‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ and ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence’ in ‘The Fabelmans’

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The director represented the most on this blog is Steven Spielberg. To see the posts about him, go to the column at right, scroll down to the word cloud, and click on his name. Yesterday was Spielberg’s 77th birthday, and in honor of the occasion, here’s a post about his most recent, and most personal, film, The Fabelmans (2022).

The first and most notable movie-in-scene comes right at the beginning, when young Sammy Fabelman and his family go to the movies to see The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Like much of Fabelmans, it’s closely tied to an incident in Spielberg’s early life. He talked about it in 2009, when he received an award named after Cecil B.De Mille, the director of The Greatest Show, at the Golden Globes. A You Tuber has cleverly edited the relevant scenes from The Fabelmans into Spielberg’s speech.

When Sammy is a bit older, he goes with his Boy Scout buddies to see John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). They want to horse around, but he’s transfixed by what he sees on the screen, in this case a close-up giving our first view of the outlaw Valance, played by Lee Marvin, and his old-fashioned highwayman line, “Stand and deliver.” Spielberg cuts to the Western opus of Sammy’s own that Ford has inspired. (I apologize for this clip having no sound. I’ll try to find some and fix it.)

As is well known, Ford was one of Spielberg’s biggest influences, and he paid the master homage by inserting a scene from The Quiet Man into E.T., and Liberty Valance (previously) into Munich. But probably his most touching tribute comes at the end of The Fabelmans. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it for you.

*Spoiler alert* ‘Cluny Brown’ in ‘She’s Funny That Way’/’Squirrels to the Nuts’

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So, yes, spoiler alert. This post gives away a key plot point in Peter Bogdanovich’s final film, which was titled She’s Funny That Way when it was released in 2014, but which Bogdanovich originally wanted to call Squirrels to the Nuts. A couple of years before the director died, in 2022, a film scholar and archivist named James Kenney recently found a copy of Bogdanovich’s long-missing original edit, which is twenty minutes longer than the 93-minute running time of She’s Funny That Way. Kenney has been screening the director’s cut under the original title, and I caught up with it at a recent showing at the Athenaeum in Philadelphia.

The spoiler comes in the next paragraph so if you have any plans to see the movie, stop reading here.

The kind of odd premise of the film, a light comedy, is that famous director Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson) has a predilection for hiring prostitutes, availing himself of their services, and then asking them if this is the life they truly want for themselves, if it’s their “place.” They tend to answer in the negative, after which Arnold delivers a speech (it’s the same speech every time):

Nobody can tell you where your place is. Where’s my place? Where is anybody’s place? I’ll tell you where it is. Wherever you’re happy, that’s your place. And happiness is a matter of purely personal adjustment to your environment. You’re the sole judge. In Hyde Park, for instance, some people like to feed nuts to the squirrels. But if it makes you happy to feed squirrels to the nuts, who am to say, “Nuts to the squirrels”?

Then he says that if they promise to give up prostitution and follow their dream, he will give them $30,000, which he happens to have in. his briefcase. They all say yes. Or anyway, that’s the impression we get from a half dozen women, all of them now accomplished professionals, Arnold encounters in the course of the movie. When each one spies him, she shouts, “Squirrels to the nuts!” and attempts to wrap her arms around him in gratitude. On a couple of occasions, he’s accompanied by his wife, Delta (Kathryn Hahn), who is bemused, to put it mildly.

In the last scene, the play Arnold has directed has just opened and the company has gathered in Sardi’s restaurant to wait for the reviews. A rave airs on TV. Then someone switches to a channel where a the 1947 Ernst Lubitsch film Cluny Brown (Lubitsch’s last), with Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, is playing.

Delta turns to Arnold and says “You mean after all that, it wasn’t even original!?!” For once, Arnold has nothing so say. Cut to black.

‘Rio Bravo’ and ‘Touch of Evil’ in ‘Get Shorty’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie in theater, Movie on TV set, Movies in movies4 Comments

Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty (1995) is as movie-besotted a movie as they come. It’s based on Elmore Leonard’s novel and more broadly on Leonard’s mostly unhappy experiences of seeing his books butchered by Hollywood. (Get Shorty — whose screenplay is by Scott Frank — and Jackie Brown, which came out two years later, represented a change for the better.)

The cinematic references are basically everywhere: on the walls, adorned with posters for The Thin Man and Casablanca; on the back of protagonist Chili Palmer (John Travolta)–he wears “a black leather jacket, fingertip length like the one Pacino wore in ‘Serpico’”; and in the characters’ heads. The movies are their frame of reference.

