Movie Exchange of the Day (“Arthur,” on Life and Girls)

Arthur (played by Dudley Moore): [while taking a bath] “God, isn't life wonderful, Hobson?”
Hobson (played by Sir John Gielgud, pictured left): “Yes, Arthur, it is. Do your armpits.”
Arthur: “A hot bath is wonderful... Girls are WONDERFUL!”
Hobson: “Yes, imagine how wonderful a girl who bathes would be. Get dressed.”—Arthur (1981), written and directed by Steve Gordon

Yes, I know that I’ve already done one (maybe two) Movie Quote of the Day from this movie. So sue me. The original Arthur, which premiered 30 years ago today, is still worth lifting a glass to.

And while we’re at it, let’s toast three of the talents sadly no longer with us who helped transform this bubbly concoction into a hit: Gordon (dead at age 43, only a year after a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for his single film), Moore (likewise, Oscar nominated, for Best Actor), and Gielgud (who actually won, in his second nomination as Best Supporting Actor).

Movie Exchange of the Day (Midler and Slater Learn About Real “Ruthless People”)

Barbara Stone (played by Bette Midler): “So, when do I get out of here?”
Sandy Kessler (played by Helen Slater): “As soon as Mr. Stone pays the ransom.”
Barbara: “What's the problem? What is the ransom?”
Sandy: “Well, we asked for $500,000.”
Barbara: “That should be no problem.”
Sandy: “He wouldn't pay.”
Barbara: “He wouldn't pay?”
Sandy: “Then we asked him for $50,000.”
Barbara: “Yeah?”
Sandy: “He still wouldn't pay. So now we're lowering our price to $10,000.”
Barbara: “Do I understand this correctly? I'm being marked down?”
[Starts crying]
Barbara: “I've been kidnapped by K-Mart!”—Ruthless People (1986), directed by Jim Abraham, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, screenplay by Dale Launer

When Ruthless People premiered on this date 25 years ago today, Bette Midler and co-star Danny DeVito, playing her cutthroat-businessman husband (think Donald Trump, with even fewer warm and fuzzies, if you can), worried that the film would tank and with it, their careers. They needn’t have worried, as it went on to do dandy business at the box office and gave Midler, for about a half-dozen years, a career as a brassy film-comedy queen to go with her success on vinyl.

In retrospect, what seems surprising about the film’s success is that it came in the middle of the Reagan era’s celebration of unbridled capitalism. This was one full year before the Wall Street crash, remember, and just before the collective perp-walk spectacle of Boesky, Milken and their minions led many (as we now know, still nowhere near enough) to question the ethical underpinnings of The Street.

As the above exchange shows, the heart of this farce is a modern-day variation on O. Henry’s classic short story “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in which a 10-year-old brat makes his kidnappers sorry they ever thought of their scheme. (In this case, of course, the "brat" has been transformed into the adult hellion Barbara.)

But the movie doesn’t stop at this premise. The real “ruthless people” are not kidnappers Sandy Kessler and husband Ken (played by Judge Reinhold) but the man who cheated them, DeVito’s Sam Stone, and his mistress Carla (played by the late, lamented Anita Morris). (I’d also include among the "ruthless" Carla's boyfriend-on-the-sly, Earl—played by Bill Pullman, in his first film role—except that he’s too stupid.)

There’s another scene that has stuck in my mind about this film. At an electronics store, Ken is trying to persuade a guy in his late teens or early 20s to buy a piece of equipment. As their conversation continues, Ken, realizing he has an easy mark, hawks the most expensive sound system in the store. Just about to clinch the sale, he notices a pregnant woman--the customer’s girlfriend. No longer with the heart to take advantage of his easy mark, Ken instead shows him equipment that will be just as high quality, but nowhere near as expensive.

In less than two minutes, the scene speaks volumes about how unfit Ken is for the task he’s set himself in kidnapping Sam’s wife--how out of his league, in fact, he and the equally sweet Sandy will be in negotiating with the businessman dying to get his hands on his loud, nightmare-from-hell wife’s fortune.

