THE FACE OF THE '70S: A TRIBUTE TO KAREN BLACK

It’s with great sadness that I write that one of my all-time favorite actresses, Karen Black, died of cancer today, August 8th, 2013, at the age of 74. This is an actress I first fell in love with when I saw her on TV - I couldn't have been more than 12 or so - in Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), her motion picture debut.

I always think of Karen Black as the face of the '70s because she appeared to me to have been one of the most prolific actresses of the decade. During the bulk of the 1970s, she seemed to be in all places at once--movies, TV, etc., (I recall seeing her sing "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog" on some late-night talk show) making it was near-impossible to avoid her. Which was fine by me. She was a colorful, eccentric, quotable personality, but she wasn't a starlet or fame junkie. She was a very serious actor, passionate about her work, and she appeared in an impressive number of films, both high-profile and low, giving attention-getting performances that by 1975, made her one of the most recognizable faces in films.

My first time seeing Karen Black on the big screen was in Peter Fonda’s counterculture hit Easy Rider (1969) in which she played the first in a long line of what critics came to identify as her trademark “All-American Trollop” roles. It was eventually Black’s close association with playing ladies of easy virtue in R-rated films that brought about my not being able to see her in another movie until 1974’s The Great Gatsby, as my mother thought that Karen Black films were full of “nakedness,” as she called it, and forbid me to go to any of them. Thus, I missed out on seeing Black’s Oscar-nominated turn in Five Easy Pieces (1970);  the drug-addiction drama Born to Win (1971); the confused college-kid angst of  Drive, He Said (a Jack Nicholson directed/penned film whose somewhat desperate print ad campaign focused on whether a particular sex scene was sodomy or not); and the I-really-didn't-think-I-stood-a-chance-with-this-one, Portnoy’s Complaint (1972). All films I would later have the opportunity to see as an adult and would greatly enjoy…often exclusively due to Karen Black’s performances.

Happily, as I grew into M/PG/GP-rated movie age, the caliber and quality of Karen Black's films began to get more mainstream. Highlights of this period in her career are that unforgettable “The Stewardess is flying the plane!” opus, Airport 1975; the horror cult-classic 1975 made-for-TV movie, Trilogy of Terror; and Robert Altman's Nashville, where Black got the opportunity to showcase her singing and songwriting skills (she had earlier supplied the songs and sang on the soundtrack of The Pyx - 1973, a little-seen devil worship thriller). In 1976 she appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot and re-teamed with Trilogy of Terror director, Dan Curtis, for Burnt Offerings, her first American film in which she was given top billing. But it was in 1975 that Karen Black (in a controversial bit of casting) starred in my personal favorite of all of her films: The Day of the Locust. She went on record as being not particularly fond of her experience making the film, but her work in it is among her best.
If you went to a movie at all during the '70s, it's unlikely that you hadn't seen at least one Karen Black film. And, in having done so, it’s even more unlikely that you ever forgot it.

Karen Black was far too much of an original to be everybody’s cup of tea. People either loved her or hated her. Critics like Rex Reed and John Simon could never get past her unconventional beauty to ever evaluate her acting fairly. Yet she consistently turned in bold, risk-taking, emotionally committed performances typified by a naked vulnerability and sensuality many found to be either uncomfortably raw or deeply engrossing. She never seemed to do anything halfway, and by putting so much of herself into her roles and taking so many chances with her characterizations, she was sometimes apt to miss the mark or shoot way over the top. But through it all, she was never less than authentic to her own vision of the character she played. She was such a surprising, inventive kind of actress that she remained eminently watchable even when she was failing spectacularly.

Labeled by columnists during her heyday as “The Bette Davis of the ‘70s,” it's a testament to her talent and one-of-a-kind appeal that Karen Black was able to distinguish herself during an era that boasted such cinema heavyweights as Glenda Jackson, Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Liza Minnelli, Ellen Burstyn, Liv Ullman, Shelley Duvall, Diane Keaton, and Sally Field.

