Madame Sousatzka

In Madame Sousatzka, Shirley MacLaine returns to the big screen for the first time since winning the Oscar for Terms of Endearment. (Well, she did a cameo in Cannonball Run II, but we’ll ignore that.) And it’s a full-blown star turn, a choice character role that the actress understandably plays to the hilt.

I suspect, however, that the movie might benefit from a performance that was a bit less obviously a trouper’s response to a boffo acting challenge. Part of this is inherent in the role; this Madade Sousatzka is one of those literary traditions, the larger-than-life teacher who completely influences the lives of her students. A music teacher, she’s prone to tell the mothers of prospective students that, “I teach not only how to play, but how to live.” Sort of a cross between Mr. Chips and a retired Auntie Mame.

Not only that, but the character comes equipped with an exotic gypsy-Russian background, and her London flat is stuffed with the bric-a-brac of an eccentric life. MacLaine will probably get great reviews and perhaps another Oscar nomination, but this role is almost too juicy. Although she has a number of telling moments, I think MacLaine remains somewhat outside her character; giving a performance, rather than inhabiting the part.

The episode in this character’s life that serves as the focus of the film is her tutelage of a 15-year-old pianist (a winning performance by Navin Chowdhry) who has the promise to be her finest protégé ever. Eventually Madame clashes with the boy’s working-class mother (Shabana Azmi), who wants her son to start giving concerts and earning money. Madame Sousatzka, recalling her own mortifying freeze-up when her fearsome mother pushed her into a coming-out concert many years earlier, doesn’t want to rush the boy.

There are a number of other story strands, expertly woven by screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (A Room with a View), who co-wrote with director John Schlesinger. Everything circles around Madame Sousatzka’s building, where her student becomes infatuated with a pretty neighbor (Twiggy, lending a beguiling presence). The neighbor’s boyfriend (Leigh Lawson) is an agent who wants to sign the kid up for a concert performance, an ambition that draws a withering response.

Schlesinger, who won the Oscar in 1969 for Midnight Cowboy, has mellowed a bit with age. There are still some elements of Madame Soutsatzka’s character that are too broadly drawn, but Schlesinger underplays other things very nicely, such as the apparently gay doctor who also lives in Madame’s building, and the symbolic fact that the building itself is being ruthlessly sized up for demolition.

As pleasant as much of this is, there’s something fuzzy and sentimental about the basic premise of the wonderful, life-changing teacher. Especially when what we see of Madame Sousatzka’s wonderfulness consists primarily of shoving cookies into her student’s mouth and demanding that he wear maroon velvet jackets.

First published in The Herald, October 27, 1988

MacLaine didn’t get the Oscar nomination, but she won a Golden Globe, so there. Navin Chowdhry went on to a long career, and Twiggy and Leigh Lawson were married the year this movie came out, and remain so. I left Peggy Ashcroft out of the cast list.

Business as Usual

Business as Usual is just the sort of little movie that generally gets lost in the shuffle, which is the fate that seems to have befallen it. It actually played at the Cannes Film Festival back in May 1987, and opened in England later that year.

It isn’t too difficult to see why the movie took awhile to open in the United States. For one thing, it’s released by the beleaguered Cannon Films, the upstart studio that has weathered  a barrage of flops and financial hard times. Aside from Cannon’s troubles, the movie itself is modest and rather “British,” and hardly likely to find a broad audience here.

Still, it’s certainly worthwhile. Directed and written by a first-timer, Lezli-An Barrett, Business as Usual takes a basic issue and, without unduly politicizing or preaching, makes some solid points.

At the crux of the matter is a Liverpool manager (Glenda Jackson) of a small fashion boutique, one store of a national chain. When the company’s area manager (Eamon Boland) pays a visit, he gets too feely with one of the clerks (Cathy Tyson, from Mona Lisa) and she tells Jackson. When Jackson registers a complaint to the fellow, she is promptly fired.

Jackson, though she is somewhat reluctant at first, refuses to take the sacking lying down, and rallies her union, her children, and her husband to her side. There’s an element of déjà vu, because her husband (John Thaw) had led a union fight of his own some years before, only to be beaten down and broken. He’s spent the last few years as a househusband.

