KIRK DOUGLAS and MAX VON SYDOW
No doubt it’s a
stretch to put these two iconic actors in the same entry, but, other than dying
within weeks of each other, they were among the last of the major cinema
figures from the 1950s still working in the new century.
In the post war
era, each played an important role in the quickly changing movie landscape,
with Max von Sydow, as Ingmar Bergman’s alter-ego, becoming one of the faces of
the growing popularity of sub-titled foreign films and Kirk Douglas taking key roles in a more
cynical, subversive American cinema.
Additionally, each
actor headlined ambitious Biblical epics of the 1960s, “Spartacus” and “The
Greatest Story Ever Told.”
Douglas, who died February 5 at age 103, made
his film debut in 1946, opposite Barbara Stanwyck in “The Strange Love of
Martha Ivers.” Not a bad way to start a career. Before mid-century, he starred
in the noir classic “Out of the Past,” Joseph Mankiewicz’s Oscar-winning drama
“A Letter to Three Wives” and “Champion” (1949), as a reluctant prize fighter,
which earned Douglas his first Oscar nomination.
But it was in the
‘50s that he established his status as one of the best-known American
performers, in many ways the cliché of “an actor.” Douglas wasn’t a subtle
actor. He demanded center stage for his characters: pouring every tick, head
jerk, strutting walk, his high-pitched commanding voice into his roles…and his
always present, jutting, dimpled jaw.
Yet
there were few actors of his generation who could be both action hero and
intellectual artist with equal conviction.
He earned two more best actor nominations,
for “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952), as a heartless movie producer, and, as
Vincent van Gogh in “Lust for Life” (1956). He also deserved a nomination for
his tough-talking police detective in William Wyler’s “Detective Story” (1951),
but his best work in this incredibly productive decade was in Billy Wilder’s
“Ace in the Hole” (1951) and Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957).
As cynical as
any movie made to that point, “Ace in the Hole” (also known as “The Big
Carnival”) follows a manipulative, self-centered reporter, slumming for a small
town paper in the Southwest, as he milks every drop of drama out of a story of
a trapped man in a cave. Douglas’ Chuck Tatum prefigures the coming era in
which too many journalists saw only fame and fortune instead of duty and ethics
while digging into stories, while Wilder (writing with Lesser Samuels and
Walter Newman) presents a world in which everyone is looking for a piece of the
action.
For Kubrick,
Douglas is at his most commanding as French solider Col. Dax, who must condemn
three of his soldiers to make an arrogant, amoral commander look good. From the
horrific scenes in the World War I trenches to the hot house moral debates
between Dax and Gen. Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), this film stands as the ultimate
exploration of military madness. “Paths of Glory” remains one of the most
underappreciated masterpieces of the American cinema.
After this
impressive run of major films, Douglas began the 1960s with his most famous
role, as the slave turned soldier, “Spartacus,” also directed by Kubrick. The
picture also established Douglas as a man whose principles came first—he
“broke” the blacklist by giving screenwriter Dalton Trumbo on-screen credit.
Though his star
began to wane in the mid ‘60s, he never stopped acting, even after a stroke,
working with son Michael and grandson Cameron in “It Runs in the Family” (2003)
at age 87, and made television appearances until recently.
Von Sydow, who died March 8 at 90, was the
most acclaimed actor of the Swedish cinema who became just as well-known as an
English-speaking Hollywood supporting player. In his fifth film, he played a
knight seeking life’s mysteries, playing chess with “death” in Bergman’s first
masterpiece, “The Seventh Seal,” one of the films that opened the door for a
generation of American filmgoers seeking out foreign movies.
The tall, lanky,
sad-faced actor’s reputation was firmly established with Bergman’s early 1960s studies
of human sorrow, “The Virgin Spring,” “Through a Glass Darkly” and “Winter
Light,” all questioning the existence in God and the point of existence. In
1965, he was cast as Jesus of Nazareth in George Steven’s telling of “The
Greatest Story Ever Told,” a ponderous film but a big first step to a Hollywood
career.
By the 1970s, while still acting for Bergman, von
Sydow became a familiar face in American films, including as the true believer,
Father Merrin, in “The Exorcist” (1973) and a hired assassin in “Three Days of
the Condor” (1975). In the 1980s, he was perfect as the artist repulsed by the
pretense of New Yorkers in “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986) and then earned his
first Oscar nomination as a Swedish emigrant working in Denmark in “Pelle the
Conqueror” (1987).