Movie Exchange of the Day (Richard Dreyfuss, Desperate, Confronts Bill Murray)

Dr. Leo Marvin (played by Richard Dreyfuss) (waving a gun): “You understand, right? There's no other solution. You won't go away.”
Bob Willy (his obsessive-compulsive patient, played by Bill Murray) “Yes, I will.”
Leo: “No, you won't. You're just saying you will, so that when I don't kill you, you'll show up again and make everyone else in my life think you are wonderful and I'm a schmuck. But I'm not a schmuck, Bob, and I'm not going to let you breeze into town and steal my family away just because you're crazy enough to be fun.”—What About Bob? (1991), directed by Frank Oz, story by Alvin Sargent and Laura Ziskin, screenplay by Tom Schulman

Sadly, writer-producer Laura Ziskin, co-creator of this comedy with future husband Alvin Sargent, died of breast cancer just a few days from the 20th-anniversary of the release of this hilarious film. If you’re in the helping profession, you’ll find this a comic vision of a familiar problem: a patient left adrift when a psychiatrist—a lifeline—leaves the city for a much-needed summer vacation.

But if you’ve visited a psychiatrist, you might find the film positively therapeutic, as the good doctor Marvin, author of bestselling self-help books (immortal sample advice: “Baby steps!”), is revealed as far less well-adjusted than the patient he calls “human Crazy Glue.” Dr. Marvin, so pompous that he makes Frasier Crane look unpretentious, comes unglued himself, in a nice bit of role reversal.

Takeaway: If you have a choice at a family barbeque between the self-important psychiatrist and “crazy enough to be fun” Bob, it’s not even a contest.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” As Karen Allen Shows Who’s Boss)

Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford): “Hello, Marion.”
Marion Ravenwood (played by Karen Allen): “Indiana Jones. I always knew some day you'd come walking back through my door. I never doubted that. Something made it inevitable. So, what are you doing here in Nepal?”
Indiana: “I need one of the pieces your father collected.”
[Marion surprises him with a right cross to the jaw.]
Marion: “I've learned to hate you in the last ten years!”
Indiana: “I never meant to hurt you.”
Marion: “I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it!”
Indiana: “You knew what you were doing.”
Marion: “Now I do. This is my place. Get out!”—Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), directed by Steven Spielberg, story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan

Raiders of the Lost Ark, premiering on this date 30 years ago, harked back to the old serials that baby boomers Lucas and Spielberg grew up with, but at its best the franchise they established set its own standard with nonstop action and wiseguy wit. But I do have to write "at their best" because, all too frequently, the results in the later three movies in the quartet were inconsistent.

Which then brings up the question: How do I rate the four “Indiana Jones” movies? Raiders of the Lost Ark, the best; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, second; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, far, far back; and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the worst, hands down.

Take a look at the two best sometime. You don’t have to examine them that critically, by the way, to discover the secret of their success. It has nothing to do with the stories, the relevant appeal of Harrison Ford, or the quality of the special effects. It all boils down to two simple words: Karen Allen.

I was lucky enough to see the talented actress in the 2001 Roundabout Theatre Co. production of Speaking in Tongues, a show that she and equally talented co-star Margaret Colin made far more intriguing than the script deserved. Truth be told, I jumped at the chance to see Allen. By the 1990s, she had largely fallen off Hollywood’s radar screen, and I considered myself lucky even to find her in a guest appearance on Law and Order or one of its spinoffs. Then, like the strong, independent Marion, Allen carved out a distinct place for herself far away--in this case, a "fiber arts" business in Western Massachusetts.

I was delighted when Allen returned in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. From the moment she came on screen with an ear-to-ear smile, you sensed that, far more than Ford, Lucas, or Spielberg, this wasn’t for her about another lucrative payday but about having fun.

How Spielberg and Lucas thought that Indiana would last five minutes with a whining blonde (Temple of Doom’s Kate Capshaw) or a treacherous blonde (Last Crusade’s Allison Doody) surpasses reason. The exchange quoted above establishes immediately why Allen makes Marion the ideal full action and romantic partner for the fedora-wearing, bullwhipping-snapping archaeologist-adventurer. She can drink you under the table, outslug you, outsmart you, but wherever you’re going, she’ll never weigh you down.

If you’re in a tight spot, facing Nazis or Commies, hordes of human snakes-in-the-grass or the reptilian kind, Allen’s Marion is the one for you. And when it’s time for tenderness, someone who’ll understand what you mean by “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage”—well, is there anyone else seriously worth mentioning in the same sentence?

