Movie Quote of the Day (‘Murder by Death,’ With a Character Who Resembles His Actor)

Lionel Twain [played by Truman Capote, pictured]: “That drives me crazy!”

Sam Diamond [played by Peter Falk]: “Sounds like a short ride to me.”— Murder by Death (1976), screenplay by Neil Simon, directed by Robert Moore

The murder mystery spoof Murder by Death premiered 50 years ago today, featuring a cast of highly accomplished film veterans like David Niven, Maggie Smith, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Elsa Lanchester, and James Coco.

But wouldn’t you know it, a mere tyro caught most of the attention of the public: In Cold Blood author Truman Capote, in the only film where he played someone other than himself. (He provided voiceover narration of his stories “The Thanksgiving Visitor” and “A Christmas Memory,” and played the Capote look-alike in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.)

I bet that you were as surprised as I was to learn that for his performance, Capote was nominated for a Golden Globe in Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture. But remember, these were the awards that notoriously handed Pia Zadora a statuette as “New Star of the Year” for the 1982 bomb Butterfly. In other words, you have to wonder which Hollywood powerbroker influenced such ridiculous recognition.

I doubt that Neil Simon thought that Capote turned in a noteworthy performance, though I have read a couple of versions of his reaction. When interviewed for George Plimpton’s 1997 oral biography Truman Capote, the playwright-screenwriter, while admitting that hiring the author was more producer Ray Stark’s idea than his own, said that he “had no problem with him.”

Well, except for two: Capote was “very ill at ease with the dialogue” and “didn’t know how to move,” as he was always looking for his marks.

On the other hand, in commentary for a 1999 DVD release of the movie, Simon said he and director Robert Moore wanted to replace Capote as Lionel Twain, the rich eccentric who invites the world’s greatest detectives to his home for a contest to solve a murder. In the end, that desire didn’t come to pass.

Two rather different reactions, as I say. But when you think about it, both were united in one belief: Capote was making mistakes that professional actors would not have committed, and it was deeply frustrating.

Besides lack of experience, there was another reason why the creators of Murder by Death should have thought better of hiring Capote in the first place: he was already well along in the drink-and-pills spiral that led to his death by liver cancer in 1984.

A couple of years before, he had been in such terrible condition when commissioned to write the screenplay for The Great Gatsby remake that he had to be replaced before he could finish. Gossip spreads fast in Hollywood, and nobody involved with Murder by Death should have been surprised that he would be a handful.

Appreciations: Neil Simon’s ‘Prisoner of Second Avenue,’ on the Suddenly Redundant Male Worker

In his heyday, Neil Simon’s niche as Broadway’s king of comedy would have been secure if only for his nearly 50 produced plays. But his extraordinary run of hits over three decades made him the most wildly successful American playwright of the post-World War II era.

Over the last quarter-century, he slipped from that lofty perch. Attempted revivals of both his 1963 hit, Barefoot in the Park, and his more acclaimed Brighton Beach Memoirs foundered.

Mysteriously, whether through the punishing recent economics of mounting a straight play, the bad luck associated with individual productions (Plaza Suite, projected as a star vehicle for real-life couple Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, closed before it could open because of the COVID-19 lockdown), or even the altered tastes of comedy-conscious fans, this former Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright had become the forgotten man of American theater by his death 2½ years ago.

At first glance, the best prospects for his resuscitated reputation might lie with two of his more acclaimed later works, Lost in Yonkers or the more autobiographical “Eugene Trilogy” (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound). But another, further back in his career, presents a vehicle more relevant to the COVID-19 era.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue, which premiered 50 years ago this coming November on Broadway, marked a notable step in the evolution of the playwright. In the 1960s, while alternating between comedies and musicals, he had stuck to a format marked by nonstop one-liners, incorporating the style he honed as a TV comedy writer for Your Show of Shows and The Phil Silvers Show.

But with a new decade came a growing seriousness, first evidenced in The Gingerbread Lady, about an alcoholic actress. The Prisoner of Second Avenue dug deeper into this new seriocomic vein, uniting Simon’s keener interest in the decay he increasingly glimpsed in New York City with the travails of a middle-aged male suddenly made redundant at the office. Imagine a somewhat more comic Death of a Salesman, but for the white-collar set.

The play was brought back to my attention several months ago when I saw the 1975 film adaptation starring Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft (pictured) as, respectively, advertising exec Mel Edison and his concerned wife Edna (assuming the roles played originally on Broadway by Peter Falk and Lee Grant).

When I viewed it on the big screen, it made no lingering impression. Indeed, how much could a teenager always told his life was ahead of him understand an angst-ridden urban professional suddenly aware that half his career, if not more, is over?

Mel’s dilemma registers far more forcefully now. Today, so-called “mature workers” face similar issues: adapting to an office environment and job market increasingly inimical to the middle-aged.