After her amazing turn in Robert Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), I confess to having missed a great deal of her latter, independent film output, preferring to stay away from the horror stuff and intentional schlock -- accepting the risk that I might be missing a few gems along the way. As I look at it now, this leaves me with a vast legacy of films I have yet to explore

In 2007 I had the supreme thrill of seeing her perform on stage in Missouri Waltz, an original play she wrote. To actually see my childhood idol in the flesh was truly surreal and an almost an out-of-body experience for me. (It was at a 99-seat theater here in LA, so the intimacy of the surroundings was heady. It took a good 15 minutes for me to get into the play and forget I was in the same room as Faye Greener and Connie White!) After the show, when she stayed around to talk to members of the audience, I was such a nervous wreck I swear that when I extended my hand in greeting, it was shaking long before she shook it.
She was soft-spoken and very sweet, and I felt I could have almost passed out from joy.
Although I was tempted, I spared telling her the story of how "Memphis," the song she composed and sang in the film Nashville, was my audition song for years during my days as a dancer/actor.

It's always odd to say that one will miss an actor when they pass away, for unlike most, they remain with us always through their films. I consider this to be very true, and it gladdens me...but y'know, I think I'm still gonna miss Karen Black. A lot.

Click on the title links below to read my posts about these unforgettable Karen Black films:

The Day of the Locust

Nashville

Burnt Offerings

You're A Big Boy Now

The Great Gatsby

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)

Portnoy's Complaint (1972)

Karen Black      1939 - 2013

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2013

THE EXORCIST 1973

I remember first becoming aware of William Peter Blatty’s novel, The Exorcist in 1971 when I saw an actress talking about it on The Merv Griffin Show. As hard as it is to imagine now, the average person in the '70s didn't know what an exorcist was, so Griffin initially (and perhaps intentionally) misheard the title and thought the actress was talking about a fitness book. Upon hearing what a terrifying read it was, coupled with the inevitable comparisons to that longtime fave of mine, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby – the most high-profile Devil vs. Catholicism novel to date – I went to the library and was put on a long waiting list to get The Exorcist.

Before the shot of Father Merrin standing under the streetlamp became an iconic touchstone, the image of an open bedroom window with the drapes blowing outward was the primary advertising image for The Exorcist

In 1971 I was just a freshman at Saint Mary’s Catholic High School in Berkeley, California. And while devout at the time, I wasn't quite the same religiously impressionable Catholic School kid who was traumatized by Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. As a novel, I thought The Exorcist revelled a little too much in detailing the grotesqueries of demonic possession for me to take it as the serious discourse on the eternal battle between Christian faith and evil its author purported it to be, but it did grab me as one of the singularly most gripping and harrowing horror novels I'd ever read. What a page-turner! It was scary, emotionally credible, and rooted in a theological world I was familiar with. I'd never read anything quite like it, and I couldn't put it down.
When the film adaptation of The Exorcist came out on the day after Christmas (!) in 1973—with much advance fanfare but very little in the way of actual "How are they going to make a movie of THAT book?" details—I was somehow successful in persuading my entire family to go to San Francisco's Northpoint Theater (where it played for six months...an unheard-of run today) to see it before news and reviews gave too much info away. After waiting in a reasonable-sized line to get in (the very last time lines would ever be that small for most of the film's run), my family and I all had the supreme pleasure of having the holy crap scared out of us in stereophonic sound. Seasons Greetings!

Ellen Bursty as Chris MacNeil

Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil

Max von Sydow as Father Lankester Merrin

Jason Miller as Damian Karras

Lee J. Cobb as Lt. William Kinderman

When we saw The Exorcist, Mike Oldfield’s eerie “Tubular Bells” theme was in heavy rotation on the radio under the title: The Theme from ‘The Exorcist, and advance word had it that people were passing out, vomiting, and being carried out of theaters in hysterics in reaction to the unprecedented horror of what transpired onscreen. Anticipation was so high and lines for the movie were so long that people were even passing out before getting into the theater. 

