cinema obscura: Stanley Donen's "Staircase" (1969)

Given its pedigree and subject matter, it's a bit of a surprise that "Staircase" has all but disappeared. Never a truly great movie, it is exactly what you'd think - a filmed play, adapted from the stage by the playwright, Charles Dyer, himself. On stage, it starred Eli Wallach and Milo O'Shea as a long-time, aging gay couple, now given to bickering endlessly and usually about day-to-day minutia - and, presumably, it was autobiographical, as one of the two main characters is named ... Charles Dyer.

For the occasion of making it into a movie, 20th Century-Fox went all out, reuniting its "Cleopatra" stars - Richard Burton and newly-minted Oscar winner Rex Harrison - to play the couple and putting them in the hands of no less than Stanley Donen, a filmmaker who moved comfortably from musicals ("The Pajama Game") to romantic comedies ("Indiscreet") to observant social dramas ("Two for the Road"), always locating elegance and sophistication in his varied material.

Labeled an "important movie" (read: Oscar bait), "Staircase" was given an entitled Christmas '69 slot but, greeted by clearly disappointed critics, it faded quickly and was no longer remembered when the 1970 Oscarcast rolled around.

Part of the film's problem, as I remember it, is that it was in conflict with itself - an essentially small "kitchen sink" piece, mixing comedy with the requisite dreariness of British theater of the time, done up in wide screen and color and generally fit for Radio City Music Hall.

Charles Dyer and Harry Leeds (played by Harrison and Burton, respectively) have been a couple for two decades, living in London's West End and working as hairdressers at Chez Harry, Harry's establishment. Each man is still attached to his mother - Cathless Nesbitt as Burton's mother and Beatric Lehmann as Charlie's mom - a matter that interfers with an already troubled, flailing relatinship.

Harrison and Burton both play stereotypes here, with Charlie representing gay flamboyance and cynicism and Harry behaving as his disapproving auntie.

The film has its moments, thanks to the director and his stars who transform the material into something more universal, addressing the everyday evasions and deceptions that define most of our lives. Had the material been kept small, as it was conceived to be, perhaps it would still be remembered today for its modest honesty and it's genuine warmth and empathy for the human condition, instead of not being remembered at all.

Cinema Obscura is a recurring feature of The Passionate Moviegoer, devoted to those films that have been largely forgotten. Suggestions welcome.

(Artwork: Two posters for Fox's "Staircase")

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Anyone interested in perusing some 2060 of my film reviews, dating back to 1994, can do so by simply going to RottenTomatoes.Com

lemmon, kovacs & quine

Throughout most of the 1950s and '60s, Jack Lemmon was a contract player at Columbia Pictures, while Richard Quine was a young house director. At some point, Lemmon and Quine's boss, the infamous Harry Cohn, lured brilliant funnyman Ernie Kovacs into the mix. Eventually, the three got together - many times.

Much has been written about the Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau/Billy Wilder triumverate. But first there was the Lemmon/Kovacs/Quine teaming - 1957's “Operation Madball,” 1958's “Bell, Book and Candle” and 1959's “It Happened to Jane,” all made for Columbia.

One could say that Lemmon/Kovacs/Quine anticipated Lemmon/Matthau/Wilder. So why hasn't someone resourceful at Sony Home Entertainment entertained the idea of a boxed set? Too esoteric, I suppose.

Meanwhile, Lemmon and Quine were particularly proficient, also collaborating on 1955's musical version of "My Sister Eileen" (Quine starred in the original Roz Russell version when he was a young actor) and 1962's "The Notorious Landlady. (Lemmon and Quine also made 1965's “How to Murder Your Wife," for United Artists, not Columbia.)

As I noted, during his lifetime, much was made about Lemmon's enduring relationships with Wilder and Matthau, but as you can see, he shared equally influential (and frequent) collaborations with Quine and Kovacs. Wilder was inarguably the director who put Lemmon on the map, but Quine was also an important recurring thread throughout his life and career.

Both Quine and Wilder served as Lemmon's best men when Lemmon married Felicia Farr in Paris on 17 August, 1962. "They were both my dearest friends," Lemmon once told me, "I couldn't choose between them."

And when Kovacs subsequently joined up, it was a teaming that would prefigure the Lemmon-Matthau acting relationship and serve as something of a prototype for the work Lemmon did with Matthau.

Couldn't you imagine Lemmon having done "The Fortune Cookie" and "The Odd Couple" with Kovacs?

Surprisingly, two of the Lemmon-Kovacs-Quine titles not only are not available on DVD but have never been released on video at all. Adding insult to injury, the two films - both co-written by Blake Edwards - haven't been aired on commercial televison for years. They seem to have disappeared from syndication and are virtually lost movies now.