“I’m gonna be 47 years old in January,” Mel complains in the first scene. “Forty-seven! They could get two twenty-three-and-a-half-year-old kids for half my money.”

That fear turns out to be all too prescient. Mel ends up unemployed, as have countless real-life counterparts in the last half-century. Age discrimination remains common even though it had been banned under federal law only a few years before Prisoner of Second Avenue premiered. It may be the most blithely practiced and most persistent form of discrimination left.

Unemployment plunges Mel headlong towards a nervous breakdown. “I don’t know where or who I am any more,” he confesses desperately. “I’m disappearing, Edna. I don’t need analysts, I need Lost and Found.”

Suddenly feeling superfluous, he putters around the apartment for most of the day in his pajamas, isolated save for one dangerous connection to the outside world: talk radio. “How many people you think listen to the radio at ten o’clock in the morning?” he informs Edna. “Everybody is working. But I heard it. And as sure as we’re standing here in the middle of the room, there’s a plot going on in this country.”

When Simon wrote his comedy-drama, Rush Limbaugh and his imitators had not yet reached nationwide audiences, but New York had its own progenitor of right-wing talk radio with Bob Grant—unnamed here, but, as he was already attracting local notoriety at WMCA, the probable inspiration for the paranoid delusions to which Mel is now susceptible. Now “open to channels of information twenty-four hours a day,” Mel is suddenly a stronger believer in “the social-economical-and-political-plot-to-undermine-the-working-classes-in-this-country.”

Simon foresaw the all-encompassing, even contradictory nature of the right-wing conspiracy theories more and more common these last three decades: “It’s not just me they’re after, Edna. They're after you, they’re after our kids, my sisters, every one of our friends. They're after the cops, they’re after the hippies, they’re after the government, they’re after the anarchists, They're after women's lib, the fags, the blacks, the whole military complex.”

“Who?” a bewildered Edna asks. “You mentioned everybody. There's no one left.”

As loving, understanding and resilient as Edna is, she finds it difficult not to pulled into Mel’s emotional whirlpool. In this case, the claustrophobia of their East Side apartment becomes progressively corrosive, as the couple begins sniping at each other.

Even Edna’s attempt to sustain them through her work only exacerbates her husband’s worthlessness as a breadwinner. The relationship, while it guards against loneliness, also irritates because of its by now stifling closeness. More than a few couples, I suspect, will find it an accurate reflection of their own marital tensions.

I wonder now if Lemmon’s prior association with Simon screenplays (The Odd Couple and The Out of Towners) might have misled some critics as to the nature of this role. The earlier characters were first-class neurotics, with a superabundance of internal sensors rendering them helpless before outside stimuli.

In contrast, Mel’s distress is triggered by an outside convulsion—the sudden loss of his job. Three plays later, Simon would create one of the few bombs of his early career with God’s Favorite, a retelling of the Book of Job. But The Prisoner of Second Avenue seems like a practice run for that.

Parallel to Mel’s nervous breakdown is the one that New York, in those pre-fiscal crisis years, was also experiencing. The signs of outward disorder—a breakdown in services, rising crime and civic incivility—are reflected within the Edisons’ building, as they cope with a nonfunctioning elevator, no water, lack of air conditioning or heat, a robbery in their own apartment and obnoxious upstairs neighbors.

In the end, Mel’s initial roar against his crumbling universe (“If you’re a human being you reserve the right to complain, to protest”) is exposed in all its futility. Like the more famous bearer of his surname, he must “invent”—or, in this case, re-invent: a new form of living and acceptance of what lies outside his control.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue has not run on Broadway since it closed in 1973 after nearly 800 performances. To my knowledge, its most high-profile revival since then was not here in the U.S. but in Great Britain in 2010, in a West End production starring Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl,

Somehow, this very dark dramedy deserves to be seen again. Though much of the action relies on physical interaction between Mel and Edna that may be difficult to perform under present circumstances, I hope that some creative director will try to reimagine it for the kind of Zoom production that so many theater companies are attempting these days. Audiences will be surprised at how well Neil Simon anticipated our own confinement—as well as how expertly he made us laugh and weep over disruption and isolation.

This Day in Theater History (Simon’s ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs’ Opens)

March 27, 1983—With Brighton Beach Memoirs, which premiered at the Alvin Theatre, Neil Simon began what might be thought of as his “BB Trilogy” or "Eugene Trilogy"—a trio of plays that excavated his past not only for the belly laughs he was long famous for, but also for lacerating truths few had noticed as he went from success to success. This latest comedy ran for nearly 1,300 performances, earned him perhaps the most critical acclaim he had known to date, and made a star of the actor playing his adolescent alter ego, Matthew Broderick.

