SELMA

I applaud Maureen Dowd’s recent editorial in the New York Times regarding some of SELMA’S allegedly flawed historical reconstructions. Admittedly, my complaining about historical inaccuracies in a biopic seems the height of hypocrisy, considering I have devoted a fair measure of my writing life to valorizing the biopic genre. Yet, she pinpoints cogently the many complaints about the depiction of LBJ’s relationship with Dr. King. I agree with her when she says, at the outset, “I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant.” Dowd follows that with a critical commentary that I find equally compelling: “But the director’s [Ava DuVernay] talent makes her distortion of LBJ more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.” DuVernay’s response is revealing: “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie.” Thus, President Johnson comes across here as more of an obstacle than a valued complement to Dr. King’s agenda. Undeniably, there is some distortion here. In his provocative defense of the “alternate history” deployed in biopics, the eminent historian Niall Ferguson demands that a measure of “probability” be observed. Historical “alterations” must be grounded in careful historical research. According to Dowd, however, DuVernay has boasted, “I’m not a historian; I’m not a documentarian.” Dowd responds, “There was no need for Duvernay to diminish LBJ, given that the Civil Rights Movement would not have advanced without him. Vietnam is enough of a pox on his legacy.” Indeed. There are “white devils” aplenty in the film, without rearranging the historical record to provide a new one.

"THE GROUND GOT TOO HARD!"

Recently, I've had occasion in the preparation of a new book of my interviews with Hollywood filmmakers, HOLLYWOOD SPEAKS, to revisit my conversation with veteran stunt man-turned actor, Richard Farnsworth. If you've never heard of Farnsworth, check out THE GREY FOX (1983), when the 63-year old ex-stuntman appeared as the legendary train robber, Bill Miner... Now come back, and we'll talk.

“It was an occupation with few veterans,” wrote Kevin Brownlow about the Hollywood stuntman. “Whatever your qualifications—whether you were a circus acrobat, a stunt aviator, an animal trainer, or a racing driver—you faced fresh challenges and unknown hazards at every call.”

Indeed, it is a profession not known for its longevity. However, a few of the most prominent stunt persons—including Jock Mahoney, David Sharpe, and Ben Johnson—have extended their careers as actors; and few have had a more remarkable career than Richard Farnsworth ( 1920-2000).

Among this select group was Richard Farnsworth. After years as a rodeo cowboy, he turned to films in 1937 and performed hazardous stunts for Montgomery Clift in Red River, Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, Charlton Heston in The War Lord, Guy Madison in Wild Bill Hickok; and also doubled for Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, and many other screen notables. Then, in 1976, after 35 years of rough-and-tumble stunting—“the ground got too hard”—his plans for retirement were interrupted in 1978 when he was asked to take on the role of an ageing cowboy in Comes a Horseman with Jane Fonda. He was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. Four years later, In the role of legendary train robber Bill Miner in The Grey Fox, he garnered the Genie Award (Canada’s equivalent of an Oscar).

Other roles followed, as a baseball coach in The Natural (1984), a horse trainer in Sylvester, a country sheriff in Misery (1990), and, in The Straight Story (2000), for which he received a second Oscar nomination in the role of Alvin Straight, as an Iowa man who made headlines in 1994 for riding his lawn mower more than 250 miles to see his ailing, estranged brother. Farnsworth was a real cowboy, on camera and off. To the end of his days, he worked a ranch in New Mexico. His story is that of Hollywood in transition—from the glory days of the stunt/action picture in the ‘30s and ‘40s to a new sensibility and maturity in the western genre of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I met Farnsworth in Los Angeles in 1984 on the occasion of his reception of an award given by the National Film Society for his career achievement. Afterward, we enjoyed a conversation that began in a Burbank saloon and continued in his nearby home, surrounded by framed photographs, western gear, and memorabilia attesting to his long career. I can still hear his slightly rasping voice, gentle, slow-talking, and modest, as he spoke of The Grey Fox and his long career in stunting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihG8vpfz1Yc

WALT WHO???

Imagine animator Walt Disney (1901-1966) meeting composer Philip Glass! It probably never happened in real life, but it is happening these days on the opera stage. The conjunction of forces is nothing less than a collision. Glass's new opera, THE PERFECT AMERICAN, premiered last year in Madrid's Teatro Real and was co-produced by English National Opera. Walt is on stage on his death bed, visited by people and events from his past life. Among his visitors are former employees, his wife, Lillian, and pop artist Andy Warhol.

The libretto is based on a book by Peter Stephan Jungk. According to an article in OPERA NEWS, 22 January 2013, "The novel is a fierce demythologizing of Walt Disney, who is depicted in the last months of his life as a racist, far-rightist, ignorant, populist bigot. The libretto for Glass's opera, by veteran novelist, playwright and scriptwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. . . maintains the Disney character as a 'negative' force but somewhat humanizes the monster of Jungk's book."

