Dorothy vs Scarlett and Ninotchka

Here's a fact for Black History Month:  Quvenzhané Wallis is the youngest nominee for Best Actress in the history of the Academy Awards.  In the Oscar race at age 9 for her performance in Beasts of the Southern Wild.  Last week, I watched The Wizard of Oz on DVD.  If little Ms. Wallis is a Best Actress nominee for that film, then Judy Garland should have received her first Best Actress Oscar nomination for the The Wizard of Oz.  She deserved to be in the race opposite Vivien Leigh for Gone With The Wind and Greta Garbo for Ninotchka.  Her soulful, memorable and moving performance as Dorothy Gale is the heart of this great musical adventure.  It endures as touching, truthful work.

So much is known about the movie's back story.  We know that MGM studio execs attempted to borrow little big star, Shirley Temple, from 20th Century Fox for the project.  Temple was the right age but wrong for the role.  We know that "Over the Rainbow" was almost dropped from the movie.  It went on to win the Oscar for Best Song, became a hit with the public and was Garland's signature tune for the rest of her life.  Some obvious elements seem to have been overlooked.  In that 1939 release, Judy Garland was a kid working with seasoned show biz veterans twice her age and older.

Ray Bolger, "Scarecrow," was in his mid-30s.  Bert Lahr and Jack Haley, "Lion" and "Tin Man," were in their 40s.

Frank Morgan, "Professor Marvel" and "The Wizard," was nearly 50.  Judy Garland was 16 and not yet a star when cast as Dorothy.  She was a screen newcomer at MGM, a cute girl with an amazingly mature voice.  She was Betsy Booth, the Broadway hopeful gal pal and never the girlfriend in Mickey Rooney's popular Andy Hardy franchise.  The emotional depth and womanliness of her voice was evident when the sang a special arrangement of "You Made Me Love You" as a girl writing a "Dear Mr. Gable" fan letter to Clark Gable in Broadway Melody of 1938.  Unlike 20th Century Fox's Shirley Temple, she wasn't a leading lady.  The contract player was still being groomed and doing good work.  Young Judy had a major responsibility on her shoulders as a teen actress hoping for stardom.  As Dorothy Gale, not only did she have to act and be believable in a role that she was a few years too old for (her developing bustline had to be obscured), she had to introduce an original movie score by celebrated songwriters Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg.

One great lesson I learned years ago in acting classes taught by Tony-winning actress Joanna Gleason (Sondheim's original Broadway cast of Into the Woods, Dirk Diggler's mother in the movie Boogie Nights), is that a good song as like a monologue set to music.  It gives information about a character.  It moves the story.  "Over the Rainbow" sets the tone for Dorothy's emotional and physical journey.  It reveals all her inner longing.  The song is a monologue that she beautifully delivers in the first 20 minutes of the movie.  That simplicity, that depth, that wistful innocence bring us into Dorothy's soul.

She's not a child of privilege and entitlement.  She hasn't always known happiness.  She lives on a Kansas farm obviously hit hard by the Great Depression.  She helps take care of that farm.  And what happened to her parents?  We never know.  She lives with her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry.  And Toto too.  She's a good girl and a loyal friend.

We're often so delighted by the movie that we don't realize how difficult an assignment teen Garland had and brilliantly accomplished.  We have to believe that Dorothy believes in all these fantastic characters and all these fantastic events.  Shirley Temple's movie characters were usually precious and precocious youngsters that folks wanted to take care of, adopt, pamper and spotlight musically on their radio shows.  She was spunky.  Judy played a poor, sweet kid that a wicked witch wants to torture and put to death.

We have to believe in all her affections, all her fears in the Land of Oz.

We have to believe that the frightened girl's love for a friend in need would be strong enough to summon up the bravery to save his life and overcome her fear of being killed by the Wicked Witch of the West.  Dorothy thinks of others. Not only of herself.