Movie Exchange of the Day (“City Slickers,” With Billy Crystal and One Tough Hombre)

Mitch Robbins (played by Billy Crystal): “Hi, Curly. Killed anyone today?”
Curly Washburn (played by Jack Palance): “The day ain't over yet...”—City Slickers (1991), written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, directed by Ron Underwood

When I started writing this post, I thought of City Slickers as perhaps the zenith of Billy Crystal’s film career--until I recalled When Harry Met Sally..., that is. Well, no matter: Slickers, released on this date in U.S. theaters 20 years ago, still has an honored place in Crystallography.

Except for voice-overs in cartoons, the comic has largely avoided roles in mainstream films over the last decade, perhaps because Hollywood can't forget the bomb that was America's Sweethearts. I can't help but hope that, before he gets too old (he's 63 now), someone will remember how good an actor Crystal can be and give him a role that will take him to the Oscars, much like George Burns in The Sunshine Boys.

If Crystal wants a lesson in the rewards of endurance, he need look no further than a key subsidiary actor in City Slickers. The role of Curly at last won for veteran actor Jack Palance a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, 39 years after his first nomination, for Sudden Fear, and 38 after his memorable, black-hatted villain Wilson in Shane.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Lord of the Rings,” on the Wound That “Will Never Fully Heal”)

Elrond (played by Hugo Weaving) (on Frodo): “His strength returns.”
Gandalf (played by Ian McKellan): “That wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life.”
Elrond: “And yet, to have come so far, still bearing the Ring, the Hobbit has shown extraordinary resilience to its evil.”
Gandalf: “It is a burden he should never have had to bear. We can ask no more of Frodo.”
Elrond: “Gandalf, the enemy is moving. Sauron's forces are massing in the East; his eye is fixed on Rivendell. And Saruman, you tell me, has betrayed us. Our list of allies grows thin.”
Gandalf: “His treachery runs deeper than you know. By foul craft, Saruman has crossed Orcs with goblin men. He's breeding an army in the caverns of Isengard. An army that can move in sunlight and cover great distance at speed. Saruman is coming for the Ring.”
Elrond: “This evil cannot be concealed by the power of the Elves. We do not have the strength to withstand both Mordor and Isengard. Gandalf, the Ring cannot stay here. This evil belongs to all of Middle-Earth. They must decide now how to end it. The time of the Elves is over, my people are leaving these shores. Who will you look to when we've gone? The Dwarves? They toil away in caverns, seeking riches. They care nothing for the troubles of others.”
Gandalf: “It is in Men that we must place our hope.”
Elrond: “Men? Men are weak. The Blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten. It is because of Men the Ring survives. I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago. I was there the day the strength of Men failed.”—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), adapted from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, directed by Peter Jackson

The Lord of the Rings trilogy may well be the film project that defines the post-9/11 era. No other spells out so vividly the monstrous terror unleashed by evil, the frailty of the human beings summoned to confront it, or the courage necessary ultimately to surmount it. The first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, opened the week before Christmas 2001. On the day I saw it, news had just broken of the shoe-bomber incident--a catastrophe that, unlike the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings three months earlier, was narrowly averted.

The adaptation of the Tolkien novels retains his tragic awareness of the persistence of evil, the way it returns because “the strength of Men failed.” Like the United States after it was plunged into the War on Terror, Frodo is left to carry his burden with an almost existential dread, as allies abandon the cause and he himself almost falls victim to the temptation of power symbolized by the ring.

I wish I could cheer louder over the death of Osama Bin Laden, but after nearly a decade, as Gandalf notes, “that wound will never fully heal.” It's personal.

I still recall the bewilderment in my office as we peered downtown after the first tower was struck, then the terror when the second plane delivered unmistakeable proof that this was no accident. I remember the chaos of trying to get back home to New Jersey for hours. I remember the flyers with pictures of the missing everywhere I turned for the next week or so; the desolate feeling in my heart hearing "Danny Boy" played in memory of the victims as I walked through the Port Authority Building on 42nd Street; and the clanging fire department bells whose sound made me pray for the next year that more lives were not about to be sacrificed.

Like many in the New York area, I knew personally (or knew of) people who were connected to Ground Zero, either working in the World Trade Center at the time or acting as first responders. One cousin escaped; a brother of a work colleague died; two other people, rushing to the scene, themselves absorbed gases let loose in the air.