The article acknowledges there are "racist and anti-union rants, but the piece also acknowledges the man's nostalgia for his childhood and his rare ability to touch the imaginations of children." The emotional center of the piece (and Walt's life) is his boyhood hometown of Marceline, Missouri.

I have visited Marceline, just two hours north and west of Kansas City, walked its Main Street (the model for all of the "Main Streets" of the Disney theme parks), and attended several of the annual "Toon Fests," which attract animators and scholars and fans from all over the world. No word yet about this new opera from the admirable Kaye Malins, who is Marceline's most enthusiastic and devoted protector of Walt's legacy. I hope to include her remarks in another posting in the near future.

I can only say that Glass's opera follows in the footsteps of a number of recent attempts to deconstruct and in some measure debunk Uncle Walt's life and legacy. Marc Eliot's WALT DISNEY: HOLLYWOOD'S DARK PRINCE (1993), led the way. The less said about that, the better. Rather more respectful but no less critical, is the documentary WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY (2009), a mesmerizing "behind-the-scenes" look at the post-Walt years at the studio.

I might add an affectionate counterpoint to all this is a new anthology from McFarland, WALT DISNEY, FROM READER TO STORYTELLER, edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West, which chronicles the literary precedents and backgrounds of Disney's films. (I am honored to have a essay included therein, "Summit Meetings: Mickey Mouse's Culture Wars.")

Uncle Walt survives it all of course. He needs no help from any of us. But I can't help but wonder when, if ever, THE PERFECT AMERICAN will reach an American opera house.

HANNIBAL LECTER LOVES BACH

The music of Bach’s Goldberg Variations acquires for some viewers of Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) a perhaps unwelcome significance. . . More on that in a moment.

First, there’s news of the recent release on Blu-ray of Albert Lewin’s 1945 horror classic, Picture of Dorian Gray, based on Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel. This is welcome, indeed. But the new release of this underrated MGM film is guilty of one glaring omission. Nothing is said about the music by Chopin that literally underscores the disturbed mind and divided soul of the eponymous Dorian Gray. I refer to the 24th Prelude from the Opus 28 set, which evokes the hammer blows of Jove’s thunderbolts. Heard throughout both diagetically and extra-digetically, and in a variety of instrumentations, the brief piano piece undergoes shape-shifting variants, some languid and dreamy, others brutal and sinister, like the inner confusions of Gray himself.

The use of classical music in the aural depiction of all manner of cinematic villains, rascals, and homicidal maniacs has been going on since the so-called “silent” days, when pianists dutifully quoted from their catalogues of classical pieces.

For now, however, I restrict myself to the sound cinema. When Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake theme is heard under the opening credits of Lugosi’s Dracula, the die (as it were) was cast. And just a few years later, Lugosi and film composer Heinz Roemheld worked together in another horror film, The Black Cat, which featured a non-stop compendium of classical allusions to music by Liszt, Schumann, Schubert and virtually every other composer of a romantic stamp. The Black Cat still holds the trophy for the sheer clever audacity of its exuberant catalogue of musical horrors.

I pass by the references beyond counting to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and the traditional Dies Irae. Needless to say every fiend incarnate sitting at the Wurlitzer has belted out one or the other.

Specifically, I note here a few examples of how certain classical tunes have been used as themes, or “signatures” for some of the great monsters in movie history. In Fritz Lang’s M, for example, Peter Lorre’s child molester whistles Edvard Grieg’s ”In the Hall of the Mountain King as his musical calling card. Gangster Tony Camonte is another whistler, whose rendition of the ”Sextet” from Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermore, is heard several times in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932). More recently, Julia Robert's abuse at the hands of her deranged husband in Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) is accompanied by Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Every time he puts a record on the turntable, you want to scream out warnings to his hapless bride. The same year of the film’s release turned out to be a banner year for sinister music. Joseph Ruben’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle features the aria “Poor Wand’ring One” from Gilbert and Sulllivan’s Pirates of Penzance as the musical analogue for the pathological nanny, portrayed by Rebecca DeMornay.

We observe that this last music is hardly sinister at all; rather, its sweet plaintive strains impart a disturbingly poignant quality to DeMornay’s horrific acts. Which is the point. Indeed, classical music is frequently deployed as a counterpoint to the villains depicted on screen. Take a look again at the main title sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, where the graceful measures of Mascagni’s “Intermezzo” from Cavalleria Rusticana counterpoint De Niro’s slow-motion shadow-boxing in the ring.

Which brings us back to Hannibal Lecter and the music of Bach’s The Goldberg Variations. Why did Jonathan Demme have Lecter select a recording of the opening “Aria” as he chewed the face off a prison guard? You would think a more brutal, even savage choice would have been more appropriate. In response, pianist Jeremy Denk offers this insight: “Cunning, evil directors almost always use classical music as an ironic foil, a tool for dissociation. This perpetuates a stereotype: classical music is unnatural. It is not the music for normal events.”

