This Day in Film History (‘Murder on the Orient Express’ Serves Up Prime Agatha Christie)

Nov. 24, 1974— Dame Agatha Christie couldn’t have been more pleased at the all-star screen adaptation of one of the most beloved of her 66 detective novels, Murder on the Orient Express, released in the United States on this date.

It’s remarkable how much the judgements of youth can stand the test of time. That, at least, was the case for me with how I felt about the production that director Sidney Lumet molded.

I should tell you that, though I’m a fan of Margaret Rutherford’s four Sixties films as Miss Jane Marple, Dame Christie didn’t appreciate how far these movies departed from her original plots. 

She had no such complaint with this latest adaptation, though: the screenplay by Paul Dehn (with an uncredited contribution by Sleuth playwright Anthony Shaffer) stuck closely to what she wrote, while adding touches of light humor that never descended into campiness.

Other Christie adaptations have come and gone, with some even being remade. But when I saw Murder on the Orient Express (hereinafter abbreviated as MOTOE) early in high school, I put it in the upper tier of Christie films with And Then There Were None (1945), another all-star vehicle.

Starting with the sumptuous soundtrack by Richard Rodney Bennett and the production and costume design by Tony Walton, this was a sumptuous, old-fashioned production—and that was before any of the actors said a word!

When I viewed MOTOE again several weeks ago on Turner Classic Movies a half century later, I was taken once again with the incredible gallery of actors assembled for Dame Christie’s “Grand Hotel” on the rails, including Martin Balsam, Richard Widmark, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Michael York, Lauren Bacall, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, and Rachel Roberts.

It was a conscious strategy on Lumet’s part, as he figured that the audience would find it easier to keep the multiple characters straight by casting well-known actors in the roles—and it worked.

Three actors stand out, for me, in this galaxy of stars:

* Sean Connery, as the first major one cast—whose luster, after a decade as James Bond, made him the most bankable;

* Albert Finney (pictured, with that amazing mustache); many in the cast, Bacall remembered, came to the project at least in part for the chance to work with this superb actor chosen to play Belgian detective Hercule Poirot;

* Ingrid Bergman, who rejected Lumet’s initial suggestion that she play the role of Princess Dragomiroff  for that of the Swedish maid because the Scandinavian actress felt a greater affinity for the character—an instinct that was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Flashback, November 1942: ‘Casablanca’ Becomes Improbable Hit

One of the most beloved movies of all time, Casablanca—released 75 years ago this month in New York—was also one of the most unlikely films ever to become a classic.

It was not the kind of biopic, costume drama or adaptation of a major novel or play that is traditional Best Picture Oscar bait, but instead a picked-up property, an unproduced drama called Everybody Comes to Rick’s.

Once Warner Brothers and producer Hal Wallis passed on the two actors originally considered for the leads (George Raft and Ann Sheridan), they still faced the difficulty of making the assembled cast and crew cohere. 

With no settled ending during much of production, Ingrid Bergman was uncertain how to play her love scenes as Ilsa (although she was certain that the actor who portrayed her husband, Paul Henreid, was self-important). The actress was also taller than Humphrey Bogart, so their size difference had to be eliminated by having him stand on boxes and being photographed from favorable angles. Even that didn’t completely mollify Bogie, who—in the death throes of his first marriage—was drinking heavily and bickering constantly with one of the studio’s favorite directors, Michael Curtiz.

Somehow, in the end, despite its numerous problems throughout shooting, the world did come to think that “the problems of three little people” “amount[ed] to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Casablanca turned Bogart not just into a lead who could carry a film (as he had been since High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon the year before), but also as a romantic—if unconventional and complicated—leading man, even as an international prototype of an existentialist hero who, despite a cynical surface, is forced to act for good amid an evil world.

While his innate acting skill and his offscreen anguish combined to produce the requisite misery of Bogart’s Rick Blaine, we can’t bypass the script. The credited screenwriters, Koch and the Epstein brothers, contributed unique points of view to the final product, including many of the most quoted lines in film history (Claude Rains’ “Round up the usual suspects”). 

But it was the uncredited Casey Robinson who may have made the most significant contribution, according to Frank Miller, author of a book on the making of the film. It was Robinson who thought that Rick should tell Ilsa to get on the plane for the good of the cause.