If young Judy Garland's performance doesn't work in The Wizard of Oz, the whole film suffers.  She's 16.  A high schooler.  And she has to carry a big budget Hollywood movie from the top studio in town.  That would be a major, daunting task dramatically.  She had to carry it with new songs.  Musicals are hard work.  She had new music and special effects to deal with in this complicated production.  It's an action/fantasy musical.  When I was 16, I had a tough time just dealing with gym class.  The word "iconic" is tossed about frequently today by entertainment journalists, but it really does apply to Garland's performance as Dorothy.  For 1939, it's proven to be as famous and memorable as Vivien Leigh's Oscar winning dramatic turn as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind.  Both films were directed by Victor Fleming.  Both Scarlett and Dorothy were strong females determined to get back home.  Being in my 50s, I'm of that generation that waited eagerly for the annual presentation of this classic on network television.  It was usually around Easter time.  And it was the only time it aired during the year.  This was before VHS, DVDs, DVR and cable television.  That annual presentation was indeed a very special broadcast for us youngsters.  We were enraptured every single year and we were awed by it, even though most of us watched Dorothy's adventures in black and white.  Not every home had a color TV at that time.  The Oriental is a revival movie theater on the East Side of Milwaukee.  The Wizard of Oz played there when I lived in Milwaukee.  That was in the early 1980s.  The place was packed -- mostly with babyboomers who'd grown up watching it on TV and now brought their youngsters to see it.  I sat next to a former co-worker who brought his little girl.  He and I had never seen The Wizard of Oz on a big screen.  The Oriental had a gorgeous print.  The colors popped.  Being that we were now grown, my buddy and I had known heartbreaks and disappointments.  We knew what it was like to try to find your way back home in some fashion.  We'd battled negative forces like the Wicked Witch in our adult lives.  Right before Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, he and I both said, "Wow."  What hit us?  How long the Yellow Brick Road stretched  up and down hills was before she found Scarecrow.  He whispered to me, "Look how far she's come."  To this day, when Dorothy says to Scarecrow, "I think I'll miss you most of all" before she leaves Oz altogether, I feel this -- it's not because she loves Tin Man and Lion any less.  It's because Scarecrow travelled the road with her the farthest.

When Dorothy awakens in her room in Kansas, we have to feel that we survived that difficult and often dangerous journey with her.  We have to feel the lessons she's learned.  We must believe her poignant declaration, "...there's no place like home."

Judy Garland was given a special Juvenile Academy Award for The Wizard of Oz.

Her first Oscar nomination came for a spectacular 1954 musical/dramatic performance.  She sang about another road.  "The road gets rougher, it's lonelier and tougher..." were lyrics in "The Man That Got Away," the torch song she introduced in A Star Is Born.

The Best Actress Oscar went to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl.  It should've gone to Judy for George Cukor's masterful musical remake of a 1937 classic drama.

Harold Arlen co-wrote new hit songs for her to sing in that film too.  For an "Only in Hollywood" item, here's one for you:  Judy Garland's Oscar-winning actress/singer daughter, Liza Minnelli, was once married to Jack Haley Jr., son of the Tin Man actor.  The Wizard of Oz made Garland famous.  In the 1940s, she was one of MGM's brightest, most beloved and most talented stars.  As for Garland's Dorothy, if you've seen Beasts of the Southern Wild, go watch The Wizard of Oz again.  If Ms. Wallis is in the running for the Best Actress Academy Award of 2012, Judy Garland should've been a nominee for the adult-sized Oscar as Best Actress of 1939.  It's quite a performance.

Michelle Pfeiffer Had a Point

Did you know that Michelle Pfeiffer was originally slated to play FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs?  Jodie Foster was her replacement.

The movie's villain will be in our homes come early April.  That's when NBC premieres its new series, Hannibal, about further adventures of the infamous Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Hugh Dancy, a fine British actor, stars in the series as Special Agent Will Graham.

When I saw the Hannibal promo during Saturday Night Live, I immediately thought of why Michelle Pfeiffer bowed out of 1991's The Silence of the Lambs.  It wasn't a scheduling conflict.  I asked her about it and included the clip in one of my demo reels.

Ms. Pfeiffer had a point.  Did you see the 2001 sequel, Hannibal, with Julianne Moore in the role of Clarice Starling opposite Anthony Hopkins repeating his role as Dr. Lecter?

Good actors.  Good performances. But that sequel made me very uncomfortable.  I don't see the need for a sequel to every single hit movie.  Often that one story is enough.

At the end of Hannibal, after an extremely grotesque Dr. Lecter dinner party, I remembered another comment Michelle Pfeiffer made during our interview.  She said that if they'd just killed him at the end, she would've been cool with The Silence of the Lambs.

I'd love to interview her now that he's got a TV series set to premiere.  Wow.  He's like the Charlie Brown of serial killers.  Coming up in October...It's the Great Pumpkin, Dr. Lecter.