Such an unfortunate stereotype undoubtedly exists, and it has been proven over and over again, for better and worse, in the movies, to the er, delectation of us viewers.

Now pardon me a moment, those ambivalent opening measures of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor are going ‘round and ‘round in my head. . . waiting for some sinister image to ground it in some horrible reality. . .

ROBERT ALTMAN: BACK TO KANSAS CITY!

 

Now that the late, great filmmaker Robert Altman is in the news again with the publication of Altman, by his widow, Kathryn Altman, and the subject of a major retrospective of his films in New York, it's time to bring him home once again. Home to Kansas City. Home to where he got his start as a film and television director. And the home to which he returned periodically. I recall an interview I did with him, March 5, 1991, during one of his return trips, when he attended a festival of his films. "I'm here in Kansas City," he told me at the time, "because I was invited to be honored at this Film Festival. I got a letter from the Mayor and he said he was going to give me a key to the city. They used to lock me up for getting into trouble in this town. At that time, they threw away the key. Now, they're giving me one!”

Robert Altman was born in l925 into an upper middle-class family on West 68th Street in the tree-lined suburb of Prairie Village. The Altman name was honored in Kansas City. His grandfather, Frank Sr., was an entrepreneur who erected several important downtown buildings, including the Altman Building at llth and Walnut in l895 (destroyed in l976) and the New Center Building at l5th and Troost (later the site of the Calvin Company); and his father, B.C., was a prominent life insurance executive. During young Robert's school years at Rockhurst High School and Southwest High School, he divided his spare time between the fabled jazz clubs of the l8th and Vine area and moviegoing at the old Brookside Theater.

"I was l4 or l5 years old in the late 1930s, when Kansas City was a wide open town,” Altman recalls. “There must have been at least 50 jazz clubs, all strung out along these streets around 18th and Vine. They all played here, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins. All the bands, all the players would wind up here, play a night here. It was a wild mix and a new style of blues and jazz came out of it. At the time you didn't think about all the vice that ran rampant everywhere, with the gambling, drugs, the crime. And the gangsters--like the Italian mobster Johnny Lazia--my dad told me you paid them protection money if you didn't want your business wrecked. The one place you didn't go for protection was the police force! All I knew was that the jazz and the songs I heard were really hot stuff. Now, these days, I come back and don't see the same city, but I smell it and I feel it.

"I spent my first 19 years here. It's where I got all my chips. I was just a kid when I was seeing my first movies at the Brookside Theater. I was fascinated with them. The movies I saw there just seemed to happen--nobody made them. I guess that's the way I still see movies--I want them to be occurrences, to just seem to be happening. I wasn't aware that all the time I was being taught and that I was learning. I was just observing and catching things by osmosis. Growing up, I lived on West 68th Street and went to Rockhurst for a year, Southwest High School, Wentworth Military Academy, and then the Air Force (where I co-piloted B-24s).

"I was just a kid when I went to work for Calvin Films. It was a Kansas City company that made industrial films. It was at l5th and Troost, a 7-story building. My grandfather built that building. It had its own l6mm lab. I learned all the tools of the trade there. I earned $250 a month, and it was mostly OJT. You can learn anything by just getting your hands dirty. At Calvin I did a lot of films for Gulf Oil and some safety films for Caterpillar Tractor and International Harvester--stuff like "How to Run a Filling Station." They were training films. They weren't a goal for me, just a process to learn how to do entertainment and dramatic films. It was a school, that's what it was. I worked there for six years, on and off. Then I went to Los Angeles and wrote some film treatments. I left Calvin three times, but couldn't get anything happening out there. So I'd come back and they'd drop me in salary a little bit each time I came back! A little punishment. The third time they said it was like the Davis Cup: They were going to keep me!”

Another, tender memory comes to light. "I remember when I was about four years old, I went to Union Station with my mother to meet my uncle. She bought me a red balloon, full of helium. But it slipped out of my fingers and flew up to the ceiling. I remember I cried and cried. I can still show you the exact spot on the ceiling where it rested, out of reach."

The 70-year filmmaker tracks with his mind's eye the flight of an errant balloon. Whether it represents his lost youth or the elusive artist's dream, it seems entirely likely that it's still there, waiting for him--but just out of reach.

DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS

Every Christmas I turn to the ”Dingley Dell” chapter in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, as if I needed any other reason to revisit that glorious novel. Although we sometimes forget that those particular pages do not directly concern a Christmas party but a wedding celebration, the spirit of the holiday prevails nonetheless. The Christmas spirit of charity and compassion and familial bonds is everywhere in his stories, no matter what the subject. The details of the Christmas story itself, as revealed in Luke, on the other hand, are noticeably absent, even in the ever-popular A Christmas Carol.

