cinema obscura: Norman Jewison's "Gaily, Gaily" (1969)

Based on Ben Hecht's autobiographical novel (in which he named himself Ben Harvey), the endearing "Gaily, Gaily" was supposed to be a huge year-end hit for United Artists, director Norman Jewison and star Beau Bridges in 1969.  It was designed as a big Christmas pic with Oscar pretentions. Sadly, it didn't turn out that way.

Perhaps the best piece of Americana produced by a Canadian filmmaker, "Gaily, Gaily" was a willfully old-fashioned entertainment that had the misfortune to be released smack-dab in the middle of the New Wave of American filmmaking.  Audiences - and critics - who had lost their cherries to "Midnight Cowboy" and "Where's Poppa?" (both also from U.A.) greeted "Gaily, Gaily" with smug indifference.  It was viewed as corn/cornpone, something decidedly square,  and, as the song goes, "How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paree?"

You can't. Audiences stayed away.

Jewison had scored an Oscar-style bullseye with "In the Heat of the Night" and was rewarded with a bigger budget. "Gaily, Gaily" was made on the scale of an old roadshow film.  Bridges, after a stint doing TV, attracted at lot of attention with his break-out role in "For the Love of Ivy" and was considered the Next.  Big.  Thing.  So Jewison nabbed him for both "Gaily, Gaily" and his next film for U.A., "The Landlord," based on the Kristin Hunter novel.  Also, Bridges sort of resembled Jewison and I'd like to think that Jewison was so entranced by Hecht's novel that he wanted the young hero to look like him.  Just a thought.

Jewison never got to direct "The Landlord."  By then, he was deep in pre-production on "Fiddler on the Roof," another year-end prestige/Oscar holiday film.  Instead, he turned the project over to his house editor, Hal Ashby, who made a most auspicious directorial debut.  Rumor has it that Bridges was the original choice to play Oliver in "Love Story," but turned it down in order to honor his committment to "The Landlord."
 
In terms of art, it was a wise and honorable move.  In terms of commerce, however, it was a disaster.  "Love Story" went on to be a bigger hit than it should have been, while it took decades for "The Landlord" to earn the respect and admiration that it eventually received.

Essentially a series of breezy skits set in 1920s Chicago and its earthy newspaper culture, "Gaily, Gaily" is driven by the apparent love for the material and the city that Jewison and his scenarist Abram S. Ginnes share with Hecht.  It basically consists of a lot of colorful characters banging and bumping into each other and slamming their way in and out of rooms and newsrooms. Bridges plays Hecht/Harvey as a young would-be writer aching to be a reporter, who is taken under wing by Melina Mercouri's brothel madam (Queen Lil is her name and she is) and by the invaluable Brian Keith as a star columnist who becomes Ben's mentor and bad example (Francis Sullivan is his name and he's as Irish as he sounds).  This may have been Keith's best film role, and few scenes are as memorable as when Keith grabs on to a disreputable doctor (Charles Tyner) and, as Pauline Kael pointed out in her review of "Gaily, Gaily," shouts, "You quack!"  It's worth sitting through the movie just to hear that.

The supporting cast consists of the great character actors Hume Cronyn, George Kennedy, Wilfred Hyde-White, John Randolph and, most especially, Roy Poole, as a movie city editor to end all city movie editors.

Also, this was the film in which Margot Kidder (Jewison's fellow Canadian) made her debut - as an innocent young prostitute, natch

Tom Peters has a small but indelible bit as Carl Sandburg who attends one of Queen Lil's soriee's and regales everyone with a rough draft of his poem, "Chicago":  

    "Hog Butcher for the World,
     Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
     Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
     Stormy, husky, brawling,
     City of the Big Shoulders..."

Heaven.

"Gaily, Gaily" airs tonight @ 6 p.m. (est) on Turner Classic Movies.

Note in Passing:  Released concurrently with "Gaily, Gaily" was another big year-end production set during the same time period - Mark Rydell's "The Reivers."  Unlike "Gaily, Gaily," however, Rydell's film was a hit and is still fondly remembered.  Of course, the difference is, "The Reivers" had a major star in the lead - Steve McQueen.

George Kaplan

It's called Sundays with Hitch and it's on Turner Classic Movies all month, starting today.  43 titles in all.  Knock yourself out. Say no more.

