Movie Quote of the Day (‘What's Up, Doc?’, As a Mild-Mannered Musicologist Faces a Judge)

Howard Bannister [played by Ryan O’Neal]: “That night, I went back to my room and she was in the bath.”

Judge Maxwell [played by Liam Dunn]: “Who was there?” [reconsiders] “No, don't tell me, just go on.”

Howard: “When Eunice walked in and the drapes caught fire, everything burned. They asked me to leave. I really don't blame them.”

Judge: “Good boy. Is there more?”

Howard: “Sure.”

Judge [sighing]: “There's more.”

Howard: “Well, the next day, today, Mr. Larrabee asked me to his house with my rocks and to bring Eunice. Or rather, Burnsy, the one he thinks is Eunice. Is that clear?”

Judge: “No, but it's consistent.”

Howard: “Shall I go back over it?”

Judge: “No, please, I beg you, don't! Just go on.”

Howard: “It gets kind of complicated now. First, there was this trouble between me and Hugh.”

Judge: “You and me?”

Howard: “No, not you. Hugh.”

Hugh Simon [played by Kenneth Mars]: “I am Hugh.”

Judge: “You are me?”

Hugh: “No, I am Hugh.”

Judge: “Stop saying that!”

[to bailiff]

Judge: “Make him stop saying that!”

Hugh: “Don't touch me, I'm a doctor!”

Judge: “Of what?”

Hugh: “Music.”

Judge: “Can you fix a hi-fi?”

Hugh: “No, sir.”

Judge: “Then shut up!”— What's Up, Doc? (1972), screenplay by Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton, based on a story by Peter Bogdanovich, directed by Peter Bogdanovich

Entertainers often have very, very complicated private lives. Case in point: Ryan O’Neal.

The Love Story actor, who died over a week ago, lived so turbulently off the screen that he became a semi-permanent resident of the gossip pages, even as his career tailed off. Personally, I find the accusations against him leveled by Anjelica Huston (described in my blog post from 2½ years ago) especially disturbing.

Compartmentalizing such a man is difficult, to be sure. Even so, whenever I see What's Up, Doc?, O’Neal’s straight-faced performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s neo-screwball farce (or, for that matter, his other two collaborations for the director, Paper Moon and Nicklelodeon) goes a long way towards lightening whatever dark mood I may occasionally experience.

Quote of the Day (Peter Bogdanovich, on the Larger-Than-Life ‘Mythology’ of Films)

“Mythology, which is what pictures are at their best, by its very nature must be bigger than life, not smaller than life. Being overwhelmed by images in the dark is part of the basic magic of the medium. Take that away and you take away a good deal of the glory. At least if you’ve seen a picture the right way once, repeat viewings retain in memory a residual glow. But kids don’t have that, so to them it becomes perhaps just a charade they must strain to view, certainly not something that takes over.”—American film director, screenwriter, and critic Peter Bogdanovich (1939-2022), “The Importance of Seeing Ernst,” The New York Observer, Apr. 8, 2008

I came across this quote from Bogdanovich the other day. It seemed appropriate to post it today, on the first anniversary of his death.

(The image accompanying this post, of Peter Bogdanovich at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, was taken Mar. 10, 2008, by Eliaws.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Paper Moon,’ as a Con Man Gets More Than He Bargained For)

[The recently orphaned eight-year-old Addie Loggins has just overheard traveling con man Moses Pray, who had recently shown up at her mom’s graveside service, bilk a third party out of $200 meant for her. Instead of driving Addie to her aunt in Missouri, as he had promised her relatives, “Moze” plans to use the money to fix his car while putting Addie on a train alone with just her ticket. As they sit in a café later, Addie has something else in mind.]

Addie Loggins [played by Tatum O’Neal]: “I want my two hundred dollars.”
 
Moses Pray [played by Ryan O’Neal]: “I don't have your two hundred dollars no more and you know it.”
 
Addie: “If you don't give me my two hundred dollars, I'm gonna tell a policeman how you got it and he'll make you give it to me because it's mine.”
 
Moses: “But I don't have it!”
 
Addie: “Then get it!”
 
Cafe Waitress [played by Jody Wilbur]: [walks over solicitously after Moses slams his fist on the table] “How we doin', Angel Pie? We gonna have a little dessert when we finish up our hot dog?”
 
Addie [sullenly]: “I don't know.”
 
Waitress [to Moses]: “What do you say, Daddy? Why don't we give Precious a little dessert if she eats her dog?”
 