The first is the very funny "Operation Mad Ball" (which I always think of as the '50s precursor to "M*A*S*H"), which Edwards wrote with Jed Harris and Arthur Carter (from a play by Carter) and co-starred Kovacs, Mickey Rooney and Arthur O'Connell. The second is "The Notorious Landlady," which Edwards co-wrote with Larry Gelbart (TV's "M*A*S*H" and Broadway's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum") and which co-starred Quine's muse, Kim Novak, Fred Astaire, Estelle Winwood, Lionel Jeffries, Maxwell Reed and Phileppa Bevans.


Kovacs' work with Lemmon in both "Operation Mad Ball" and "Bell, Book and Candle" is inspired. But he outdid himself in "It Happened to Jane." While we were working on a book together, Lemmon told me that Harry Foster Malone, the villain that Kovacs plays in “It Happened to Jane,” was based directly on Columbia head, Harry Cohn, who died while the trio was making "Bell, Book and Candle" the year before.

Kovacs even affected Cohns' look, cosmetically, for his wicked impersonation, donning a bald plate for the film and reportedly gaining 40 pounds.

While it's often been rumored that Malone was modeled after the Charles Foster Kane character in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941), only part of the character's name was borrowed from Welles. But the name Harry itself comes directly from Harry Cohn.

There's a brilliant bit of dialogue in "Jane" - written by Norman Katkov - which could have been spoken by Cohn himself...

Harry Foster Malone: “Get this, Sloan. I’m 52 years old and I was born on the lower east side in a cold-water flat. I wasn’t lucky enough to get to college or law school. I’m a slob that came up the hard way. But let me give you a chunk of information. Anybody who gives trouble to Harry Foster Malone, gets trouble, got that?

Crawford Sloan (Walter Greaza): “Have it your way, Harry.”

Harry: “I will.”

"It Happened to Jane," inspired by Frank Capra's films (and with the Capra-like working title of "Old 97 Goes to Market"), was filmed in small-town Chester, Conn, where Quine took advantage of the local populace for a memorable town-meeting sequence that revolves around Lemmon and the galvanizing speech he gives. And on a more charming note, there's the moment when Doris Day, balancing herself on a moving train coerces a proposal out of Lemmon. So, exactly why hasn't this endearing little film been more embraced? It's excellent.

Lemmon may have had more pretigeous hits in such Wilder films as "Some Like It Hot" and "The Apartment," but few of his films are as well-written as "It Happened to Jane " and "The Notorious Landlady." I know I'm in a minority here but so goes it.



While I'm at it, Kovacs is long overdue for a rediscovery. Sure his TV standup routines have been showcased on DVD but how about the other films that he made for Columbia - Sir Carol Reed's "Our Man in Havana" (1959), Mervyn LeRoy's "Wake Me When It's Over" (1960), with Dick Shawn, and Irving Brecher's "Sail a Crooked Ship" (1961)? At least, his 1960 Columbia film for Quine, "Strangers When We Meet," is available.

Finally, there's Judy Holliday - another Columbia contract player, like Lemmon and Kovacs - who deserves a boxed set of the six films she made for the studio, namely “Born Yesterday,” “The Marrying Kind,” “It Should Happen to You,” “Phffft!,” “Full of Life” and “The Solid Gold Cadillac.”

(Artwork: From top: Richard Quine with Virna Lisi on the set of United Artists' "How to Murder Your Wife," publicity shots of Doris Day, Jack lemmon and Steve Forrest in Columbia's "It Happened to Jane" and a publicity still of Ernie Kovacs)

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Anyone interested in perusing some 2060 of my film reviews, dating back to 1994, can do so by simply going to RottenTomatoes.Com

taymor versus roth

"All it takes is no talent."
-Tessie Tura in "Gypsy"

When Harvey Weinstein was running Miramax with his brother Bob, he earned the nickname Harvey Scissorhands because of his penchant for reshaping other filmmaker's movies in the editing room - his most triumphant hatchet job being Giuseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso"/"Nuovo cinema Paradiso," which was reduced from 170 minutes to 155 minutes to its final 123 minutes.

At the height of Weinstein's popularity and infamy, it was often asked what qualified him to do that to other people's films - I mean, aside from the fact that he was the boss. Well, Weinstein did make a couple films of his own - "Playing for Keeps" (1986) and "The Gnomes' Great Adventure" (1987). Never heard of them? Well, who did?

This is in preamble to asking the same question about Joe Roth, head of Revolution Studios, who reportedly has trimmed Julie Taymor's upcoming movie musical, "Across the Universe" from 128 minutes to approximately 98 minutes - much to the chagrin of Taymor, of course.

Roth's qualifications? Well, he is also an occasional filmmaker, having been responsible for "Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise," the atrocious "Christmas with the Kranks" and the tolerable "Freedomland." Yep, that's his personal filmography. Honest. I couldn't make that up.