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You can make a case—as I’m about to do—that the high point of Simon‘s career began with this play. Reverses in his personal life (divorce from actress Marsha Mason, followed by two marriages and divorces from the same woman, Dianne Lander-Simon, followed by another to her by the millennium!), might have heightened his ability to render marital tensions onstage with honesty and realism. In the two plays that immediately followed, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound, he continued to chart the path to adulthood of his youthful stand-in, Eugene Morris Jerome. A career climax would surely have been his Pulitzer Prize for another play in this increasingly rueful retrospective decade, Lost in Yonkers (1991).

Few in the early Sixties, when “Doc” Simon first conquered Broadway with Come Blow Your Horn (1961), would have predicted this critical approbation, anymore than film critics could have foreseen that “The Man With No Name” of spaghetti Western fame, Clint Eastwood, would become one of the most honored and acclaimed filmmakers of his time. In both cases, the new-found critical esteem came after these two figures cast a more self-critical eye on their lives and legacies. Eastwood’s came by reconsidering, in the Oscar-winning Unforgiven and the more recent Gran Torino, the cost of the violence with which he was associated as a young actor. Simon’s came by showing how his bent toward comedy developed in a Jewish family battling dire poverty, anti-Semitism—and, sometimes, each other—in their Brooklyn home.

At one point, in the 1966-67 season, Simon had four plays running simultaneously on Broadway: Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Sweet Charity and The Star Spangled Girl. Just before Brighton Beach Memoirs, he ran into something of a dry spell, with three plays tanking, one right after another: I Ought to Be in Pictures, Fools and a revised version of Little Me.

With his trio of autobiographical memory plays, however, Simon went a long way toward dispelling the notion that he was simply a gag writer. Now, the comparisons evoked by these memory plays were to Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill (in Ah,Wilderness!). 

The greatest recognition of Simon as perhaps the greatest hitmaker of all time among Broadway playwrights came only three months into the run of Brighton Beach Memoirs, when the Alvin Theatre was renamed the Neil Simon Theatre in his honor. This venue, under its new name, also witnessed the premiere of his Biloxi Blues and Jake's Women.

The last Simon play to open on Broadway was 45 Seconds to Broadway, back in 2001. If you don’t remember it, don’t feel badly—it didn’t last much more than 45 seconds (73 performances, if you insist on counting).

Contemporary Broadway has claimed its greatest victim in Simon, a fact underscored in 2009, when, despite fairly good reviews, a revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs tanked and Broadway Bound never had a chance to get off the ground. What ended up dooming the plays was not changing audience expectations about comedy, nor even the reportedly fractious atmosphere behind the scenes at this production, but rather the economics of the Broadway scene that had repeatedly strangled nearly all new non-musicals mounted without a star as an insurance policy, according to a blog post by the Los Angeles Times’ James C. Taylor.

(The accompanying photo, taken by the New York World Telegram and Sun’s Al Ravenna in 1966, shows Neil Simon sitting on a windowsill at home reviewing a script of play he wrote. The image is now part of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection.)

Theater Review: “Promises, Promises,” Starring Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth

I have meant to review this show for nearly three months, but one thing after another got in the way. Now, I have no excuse: What better time to talk about a show, after all, with a musical number called “Turkey-Lurkey Time,” than on Thanksgiving?

You could argue, I suppose, that, given its decidedly tepid opening notices, the continued survival of Promises, Promises has more to do with star power than anything else. But this would be a myopic misreading—just the type of thing that Gotham theater critics provide, without thinking twice.

I almost didn’t see the revival of the 1969 Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s classic 1960 corporate satire, The Apartment. Critical carping was so overwhelming that early on, I figured that, more likely than not, their negative judgment had to be more right than wrong.

But eventually I recalled that as a teenager, during a phase of reading plays as opposed to seeing them performed (the type of thing you do without money of your own), I had been struck, in an anthology of comedies by Neil Simon, by how funny the book he created for the show was. And by early September, given the circumstances of my life, I decided that I could really, really, really use a good laugh or two. So I went to the Times Square TKTS booth and, to my astonishment, not only found that I didn’t have to stand in line long, but that the show wasn’t sold out—and that it turned out to be quite good, in the bargain.

You could practically hear the condescension dripping from New York Times critic Ben Brantley’s review of the show back in April. The gist of it was—you’ll never guess!—that the show was “dated.” Its view of sexual harassment was retrograde, he sniffed. He also couldn’t resist a dig at the Times’ critic from the late Sixties, Clive Barnes, who hailed the show for bringing to the stage “the music of today.”

Just one problem with the review: damn near everything. To start with: maybe the show hadn’t been mounted on Broadway in more than 40 years, but what of it? Neither, before its recently closed production at Lincoln Center, had Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which, by nearly every measure, is one of the half-dozen greatest American musicals.