Jackson gradually puts her case across, the home office starts to feel the pinch of protest, and a gala reopening of the store, complete with bikini-clad hostesses, is ruined by the presence of pickets. In sketch, this may sound like a tract, but the movie almost never gets strident about any of this. It remains focused on the human aspects of the issue at hand.

In fact, the film’s unforced nature probably works against its box-office prospects. If Business as Usual got fiery or overdramatic about its issues, it might whip up some melodrama (the only scene that tips into shrillness involves the unwarranted strip-searching of a picketer). But its grassroots activism is presented as a natural part of one’s duty to oneself – really just business as usual.

First published in The Herald, October 27, 1988

This and a previous short are Lezli-An Barrett’s sole credits on IMDb, but she’s on LinkedIn, so you can look her up there. Beyond that, well, a good cast. I wonder if they regretted going with Cannon.

Memories of Me

If you took Nothing in Common and threw in just the merest dash of Death of a Salesman, the result might be Memories of Me. This film, written by Eric Roth and comedian Billy Crystal, wades through some thick family history that’s been surrounding a father and his far-off son.

They’ve been keeping a continent between them, but when Abbie Polin (Crystal), a New York doctor, suffers a heart attack, he figures it’s a cue to patch things up with his father, Abe (Alan King). So Abbie flies to Los Angeles to spend some time with dad, who’s made his living as a Hollywood extra (though the son prefers to think of him as “a professional embarrassment”).

They’ve never really gotten along, but – as if you couldn’t guess – they come to some sort of understanding as the days go by. To make it all neat and tidy, the script throws a terminal illness in the direction of the father. This definitely focuses things.

What makes this warmed-over material halfway watchable is the sometimes thoughtful, sometimes playful direction of Henry Winkler. This is the first feature directed by the actor best known as The Fonz, and it bodes well for the future. Winkler’s touches tend to be superior to whatever’s going on in the scene, such as the projecting of home movies on a refrigerator, or the deliberate way Crystal slices an apple when he describes his father. Winkler often shoots scenes in long camera takes, allowing the actors to find their own pace and rhythm, a useful approach for this material.

And he’s clearly an actor’s director. Crystal isn’t a deep actor, but he’s easy in this role, and he and King share the automatic timing of the comedian. JoBeth Williams, who has a thankless part as the girlfriend, makes herself ingratiating through sheer energy.

King does nicely as the grouchy old man, who prefers communicating entirely in one-liners. He takes great pride that, although he’s never had a speaking part, he’s considered “The King of the Extras,” and has hobnobbed with all the greats. He imagines his Variety obituary and proudly assumes he’ll be remembered as “the 19^th man to yell ‘I am Spartacus.'” King’s pure professionalism almost makes you believe in this man, if not this movie.

First published in The Herald, October 6, 1988

Is it time to bring this movie back? I cannot say, for I have forgotten it completely. The high hopes I had for Henry Winkler’s directing career did not pan out – he did Cop and ½ , a Burt Reynolds comedy I wouldn’t wish on anybody’s filmography, and then a surprisingly small amount of TV stuff. But his other career has maintained. In my mind this film sits on a double bill with Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night, another showbiz cupcake laced with arsenic.

Marlene

Marlene is a documentary about Marlene Dietrich consisting largely of a lengthy interview for which the actress refused to be photographed. This decision is the central reality of the film, and a frustration that drives interviewer/director Maximilian Schell to explosions of pique.

In its own way, Dietrich’s refusal to be photographed is an entirely appropriate gesture. “I’ve been photographed to death,” she says, and she’s right; Dietrich may well have been the most stylishly photographed actress in cinema. Her masklike beauty lent itself to rapturous close-ups that captured and reflected the silvery light of the movies; without, curiously, ever quite seeming to generate that light.

Interestingly enough, it has been suggested that her exotic image – particularly as exuded in the seven films she made with her Svengali director Josef von Sternberg – had little to do with the woman herself. In von Sternberg’s films, she was the cool temptress who drew men to her, only to leave them cut and bleeding from her sharp eyebrows and cheekbones.

Yet in life, she seems to have been a game gal who cheerfully pitched in to the American war effort, viewed her acting as a job, and regarded sex – if she regarded it at all – as an indifferent marital obligation. As we see film clips, performance footage, and newsreel shots, she dismisses the body of her work as rubbish and kitsch.