For a fine brief retrospective of this improbable cinema triumph, what many think of as the “Great American Movie,” I urge you to read Robert Garnett’s excellent article in this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

Quote of the Day (Isabella Rossellini, on Her ‘Adventurous’ Mom, Ingrid Bergman)

"Everyone was a symbol: the gangster, the femme fatale. Cary Grant always played Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart played Jimmy Stewart. Mother was typecast as the ingenue, but she was very adventurous and wanted to find more ways of making art."— Isabella Rossellini on her mother, Ingrid Bergman, quoted in Julia Llewellyn Smith, “Isabella Rossellini on Ingrid Bergman's Painful Final Days,” The Telegraph (UK), Aug. 25, 2015

Today marks the centennial of the birth of Ingrid Bergman (in the image accompanying this post, with perhaps her most famous movie, Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart). She was, as her daughter matter-of-factly notes above, “very adventurous”—and, to the enduring delight of cinephiles such as myself, she founded every possible way of “making art."

In her very first Hollywood picture, Intermezzo, the Swedish actress refused the urging of producer David O. Selznick that she change her German-sounding last name and fix her teeth. 

(Eventually, as I recounted in a prior post, Selznick realized that he could capture on film her luminous beauty by laying off the heavy makeup—and found himself credited with pioneering a trend toward “natural beauty” onscreen.) 

Her resistance to typecasting was braver than we can imagine now, in an era when actresses such as Luise Rainer, Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland had to endure suspensions, litigation and even exile to break out of the creative straitjackets imposed by the studios.

That adventurousness also threatened to end her career at its height, when an extramarital affair with director Robert Rossellini led to a hysterical outcry that might have reached the ultimate in ludicrousness when she was even denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as an “instrument of evil”!

It took six years for the hubbub to die down and Bergman to return to Hollywood in the role that won her a second Oscar, for Anastasia.

Her work, particularly in the 1940s, can hold up with the best of any actress of her time. But Bergman ended up sacrificing much for her art and her desires, including, because of appearances on film and stage sets, time with her children. 

I urge you to read a fine dissection of her last film, Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, by the exceptional blogger Farran Smith Nehme (or, as she’s known in the blogosphere, “Self-Styled Siren”), which examines how her role as a career-first concert pianist inevitably reflected aspects of her own life.

Bergman was ready to try a role in any medium--for instance, taking on the role of Joan of Arc on film, on stage, and even in an opera. As part of a collection of interviews with actors, The Player: A Profile of an Art, Bergman communicated to sister co-authors Lillian and Helen Ross that she even found television “very stimulating”: 

“Television acting combines the best of the theatre and the best of movies. It is another new thing to do and to try. In making a movie, you say a line over and over, and by the time you've said it for the take, you don't remember what it is you're saying. Acting in the theatre, you have to shout, so that people up in the balcony can hear you. But when you do a television play, there are four cameras working at once, and you have both the wonderful intimacy of the screen and the live acting of the stage. In television, I know I have to be calm while everybody else is rushing around, and I love it.”

You can see what Bergman is talking about in her performance in a 1963 TV adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. I was lucky enough to view it several years ago at the Paley Center for Media in New York, but you can see it here now, on this YouTube clip. 

It might not be as widely circulated as Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gaslight, The Bells of St. Mary's, or Murder on the Orient Express (which won her a third Oscar). But, in taking on the female role that, in fearsome complexity, most rivals Hamlet, Bergman demonstrated again her infinite artistry as well as fearlessness. Her sense of the dramatic moment persisted to the end, as she died of breast cancer on her 67th birthday.

Quote of the Day (Ingrid Bergman, on a Kiss as ‘A Lovely Trick’)

“A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop speech when words become superfluous.”– Attributed to actress Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982)

This Day in Film History (Yule Classic “Bells of St. Mary’s” Opens)

December 6, 1945--The Bells of St. Mary’s, with Bing Crosby reprising his Oscar-winning Going My Way role as Fr. Chuck O’Malley, opened in New York City, not only nearly doubling its predecessor's box-office take but going on to become the biggest hit in the history of RKO Studios.

At the Oscars earlier that year, when Going My Way beat out Double Indemnity, writer-director Billy Wilder was so incensed that his pessimistic film noir lost to a work so cheerful that he tripped his rival in the Best Director category, Leo McCarey, as he went up to collect his award.

White Wilder's stature has risen steadily since the 1970s (notwithstanding his awards churlishness), McCarey--with far more successful pictures early in their careers--has gone into comparative eclipse. It’s not surprising, considering how cynical the times have become since then. I recall Mad Magazine's parody of Going My Way, taking the unconventional Fr. O’Malley to his logical conclusion in re-imagining him, for early-Seventies readers, as a radical priest. The title of the satire: “Going All the Way.”