Say no more.

(Artwork: Julie Taymor - director of "The Lion King" on stage and, on film, "Titus," "Frida" and the upcoming "Across the Universe" - at a Tony Awards ceremony)

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Anyone interested in perusing some 2060 of my film reviews, dating back to 1994, can do so by simply going to RottenTomatoes.Com

Courteney Cox's "Dirt"

In her brilliant 1971 essay, "Notes on Hearts and Minds," the late Pauline Kael took on the critical establishment and its seeming willingness to become just another marketing tool of the big Hollywood studios.

She wrote: "The pressure is so strong on reviewers to do what is wanted of them that many of them give in and reserve their fire for pathetic little sex pictures - cheap porny pix - which they can safely attack because there's no big advertising money behind them."

In the 30-some years since Kael wrote that astute observation, this tendency among critics has become much worse. The thumbs-up/four-star hysteria that seems to accompany every movie opening these days (replete with requisite exclamation points, of course) is so pervasive that it's insidious and now critics seem to like so much of what Hollywood makes that they often save their "fire," to borrow Kael's word, for perfectly fine little films that they are more than willing to sacrifice. After all, you have to hate something, right?

Anyway, this trend has been extended to TV criticism, with such genuinely amusing, well-written shows as Brad Garrett's "'Til Death" (Fox), a wicked contemporary variation on "The Honeymooners," only more cynical (if that's possible), and Courteney Cox's delicious and inspired "Wicked" (FX). Both have taken immediate drubbings.

Of the two, "Dirt" has the classic contours of a cult/midnight attraction as it refreshingly exposes the other, more interesting side of "prestige journalism" and its greed for Pulitzers and its irrational fear of plagiarism - namely, torrid, sensational reportage where prizes are deservedly sneered at and fabrication is all but encouraged.

The show is hands-down, low-down fun, anchored by Cox's remarkable performance - a comedy turn played dead serious and with a straight, almost mask-like face. Cox is pitch black and pitch perfect as Lucy Spiller, an ambitious careerist high on power - an editor as editors really are, only not hiding behind the usual sanctimony.

She is matched by the invaluable British actor Ian Hart as Don Conkey, a self-described "highly functioning schizophrenic" and (wittily put) "voiceover extraordinaire" who works for Lucy as her top photographer at Dirt/Now magazine and as her loyal all-around right-hand man who relishes the dirty work. (This show proves that Cox is unmatched when it comes to having chemistry with whomever she's acting opposite.)

Among other fresh touches on the show are the adroit ways in which Don's various hallucinations are conveyed. Frankly, I can't think of anything - on the big screen or small screen - as brilliant as "Dirt," the brainchild of someone named Matthew Carnahan who, on the basis of this show, deserves a bright, bright future.

(Artwork: top and bottom: Publicity shots of Courteney Cox and Ian Hart in Matthew Carnahan's "Dirt" for FX)

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Anyone interested in perusing some 2060 of my film reviews, dating back to 1994, can do so by simply going to RottenTomatoes.Com

stuart rosenberg, 1927-2007

Word just came in that Stuart Rosenberg died today from a heart attack. One of our more underrated directors, he didn't receive half the attention that is routinely doled out to the usual suspects - i.e., Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman.

After spending most of the 1950s and early '60s directing episodic TV ("The Untouchables," "The Naked City"), Rosenberg was hand-picked by Jack Lemmon to direct Paul Newman in Lemmon's first Jalem production, "Cool Hand Luke" in 1967. Two years later, he directed Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve in the enchanting and now-forgotten, "The April Fools."

For the next fifteen years or so, Rosenberg helmed an impressive list of modestly accomplished little films and if anyone out there is considering an at-home Stuart Rosenberg Film Festival, here are some titles, in addition to "Cool Hand Luke" and "The April Fools," that should be considered:

-- The compelling "WUSA" (1970), starring Newman, Joanne Woodward and Anthony Perkins;

--"Move" (1970), a lost Elliott Gould comedy made at the actor's peak;

--"Pocket Money" (1972), with Newman again and Lee Marvin;

--"The Laughing Policeman" (1973), starring Walter Matthau in one of his best dramatic performances;

--"The Drowning Pool" (1975), with Newman reprising his Harper character;

--the all-star "Voyage of the Damed" (1976);

--"Brubaker" (1980), the compulsively watchable Robert Redford prison flick, and

--"The Pope of Greenwich Village" (1984), with both Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts in bravura performances.

(Artwork: Poster art from Warners' "Cool Hand Luke" and Fox's "Brubaker," both directed by the underrated Staurt Rosenberg)

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Anyone interested in perusing some 2060 of my film reviews, dating back to 1994, can do so by simply going to RottenTomatoes.Com