Showing posts with label Veronica Cartwright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Veronica Cartwright. Show all posts

Sunday, June 9, 2019

ALIEN 1979

When I think of the films that have given me the most memorably fun scares of my movie life, my mind goes to Wait Until Dark (1967), The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), The Omen (1976), and Alien. In another category entirely are the films I consider to be scary because they are disturbing and unsettling (like Rosemary's Baby which I saw in 1968 when I was still an impressionable Catholic School kid). Those movies are memorable cinema experiences, but too shattering to be labeled "fun."
But Alien was another matter. Ridley Scott's science fiction monster movie masterpiece was structured like the classic monster movies of my youth, a movie manufactured to deliver solid, old-fashioned thrills, suspense, and excitement. Seeing it for the first time on opening day in 1979 was a fun, thrill-ride movie experience I've never forgotten. 
Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley
Tom Skerritt as Captain Arthur Dallas
John Hurt as Executive Officer Gilbert Kane
Veronica Cartwright as Navigator Joan Lambert
Yaphet Kotto as Chief Engineer Denis Parker
Harry Dean Stanton as Engineering Technician Samuel Brent
Ian Holm as Science Officer Ash


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE
In my earlier essay covering Alien’s opening day at Los Angeles’ Egyptian Theater in 1979, I mentioned how I wasn’t initially all that keen on seeing the film because sci-fi flicks—like westerns, sports films, and war movies—are not generally my cup of tea. This wasn’t always the case.
When I was young, television (all three channels of it) was virtually non-stop westerns, sporting events, military combat shows, and sci-fi programmers. And broadcast movies were only more of the same. I remember liking them a great deal when I was small, but after years of exposure to these formulaic, male-centric entertainments, I grew weary of their elemental sameness. What they all seemed to share was a strict adherence to the fundamental format of your average western: evil force terrorizes a township or isolated group, only to be confronted and eventually vanquished by a solitary, lantern-jawed hero (always white, always male) while the women shriek helplessly on the sidelines and the weaker men resist taking action.
Having this macho myth recycled endlessly in films and TV shows over the years may have done wonders for bolstering the egos and fueling the fantasies of adolescent boys of all ages, but the combination of predictability and patriarchal pandering only led to my developing a strong, broad-strokes antipathy toward films that fit into any of the above-named genres.
I never stopped enjoying being pleasurably scared by a good sci-fi thriller or monster movie, but how I longed for some kind (ANY  kind) of deviation from type. Then I saw the advance trailer for Alien. Its biggest appeal being that it didn't tip its hat and give away its surprises. Indeed, what initially attracted me to Alien was its having the confidence and self-assurance (conveyed by its subtle ad campaign) to simply tease. It didn't give away any of its surprises, and by withholding so much, it seemed to promise even more. 
I was immediately drawn to Alien via the comfy familiarity of its setting and premise. It reminded me of Creature Features sci-fi programmers like The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Green Slime (1968). Just two years earlier George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) had spectacularly updated those Saturday matinee adventure serials of the ’30s and ‘40s, so the idea of Alien being a throwback to the tradition of those space invader films of the ‘50s I used to watch on TV as a kid struck me as both welcome and promising. 
And Alien did, indeed, live up to its promise…exceeded it, in fact, by emerging as both a throwback and a work of canny originality. For all its harkening back to the sci-fi monster movies of my youth, Alien, by merely tweaking some of the more careworn clichés of the overly-familiar genre, proved that innovation doesn’t always require redesigning the wheel; sometimes it’s simply a matter of getting that wheel out of a rut. 
Described aptly (if a tad dismissively) by many critics at the time as “Jaws in space,” Alien, at least on a superficial level, does appear to be a film with but one objective: scare the bejesus out of the audience. But the means by which the film goes about achieving this not-so-simple goal is why memories of the original Alien remain indelibly etched in my mind, while the numerous sequels and prequels in the franchise all seem to converge and coalesce into one derivative, pedantic blur.

One of the smartest things Alien does is immediately establish a sense of realism via its Used Future look. Alien envisions a recognizably grungy 2122 devoid of 2001: A Space Odyssey sterility and (mercifully) lacking in self-consciously futuristic attire like bodysuits, spandex, or metallics. There’s none of the shiny optimism of Mid-Century Jetsons streamline that flatters our illusions of progressiveness. Instead, the future looks very much like industrial now.
Which leads to the next great thing about Alien’s setup.
In lieu of adventurers, space explorers, Colonial Marines, or other interstellar travelers who knew the job was dangerous when they took it, Alien gives us a motley crew of laborers ill-equipped and ill-suited for the events that await them. The seven-member crew of The Nostromo, a commercial towing vehicle, are essentially space truck drivers who…like your average working stiffs…spend their time getting on each other’s nerves, quibbling about their salaries, and griping about the quality of the food. They have zero interest in anything but finishing their jobs and going home.

