Tag: 1990s

‘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 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.

‘Beast with a Gun,’ ‘Detroit 9000’ and ‘Dirty Mary Crazy Larry ‘ in ‘Jackie Brown’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie on TV set, Movies in moviesLeave a comment

Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown isn’t a very good movie, but it’s interesting, which is not nothing. Re-watching the 1997 film — an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch — on HBO Max, I was struck, first, by how self-indulgent Tarantino is and, second, how he carries self-indulgence off better than most. Much of the film’s two hour and thirty-four-minute running time is occupied by Tarantino sticking a camera in front of two or three of his formidable cast (Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Samuel L. Jackson, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, Robert De Niro), and then not turning it off for a long time. Far from being boring, the long takes usually foment a kind of fascination.

The thing I found most interesting about the movie was how, despite being set in the mid-’90s present tense, it is firmly planted in the 1970s. That applies to the soundtrack, which kicks off with Bobby Womack’s rousing “Across 110th Street” and includes a couple of great Philadelphia soul tunes from the Delfonics, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” and “La-la Means I Love You.” The characters played by Grier and Forster actually bond over the Delfonics, and another feature of the film is how Tarantino’s camera lingers over the interesting faces of those two ’70s icons, neither in the first bloom of youth.

The other really ’70s thing about Jackie Brown is the movies-in-movie aspect. Jackson plays a two-bit gun smuggler named Ordell Robbie and Fonda his surfer-girl girlfriend. At one point Ordell walks in on her smoking a bong:

Ordell: Goddamn girl, you gettin’ high already? It’s just 2 o’clock!

Melanie: [chuckling] It’s that late?

Ordell: You know you smoke too much of that shit, that shit gonna rob you of your own ambition.

Melanie: Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV.

Indeed, the TV is always on in the apartment, and what do you know, it’s tuned to a channel whose continuous fare, somehow, is 1970s grindhouse flicks. The first we glimpse is Beast with a Gun (1977). IMDB’s plot summary: “In Italy, escaped sadistic killer Nanni Vitali and his henchmen terrorize the populace and seek revenge against those responsible for Vitali’s incarceration.”

And right, Helmut Berger it is.

Later, Jackie Brown (Grier), in a red dress, walks by the TV as it’s playing Detroit 9000, a 1973 blaxploitation flick which Tarantrino likes so much he sponsored its reissue on DVD a few years back.

The most delicious moment is Fonda watching Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1973). How come? Well, it stars her dad, Peter — shown here with Susan George, kind of a ’70s icon herself.

‘King Kong’ and ‘Rebecca’ in ‘The Cider House Rules’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie in theater, Movie somewhere else, Movies in moviesLeave a comment

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The Cider House Rules (1985) is my favorite John Irving novel, and I liked the 1999 film adaptation by Lasse Hallström a lot, too. Preparing this post made me appreciate a particular difference between the two versions. In the book, characters are always reading Victorian novels: Dickens’s David Copperfield, Little Dorritt, and Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. That’s no coincidence, for Irving successfully (in my view) modeled his own book after these older works.

Skimming through the novel, which takes place during World War II, I find only one reference to a film. The main character, Homer Larch, who has been raised in a Maine orphanage run by the obstetrician Dr. Wilber Larch, goes to his first drive-in movie, also, judging by his reaction, his first movie of any kind.

… a gigantic image filled the sky. It is something’s mouth! thought Homer Wells. The camera backed, or rather, lurched away. Something’s head-a kind of horse! thought Homer Wells. It was a camel, actually, but Homer Wells had never seen a camel, or a picture of one; he thought it was a horribly deformed horse-a mutant horse! Perhaps some ghastly fetus-phase of a horse! The camera staggered back farther. Mounted by the camel’s grotesque hump was a black-skinned man almost entirely concealed in white wrapping-bandages! thought Homer Wells. The ferocious black Arab nomad brandished a frightening curved sword; whacking the lumbering camel with the flat of the blade, he drove the beast into a faulty, staggering gallop across such endless sand dunes that the animal and its rider were soon only a speck on the vast horizon. Suddenly, music! Homer jumped. Words! The titles, the names of the actors were written in the sand by an invisible hand.