Where we lucked out is that we saw The Exorcist right away, while people were still away on Christmas holiday, before the film went into wide release, and before word-of-mouth spread and mass hysteria set in. Few people remember it, but The Exorcist was really the dark horse release of 1973. The really heavily anticipated films that Christmas season were Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in the prison escape film Papillon; Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, the sequel to the hugely popular Dirty Harry (1971); and The Sting - a comedy (and thus the most holiday-friendly release of those listed) which marked the much-anticipated re-teaming of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid’s Paul Newman and Robert Redford. 

Jack MacGowran as Burke Dennings
The character actor, familiar to fans of Roman Polanski by his appearances in the films Cul-De-Sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers, died not long after completing work on The Exorcist. His death at age 54 (from flu-related complications) is often cited as part of the so-called The Exorcist Curse. Details about which can be found throughout the internet.

All the smart holiday boxoffice money was riding on the above three films. Each movie was a major release boasting the absolute top-ranking stars of their day, promoted with massive publicity campaigns and pre-sold audience interest. In addition, each film had a significant release date jump on The Exorcist (December 16th for Papillon, Christmas Day for The Sting and Magnum Force). The Sting, in particular, was blessed with the added advantage of having received largely positive reviews from the critics, and was shored up promotionally by the growing popularity of its theme music: Marvin Hamlisch’s jaunty adaptation of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” which became an instant MOR favorite on radio.
By way of contrast, The Exorcist was based on a popular and controversial bestseller, but featured a cast of actors whose names (if known at all) meant absolutely nothing at the boxoffice. In fact, author William Peter Blatty and Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin (The French Connection) were initially The Exorcist’s most exploitable commodities.

Kitty Winn as Sharon Spencer

The Exorcist was such a talked-about book that a great deal of interest surrounded its film release, but advance reviews of the film were poor to mixed, and few Hollywood oddsmakers had any confidence that holiday audiences would be in the mood to see a dark-themed horror film the day after Christmas. So, while most of San Francisco was lining up to swoon over Paul Newman’s blue eyes or see Clint Eastwood blowing bad guys away with his .45; my family and I got in to see The Exorcist with comparative ease. Lucky for us that we did. The Exorcist opened on a Wednesday, and by the weekend, it had grown into the must-see film of the season. Lines wound around the block and crowd control tactics had to be employed to deal with the overflow numbers. In the course of a few days, The Exorcist had become a cultural phenomenon.

Site of Where I Had the Holy Hell Scared Out of Me
The Exorcist opened at San Francisco's Northpoint Theater, located on the corner of Bay and Powell. Click HERE to see great documentary footage of theater patrons from 1973 reacting to seeing The Exorcist for the first time.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Looking back on that first time seeing The Exorcist,  the memory that stands out the strongest is of the entire experience being so thrilling and emotional. There was just a feeling in the air that gave me the sense I was seeing something really special. A feeling more exciting than mere anticipation of the unknown; something deeper than being frightened, something more electric than my response to the film's ability to shock, unsettle, repulse, or take me by surprise.  It was the sense that I was being treated to a really different kind of film and being drawn into a reality calculated to get me to respond on a visceral level.
It was a thrilling, one-of-a-kind experience seeing The Exorcist for the first time. It generated for me the kind of excitement that makes you shiver in your seat and pull your coat up around your chin. You sit there with your eyes wide open, not wanting to miss a thing, and then every once in a while something would happen that would make your jaw fly open or cause you to cover your eyes. As one grows older, this type of total emotional immersion becomes harder to come by, but at age 16, I was just mature enough and just naïve enough for The Exorcist to give me the thrill ride of my life.

Home & Family and the Illusion of Safety
When I saw The Exorcist, I was still at the age where one still feels home and family is sufficient a blanket of security to keep harm at bay. The Exorcist, in detailing the banal normalcy of the lives of Chris and her daughter (juxtaposed with the barely-acknowledged tension of familial discord and divorce), shattered the illusion of home as sanctuary.

