Movie Quote of the Day (‘The American President,’ on an Institution No Longer Around)

[Walking with each other before delivering his State of the Union address]

Sydney Ellen Wade [played by Annette Bening]: “How'd you finally do it?”

President Andrew Shepherd [played by Michael Douglas]: “Do what?”

Sydney: “Manage to give a woman flowers and be president at the same time?”

Andrew: “Well, it turns out I've got a rose garden.”— The American President (1995), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Rob Reiner

It’s funny how seeing a movie decades apart can make you look at it in completely different ways. Case in point: The American President, which I viewed shortly after it came out in November 1995 and again yesterday afternoon, at a special Presidents’ Day presentation at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ. (It featured an excellent introduction by Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Pat Schuber on the evolving nature of the Presidency.)

When I heard the above exchange three decades ago, for instance, I groaned at lines so corny that even Frank Capra (such an obvious inspiration for the movie’s creators that he’s even referenced at one point) wouldn’t have served them up.

Yesterday, I groaned for a different reason: the Rose Garden that President Shepherd makes use of no longer exists, in the beloved form that Americans of both major political parties cherished. And all because of one man.

Years ago, I had decidedly mixed feelings about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, as I did in my few attempts to watch the TV show for which this film was, in effect, a dry run: The West Wing. It raised valid concerns about America’s polarized environment, the microscope under which modern Presidents exist, and the precious lack of personal privacy they enjoy.

But with its bad guys—all Republicans without a single redeeming ideological or social value—it created straw men that his heroes (liberal Democrats) could easily swat away. At least George Bernard Shaw, also given to long speeches in his plays, gave his devils their due, which made rebutting them all the more convincing.

Moreover, Sorkin's heroes possessed few complications, with their real-life inspirations bleached of their flaws when depicted in fictional form. In this film, as a centrist liberal facing a sex scandal promoted by the opposition, Shepherd had clear affinities with the President at the time, Bill Clinton.

Except for this fact: Clinton not only had to issue a false denial that only the most gullible believed about a past affair (with trashy entertainer Gennifer Flowers), but his campaign labored mightily to stamp out entire “bimbo eruptions,” while Shepherd was a lonely widower enchanted by a single intelligent, lovely environmental lobbyist.

Despite these shortcomings, time had raised my opinion of The American President from decidedly mixed to good, if not great. It was even better cast than I had recalled, with Samantha Mathis, John Mahoney and Wendie Malick in interesting supporting roles, and several lines and situations rang with unexpected prescience.

In his climactic speech, for example, Shepherd not only identified the divisive electoral strategy of his rival (an obvious Newt Gingrich stand-in), but the same one employed by the current Oval Office occupant for the last decade: “Whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.”

And, when Martin Sheen’s chief of staff A. J. MacInerney tells Michael J. Fox’s idealistic aide, “The President doesn't answer to you,” Fox could answer for today’s citizenry outraged by daily lies and civil liberty violations: “Oh, yes he does.…I'm a citizen, this is my President. And in this country it is not only permissible to question our leaders, it's our responsibility!”

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Lady Eve,’ As a Conversation Takes an Unusual Turn)

Charles [played by Henry Fonda] [speaking of card playing]: “Now you, on the other hand, with a little coaching you could be terrific."

Jean [played by Barbara Stanwyck]: “Do you really think so?”

Charles: “Yes, you have a definite nose.”

Jean: “Well, I'm glad you like it. Do you like any of the rest of me?”— The Lady Eve (1941), screenplay by Monckton Hoffe and Preston Sturges, directed by Preston Sturges

Quote of the Day (Orson Welles, on Happy Endings)

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”—American actor, director, and screenwriter Orson Welles (1915-1985), quoted in Orson Welles: Interviews, edited by Mark W. Estrin (2002)

Quote of the Day (David Lynch, on How ‘People Are Like Detectives’)

“People are like detectives and our lives are filled with clues. Some people wonder and look around and they take what they see and try to figure out what it all means. And they reach different conclusions. We are all like detectives, trying to figure out the meaning of life. And the same thing goes for film. You want to find a meaning – at least some people do. But now the world goes so fast. It’s just screaming on the surface loudly. And there’s not that much time for people to contemplate things and daydream and ponder.”—American film director David Lynch (1946-2025), quoted by Ross Simonini, “ ‘Daydreaming Is So Important To Me’: How David Lynch Fishes for Ideas,” Art Review, Jan. 5, 2021

The image accompanying this post, of David Lynch at a ceremony for Sissy Spacek to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was taken on Aug. 1, 2011, by Angela George. 

Quote of the Day (Rob Reiner, on How He’d Like To Be Remembered)

“Complete this sentence (fact or fiction are both acceptable): ‘I was born in THE BRONX, N.Y. and I studied MY FATHER AND MOTHER at HOME. I became world famous in SHOW BUSINESS and I hope I'll be remembered as MORE THAN JUST A MEATHEAD.”—American film director (and actor on TV’s All in the Family) Rob Reiner (1947-2025), completing “The Mel Brooks Questionnaire,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Sept. 28, 2025

I never thought, when I first spotted this quote, that I would be using it so soon on this blog. It’s a tribute to Rob Reiner that he had such an ability to laugh at himself—and to help others do the same in the often insane world in which we live.