Sunday, September 1

10 a.m. – Murder! (1930)

Noon – Rope (1948)

1:30 p.m. – Spellbound (1945)

3:30 p.m. – Marnie (1964)

5:45 p.m. – The Birds (1963)

8 p.m. – Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

10 p.m. – Psycho (1960)

Midnight – The Lodger (1926) – A TCM Silent Sunday Night Presentation

2 a.m. – Blackmail (1929) – TCM Import Presentation

3:30 a.m. – Frenzy (1972)

Sunday, September 8

10 a.m. – Under Capricorn (1949)

Noon – Stage Fright (1950)

2 p.m. – I Confess (1953)

4 p.m. – The Wrong Man (1956)

6 p.m. – Saboteur (1942)

8 p.m. – Foreign Correspondent (1940)

10:15 p.m. – North by Northwest (1959)

12:45 a.m. – The Ring (1927) – TCM Premiere – A TCM Silent Sunday Night Presentation

Sunday, September 15

10 a.m. – Number Seventeen (1932)

11:15 a.m. – The Trouble With Harry (1955)

1:15 p.m. – Family Plot (1976)

3:30 p.m. – The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

5:45 p.m. – Vertigo (1958)

8 p.m. – Rear Window (1954)

10:30 p.m. –      To Catch a Thief (1928)

Midnight – The Farmer’s Wife (1928) – TCM Premiere – A TCM Silent Sunday Night Presentation  

Sunday, September 22

10 a.m. – The Skin Game (1931)

11:30 a.m. – Lifeboat (1944)

1:15 p.m. – The Lady Vanishes (1938)

3:15 p.m. – Topaz (1969)

5:45 p.m. – Torn Curtain (1966)

8 p.m. – The 39 Steps (1935)

9:30 p.m. – Sabotage (1936)

11 p.m. – The Dick Cavett Show: Alfred Hitchcock (1972)

12:15 a.m. – Champagne (1928) (also Silent Sunday Night)

Sunday, September 29

10 a.m. – Rich and Strange (1932)

Noon – Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)

2 p.m. – Suspicion (1941)

4 p.m. – Strangers on a Train (1951)

6 p.m. – Dial M For Murder (1954)

8 p.m. – Rebecca (1940)

10:15 p.m. – Notorious (1946)

12:15 a.m. – The Manxman (1929) – TCM Premiere – A TCM Silent Sunday Night Presentation

cinema obscura: Martin Ritt's "Five Branded Women" (1960)

Silvana Mangano (far left) and fellow prisoners Jeanne Moreau, Vera Miles, Carla Gravina and Barbara Bel Geddes face off with Nazi Richard Basehart in Ritt's "Five Branded Women" (1960)

In 1960, Martin Ritt joined forces with super producer Dino DeLaurentiis for a most provocative war-time drama, abetted by five talented, diverse actresses who, in tandem, bring an international flair - and constrasting acting styles - to "Five Branded Women." For the resourceful DVD addict, Ritt's film would make a fine double-bill with John Ford's similar "7 Women" (1966).

Silvana Mangano, Jeanne Moreau, Vera Miles, Carla Gravina and Barbara Bel Geddes - all cast as Yugoslavians - are the titular women, ostracized by their country's Partisans for having had sexual relations with a Nazi officer, initially played with an all-American swagger by Steve Forrest.

As further punishment for their shared transgression, each one is branded by having her hair shaved - a symbol of their shame. Hence, the title. (The film's working title was "Jovanka and the Others" - Jovanka being the Mangano character.) Forrest's Nazi doesn't exactly get off easy: He's castrated by the Partisans and few scenes are as bluntly memorably as the moment when Forrest shouts from a window, "I am no longer a man!"

The film then follows the women, unknown to each other and suspicious of each other, as they reluctantly band together for the sake of survival - stealing food, dodging rapists and picking up guns and fighting.

The script by Ivo Perilli (with uncredited help by Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico) is based on the novel, "Jovanka e le altre," by Ugo Pirro and takes time out for some quiet introspective moments as each woman shares what she hoped to gain from her relationship with Forrest. One of the women turns out to be pregnant; another attempts suicide.

And she never even slept with Forrest.

"Five Branded Women," directed by Ritt with his usual fluidity and political conscienceness, is grim and yet it's a startling testament to human resilience - and an examination of the torments of guilt and separation.

Its fine supporting cast includes Van Heflin, Harry Guardino and Richard Basehart as another Nazi. Its harshly atmospheric black-&-white cinematography is by Fellini favorite, the great Giuseppe Rotunno, who also did "All That Jazz" and "Carnal Knowledge." It looks very European.

Now ... where's the DVD?