Moses [annoyed]: “Her name ain't Precious!”— Paper Moon (1973), screenplay by Alvin Sargent, adapted from the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, directed by Peter Bogdanovich
 
I’m not sure why, but I not only never saw this movie when it came out, but managed to bypass it in all the years since—until last week, when I caught it as part of TCM’s tribute to the late Peter Bogdanovich.
 
I’m glad I waited, as I was finally able to appreciate this droll black-and-white road comedy set in the Great Depression. The sub-teen Tatum O’Neal won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this—only, Bogdanovich insisted later, because Hollywood would never award Best Actress to someone so young.
 
Ryan O’Neal, the story goes, was so annoyed that his daughter was nominated while he wasn’t that he refused to accompany her to the ceremony. That set the stage for decades of turbulence between the two.

(Not that there hadn’t been tension between them already on the set: In interview excerpts included in the blog, Cinephilia and Beyond, Bogdanovich related, “I had to keep Ryan from killing her” over the child’s inability to learn her lines.)

 
No matter. The people who give us classic film comedies are often terribly complicated people who, in spite of themselves, give us a few hours of laughter and light that they don’t experience. Cherish their gifts to us, anyway.

This Day in Film History (Howard Hawks, ‘Great Professional’ of Hollywood Golden Age, Born)

May 30, 1896—Howard Hawks, who developed a reputation as a competent craftsman before being reevaluated as one of Hollywood’s premiere directors toward the end of his five-decade career, was born in Goshen, Ind.

Though associated with a score of Tinseltown’s best-loved, timeless classics, Hawks made little impression on critics for a long time. Holding neither the interests nor the talents of a specialist, he made it difficult to identify what constituted “A Howard Hawks Film,” in the way that some contemporaries made their marks with particular genres or settings, such as Alfred Hitchcock (thrillers), John Ford (westerns, war films, or cinema about Ireland), or Billy Wilder (fast-talking, cynical comedy-dramas).

Instead, Hawks took it as a challenge to create top-flight movies across genres: the gangster film (Scarface), screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby), biopics (Sergeant York), musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), film noir (The Big Sleep), sci-fi (The Thing), widescreen historical epics (Land of the Pharoahs), and westerns (Red River, Rio Bravo). No wonder a 1967 TV summary of his career was entitled, “Howard Hawks: The Great Professional.”

Remarkably, this versatile director was nominated for a competitive Oscar only once in his career, for Sergeant York. (In one of the Academy Awards’ embarrassed annual attempts to honor a film giant before it’s too late, he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement in 1974, only three years before his death.)

Yet, in addition to the French “New Wave” critics-directors who began to reappraise his work as an “auteur” in the 1950s, Hawks also influenced such American filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Brian de Palma, John Carpenter, and Peter Bogdanovich (who signaled his great debt to Hawks in his first two major successes, The Last Picture Show and What's Up, Doc?).

Majoring in mechanical engineering in college, the director was less interested in inventing entirely different methods of moviemaking than in tinkering with a celluloid product until it moved faster and more smoothly.

Even if faced with a script with only the wispiest of plots, he’d sit down on the set, pull out a big yellow legal pad, and scribble down dialogue that made audiences enjoy this scene and forget about the overall lack of a substantial story, recalled Kirk Douglas about a turning point in their 1952 western, The Big Sky.

An even more telling example of this is in the sexually charged encounter between Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe and Dorothy Malone’s Acme Bookshops proprietess in The Big Sleep. The plot of the film is almost preposterously serpentine (even author Raymond Chandler had trouble recalling the killer), but the fencing between the private eye and the bespectacled but seductive bibliophile in this scene remains fondly recalled three-quarters of a century later.

Hawks got his start in film at the technical end during the silent era as a prop man, then parlayed some training in architectural drawing at school to land a job building a set for a Douglas Fairbanks film. Part of the reason why he commanded so much respect on a film set was that he had performed so many functions before finally getting a chance as a director: assistant director, casting director, script supervisor, screenwriter, editor and producer.

While possessing his own ideas on how a scene would work, Hawks was so self-assured that he allowed those he worked with to arrive at the solution themselves. He encouraged actors to improvise (as demonstrated vividly and brilliantly in “Self-Styled Siren” film blogger Farran Smith Nehme’s analysis of Rosalind Russell’s performance in His Girl Friday).

Angie Dickinson, who worked with him on Rio Bravo, related Hawks’ indirect approach in this interview for the Web site “Ain’t It Cool”:

“Hawks was tough, because he would not really tell you what to do. He would just sort of get around to what he was after, because, and I finally analyzed it, if he told you what to do it wouldn’t come from you, so he had to make you, through osmosis, do what he had in mind, but not specifically.”