Chili, a benign mob collector (in another film he would be a hit man), is a movie buff to beat the band. For some complicated plot reasons, his work takes him to Hollywood, where he is thrilled to meet C-movie queen Karen Flores (Rene Russo):

Karen: I know I’m better than what I’ve been doing all these years, walking around in fuck-me pumps and a tank-top, waiting until it was time to scream.

Chili: Yeah, but what a scream.

Karen: Oh yeah, it’s a real talent. Look, all I’m saying is, what I wouldn’t give for the chance to say one really great line. You know, like in that great Bette Davis movie where she says, “I’d kiss you… “

Chili: “But I just washed my hair

The Davis film is The Cabin in the Cotton (1932)

There are also references to fake movies, many of them in the filmography of the celebrated actor Martin Weir (Danny De Vito), who is riding high with his starring turn in the prestige picture Napoleon. Out for a meal with producer Harry Zinn (Gene Hackman), Chili spots Weir at a hip eatery:

Chili: That’s Martin Weir! He’s the one who played the mob guy-turned snitch in “Cyclone!”

Harry: One of his best parts.

Chili: No, his best part was when he played the crippled gay guy who climbed Mt. Whitney.

Harry: “Ride the Clouds.” Good picture.

Chili wants to be in the movies, he just doesn’t know in what capacity. An actor? “Well, I could see myself in the parts that Robert De Niro plays,” he muses. “Or maybe even, an Al Pacino movie, you know, playing a real hard-on. But I couldn’t see myself in those movies where three grown-up guys get left with a baby, and so they act like three grown-up assholes, acting all cute.” (The last line is of course a dig at Three Men and a Baby, and probably also Travolta’s own Look Who’s Talking. Get Shorty is full of such Easter eggs.)

It’s not surprising that Chili and Karen should hook up — hey, it’s a movie! — but the scene in which the sparks first fly is fresh, as well as providing entry to this blog. It’s also a great bit of acting by both — Travolta showing a guy really loving a movie, and Russo showing being surprised at being totally charmed by same. The film is Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), with Welles, Marlene Dietrich, and Charlton Heston.

In the second movie-in-movie scene, Chili is sleeping over at Karen’s when he oddly hears the TV on downstairs. He goes to investigate and, Chili being Chili, swiftly IDs the Howard Hawks Western that’s playing. And Chili being Chili, he is transfixed by the scene, despite the fact that it’s weird and scary that the TV should be on at all.

It turns out the television was turned on by a bad guy named Bo Catlett (Delroy Lindo). Some time later, Delroy meets up again with Chili and references their earlier encounter, watching “John Wayne and Dean Martin shooting bad guys in El Dorado.”

Chili is quick to correct: “That was Rio Bravo. Robert Mitchum played the drunk in El Dorado. Dean Martin played the drunk in Rio Bravo. Basically, it was the same part. Now John Wayne, he did the same in both. He played John Wayne.”

Bo responds (and I totally get how he feels): “Man, I can’t wait for you to be dead.”

Neo-noir II: ‘This Gun for Hire’ and ‘Roman Holiday’ in ‘L.A. Confidential’

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In 1997, four years after Robert Benton’s Twilight, Curtis Hanson made the early-’50s period piece L.A. Confidential. The movie garnered a lot of praise: Oscars for its screenplay (adapted from James Ellroy’s novel of the same name) and Kim Basinger’s performance, and Best Picture nods from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. (It got beaten out for the Academy Award by the juggernaut Titanic.)

A quarter-century on, the movie holds up pretty well, and one of the best things about is the way it depicts L.A. of the time as so wrapped up in the Dream Factory that it doesn’t know what’s real and what’s Hollywood fantasy. This is clear from the opening-credit sequence, narrated by the gossip-purveyor played by Danny DeVito (another of the best things about it).

Badge of Honor is a fictional show, clearly based on Dragnet, with its valorizing portrayal of the LAPD. But the the titles on the marquees that appear just about every time the characters take a stroll are of real films, judiciously selected by Hanson for maximum ironic effect.
Danny DeVito and Kevin Spacey, as a bent cop; “When Worlds Collide” in the background.
For more on the movie back-lighting Russell Crowe, see ‘The Bad and the Beautiful’ in ‘Two Weeks in Another Town’

Mild spoiler to follow. At the center of the plot, and Exhibit A in the fantasy-reality mixup, is an enterprise (apparently based on a real one) in which prostitutes are made up, or have had plastic surgery, to resemble movie stars. Basinger’s character is supposed to be Veronica Lake, and her john is apparently so into the deception that he insists on screening Lake movies at their assignations — here, the noir This Gun for Hire. Fans of Taxi Driver should pay attention to the first words out of Alan Ladd’s mouth.