I’m not going to talk—at least not right now—about the President’s graceless social media post about the tragic murder of Reiner and his wife Michele at the hands of their son Nick, following their unrelenting but unsuccessful efforts to save him from drug addiction and depression. I’d rather discuss what Reiner’s TV and film work meant to me.

As a tween, I came to know Reiner through his role as Mike Stivic, the liberal "Meathead" foil to bigoted father-in-law Archie Bunker on Norman Lear’s taboo-breaking Seventies TV satire All in the Family. 

Nowadays, some on the right might tag him as a “nepo baby” as the son of The Dick Van Dyke creator Carl Reiner. What I did know was that he was brilliant, richly deserving of the Best Supporting Actor Emmy he won before departing the show.

I have so many favorite episodes involving him (and, indeed, as far as I’m concerned, it never recovered after he and Sally Struthers left), but I urge you to view two in particular: “Gloria Poses in the Nude” (Season 4), when Reiner uses a twitch in the eye to signal his jealousy of his being painted by a friend of his, and “Gloria Suspects Mike” (Season 6), in which Mike nervously tries to fend off an attractive economics student (played by Bernadette Peters) who is coming on to him.

Even while appearing in All in the Family, Reiner was looking to write and direct. He did so on several episodes in the show’s first few seasons, and helped conceive the short-lived summer replacement comedy The Super, starring Richard Castellano.

A decade later, he had become a force in film, pushing from strength to strength with The Sure Thing, This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, Misery, and A Few Good Men.

Dustin Hoffman joked that every actor has at least one Ishtar on his resume. The same applies to directors. I’m afraid that I was peripherally involved in what may well have been Reiner’s. 

In the early 1990s, while working in research at a nonprofit trade association, I was contacted by a staffer at Rob Reiner’s production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, for the names of some area enclosed malls that could be used for a scene in his next film, North. I provided a few names, and couldn’t wait to see the results.

In 1994, North finally appeared. It not only underperformed at the box office, but in the years since, it’s been listed among the worst movies ever made. Well, every decent film director is entitled to at least one misfire, I guess.

From what I can tell, however, no movie in Reiner’s considerable filmography as a director, producer, and writer was in bad taste. Quite simply, he respected the intelligence of audiences, like his father and Lear.

Rob Reiner grew up and flourished in a better time than the current moment. His life and work deserve celebration, not trolling by a barbarian and his all-too-easily-influenced horde.

Nearly 40 years after working with Reiner on Stand by Me, one of its child actors, Will Wheaton, now established in the industry, told CNN, upon hearing the news of the director’s death:

“The world knows Rob as a generational talent, a storyteller and humanitarian activist who made a difference with his art, his voice, and his influence. I knew that man, but I also knew a man who treated me with more kindness, care, and love than my own father ever did. And it is the loss of that man that is piercing my heart right now.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Rob Reiner at the German premiere of The Bucket List, was taken in Berlin on Jan. 21, 2008, by Franz Richter)

Quote of the Day (Nick Pinkerton, on ‘Dodgy’ Investing in Films)

“The [movie] business is, and has always been, a dodgy boondoggle; not for nothing were the old-money WASPs at the East Coast banks reticent to put capital behind fledgling Hollywood. When [American film director Abel] Ferrara was starting out, private investment in low-budget films was spurred by tax loopholes, a way for doctors, dentists, and racketeers to get rid of extra cash that would otherwise wind up in Uncle Sam’s grubby mitts. Fortunes could be made, even if they rarely wound up in the hands of the ‘talent,’ and were made just often enough to keep alive financiers’ delusions of having money down on what could be the next sleeper hit…a situation that can’t be said to persist today, when persuading someone to back an independent film is essentially a matter of finding a credulous dupe to give you a pile of cash to set fire to. In terms of its risk-to-reward ratio, investing in an independent film ranks somewhere in the neighborhood of accepting the hand of a Nigerian prince who has introduced himself to you via cold email. To be a successful independent filmmaker—that is, one who is even sporadically employed—is, in essence, to be a bit of a con man.”— American film critics, screenwriter, and editor Nick Pinkerton, “A Rake’s Progress” (review of Abel Ferrara’s memoir Scene), Harper’s Magazine, November 2025

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Bridges at Toko-Ri,’ on ‘The Sacrifices of a Few’ in War)

[A WWII veteran, Lt. Harry Brubaker, has been drafted back into service in the Korean War as a Naval Reserve pilot, and asked to undertake a dangerous new mission.]

Rear Adm. George Tarrant [played by Fredric March]: “Son, whatever progress this world has made, it's always been because of the efforts and the sacrifices of a few.”

Lt. Harry Brubaker [played by William Holden, pictured]: “I was one of the few, Admiral, at New Guinea, Leyte, Okinawa. Why does it have to be me again?”