Religious Imagery
Even though, at age 16, I was starting to question all  I had been taught in years of Catholic School, the traditions of religion; its mythology and iconography, could still prove unsettling to me in a context as violent and anarchic as The Exorcist. 

Adult as Protector
In a teenager's world, adults are still the figures one looks to for strength and the reestablishment of order when things go wrong. The Exorcist, in showing a mother helpless to save her child in the face of an unnamed evil, hit a raw nerve with me. This cutaway shot of Chris reacting to the horror of Regan's possession just blew me away as a kid. Even today, this brief shot still stands as one of the most powerful images in the film for me.

Rev. William O'Malley as Father Joseph Dyer
Most of the teachers at my school were either priests or Catholic Brothers. A great many of them looked exactly like real-life priest William O'Malley. A fact that only went to further cement the disturbing verisimilitude within the fantasy that was The Exorcist.

Good vs Evil
I daresay that the disheartening state of the contemporary world is enough to challenge anyone's faith. But to be raised Catholic is to feel acutely the disparity between what one is taught to believe and what one encounters in the world. The visual excesses of The Exorcist have always felt like such a perfect dramatization of the inexplicable ugliness in the world that exists side-by-side with all that is beautiful. Though I'd hasten to label it poetic, I wouldn't hesitate for a minute to call it powerful (and occasionally moving).

Science vs. Religion
Today, I find the willful disavowal of science in favor of myth and ignorance to be fairly absurd, but in my youth, both Rosemary's Baby and (most explicitly) The Exorcist provocatively held forth on the possibility that science was perhaps no match for that which could not be explained. This point was driven agonizingly home when The Exorcist's scenes of medical science at work proved far more shocking and inhumane than anything the Devil was able to cook up.

PERFORMANCES

One benefit afforded me back in 1973 that’s denied most viewers of The Exorcist today, was my wholesale unfamiliarity with the film’s cast. Linda Blair and Jason Miller were, of course, making their film debuts, but outside of Lee J. Cobb, The Exorcist was the first time I’d ever seen Ellen Burstyn and Max von Sydow on the screen. The removal of that extra layer of subliminal artificiality—born of watching actors one knows from earlier films portraying entirely different characters—immeasurably enhanced The Exorcist’s verisimilitude and heightened its intensity for me. The actors were the characters they played. It's something you can't always count on or anticipate, but when a film asks an audience to accept fantastic events as realistic, it helps to eliminate as many reminders as possible that one is "watching a movie." In this instance, my ignorance contributed to my bliss.

Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-nominated performance is a good example of why, even when making cheap horror films, it’s worth the expense and trouble to get good actors. Neither Damien Karras' crisis of faith nor Father Merrin's preordained encounter with the forces of evil engaged me as much as the gradual emotional disintegration of Chris MacNeil and her mounting desperation. Burstyn's incredibly committed performance has always been The Exorcist's emotional center for me, and it's precisely the kind of grounded realism she brings to her role that draws me into the film's events and gets me to believe in it. Even as the film's special effects begin to look quaint in this age of CGI, Burstyn's performance never gets old. Everyone in The Exorcist is terrific, but I have total confidence in my belief that the film wouldn't have worked at all without her. 

I've come to look kindlier upon Lee J. Cobb's ramshackle Lt. Kinderman over the years. When The Exorcist first came out, Peter Falk's Columbo was still on the air and Cobb's takes-forever-to-get-to-the-point detective seemed then like an imitation. 