The characters are well-delineated in an ensemble-cast sort of way, fleshed out in minimalist detail by the talented actors in a way that sidesteps the kind of war movie shorthand of Whitman Sampler archetypes that marred Aliens (1986) for me. The flinty crew of The Nostromo come across as comfortable with each other, relaxed and natural in their behavior (crucial to rooting a fantasy film in a recognizable reality), and, at first glimpse, refreshingly non-heroic.
The latter goes a long way toward infusing Alien’s disarmingly uneventful early scenes with a great deal of suspense. I like that when ordered by MU-TH-UR, the mainframe computer responsible for running The Nostromo, to investigate a possible SOS signal on a nearby planetoid, everyone is of a different mind about it. No one, not even the captain, leaps to hero mode; they do so more out of professional duty (fear of forfeiting their pay shares) than moral obligation. And since we’ve ready had a foretaste of their workplace fellowship (Parker and Brett are in a clique, Ripley and Lambert have an unexplained friction between them, and nobody seems to care for Ash) throughout the expedition—from exploration to alien infestation—there’s absolutely no certainty of what to expect from any of them.

H. R. Giger’s designs for the rapidly-growing alien and that creepy derelict spaceship are as iconic as they are nightmarish, but it’s chiefly through the film’s ability to get me to identify with and relate to the human characters…to get me to see them as real and care about their fates…is where Alien triumphed and succeeded in becoming a genuinely scary movie experience. 

PERFORMANCES
I know others feel differently, but when I’m watching a science-fiction or fantasy film, the details of set design, accuracy of the science, or the sophistication of special effects aren’t nearly as significant in creating a sense of verisimilitude as the characters. If the characters are written with complexity and dimension, cast with actors capable of inhabiting a role and bringing it to life with minimal dialogue and screen time, if they behave and relate in ways consistent both to the character and recognizable human psychology; most any situation or setting, no matter how fantastic, can be made believable and convincingly real. (1978’s Superman: The Movie comes to mind.)

Alien is blessed with an uncommonly talented cast providing a level of ensemble acting I think is uncommon in many genre films. The way each creates a full-fledged character whose life I can envision beyond The Nostromo reminds me of some of the personal, small-scale performances in the films of Robert Altman or Alan Rudolph that have remained etched in my memory.
Perhaps due to the fact that at one time or another I've had co-workers similar to The Nostromo crew, and I always gravitate to the Lambert type (a little high strung and prone to bellyaching), I have a particular fondness for Veronica Cartwright in this film. It’s not just that I’d behave EXACTLY like her character in this situation, but as Tom Skerritt once stated, Cartwright gives the best performance in the film. And I absolutely agree.
With Sigourney Weaver commanding the screen with assurance and staking her claim for movie immortality in this, her star-making feature film debut (not counting a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it bit part in Annie Hall), the strength of the performances of the women in Alien play no small part in it being my favorite sci-fi thriller of all time.
Jonesy the cat is cute and all, but he's a bit of a jerk
and is responsible for far too many deaths and close calls 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Not being one of those mainstream film critics of the ‘70s conditioned to ignore the contributions of Black Cinema, I was aware of both Pam Grier (Foxy Brown – 1974) and Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones – 1973) as trailblazing female action movie heroines long before Sigourney Weaver blasted that alien “The fuck out into space.”  Yet, factoring in the widespread success and influence of the whole Alien franchise, it’s hard to over-emphasize the impact the character of Ellen Ripley has had on the depiction of women in action and sci-fi films.
By now, most everyone knows that Warrant Officer Ripley was originally conceived as a man; a gender switch regarded at the time as just another unexpected thriller twist for the audience. As it turns out, having a woman be the sole self-rescuing survivor in a traditionally male-dominated genre came to rank right up there with the hiring of H.R. Giger to design the creature as among the sharpest of Alien’s pre-production decisions. 
Having Ripley be a woman (the role allegedly not altered in any significant way in the transition) adds all manner of intentional and unintentional layers to Alien. For example, the otherwise typical workplace resistance to authority exhibited by engineers Parker and Brett (Kotto & Stanton) has a double meaning when the figure of authority they're resisting is a woman. And although we later learn why Ash behaves as he does, Ripley’s interactions with Ash likely resonate with any woman who’s ever had to deal with men making no secret of their resentment at having to answer to a female superior.
As this pertains to the scene where Ripley orders the infected crew members to be quarantined, it begs the question as to whether or not there would have been such swift resistance to the command had it come from Dallas or Kane. 
A pet peeve of mine is when screenwriters assume they have created a strong, feminist female character when they have really just created a woman who behaves in a macho manner (say, like the hot-rodding women in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!). Sure, it's important when a woman has agency in a film and her actions propel the plot, but simply ascribing aggressive male characteristics to a woman and declaring "feminist!" only signals to me the writer has little understanding of either.

Ellen Ripley may have evolved into an action-hero type over the course of all those sequels, but in Alien she’s just a no-nonsense type, good at her job and not prone to panic. For all her resiliency, she’s an incredibly empathetic, good-hearted, and sensitive character. Just check out Weaver's reactions during the chest-bursting scene…Lambert is horrified and in hysterics (again, me) but Ripley’s face (and it’s the most amazingly subtle thing) conveys both alarm and compassionate anguish for what Kane is going through.
While I fully understand the well-taken criticism, but I'm one of those "nudity is not always sexual" guys. I'm in the camp that doesn't find Ripley's controversial strip to her underwear sexualizes her. It feels like a connecting link to the opening scene where John Hurt awakens from hypersleep and the camera lens lingers on him in his underwear. Both scenes emphasize the vulnerability and humanity of the characters against all that space technology. The contrast of human flesh and the part-machine/bio-organism design of Giger's creature is a visceral underscoring that is chilling.


THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Much in the way Twyla Tharp's loose-structured dance designs made her the ideal choreographer for Miloš Forman’s adaptation of Hair, Alien (and, indeed, the entire science fiction movie genre) owes an unpayable debt to the biomechanical nightmare designs or Swiss artist H. R. Giger. 

It’s not often that one encounters the unimaginable (thank God), but Giger’s exceptionally strange, sexualized, body-horror designs for the film are what set Alien apart from any other film I’ve ever seen. The unsettling blend of the mechanical with the organic—in which both structures and organisms share the same solid/soft, vulnerable/impenetrable contrasts—transport the primal shocks of the average monster movie to places so dark (male rape, impregnation, and violent birth) you feel slightly queasy. Thank goodness Ridley Scott chose to keep shots of the fully-formed alien to a minimum. I was plenty unsettled by the facehugger, the chest-buster, and the ribcage/vertebrae interior of that creepy ship they explore.
Giger's magnificent, ugly-beautiful design work--triggering subliminal impressions of sex, flesh, metal, and machine--heighten Alien's ick factor by making the unimaginable not only possible, but credible. And once a horror film succeeds in making the impossible credible, you're a goner, for then you know you're in a place of the unstable and unpredictable where anything can happen.


In space no one can hear you scream.
I've intentionally left out behind-the-scenes trivia and information pertaining to the making of Alien because the internet overflows with a veritable treasure trove of information, scripts, production notes, and all manner of details relating to the production. Here are links to a couple of my favorites.

"This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off."

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2019

Saturday, May 25, 2019

YOU ARE MY LUCKY STAR: ALIEN 40th ANNIVERSARY 1979

The sci-fi horror thriller Alien turned 40 this year. And in that timeprogressing from sleeper hit to franchise to authentic classicRidley Scott’s 2nd feature film has enjoyed a growth cycle arguably as swift and expansive as that of the titular xenomorph itself. As a rule, science fiction tends to rank somewhere beneath westerns, sports films, espionage thrillers, and war movies in my roster of least-favorite movie genres, but Alien is a different animal entirely. An ingenious and genuinely scary update of those '50s sci-fi Creature Feature programmers I recall from my youth; Alien is a solid suspense thriller that just happens to take place in outer space. I fell in love with it when I saw it on opening day in 1979, and after all these years, after seeing it countless times, Alien still rates a special place in my heart. Just as long as it's not in my chest.

On the occasion of Alien's 40th Anniversary, 
my electronic film diary memories of Alien's opening day, May 25, 1979. 

A Cruel Summer
Alien and a then-unknown Sigourney Weaver make the June 18, 1979 cover of Newsweek

Because movies aren't created in a vacuum, because successes can't be predicted, and because I'm forever fascinated by the almost alchemical selection process by which the public responds to one particular motion picture over another; allow me to take a moment to put the release of Alien in a bit of context by taking a look at what was hitting the theaters in the summer of 1979.

The year began with new releases from favorites Robert Altman (Quintet, A Perfect Couple), Woody Allen (Manhattan), & Milos Forman (Hair). And the fall promised an original musical from Bob Fosse (All That Jazz), a romantic comedy from Alan J. Pakula (Starting Over), and the film debut of Bette Midler (The Rose). But when I looked ahead to what the summer months promised in the way of film releases, the Summer of ’79 didn't appear to be shaping up to be much of a banner season at the movies.
For those who like their big-name stars served up with as few surprises as possible, there was Clint Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz and Barbra Streisand reteaming with her What’s Up Doc? co-star Ryan O’Neal in The Main Event (getting a significant publicity boost from La Streisand’s late-to-the-party stab at disco with the film’s theme song). That summer also saw my beloved Audrey Hepburn and Ali MacGraw testing the limits of the adage ‘Everybody loves a comeback story’ by appearing in the high-profile miscalculations Bloodline and Players, respectively.
Photo: Gary McVey
On the topic of adages (or proverbs), no summer would be complete without echoing homage paid to: ‘If they liked it once, they’ll love it twice.’ On that score, the Airport and James Bond franchises persisted with The Concorde… Airport ’79 and Roger Moore’s 4th go-round as 007 in the 11th Bond film Moonraker. Meanwhile, major industry money was riding on the sequels Rocky II and More American Graffiti (the former delivered, the latter, not so much) while somewhere in the distance Irwin Allen was squeezing the life out of the once vital disaster film genre with his unasked for Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.

For those inclined to play it safe, there were limited-engagement 70mm rereleases of both Grease and The Exorcist. For the gamblers, the summer presented a roster of television personalities making a play for big-screen gold: Charlie’s Angels’ Farrah Fawcett appearing in SunburnThree Company’s John Ritter in Americathon, and SNL’s Bill Murray in Meatballs. And if those prospects weren’t scary enough, The Amityville HorrorProphecy, and Dracula hoped to add a few chills to the summer heat.