Can you imagine Hannibal Lecter on the Red Carpet?  When you ask him "Who are you wearing?," his answer would be very creepy indeed.  

Free This Jennifer Hudson Biopic

Where did her movie go?  It played in Canada.  Where is it?  Simon Cowell didn't think she had the star quality to advance on TV's American Idol but Hollywood saw it.  Jennifer Hudson landed a dream role in the movie version of Broadway's Dreamgirls.  She was the talented and complicated Effie, the back-up singer seen on the far right.

After years of disappointments, Effie's talent and a new attitude bring her to center stage.

The performance earned Jennifer Hudson the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress of 2006.

In between 2006 and her recent appearance on NBC's Smash singing with the show's star and fellow American Idol loser, Katherine McPhee, Ms. Hudson went dramatic.

 

It was a major big screen assignment.  She played Winnie Mandela opposite Terrence Howard, Best Actor Oscar nominee for 2005's Hustle & Flow.  Howard co-starred as young Nelson Mandela in Winnie.  This film focuses in the early years of the woman who became the wife of the now-globally famous ex-prisoner and South African anti-apartheid activist.  Winnie was supposed to supposed to be released in 2011.  Here's a clip.

It was reported the film would  come out in 2012. It didn't. Heck...Nelson Mandela was released before this movie was. It screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011. I was really curious to see how Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson handled the Winnie Mandela role in that biopic.

If you've seen Winnie, leave me a short review.  Happy Black History Month.

Where Is Linda Fiorentino?

She sizzled in The Last Seduction, a 1994 indie drama with a 1940's film noir attitude.  Linda Fiorentino picked up the torch from actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck in 1944's Double Indemnity and Kathleen Turner in 1981's Body Heat and ran with it.

This was one smart, boldly sexy performance by a skilled new movie actress playing a hot-looking babe who's about as safe as a scorpion.  For The Last Seduction, she was a Best Actress nominee for the BAFTA Film Award, the British equivalent to our Academy Awards.  She was voted Best Actress by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Linda Fiorentino was a terrific femme fatale.  Then, also like Stanwyck, she proved she was just as fabulous handling some goofy comic situations.  Think of Stanwyck's Christmas in Connecticut and Ball of Fire.  Fiorentino kept up with the guys and got big laughs as the Men in Black doctor.  With Oscar nominees Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, she tackled the situation of criminal space aliens in disguise in New York City.

She was as delightful in this 1997 hit as she was dangerous in The Last Seduction.

After I saw her Men in Black performancce, I thought Hollywood should utilize her like it did Barbara Stanwyck.  Not that I advocate remaking all the classics.  But, if anyone had decided to do yet another remake of Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, Linda Fiorentino would've been perfect as the lovable vamp cardshark Stanwyck played.

Not many actresses could switch easily from film noir to screwball comedy.

Stanwyck could.  I felt that Linda Fiorentino could too.  By the way, The Lady Eve was remake in the 1950s with musical numbers.  Mitzi Gaynor and George Gobel took on the Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda roles.  Sturges rewrote his original screenplay.

David Niven co-starred as the dad of the duplicitous lady in The Birds and the Bees.

In 1999 and 2000, I hosted a weekly show on cable in New York called Metro Movies with Bobby Rivers.  Our show put a spotlight on a lot of independent filmmakers -- known and trying to become known.  We did a feature on the comedy, Dogma.  Fiorentino co-starred with Chris Rock in this 1999 satire about religious beliefs and behavior.

Again, she got laughs.  Kevin Smith wrote and directed this indie film.  Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, George Carlin, Alan Rickman and Salma Hayak are in it too.  The story revolves around two renegade angels on earth who are trying to re-enter heaven.

We interviewed cast members on our show.  Linda Fiorentino was just as and warm and funny in an interview as she was on film.  Where did she go?  Why didn't Hollywood do more with her?  Why isn't TV doing something with her?  I sure would like to know.

A Kiss and A PLACE IN THE SUN

"Seems like we always spend the best part of our time just saying goodbye."
~Elizabeth Taylor as Angela Vickers in George Stevens' A Place in the Sun 

Hollywood princess Elizabeth Taylor was breathtakingly beautiful in this masterpiece.