It turns out to be a pirate picture, and the black man on the horse is never seen again, but Homer comes to identify with him–a Bedouin, a wanderer with no home. (And by the way, I assume Irving had a real pirate movie in mind, and I’d be interested in any thoughts or nominations for what it might have been.)

By contrast, the film version of Cider House (Irving won an Oscar for his screenplay) foregrounds movies. We’re given to understand that on movie night Dr. Larch (Michael Caine) screens the same film for the children and staff, because one movie, made way back in 1933 and showing a lot of wear and tear, is all he has has. Nobody, including Homer (Tobey Maguire), seems to mind.  In the clip, the movie scene starts at about the 1:45 mark.

Later, Fuzzy (the boy who says Kong thinks Fay Wray is his mother), ill and under a makeshift oxygen tent, has a private screening of King Kong.

Homer starts dating Candy Kendall (Charlize Theron) and we see them going to two movies, both starring Laurence Olivier. Here, they watch a scene from Rebecca (1940) where Olivier dances with Joan Fontaine. (The voice over is Dr. Larch, reciting a letter to Homer.)

Another time, they walk out of a theater having seen Wuthering Heights (1939), with Olivier and Merle Oberon, and discuss the movie. For not having seen many films, Homer shows himself to be a pretty sharp film critic.

CANDY
		(disappointed)
	But you looked as if you liked it.

			HOMER
		(smiling)
	I *did* like it. All I said was, 
	"It's not 'King Kong'."

What’s the Worst Fake Bad Movie?

On By Ben YagodaIn Movies in movies, Not real2 Comments

Careful readers of this blog know that there’s a category on it called “Not Real,” covering cases where the movie or TV show the characters are watching isn’t, you got it, real. You can see all such entries by navigating over to the right, scrolling down, pulling down the “Categories” menu, and clicking on “Not Real.”

A disproportionate number of those fake movies are pretty bad, obvious even in the brief glimpse we get of them. Examples would be Flames of Passion in Brief Encounter, Angels with Filthy Souls in Home Alone, Habeus Corpus in The Player, Garden Tool Massacre in the 1988 remake of The Blob, and Coed Frenzy in Blow Out. That badness isn’t really surprising. The director of the real movie is concentrating his or her creative energies on that one; the ersatz film serves to provide some sort of counterpoint, or merely to mock a tired genre. They’re sort of film-school exercises, and I imagine they’re a lot of fun to make.

This post contains a few more examples. At the end, there’s a poll where you can vote for the best worst fake movie of all time. And if you have any other nominees, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

When Christopher Guest’s For Your Consideration came out in 2006, I remember thinking that his “mockumentary” series (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, etc.) had pretty much played itself out, and that the only really funny thing was the (bad) movie within the movie, a holiday tearjerker called Home for Purim (Purim being perhaps the most minor of minor Jewish holidays).

I think my take holds up, at least regarding the brilliant excruciatingness of Made for Purim, which is set in the South, probably so as to put on display a dizzying array of bad Southern accents, and set in the ’40s, probably because why would you set a sentimental Purim movie in the ’40s? The clip below is a pretty generous look at it. At the head of  the holiday table is matriarch Esther Pischer (Catherine O’Hara); moving counter-clockwise there’s her son with the guitar (Christopher Moynihan), the Pischer patriarch (Harry Shearer), daughter Callie Pischer, and Callie’s special friend, played by Rachael Harris. (“I did meet a nice fella,” Callie had told Esther in a scenery-munching scene, “… and her name is Mary Pat!“) All are brandishing their traditional Purim noisemakers.

