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Archive for the ‘Roddy MacDowell’ Category

Holiday In Mexico

20 Jul

Holiday In Mexico – directed by George Sidney. Musical. 128 minutes Color 1946.

★★★★

The Story: The daughter of the ambassador to Mexico convinces herself into an imbroglio and then sings her way out of it.

~

Jane Powell’s first film at MGM which produced, let’s say overproduced, ten years of her subsequent films. These were the sort of films one stayed away from in the dull days of DDI. Those were the times when The American Dream was just invented. It consisted then as now of two things: a tract home and golf. And that demented fiction: The Girl Next Door. Taken over from Dianna Durbin and Judy Garland, this presented the American teen-age lass as sparkling, as jolly, and as virginal as an icecream soda.

Jane Powell began very good at this, except that she not only plays characters who are irritating but she also is so. And she is so because, at this point in her development, everything she does as an actor is pat. It is new but it is never fresh, which makes it shiny but conventional. For she is never in the moment. She on top of the moment as one might be said to be on top of a carousel horse. So, while her responses are always on the money, they come out as miniature mugging. She’s not riding a real horse.

Three kinds of acting are on display here, and they are wonderful to behold in juxtaposition. Next to Powell as her father is that master of imperturbability, Walter Pidgeon. He is riding a real horse. He never brings anything new but everything he does is fresh, so it looks new. Everything he does belongs to him. Nothing is forced. Everything is right. He is easy in his craft. He has presence. He has bearing. He has humor about himself and others. His alias is Aplomb. He is completely responsive to the actors opposite him. And at the end he gives one of the most beautifully delivered, down-to-earth tablecloth speeches I have ever heard an actor negotiate.

The speech is good also because it’s well-written, although the same may not be said for the scenario as a whole, which involves our Jane, aged fifteen, running after José Iturbi, a grandfather. We won’t go into it. It is a wonder Xavier Cugat himself does not go after her; he was said to have an eye for Chihuahuas and nymphets. Chihuahuas and nymphets? Actually they’re both the same thing.

In the third kind of acting, Mikhail Rasumny, plays a Russian Ambassador whose daughter has fallen for Pidgeon. What was going on in The Moscow Art Theatre at that time had nothing to do with Lee Strasburg. This is brilliant prototypical comic Russian acting. Don’t miss it. One scene. He’s hilarious. A masterwork of its type. A lesson in the craft.

To say the film is a holiday is bunko; it is not a holiday; they are in residence – which is no more Mexican than the MGM backlot. And Cugat and Iturbi were Spanish.

Yet the whole business is beautifully produced and costumed and directed. And Iturbi’s piano numbers are a lot of fun to watch. As is the finale – where they all appear in a outdoor concert with our Jane singing Ave Maria (written by an Austrian) in an open air arena the size of Arizona.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jane Powell, José Iturbi, Roddy MacDowell, SINGING MUSICAL, Walter Pidgeon, Xavier Cugat

 

The Big Picture

03 Aug

The Big Picture ­­­­–– directed by Christopher Guest. Satire. A film student gets discovered by Hollywood and barters away his soul, almost. 100 minutes Color 1988.

★★★

I am actually zero degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. For back in the palmy days of the 70s, my lady friend drew me from Greenwich Village to a big Thanksgiving party in the Philadelphia house of Kevin Bacon’s parents, whose father was city planner. Kevin was a kid running around the yard playing touch.

Because of this gratifyingly high position I hold in his life, I have always wanted him to be a favorite actor of mine, but there are too many degrees of separation for that.

There is a human model called Fusion, which divides folks into two outer types, either the controlling or the withdrawn, and each of these combines with an inner type, either the steady or the volatile. Katharine Hepburn would be Volatile/Controlling, and Spencer Tracy would be Steady/Withdrawn. Kevin Bacon would be Volatile/Controlling also, and his best friend in the movie and his girlfriend would both be Steady/Withdrawn.

The problem with Kevin Bacon as an actor is that his Controlling energy is used, probably unconsciously, not to control his surroundings and make them better, but to control himself. The result is a tension ever present and useful only in dramatic roles. In a comedy, which this film is, it is useless and indeed detrimental. In dramatic roles it gives him a certain deadness; this makes him an ideal villain. But it prevents him from being a natural comic actor, someone who is inherently funny. And without this quality the present film falls flat.