It wasn’t so evident in 2001, but there was also a wound to the American body politic that gradually festered. Members of both political parties sought to diminish their respective roles in the train of events that culminated in 9/11 and, to their shame, concentrated more on pointing fingers and posturing than on uniting behind the effort to take out terror, root and branch. In the years since, we often lost our way. The damage to our psyches, our institutions and our way of life was severe, and, we can only hope, not lasting.

And yet…The United States has shown “extraordinary resilience” in the face of evil. The greatest mass murderer in American history will never mastermind another crime, nor enlist others in his twisted enterprise. (And let us hope, if there is a hell, that he was dispatched there immediately, haunted by the cries of those whose lives he was responsible for ending prematurely.)

In the end, there is a value in not giving up. To the many who wish America ill in the world, they surely now know we have more patience in pursuit of justice than they ever gave us credit for.

It is true, as I heard an eloquent priest say on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, that hate started the fires on that awful day, but love put them out.

Yet it is also true that courage--from the first responders who rushed to the scene that nightmarish Tuesday morning a decade ago, to the Navy Seals who dispatched bin Laden to his richly deserved fate this weekend--undergirds love, giving us hope that, though the wound that opened a decade ago might leave a scar, it will, at some point we can't see now, close.

Movie Exchange of the Day (Cagney and Clarke, Having It Out in “Public Enemy”)

Tom Powers (played by James Cagney): [shuffling to the breakfast table in his pajamas, hungover] “Ain't you got a drink in the house?”
Kitty (played by Mae Clarke): “Well, not before breakfast, dear.”
Tom: “I didn't ask you for any lip. I asked you if you had a drink.”
Kitty: “I know Tom, but I, I wish that... “
Tom: “...there you go with that wishin' stuff again. I wish you was a wishing well. So that I could tie a bucket to ya and sink ya.”
Kitty: “Well, maybe you've found someone you like better.”
[Enraged, Tom shoves a grapefruit in her face as he leaves the table]—The Public Enemy (1931), written by Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, adapted by Harvey Thew, directed by William W. Wellman

A complete revolution in audience attitudes has occurred in the 80 years to the day that filmgoers first witnessed this scene, but I doubt if the visceral shock has faded a bit. 

Part of this shock derived from Mae Clarke’s reaction to James Cagney’s grapefruit pushed in her face. (Later, the actress claimed that the scene was supposed to climax only with verbal abuse, while he said that the grapefruit was supposed to brush past her but look like a real attack.) 

The surprise—the disgust—registers unmistakably on her face, as you'll see in this YouTube excerpt.

This performance, his fifth for Warner Brothers, made Cagney, in the same way that Richard Widmark’s similarly villainous turn did in Kiss of Death and James Woods’ did in The Onion Field. Impressions this vivid have a way, through no fault of the actor’s, of becoming a creative straitjacket.

It could have been especially true for Cagney, a a song-and-dance man on Broadway before this role led inevitably led to one Hollywood thug role after another. The ironic thing is, he wasn't supposed to play gangster Tom Powers when shooting began. 

Then, a few days into shooting, director Wellman realized that Edward Woods, originally cast as Powers, wasn't working out, and had the brainstorm of having Woods and Cagney switch roles.

This scene was essential for Cagney in staking out the ground for Powers. It’s not enough to show that Powers is a vicious sociopath—any shot of him with his pistol out on the street would do that. No, he is truly dangerous in his volatility, a trait best shown in a seemingly ordinary setting: a breakfast table.

It’s this upsurge of savagery that isolates Powers, as a man utterly uncomfortable with the slightest bit of domesticity, even with his moll. (One suspects he would become positively bug-eyed at mafia chieftain/affectionate papa Vito Corleone in The Godfather, as well as at Tom Hanks’ mob killer by day, devoted dad at night in The Road to Perdition.) 

Though he later dumps Clarke for Jean Harlow, he’s clearly more at ease in the company of fellow male killers than with a female. Never mind a wife—he can’t even keep a mistress without rejecting her.

The Public Enemy wasn’t the prototypical gangster film—that honor belonged to Little Caesar, the Edward G. Robinson vehicle released by Warner Brothers earlier in 1931. But The Public Enemy offered quite a variation on its predecessor. 

As Roger Dooley noted in From Scarlett to Scarface: American Films in the 1930s: “Just as Robinson made Rico, written more or less sympathetically, repellent, so did Cagney make Tommy, meant to be repellent, irresistible.”