Henry Adams’ terse description of Theodore Roosevelt may be applied just as easily to Hawks: “he was pure act.” A racing car and airplane aficionado, he reminded listeners that the essence of movies was motion pictures. Unenthusiastic about sending messages through his work, he was equally unpretentious about working well but swiftly and within budget. (On Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion death scenes in The Wild Bunch: “Oh, hell, I can kill and bury ten guys in the time it takes him to kill one.”)

Adept at fashioning rapid dialogue, Hawks was a slow, deliberate talker himself. It forced the listener to hang on his every word, only reinforcing his reputation for gravitas.

John Ford, Hawks’ good friend, bestowed on him the nickname “The Silver Fox,” in simultaneous tribute to his exalted reputation as a ladies’ man and his white hair. Though many of his films reflected his Hemingwayesque appreciation for the skill and sang froid required by male professionals such as airplane flyers, racing-car drivers, soldiers and hunters, they never wasted the opportunity to highlight self-confident, wisecracking women too wise to tolerate nonsense.

Three actresses were especially shaped under his direction:

*Lauren Bacall attracted attention in her film debut, To Have and Have Not, as Hawks reportedly based her cool, brassy, athletic persona—even her onscreen nickname “Slim”—on his wife at the time, Nancy Gross.

*Marilyn Monroe took a major step forward in her career by moving from eye-candy adornment to sexy but vulnerable in Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

*Angie Dickinson enjoyed a career-making performance, after only four years in the business, as the traveling card shark who holds her own against sheriff John Wayne through humor, flirtation, and a steely refusal to be wronged in Rio Bravo. (Do I even have to mention that the actress appears on the right, with the director and The Duke, in the image accompanying this post?)

Even after all his late-career attention, “Hawks remained the least understood among the great American directors,” Bogdanovich wrote in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. “But his films represent one of the most vivid, varied, yet consistent, bodies of work in movies; ironically, too, perhaps the most typically American. Which maybe explains why his pictures don't date as so many do, even the best: he touched some parts of the American psyche that are there forever.”

Quote of the Day (Peter Bogdanovich, on the Magnetism of Montgomery Clift)

“[Montgomery] Clift had been a kind of unacknowledged leader. His performances in [Howard] Hawks’ Red River (his first movie, though [Fred] Zinnemann’s The Search was released earlier), in [William] Wyler’s The Heiress, in [George] Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, heralded a new acting style. It came to be known, inaccurately, as the Method. After Clift came Brando, and after Brando, James Dean. Clift was the purest, the least mannered of these actors, perhaps the most sensitive, certainly the most poetic. He was also remarkably beautiful. Over eight years he acted in eight films, became a teenage heartthrob as well as a popular star with older audiences. He was nominated for Best Actor Oscars three times in six years and should have won each time. He gave at least four performances – in Red River, in A Place in the Sun, in I Confess and in Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity – that remain among the finest anyone has given in the movies.”— Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Hell’s in It: Portraits and Conversations (2004)

Montgomery Clift was born 100 years ago today in Omaha, Neb. Bogdanovich describes meeting this “most romantic and touching actor of his generation” at a 1961 showing of I Confess at a New York revival house.

As a result of a horrifying car accident three years before that wrecked his looks, Clift was on the downside of his career and five years away from his death at age 46. (I discussed that career- and life-changing incident in this post from 11 years ago.)

Bogdanovich’s narration of this encounter is profoundly poignant and moving. But to get beyond the tragic facts of his life to why we continue to value Clift’s work—the sheer labor, intensity and sensitivity he brought to each role—I recommend this post from the blog “And So It Begins” by director Alex Withrow.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Peter Bogdanovich, Link Between Welles and Tarantino)

July 30, 1939— Peter Bogdanovich, a film aficionado who parlayed his obsession into a 50-year directing career in which early success was followed by crushing commercial and personal disappointment, was born in Kingston, NY.

The men that Bogdanovich admired most—the likes of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, and Buster Keaton—invented the grammar of film practically out of whole cloth from the Twenties to the Forties, while still bringing their own life experiences and immersion in other media. 

Bogdanovich was part of a later generation who grew up with film as much a part of their language as English, thanks to obsessive viewing, first on TV as children, then, as adults, through film schools (George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma) or another artistic institution (in Bogdanovich’s case, the Museum of Modern Art, where he served as a programmer in the early Sixties).