It’s a delicious moment, but as L.A. Confidential goes on, the movie-in-movie moments get a bit obvious. Not once, but twice, cops bust open the door to scenes of degradation and violence to find a TV tuned to something anodyne (in one case the 1932 cartoon “Noah’s Outing,” in the other, Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall). And (another spoiler) when tormented cop Crowe and heart-of-gold hooker Basinger fall for each other, is it any surprise that their date movie is Roman Holiday? Yup, we get it: they want to escape to a world that’s less, well, noir.

Neo-noir I: ‘Downhill Racer’ in ‘Twilight’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie on TV set, Movies in movies1 Comment

Let’s lift a glass and drink to Robert Benton, a modest man of more than modest talent. Benton was born in Waxahachie, Texas, in 1932, attended the University of Texas, and made his way — as so many others have done before and since — to New York City. There he collaborated with a UT buddy, Harvey Schmidt (later to co-write The Fantasticks) on a clever book called The In and Out Book, and eventually landed a job as art director of Esquire magazine, then at the center of the New Journalism and other manifestations of American hipness. Benton and another Esquire editor, David Newman, created the magazine’s annual Dubious Achievement Awards, wrote a clever book of their own, and wrote the script of a clever musical, It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman, which I saw on Broadway in 1966.

The following year, Benton and Newman really made a splash with their first screenplay, for Bonnie and Clyde. Benton made the move to directing in 1972 with the revisionist western Bad Company, and subsequently released a string of classics, near-classics, and interesting failures, including The Late Show, Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart, Billy Bathgate, and Nobody’s Fool. That last film, released in 1994, starred Paul Newman, and he and Benton reunited four years later forTwilight, an elegiac private eye picture. Newman is the detective, Harry Ross, who tries to sort out the truth and cling to a code of honor, however tattered.

That’s right, it’s updated Raymond Chandler, and frankly, Robert Altman did it better in The Long Goodbye. But it’s fun to watch Newman and fellow old pros Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, M. Emmett Walsh, James Garner, and Stockard Channing mix it up with the talented newcomers Reese Witherspoon, Margo Martindale, and Liev Schreiber.

The movie-in-movie scene is a corker. Hackman plays Jack Ames, an actor who’s battling cancer. He and Harry have a complicated relationship, playing cards and avoiding mutually agreed on sensitive topics. Like a lot of aging stars, apparently, Jack likes watching his own old movies, in this case, Downhill Racer (1969).

The Twilight scene is a nice one for a number of reasons, including the appreciation Benton — as both writer and director — shows for the power of silence.

‘Springtime,’ Fake Western, and Fake Quiz Show in ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’

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After viewing Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) — directed by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wolfgang Reitherman — I am of the mind that there are two terrific things about the movie. The first is the animation of the dalmatian puppies, which is incredibly lifelike and endearing. The second (related) is the use of movies-in-movie.

Specifically, One Hundred and Dalmations shows, in a vivid and clever way, film’s ability to rivet us. As this blog has repeatedly noted, the power doesn’t necessarily diminish when the film is schlocky. A bit more than us humans, the puppies — especially Lucky, who seems to want to climb into the TV, even when a commercial is on — are transfixed by a good story, to the point of forgetting it’s not real. And especially when the hero is a dog.

The two bad guys entrusted with keeping watch over the dognapped puppies are similarly transported — to the point of neglecting their duties — by the quiz show What’s My Crime?, which by this time I probably have to point out was a takeoff on the then-popular series What’s My Line? Not surprisingly, Lucky, the sort of audience member every filmmaker wants, is loving it too.

I hate to say it, but to me the worst clip is the real one. We’re back with the bad guys and the puppies. On the telly is a Disney short from 1929, “Springtime,” complete with dancing flowers. It’s so blah it can’t even hold Horace and Jasper’s attention. But the doggies are into it. Especially — even after mayhem breaks out — Lucky.

‘Double Indemnity’ in ‘Ransom for a Dead Man’

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This Columbo pilot from 1971 doesn’t quite fit into the trope of aging-actresses-watching-their-old-movies, but it’s a kissing cousin, so I’m going to take a look at it and then say farewell to ’70s TV detective series. (I hope.)