When it comes to genre films, the most elaborate special effects in the world don’t amount to much when there is nothing human at the center of all that carnage and melodrama. Many a well-made horror film has been ruined by actors incapable of registering even the most rudimentary signs of fear, despair, anguish, or trauma…recognizable human reactions that raise the emotional stakes of the drama, helping the audience to become invested in the outcome.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

No point in going on about The Exorcist's then-unprecedented shocks. Suffice it to say that I spent a great deal of the latter part of the film with my coat at the ready to shield my eyes; my little sister was reduced to tears, and a sizable portion of my popcorn went uneaten. There's been much written about what an emotional roller-coaster ride The Exorcist is, but few mention what a physical toll this movie takes. I remember my body being wound tighter than a mainspring every time a character approached that bedroom door. The sense of apprehension and dread I felt at every reveal of the degree of Linda Blair's possession was almost unbearable. And the sound! Was there ever a film with a more active and jarring soundtrack? Even when your eyes were closed the movie terrified you.

No one fainted or passed out during the screening I attended, but such screaming and yelping you never heard in your life. People leaving the theater had the look of folks who had just been rescued off of a sinking ship or something. Some were giddy and pleased with themselves for having survived, others looked drained and in need of physical support, and many were just stumbling out as if a daze. Me? I recall wobbly knees and teary eyes (It always makes me cry when Linda Blair kisses the clerical collar of Father Dyer). Was I grossed out? Yes! Was I entertained? Oh, but yes...it was wonderful!

The Exorcist author and screenwriter William Peter Blatty (r.) makes a cameo appearance.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The enduring legacy of The Exorcist disproves the popular belief held in 1973 among the film’s detractors who claimed that once the shock value of the gross-out effects were experienced, there was little of substance in the film for audiences to enjoy. On the contrary, my familiarity with the film’s shock effects has allowed me, over the ears, to grow ever more appreciative of what a superior example of filmmaking as storytelling The Exorcist really is. Whether one takes it seriously as the “theological thriller” it was intended to be, or, like me, merely enjoy it as one of the best horror movies ever made, The Exorcist is a bona fide, gold-plated classic of the first order. And I’m thrilled to have been around to experience The Exorcist cultural phenomenon first-hand. I’ll never forget it.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES: 

Linda Blair
Met her in a L.A. supermarket and she was such a sweetie when I asked for an autograph. I commented on how she is one of my favorite screen criers, to which she replied "You've seen those movies,..believe me, it's heartfelt!" 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

STAR 80 (1983) / LOVELACE (2013): PORN, COMPLICITY, AND RAPE-CULTURE IN MOVIES

“Everyone that watches ‘Deep Throat’ is watching me being raped.” 
― Linda Lovelace, in her 1980 book, Ordeal  

“Yes, there’s a lot of nudity, but it’s a message movie about respecting women.”

― Producer Patrick Muldoon, speaking to the press about his 2013 film, Lovelace

Mariel Hemingway as Dorothy Stratten and Eric Roberts as  Paul Snider in Bob Fosse's last film, the morbid and depressing, Star 80

America loves its porn, but it’s never quite sure how it feels about it. Looking at the theatrical trailer for Lovelace, the forthcoming biopic of 70s Deep Throat porn sensation, Linda Lovelace; I was struck by how much it reminded me, both in subject and approach, of Star 80, Bob Fosse’s 1983 film about Playboy Playmate, Dorothy Stratten.

Both films tell the story of unsophisticated small-town girls who come under the influential wing of sleazy, disarmingly charming - ultimately controlling and abusive - lovers/managers who pimp the women out to the sex industries. Hardcore porn in Linda Lovelace's case (nee, Linda Susan Boreman); the sanitized, mainstream-porn limbo of “men’s magazine” nude photography in the instance of Dorothy Stratten.

photo: The Times

Peter Sarsgaard & Amanda Seyfried (top) portray Linda Lovelace and husband Chuck Traynor (below) in the film, Lovelace (2013).