In this century,
von Sydow remained active, with supporting roles in “Minority Report” (2002),
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2007), “Rush Hour 3” (2007), Shutter
Island” (2010) and, scoring another Oscar nod, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close” (2011) as an elderly mute man who befriends a young boy.
His striking gaze
and naturalistic acting made von Sydow one of the most distinctive actors of
the last 60 years.
While the 1950s are best remembered as a
conservative, restrictive era. With the nuclear family and the Cold War setting
the tone, the seeds of the freedom and innovation that was coming in the next
two decades were planted. Douglas,
through his role choices, and von Sydow, as Bergman’s public voice, were at the
forefront of sowing a new age of cinema that played a part in a worldwide
cultural revolution.
THE DANGEROUS CHRISTMAS OF RED RIDING HOOD (1965, TV)
I can’t remember
who alerted me to this forgotten television special available on YouTube—it’s
probably been a few years—but it took a pandemic for me to get around to watch
this curiosity.
The hour-long black-and-white
musical stars 19-year-old Liza Minnelli, fresh off her Tony Award-winning
performance in “Flora the Red Menace,” as a version of the fairy tale’s
heroine, who ventures into the frightening woods to visit grandma. Yet in many
ways, this version is more the story of the Big Bad Wolf, played with aplomb
and wit by Cyril Ritchard, the infamous Captain Hook in the TV version of “Peter
Pan,” an annual TV event for those who grew up in the 1960s.
While the songs
aren’t very memorable and the set design isn’t much more elaborate than a
segment on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Minnelli’s powerful voice is mesmerizing.
And then there’s the Animals.
Yes, the British rock ‘n’ roll band (“House of
the Rising Sun,” “I’m Crying,” “It’s My Life”) led by singer Eric Burdon are
featured as the Wolf’s pack. Sporting tails and Spock-like ear extensions, they
mostly encourage the Wolf to be bad, but at one point they sling on their
guitars and bring something a bit more hip to the Broadway-style musical. (The
music is by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, best known for “Funny Girl.”)
The other key
player in this odd collection of talent is Vic Damone, a popular singer of the
era, playing the friendly woodsman who saves Red Riding Hood from the Wolf’s
boiling pot.
Though in some
ways it looks like an ancient television artifact, 55 years after it first
aired, it also represents an era when TV was trying to bring culture to the
masses. That dream didn’t last long.
JUST MERCY (2019) and CROWN HEIGHTS (2017)
It’s not
surprising that most of the films about criminal injustice feature African
Americans, as they are incarcerated in state prisons five time more often than
whites, despite representing about 12 percent of the population.
This movie genre started, in modern times,
with “To Kill a Mockingbird,” portraying Southern racism. The many films that
followed usually involved a white attorney or advocate fighting to free the
persecuted black man.
But two recent
pictures move away from the “white savior” aspect that has tainted many films
in this genre.
In the December
2019 release, “Just Mercy,” the center of the film is Harvard-educated lawyer Bryan
Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) who sets up shop in Montgomery, Alabama to aid
death-row prisoners. The real-life Stevenson, whose memoirs the movie is based
on, has been doing this for 35 years and is responsible for overturning at
least 125 death sentences.
The movie follows the case of Walter
McMillian (a quietly powerful Jamie Foxx), a middle-aged man who is railroaded
through the system on fabricated testimony in the killing of a white woman. His
real offense: he had previously had an affair with another white woman in Monroeville,
the Alabama town where he lived. Ironically,
it is also the setting for Harper Lee’s classic tale.
What becomes
clear once Stevenson starts looking into the case is that it takes more than a
couple of bigoted cops to condemn an innocent man—it’s systemic racism up and
down the justice system, including jurors, lawyers, sheriffs, judges and the local
white citizens.
Of
course, we’ve all seen this story. Which means it all comes down to how
convincing the acting and script are in making the characters come alive on the
screen. The cast of “Just Mercy” is uniformly superb.
Jordan might not be a great actor, but he
knows how to bring that sincere everyman charisma to his roles, starting with
another story of a persecuted innocent, “Fruitvale Station” (2013). Stardom
came with carrying on the “Rocky” tradition in “Creed” (2015) and “Creed II”
(2018) and in the Marvel hit “Black Panther” (2018).