After enduring nearly four years of hype and controversy, the film I was most stoked to see was Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. No one believed it was going to make its exclusive August 15th opening date.  

Which brings us to Alien. I wish I could say that the film that turned out to be my number one, absolute favorite movie of the summer was a film whose release I'd eagerly anticipated. That it was a film I'd read about, heard advance word about, and knew would be a hit. I wish I could. But the truth is, Alien was a movie woefully off my advance radar. Maybe it was due to other, more high-profile films hogging the publicity landscape at the time, but I have ZERO recollection of even being aware of the existence of Alien before teaser ads began to appear in the trade papers at the start of the year, and when intriguingly cryptic ads began airing on TV.
What really brought Alien to my attention was when posters for the film began to appear around town. They really grabbed me. I mean, after the PG-rated, retro earnestness of Star Wars and all that benevolent optimism in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, here was an R-rated sci-fi monster movie that held the promise of a creature that wasn't so nice.
Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley
Tom Skerritt as Captain Arthur Dallas
John Hurt as Executive Officer Gilbert Kane
Veronica Cartwright as Navigator Joan Lambert
Yaphet Kotto as Chief Engineer Denis Parker
Harry Dean Stanton as Engineering Technician Samuel Brett
Ian Holm as Science Officer Ash the Android

An Alien Encounter
I saw Alien on the Friday evening of May 25, 1979. The date was the kickoff of a long Memorial Day weekend which also happened to be the 2nd Anniversary of the blockbuster release of Star Wars. The studio 20th Century-Fox (no doubt hoping that lightning would strike twice) marked the occasion by premiering Alien, its new sci-fi release, in 70mm and Dolby Stereo at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Not an official, invitation-only movie premiere, but an exclusive engagement that had Alien was screened for 48 continuous hours over that holiday weekend, its debut feted with searchlights, towering signs, giveaways, lobby displays of props and models, and a massive scale replica of the film’s “Space Jockey” in the theater’s courtyard (Space Jockey is a name that came to stick sometime later. Then, still in the flush of Star Wars mania, many referred to it as the “Star Pilot”).  
The line I stood in was an incredibly long one that stretched west from the theater’s massive curved marquee (George Hamilton’s Dracula spoof Love at First Bite—a holdover from April—was playing in the smaller Egyptian Theaters II and III) past the London Britches blue jeans store next door (in 1927 it was the Pig 'n' Whistle restaurant), beyond Jambi’s sandwich shop, down to the Pioneer Chicken take-out on the corner, winding around McCadden Place across from the Scientology building, all the way down to Selma Avenue.
Certainly, public interest was high for any all science fiction films released while awaiting the December premiere of Star Trek: The Movie, but a contributing factor to Alien's huge turnout had to be that it had the weekend virtually all to itself. Friday the 25th also saw Mann's Chinese Theater regretting booking Peter Sellers' The Prisoner of Zenda (a film I'd wager even his fans have forgotten), and further up the boulevard headed east, minimal competition was offered by the release of David Cronenberg's The Brood.
By 1986, the sequel to Alien would open in dozens of theaters throughout the Los Angeles area, but in 1979, I only recall Alien premiering at 2 locations: the Egyptian in Hollywood and the Avco Center Cinemas in Westwood (above). As you can see, the triplex also hosted Harrison Ford's WW II bomber bomb Hanover Street and The China Syndrome.

The buzz standing in line was tremendous because, like Star Wars, Alien was an “event” movie with nary a star in its cast and a film that no one knew anything about. It was a high-concept scary movie whose marketing seized the imagination by playing up the ambiguity. With a campaign and poster designed by the same team responsible for the groundbreaking marketing campaign for Rosemary’s Baby, everything from Alien’s trailer to TV ads were all about what you didn’t know and what you couldn’t see. Similarities to the iconic 1968 Rosemary’s Baby poster could be seen in Alien’s eerie green/black color scheme, its arrestingly simple typeface, the bold graphic of a scabrous egg emitting a green vapor from a glowing crack in its surface, and that irresistible, unforgettable (now classic) tagline: In space no one can hear you scream.
Philip Gips, Barbara Gips, Stephen Frankfurt, Paula Silver, Gina Stone, Belott-Wolfson photography

A significant part of my excitement that night was anticipation born of simply not knowing what I was in for. I didn't know anything about Ridley Scott or designer H.R. Giger, and I’d never heard of a Sigourney Weaver, much less knew how to pronounce it. Everyone else in the cast was familiar in a vague kind of way from TV episodics or small roles in films. Tom Skerritt I remembered from playing Shirley MacLaine’s husband in The Turning Point (1977), Yaphet Kotto as the bad guy in Live and Let Die (1973), John Hurt from when PBS aired The Naked Civil Servant back in 1976, and Harry Dean Stanton from appearing in practically every TV show on the air in the ‘60s. Curiously enough, Alien’s biggest star and primary draw for me was Veronica Cartwright, the versatile and underappreciated actress I’d fallen in love with after seeing her in Inserts (1975), Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1976), and nearly walking away with the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). 
Before Alien, sci-fi movies were a boys club genre where women were either ornamental or sat worrying on the sidelines. My initial disinterest in Alien was sparked by this teaser ad that appeared in the trade papers. It made the film look like another one of those snoozy sci-fi melodramas like Marooned or Capricorn One.