Cagney did so through an irresistible force field emitted by his small body. There’s that same sense in another performer and movie as far removed from Cagney and Public Enemy as you can get: Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

I say “unlikely,” except for a qualifier that really makes all the difference: Growing up in the Northern Ireland of the 1960s, an area with strife to match the Prohibition Era Chicago of Tom Powers, Branagh sat enthralled before his TV by the films of the Irish-Norwegian-American Cagney. 

As soon as he had the box-office credibility to do so, he staged a drama whose title directly paid tribute to his boyhood idol: Public Enemy.

Without the matinee-idol looks of fellow Shakespearean actor-hyphenate Lawrence Olivier, Branagh, a self-confessed “short-assed, fat-faced Irishman,” made use of his plebeian looks in Henry V with a restlessness and common touch that Cagney would have applauded.

The electric charge that Branagh recognized in the American was so powerful that Warner Brothers, fearing the heavy hand of censors concerned that he would glamorize evil, began to cast Cagney in films where he would be on the right side of the angels, such as G-Men.

But so outsize is the impact made by Cagney’s gangster roles—Public Enemy, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties, White Heat, even the late Love Me or Leave Me—that you wonder where it all came from. That mystery only grows when you recall the nickname bestowed by fellow Hollywood “Irish Mafia” friend Pat O’Brien: “the faraway fella.”

Cagney was far, far removed from Hollywood mainstream in both living arrangements and attitudes. Sure, he would battle the studios when he had to for better parts, but he was instinctively inclined offscreen to trade pugnacity for pensiveness.

Start with his single marriage, of more than 60 years. Only once during that time was he tempted to stray—on a train ride with Merle Oberon—and even then he stopped before anything really happened. This product of the Lower East Side, as soon as he could, bought farmland in upstate New York, where he raised horses, and became proficient at painting as well.

Maybe the eye he trained in painting enabled him to pick up visual clues that enabled him to become an emotional sponge, to embody those he saw on the mean streets of New York without falling victim to their pathologies. 

The quintessential "New York actor," he would sketch the outline of a broad character type, but fill the space between with different psychological shades and hues that made each role uniquely human, vibrant, still able to burst the bounds of screens all these years later.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Darling,” on Sex and Children)

Diana Scott (played by Julie Christie, in the accompanying image): “Imagine if...”

Miles Brand (played by Laurence Harvey): “What?”

Diana: “It took three.”

Miles: “Took three?”

Diana: “Sexes. To make a child.”

Miles: “Very entertaining.”

Diana: “Everything would be different, wouldn't it, quite different, with three sexes.”

Miles: “Haven't we got enough problems with two?”—Darling (1965), screenplay by Frederic Raphael, directed by John Schlesinger

A Hard Day’s Night, I believe, blew off, once and for all, the gloom accrued to Britain’s “angry young man” cinema of the early 1960s. But there was a hint the year before, in 1963’s Billy Liar, of similar possibilities. It was embodied in that film by the carefree walk of Julie Christie, representing all the youthful glamour of mod London.

On this day in 1965, the movie that would provide Christie with her sole Oscar to date, Darling, premiered. This cautionary tale of the rise to prominence of a model--and of the men she discarded along the way--was one of two of her films that made a huge splash that year (the other, of course, being Dr. Zhivago).

Cinema, like the memory of a long-ago friend, can freeze an image in time. For me, Christie will always retain the radiance of her twenties. I’m not sure, then, despite her extraordinary gifts, if I’d be able to accept the thought of her as an Alzheimer’s patient in Away From Her. I suspect that those closer in age to her will find this equally challenging to credit.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“The Blues Brothers,” on Lying to a Nun)

Jake (played by John Belushi), surprised as they arrive at their old orphanage: “What are we doing here?”

Elwood (played by Dan Aykroyd): “You promised you'd visit The Penguin the day you got out.”

Jake: “Yeah? So I lied to her.”

Elwood (incredulously): “You can't lie to a nun. We got to go in and visit The Penguin.”

Jake: “No... fucking... way.”—The Blues Brothers (1980), written by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis, directed by John Landis

Elwood is right: You can’t lie to a nun. But, as we find out in the following hilarious scene, Jake is right, too, to be wary of their spontaneous visit to the orphanage where they grew up: the decidedly pre-Vatican II Sister Mary Stigmata is about to leave her mark on them again.