Tarrant: “Nobody ever knows why he gets the dirty job. And this is a dirty job.”— The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), screenplay by Valentine Davies, adapted from the novel by James Michener, directed by Mark Robson

I have known about this movie for quite a while, but had never seen it till this weekend, when I watched it in preparation for a talk next month on one of its stars, Grace Kelly (who plays Holden's loyal but worried wife). This quote seems especially appropriate on Veterans Day.

The screenplay is not everything it could have been, but it captures quite well the ambivalence that even the best service personnel, like Tarrant and Brubaker, feel about such conflicts. 

And the Oscar-winning special effects powerful approximate the visceral sensations involved with flying into the form of hell known as the combat zone—something that most of us will, fortunately, never experience firsthand.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Prizzi’s Honor,’ on a Hit Man’s Head-Scratcher)

[Charley is telling former girlfriend Maerose about new love Irene Walker.]

Charley Partanna [played by Jack Nicholson]: “I met her in a church. It just happened. I knew she was the woman for me. She'd organized the scam in Vegas. I go looking for the bad guy and it turns out to be my woman, can you imagine this? Not only that—Pop tells me she's the piece man for the Nettabino contract. Just the same, I love her, Mae... I love her.”

Maerose Prizzi [played by Anjelica Huston]: “Well...”

Charley: “How can I live with this? I gotta do something about it. I gotta straighten it out.”

Maerose: “Then do.”

Charley: “Do what? Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which one of these?”— Prizzi’s Honor (1985), screenplay by Richard Condon and Janet Roach, adapted from the novel by Richard Condon, directed by John Huston

Flashback, September 1975: Redford Paranoid Thriller ‘Three Days of the Condor’ Opens

Three months after the Rockefeller Commission released its report documenting abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Three Days of the Condor was released 50 years ago this week, further heightening audiences’ fears about a secret government agency run amok.

The movie, which starred Robert Redford, brought in $27 million in box-office revenues on a budget of $20 million, cementing the actor’s status as the premier leading man of the mid-1970s after it had been temporarily disrupted by the underperforming The Great Gatsby.

The film was an adaptation of the James Grady novel Six Days of the Condor. Though there were numerous changes from page to screen (itemized in Allan MacInnis’s 2011 post from the “Alienated in Vancouver” blog), the most significant might have been the time compression indicated by the title.

Peter Yates, who worked with Redford three years before on The Hot Rock, was originally set to direct. But he was replaced by Sydney Pollack, who had collaborated with the star on The Way We Were and would make a total of seven films with him.

Pollack’s “great gift,” Redford said in a Time Magazine interview after his friend’s death in 2008, was “to cover what could have been just sort of crass commercial filmmaking with a whole artistic [approach] that was more abstracted and was more hip and was more offbeat.”

In Pollack’s filmography, the movie resembling this the most might be The Pelican Brief, another slick thriller featuring the biggest box-office star of the time (Tom Cruise) and the requisite love interest (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

Redford’s character, Joe Turner, goes out to pick up lunch for his colleagues at the fictitious American Literary Historical Society (a CIA cover), only to discover upon his return that all his coworkers have been slaughtered. Following a planned attempt to “come in from the cold” that nearly ends with his own assassination, he goes on the run to save his life and ferret out the truth

Reflecting in some manner the film’s plot, the atmosphere on the set was “tense,” according to this recollection by photographer Terry O’Neill, “mainly because the film was very topical, New York City was a bleak place in 1974, the President [Nixon] had just resigned, and the former head of the CIA [Richard Helms] was supposedly on set talking to Robert Redford.” 

That turned out to be the case, as the actor was, with as little fanfare as possible, eliciting from Helms inside tips about his former agency.

Redford’s Turner is supposed to be bookish and slightly naïve as he pores over books in his unsecured office.

But Redford being Redford, he doesn’t look the slightest bit nerdy, an impression enhanced by his stylishly casual apparel: flared denim, a gold and gray wool tie, and a gray tweed herringbone jacket that fostered such a fashion trend that “all menswear guys have tried to copy this jacket,” said French designer Nicolas Gabard, according to Charles Teasdale’s retrospective on the film this month in The Financial Times.

I guess the filmmakers needed something to make it plausible that Faye Dunaway’s Kathy would fall for this stranger who abducts her in his frantic attempt to stay alive—not normal behavior for most women in similar circumstances.

But for all that, the plot was taut and the conspiracy details not especially far-fetched—especially so for 1970s audiences who were learning daily, through the evening news, to distrust whatever the government was telling them. 

Though Dunaway did not experience with Redford or Pollack the animosity she had encountered with Roman Polanski on Chinatown, her role was also hardly as complex or extensive as in that classic neo-noir. Nor was she able to rehearse or emotionally bond much with Redford, who was already busy with pre-production on All the President’s Men.

That adaptation of the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein bestseller about how they broke the Watergate story was a real-life version of the “paranoid” or “conspiracy” thriller genre that became so prominent in the Seventies.