Here are the rest, in chronological order of the real film’s release. Singin’ in the Rain (1952), directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, is about the difficulties of the transition from silent films to talkies in the 1920s. All of these are on-display in a test screening of The Dueling Cavalier, with Kelly as Don Lockwood and Jean Hagen as absolutely-not-ready-for-sound silent star Lina Lamont. (The rustling of the pearls is an especially nice touch.)

Pretty much every review of Joe Dante’s Matinee (1993) includes the word “loving,” and that’s an apt designation for Dante’s take on the B-movies of the ’50s and early ’60s. Matinee, set in 1962, is about Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman),  not-so-loosely based on schlock producer William Castle. For showings of his latest production, Mant, Woolsey has rigged up buzzers under the seats in theaters — a nod to what Castle actually had done in 1959 for The Tingler.

This Mant clip is great fun, not only for such lines as, “The ant’s saliva must have gottin into Bill’s bloodstream and gone sraight to his brain,” but also for seeing such Hollywood pros as William Schallert (as the doctor) and Jesse White (as the theater owner). Cathy Moriarty isn’t such a veteran but she’s just right as Mrs. Mant.

Matinee’s counterpoint to Mant is The Shook-Up Shopping Cart, a not-so-loving version of wacky Disney comedies like The Love Bug. (The kids’ bored reaction suggest Dante’s view of the genre.) The clip stars Naomi Watts, just before she got big. And by the way, not to be a stickler, but has any movie theater been as brightly lit as the one in Matinee?

In Frank Oz’s Bowfinger, Steve Martin plays the title character, a wannabe producer who’s as schlocky as Lawrence Woolsey, but way less adept. His accountant has written a script called Chubby Rain, and Bowfinger wants to bring it to the screen, but can do so only if he gets action star Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy) for the lead role. Hilarity ensues, which I will spoil only enough to say that Chubby Rain finally gets made, and that it is truly horrible. (Unlike the Dueling Cavalier audience, this one unaccountably goes for it.) In the clip, Martin’s flanked by Jamie Kennedy and Christine Baranski (who’s also in Chubby), and next to Murphy is Heather Graham.

Finally, our shortest clip comes from Judd Apatow’s Funny People. Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a Sandler-like comedian who has been involved in even dumber properties than Sandler himself. At first we glimpse a poster for one of them, MerMan, with Elizabeth Banks, tagline “A love story that’s a little fishy.”

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Next comes a clip from Re-Do (Justin Long’s the straight man), which takes the premise of Look Who’s Talking and does what you wouldn’t think possible, makes it dumber.

 

‘Jaws’ in ‘Jurassic Park’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie somewhere else, Movies in movies1 Comment

I instituted the tag “Watching yourself” for movies in which an actor (A) plays an actor (B) and B watches a film in which A actually appeared. So, for example, in Two Weeks in Another Town, Kirk Douglas plays washed-up Hollywood star Jack Andrus, who in one scene watches a clip, supposedly of one of his old movies, but really of Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful. Click on “Watching yourself” in the Tag Cloud at bottom right if you want to see more examples.

I now realize “watching yourself” can apply to directors as well as writers. After all, Vincente Minelli directed both The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town, so the clip of the former in the latter could be considered a sort of Hitchcockian cameo. I’ve got another example, which I learned about via the sleuthing of Jeremy James Prutchick on YouTube. It’s a brief scene (don’t blink) from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). The creator of the cloned-dinosaur park, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), is admonishing lead programmer Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight–Seinfeld‘s Newman).

 

Don’t feel bad if you missed it — but in the last image, on the left side of Dennis’s computer monitor, is a scene from Spielberg’s first big hit, Jaws (1975): the one where Quint and Brody, on a boat, see the killer shark for the first time.

At another point, there’s another, totally out-of-sequence Jaws moment on the monitor, showing Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody. Prutchick helpfully enlarges it:

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Here’s Prutchick’s frame-by-frame breakdown of the scene, which also includes a second Jaws moment on the monitor.