The current production, now at New York’s Broadway Theatre, under the direction and choreography of Rob Ashford, is hardly perfect. It is, however, perfectly enjoyable, with much less to be ashamed of than Brantley.

We theater fans, according to the critical naysayers, are supposed to feel that we’re not really receiving an authentic version of the original show, since two Bacharach-David hits have been added to boost Kristin Chenoweth’s role as Fran Kubelik: “A House Is Not a Home” and “I Say a Little Prayer.”

But when have musicals—or their creators, for that matter—ever been so purist? None other than Stephen Sondheim (known, to a considerable portion of theater cognescenti, as “God”) has been known to take the chisel to a number of his shows, most prominently Merrily We Roll Along and Bounce. Moreover, a virtual cottage industry—the “revisal”—has sprouted up that has heavily changed the books of musicals. Why are texts considered objects for theater scalpels but not lyrics and music?

As it happens, the two added songs work unexpectedly well in their new context. Very casual Bacharach fans would be astonished to hear that “I Say a Little Prayer” was originally written as an antiwar song, during the Vietnam War era. The lyrics only hint at this in the most indirect way. As an expression of deep, ineradicable romantic longing in Promises, Promises, on the other hand, it works far better in this musical.

A secondary, sillier controversy broke out about the show after a Newsweek critic wondered how openly gay Sean Hayes could play the romantic heterosexual lead, C.C. (Chuck) Baxter. The short answer is: Easy! But let’s indulge the Newsweek fellow for a tad longer:

1) Theater and film require more willful suspension of disbelief than any of the other performing arts except, perhaps, for operas (and even that appears to be changing, as divas become far more aware of how they look on high-definition screens in cinemas). Does anyone familiar with Susan Sarandon’s romantic history find fully credible the idea of her playing a Roman Catholic nun in Dead Man Walking? And who on earth can accept, without considerable laughter, the concept of Denise Richardson--outfitted in tank top and shorts--as a nuclear physicist named Dr. Christmas Jones in the James Bond feature, The World Is Not Enough? Talk about straining credulity! Given all that, is Sean Hayes as a heterosexual really that outlandish?

2) The only way that Hayes might be regarded as unbelievable would be if he played Chuck in the same campy manner as he did Jack McFarland on Will and Grace. Such was not the case here, however.

3) Hayes is a marvel of comic timing and slapstick. Watch the several minutes of comic gold he spins with one prop--one of those Sixties office chairs meant more to be admired for their unusual shape than to be sat in--during Baxter’s scene with his lousy boss, Jeff Sheldrake. Hayes grins nervously, twists, slides, sinks, and finally collapses. He’s a worthy successor to two other comic masters who preceded him in the role of Chuck: Jack Lemmon, who originated the role of Chuck in The Apartment, and Martin Short, who performed in a 1990s revival of the show at Encores!

4) Hayes’ voice is overshadowed by his comic talent, but it shouldn’t be. It’s not just strong and certain, but able to meet the demands that Bacharach’s acrobatic score makes on it. Take the title song. In a memorable appraisal of Bacharach more than a dozen years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, critic Francis Davis noted how devilishly difficult the song “Promises, Promises” was: it “starts off in a 3/4 time too fast and [is] diabolically syncopated to be called a waltz and then changes meter twenty times, often after just one bar.” Yet Hayes handles it all with aplomb.

If there’s any actor miscast here, it’s Chenoweth. Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment played the role of Fran, the office worker who captures Chuck’s heart, in the most appropriate way: as a perky woman still too young and naïve to know when someone is breaking her heart. Given her age (early 40s) and a glamorous hairdo reminiscent of Bacharach’s ex-wife, Angie Dickinson, it’s difficult to view her Chenoweth's Fran as anything but wised-up in matters of the heart.

And yet, most people--and I would count myself among them--wouldn’t care a bit, anyway, that Chenoweth is not exactly suited for this role. By the end of her first song, I could only marvel how such a large sound could issue from such a remarkably petite woman. I suspect that I wasn’t the only member of the audience who felt this way. Hers is the type of voice any composer would clamor to have perform his or her songs.

One other cast member should be mentioned: Katie Finneran, in one of her last performances before she left the cast to have a baby. Her performance as a barfly of easy virtue is hilarious. The role, very funny in the Wilder film, becomes a sheer, giddy delight here.

Promises, Promises, the only musical comedy from the Bacharach-David team, spawned two Dionne Warwicke hits: "Promises, Promises" and "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." The comic talents of Hayes and Finneran--and the magnificent voice of Chenoweth--were given ample room by the two composers, and it makes one sorry--Ben Brantley to the contrary--that they didn't try more stage productions before their collaboration came to an end after the disastrous musical film adaptation of Lost Horizon.