The von Sternberg films, in particular, she seems to find absurd, almost as though she were afraid of their implications. (She claims never to watch her old movies.) Fascinatingly, she chooses the insane climax of von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress, one of the American cinema’s delirious high points, as her favorite movie scene.

Schell, who starred with her in Judgment in Nuremberg, shows her video clips to jog her memory. But she expresses boredom with this, and insists she is without nostalgia – until the moment she recites a poem she has loved for years. Then, briefly, the façade breaks down.

But not for long, which drives Schell into some irritating hand-wringing (the movie is also about the process of making the film). Dietrich questions his professionalism a couple of times, and it’s hard to disagree with her.

Despite Schell’s self-indulgence, the film is arresting. Dietrich bristles with down-to-earth opinions. On the afterlife: “Horrible. You can’t believe that they all fly around up there?”

All this, without her face. But it may be said that Dietrich’s face takes shape throughout this exploration, as a composite of the film images and gravelly mature voice. Perhaps that voice can give us a truer face, without the distraction of Marlene’s mask.

First published in The Herald, November 1986

I have to guess at the publishing date, but that’s close enough; it opened in Seattle at the Egyptian theater. I don’t know where I come off pontificating in this way about the great Dietrich, but some of it comes from the documentary; I remember that Schell comes across as pretty insufferable. Now go watch The Scarlet Empress.

Miles from Home

Miles from Home was originally titled Farm of the Year. Not a very sexy handle, but it would have been a more bitterly appropriate title for this film of unrest in America’s heartland.

It begins with some dreamlike black-and-white shots in which an Iowa farmer is visited by Nikita Khrushchev during the Soviet premier’s trip to America in 1959. The farm has won an award as “Farm of the Year” and Khrushchev wants to see an example of cornfed capitalism.

Nearly 20 years later, the farm of the year has run out of glory. The two sons who inherited the place (played by Richard Gere and Kevin Anderson) are forcibly evicted, having gone heavily into debt. (A scene in which a bank official comes to foreclose on the land has haunting overtones of the similar scene near the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath.) In a hastily conceived act of cavalier defiance, the brothers torch the house and barn and light out.

Unexpectedly, they becomes celebrities because of the torching, folk heroes with a cowboy aura. They’re sheltered by a goggle-eyed celebrity-monger (Judith Ivey); helped by an “exotic dancer” (Laurie Metcalf), who squeals, “You guys been on TV all day!”; and interviewed by a reporter (John Malkovich) who gets them national coverage.

It’s a kick, for a while. But the elder brother, well-played by a disciplined Gere, begins to overindulge in the folk-hero stuff. Soon he’s stealing cars and robbing banks, and eagerly taking credit for the deeds.

It becomes clear that the reason for his erratic behavior stems largely from his guilt about running the once-proud farm into the ground after his father’s death. This is the most touching aspect of Miles from Home, in that it deepens the social issues of the farmers’ plight into something more complex.

More complex, yet uneven. There is a lot that is good about Miles from Home, but there are lapses. It’s the first feature directed by Gary Sinise, who has done extensive work with Chicago’s forward-looking, highly respected Steppenwolf Theater (many of Steppenwolf’s actors are in the film, including Anderson, Malkovich, and Terry Kinney). One might have expected something more unconventional and daring from Sinise.

Sinise, working from Chris Gerolmo’s script, can’t quite make Anderson’s love interest (Penelope Ann Miller) believable, and the issue of the brothers’ celebrity is handled half-heartedly. All the elements are present in this movie; they just don’t all come home.

First published in The Herald, September 30, 1988

I left some names out of the cast here: Brian Dennehy, who plays the family patriarch in flashback but doesn’t have any lines, and Helen Hunt. The movie is also the film debut of Laura San Giacomo, in an unbilled role. Other than that, I know it only as a dull memory.

Mac and Me

Mac and Me is a really weird movie that appears to be half E.T. rip-off and half long-form McDonald’s commercial. That combination of elements sounds like a recipe for excruciation, and it mostly is.

In fact, the only interesting thing about Mac and Me is that any filmmaker could take this material and make a sincere attempt to animate it. But that is what director Stewart Raffill seems to have done. Raffill’s made some trashily enjoyable movies (The Philadelphia Experiment, Ice Pirates), and he actually gives Mac and Me the old college try.