While I’ve since matured (calcified?) into the kind of person who runs in the opposite direction at the mere sight of a line forming, back in May of 1979 when I was a 21-year-old with a far more gregarious nature, the idea of waiting in a line for two hours to see a film merely added to the overall excitement of the moviegoing experience. The evening the general atmosphere on the line was genial and full of anticipation, and with no cell phones to bury our heads in while waiting, many of us joined in conversation with the folks standing near us in line, each of us comparing notes about how much or how little we knew. And what with the aforementioned Jambi’s sandwich shop and Pioneer Chicken take-out doing land-office business with patrons sitting along the boulevard eating and drinking, waiting to see Alien also felt like an automobile-free tailgate party.

A funny thing about standing in line for a new film, especially on a street as heavily traveled by tourists as Hollywood Blvd, you can find yourself seized by this foolish, decidedly silly notion that you have suddenly become part of the city's attractions to gawking out-of-towners. Just standing there amongst the Walk of Fame stars on the sidewalk and the beaming Klieg lights at the curb, you are no longer yourself, you are now "a huge line outside the Hollywood premiere of Alien" in somebody's vacation anecdote.
Photo: William Malone
Prop of the Alien Egg Chamber

Ever the eager-beaver when it came to movie opening nights, I was able to snag a primo bit of movie line real estate. A location very near the entrance to the theater’s courtyard which afforded a prolonged look at Alien’s posters and lobby cards, along with a sizable, unsettling 3-D promotional display/movie prop that at the time looked to me like rows of oozing, two-feet-tall Cadbury Crème Easter Eggs that had seen better days.

As the line progressed further into the theater’s then-roofed courtyard, things began to take on the feel of an amusement park. Following a barricaded path to the theater entrance, patrons were led through the dark, padded hallway of a spaceship when then opened out into a rather dazzling geometric room of tiny yellow lights and computer screens. This, of course, was the mainframe computer room of The Nostromo, but at the time I only had Disneyland’s Space Mountain ride as a point of reference, and that’s what it all reminded me of.
Photo: Lisa Morton
Photo: Alien Explorations
By this time I’d already begun to feel somewhat giddy with anticipation, but when the enclosed computer room opened out into the larger rear courtyard (near the Wishing Well of the Stars) I came face-to-face with a mind-bendingly bizarre structure that looked like the skeleton of an elephant fused into a chair and looking through a futuristic Planetarium projector…well, I was a goner. Neither I nor anyone else in line had any idea of what we were looking at (a ¾ scale prop of the Alien Space Jockey) but it struck me as being surreally grotesque, phallic, and utterly disturbing…in other words, absolutely gorgeous.
Photo: William Malone
At last, we were at the entrance to the theater. Regrettably, my awareness of the throngs of people waiting to get in, combined with my obsession with grabbing the ideal seat smack dab in the middle of the auditorium, prevented me from even noticing that there were more props and models from Alien on display in the lobby. I simply dashed to my seat, ignoring the snack bar and the very likely prospect of a souvenir program for sale (you can get a look at all the lobby props I personally missed at this blogger's account of the Alien premiere Here).

Upon entering the auditorium, early arrivals were given a free promotional pinback button. An item that triggered an ungrateful, inner “WTF?” response from me.
The reason is that the free souvenir button didn’t feature the film’s tagline, a picture of one of those alien eggs, or even the film’s title. Any of which I’d have been happy to have. No, it was a black button approximately 2 ½ inches in diameter that simply had the words “You Are My Lucky Star” printed on a starry background. Hindsight plainly reveals this to be a very clever giveaway that patrons wouldn't appreciate until after they'd seen the film (Ripley sings the song to herself in the climactic scene as a means of calming her nerves) but at the time all I could think was what the hell did a tune from Broadway Melody of 1936 have to do with Alien
I still have my souvenir Alien button. 

These days, especially here in L.A., it’s not uncommon for movie theaters to display the props and costumes of films on exhibit in their lobbies. But back in 1979 such pomp and circumstance were largely the stuff of star-studded premieres and rarely available to the public. That novelty factor is perhaps why the Egyptian put faith in the honor system and left the safety of its display items in the hands of just a few strategically placed “Please Do Not Touch the Display” signs. When I returned to the theater the following weekend to see Alien a second time, the props had all been removed due to someone having set the Space Jockey sculpture on fire. Imagine, an extraterrestrial fossil surviving all that time on a planetoid, only to be demolished in a matter of days when confronted with the boundless stupidity of what passes for "intelligent life" on this rock called earth. 
Strange Shapes
So, what was it like seeing Alien for the very first time with absolutely no foreknowledge of what I was getting myself into? Abso-fucking-lutely A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

What did I ultimately think of the film and what were my overall impressions?
That's for my next post. 

Happy Birthday, Alien!