 

 

‘Angels with Filthy Souls’ in ‘Home Alone’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie on TV set, Movies in movies, Not real2 Comments

Home Alone (1990; directed by Chris Columbus; conceived, written and produced by John Hughes) presses all the buttons. You’ve got your madcap humor, your cartoon violence, your patented John Hughes pathos, your upper-middle-class white Midwestern suburbanite setting, and (possibly the only element that still feels fresh and unpremeditated) your breakout performance by Macaulay Culkin as 8-year-old Kevin, who (it can’t be a spoiler if it’s the title of the movie) is inadvertently left home alone when his family flies to Paris for Christmas.

Ah yes, Christmas — that’s the other big button. Home Alone was conceived in and dedicated to the proposition of being a holiday movie. One way it establishes this is time-honored: having characters watch (on TV) Miracle on 34th Street, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and of course It’s a Wonderful Life. (The last is seen by the Kevin-less clan while in Paris, and is dubbed into French.)

There’s one other movie that’s featured in the film: Angels with Filthy Souls. Kevin finds a VHS tape of it and, presumably titillated by the title, slips it into the VCR. (It sure beats the the other choices on top of the player, the boomer rock of Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones.)

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He and the audience see what appears to be a 1930s film noir, in black and white of course. A trench-coated guy named Snakes, who has a very gangster look to him, pays a call on a private eye named Johnny. (Even if we couldn’t backwards-read the words “Private Investigator” on his  frosted-glass door, we could tell his occupation by the frosted-glass door itself.) There’s something odd about the clip, however. For one thing, Johnny has a really strong Chicago accent, not something often heard in movies; just listen to the way he says, “He’s upstairs, taking a bey-uth.” For another, Angels with Filthy Souls sounds just a little too over-the-top to be the title of a sequel to the real ’30s movie Angels with Dirty Faces. And finally, the shoot-him-full-of-lead sadistic violence, followed by the gleeful catchphrase-to-be, “Keep the change, ya filthy animal,” would in no way have passed muster with the Hollywood Hays office at the time.

Nevertheless, some people persisted for a long time in believing Angels with Dirty Souls was a real movie–including Seth Rogen, Chris Evans, and Nick Kroll.

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And also including Macaulay Culkin!

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I’m not sure what disabused Rogen of his error, but he would have known the truth had he read a 2015 Vanity Fair article that told the whole story of the conception and production of Angels, down to the care taken to recreate the noir look. Director of Photography Julio Macat

persuaded Columbus to shoot the sequence using the techniques and black-and-white negative film stock of movies from the 40s. The high-key lighting, high-contrast aesthetic would evoke “a cross between film noir and the really crazy stuff you see in early television, like Playhouse 90 or One Step Beyond,” said production designer John Muto.

Like most of the other interior shots in Home Alone, including all the scenes inside the McCallister family home, the sequence was shot on a sound stage in the abandoned New Trier West High School gymnasium. The entire set consisted of just a couple of walls. (Webster suspects that the walls were reused in the “real world” of the movie, for the set of the police office. “We didn’t have the biggest construction budget.”)

Johnny’s office was designed especially for maximum dramatic backlighting potential: pebbly-textured translucent glass on the door and a Palladian window that would sinisterly spotlight him at his desk through Venetian blinds.

As I suggested earlier, Home Alone is a well-oiled machine, and of course, true to the principle of Chekhov’s gun, Angels with Dirty Souls shows up again, and again, used by Kevin as part of his whole-house booby trap strategy. The second time, he’s trying to foil the inept crook Marv (Daniel Stern).

Hughes and Columbus were not done with Angels with Filthy Souls. Its sequel — Angels with Even Filthier Souls — shows up in their 1992 sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and repetitively is used to scare the officious concierge at the Plaza Hotel (Tim Curry).

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ in ‘Home Alone,’ ‘Bruce Almighty,’ and, well, practically everything.

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

my_so_called_life
A mashup of this movie and TV series would be called “My So-Called Wonderful Life.”