The material defeats him. As the film opens, an American space probe vacuums up a family of aliens. (Well, not aliens actually; they’re on their own planet, after all. Natives, call them.) This family is brought back to Earth and spewed out in California. One little extraterrestrial gets loose by himself and falls into the custody of a mother (Christine Ebersole) and her two adolescent sons.

When the family moves into a new house in Sacramento, the creature moves with them. He gets into hijinks and finally befriends the younger boy (Jade Calegory), who is in a wheelchair.

“Mac,” by the way, stands for Mysterious Alien Creature. But before the movie is over, you realize that “Mac” also refers to a certain fast-food item sold at a many-tentacled restaurant chain.

This is where the weirder aspects of the movie come into play. While some portion of the profits of the film have been earmarked for donation to needy children, via Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities, Mac and Me is also filled with rampant hucksterism.

Other products are prominently placed, but their names need not be mentioned here (there’s enough of that in the movie). The main thrust is provided by McDonald’s. The fast-food consortium is constantly talked about, and one big scene is set in a franchise. In this scene, a gaggle of fresh-faced kids dance through the McDonald’s while singing some upbeat song. And, as the ads promise, there is a cameo appearance by Ronald McDonald himself. It’s enough to make you swear off hamburgers.

First published in The Herald, August 18, 1988

It’s had a long afterlife: Razzie awards, the Mystery Science Theater treatment, a running joke between Paul Rudd and Conan O’Brien. So all I can do is ask you to imagine what it was like to see this film cold, when it was new, without any of the comfort of irony or so-bad-it’s-bad history, and feel something for the author here. It was Jennifer Aniston’s film debut, as an uncredited dancer at McDonald’s.

Midnight Run

Robert De Niro may have opted out of the lead role in Big – he was an early choice – but he did not, evidently, give up on trying his hand at comedy. Midnight Run, De Niro’s newest, allows this gifted actor to let fly a few punch lines for a change.

In Midnight Run, De Niro is playing opposite an actor much better known for comedy roles: Charles Grodin. This, on first glance, looks like an exceptionally odd pairing, but then that’s what the movie is about. De Niro is a rough, wily bounty hunter hired to pick up Grodin and transport him from New York to Los Angeles. Grodin is a mob accountant who is almost certainly going to be killed by his ex-boss, the Mafia chief (Dennis Farina), when he is delivered into custody.

So Midnight Run mines a couple of different veins at once, the buddy movie and the road movie. George Gallo’s script, notwithstanding some loose ends, is quite ingenious in getting the couple from plane to car to bus to train. The traveling companions are being chased by the mob, a very ticked-off FBI man (Yaphet Kotto), and a competitive bounty hunter (John Ashton).

The buddy stuff succeeds because the combination of De Niro and Grodin is just unlikely enough to work. Grodin may have the best deadpan in the business – he’s made a virtual career out of it, even in his talk-show appearances – and he keeps it trained steadily on De Niro. There’s nothing original about the combination of personalities; Grodin’s the fussy one, goading De Niro about the negative effects of fatty foods and cigarettes, and about De Niro’s estrangement from an ex-wife in Chicago. De Niro, predictably, bristles and barks at Grodin’s touchy-feely approach.

Nothing new about that, but these two actors are inventive enough to discover fresh ways of doing it. Director Martin Brest lets some scenes run on in loopy improvisational manner, and De Niro and Grodin find some charmed chemistry together.

It’s a pretty funky movie – gritty and foul-mouthed and loose – but with an unforced measure of sweet stuff. That it works as often as it does is a tribute to Brest, who juggled similar elements in his fine Going in Style earlier this decade. There’s a terrific scene in Midnight Run in which De Niro and Grodin stop by the house of De Niro’s ex-wife, and the comic argument that ensues is suddenly stilled by the appearance of De Niro’s daughter, whom he has not seen in nine years. It’s a very touching moment.

I don’t know if Brest is cursed by good fortune, or what. He had a megahit in 1984 with the original Beverly Hills Cop, but Midnight Run is his first movie since. I hope Midnight Run doesn’t have to top that movie for this guy to get another job – he’s too good to waste.

First published in The Herald, July 21, 1988

It was a hit, although it’s uncertain whether Brest, who has made exactly three features since this came out, and none since Gigli in 2003, was cursed by good fortune. Everybody give it up for Going in Style, a nice picture. And RIP Yaphet Kotto.