Read my review ALIEN the film, not the opening day experience, HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2019

Thursday, November 19, 2015

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR 1961

*Spoiler alert. This essay gives away key plot points

Much in the manner in which Warner Bros. cartoon character Elmer Fudd is compelled to use words teeming with the very Ls and Rs he's unable to pronounce (his Owivia DeHaviwand being a particular favorite); Hollywood during the Production Code era (1934-1968) just couldn’t keep away from “adult”-themed projects it had no reasonable hope of adequately interpreting.

Dramatist and screenwriter Lillian Hellman had her first major theatrical success in 1934 with the banned-in-Boston stage hit The Children’s Hour: a shocking-for-its-time play in which the two headmistresses of a tony girls’ boarding school have their careers and lives ruined by the spread of the malicious rumor that the pair are in fact illicit lovers in a lesbian relationship. 

When William Wyler first adapted Hellman's play for the screen in 1936, the show's scandalous reputation was such that not only was a title change mandated (The Children’s Hour became These Three), but "the lie with the ounce of truth" was changed from the whisper of lesbianism to the more socially palatable rumor of heteronormative adultery. Instead of an accusation of being in love with each other, the two women were now accused of (yawn) being in love with the same man. And lest one think this a Hollywood cop-out of the highest order, know that it was Lillian Hellman herself who approved and adapted the screenplay of the 1936 version for the screen.

Hellman's almost word-for-word-faithful adaptation of her play for Wyler confirmed her oft-repeated claim that The Children’s Hour was not really about lesbianism so much as the pernicious power of a lie. "The bigger the lie, the better," Hellman affirmed. A point of view she would gain a great deal of first-hand experience with when, in 1952 she was blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee; and later in 1979, charged with falsifying the details of her memoir, Pentimento. (Author Mary McCarthy [The Group] on Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'!")

Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier
A salacious seed is planted in the minds of the  girls when they read the scandalous 1834 French novel in which a woman disguises herself as a man and has affairs with both sexes

In 1960, in an effort to rectify the compromises he felt imposed upon him by MGM and the Hays Code in 1936, William Wyler returned to The Children's Hour vowing to make a more faithful version of the play. Taking advantage of the permissive atmosphere of the times, Wyler even went so far as to say he’d be willing to release his film without the MPAA seal of approval if need be. (Many newspapers at the time refused to carry ads for films lacking the Production Code seal. Similarly, many theaters wouldn’t exhibit non-approved films.)
Whether it was due to Wyler’s pronouncement that his remake was to be “A clean film with a highly moral story!”, or the casting of ladylike Audrey Hepburn as the fem half of the whispered-about duo (Wyler:“We don’t want bosoms in this!”), the studio heads ultimately relented and The Children’s Hour was green-lit for production. Provided, of course, that the word “lesbian” never be uttered, and that there be no demonstrative sexual contact of any sort. Yep, certainly sounds like those 1936 compromises were put to rest by 1961. 
Audrey Hepburn as Karen Wright
Shirley MacLaine as Martha Dobie
James Garner as Joe Cardin
Fay Bainter as Amelia Tilford
Miriam Hopkins as Lily Mortar
Coy as it seems today, The Children’s Hour was written at a time when it was illegal to even make mention of homosexuality in a Broadway play. The show’s ultimate success somehow surmounted public moral outrage, allowing for it to become one of the first Broadway plays to feature a LGBTQ character. Similar honors went to Wyler’s 1961 film adaptation, with Shirley MacLaine being one of the first major stars to play a gay character in a motion picture; albeit just barely. Change was obviously in the air in the early '60s, as several other gay-themed films arrived in theaters within months of The Children’s Hour’s release: Dirk Bogarde’s Victim, Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent, and Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey with Brit fave Murray Melvin making his film debut as a sympathetically portrayed gay teenager.  
The Hateful Eight...er, 12-year-old
Making her film debut, Karen Balkin as Mary Tilford

Karen Wright (Hepburn) and Martha Dobie (MacLaine) are two college chums now partnered in the ownership and operation of a girls’ boarding school. After years of struggle, the school, catering to the adolescent daughters of well-to-do families, appears at last to be up on its feet. So much so that Karen, engaged for the last two years to local doctor Joe Cardin (Garner), at last feels free to marry. A decision which doesn’t set well with Martha, who outwardly expresses her displeasure as simply the fear that marriage and motherhood will lead to Karen’s abandonment of the school.

The pair’s heated discussions and platonic entreaties of love and loyalty on the topic are overheard and misinterpreted by Mary Tilford (Bakin), a troublemaking student whose compulsive lying and disobedience has made her the frequent object of discipline. In spiteful retaliation for one such upbraiding, Mary tells her grandmother (Bainter) that Miss Wright and Miss Dobie are lovers, and that she has seen them kissing and engaging in all manner of nocturnal hanky panky.
Before long, the lie concocted merely to avoid the consequences of a rule infraction mushrooms into a scandal which closes the school and makes a shamble of the lives of three innocent people.
These Three
Given the director, it comes as no surprise that The Children’s Hour is a handsome, well-crafted, and finely-acted film of almost irresistible watchability (like All About Eve, The Children’s Hour is one of those movies impossible to channel surf past, no matter how far along into the story I catch it). I don't know if there is such a thing as a "William Wyler movie," as he has always struck me as one of those industry professionals devoid of an identifiable style, but he is noted for producing consistent quality work.
Auteur or not, I do know that William Wyler movies occupy a lot of space on my DVD shelves: Roman Holiday, The Heiress, The Little Foxes, Funny Girl, The Letter, and of course, The Children’s Hour; a film whose every frame supports his reputation for vivid storytelling and extracting superior performances from his cast. The Children's Hour was the no-win recipient of five Academy Award nominations (supporting actress, cinematography, costume, art direction, sound).
Children Will Listen