A couple of posts ago, I suggested that Brief Encounter may hold the record for being used in the most other movies. Ben Zimmer, whom I sometimes think of as my own personal fact-checker, begged to differ. He nominated Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) as the record-holder, and while I’m not positive, I’m pretty sure Ben is right. The Films in Films blog lists fourteen separate movies containing IAWL clips, starting with Music of the Heart; Bruce Almighty; Gremlins; Android; The Big Picture; National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation; Money Train; Look Who’s Talking; The Ref; Meet Dave; Menace II Society; Trauma; and Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. In Home Alone, the movie is dubbed into French.

The sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, in a callback, has a Spanish version of IAWL.

The IMDB “Connections” feature, unbelievably, lists fifteen more films in which It’s a Wonderful Life is shown, including Doc Hollywood, Deadly Obsession, and Same Kind of Different For Me. IMDB also says the Capra film is watched by characters in at least twenty television series, including My So-Called Life, Roseanne, Muppet Babies, Cheers, and, of course, The Sopranos.

Every single one of those movies and episodes was made after 1974, and ten of the fourteen movies on the Films in Films list came out between 1974 and 1993. Those dates are significant because during that twenty-year period, through a quirk in copyright law, It’s a Wonderful Life was in the public domain. As a result it aired repeatedly on TV during the Christmas season and came to be seen as the quintessential Christmas movie.

Thus a well-chosen and well-placed clip from the movie can make a potent counterpoint to the doings in any holiday-set film. And best of all, in the twenty-year public domain period, you didn’t have to pay for the rights! As Louisa Mellor wrote on Den of Geek!:

If [a TV] episode needs to quickly establish that it’s Christmas Eve, it’s as easy as inserting a few seconds of Clarence and George into a scene. If a film wants to evoke cynicism around the festive period, then its characters need simply complain, Al Bundy-style, that there’s never anything else on TV. When creatives want to piggyback on some ready-made sentiment or create unlikely juxtapositions then, copyright permitting, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed are their guys.

Tom Shadyac directed Bruce Almighty in 2003, at which point It’s a Wonderful Life was no longer in the public domain, but Spyglass Entertainment and Universal Pictures evidently thought they could afford the licensing fee. The film is used not for cynicism, sentiment, or juxtaposition, but for some clever mirroring, similar to the way The Quiet Man is used in E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Despite temporarily becoming God, Bruce (Jim Carrey) is having romantic troubles with his girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston), not so subtly named Grace. He’s at a party, and wants her to come, but she won’t pick up the phone when she calls. So he does a bit of divine intervention and makes a certain movie come on her TV. Jimmy Stewart’s line “I’ll give you the moon, Mary” is a reference to an earlier romantic moment in Bruce, and is guaranteed to do the trick.

 

“Brief Encounter” in “A Touch of Class,” “84 Charing Cross Road,” and “Truly Madly Deeply”

On By Ben YagodaIn Actual, Movie in theater, Movie on TV set4 Comments

The 1945 British film Brief Encounter — directed by David Lean, screenplay by Noel Coward, based on his play — may hold the record for the movie that’s watched in the greatest number of other movies. In addition to the three examples discussed in this post, IMDB’s valuable (though sometimes overpopulated) “Connections” department lists it as being featured in The Mirror Has Two Faces, Till There Was You, and Brick Lane, as well as the TV movies The Heidi Chronicles, Daisies in December, and The Care and Handling of Roses, plus various television episodes.

Why the attraction? It’s not simply that Brief Encounter is a classic. (In 1999, the British Film Institute voted it that country’s second best movie of all time, behind only The Third Man.) Beyond that, the film, with its thoroughly decent, stiff-upper-lip, and ultimately self-sacrificing lovers — the black-and-white photography being a kind of spartan objective correlative — is an emblem for a certain vision of romance, and thus a counterpoint to (and occasionally model for) the many, many other kinds of romance that movies portray.

In Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class (1973), the contrast couldn’t be starker. After meeting cute what seems like eleven times, the characters played by the startlingly young, slim, sharply dressed, and good-looking Glenda Jackson (Vickie) and George Segal (Steve) embark on a strictly-for-sex affair. In Brief Encounter both of the lovers are married, but here Vickie is divorced, which hints at the unequal dynamics at play. Steve wants to have it both ways, which is in keeping with his me-me-me sense of the world; he’s always shown scurrying off from the opera intermission to shtup Vickie at their love nest, then hurrying back to his seat next to his wife before the end of the next act. The puzzlement of the movie is why Vickie — who, as a Glenda Jackson character, is required to be clear-eyed and intelligent — doesn’t dump Steve.

The answer — that she has fallen in love with him, and he with her — is supplied in the movie-in-movie scene, in which they watch Trevor Howard breaks bad news to Celia Johnson. The scene is asked to do the work that’s absent in the screenplay, their boo-hooing supposedly showing the relationship has reached a new level of intimacy and care. Then the alarm rings, and Steve scurries back to his family.

David Jones’s 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) is about an American writer, played by Anne Bancroft, who carries on a two-decade correspondence (1950s and ’60s) with the buyer at a London bookshop, played by Anthony Hopkins. He’s married and they never meet; the love that Brief Encounter reflects is her Anglophilia. Her fascination with the film seems to extend to the ash of her cigarette (yes, young’uns, smoking in cinemas used to be allowed), curling and lengthening but so wrapped up in the oh-so-Englishness of the movie that it doesn’t drop.

And now for something different, Anthony Minghella’s 1990 film Truly Madly Deeply. The love story here is between Nina (Juliet Stevenson) and her  boyfriend, Jamie (Alan Rickman), who keeps turning up even though he is dead. But this is no Ghost: Jamie is sniffling, needy, and annoying. And so are his movie-buff mates, who show up at en masse, wrap themselves in cozy duvets, and make trainspotting comments while watching the 1917 Charlie Chaplin comedy Easy Street. (Like many movie buffs, myself include, they are prone to error; one guy identifies the big comic as “Eric Stewart Campbell”; in fact, his given name was Alfred Eric Campbell. It is true that he died in a car crash shortly after making this film.)

The guys may be well-schooled in cinema, but they’re not too sophisticated to be wrapped up in Brief Encounter, reciting the final lines along with the Johnson character’s husband, and slow clapping their approval after “The End” rolls.

 

 

 

 

‘Three’s Company’ in ‘Friends’

On By Ben YagodaIn Actual, TV in TVLeave a comment

This scene appeared in 1994, in the second episode (the first, if you don’t count the pilot) of the NBC sitcom Friends.

The fifteen-second sequence suggests some of the things I like, and don’t like, about Friends. On the like side: the reference to Three’s Company is canny. That comedy, which aired from 1977 till 1984, was also about a coed group of young people who lived in proximity to each other (Friends doubled the number to six) and relied a lot on sex jokes and innuendo. But with this early scene, Friends’ creators — David Crane and Marta Kauffman — signaled that this was a new era. Their show would be less broad, smarter, and (I hesitate to use the word) more realistic.

On the don’t-like side: Friends relied way too much on Chandler’s sarcastic wisecracks, and often they weren’t great wisecracks. Like this one: “I think this is the episode of Three’s Company where there’s some kind of misunderstanding.” It’s well-crafted, I grant it that — although it would have been better if the writers had respected our intelligence a bit and left out the words “of Three’s Company.”

More of a problem is that even in 1994, it was a tired joke. I remember going to comedy clubs in the early ’80s and hearing comedians talk about being in hotel rooms and turning on Gilligan’s Island — “It was the episode where they almost get off the island.” Beyond that, Chandler’s line isn’t specific to Three’s Company. Probably three quarters of all sitcoms, at least before the ’80s, revolved around some kind of misunderstanding.

Of course, Friends doesn’t need my approval. It’s been voted as the greatest sitcom by IMDB and Ranker, and Netflix just paid $100 million for the rights to keep airing it. It even has become the means by which just almost all Spanish-speaking baseball players attempt to learn English.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.