It’s actually the second movie-length pilot for the Peter Falk series, the first one having aired back in 1968. Here, Falk is the Columbo the world would come to know and love, smoking and shambling in his threadbare raincoat. Also in keeping with the soon-to-be-familiar formula, the murder takes place early on (at about the 2:15 mark) and there is no mystery about it. We see Leslie Williams (played by Lee Grant, 46 years old at the time, so not that aging) shoot her husband at point blank range, and we spend the rest of the episode watching Columbo come to suspect her, and then trap her.

Indeed, one of the fun things about the episode, which was directed by Richard Irving, with a script by Dean Hargrove, is Leslie’s realization of what he’s up to, and then calling him out on it.

Leslie: You know, Columbo, you’re almost likable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it’s the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks.

Columbo: Me? Tricks?

Leslie: The humility, the seeming absent-mindedness, the uh, homey anecdotes about the family: the wife, you know?

Columbo: Really?

Leslie: Yeah, Lieutenant Columbo, fumbling and stumbling along. But it’s always the jugular that he’s after. And I imagine that, more often than not, he’s successful.

Columbo: I appreciate that compliment, Mrs. Williams, and I particularly appreciate it coming from you.

The movie-in-movie scene comes about halfway in. Leslie walks in as her stepdaughter, Margaret (Patricia Mattick), is eating breakfast and watching TV.

I love it that Irving and Hargrove (and I’ll thrown in Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link, who get story credit) chose Double Indemnity as the movie on the screen. It is a classic, perhaps the classic, of film noir, with credits to die for: directed by Billy Wilder, screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by James M. Cain, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. (A bit sadly, they were better known in 1971 for their TV stints in The Big Valley and My Three Sons.)

What’s more, the clip points up the ways in which Ransom for a Dead Man echoes Double Indemnity. There’s no insurance scheme in the Columbo episode, but both are about cold-blooded cases of husband-cide. And knowing Double Indemnity adds an extra wrinkly to Ransom. In Wilder’s film, it’s the victim’s daughter who first realizes the person responsible for her father’s murder is her stepmother, Stanwyck. You can just imagine Margaret coming to this point in the movie and saying to herself, “Hey, wait a minute…”

‘Rebecca’ in ‘Cannon’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie somewhere else, Movies in TV2 Comments

I keep finding new examples of 1970s TV detective dramas with aging actresses playing aging actresses who, a la Sunset Boulevard, watch their own old movies. After I wrote about Columbo episodes starring Janet Leigh and Anne Baxter (Baxter’s actually not the one doing the watching), reader Ronald Landri clued me in to an episode of Cannon with Joan Fontaine in the aging siren role.

Great idea but hard to execute for the blog, since I needed to see (and post) the scene, and episodes of Cannon — which starred William Conrad as a portly private eye — are quite hard to come by. They’re not streaming anywhere, and I couldn’t find a copy of the DVD on Amazon or Ebay. Fortunately, nineteen libraries worldwide own the DVD set of Cannon, season five, and I was able to order one through Interlibrary Loan.

The episode was called “The Star,” and it aired on December 10, 1975. The date is important since the Janet Leigh Columbo episode, “Forgotten Lady,” aired barely three months before, and “The Star” is a pretty clear rip-off of it.

Fontaine plays Thelma Cain, who (of course) lives in the past. She’s engaged Cannon because her wayward son is missing. But some rough characters are also on the chase, and Cannon barely escapes from their clutches. He heads back to Cain’s mansion, which she shares with her (suspiciously) young husband.

Yes, it’s Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940); Fontaine, as the second Mrs. de Winter, is having her classic confrontation with the diabolical Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson). It probably wasn’t the best idea for the Cannon director (William Wiard) and writer (Margaret Armen) to include this scene. Even in black and white and projected on Cannon’s capacious body, it is so much better than “The Star” that one wants to avert one’s eyes. As even Cannon says, “I like that performance better.”

I came away from the episode with one question. It was done pretty much on the cheap, and so, in contrast to “Forgotten Lady” or (for that matter) Sunset Boulevard, the mise en scène doesn’t include lots of framed pictures of the star’s early days. With one exception. This portrait is in Thelma Cain’s parlor:

It’s clearly of the young Fontaine, sort of in the style of Renoir, and I’m quite curious as to how it was procured. But I can’t find it via Google search. I wonder if the Cannon folk commissioned it, and it’s now resting in someone’s attic. Probably one of life’s unanswerables.