For all its technical distinction (the lighting, editing, and shot compositions are really something to be applauded) and the high-drama content of its plot (as stated, the film is compellingly watchable), it's still difficult for me not to feel as though The Children's Hour suffers a bit from Wyler's very obvious efforts to deliver a “clean” and “highly moral” film about a subject that is a great deal more than mere sensation. In his well-intentioned desire to grant the story the solemnity and respect, I'm sure he felt was its due; Wyler falls prey to adopting a tone of such unyielding good taste and decorum that it feels at times almost airless. The result is that The Children’s Hour vacillates between stagy soap opera and overheated melodrama precisely at moments calling for the raw intimacy of emotional honesty. 
It's during these moments when The Children’s Hour calls to mind for me the character Mary Tyler Moore played in Ordinary People - it becomes a film determined not to draw attention to itself by making a scene.
Veronica Cartwright as Rosalie Wells
One of the best criers in the business

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
It is incredible that educated people living in an urban American community today would react as violently and cruelly to a questionable innuendo as they are made to do in this film.”  - Bosley Crowther's New York Times review of The Children’s Hour March, 1962

Obviously, movie critic Bosley Crowther needed to get out more. In the face of homophobia and bigotry, incredulity like Crowther’s seems sophisticated and liberal in that it superficially gives people credit for being more civilized and intelligent than a film like this suggests. But in reality, to ignore and deny that gay lives are ruined every day in America by the very same rootless bigotry and baseless homophobia The Children’s Hour dramatizes, is head-in-the-sand blindness. A subtle and privileged means of refuting and denying the suffering that is the day-to-day reality for many LGBTQ individuals even today.

Indeed, one of the contributing factors to my not having even seen The Children’s Hour until recently is due to almost everything I’d read previously about the film corroborating Mr. Crowther’s position. I avoided The Children’s Hour because I assumed it was going to be another dated Hollywood exercise in homosexual self-loathing masked as liberal discourse.
When I finally did see the film, I was happily surprised that, regardless of how dated the surface trappings were, the message of the film felt timeless. Remove the old-fashioned acting, starchy language, and that '60s censorship straitjacket (à la Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) necessitating characters verbally dance all around an issue without ever saying it plainly, and you’ve got a story that plays out in all corners of our country today. Set Hellman's story in the present, trade a girls' boarding school for a Boy Scout troop...would anything play any differently? America harbors such strange delusions about itself. I don't know how anyone could look at this film and say with a straight face "This could never happen today!" No, the themes Lillian Hellman sought to address (how truth and facts are often no match for willful ignorance) remain contemporary and unchanged.
Careless Whisper
In this, her last film, Fay Bainter garnered The Children's Hour's sole acting Oscar nomination, and deservedly so. She's a forceful and dynamic presence in every scene. In the role that won Bonita Granville an Oscar nomination in 1936's These Three,  Karen Balkin (who sometimes bears an unfortunate resemblance to Charles Laughton) gives an outsized performance that wouldn't be out of place in a comedy like The Trouble With Angels. Still,  I wouldn't say she's exactly ineffective in the role, as by the third act you're apt to find the character she plays loathsome in the extreme. She makes The Bad Seed's Rhoda Penmark look like Shirley Temple

If The Children’s Hour has a credibility problem at all, it lies not in its depiction of the swiftness with which the community condemns the women on baseless innuendo (these days, inciting the public to overreact to unsubstantiated hate-mongering has practically become an official GOP political platform); but in anybody not being able to see through little Mary’s broad-as-a-barn-door lying and bullying tactics. Barring this, I think The Children’s Hour presents one of the screen’s more accurate and cutting indictments of hysterical bigotry.
The ever-likable James Garner is solid as always,
but isn't called upon to do much more than stand around looking all hetero and stuff

PERFORMANCES
I have no idea how 1961 audiences responded to Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine appearing in this “daring” film, but these days when a straight actor takes on a gay role, the public practically awards them a medal of bravery. Everyone, gay and straight alike, carries on as though the actor had just crawled through the foxholes of war-torn Iwo Jima with an orphan on their back.
Nevertheless, back in 1961, it was no doubt a big deal for two such high-profile stars to appear in a film with a lesbian theme. But (not to diminish the risk-taking of either actress), Hepburn had just played a prostitute--or Hollywood’s idea of a prostitute--in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and was eager to shed her ingénue image, while MacLaine had a bohemian “kook” reputation (yes, even as far back as that) which lent itself to character roles (aka, women outside the mainstream). And politically speaking, it certainly didn’t hurt that both women were at the time married with children. One source I read speculated on the unlikely chance an unmarried actress would have taken on either role. 
Audrey Hepburn, who got her start and an Academy Award in Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), is an enduring favorite of mine and her performance here, while not particularly showy, is one of the strongest of her early career. Clearly cast (at least in part) for her lack of an overtly sexual screen persona and for having an image that adhered to traditional notions of femininity; one can only imagine how provocative The Children's Hour would have been (something Wyler wasn't interested in, it seems) had she been cast in MacLaine’s role.
Miriam Hopkins, who actually did play the MacLaine role in These Three opposite Merle Oberon and Joel McCrea, is a hammy delight as Martha's affected, self-dramatizing aunt.

