He's Just Not That Into You (Cleveland): A Special Sneak Preview

FADE IN as a NARRATOR somberly intones:

NARRATOR:

This is a story of boy meets city....

NARRATOR:

(cont'd)

The boy, LeBron James, grew up believing he would be "The One."

This belief stemmed from early exposure to entourages,

and a total misreading of Nike shoe slogans.

NARRATOR:

(cont'd)

The city, Cleveland, Ohio, had not won a championship

in any professional sport since 1965. Ever since that time,

there had been endless pain, frustration and agony:

The Drive, The Fumble, The Shot, and countless

other debacles over the years.

NARRATOR:

(cont'd)

Nevertheless, from the moment Cleveland

met LeBron James, it invested all its hopes

in him, firmly believing that he truly was "The One."

This is a story of boy meets city.

But you should know up front, this is not a love story....

OVER OPENING CREDITS, clips of home-movies play of both boy and city, a bittersweet trip down memory lane, scored to Regina Spektor's "Us."

INT. NIGHTCLUB, SOUTH BEACH, FLA.--EVENING.

A typical Miami nightclub: loud music, wild dancing, patrons consuming heavy amounts of blow sweets. A visiting CITY, all dolled up, approaches a BASKETBALL STAR at the bar. His best friends, DWYANE and CHRIS, are chatting up some bikini-clad girls nearby.

A TITLE CARD READS:

"January, 2011"

CLEVELAND:

Hey, you!

LEBRON:

Hey.

CLEVELAND

(blushing):

Well, how's this for a coincidence?

LEBRON:

Uh, yeah.

CLEVELAND:

Surprised to see me?

LEBRON:

Uh, yeah.

CLEVELAND

(twirls around):

Don't I look nice?

LEBRON:

Uh, yeah.

CLEVELAND:

Don't you like what I've done with my bridge?

LEBRON:

Uh, yeah. Listen, what are you doing here?

CLEVELAND:

What do you think I'm doing here, silly?

(giggles)

I came to see you.

LEBRON:

Well, look, LeBron James is flattered. It's just that, you know,

LeBron James thought we had an understanding.

CLEVELAND:

Hmm? What do you mean?

LEBRON:

You know, when LeBron James left. Six months ago.

LeBron James thought we agreed to stop seeing each other.

CLEVELAND:

Ohhhh, that!

(slaps his shoulder and tee-hees)

That was all just a silly misunderstanding.

I was going through a phase back then. I'm

in a much better place now.

LEBRON:

That's great. It's just that, you see,

LeBron James is in a better place now too.

CLEVELAND:

I don't follow.

LEBRON:

LeBron James is happy here.

CLEVELAND:

I'm glad to hear you say that.

(squeezes his hand)

I'm happy here with you too.

LEBRON:

(pulls hand away)

Look, Cleveland, what I'm trying to say is....

LeBron James has moved on. You need to move on too.

CLEVELAND:

You mean that?

LEBRON:

Yes.

CLEVELAND:

Gosh. I came all the way out here.

I got all dressed up.

LEBRON:

LeBron James is sorry.

CLEVELAND:

I feel like such a fool.

LEBRON:

It's not you, it's LeBron James.

CLEVELAND:

(sobs)

You never loved me!

LEBRON:

Of course LeBron James loved you.

LeBron James still loves you.

LeBron James just isn't in love with you.

CLEVELAND:

Oh, why didn't I see the signs?

LEBRON:

What signs?

CLEVELAND:

The signs that you were interested in someone else!

LEBRON:

Not ringing any bells.

CLEVELAND:

(hysterical)

The signs that you were going to betray me!

LEBRON:

Don't know what you mean.

CLEVELAND:

How could you humiliate me like that?

On national television!

LEBRON:

LeBron James wanted to get it all out in the open.

CLEVELAND:

It was humiliating for you too, you know.

It was even worse than that cover photo

you agreed to do for Vogue.

LEBRON:

LeBron James would appreciate it if

you didn't bring that up.

CLEVELAND:

Don't you know racism when you see it?

LEBRON:

(pause)

We were together for seven years. All that time

I put up with your flirtations, your coming up short in the playoffs,

your constantly referring to yourself in the third-person.

And only now am I finally seeing you differently.

LEBRON:

How do you mean?

CLEVELAND:

I mean that you are self-aggrandizing.

I mean that you are a cold-hearted bastard.

LEBRON:

LeBron James thinks you can be pretty cold too.

CLEVELAND:

Nevertheless, you hurt me very badly.

LEBRON:

You hurt LeBron James too. After LeBron James left.

CLEVELAND:

I may have overreacted....

LEBRON:

You frightened LeBron James.

CLEVELAND:

I got a little carried away.