Such movies as The Parallax View, The Conversation, Klute, and Winter Kills marked a sharp turn away from nail-biters from a few decades before, when—at least on film—the U.S. government protected its citizens from foreign agents infiltrating the U.S. (Additionally, two Godfather movies and Chinatown evinced cynicism about Law and Order, American style.)

Now, with revelations of Presidential deceit about Watergate and Vietnam—not to mention the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr.—the American government and private companies with access to high-tech equipment and secrets were being depicted as nefarious.

Unlike wartime and later “conspiracy” movies, Three Days of the Condor was neither blithely optimistic nor pessimistic. Its “open” ending about Turner’s fate was, however, deeply disquieting—in effect, leaving it up to the public to defend against attacks on the liberty of institutions as much as on individuals, from whatever quarter.

Quote of the Day (Richard Russo, on Half of a Movie Buddy Team)

“[Actor William] Nolan was the reliable, competent American Everyman, the Nick Carraway who would never understand or accept or like himself half as much as Gatsby did. The Milton of my fourteen pages was a lot like me, a man cautious by nature and experience, who knew himself too well to be much of a fan and, as a result, was often too grateful for the good opinion of others.”—American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo, “Milton and Marcus,” in Trajectory: Stories (2017)

The news of Robert Redford’s passing this week prompted me to read at last the novella “Milton and Marcus,” in the story collection Trajectory by Richard Russo. Somehow I had never gotten around to perusing the book after buying it eight years ago, even though I’d heard it was a roman a clef (i.e., a story about real people or events, but overlaid by thinly fictionalized names and details) about his adventures as a screenwriter for Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Once I started reading it, it turned out to be every bit as dishy as I’d been led to expect—and every bit as funny, compassionate, and rueful as the fiction that has brought Russo critical and popular acclaim.

The novella’s narrator (only referred to by the nickname “Hotshot” by one of the two movie stars in the story) is a less successful alter ego of Russo: a novelist and screenwriter whose career is on the wane. I knew that Russo had worked several times with Newman (called here Wendell Pierce, or “Wendy”) but I’d been unsure of any Russo collaboration with Newman’s two-time co-star and longtime friend, Redford (called “William Nolan” in this story).

Then, according to this 2012 Albany Times-Union article, I discovered that Russo had been working on the screenplay for the 2015 Redford film A Walk in the Woods. Yet final writing credit for the movie went to Michael Arndt (under the pseudonym “Rick Kerb”) and Bill Holderman, rather than Russo.

Clearly, at some point, Russo’s and Redford’s views on the first draft had diverged and the novelist was no longer associated with the project.

Until the appearance of either a Russo reminiscence or a full-scale Redford biography appears, all we have about what transpired during the script’s development is conjecture.

But “Milton and Marcus” offers a clue: Redford had a fragment of a script early on, solicited Russo’s ideas for expanding it some years after Newman had died, but chose to use the contributions of other writers whose services he had engaged in the meantime.

Ultimately, “Milton and Marcus” becomes a story of charisma, loyalty, self-absorption, and desire—sometimes on the part of writers as much as actors. “Wendy” is depicted more affectionately than “Regular Bill” (the nickname for the Redford character, who was called “Ordinary Bob” by many in the film industry).

But much of the intrinsic interest in the tale also comes from inferring the parallels between its characters and their real-life counterparts:

*Wendy and “Regular Bill” score huge successes in their younger years with a few “buddy” movies, as did Newman and Redford with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting (in the image accompanying this post, of course);

*Wendy engages in a fruitless, decades-long attempt to find another script for himself and Nolan to work with, as Newman did with Redford;

*Wendy thought before his death that the script idea by “Hotshot” (his nickname for the Russo alter ego) might appeal to Nolan’s “left-wing” tendencies; Redford was similarly a longtime progressive, particularly as it related to environmentalism;

*An associate of “Regular Bill” chuckles about the star’s penchant for fast driving; and yesterday’s New York Times obit noted that Redford in one year, the star received eight tickets for speeding in a Utah canyon;

*Nolan lives in Utah, as did Redford;

*To the surprise of many, a decade after Newman’s death, Nick Nolte replaced him on A Walk in the Woods; Nolan’s eventual co-star for “Milton and Marcus,” Gene Handy, possesses a similar gravelly voice, reputation as a dedicated actor, and tendency towards hard living that landed him in rehab;

*“Regular Bill” convenes his group to talk about “Hotshot’s” script while in post production on Desperation Alley, “which was rumored to be overbudget and behind schedule”; similar speculation swirled around a 2007 film that Redford directed, Lions for Lambs, whose $15 million in US and Canadian gross revenues fell well short of its $35 million budget.

As Wendy aged, Russo implies, he took increasingly riskier roles, while for Nolan, the notion of leading a “regular” existence, or even taking roles of “regular” people, had become unattainable.