The trailers for Star 80 and Lovelace are available for viewing on YouTube, with their similarities extending not only to leaving vague each film’s attitude about any presumed passivity or unwitting complicity on the part of these women in their fates, but in addition: near-identical prototypical sleazeball boyfriends assayed by Peter Sarsgaard in Lovelace and Erich Roberts in Star 80 (Roberts also happens to be in the cast of Lovelace); scenes of a woman dominated and forcibly seated in a chair by an aggressive male; and, most intriguingly, a subliminal “inheritance of exploitation” element introduced by the casting of conspicuously deglamorized former sex-symbols (Carroll Baker in Star 80, Sharon Stone in Lovelace) as the mothers of these victimized women.

Given our culture’s ambiguous relationship with industries that traffic in the commodification of sex, it’s perhaps not surprising that whenever we choose to train a cinematic spotlight on pornography, it’s not by way of celebration, but through the dramatic prism of a moral cautionary tale. (Although one might think, in an industry raking in upwards of $1.8-billion annually, there must be somebody celebrating somewhere.)

Lovelace and Star 80 tell tragic true-life tales of women suffering physical abuse at the hands of a professional Svengali. Stratten was ultimately murdered by hers, Lovelace broke free. But the air of sadness that always seemed an intractable part of Linda Lovelace's liberated, anti-porn countenance, hinted at a psychological scarring that prevented one from taking much comfort in her too-public emancipation. The message one gets from the trailers is clear: pornography is dehumanizing. The analogy unassailable: the porn industry and mainstream show business are not dissimilar in their treatment and exploitation of women.

But what about the films themselves?  Is it possible to make a film about sexual exploitation without inadvertently resorting to (and in effect, participating in and sanctioning) the very kind of behavior it seeks to indict?

Read the complete article at HERE at Movieline.com

Copyright © Ken Anderson

SCROOGE 1970

It’s Christmas in July! Or, at least that’s how it feels since I got it in my head this month to read (for the first time!) Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. An act which, in turn, brought about my umpteenth revisit to the 1970 big-budget musical flop Scrooge (mercifully, without an exclamation point), my absolute favorite screen adaptation of this oft-told holiday allegory.

A Christmas Carol and its tale of a miserly old curmudgeon who finds spiritual redemption through the intervention of three spectral warnings, has been adapted, reworked and re-imagined so many times and in so many different formats that reference sources can't even agree on an actual number. I've seen and suffered through a great many over the years myself, the best of the lot being the well-regarded 1951 Alastair Sim version; that beloved staple of my childhood, Mr. Magoo’s A Christmas Carol (1962); and, a particular favorite, 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol. But no adaptation rouses me, touches my heart, or gets the waterworks flowing for me like Scrooge. I just adore it. It may not be the most faithful Dickens adaptation, or even the best, but like the tree atop the Capitol Records Building in my neighborhood of Hollywood, it never fails to make me feel like it's Christmas. And as such, it's the most thoroughly charming and satisfying of all the versions of A Christmas Carol I've ever seen.

Albert Finney as Ebenezer Scrooge

Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley

Dame Edith Evans as The Ghost of Christmas Past

Kenneth More as The Ghost of Christmas Present

A brief look at the films released in 1970 reveals a kind of battle being raged at the boxoffice. Old-fashioned, elephantine studio releases like Airport, Tora!Tora!Tora!, and Ryan’s Daughter were duking it out with smaller, youth-centric films like M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, and Diary of a Mad Housewife. When my friends and I went to the movies on weekends, it was often a choice between what we called “parents' movies” or “something good,” which usually meant something pretentious, grounded in “realism,” or with nudity (preferably, all three).
Old-style Hollywood movies, particularly musicals, were considered "plastic." Something which, in post-'60s vernacular, was appreciably worse than old-fashioned. Plastic meant artificial, contrived, corny, and old-hat. Hollywood, which had grown increasingly out of touch with public tastes in the latter part of that decade, could have saved itself untold headaches (not to mention millions) by heeding the cultural warning signs and not continuing to sink money into pricey dinosaurs like Star! (1968), Hello Dolly (1969), and Paint Your Wagon (1969) long after interest in films of this scope had waned.