At that moment, a deranged NBA OWNER enters the club and approaches the bar.

DAN GILBERT:

How "dare" you "toy"

with our "emotions!"

"I" personally "guarantee" we will "win" a "championship" before "you" do!

CLEVELAND:

Dan, what did I tell you? Wait in the car.

Dan Gilbert stalks away to the other end of the bar.

LEBRON:

LeBron James would have stayed had Dan

ever picked up some decent free agents.

LeBron James can't do everything by himself.

CLEVELAND:

Is that why you came to Miami--so there would

be less pressure? So you could play with your friends?

LEBRON:

Yes.

CLEVELAND:

And you're not the only "King" any more?

LEBRON:

LeBron James is happy to share his crown.

CLEVELAND:

Well then, I guess I should wish you well....

LEBRON:

LeBron James is not a machine.

LeBron James has feelings too, you know.

CLEVELAND:

You're going to be okay, LeBron. And you know

what? I'm going to be okay too! The name

"Cleveland" has a long, proud history.

LEBRON:

That's true.

CLEVELAND:

The name "Cleveland" is not somebody's idea

of a cheap joke!

LEBRON:

That's right.

CLEVELAND:

Oh, LeBron, I'm glad we had this talk.

LEBRON:

Cleveland, LeBron James has made some mistakes. And

LeBron James knows that right now it still hurts.

CLEVELAND:

(wipes a tear)

It does.

LEBRON:

But LeBron James knows, one day you will

get over LeBron James.

CLEVELAND:

I know.

LEBRON:

LeBron James wishes you all the best.

LeBron James hopes we will meet again as friends.

They embrace. LeBron returns to his seat, looking melancholy. Cleveland takes a couple steps before turning back around.

CLEVELAND:

If we do, it probably won't be in the playoffs.

(laughs)

Everybody knew that we would struggle this season.

But it looks like you guys are struggling too. Rumor has it

it's only a matter of time before you get a new coach. Is

that true?

Just then, a slick-haired, AL PACINO LOOK-ALIKE strides to the bar. He drapes an arm around LeBron, an NBA championship ring on each finger.

PAT:

Hey LeBron, how you doin', pal?

(points to Cleveland)

This town bothering you?

FADE TO BLACK.

Dead Certainties (Army of Shadows and Edge of Darkness)

It is my dream to one day see a film in France -- preferably though not necessarily at Cannes -- for French audiences are famously unhesitant about voicing their opinions. At the 1939 debut of Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (which I finally saw this week for the first time), the premiere crowd threw chairs at the screen, with one patron even attempting to set the theater ablaze. Even with our surplus of rabid nerd hordes, American audiences are relatively timid; the only times I have witnessed near-riots and mass-exits in a movie theater occurred during the last four films of Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood). What's ironic about Anderson (who may be, not incidentally, my favorite contemporary filmmaker) is he's not out to provoke anyone; he is endearingly naive enough to believe that audiences have the same patience, fortitude and adventurousness now that they did in the 70s -- like Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time.

Jean-Pierre Melville's extraordinary Army of Shadows debuted in 1969, the same year Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five was published: like Vonnegut's novel, Melville's film is an uncompromising depiction of the cost of war on not only human lives but also human conscience; also like Vonnegut, Melville uses a Good War, a Just War as an unsettling mise-en-scene with which to explore this theme. Yet whereas Slaughterhouse-Five resonated in the United States, particularly among American youth, Army of Shadows was received with only slightly less hostility in France than The Rules of the Game thirty years earlier. A stark docudrama about the French Resistance in World War II, and based largely on the director's actual experiences, Army of Shadows must have touched quite a nerve in its refusal to glamorize the actions of its characters, to paint the struggle with Germany in black-and-white. A somewhat similar reaction greeted Louis Malle's autobiographical 1987 Au Revoir les Enfants, which some took as an indictment of French anti-Semitism and Nazi collaboration. Which may be true. Look closer, though, and it's clear that Melville -- like Malle -- is also indicting himself.

Occupying the tenuous center of Army of Shadows is Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), a sardonic, middle-aged Resistance leader whom we first meet in a POW camp in 1942 Vichy France. Through terse voiceovers, we hear the camp commandant size up Gerbier ("Sardonic and ironic attitude....suspected of Gaullist sympathies"), then Gerbier himself swiftly discern the divisions and loyalties among prisoners in the camp. Gerbier recruits a younger inmate for an escape attempt, which transpires not in the camp like they (and we) expect, but in a Vichy headquarters. It's not hard to see where Tarantino learned how to tease out the suspense of a scene while watching Gerbier wait for what seems an eternity before stabbing a guard in the throat. Even more shocking than this sudden act of violence is learning that the older man used his younger compatriot as a diversion to aid his own escape.