Playing an overly-theatrical B-level stage actress, Miriam Hopkins is seen here clutching the mementos of her career. In this instance a glamour portrait that is actually a publicity pic of Hopkins from the 1936 film, Becky Sharp.   

As someone once commented on this site in relation to an earlier post about the movie Hot Spell, Shirley MacLaine can come off a little shrill in scenes requiring displays of anxiety or excitability. But like many gifted comic actors, she can really deliver the dramatic goods when playing hostility and pique. In a film that codifies lesbianism as simply an absence of glamour, MacLaine is really very good (this is where the film in its own small way is rather progressive) and grants her sympathetic character a depth and humanity refreshingly devoid of caricature. She resorts to no gimmicks or tricks to signify Martha's latent homosexuality, playing the role honestly and without artifice. In recent interviews about The Children’s Hour, MacLaine likes to relate how Wyler got cold feet during the making of the film, resulting in several non-explicit scenes of Martha showing her affection for Karen (brushing Hepburn’s hair, ironing her clothes, and cooking) ending up on the cutting room floor.
I’m not altogether sure how the inclusion of those sequences would have helped a film whose big dramatic payoff is an 11th-hour “self-realization” scene (which for my money MacLaine pulls off very well in spite of it being a tad overwritten). Besides, such demonstrativeness to me would appear redundant given how well she already successfully conveys her deep love for Hepburn’s character through a dozen subtle looks and gestures.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The Children’s Hour has always been controversial for the part it played in kickstarting the tired movie trope of the doomed/suicidal homosexual: an overworked cliché born of a warped morality, homophobic societal norms, and the Hollywood Production Code. 
For the most part, gay characters in films tended to be used for comic relief, easy sensationalism, or a glib, short-cut bid to signify sophistication or wanton liberalness. From the start, studios and censors gleaned that the death of a the gay character in the final reel not only satisfied the movie mandate requiring “sinners” pay for their transgressions, but presented, at fadeout, a symbolic “return to normalcy” for viewers, calculated to reassure and secure their faith in the enduring indomitability of heterosexuality and triumph of the status quo. 
Problematic as the ending of The Children’s Hour is for many (MacLaine’s character hangs herself), anecdotally I’ve always felt it presented a situation more complex for Martha than mere homophobic self-loathing. In the scene precipitating her suicide, Martha comes out to Karen at precisely the same moment she comes out to herself. She falls apart in a stream of consciousness monologue in which she tries to sort out her feelings about herself amidst paralyzing confusion and guilt over the role her lack of self-awareness may or may not have played in the destruction of so many lives. Including her own.

It's arguable and certainly up for debate whether Martha's self-disgust ("Oh I feel so damn sick and dirty I can't stand it anymore!") is wholly related to her discovery of her true sexual identity, and not, at least in part, also attributable to genuine guilt-based self-recrimination. 
Martha's vocal and frequent emotional outbursts--ill-temper with Joe, her impatience with her silly Aunt--all brought on by her repressed feelings for Karen, are what the children overhear. What arouses their suspicions. For me, it makes both psychological and emotional sense for Martha to be just as wracked with guilt over bringing harm to the woman she loves as she is plagued by internalized homophobia and self-loathing. 
It's not an either-or situation, it's a combination of complex, combatting emotions brought about by abrupt self-confrontation and self-realization. I think it trivializes the story and the character to reduce the cause of Martha's suicide to "Because she realized she's gay." 
So, while there's no denying Martha's suicide is an extreme response to her suffering from a particularly acute case of "gaynst" (gay-angst); it can also be perceived to be the final, selfless act of love her character intends it to be. This is to say that within the confines of the narrative (the last we see of Martha alive, she's not brooding intently upon herself, she's looking lovingly at Karen from a window) Martha's love is such that she commits an act of martyrdom by killing herself, thereby freeing Karen.

Of course, Martha might have achieved the very same thing by merely hopping on a train (which Martha actually does at the end of These Three), but as I said earlier, this is Hollywood, and it would be several more years before the movies would grant any gay character a happy ending.
..and if you found a pun in that sentence, shame on you!


BONUS MATERIAL
A production still of the libel suit courtroom sequence that was deleted from the final film. 

The theatrical trailer for William Wyler's These Three (1936)

In this clip from the 1996 LGBTQ documentary, The Celluloid Closet, Shirley MacLaine talks about making The Children's Hour.

The Children's Hour had its title changed in the UK

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015