Dancing on His Grave
The townsfolk celebrate Scrooge's demise in the exuberant (and Best Song Oscar-nominated) "Thank You Very Much," a number owing a considerable debt to Oliver!'s "Consider Yourself"

An excellent example of how abruptly tastes had changed by 1970 is apparent in the way movie fans that year avoided Barbra Streisand doing what she does best (singing) in the G-rated On a Clear Day You Can See Forever in favor of seeing her in a more realistic milieu (crassly so, many thought) playing a foul-mouthed, non-singing, New York prostitute in the R-rated and hilarious The Owl & the Pussycat. Even Julie Andrews, the lady primarily responsible for reviving the musical genre with The Sound of Music, couldn't get fans to turn out for Darling Lili that same year. Tellingly, the only movie musicals young people went to see in 1970 were all documentaries: Woodstock, The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter, and The Beatles’ Let It Be.

The Ghost of Hollywood Yet to Come
By the '70s, big studio productions like Scrooge were already a dying breed. 

While the story of Ebenezer Scrooge had a pre-sold market familiarity and a royalties-free public domain accessibility, the mounting of a large-scale, wholly British musical production of the material was a hard sell from the start. Albert Finney was known to American audiences for his Academy Award-nominated/Golden Globe-winning performance in Tom Jones (1963), but was nobody's idea of a boxoffice draw. Likewise, director Ronald Neame (The Prime of Miss JeanBrodie, The Poseidon Adventure) was hardly a household name. Screenwriter/composer Leslie Bricusse was seen as something of a drawing card due to his long association with entertainer Anthony Newley, but whatever goodwill he'd built up on the strength of Broadway hits like Stop the World I Want to Get Off (1961) was compromised by being very publicly associated with the double-barreled bombs: Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969) and Doctor Dolittle (1967).
Saddled with feebly-rendered posters and a terrible ad campaign practically designed to scare audiences away (“Scrooge - All Singing! All Dancing! All Heart!”), Scrooge limped into theaters in November of 1970, with its only marketing hooks being the familiarity of Dickens' story and the surprising presence of a handsome 34-year-old leading man cast in the role of the crotchety old miser.

Albert Finney as young Ebenezer, Suzanne Neve as Isabel Fezziwig, the love he let get away

For all the above-stated reasons, I steered clear of Scrooge when it came out. But when it began to make the rounds on TV every Christmas, I regretted never having granted myself the opportunity to see it on the big screen. Even in its heavily-edited* state, it thoroughly delighted and captivated me.

*Perversely, early TV broadcasts eliminated most of the musical number "Thank You Very Much," arguably the most lively and kid-friendly song in Scrooge's lovely but somewhat sluggish score. They also edited out the scenes of Scrooge in hell and some of the scarier stuff involving Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Ignoring that children's classics like The Wizard of Oz are heavy on both scares and cheerful music, like a death wish, the networks instead zeroed in on Scrooge's warmth...a guaranteed humbug for children's Christmastime viewing. Happily, the DVD has everything restored.

Banished to Hell, Scrooge is shown the ropes
(or, in this case, chains) by his old friend, Jacob Marley 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I do not mean to sell Scrooge short, but I'd be less than honest if, in praising this well-acted and wholly pleasing adaptation, I fail to mention that I'm a bit of a soft touch when it comes to A Christmas Carol as a story. There is just something I find so elementally moving in the hopeful theme of personal transformation, the retrieval of the lost soul, and the warming of a frozen heart. The idea that all people, no matter how deeply mired in the selfish and superficial, have within them the potential for positive change has always been one of my narrative pet weaknesses. It just rips me up. It would be a poor adaptation of A Christmas Carol, indeed, that doesn't have me in tears by the time Ebenezer begins to see the error of his ways. Scrooge does this job exceptionally well, and by the film’s last 10 minutes I’m fairly a mess.