Foxx
gives his best performance since he won the 2004 Oscar for “Ray.” His Walter
has given up on hope as he’s seen first-hand how casually the system puts an
innocent man on death row. But the most deeply felt, memorable performance of
the film is given by Rob Morgan as a death row prisoner whose date with the
executioner finally arrives. Not many death row scenes as moving; Morgan brings
a harrowing realness to it that reminded me of Sean Penn performance in “Dead
Man Walking”—I can’t think of higher praise.
The first-rate
cast also includes Brie Larson, Oscar winner for “Room,” playing a local woman
who partners with Stevenson in organizing and keeping alive the justice center,
and Tim Blake Nelson as a tough, damaged convict whose testimony is crucial to
the case.
Director Destin
Daniel Cretton (“Short Term 12,” “The Glass Castle”) never lets the film slip
into TV-movie sentimentality. Every emotion is well earned and the characters
are real, not caricatures.
In “Crown
Heights,” no lawyer really steps up for Colin Warner, sent to prison for a
murder he had nothing to do with. LaKeith Stanfield, an emerging star after bringing
very different characters to life in “Get Out,” “Sorry to Bother You” and
“Uncut Gems,” gives another fine performance as the 18-year-old who grows more
bitter as he remains in prison for more than 20 years. (This too is based on a
true story.)
His best friend KC
(Nnamdi Asomugha, former NFL Pro-Bowl player with the Oakland Raiders) is the
one who risks his marriage and responsibilities to keep pressing the case for Colin,
no matter how costly or hopeless.
“Crown Heights,”
a section of Brooklyn, is more about street crime and how the assumption of
guilt comes with being young, black and a member of the neighborhood. KC spends
years trying to convince those who lied to gain leniency to offer the truth
needed for Colin’s freedom.
Maybe the most
poignant lesson of both films is how the system, once you are convicted, never
doubts your guilt, making it almost impossible to reverse the original
judgment.
“Crown Heights” writer-director
Matt Ruskin, in just his second feature, keeps the film lively—as Colin sits in
prison—as we’re introduced to the shady characters who conspired, willing or
not, to keep him behind bars. It’s clear that justice, for what it’s worth,
requires much patience and persistence.
THE BRIDGE (1959) and JOJO RABBIT (2019)
Both of these World
War II pictures, made 60 years apart, in styles that couldn’t be more
different, offer a view of the conflict through the eyes of Germany’s youth.
The West
German-made “The Bridge,” a 1959 Oscar nominee for best foreign film, tells the
story of a group of enthusiastic high school boys who, as the war nears its
end, all receive draft notices on the same day. For this group of true
believers, it is, finally, a chance to fight for the Fatherland and, just as important,
get out of school.
Though anxious
to transfer to the front lines after basic training, this fresh-faced group is
assigned to guard a bridge in their hometown—a bridge that German troops have
plans to destroy.
Austrian director Bernhard Wicki, who went on
to serve as one of the directors of “The Longest Day” and helmed the Marlon
Brando film “Morituri,” doesn’t pull any punches in portraying the morally
vacant attitude of the Nazi leadership in the waning days of the war. Made just
15 years after the Allies’ victory, “The Bridge,” based on actual events, was
acclaimed in West Germany, winning that country’s award for best picture and
director. You won’t see many films more damning of blind patriotism.
“Jojo Rabbit”
turns a similar story into a comic coming-of-age story that, while featuring
moments of poignancy, inevitable undercuts it with its central conceit.
Ten-year-old
Nazi devotee Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis) has an imaginary friend—the Fuhrer
himself, played with quirky buffoonery by the film’s director, Taika Waititi. He
hops around Johannes’ bedroom/imagination, filling him with patriotic
inspiration.
I found it hard
to sit through the first 45 minutes of the film, when the kid and, needless to
say, his friend Adolf spew Third Reich rhetoric, offensively glorifying the
Nazi regime. Yes, “Springtime for Hitler,” remains a hilarious bit, but it’s a
short segment in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” and performed by a clearly insane
man—not a young, fresh-faced boy in the midst of the war. By the time “Jojo
Rabbit” starts showing the other side of Nazi Germany, it had lost me.
Of course Johannes
is going to realize that there might be something wrong with the twisted morals
of the Nazis, but it takes too long.
Scarlett Johansson
scored a supporting actress nomination for her role as Johannes’ mother, a
quiet resistance member who hides a young Jewish girl in a secret room. But I
didn’t see anything special in her performance; Johansson has been more impression
in a half-dozen pictures.