If possible, The Bells of St. Mary’s has divided viewers even more than Going My Way. While critic Joseph McBride has written that he doesn’t want to meet anyone not moved by the finale of Bells, fellow scribe Richard Corliss has reacted in much the same manner that Oscar Wilde did to Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (i.e., “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”) In fact, Corliss has placed Bells on his list of the “Top 10 Worst Christmas Movies.”

Corliss’ choices in the latter can--and should--be strenuously argued (the original, glorious Miracle on 34th Street joins Bells on the list, but not Bill Murray’s unbelievably lame Yuletide satire, Scrooged).

In my childhood, my family watched Bells religiously every year during the holidays on New York area station WPIX. But I hadn’t seen it in years when I caught up with it a year or so ago on cable.

In that vast interval of time, my cynicism--and my impatience with lame films--had grown. But so had my appreciation for McCarey’s artistry, and for his deeply realistic view of tensions between priests and nuns that he hid beneath a cunningly constructed tearjerker.

A generation of film fans was turned onto McCarey’s work (though never realizing it was his) through Nora Ephron’s homage to his An Affair to Remember in Sleepless in Seattle. But there was far, far more to him than that.

Though Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra were great fans, it was a critic-turned-director, Peter Bogdanovich, who offered the most insight into McCarey in a chapter from his collection of interviews with great directors, Who The Devil Made It? Bogdanovich came away from deathbed interviews with McCarey in 1969 with appreciation for his courage and charm in the face of age, overwhelming health problems and imminent death, not unlike what many characters faced in movies made by “the handsome, reckless, crazy Irishman who understood people.” (Bogdanovich's valentine to the early days of cinema, Nickelodeon, even has as its main character an Irish-American character named Leo who breaks into films.)

McCarey, detractors say, never developed a distinctive visual style, nor take one genre to its peak, as John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock did with the western and suspense film, respectively. But his comic touch was evident throughout his career, whether he was bringing Laurel and Hardy together for the first time, guiding the Marx Brothers to one of their peak performances in Duck Soup, or helping Cary Grant develop his comic talent in The Awful Truth.

I learned from Bogdanovich’s book, as well as from a Paul Harrill essay on the “Senses of Cinema” Web site, that McCarey was the son of a boxing promoter; that he practiced law, only to give it up because he had trouble defending clients he knew were guilty; that he invested in a copper mine that promptly went belly up; and that a career path more aesthetically pleasant but equally unremunerative—songwriting—led him to the movies. He incorporated all of these life experiences, in one way or another, in his work.

One example comes in The Bells of St. Mary’s, when Sister Mary Benedict attempts, with hilarious results, to teach one of her young male charges how to defend himself. (Several years ago, I saw a variation of this in a rerun of The Donna Reed Show, in which the star tries to teach Paul Peterson the same thing. Wonder where the show’s creators got that idea?)

A couple of other aspects of McCarey’s character might account for why his films haven’t garnered him more attention.

First, his was not a cynical or ironic wit, like Billy Wilder’s or David Letterman, but a humorous style in which the teller of the joke included himself among his targets. This was warm, generous laughter, but hardly the kind of style to which people have become accustomed over the years.

Second, his attitude toward religion lacked the irreverence that has become de rigueur in Hollywood and, sad to say, most of the public these days. Not that his characters—including priests—were wise or goody-two-shoes (clearly, Barry Fitzgerald’s aging pastor in Going My Way is neither), but, all the more because of their emotional frailty, they knew how much they needed God.

It wasn’t only McCarey’s Irish-American ancestry that made him respectful toward religion; it was a personal connection. Ingrid Bergman’s character in The Bells of St. Mary’s, Sister Mary Benedict, was based on the director’s own aunt, who died of typhoid.

That intimate knowledge of priests and nuns enabled McCarey to create situations with far more conflict and edginess than one might expect at first. Consider, for instance, the central situation of Bells: a liberal priest encountering resistance in attempting to get a nun to relax her strict attitudes.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? Well, yes, albeit turbocharged with far more explosive subject matter: John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt.