Albert Finney won a  Best Actor Golden Globe for Scrooge. He would sing onscreen again as Daddy Warbucks in 1982's Annie

There’s something about the fairy-tale quality of Dickens’ writing - present in A Christmas Carol in particular - which lends itself to easy transfer to a musical format. The characters have great, Seussical names like Fezziwig and Cratchit (and, of course, the onomatopoeic perfection that is Ebenezer Scrooge…which is, like, the best name EVER!), and the broad emotions of Scrooge’s reality are, almost like musical counterpoint to the melancholy tenderness of the story's sentimentality. When the two contrasting worlds mesh during the last act, it feels like a musical crescendo.

The redemption/transformation musical medley that makes up the final act of  Scrooge (wherein many of the songs that had previously underscored highlighted Scrooge's misanthropy are converted into anthems celebrating his magnanimity) is the star on top of this particular cinema Christmas tree. It's funny, it's moving, and I wish I could watch it just once without getting all choked up.

Because the story itself has such a musical rhythm, Leslie Bricusse's score of melodic, undistinguished songs feel perfectly fine without being particularly noteworthy. The songs are pleasant enough, propelling the plot, fleshing out character and motivation, and, when they are at their best, expressing joy. But unlike say, the songs of the Sherman brothers (Mary Poppins, Bedknobs & Broomsticks) whose melodies for Disney movies are so infectious they have almost become nursery rhymes and childhood classics; no matter how often I see Scrooge, I can’t remember a single song afterward except “Thank You Very Much.” On the plus side, the forgettable nature of Bricusse's songs has the effect of making the film feel new to me each time I revisit it.

David Collings and Frances Cuka as Bob & Ethel Cratchit
I love adaptations of A Christmas Carol that deviate from the book text and
 allow for scenes of the Cratchit family reacting to the rehabilitated Scrooge.

PERFORMANCES

Where Scrooge surpasses so many other versions of A Christmas Carol for me is in the pleasure I derive from Albert Finney’s bilious take on Ebenezer Scrooge. He’s a great deal of fun as a devoted killjoy, barking insults at people and shoving children out of his path. So much so that one is likely to be reluctant to see him rehabilitated too soon. As should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen his Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express, Finney is a movie star with the heart of a character actor. Concealing makeup and prosthetics that would swallow up lesser actors only seem to liberate the versatile British actor from the limitations imposed by his "leading man" good looks.
As Scrooge, Finney’s transformation is mostly body language, and he plays Ebenezer as a sad, disappointed man who has steeled himself from pain by stiffening and gnarling his entire countenance into a knot of meanness.

Scrooge contemplates his younger self

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I have no idea what that shooting budget for Scrooge was, but the film looks great in that old-fashioned, shot-entirely-in-a-studio way that triggers a certain nostalgia. The scope of the film isn't as grandiose as its spiritual cousin Oliver!, but Scrooge boasts a distinguished cast of British actors, pleasing period detail in costumes and sets, and the overall look of it is finely turned-out and sumptuous. The special effects, which must have been pretty dazzling in 1970, are pretty primitive by today's standards, but rendered all the more charming by that fact (God, am I tired of CGI). Also, I think most of the cast, if not all, does its own singing! 

A Page Out of Dickens
Bob Cratchit with son Tiny Tim (Richard Beaumont) and daughter, Kathy (Karen Scargill)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Christmas is my favorite holiday season. And living here in L.A., its a beautiful time where the city of glitter and glitz puts on an extra layer of tinsel that makes a simple walk down the street feel like you're starring in your own MGM musical. It's not my usual habit to watch holiday movies in the swelter of summer, but in this case, I had such a blast (and a REALLY good cry) revisiting the world of Charles Dickens. Dickens by way of a delightful musical film that just happened to have been released when delightful musical films were no longer on America's agenda of moviegoing prerequisites. If Scrooge isn't already considered a holiday classic, it should be. It stands as an excellent reminder that just because a film is out of step with the times in which it was made, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a film out of step.

"God bless Us, Every One!"

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013