry at last asks Sarah to marry him in a memorable sequence. One day when the weather has improved and the winter chill is relenting, Fentry asks Sarah to accompany him to the place where his employers have promised to build him a house in the spring. He has already selected the site, a lovely clearing surrounded by trees, and planned the design for the three-room house. As the two sit comfortably in the sunlight at the building site, Fentry suddenly blurts out, "Marry me, Sarah." Sarah refuses because the marriage would be bigamous. If Fentry is disappointed he certainly doesn't express his feelings in either his speech or his facial expression. His face remains as impassive as Buster Keaton's, and they simply return to the cabin and carry on as before.
A few weeks later Sarah goes into labor, and Fentry rushes to get the midwife. The delivery is successful, and the baby is a boy. But the midwife tells Fentry that she is doubtful Sarah will survive. The severely weakened Sarah, sensing that death is near, finally agrees to marry Fentry and barely makes it through the brief bedside ceremony before dying. After burying Sarah, Fentry returns to his father's farm with the boy that he loves as if her were his own. In a touching montage, we see a few idyllic years pass as Fentry and the boy, whom he names Jackson and Longstreet Fentry, grow closer and share their obvious love for each other. This is the only time in the entire movie that the stoic Fentry shows any discernible emotion.
But as Faulkner said in an interview that appeared in the Paris Review in 1956, "[Art] has no concern with peace and contentment." One day Sarah's father and brothers arrive with legal papers to claim the child. After being physically forced to give up the boy, Fentry lies immobile on the ground, no longer resisting what he must resign himself to accept as inevitable. Eventually he simply gets up and goes on about his business. In that same interview Faulkner said, "My favorite characters [in literature] . . . coped with life, didn't ask any favors, and never whined." This is exactly what Fentry does and the way he lives the rest of his life—until, that is, he is called to serve on the jury at that murder trial. Fentry knows that he can't do anything to change the past or rectify the painful injustice he suffered all those years before when he lost the boy he considered his own son. But the movie makes it clear that he has never forgotten the sorrow of that experience and that in stubbornly refusing to follow the other jurors in condemning as worthless the life of the young man who was shot that night, the otherwise powerless Fentry at last finds his own way to make one small symbolic gesture to honor the only few brief years of joy he will ever experience in his life.
As the narrator of the movie says at the end, Fentry is one of the "invincible" people who simply continue to endure "tomorrow . . . and tomorrow . . . and tomorrow." What a quietly poignant summation of a quietly poignant and movingly honest film, one that anybody interested in movies, literature, or what Faulkner called "the truth of the human heart" must see.
The quotation "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth, where it is spoken in a soliloquy by Macbeth (Act V, scene v). The fascinating Paris Review interview with William Faulkner can be found at http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4954
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Megan Fox-James White Photoshoot
Birth Name Megan Denise Fox
Nickname Mega Fox Foxy Megan
Height 5' 6" (1.68 m)
Mini Biography
Megan Fox was born May 16, 1986 in Tennessee. She has one older sister. Megan began her training in drama and dance at the age of 5 and, at the age of 10, moved to Florida where she continued her training and finished school. She now lives in Los Angeles. Megan began acting and modeling at the age of 13 after winning several awards at the 1999 American Modeling and Talent Convention in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Megan made her film debut as "Brianna Wallace" in the Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen movie, Holiday in the Sun (2001) (V). FHM magazine's "100 Sexiest Women in the World 2006" supplement. (2006).
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