Movie Quote of the Day (‘Nothing in Common,’ As Father and Son Face Off)

Max Basner (played by Jackie Gleason): (snarling): “Why don’t you get yourself a regular car?”

David Basner (played by Tom Hanks): “It’s a jeep, Dad. I look good in it.”

(They climb in, Max doing so uneasily.)

Max: “This goddamn car. You have to be a mountain climber to get in it.”

(David puts on the radio to fill the silence. Max thrusts a big, fat, smelly cigar toward him.)

Max: “Want one of these? They’re Honduran.”

David (sullenly): “No.”

Max: “You can’t get the Cubans anymore.”

David (hoping to put this to rest): “No, thank you.”

(The silence resumes, finally broken by Max.)

Max (morosely): “I lost my lines. They fired me.”

[David gets out of the Jeep and walks around angrily for a minute, then gets back in.]

David: “What are you gonna do?”

Max: “I know you hate me. But you have to help me.”— Nothing in Common (1986), screenplay by Rick Podell and Michael Preminger, directed by Garry Marshall

When Garry Marshall passed away a week and a half ago, the director-producer-writer-actor was recalled most often for several TV series (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd Couple, Mork and Mindy) and films (Pretty Women, Runaway Bride, The Princess Diaries). But for me, the work that lingers in my memory the longest is the dramedy Nothing in Common, released 30 years ago this week.

Although only Marshall’s third film to that point, he demonstrated a sure touch with a variety of actors: an insecure model unsure if she could establish herself as an actress (Sela Ward), an up-and-coming star (Tom Hanks), and an aging legend who needed to be treated with care (Jackie Gleason). He needed all of this skill in serving a script that threaded together a romantic comedy and deeply serious drama.

On one level, the film can be enjoyed as one of the best screen treatments of the creative exhilaration of the advertising world, focusing on how Hanks’ David Basner woos clients as easily as women. It’s breezy and insouciant, a throwback to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It takes a long while for the yuppie David to realize that life is not that easy. That recognition arrives courtesy of what he has not bothered to notice—has not really wanted to notice—on his headlong path to success: that the marriage of his parents (played by Gleason and Eva Marie Saint) has come apart.

The beginning of the above exchange between David and Max hints at part of the reason for the crumbling marriage: Max’s irascibility. But David’s resentment at being drawn into the parental quarrel, we’ll soon learn, increases because of guilt over traits shared with his father: lack of commitment and a wandering eye.

In his cinema swan song, Gleason employed none of the attributes that had endeared loud-mouthed Ralph Kramden to audiences in The Honeymooners, such as his helpless, inept dreaming and constant sheepish begging of forgiveness from wife Alice. Even in this scene, when we realize the extent of Max’s emotional extremity—getting fired from his job, like another used-up salesman, Willy Loman—we know that this not-very-good father was temperamentally unsuited for his sales specialty: children’s clothing.

And Max's cigar: It sums up an awful lot about the attitudes and appetites that have brought him to his current pass, one so desperate that he has to beg help from the son he really has never communicated with. Within the immediate context of this scene, it signals both his in-your-face personality and his half-hearted, clumsy attempt to ingratiate himself with David. Before long, though, the gesture says even more about the self-indulgence that imperils first his marriage, then his health.

How much of himself an actor brings to a part is a complicated question, and Gleason’s role in this movie is a case in point. He ate and drank to excess, cheated on his wives, was an absentee father, and could be cruel to others involved in his shows. It was as if he felt bound to inflict on others the hurt he experienced when his father abandoned the family. If it sounds familiar, it should: Max seems an awful lot like him, but without the transcendent acting talent. (In fact, the screenwriters of Nothing in Common, Rick Podell and Michael Preminger, drew on much of this unhappy background when they created the 2002 TV biopic Gleason, starring Brad Garrett.)

Yet that talent is impossible to discount, and perhaps, at some level, Gleason understood all too well how Max must feel. In his 2012 memoir, My Happy Days in Hollywood, Marshall noted that Gleason was thoroughly professional and uncomplaining during shooting, despite considerable physical frailty. (He died of cancer a year after the film’s release.) The actor concentrated on his work and did an exemplary job in humanizing without sentimentalizing this most difficult of men. 