In Stevens' production, she gracefully made the transition for movie star to actress in this tragic love story.  Hers wasn't the only beauty in this 1951 film.  I was a high school freshman the first time I ever saw A Place in the Sun.  It aired on TV.  It opens with a close-up of Montgomery Clift right after the credits.  When he turned around and faced the camera, I didn't quite understand why I was feeling what I was feeling.  While standing up, I felt like someone had just stolen my knees.  The camera loved his face.  I did too.

Director George Stevens gave us a story about social class in America.  George Eastman (Clift) is a poor guy with little education who wants to make something of himself.  He has a rich distant relative who may be able to give him a job.  He hitches rides to meet him.

George has known hard times.  He hasn't known much love.  There's just his single Christian mother.  He's blocked by and frustrated by three elements in his life -- family, religion and class.  He wants to break free of the confines each has placed around him.  There is a light and dark side to George's ambition.  Then one night he sees gorgeous Angela Vickers, a rich and kind girl.  He's an outsider in her world.  He's in love with her.

In English Lit. classes at school, we had to read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  This was at the end of the turbulent 1960s and I attended a high school in Watts.  That South Central L.A. community made national headlines with several days of destructive race riots that brought the armed National Guard in to patrol our neighborhoods.  I got the point the teacher was trying to make with colors as symbolism in the Fitzgerald novel, but I couldn't connect to the characters.  I didn't care about Jay Gatsby's pastel-colored shirts or the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.   I wasn't the only one in class who couldn't connect to them.  We were teens in an economically depressed, predominantly black community in Los Angeles.  We could not understand the kind of wealth these people in Long Island, New York had for amusement.  They were in a world we didn't see, a world we were too young to grasp.  They were too hightone and chilly, like they were in aspic.  Jay and Daisy never came to life for us.  Years later when I attended a Midwest university and had met kids of privilege, I could understand the book a bit more.  I read it when I lived in New York and realized then its brilliance.  Thanks to TV in my youth, we high schoolers totally connected to George Eastman of A Place in the Sun.  He was one of us.  We understood his conflicts, his passions, his life.  We could see why he'd be driven to a certain point of madness to protect his love affair.

We were young men taught that an education would be our passport to privilege.  But we regularly heard about middle class white guys who could talk their way onto a Hollywood lot and wind up with a great job.  How come white guys could easily get gigs writing for sitcoms like Sanford & Son, but the black and Mexican-American fellows who lived in the characters' Watts area and studied hard couldn't even get an interview?  We knew what George Eastman would discover.  It's not always how hard you work, how diligently you train.  It's who you know.  Stevens shows this cinematically with one simple scene.  George falls for Angela.  It's love at first sight.  It will be mutual.  She will fall for poor George.  He's not like the oafish rich young men her family knows.  For all George's hard work and ideas at the factory, did his talents prove to be the ticket to privilege?  No.  It was being Angela's boyfriend.  At a party, they embrace.  When Angela holds George and slowly, romantically they dance from one room into another, he has just glided from one class into another.  It was as simple as that.  He's no longer the outsider.

At one party, their emotions spill out in a tender scene.  George has now been accepted.  It's an elegant formal party.  He's handsome in a tuxedo.  But can he escape his lower class past?  If I had to choose my "Top 5 Favorite Movie Kisses," this would be one.  There's Taylor, who practically grew up on camera, looking directly into it and darting off to escape its gaze.  There's Clift, the troubled gay man off camera who probably fell in love with Taylor a bit while making this film.  I would have.  I love this love scene.

This is based on the Theodore Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy.  Keeping that title, the story was first filmed by director Josef von Sternberg in 1931.  For me, this is a case in which the remake tops the original.  What a movie.  What a kiss.

See A Place in the Sun.  I highly recommend it.

On THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

I loved Tim Robbins in this screwball comedy from the Coen Brothers.  The Hudsucker Proxy was close to being excellent.  Robbins was perfectly cast as Norville Barnes, the poor schnook from the mailroom who's kicked up to a top job in the boardroom.  He doesn't realize it but he's really being set up to take the fall for some corporate greed.

I also loved the production design of this movie that takes place in 1950s New York City.

There were times when it reminded me of Manhattan set designs for the 1940 Preston Sturges classic, Christmas in July.  It was terrific seeing Paul Newman exercise his zany comedy muscles as Sidney J. Mussberger, top man on the board of directors.