I believe that in the case of Redford, this was largely true—by the mid-Seventies, he had stopped taking the edgy parts he had often taken as a younger, hungrier actor (as in Inside Daisy Clover, where he played a bisexual character). As a director, however, the opposite was true. The Milagro Beanfield War, for instance, was the first big-budget Hollywood production with a largely Hispanic cast, while his establishment of the Sundance Institute boosted the production of independent films.

Following Redford’s death, tributes have flowed in for the star, from both film colleagues and from people whose lives were touched by his activism. Moviegoers, unlike entertainment industry professionals, are less familiar with idols’ complex personalities and working methods. “Milton and Marcus” is an insightful reminder of how those who enter their turbulent orbit experience them at close range.

Quote of the Day (Robert Downey Jr., on Genre Vs. ‘Important’ Movies)

“There is no guarantee that doing a movie you think is 'important' isn't going to be the worst piece of tripe I've ever had to sit through. Or that this kind of two-dimensional genre movie I'm doing isn't actually going to be thoroughly entertaining. Isn't that why you went to the movies to begin with?”—Oscar-winning actor Robert Downey Jr. quoted by Chris Heath, “RD3,” GQ, May 2013

This is the argument that Hollywood has been making since at least 1938, when Marie Antoinette and The Adventures of Robin Hood both premiered. Which is more fondly remembered—and, I would say, viewed—these days?

The image accompanying this post shows Robert Downey Jr. speaking at the 4 San Diego Comic Con International, for "Avengers: Age of Ultron," at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA. It was taken on July 26, 2014, by Gage Skidmore.

Quote of the Day (Martin Scorsese, on Family Moviegoing Experiences in the Early Postwar Era)

“I realize now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images on the screen gave me something very precious. We were experiencing something fundamental together. We were living through the emotional truths on the screen, often in coded form, which these films from the 1940s and 1950s sometimes expressed in small things: gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. These were things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our lives.”—American Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese, “The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 15, 2015

The image accompanying this post, of Martin Scorsese at the 2023 Montclair Film Festival, was taken Oct. 27, 2023, by Neil Grabowsky.

Appreciations: ‘Craig’s Wife,' With Rosalind Russell, at MOMA

It’s been 20 to 30 years since I saw a film at the Museum of Modern Art. But earlier this week, one caught my eye on the institution’s Website: Craig’s Wife, a 1936 movie that is part of the series The Lady at 100: Columbia Classics from the Locarno Film Festival.

I gather that TCM has shown this at some point, but the vintage-film channel must have buried it overnight, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to see it while I could. My guess is about 60 people joined me Wednesday night in the audience at MOMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2.

I became interested in this film through my exposure, via the Off-Broadway troupes the Peccadillo Theater Company and The Mint Theater, to George Kelly, a member of the famous clan of that name in Philadelphia. (Yes, he was Princess Grace’s uncle, and reportedly a major positive influence on her decision to become an actress.) 

The three Kelly plans I saw through the Mint—The Show-Off (1922), Philip Goes Goes Forth (1931), and The Fatal Weakness (1946)—convinced me that he has become an unjustly neglected playwright. If I found these plays of merit, then how could I resist the allure of Craig’s Wife, which won the Pulitzer Prize after it premiered in 1925?

One aspect of Craig’s Wife may account for why it might not be revived so much these days. A conservative Catholic, Kelly held to then-traditional ideas of a wife’s subservience to her husband, and to some extent this drama reflects these mores.

Harriet Craig, the title character, living in an age when women enjoyed little to no financial independence, would certainly win greater sympathy from modern audiences than she would before the rise of feminism in the Sixties. But Kelly’s severe indictment of her materialism and strange emotional detachment registers just as strongly as before, if not more so.

The playwright, who between Broadway stints worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter, was reportedly displeased by how his prize-winning work had been adapted by other hands for the big screen. But today’s viewers are likely to regard the movie as an improvement—one that “opens up” the action, while streamlining the dialogue so that the peculiar chilliness of Mrs. Craig becomes more manifest.

The three people most responsible for this successful stage-to-screen transfer were all women—all perhaps better attuned than Kelly to the psychological undercurrents of the main character.

Rosalind Russell was supposedly none too happy about MGM loaning her out to Columbia Pictures to play this unsympathetic role. Her fears proved groundless. She not only received top billing for the first time onscreen but widened her range by playing the kind of challenging female lead in which Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would soon specialize. (In fact, the latter played Mrs. Craig in the 1950 remake.)

The role was carefully crafted with input from director Dorothy Arzner and screenwriter Mary McCall, Jr.  The only female director who worked consistently in Hollywood’s Golden Age of the Thirties and Forties (and, I discovered from Ben Mankiewicz’s discussion of the film on TCM, the inventor of the “boom mic” that allowed actors greater freedom of movement), Arzner did something that male colleagues had done frequently before but might have given pause to someone in her exposed position: she fired the production designer.

Instead, she turned to former MGM star William Haines, who had forsaken his acting career to become an interior decorator. Using Kelly’s stage directions as inspiration, Haines transformed the upper-class Craig house into a virtual fortress in its own right—uninviting, even forbidding, reflecting Harriet's hauteur. With one additional, telling set of details: Greek motifs which subtly suggested that a tragedy of the protagonist’s own making was occurring inside.