And it falls even flatter by contrast when there appear in it actors who are inherently funny, or who can do funny things, or both. Such ones are Fran Dresher, who is marvelous as the Hollywood wife who is forever redecorating her home. Or Martin Short, whose exquisitely and imaginatively rash take has an uncanny viability as a gonzo Hollywood agent,. Or Teri Hatcher as the sex-bomb starlet. Or Jennifer Jason Leigh, my least favorite actor, who, in a very well-written part, is brilliant in making the manically volatile film student into someone one’s heart bleeds for. These four have talents that can rise to meet the challenge satire demands.

As has the great J.T.Walsh as the sinister, controlling studio head. But Bacon is so tense, even his teeth are tense. It throws his timing a half-beat short. It makes everything he does preplanned, so even his improvisations seem like nothing is actually happening to him. Nothing looks fresh. Everything looks thought-out even when nothing is. He is a very good actor, but his presence in this material is the ruination of it. It’s a Tom Hanks part; it needs someone you can get behind, someone inherently a fool. The best Bacon can come up with is routine naiveté. It wants not just an actor you like but one you can admire for making a jackass of himself, someone so vulnerable they are lucky.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, BACK SOUNDSTAGE COMEDY, Directed by Christopher Guest, J.T. Walsh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kevin Bacon, Martin Short, Roddy MacDowell, SATIRE

 

The Greatest Story Ever Told

13 Feb

The Greatest Story Ever Told — directed by George Stevens. A prophet appears in the ancient Middle East and is believed and followed and then beset by political superstition.

3 hours and 19 minutes, Color, 1965.

★★★

It is not fair of me to review this film, for I have not seen it in a movie theatre, but only on my TV, which, while it is fairly large, cannot do justice to the size of the screen for which it was made. When Stevens was asked to choose between Panasonic and super-Panasonic, he chose the latter, although only two such cameras were available. Others were soon found. And the film was made as a story dependent upon its narration for a huge broad screen. Stevens had been a cameraman for years before he became a director, and he could combine the integrity of his material with the size of the canvas upon which he painted. The sort of the story and its telling were intrinsic to the size of the screen. The one had to do with the other, and to see this film on a TV screen is simply for most of it to fail to register as story. Or so I imagine. It may not be the Greatest Film ever made but it must be the most gorgeous. After research in the Holy Land, Stevens made it in remote Arizona settings which resembled that land of long ago. The flooding of Lake Powell was halted so it could be filmed as the Sea of Galilee. The settings are vast and panoramic and are meant, I believe to buoy up the power of the actions on the screen into a spiritual or at least other world dimension, and this I think they may succeed in doing. The individual scenes are made with Stevens’ unerring sense of beauty; he was inspired by famous paintings and their lighting; many interiors are dark and mysterious, lit for chiaroscuro and for effects which his simple camera setups were primed. Max Von Sydow is fine as Jesus as an actor, but no one else comes up to be as good as to be even bad. Great actors like Van Heflin look as uncomfortable in their sandals as everyone else; God, their feet must have hurt. The crowd scenes are just like all Hollywood crowd scenes, a lot of people shaking their fists in the air at the same time unconvincingly. No one is at home their costumes. The actors pause portentous eons between syllables, except for Jose Ferrer who mercifully picks up all his cues and for Claude Rains who gets on with it also. Charlton Heston is well cast as the humorless John The Baptist and delvers his lines through his stentorian teeth like a baleen whale in a vomitorium. Sal Mineo is marvelous as a cripple who is able to walk; his is the best performance in the film and probably of his career. Sometimes the old sermons are moving, but the picture does not seem to be, except once, when Sydney Poitier picks up the cross from Jesus’ stumbled back and helps him along with it. Much of the heart of the film seems to be kept at a distance, a beautiful distance, true. The miracles are all off to one side, never shown; only their effect is shown. The effect of Jesus on his apostles is never shown, always granted. Eventually, the film got out of control, and Jean Negulesco shot the Jerusalem street scenes and David Lean cast and shot the Claude Rains sequence. Alfred Newman scored it with ancient instruments, his own score, and Handel’s Messiah which is quite grating. Some day if I have the chance I will see this film in a movie house. William Mellor, Stevens’ favorite photographer shot it, and there isn’t a scene in it that isn’t rapturously beautiful. From a camera point of view. Whether from a human point of view and a narrative point of view, I wonder.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: YOU-COULD-DRIVE-A-TEAM-OF-HORSES-THROUGH-THE-PAUSES, Angela Lansbury, BIBLICAL EPIC, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, Claude Rains, David McCallum, Directed by George Stevens, Donald Pleasence, Dorothy McGuire, Ed Wynn, John Wayne, José Ferrer, Joseph Schildkraut, Martin Landau, Max von Sydow, Pat Boone, Paul Stewart, Richard Conte, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia, Roddy MacDowell, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Telly Savalas, Van Heflin