From Hud to The Hudsucker Proxy.  Newman got better at comedy when in his prime.  The older he got, the lighter the touch.  He's delightfully loopy in this role.

Norville, while maybe not the smartest guy in town, has a talent for invention.

He'll create a Hula Hoop-like toy sensation that affects the company's profits.

Then there's Amy Archer, a female reporter who's often the smartest guy in the room.

She'll pull a fast one in order to get the scoop she wants.  But we know that she'll ultimately get tripped up in her own game and wind up falling for the fall guy.

If you're a classic film fan, I'd like your opinion on this.  Jennifer Jason Leigh is a mighty fine actress but the Coen Brothers let her make the wrong choice with that accent.  The Coen Brothers were heavily influenced by director/screenwriter Preston Sturges.  The Hudsucker Proxy is ripe with that influence.  Tim Robbins obviously gets it.  As Norville Barnes, Robbins is basically an Eddie Bracken character in a Sturges satire.  Think of Bracken as Norval Jones in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek with Betty Hutton....

...and as Woodrow Truesmith in Hail the Conquering Hero.  Woodrow tried to enlist and do his partriotic duty in World War II.  But he couldn't pass the physical.  No other Hollywood director utilized Bracken's talent as fully as Sturges did in those two films.

Robbins even has a Bracken-like physicality in his comedy.  Leigh sounds like Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year.  That's what limits the comedy in the "very good" instead of "excellent" category.  Everything else has a Preston Sturges vibe.  Katharine Hepburn was not a Preston Sturges-style actress.  She had a different energy and class.  She was more George Stevens or George Cukor.  The Coen Brothers should've had Jennifer give us some Barbara Stanwyck -- star of the 1941 Preston Sturges classic, The Lady Eve.

In that gem, written and directed by Sturges, and in 1940's Remember the Night, written by Sturges, she's the ambitious gal who can outwit the guys but ultimately gets tripped up in her own schemes.  If not Stanwyck, another good choice would've been to give us some Jean Arthur.  She starred in the 1937 screwball comedy, Easy Living.  Like Stanwyck's Remember the Night, it was directed by Mitchell Leisen and written by Preston Sturges.  Both Stanwyck and Arthur played smart reporters in the Big Apple.  Stanwyck played one for Frank Capra in 1941's Meet John Doe with Gary Cooper.

Jean Arthur is out to take down a rich dope and get herself a raise in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.  In both Capra films, the ace reporter dames fall for the good-hearted dopes.

I feel that Leigh's choice to sound like Kate Hepburn throws off the Preston Sturges-influenced rhythm of the picture.  It's fabulous work unto itself but not right for this film.

It's like when Stanley Kubrick got enamored with Peter Sellers and let him ad lib in Lolita.  He was funny but it threw the film off-balance.  It was the wrong tone.  Check out The Hudsucker Proxy for yourself and leave me some comments.  This gorgeously produced 1994 screwball comedy from the Coen Bros. is now on Warner Bros. Blu-Ray.

The Pope Is Leaving

"Then close your eyes and tap your heels together three times...and think to yourself There's no place like Rome, There's no place like Rome."

He gave two weeks' notice.  And he gave it verbally in Latin.  So some of the folks listening didn't even know he'd just quit because Latin is a dead language.  Except in Vatican City.

Two weeks' notice.  Like he's a manager at Kinko's.  Wow.  I'm Catholic.  When I awoke early yesterday morning and turned on the news, I couldn't believe I'd heard that the Pope quit.  He leaves at the end of this month.  Does he get to keep the wardrobe?

I still find it hard to believe that any grown man who had items like these in his closet was against equal rights for gay people and for women of either sexual orientation.

That is Papal Wear.  I saw it and thought, "Where have I seen matching gloves and shoes like that before?"  And then it occurred to me.  Before she was replaced by Betty Hutton in the movie, Judy Garland was slated to wear this outfit in the MGM musical, Annie Get Your Gun.  Here's a wardrobe test photo.  Notice the festive gloves and shoes.

Of course, when we saw the Holy Father steppin' out in his Prada shoes, we always thought about Judy's most famous footwear fashion statement.

If only Pope Benedict could have been as kind and as embracing of diversity as Judy Garland was.

Come March, for the first time in centuries, there will be two living popes -- the recently-elected one and the one who quit.  The College of Cardinals is now seeking a new Pontiff.

If that's yet another gig that goes to Ryan Seacrest....