I suspect I was far from alone in laughing like hell at Sister Mary beating the stuffing out of brothers Jack and Elwood. Yes, the rough-and-tough nun is a stereotype. But nearly every Catholic baby boomer at least knows of someone who’s experienced this particular form of discipline, and a number have known it firsthand as well.

I wish I got a kick out of the rest of the film—which premiered on this date in 1980—as much--even if the Catholic hierarchy has gotten over its uptight attitude toward the film upon its original release and now hails it as a "Catholic classic."

Like Caddyshack, another 1980 comedy that starred two leading members of Saturday Night Live’s Not Ready for Prime Time Players, The Blues Brothers has a frustratingly ramshackle structure. Yes, we know that comedy isn’t pretty, and there are some wonderful scenes here that make me wonder if my friend Jim isn’t right in regarding this as one of his favorite comedies.

But the whole thing is heavily reliant on raucous motion (the huge, squealing car chase) at the expense of wit. Moreover, funny bits just happen—they don’t build and develop. It feels exactly like what it was—a five-minute TV skit puffed up to two hours—and the strain shows.

In a way, director John Landis’ interaction with John Belushi here anticipates his later relationship with another breakout SNL star of a few years later, Eddie Murphy. The prior Landis-Belushi collaboration, Animal House, was a monster hit.

Two years later, however, momentum had swung away from the director and decidedly toward his star. The film was a hit—as of yet, nothing was going to stop Belushi.

But puffed up by ego, hopped up on drugs, the star was becoming considerably harder to work with. At one point, Landis couldn’t film a scene because Belushi was catatonic from a cocaine-and-Quaaludes combination. (In a couple of years, of course, he’d be dead all too soon.)

Similarly, in 1983, Landis helped Murphy avoid the sophomore jinx by making his second film, Trading Places, even more memorable than his debut, 48 Hours. By 1988, however, the Landis-Murphy partnership proved decidedly lame with Coming to America. The star’s gifts were still in evidence—in fact, they still are—but he was becoming less amenable to suggestions --and to the end of his remarkable ‘80s box-office run.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“North by Northwest”)

Eve Kendall (played by Eva Marie Saint): “Roger O. Thornhill. What does the O stand for?” Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant): “Nothing.”—North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by Ernest Lehman (1959)

Offhand, I can’t remember a more entertaining comic thriller than Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which premiered in New York on this date 50 years ago. Yet, as this brief exchange indicates, underneath the glittering surface are some of the director’s most profound questions about the dangerously elusive nature of identity.

Roger Thornhill works in advertising, a profession dedicated, as he wryly observed, to “elevated exaggeration,” since it acknowledges no such thing as lies. His two ex-wives have divorced him for “leading a dull life.” That makes it all too easy for him to be mistaken for “Mr. Kaplan” by suave villain James Mason.

Hitchcock had his own issues working out Thornhill’s persona. The genesis of the movie was an image of a character hanging from Mount Rushmore, giving rise to the director’s original proposed title: The Man in Lincoln’s Nose. It took lengthy sessions with screenwriter Ernest Lehman to flesh out the scenario of a man who became powerfully defined through action (including the famous crop-duster scene).

The title finally settled on for the film is far more evocative than the one originally conceived. It not only describes the geographic thrust of the plot, but subtly rephrases a line from another figure puzzling out matters of personal identity, Hamlet: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

This would be the first of two Hitchcock films in which a character’s initials signify the instability of identity. When Anthony Perkins disposes of Janet Leigh’s corpse in Psycho, he drives off in her car, which bears the license plate number NFB 418. The letters, of course, stand for Norman Francis Bates, the killer with mother issues that have finally overwhelmed his persona to murderous effect.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Only Angels Have Wings”)

Sparks, radioman (played by Victor Killian): She wants to know why you like flying.

Kid Dabb (played by Thomas Mitchell): I've been in it 22 years, Miss Lee. I couldn't give you an answer that would make any sense. What's so funny about that?

Bonnie Lee (played by Jean Arthur): That's what my dad used to say.

Kid Dabb: Flier?

Bonnie Lee: No, trapeze. High stuff. He wouldn't use a net.

Sparks: Not much future in that, either.