Nearly six decades before the latter film, McCarey was already investigating the latent conflict between the women who ran America’s parochial schools and the male parish pastors who controlled their fates. The latter might have been more worldly, but, as we know now, they were not, in all too many cases, better. Frequently, the pastors got their way not through the triumph of their putative more liberal attitudes, but through the privilege of male authority. On the other hand, the real-life counterparts of Sister Mary, let it be remembered, might not have acted patiently all the time, but it’s hard to conceive of anyone who would when they had to battle every minute of the day to keep the schools going.

(Incidentally, Sister Mary’s school, a firetrap waiting to happen because of chronic underfunding, was recognizable to all too many mid-century Catholics, especially in the Chicago area, which was rocked in 1958 by a fire that destroyed Our Lady of Angels Elementary School, taking the lives of a number of students and nuns--and leading to sweeping school fire-protection legislation all across the country.)

Bells allows the audience to see this conflict at its most basic level, without Doubt’s contemporary, sensational subject: child molestation. Both Fr. Chuck and Sister Mary are warm-hearted, dedicated human beings, but they’re destined to butt heads about practically everything relating to operating the school.

Film fans were led into this realistic treatment of a common situation through a shrewd undercurrent throughout: the sublimated love affair between Fr. Chuck and Sister Mary. Like other screen romances, the course of love for them hardly runs smooth and, in fact, is filled with constant misunderstandings. In the end, the two antagonists finally see each other for what they are--emotionally, if not physically, united--because of tragedy.

Crosby and Bergman understood this subtext. One day, during shooting, they decided to play a practical joke on a priest acting as adviser to the film. Receiving McCarey’s permission for one more take so they could get their farewell scene right, they suddenly engaged in a passionate clinch.

Immediately, the appalled padre rushed forward, tut-tutting that this just would not do…

Chautauqua Journal (Day 4, Wednesday, August 6: “Intermezzo” at the Chautauqua Cinema)

If you want to know my favorite movie showcases, they’re the single-screen types—like the Plaza Theater of my youth in Englewood, N.J. (its marquee, seen briefly in Annie Hall, gave it a form of immortality; nowadays it’s been transformed into the Bergen Performing Arts Center); the recently deceased and lamented Rialto Theater of Ridgefield Park, N.J.; and the still-vigorous Lafayette Theater of Suffern, N.Y.—places with plenty of seating, sightlines that don’t force you to bend your neck at angles that even a chiropractor can’t fix, and a sound system that might even support a piano or organ.

Chautauqua Cinema in upstate New York is a more demure cousin to these. It’s not one of those 24-plex monstrosities that run for much fanfare until the 30-screen cineplex a few miles away opens, at which time the customers desert and the management skips on bathroom maintenance; that contain walls a millimeter thin, so the Surroundsound from an adjacent room with a loud coming attraction drowns out the quiet, character-driven feature you’re watching; or that require a shameful amount of parking that can be used for other, better purposes, such as greenery. (Once you’re on the grounds, you can walk to the show.)

In a way, it’s appropriate that Chautauqua feature films on the grounds; after all, Thomas Edison was here visiting his in-laws when the site of the current Chautauqua Cinema, formerly named Higgins Memorial Hall, opened in 1895. And that 20th-century embodiment of the pure motion that is at the essence of cinema, Theodore Roosevelt, had breakfast at the hall in 1905, just before delivering a speech at the Amphitheater. After being used for other social and educational purposes, the 350-seat building has been used for cinemas since 1916.

I’ve been passing by the Chautauqua for more than a decade, but I did not find out about its history—or the current ownership structure that keeps it going, Uniplex Cinemas--till now. The theater is part of a circuit, but that’s of uniplexes, so as far as I’m concerned it gets a pass.

To tell the truth, I’m not sure how Chautauqua Cinema makes a dime—it’s so far removed from any large population center. At the height of summer—the only season it’s open—it competes for the attention of tourists like myself who have so much to occupy us—on this particular August night, for instance, I had the choice of attending a photography exhibit, a community choir rehearsal, a concert at the Amphitheater, a voice-department opera performance—or, for people so inclined (and there are still many, many such people here who want to leave the world behind), simply sitting on the front porch of their inn, talking or reading a book. A year ago, I had passed up the chance to see Away From Her, with Julie Christie. I didn’t want to miss another fine film.

The uniplex features art-house, independent and classic cinema—fare that many visitors here might not get in their hometowns. During the week I was there, for instance, it played Before the Rains, No Country for Old Men, The Savages, The Great Debaters, and Wall-e.