‘Diner’ in ‘The Kominsky Method’

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The 2018-2021 Netflix series The Kominsky Method, produced and written by Chuck Lorre, had a lot of showbiz in-joke Easter eggs. There was the moment when Jon Cryer (playing himself as an awards-show presenter) shouts down a heckler named “Chuck”–presumably Lorre. It tickled me when some students in the acting class of Sandy Kominsky (Michael Douglas), students staged a scene from Lorre’s popular hit, critical whipping post Two and a Half Men. The somewhat pretentious Sandy cringed; the scene killed. And (spoiler alert), in the final season, Sandy–who has always been a those-who-can’t-do-teach kind of guy–gets cast in the title role of a big-budget version of The Old Man and the Sea, directed by Barry Levinson, playing himself.

But my favorite was the movie-in-movie scene in the penultimate episode, written by Lorre and directed by Andy Tennant. Gathered around the TV are Sandy, his ex-wife (Katherine Turner), their daughter, Mindy (Sarah Baker), and Mindy’s husband, Martin (Paul Reiser, going with the unfortunate balding pony tail look).

It’s a classic scene from Levinson’s first movie, Diner (1982), featuring Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Kevin Bacon, and–of course–Reiser himself, more or less unrecognizable. As Sandy says, “Hard to believe these guys were unknown actors when Barry cast them.”

Delicious.

? in ‘Across the Pacific’

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The Maltese Falcon (1941), Across the Pacific (1942), and Casablanca (a little later in 1942) make up a trio of films that interlock in complicated ways.

All three: star Humphrey Bogart, costar Sidney Greenstreet, released by Warner Brothers.

Falcon and Pacific: directed by John Huston, costar Mary Astor (whom the Bogie character calls “Angel”), Greenstreet character referred to as “the Fat Man.” (He’s even called that in the Across the Pacific newspaper ad, above.)

Falcon and Casablanca: costar Peter Lorre.

Pacific and Casablanca: Bogart character named “Rick,” film is set in the days just before Pearl Harbor.

Across the Pacific is the weakest of the three, but it’s the only one with a movie-in-movie scene, and hence it’s my subject today. Bogart is Rick Leland, who, as the movie opens, has been court-martialed from the U.S. Army for stealing. But things are not as they seem. He’s actually a spy on a top-secret mission, which involves him traveling on a Japanese ship from Nova Scotia to Yokahama. But the ship is held up in Panama, where the denouement takes place.

The whole thing is pretty ludicrous, not to mention racist. Rick at one point actually says, “They all look alike.” (Huston and Warner Brothers must have thought so, too: all the Japanese characters are played by people of Chinese descent. In 1942, of course, Japanese-Americans were otherwise engaged in internment camps.)

But by the time, the movie-in-movie scene comes around, all the plot points have been taken care of and we can get down to action. Rick’s contact has told him to go to a movie house, which turns out to service Panama’s apparently sizeable Japanese community. Rick sits down, and Huston very skillfully builds suspense that suddenly erupts in a climax reminiscent of HItchock’s Saboteur, which had come out just a few months earlier. Note the audio track, with its mix of audience titters, a crying baby, and the movie’s dialogue and soundtrack.

Now, you will have noticed the question mark in the title of this post. The usually reliable IMDB doesn’t name the film being shown, and I haven’t been able to find it in any other source. I happen to have a neighbor and occasional tennis partner named Satoru Saito, who is a professor of Japanese literature and film at Rutgers University. He was kind enough to take a look at the clip and reported:

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out the name of the film. The poster in the lobby (the same one as the outside) is a women’s magazine (Fujin koron) cover. As for what the characters are saying, it’s a bit hard because the woman is definitely not a Japanese speaker, and they are both reading off a script (the movie is likely a silent film, and I don’t know if what is being said accurately reflects the silent movie). The dialogue is something like this:

The man: “I will make sure to use my time only for you.  I won’t go out with Hanako.   For ___ reason, I couldn’t help it.”

Woman: “I am happy to hear that…. Oh my classmates are here.”

Classmates: “They are very touchy.”

Man: “You must be tired; let’s go for some tea.”

Woman: “I don’t think I can today.”

Man: “Don’t say that, let’s go.”

So that’s all I got. If anybody has a clue to what this movie is, I would be delighted to hear it.