With Arzner ensuring her presence on set, even enabling her to come up with alternative lines on the spot, screenwriter McCall reworked Harriet into a woman less status-conscious than intent on maintaining a hard-won measure of autonomy within marriage—breeding a fanaticism about her home that alienates everyone in it, even her besotted husband.

The script advances this conflict, with none of the leisurely exposition favored by Kelly. A prime example: the first line and image, with Mrs. Harold crying out in alarm to her fellow housemaid, “Mazie!”—signaling to viewers immediately that the abused household staff remains on edge even without Harriet around to supervise the maintenance of her “holy of holies,” as Mrs. Harold calls it.

Equally helpful, McCall and Arzner actually showed the characters referred to but never shown onstage: the doomed Fergus and Adelaide Passmore. That provided an early opportunity for the great character actor Thomas Mitchell (Gerald O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life) to display his skill in a short but crucial role as desperate Fergus.

Though the role of Harriet’s easily manipulated husband Walter was too one-dimensional, other characters fared better under Arzner’s guidance, notably Jane Darwell (Mrs. Harold), who a few years later would the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Grapes of Wrath; Billie Burke (next-door neighbor Mrs. Frazier), best known as the Good Witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz; and John Hamilton, who made his mark two decades later as editor Perry White in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman.

Later this year, I hope to write more about how Joan Crawford played this role, as well as the controversy over the years involving the play itself. But if you can’t watch the 1936 version on the big screen, as I was lucky enough to do, I urge you to catch it on YouTube.

Quote of the Day (Demi Moore, on Her Oscar-Nominated Role in ‘The Substance’)

“Why it was easy for me to do this is because I don’t feel I am her. This is a woman who has no family — she’s dedicated her entire life to her career, and when that’s taken, what does she have? And so, in a way, I had enough separation from her, and at the same time, a deep, internal connection to the pain that she was experiencing, the rejection that she felt. I knew it would be challenging, but potentially a really important exploration of the issue.”—American actress Demi Moore, on her role in the film The Substance, quoted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “The Interview: Demi Moore Is Done With the Male Gaze,” The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 22, 2024

With recent Critics Choice, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild awards, Demi Moore seems well-positioned to take home a Best Actress statuette at tomorrow night’s Oscar ceremony. It’s a far cry from her career from the Eighties through the early aughts, when her scant critical acclaim was signaled by the five “Razzies” “honoring” the worst in contemporary cinema in the prior year.

The Substance is by no stretch of the imagination cheerful, and, after seeing the movie a few weeks ago, I found a bit of trivia disclosed before the movie (36,000 gallons of fake blood for just one scene) a severe understatement of its grossness and goriness.

But give Moore props for taking on such a risky role—one that requires her, at age 62, not only to disrobe even more than she did, onscreen and on a Vanity Fair cover, three decades ago, but also to channel a career’s worth of frustration and rage over the male gaze.

The Substance itself has been far better received than another dystopian horror film that it resembles in several fascinating ways, Seconds. Moreover, the star of that 1966 sci-fi shocker, Rock Hudson, didn’t win anything like Ms. Moore’s plaudits. The relative reception of these two deeply downbeat dramas says much about the changing expectations of audiences and critics.

The resemblances between the two movies are multiple and, at times, uncanny, including:

*an aging middle-aged protagonist at a crossroads, profoundly dissatisfied and at a dead end in life;

*a mysterious stranger who tells the protagonist about the possibility of being a younger self;

*the stranger follows up on the stranger’s tip by going to a secretive organization that warns that, though the rewards of the new life are amazing, certain instructions must be followed—or else;

*the bodily transformation that follows is as bloody and disgusting as the big screen permits;

*despite the rewards reaped from the new life, the protagonist still feels empty inside—in fact, worse;

*the protagonist tries to end this experiment in the fountain of youth;

*that attempt is—well, no spoilers!

The greater success enjoyed by The Substance might have something to do with its specific application to Hollywood. Many actresses—and, I suspect, even some male matinee idols—surely identify with Moore’s “Elisabeth,” a former box-office star who loses her most recent gig as a TV fitness guru because of the crime of turning 50.

Comic relief, such as it is, comes from the caricature of the agist, sexist TV exec (played by Dennis Quaid) who fires Elisabeth and, after a much-hyped search, hires as her replacement her second, transformed self, “Sue” (played by Margaret Qualley).

No such opportunity for laughs exists in Seconds, and its put-upon central character, Arthur Hamilton, a Scarsdale banking executive who laments his lost youth and dream of an artistic life, hits squarely at mainstream suburban life in mid-Sixties America.

Hudson, believing he could not realistically play both Arthur and the younger self he becomes through plastic surgery, Tony Wilson, lobbied director John Frankenheimer to split the parts among himself and an older actor (who ended up being John Randolph).