But what really attracted to Chautauqua Cinemas was the Classic Film Series, hosted by film historian David Zinman. That particular midweek show featured Intermezzo, with Ingrid Bergman in her first American film, and Leslie Howard, who you might have heard of from another movie made in 1939: a little-appreciated, unsung number called Gone With the Wind.

(I was drawn to the event partly by the prospect that I might, with luck, win a free film book, 50 Classic Motion Pictures, by Zinman for my nephew Sean, the youngest film buff in the family. Someone at Carey Cottage Inn, where I was staying, said an audience member had won the prior year in what was, in effect, sheer luck of the draw. So it proved this time—Zinman asked the audience for a number, then walked a certain number of rows and picked a member of the audience who was at the spot. Oh, well—you’ll have to wait till next year on that book, Sean!)

Before I get to Intermezzo, I should discuss the 1932 Oscar-winning Laurel and Hardy comic short that preceded it: The Music Box. It’s a variation on the Myth of Sisyphus, played out, to excruciatingly hilarious effect, on a steep Southern California hillside, as the team attempted to move the piano to the top.

A brief discussion followed the film. Seldom have I seen so many divided opinions on a single feature. Many in the audience (including myself) laughed uproariously throughout, but others were unmoved, including a lady of mature years who announced to the group, in a reedy but unswerving voice: “I saw this movie when it first came out. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now!”

I had really come for Intermezzo, though. For a vintage movie in a vintage year, it doesn’t pop up on TCM or at Blockbuster as much as you might think. In any case, hearing a film historian’s take on the film might prove enlightening. So it proved.

If anything, the movie divided the Chautauqua audience even more sharply than The Music Box. Leslie Howard plays a concert violinist who becomes enraptured by the playing of his daughter’s music teacher, Anita Hoffman (Bergman). It is striking that Howard takes notice of Anita’s virtuoso piano playing before her good looks (some might also call that unrealistic, but we won’t get into that).

What struck everyone about the film was how old-fashioned it was. It took a long time for Howard and Bergman to begin their affair. Naturally, this being the 1930s, that fling was punished, and in the harshest possible way imaginable. Likewise, the self-sacrifice displayed by one of the principals, I believe, could not possibly be understood in our individualistic age.

One aspect of the film that a number of audience members identified as—and I quote—“sleezy” was the age disparity between Howard and Bergman. (At the time of her breakthrough role, Bergman was 23; Howard, 46.) I was a little taken aback by this reaction—not because I disagreed with it, but because it came from a group that, like most other Chautauquans, tend to be non-judgmental and politically progressive.

As for myself, I gave the film a B to B-minus. The direction was not particularly distinguished and the script was conventional. The chief allure of the film—and it remains considerable—lies in the leads.

If you ever see this film, put away any notion you might have had of Howard as the sensitive, world-weary type he played in Gone With the Wind, Of Human Bondage or The Petrified Forest. His violinist’s self-absorption is much closer in spirit to another role that had won him an Oscar nomination the year before—Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. With those long, delicate fingers, however, he sure looked like an aesthete.

(Zinman related a fascinating fact about Howard—he had been gassed and shell-shocked as a British soldier in World War II. Upon his release, he was advised to take up acting as therapy. The lessons took hold pretty well, wouldn’t you say?)

As for Bergman, all the promise of her later great roles is right here. Crucial to the film and her impact, I learned from Zinman’s post-show discussion, was the contribution of cinematographer Gregg Toland (who also performed wonders for directors such as Orson Welles and William Wyler).

Intermezzo was originally a Scandinavian film, released in 1936, when Bergman was only 20. Right after seeing it, producer David O. Selznick not only bought the film’s rights but secured the services of its female star so the film could be remade for an American audience—a common enough practice in those days.

At some point in the early rushes, legendary fussbudget that he was, Selznick fired the remake’s first cinematographer. (The man shouldn’t have felt so bad—as I discussed in a prior post, Selznick meted out the same punishment to poor George Cukor on the set of Gone With the Wind.)

He soon expressed his frustration to Toland: Why had Bergman appeared so luminously beautiful in the Scandinavian film and not this one?

Simple, Toland replied: In the American remake, Bergman’s face was being caked with far more makeup. Immediately sensing this was the case, Selznick asked for reshoots without all that makeup, and it turned out to be the case.

As I mentioned, the script – written, if you really must know, by Gosta Stevens and Gustaf Molander—was nothing much to speak of. But Bergman’s natural, makeup-free beauty conveys more than any script could about why Howard’s character could fall so hopelessly in love with her.