Note in Passing: If Vera Miles hairline always looked suspicious to you in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960), it's because she had to wear a wig throughout the production. Miles had made Ritt's film immediately prior to "Psycho" and her hair was still crew-cut length, requiring a wig.

cinema obscura: Marc Klein's "Suburban Girl" (2007)

 
A sense of discovery, what used to be among the more simple pleasures in one's moviegoing life, has become such a rare and fleeting event nowadays that it is unappreciated and often misunderstood.

We've been conditioned to assume that any film - either a mainstream monstrosity from the studios or an indie darling from the festivals - that isn't hyped is suspect and must be bad. And must be avoided.

Marc Klein's first feature as a director, "Suburban Girl," went missing back in 2007 when it somehow fell off the fillm-fete assembly line and disappeared.  It played Cannes and the Tribeca Film Festival and all of the major markets in Europe but never quite made it back home.

Klein, a screenwriter whose credits include "Serendipity," "A Good Year" and, more recently, "Mirror Mirror," has fashioned a bittersweet relationship film (not to be confused with your standard romcom) about a young woman with some minor father issues who becomes involved with an older man with major daughter issues. He based it on two short stories, "My Old Man" and "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine," from Melisa Bank's "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing," which was the film's working title. ("Suburban Girl" is a most unworthy moniker.)

Set in Candace Bushnell's New York, Klein's film is what one would expect from an episode of  "Sex and the City" written and directed by Woody Allen:  It is observant, literate, occasionally witty and quite tart.

And in the lead roles, Sarah Michelle Geller and Alec Baldwin do alert, deeply shaded variations on the Carrie Bradshaw-Mr. Big duet, adding some fascinating new wrinkles to an all-too-familiar theme. 

Geller, a solid actress who operates too often under the radar, is Brett Eisenberg, an associate editor whose talent and ambition are being smothered by her new boss at the publishing house where she works. 

Baldwin is Archie Knox, the Mailer-esque author - part writer, mostly womanizer - who wants to seduce and mentor her at the same time, forgetting that Brett is neither his mistress nor his daughter, but his equal. 

While this is very much Geller's film, which she carries with exquisite, attractive ease, Baldwin is commanding, both suave and sexually intimidating - and also touching - as an older man who is also an aging lothario.  Baldwin, whose life as a promising leading man in movies self-aborted, found his second act in Jack Donaghy, a character that, for better or worse, has invaded some of his other recent performances.  But not here.  Archie Knox is a character/performance that stands very much on its own, free of any Donaghy/Baldwin, Baldwin/Donaghy tics.

The large supporting cast includes turns by James Naughton as Brett's beloved father, Maggie Grace as her BFF/confidant and Mirian Seldes (Mr. Big's mother herself!) as a tony literary critic.

My theory on why this film fell through the cracks:  It's not really an indie and it's not really mainstream either,  which poses a marketing problem.  Klein, I suppose, could have easily made this for a major studio, but it's doubtful if either Baldwin or Geller would have been the leads.

Which would have been a loss. 

The difficult-to-see "Suburban Girl"  can be found these days on the fringes of cable TV, usually Showtime.  Check it out or (given the inconvenient hours that it's usually shown) record it. You'll be suprised and gratified.

I hope.
 

tec

Morton DaCosta's screen credit for "Auntie Mame" (1958)

Now is the time to praise Morton DaCosta. This hugely underrated made only three films but two of them are widescreen classics. 

A successful stage director, DaCosta had a string of Broadway hits under his belt  (including "No Time for Sergeants" and "Plain and Fancy") when he made his film debut with the movie version of one of them, 1958's "Auntie Mame," headed by its original stage star, Rosalind Russell, whom DaCosta astutely surrounded with a superb supporting ensemble.

DaCosta had a keen eye for casting, not surprising given that he started his theatrical career as an actor himself, and, for this occasion, he corralled the inimitable Coral Browne, Forrest Tucker (whom DaCosta had directed in a stage production of "The Music Man," also in 1958, the year "Mame" was release), a priceless Connie Gilchrist, Patric Knowles (one of Russell's occasional co-stars from the '40s), Fred Clark, Willard Waterman, Lee Patrick, Pippa Scott, Joanna Barnes, Robin Hughes, Carol Veazie, Henry Brandon, Yuki Shimoda, Brook Byron,  the venerable Margaret Dumont and Dub Taylor (in brief bits), a very young Roger Smith and, from the play, Peggy Cass and child actor Jan Handzlik.

There isn't a bad performance among them, evidence that DaCosta was an excellent director of actors.  And that would even include DaCosta himself:  He provided the deeply resonant voice of Edwin Dennis, whose reading of his Last Will and Testament opens the film.