Even so, Hudson regarded his part as complex and challenging enough that he could pivot away from the Douglas Sirk melodramas and Doris Day rom-coms that had boosted him to the upper echelon of Hollywood leading men.

The role was a career changer, all right—almost a career ender. Moviegoers stayed away from this film with such grim subject matter. It was even greeted with hostility by European critics at the Cannes Film Festival, who were more open to unusual subject content than their American counterparts.

It was bad enough that Hudson fell off his box-office perch and that he would have to resort to TV (McMillan and Wife) to revive his career. But, unlike Ms. Moore, he was unable to distance himself sufficiently from his character.

At one point, perhaps as a gay man, finding the role of a character filled with buried emotions to be too close to home, he went into an unplanned crying jag in one scene. Frankenheimer had to close the set to allow Hudson to regain his composure.

Several decades later, Seconds would be regarded as prophecy—a cult classic not just anticipating the counterculture that bloomed the following year, but also the false hope of spiritual and physical rejuvenation nourished by the baby boom generation (depicted so graphically in an actual rhinoplasty operation that the cameraman fainted).

Frankenheimer wryly observed that his paranoid thriller was "the only movie, really, that's ever gone from failure to classic without ever having been a success." But it remains so unrelentingly bleak that many viewers (including myself) have found the going so rough that we couldn't make it all the way through. 

In that sense, if not its box-office performance and Hollywood’s possible highest honor for Ms. Moore, The Substance shares much in common with this prior bit of disturbing cinematic fare.

This Day in Film History (‘Godfather Part II,’ Oscar-Winning Sequel, Opens)

Dec. 20, 1974—Two years after The Godfather broke box-office records, the sequel went into general release in the U.S., in a production that was more generously budgeted, longer, more ambitious—and with a far more tragic vision of the American Dream.

The Godfather Part II duplicated its predecessor’s success, garnering six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Many critics regard it as even superior to the first. 

Though it mirrored the original in many respects, it departed from it in relying less on memorable killings (e.g., the toll-booth murder of Sonny) and one-liners (“leave the gun, take the cannoli”) and more on narrative structure, characterization, and symbolism.

While Francis Ford Coppola was initially reluctant to direct Part II (even suggesting Martin Scorsese for the job), he came around to the idea because of two factors.

First, he insisted on—and won—greater creative control, largely sidelining his nemesis on the first film, Paramount studio exec Robert Evans, in the process.

Second, he was so disturbed by the audience’s delight at a sneak preview for the first film—the final scene, where the door is closed on Kay Corleone as her husband Michael conducts “business” as the new don—that he wanted to leave no doubt whatsoever that a fissure had appeared in their marriage and that the crime boss had endangered his soul.

In other words, he wanted to definitively disprove critics who thought the first film had romanticized the Mafia by depicting them as devoted family men rather than as killers. By the end of Part II, Michael Corleone sits utterly alone, as his focus on “business” has left him paranoid and questioning how it could have all gone so utterly wrong.

What went wrong for the Corleones, the film suggests, is also what went wrong with the American empire.

The movie, while covering roughly the years from 1957 to 1960, actually reflects America’s dark post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood, in which cynicism about government lies and corruption became the order of the day. 

Coppola settled on the architecture of this epic with parallel stories of two fathers of roughly the same age, Vito and Michael Corleone, tracing the rise and decline of their family—their personal one as well as the criminal one they head.

I discussed Part II briefly 10 years ago in this post. I had seen bits and pieces over the years, both in The Godfather Saga (a chronological TV presentation beginning with nine-year-old Vito Corleone in Italy through the death of his son Michael roughly three-quarters of a century later) and on AMC (where, over the last few years, Parts I, II and III have been run as holiday mini-marathons).

But a couple of days ago, for the first time, I saw Part II as a complete entity in its own right, reel to reel. The richness I (re)discovered convinced me it was worthwhile exploring in greater depth.

Its nearly half-hour more of running time compared with Godfather I gave co-screenwriters Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo more time not only to convey atmosphere, but also to offer hints about character motivations and relationships.

This time, knowing the major plot points of the movie, small, seemingly minor moments loom larger, as with the pills that Michael takes on the way to meet partner Hyman Roth—perhaps a means of alleviating the tension and anxiety of running a far-flung criminal enterprise and of surviving an assassination in his own home.

Coppola has likened the film to a saga about a king and his three sons. The imperial theme resonates most loudly and mournfully when Corleone consiglieri Tom Hagen and “soldier” Frankie Pentangeli muse on the Roman Empire:

Hagen: “You were around the old timers who dreamed up how the Families should be organized, how they based it on the old Roman Legions, and called them 'Regimes'... with the 'Capos' and 'Soldiers,' and it worked.”

Pentangeli: “Yeah, it worked. Those were great old days. We was like the Roman Empire. The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire.”

Hagen (sadly): “Yeah, it was once.”

While thoroughly of its own time, Part II anticipated much of the disillusionment in America over the last few decades by detailing the costs of the intersection of entertainment, politics, business, and crime.