When Nothing in Common was filmed in the mid-1980s, “selfish” was associated so frequently with “yuppie” that it might as well have been a barnacle stuck to the noun. If Hanks’ David is not outright selfish, he is certainly self-absorbed. While the film initially earns comic mileage from his attitude (“Does self-involvement count?" he responds when a lover asks if he’s involved with anybody), a reckoning will be in order.

What could make such a person snap out of this emotional constriction? Ties of family so strong they override years of distance, misunderstanding and wariness. Until the 2007-09 financial crisis, probably nothing forced baby boomers out of their careerist zone so much as the need to care for their aging parents.

Nothing in Common was Marshall’s attempt to execute the same kind of change in direction that Neil Simon was performing around this time with Chapter Two and his Eugene Jerome autobiographical trilogy: comedy not merely shot through with one-liners, but filled with rue. Audiences did not respond as enthusiastically as they did to his preposterous prostitute-as-Cinderella tale, Pretty Woman.

But, in addition to providing Gleason with a memorable fadeout and Ward with a good career launching pad, the film served notice that Hanks—not unlike Jack Lemmon in The Apartment—could master drama as easily as comedy. Moreover, in depicting the discomfort and agony of a Me Generation forced to choose between career aspiration and unwanted personal responsibility, it still rings today with powerful truth.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Honeymooners,’ on Why Ralph Appeals to Women)

Ralph Kramden [played by Jackie Gleason]: “Well, let me tell you something, I had some chances, too, you know, before I married you!”

Alice Kramden [played by Audrey Meadows]: “Ha ha!”

Ralph: “Don't laugh, Alice, there were plenty of girls crazy about me and you know it. Every time I went down to the beach, they used to crowd around me.”

Alice: “Sure. Sure, they crowded around you. That didn't mean they were crazy about you. They just wanted to sit in the shade!”— The Honeymooners, “Hello Mom,” Season 1, Episode 10, original air date Dec. 3, 1955, teleplay by Marvin Marx and Walter Stone, directed by Frank Satenstein

Jackie Gleason, “The Great One,” was born 100 years ago today in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The set of The Honeymooners was, in fact, based on his childhood home in the borough’s Chauncey Street.

He had the proverbial Dickensian childhood: an older brother died when Jackie was three. Six years later, his Irish-American father, an insurance auditor, left the family for good. His Irish-born mother died when he was about 19, leaving him penniless.  Performing arts became his path out of misery, as he took jobs, in turn, as a stunt driver, a carnival barker, as well as working in a pool hall and in touring shows. Sheer talent helped him triumph, even over his own excesses—the taste for food (ridiculed in the above quote), women and booze.

He got his first real break in a Broadway musical, Follow the Girls (1944). It might have been appropriate, then, that he won a Tony as the ne’er-do-well, alcoholic brother-in-law in another musical, Take Me Along (1960).

At a time when much of the rest of television was turning its attention to suburban dads, Gleason found comic gold in a more gritty urban setting. Bus driver Ralph Kramden's arguments with wife Alice (which, for all his blustering about sending her “to the moon,” always ended with him shown up as stupid) often revolved around the kind of things that people who are financially hard-pressed would, such as money. Millions of TV viewers nodded even as they smiled and laughed.

Outside of The Honeymooners, Gleason demonstrated his skill as an actor in The Hustler (1961), in an Oscar-nominated role, and a particular favorite of mine, his last movie, the comedy-drama Nothing in Common, in which he played Tom Hanks’ cantankerous father.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Honeymooners,’ In Which Ed Reveals Where He Got Ralph’s Gift)

[Ralph's Christmas gift from Norton is a pair of spats.]

Ralph Kramden (played by Jackie Gleason): “I know it came from your heart.”

Ed Norton (played by Art Carney): “No it didn't—it came from the fat man shop!”— The Honeymooners, Episode 13, “'Twas the Night Before Christmas,” original air date December 24, 1955, teleplay by Marvin Marx and Walter Stone, directed by Frank Satenstein

Photo of the Day: “NORTON!!!!!”

In the old days, Americans erected statues to real-life people, more often than not larger-than-life generals mounted on horses. A little over a decade ago, however, TV Land created a set, in locations around the country, for fictitious television icons, including for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Minneapolis), The Bob Newhart Show (Chicago), Bewitched's Samantha (Salem, Mass.) Happy Days' Fonzie (Milwaukee) and The Andy Griffith Show (North Carolina).