The natural culmination of this habit of obsessive viewing might be Quentin Tarantino, who rose from video-store clerk to Oscar-winning auteur over the last quarter century. Tarantino is enough of a fan that he has had Bogdanovich stay as a house guest for an extended period.

Over the years, Bogdanovich has been targeted with so much opprobrium—first jealousy, because of his initial trio of successful movies (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc?, and Paper Moon), then scorn, because of his relationship with model-turned-actress Cybill Shepherd—that he might be forgiven for feeling gratitude to the younger Tarantino. 

But I would argue that Bogdanovich comes from a far different intellectual place than Tarantino: not just programming notes he wrote for MOMA, but also his Esquire film criticism. Had he never gotten behind a camera, he would have contributed just as significantly to the art of film through his commentary.

I also admit to being much captivated by his appearance in the late Nineties at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he was promoting long-ago interviews with great directors, Who the Devil Made It.  

 From the moment he took to the podium, he held the audience in thrall, whether through funny derisive commentary about one of  his Last Picture Show actors, Timothy Bottoms, inside stories of films in which he was involved (and a near-miss: Lonesome Dove), and his expert mimicking of James Stewart, John Wayne and Alfred Hitchcock.

Bogdanovich might have never achieved all that he wished from his career—and, in fact, experienced severe personal and commercial let-downs in the late Seventies and early Eighties—but his films evince taste, intelligence, humor and warmth. In the best sense, he has tried to create his own works not so much by copying the camera movements of the masters he loved but by channeling the hearts of these films.

(Photo of Peter Bogdanovich taken at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, March 7, 2008, and uploaded three days later by Eliaws.)

This Day in Film History (Birth of Leo McCarey, The Man Behind Stan, Ollie, and Cary)

October 3, 1898—Leo McCarey, a three-time Oscar-winning director, screenwriter and producer whose films reflected his own considerable charm and humor, was born in Los Angeles, Calif.
 

McCarey created the rom-com-as-weepie with Love Affair and its high-gloss color remake, An Affair to Remember (and thus, indirectly inspired Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle); helmed one of the archetypal “screwball comedies,” The Awful Truth; and brought together Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as perhaps film’s most successful comedy pair.

The son of an Irish-American boxing promoter, McCarey, in his waggish recollections, stumbled into Hollywood. Having failed as a copper miner, vaudeville songwriter, and middleweight slugger, he became a lawyer at the urging of his father, only to find this, too, an uncongenial pursuit.

Then one day, in a divorce action, the young lawyer, finding out his client was a wife-beater, quit the case, whereupon he was chased out of the courtroom and down the street. “After about three blocks, I lost him and I kept running out to Hollywood.” (The young admirer to whom he related this anecdote, Peter Bogdanovich, used it to kick off his own valentine to the early movie industry, Nickelodeon, even getting his hero a name—Leo Hartigan—that echoed McCarey’s.)

To his vast amusement, McCarey discovered that the skills he had developed to sway juries also impressed studio executives. “Because of my legal education I had developed quite a vocabulary,” he recalled to Bogdanovich, in an interview collected in the latter's Who the Devil Made It, “and the heads of the studios in those days didn’t have the advantage of advanced education. And they thought I was brilliant because I used big words. So they made a director out of me at the end of the picture! I was script girl and at the end of the picture, they were measuring me for jodhpurs!”

Working with comedians such as Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers honed McCarey's ability to enhance scripts through improvisation, and to coax expert performances from actors who could bedevil other directors.

Many colleagues regarded McCarey as handsome, humorous and suave as Cary Grant, but the two worked uneasily if productively on four films: The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Once Upon a Honeymoon, and An Affair to Remember. “Of the sixteen hours a day when he's awake I don't think there are twenty minutes when he is not complaining,” the director griped. “I've never seen a man more constantly in turmoil.” 

Though readily acknowledging that the actor’s sense of humor was “extraordinary,” McCarey could not really get over that Grant had tried to buy his way out of The Awful Truth and that, during the making of that movie (which, incidentally, ended up winning winning McCarey a Best Director Oscar), Grant had tried to imitate his style and personality. 

As that complaint suggests, McCarey could nurse a grudge for years—so much so that, he told fellow director Edward Dmytryk, he had charged Paramount “a half-million more than it should” because the studio threw him off the lot the moment a picture he was making for them was completed.

At the same time, McCarey was friendly, without the neuroses endemic to the industry, and a devout Roman Catholic who made what became, in effect, great recruitment films for the priesthood and sisterhood, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, both starring Bing Crosby.