Four years later, in 1962, DaCosta would direct his second film, based on another of his Broadway hits - the Meredith Willson musical, "The Music Man," again headlined by its original star, Robert Preston.

For his sophomore film, DaCosta came up with a treasure trove of character actors - Paul Ford, Hermoine Gingold, the inimitabe Pert Kelton (a victim of the McCarthy blacklist era), Buddy Hackett, Charles Lane, Mary Wickes, Harry Hickox, Percy Helton, Barbara Pepper, Max Showalter, Hank Worden, William Fawcett, Adnia Rice, Sara Seegar, Jesslyn Fax and Maudie Prickett.

"The Music Man" and "Auntie Mame" each received best picture Oscar nominations in their respective years, but DaCosta was overlooked both years in the director category (although as the producer of  "The Music Man," he received a nomination by extension).

For the life of me, I can't explain why he was snubbed both times, considering that his work on each one is nothing short of masterful - each film a tightrope balancing act:  He was cognizant and respectful of the stage source of those works (artfully using the "black out" device to close certain scenes in both films), while also embracing them with a distinct cinematic flair.  I'm sure much of his success as a director of these two pieces, as well as his command of the vast Technirama proces, is based on his close collaboration with his cinematographers - Harry Stradling on "Auntie Mame" and Robert Burks on "The Music Man."

DaCosta was born Morton Tecosky in Philadelphia on March  7, 1914 and went by the nickname tec.  (That's his signature above.)  He was of Lithuanian descent, which helps explain the two Lithuanian jokes that he sly slipped into the films of "Auntie Mame" and "The Music Man" (jokes that were nowhere to be found in the stage versions).

In the opening party sequence of "Auntie Mame," Mame is introducing her nephew Patrick to some of her guests when a man with a long beard and dressed entirely in black Eastern Orthodox liturgical garments walks up.

Patrick: "Who's he?"

Mame: "Oh, that's a Lithuanian bishop, darling.  Doesn't speak a work of English. Stimulating man!" (to the bishop) "Your grace." (back to Patrick) "Why, he's such a darling!  And so worldly for a man of God."

And in "The Music Man," when Mayor Shinn's acolytes successfully capture Tommy Djilas, the kid who put a firecracker under Mrs. Shinn at the Fourth of July celebration, the following comments are made.

Mayor Shinn: "Grab that hoodlum!  He almost blew up Mrs. Shinn." (to Tommy)  "You wild kid, ya!  Hanging around my oldest girl." (to Professor Harold Hill) "His father is one of those Lithuanians from the south side of town." (back to Tommy) "You wild kid, ya!"

 Anyway, after making these two very lavish, high-profile films, DaCosta scaled back for his next - the modest, amiabe but ultimately disposable caper/gangster flick "Island of Love," starring Preston, Tony Randall and Walter Matthau.  This one was not based on Broadway material from his past. It sailed in and out of theaters under the radar - and DaCosta subsequently sailed away from movies. For good.

Following Saturday night's screening of "Auntie Mame" on Turner, host Robert Osborne commented to Drew Barrymore that he found it unfathomable that DaCosta never made another film.

One could speculate, perhaps, that Hollywood considered him an outsider, an animal of the theater.  Or to blame, as is my wont, snotty cinèastes who never gave him his due. But the explanation is really less complicated than that. 

DaCosta simply prefered the stage and returned to it.

He went on to direct Judy Holliday in "Hot Spot," Shirley Jones (his "Music Man" leading lady) and husband Jack Cassidy in "Maggie Flynn," Kier Dullea and Ron Liebman in "Doubles," Howard Keel and Carol Lawrence in "Saratoga" (based on the Edna Ferber book and the 1945 film with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman), and George Sanders and Delores Gray in "Sherry!" (the musical version of "The Man Who Came to Dinner"), among others. Not all of these were successful; many weren't.

In fact, Morton DaCosta's two greatest hits were for ... film. Ironically.

Tec died of heart failure on January 26, 1989 in Redding, Connecticutt.

Notes in Passing: I hasten to add that, although Broadway types wish otherwise, it was "The Music Man," and not "West Side Story," that won the 1957 Tony Award for best new musical.  Despite WSS's major score and cutting-edge choreography, its cringe-inducing book and dialogue undermine those notable accompishments.  "The Music Man" is an all-around superior musical.  It's also aged better.  Much better.  

Again, please note that "The Music Man" airs tonight @ 8 (est) on Turner Classic Movies as part of its July 4th celebration.

And many thanks to Lisa Delman for sharing invaluable information about her uncle.

Morton DaCosta's screen credit for "The Music Man" (1962)