 

Son Of Fury

10 Jul

Son Of Fury  Directed by John Cromwell. Costume Romance. The heir to a great English estate vows to take his rightful place presently occupied by a selfish Uncle. 94 mintues Black and White 1942.

* * * * *

In those days, the male stars were more beautiful than the female stars, but the female stars were better actors. Joel Macrea, John Wayne, John Payne, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable were gorgeous guys, and the most gorgeous of all was Tyrone Power. His looks were black Irish with Garbo-long eyelashes – along the lines of George Clooney, except Power, of course, was better looking. Clooney has one advantage over Power in that Clooney is now alive and Power is not, which means that Power is no longer seen as sexually attractive by those who grew up with him in the 30s, people whose sexual development is simultaneous with his own. It’s what makes a star and keeps a star a star. In Power’s case, he also had talent, but, because of his scripts, it was banked – right into Zanuck’s account, for Power was the biggest star at Fox. Zanuck assigned him role after role the same. You can see the responsibility a superstar of that era had to meet by the dumbing down of their range, while George Sanders and Dudley Digges especially savor the scenery. Diggs really has a good time; playing a mercenary lawyer, he gobbles up the camera like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. In the scene Power has the want; Digges want is to deflect the want, but just imagine what Digges comes on with in this scene. Sits behind a desk the whole time, and plays, not a particular action or want, but rather a way of life, all-powerful and impressed by nothing. What a perfect choice to make to play the key moment in the scene. And later on, to make his entrance into court and dress himself in court. Also check out George Sanders’ opening moment when he has to oblige a ruthless close-up to tell us that his long-lost nephew has been discovered. His response is conventional; what lies behind it is the genius to have created the energy of a man who enjoys his own greed. And that, not his technique and not his want or intention, is the force that drives the truth of the moment into life. And so we have the great character actors of the movies doing the same thing forever and also in this film, Henry Davenport as the loving gramps, John Carradine (who was a bad actor but an understandable one), and Elsa Lanchester (who is also a bad actor, because self-conscious of her effects, but believable here). And Tyrone Power was just such a type-cast actor. He played the Tyrone Power type, and film after film duplicated the format, including an early childhood, here played by little Roddy MacDowell, completely devoid of sentimentality, firm in his energy, and fascinating to watch in his withheld ruthlessness. Power was a master at mediating the unbelievable lines he was given in these costume shows. He never overplays his hand, and so the lines sound believable. It is not that he believes in them, so much that the decency he summons plays off a certain challenge to carry him through them. He was a romantic actor par excellence, which means that his sexual instrument is not lustful but lyrical. In wooing a lady he is not rapacious but fun and kind and heart struck. Bolder with Frances Farmer as milady and more bowled over by Gene Tierney doing a South Seas hula-hula, but always respectful of the lady. If you can look beyond his mesmerizing beauty, into his eyes you can see how he comes alive and in what ways. The direction by John Cromwell is discrete, the filming by Arthur C. Miller is narratively helpful, unintrusive, and, in the London rather than the South Seas scenes, spectacularly convincing, as are the fight scenes between Sanders and Power, for they are cunningly performed by bewigged stunt extras.  The score by Alfred (too-many-violins) Newman is intrusive, the exact opposite of Power’s presence, and the perfect model of what not to do while performing balderdash.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, COSTUME ROMANCE, Dudley Digges, Elsa Lanchester, Gene Tierney, George Sanders, Harry Davenport, Roddy MacDowell, Tyrone Power: screen god

 
 
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