Perhaps the most vivid example is when Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista meets with United Fruit Company, United Telephone and Telegraph Company, Pan American Mining Corp., South American Sugar—and Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth.

Visually, it echoes the scene from Part I when a grief-stricken Vito Corleone calls a summit meeting of the Mafia families to call a halt to their bloody vendetta—as the inclusion of Corleone and Roth with the more conventional companies implies that little difference exists between ostensibly non-criminal and criminal enterprises.

That sense is reinforced when Batista thanks a group member for the Christmas “gift” of a solid gold telephone, and later when Roth confides to colleagues: 

“There’s no limit to where we can go from here. This kind of government knows how to help business, to encourage it…We can thank our Friends in the Cuban government, which has put up half of the cash with the Teamsters on a dollar-for-dollar basis and has relaxed restrictions on imports. What I'm saying is that we have now what we have always needed: real partnership with the government.”

Roth is voicing the code of businessmen that has prevailed so often from Adolf Hitler to the wanna-be dictators of today: the transgressions of government heads matter little so long as they can forge a “real partnership” that allows them carte blanche to operate.

It has been a devolutionary process even near the start of the movie, when nine-year-old Vito and other passengers gaze longingly at the Statue of Liberty, coming just a few scenes after we see what has happened over 50 years later: Vito’s now-grown son Michael tangling with a zenophobic U.S. senator over a bribe to secure a Las Vegas casino gambling license.

Movie Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, As a Psychoanalyst Futilely Interacting With a Patient)

Psychoanalyst [played by Robert Benchley]: “Ah, you think both your father and mother were normal?”

Patient [played by John Butler]: “How should I know? They looked all right to me!”

Psychoanalyst: “Was either one of them ever psychoanalyzed?”

Patient: “No, of course not.”

Psychoanalyst: “Just how would you describe your phobia?”

Patient: “My what?”

Psychoanalyst: “Your phobia—this fear that you seem to have—uh, what it is you're afraid of.”

Patient: “Oh, I seem to be afraid of falling all the time, falling off things.”

Psychoanalyst: “You're afraid of falling off high places.”

Patient: “Huh? Uh, no—off of low places.”

Psychoanalyst: “Would you please explain that a little more fully?”

Patient: “Well, whenever I get on anything low like a milking stool or a suitcase—you know, [motioning toward his knee] about that high—I'm just afraid I’ll fall off, that's all.”

Psychoanalyst: “Well, it's a clear case of gluctophobia. Have you ever actually fallen off a milking stool or a suitcase?”

Patient: “Oh, sure—all the time.”

Psychoanalyst: “Very interesting, very interesting. When did you first notice this?”

Patient: “When I first fell off.”— Mental Poise (1938), film short written by American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945) and directed by Roy Rowland

Movie Quote of the Day (‘All the King’s Men,’ on a Would-Be Dictator Warding Off Peril)

Jack Burden [played by John Ireland] [narrating]: “He roared across the state making speeches. All of them adding up to the same thing: 'It's not me they're after. It's you!' Willie hollered 'foul.' He knew if you hollered hard and loud enough... people begin to believe. Just in case they didn't, he organized demonstrations.”

Willie Stark [played by Broderick Crawford]: “Tell the boys to get the hicks out. Bring them in from the sticks. Empty the pool halls. Turn ‘em out! Turn the yokels out!”

Jack: “In case anyone hollered back, he organized spontaneous slugging. Willie pulled every trick he ever knew and added a few more.”—All the King’s Men (1949), written and directed by Robert Rossen, adapted from the novel by Robert Penn Warren

Seventy-five years ago this Thursday, this adaptation of All the King’s Men premiered in New York City. Though a remake came out in 2006 starring Sean Penn, the earlier version remains, for many, the gold standard, going on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Actor (Broderick Crawford) and Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge).

During production of the first version, the cast and crew involved in translating Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen never uttered the name “Huey Long,” recalled star Broderick Crawford.

In fact, the state depicted onscreen was left intentionally unnamed, even blurred, with not even a Southern drawl, let alone the down-home Louisiana cadences of Long.

The plot of the movie, when you get right down to it, could even have been set in the American Heartland—a place like Ohio, maybe even Michigan.

Michigan—these days, the state is no longer the uncontested world center of the automotive industry, as it was during the making of this film, but a laboratory for far-right coups—not only against its governor, but, through the courts and otherwise, the Presidency of the United States.

At least Stark/Long started out with good intentions, and actually built things while in office: a highway program of 13,000 roads, free textbooks for schoolchildren, LSU Medical School, and an expansion of the state Charity Hospital System. The former occupant of the Oval Office now seeking a return only destroyed while in office. 

Re-read some of that dialogue above: “It’s not me they’re after. It’s you!” It’s all too easy to supply the contemporary follow-up: “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution."

Back in 1989, the late New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, sourly surveying a local real-estate developer who’d just taken out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, warned, “Beware always of the loudmouth taking advantage of the situation and appealing to a crowd’s meanest nature.”

That loudmouth runs from the semi-fictional Willie Stark to the all-too-actual Former Guy.