"It should not be imagined," wrote biographer Edgar Johnson, "that Christmas has for Dickens more than the very smallest connection with Christian dogma or theology." Dickens had been brought up in the Church of England (although his parents were not strict adherents). He claimed he learned at an early age to detest church ceremonies with their long-winded sermons and Sunday evening services. Being washed and scrubbed for these occasions was like being "steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath" of his hated minister and congregation, as he recalled, and he usually fell asleep during services. As his most recent biographer, Fred Kaplan has noted, "he associated organized religion with stale custom at best, with repressive fanaticism at worst. He aspired to a religion of the heart that transcended sectarian dogma."

He found it in the celebration of Christmas. Its tradition of festive family celebrations and its spirit of mystery, mirth and charity supplied a fantasy refuge for the man whose own childhood and family had been so troubled and disrupted. "Indeed, throughout his adult life," writes John Mortimer, "[Dickens] thought of himself as a boy, as the child who had been wide-eyed in the theater and been maltreated in the blacking factory. The trouble with Ebenezer Scrooge, the Christmas-hating miser, is that he has completely lost touch with the child within him." In a more general sense, insisted G. K. Chesterton, that most genial and insightful of Dickens commentators, Dickens felt that Christmas was a tool in the battle against the stifling drabness of English industrialism: "In fighting for Christmas he was fighting for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian, for that trinity of eating, drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent."

Thus, Dickens poured all of his formidable energies into his Christmas stories. They readily reveal the contradictions in his mercurial and restless temperament. The deft and fragile touch in the tender whimsies of an early story, "The Christmas Tree," the toymaker's fantasies in The Cricket on the Hearth, and the cozy and warm tone of the Dingley Dell festivities in The Pickwick Papers contrasts sharply with the heavy-handed and forced heartiness of many of the seemingly endless eating and drinking scenes--such as the Cratchit family celebration in A Christmas Carol ("Never was there such a goose!"). Such excess prompted G. B. Shaw to sneer that Dickens sometimes leaves the reader with a kind of literary indigestion, as if stuffed with "the gorgings and guzzlings which make Christmas our annual national disgrace."

I close with a gentle reminder that the holiday season calls for renewed attention not to the endless array of adaptations of Dickens on film but to the prose itself. Then and now (and probably in times to come) those singing and metaphor-laden pages elude the clumsy craft of image-making on the screen.. . and provoke the singular pictures and feelings in our imaginations.

SCHUMANN AND HOLLYWOOD

My friends and associates are already too well aware of my lifelong enthusiasm for and study of the life and works of the great German Romantic composer, Robert Schumann (1810-1856). This abiding passion has already resulted in a book-length biographical study, SCHUMANN: A CHORUS OF VOICES (2010) and a 17-part radio series for Public Radio, THE WORLD OF ROBERT SCHUMANN that spans more than thirty years of research and production.

Now it is time to bring Mr. Schumann to Hollywood.

I have just completed what might well be the last in my ongoing radio series, a program called "Schumann and the New World." Not only does it involve the fascination European artists had for performing opportunities in America at mid-19th century, the new eclecticism in American music that greeted these incursions, but Schumann's own involvement in the New World experience. Which is to say, many of his works reached American shores during his lifetime; and subsequently several biographical studies have likewise emanated from Hollywood and independent cinema sources. Chief among them is MGM's SONG OF LOVE (1947), directed by the inimitable Clarence Brown and starring Katharine Hepburn and Paul Henreid as Clara and Robert Schumann. Not to be forgotten is a marvelous performance here by the wonderfully wry Henry Daniell as Franz Liszt.

My new radio show pays ample tribute to this film and the undeservedly neglected genre of composer biopics. Chief among the guest commentators are cultural historian Albert Boime of UCLA; music historians Ted Albrecht, Bunker Clark and Robert Winter, of, respectively, Kent State, University of Kansas, and UCLA; and pianist Claude Frank. Maestro Frank provides his own "one-man show" at the keyboard in which he interprets the film's key scenes and music excerpts.

I write this in hopes that the much-maligned composer biopic--indeed, biopics in general--be given a closer look by many who seem disposed to dismiss them out of hand. I know there have been some Schumann entries since SONG OF LOVE, including, most notably a 1983 film from Germany, SPRING SYMPHONY, with Nastassia Kinski as Clara Wieck, and a bizarre piece of psycho-drama from actor Simon Callow and conductor Roger Norrington called THE SCHUMANN ENCOUNTER. The subject is hardly exhausted, and I anxiously await more entries.

As for my radio show, I will take it and excerpts from many pertinent films to WFMT Public Radio in Chicago at the end of January to devote a whole day to the subject of the composer biopic.