But of them all, the one accompanying this post--of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden, carrying his lunchbox on the way to his job as a bus driver--might be my favorite. I took this shot last week at its location outside New York City’s Port Authority Building, down in midtown. (In case you're wondering: No, Ralph didn't go on a diet before I snapped this image. I cropped the shot extra close to squeeze out a lunkhead on the side of the frame who was desecrating this shrine to The Great One.)

Oddly enough, I normally pass in and out of the building directly north of the one where Ralphie Boy greets commuters, but I seldom pass this. But I was inspired (if that’s the right word) to take the short walk over by a reader of this blog, who, in responding to a post on JFK’s call to land a man on the moon, expressed the belief that The Honeymooners’ Ralph and his dearly beloved Alice had made it there first.

TV Dialogue of the Day (Ralph and Alice Kramden on a Fringe Benefit of Lodge Membership)

Ralph Kramden (played by The Great One, Jackie Gleason): "Alice, don't you realize that if I'm elected Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler of the Raccoon Lodge, you and I get free burial at the Raccoon Cemetery in Bismarck, North Dakota?"
Alice Kramden (played by Audrey Meadows): "Gee Ralph, I'm so excited, I don't know whether to live or die."—The Honeymooners

(Thanks to my friend Jim for the suggestion.)

Quote of the Day (Jackie Gleason, Amateur Theologian, on Sin)

“I have always believed that most sins are committed not because of the inability to control them, but because of the ability to perform them.”—TV comedian Jackie Gleason, quoted by Edith Efron, “Jackie Gleason on Sin, Music, Plato, Pity and Other Subjects,” TV Guide: The First 25 Years, compiled and edited by Jay S. Harris in association with the Editors of TV Guide Magazine (1978)

Yesterday, flipping through this anthology for story ideas, I came across this interview. It fascinates me because of the yawning contradiction between “The Great One’s” lifelong beliefs as a Roman Catholic and his frequently losing battle with just about every form of the Seven Deadly Sins, most notably pride, wrath, avarice, gluttony, and lust.

From time to time, Gleason made attempts at reform, including a reconciliation with his first wife, but these seldom lasted.

Gleason’s heavy drinking—borderline alcoholism, I think—is very much to the point of this quote. Addiction, we have come to believe after years of AA, certainly results from “inability to control” a biochemical mechanism. Yet the comedian seems to be rejecting psychology’s insights into addiction.

It all comes to mind with the story this past week of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Why anyone would go to such lengths—down to South America, no less—to be with a mistress?

Now, I’ve heard all kinds of tales over the years about the sexual escapades of politicians (including a long-ago mayoral hopeful in my hometown who funded his mistress’ massage parlor). But Sanford’s case, like few others, raises the question of sex addiction.

Gleason’s remarkably old-fashioned take—perhaps instilled by the lessons of his impoverished Irish Catholic mom, perhaps by his own hard experience—is that we (very much including Sanford) shape our own destinies.

In this context, Sanford’s affair could take the astonishing turn it did precisely because the governor’s power and opportunities as head of a state seeking foreign investment afforded him numerous possibilities for what the Church (far more than it has been recently) once called “occasion for sins.”

Bill Clinton, guilty of his own variation of Sanford’s madness, explained in four words why he became involved with Monica Lewinsky: “Just because I could.” That’s a pithier seconding of Gleason’s point.

Gleason’s final project, the Garry Marshall-directed dramedy Nothing in Common, might surprise those who fondly remember his Ralph Kramden, Reginald Van Gleason, and even Minnesota Fats, yet I suspect that, filming only a year before his own death, he identified strongly with his part, in much the same way that John Wayne did with his cancer-afflicted gunslinger in The Shootist.

As Tom Hanks’ irascible father, Gleason does nothing to sugarcoat the selfishness and thoughtlessness with which his character has lived his life, particularly concerning his estranged wife. But a life-threatening medical condition brings him face to face with the meaning of his life and work—something that obsessed Gleason in his TV Guide interview, when he talked at length about original sin and living life with purpose.

At the end of Nothing in Common, Gleason’s sour patriarch finds himself saved despite the sum of his many wrong moral choices. He marvels at the mystery of love that has drawn his son closer to him. With time and the same sense of atonement (something sorely missing to date in his self-serving reflections about King David continuing in office), Sanford would be fortunate to experience the same moral awakening.