Bonnie Lee: Yes. We found that out.—Only Angels Have Wings (1939), story (uncredited) by Howard Hawks, screenplay by Jules Furthman, directed by Howard Hawks

Recently, while researching a post on Lou Gehrig, I concluded that Teresa Wright, talented as she was, was miscast as the Yankee slugger’s wife Eleanor in Pride of the Yankees. To evoke the real Eleanor Gehrig—someone less wholesome than all-American girl Wright, more inclined to laugh, belly up to the bar with the boys, see through life’s illusions even while contemplating impending tragedy—you really needed Jean Arthur.

Case in point: Only Angels Have Wings, a film likely to get lost in the crowd of classics released in 1939: Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gunga Din, Stagecoach, The Old Maid…and my fingers are tired from typing these already. But don’t pass up your chance to see this terrific action movie.

In the South American port of call of Barranca, in the early, heroic age of commercial aviation, Geoff Carter (played by Cary Grant, at his most virile) and his crew of daredevil pilots live on the cusp of danger, trying to negotiate tricky mountain passes perpetually shrouded in fog.

But they also live in a close communion in which wisecracks and looking out for each other make for a kind of masculine paradise. It’s the kind of Eden, with thoughts unspoken but still understood, without a woman to introduce disruptive passions, that exists for Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. (Instead of taking a crack at Papa’s melancholy take on the Lost Generation—one that, admittedly, might have posed censorship issues at the time—Howard Hawks tackled one of the novelist’s worst, To Have and Have Not.)

Change the phrase “novel-writing” to “filmmaking,” and I think Hawks would have let loose with a loud, oath-accompanied “Amen!” to this observation by novelist Willkie Collins in the 1861 edition of his Victorian thriller, The Woman in White: “It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters; their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told.”

In other words, the magic of this film doesn’t lie in special effects but in characters we come to care about, driven to their respective fates. The Sheila Variations has a great post on just one scene illustrating this.

Grant being Grant, there isn’t a woman who gets stuck in this godforsaken place who doesn’t swoon at the sight of him—or, in the case of Rita Hayworth, playing a former flame of his, hasn’t done so already. With her hard drinking, clever retorts and hard-bitten attitude toward fate, Arthur’s stranded showgirl Bonnie Lee would seem a natural for this masculine crowd.

But that catch in Arthur’s throat—one used, over the years, in vehicles as diverse as screwball comedies (Easy Living), populist Capracorn (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), and westerns (Shane)—gives the game away. She’s stuck on Grant, which complicates life for him—something he can’t abide, since he has enough problems with getting the job done and making sure his crew survives till tomorrow.

So rent this to experience the best of character-driven action, or to savor the filmography of the versatile Hawks, or, as many people prefer, to catch the incomparable Grant as, still relatively early in his career, he crafts his persona of the effortlessly attractive, endlessly wry, deeply woman-weary hero.

But watch it, too, for the other great actors—not just Arthur, but Thomas Mitchell, as the visually impaired friend that Grant watches more like a mother hen than a hard-driving, results-oriented boss.

Somebody tell me—did any other character actor besides Mitchell appear in so many all-time great films in a single year? Count them—not just this, but also Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gone With the Wind, and the film that netted him his highly deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Stagecoach.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Die Hard”)

Hans Gruber, terrorist (played by Alan Rickman): “Attention Mr. Cowboy, or should I call you... Mr. McClane? Mr. Officer John McClane of the New York Police Department?”
John McClane (played by Bruce Willis): “Sister Teresa called me Mr McClane in the Third Grade. My friends call me John... and you're neither, s--thead.”—From Die Hard (1988), screenplay by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp
(Just my kind of action hero—an Irish-American wiseguy! Die Hard opened 20 years ago today, turning Bruce Willis from a TV star with an indifferent box-office record in films into an A-list star—sort of like what happened with George Clooney a few years ago. For my money, this first of the “Die Hard” franchise is still the best of the lot, because you don’t know until the final seconds of the movie if John McClane is going to survive.

Fans of the movie might be surprised to learn that McClane is based on Joe Leland, the protagonist of Roderick Thorp’s novel The Detective (1966), which was made into a film starring Frank Sinatra. Thirteen years later, Thorp—who taught creative writing at Ramapo College in the early 1970s—reprised the character in Nothing Lasts Forever, only this time the character was an office building security consultant. Instead of an estranged wife, he has an estranged daughter and grandchild. At this point in his career, Willis is a lot closer to playing that character as originally conceived.)