The sunny Going My Way came out the same year (1944) as one of the darkest of all film noirs, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. When the Oscars came, Going My Way almost totally eclipsed its rival, and McCarey himself picked up awards for Best Screenplay and Best Director. Wilder didn't take his losses well at all: as McCarey walked up to collect his Best Director statuette, his rival stuck his foot out to trip him!

In his last two decades, McCarey’s productivity slackened because his health became more uncertain. A problem he had had with alcohol for years was now compounded by an addiction to painkillers he had developed after an auto accident in 1940. His reputation also took a hit after the release of My Son John (1952), an almost hilariously hysterical red-baiting film released at the zenith of the McCarthy era, and his appearance as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But at his best, he could make listeners guffaw, cry, and do both in quite succession, including his two with Bing Crosby, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, and his own personal favorite, Make Way for Tomorrow, about an elderly couple forced to live on the tender mercies of their not-so-helpful adult children. In the gallery of great directors that Bogdanovich interviewed for Who the Devil Made It--including Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, and Otto Preminger--McCarey comes across as the funniest and most humane.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Robert Mitchum, Postwar King of Cool)

August 6, 1917— Robert Mitchum, whose image of anti-heroic cool made him an emblem of postwar disillusionment even as it masked his very real concern for his work, was born in Bridgeport, Conn. 

Mitchum’s list of noteworthy quotes is long and often hilariously crusty (e.g., “Young actors love me--they think if that big slob can make it, there's a chance for us”), and Lee Server's 2001 biography was titled, all too appropriately, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don't Care.”  The actor’s contempt for filmmaking as a haven for bullies and pretenders was real enough. In these circumstances, it was better that he never give such individuals the satisfaction of thinking he cared about the work. 

Except that, sometimes, it leaked out. While directing Mitchum in El Dorado, an astonished Howard Hawks exclaimed, “You’re a big phony—you’re one of the hardest-working guys I ever saw.”

“Don’t tell anybody,” Mitchum said wryly.

Even industry talent who could not overlook Mitchum’s flip remarks or his penchant for spectacular hellraising still found it hard not to acknowledge what he brought to the screen, such as director Don Siegel, who, in a 1968 interview included in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1997 Who the Devil Made It, recalled their work on The Big Steal (1949), made after the actor’s arrest and conviction for marijuana usage:

“When Mitchum wasn't drunk, which was infrequent, I got along very well with him. He has his own inimitable style. It's impossible to give him a reading and one shouldn't, because his delivery is entirely different. I have a great deal of respect for him—I think it's his privilege and he's very successful doing it. He leads a very strange life. Maybe next week I'll be working with him. I don't look forward to it.”

The fact that Siegel thought he might work with him again said something about the actor’s enduring appeal, not just to audiences but to a variety of directors who employed him in a surprising array of roles. 

Before WWII, Mitchum’s famous sleepy-eyed appearance (“Old Rumple Eyes” was one of his nicknames) might have led him to be typecast simply as a hood. But the horrors of a world lurching out of control led audiences to see him as an Everyman just trying to hold his own, and the actor’s own difficult background (poverty in Bridgeport, arrest as a teenage hobo that led to work on a chain gang, that aforementioned pot bust) gave him an instinctive feel for his characters (often drifters and loners) that compensated for his lack of thespian training. 

In particular, in film noir (Out of the Past) and neo-noir (Farewell, My Lovely), Mitchum seemed such an archetypal representative of a world he never made that many would have been surprised to learn he hadn’t been born in a raincoat, fending off dangerous women. 

In the end, consider his range: romantic lead (Two for the Seesaw), alcoholic sheriff (El Dorado), sensitive middle-aged Irish schoolteacher (Ryan’s Daughter), small-time hood (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), and an insolent, terrifying sexual predator out for revenge against the lawyer who helped put him away (Cape Fear). Above all, there is his breakout role as the war-weary but thoughtful Captain Walker in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), which landed him his first and only Oscar nomination. His company commander--weary beyond all measure, but committed equally to achieving his mission and looking out for his men--is a virtual prototype for Tom Hanks' similar role in Saving Private Ryan.

Mitchum passed away in 1997, only one day before his co-star in the 1978 Philip Marlowe mystery, The Big Sleep, James Stewart. The two embodied two powerful images of the American male: one, of the devil-may-care variety; the other, of American decency. But maybe they had more in common than might at first appear. In both actors' films, their American male comes under enormous pressure, and audiences believed instinctively that each was reacting according to his nature.