Even more
baffling to me is the Oscar for adapted screenplay (from a novel by Christine
Leunens) awarded to Waititi, a New Zealand writer-director-actor-comedian who
previously directed “Thor: Ragnarok.” For
me, it was too clever for its subject and too obvious to be taken seriously.
DON QUIXOTE (1992)
Movie
aficionados and historians spent years salivating over the
possibilities of Orson Welles’ “lost” films. The great director—maybe the most
talented filmmaker to work in Hollywood—completed a dozen movie, five of which
are great films, including the anointed “greatest American film,” “Citizen
Kane.” But he also teased the cinematic world with unfinished works “Don
Quixote” and “The Other Side of the Wind.”
Now that versions
of these films are available, it is clear that the time Welles spent on these
projects—decades, in fact—was all but wasted, as they both contain little
evidence that the material ever could have been pulled together to create an
entertaining, even slightly interesting motion picture.
I went on at length about
the disaster of “The Other Side of the Wind” last year. Now I’ve seen
“Don Quixote” and can confirm that it’s equally convoluted. I’ve seen
better short films made by high school students than what the great man shot
for his version of the Cervantes story.
Spanish actor Francisco
Reiguera plays (or, more accurately, poses as) Don Quixote, roaming the countryside
in search of someone to rescue as his trusted sidekick Sancho Panza (Hollywood
actor Akim Tamiroff) tries to keep up. At least 40 percent of the movie is Sancho
struggling through crowded streets to find the ever-wandering dreamer. The hook
of the film is that it's set in modern times, even though Quixote and Panza
look like characters out of the 17th Century.
At the same time, a
film of "Don Quixote" is being made (by Orson Welles) in the
same area where the "real" Don Quixote is roaming. That’s right:
Welles has made a film about fictional characters existing in the same world
that Orson Welles is directing a film that stars those fictional characters. The
scenes of Welles show him riding in a car, in what looks like paparazzi video.
This version of
Welles film, first shown in 1992, was put together by Spanish producer Patxi
Irigpyen and editor Jess Franco (who served as an assistant to Welles during
the shoot) seven years after Welles death. It's hard to say this is what Welles
was hoping for, but since he spent nearly a decade, starting in the late 1950s,
fooling around with the film, it probably as good as it was going to be.
The film is
poorly shot and thoughtlessly constructed. Occasionally I recognized Welles
voice, for both actors, but the voice changed from scene to scene, adding to
the amateur quality of the movie. And the performance by Reiguera resembles
someone either senile or on death’s doorstep. Though Welles reportedly had a
script of 1000 pages for this film, not a word of any insight is offered in
this version.
I’ve never
understood the appeal of the tale of Don Quixote. What are we to learn from a
delusional fool and his comical buddy who indulges the old man’s incoherent
mutterings? I guess I’m missing the profundity in the story; the characters come
off as irritating simpletons.
Terry Gilliam,
another director who tilts against windmills, made a version of this story,
“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” that was released in 2019. It’s not much
better while presenting the tale in modern times with a filmmaker (the
ubiquitous Adam Driver) returning to the scene of a previous movie he shot in
Spain. At least, Jonathan Pryce brings some humor to Quixote.
Welles could have used that; or at least something to bring some
coherency to this pointless, rambling travelogue of Spanish countryside.
STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019)
The overarching
sentimentality of the concluding trilogy of the George Lucas saga reaches its
apex in this concluding episode.
The plot is as
predictable as the fractured grammar of Yoda, sadly missing, and not near as
endearing.
As usual, it
looks like the end for the rebels as that damnable Palpatine returns,
vampire-like from what all assumed was actual death in one of these episodes
where Hayden Christensen was ruining the character of Darth Vader.
Rey (a more
stoic Daisy Ridley), not much of a team player, is focused on connecting with
the Force in anticipation of the ultimate showdown with the dark side and Kylo
Ren (Adam Driver, who I’ve never liked in this role). Apparently, it was
important to determine Rey’s family history—I never gave it much of a thought
in the previous pictures—and that becomes a central aspect of the story.
Meanwhile, Finn
(John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac) battle overwhelming odds to stop the seemingly
invincible Empire, now calling themselves the First Order.
Skilled sci-fi
director J.J. Abrams keeps everyone moving at a breakneck pace to the point
that you stop paying attention to actual plot developments. Sad to say, but his
two “Star Trek” films far outshine his two “Star Wars” pictures.
While this
trilogy has washed away the bad taste of the Christensen-Natalie Portman
disasters, it remains in the shadow of the first two Lucas originals.