Loyalties shift constantly throughout the film, as Melville gradually broadens his perspective to include other members of the Resistance. A pair of lieutenants, Le Masque (Claude Mann) and Le Bison (Christian Barbier), are unwilling accomplices in a plot to assassinate a traitor in their midst. One protests that he's never killed a man before; Gerbier replies matter-of-factly, "Neither have we; isn't it obvious?" Later, their group attempts a daring rescue of a colleague held captive in a Nazi occupied hospital. The mission is led by the hard-shelled Mathilde (an unforgettable Simone Signoret): disguised as aid workers, she and her team drive an ambulance straight into the lion's den, and the inexorable tension builds the sequence into one of those masterful set-pieces that is the hallmark of all classic films.

Army of Shadows finally premiered in the United States a mere four years ago, where it received ecstatic reviews. (Glenn Kenny observed -- correctly, in my view -- that for all the qualities of the at-the-time recently released Munich, Melville "leaves Spielberg's film in the dust in the moral-ambiguity department.") Yet it's not hard to surmise that the director's clear-eyed uncertainty, so widely admired today, is precisely what troubled audiences in his homeland three decades earlier. One character, captured by the Germans, is used for sport by being set loose along with other prisoners in a mad dash for freedom through a barrage of machine-gun fire. At first he vows to stay still, but soon fear gets the better of him and he bursts into a sprint. Later he curses his cowardice, but Melville makes his actions wholly identifiable, more universal than perhaps many of us would care to admit. Army of Shadows has all the earmarks of a masterpiece: utterly fixed in the details of its era, yet thrillingly unstuck in time.

There is a similar scene to the aforementioned in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, where the movie's protagonist outruns his bloodthirsty Mayan captors by dodging a hail of javelins. It's hard for me to watch this scene without hearing Peter Falk from The In-Laws shout, "Serpentine! Serpentine!" not least of which because Gibson, who used to possess a puckish sense of humor, has become monotonously serious about his artistic objectives, both behind the camera and before it. Moreover, his off-screen antics have only added to the difficulty of separating the man from his work.

I saw Edge of Darkness, Mad Mel's first starring role in eight years, on DVD a few days before his private self once again reared its ugly head, but I found the film a vile mess entirely on its own terms. A Mel Gibson plot is like a grittier version of a typical Harrison Ford storyline: his family isn't merely in danger, they're usually kidnapped, tortured, even killed. In this instance, his Boston homicide detective's grownup daughter runs afoul of some shady corporate types, and he wreaks vengeance. Steven Soderbergh used virtually the same outline in The Limey to show how his central killer pulls together the shards of the past on his quest for revenge, only to find himself among the culpable. No such silly nuances to be found in Edge of Darkness, however; what you see is what you get, with on-the-nose casting (Danny Huston an a white-collar snake, Jay O. Sanders as a lily-livered sellout) driving home the point.

A few critics who should have known better gave this kind reviews, focusing their praise mainly on the sure-footed direction of Martin Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, Casino Royale). Granted, Campbell's economy of movement is as sharp as ever: through ingenious editing and framing, he sets up a handful of genuine shocks; and he stages the violence in sudden, cathartic bursts. But nothing can disguise the withered human being at the center of this passion play (though it should be amusing in the coming days and weeks to see apologists like Armond White and Danny Glover try). Gibson's acting is adequate; in a sense, he's still a commanding presence. Yet he's also a black hole, one I don't care to ever see again. "You know you deserve this," he snarls at a bad guy during the bloody climax (the complete antithesis of Jean-Pierre Melville's worldview). A pity Gibson doesn't realize that what his audience deserves is better movies.

Czech Mate (Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde)

There's a scene in Keeping the Faith, Edward Norton's underrated 2000 comedy, where Norton's young priest, who has fallen for a woman, listens to a piece of advice from the older and wiser Father Havel, wonderfully played by Milos Forman. "I remember I fell in love with this girl in Prague," Forman says wistfully. "She was beautiful. She looked like Carole Lombard. She grabbed me in the alley behind my church, she pressed me against the wall, she kissed me. I was so happy I thought I would die." Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965), a movie which, along with the subsequent The Fireman's Ball (1967), helped establish him as one of the leaders of the Czech New Wave, is a vivid snapshot of the director's headier days. The setting is mostly in the small industrial town of Zruc, with only a brief stopover in Prague; and his leading lady, Hana Brejchova, resembles not so much Carole Lombard than a young Julie Christie. (Back, of course, when Julie Christie resembled a young Julie Christie.) Yet Loves of a Blonde is an enchanting, heartbreaking autobiographical portrait of a life he experienced and (in 1968, due to the Russian invasion) had to leave behind.

An 85-minute movie that feels even breezier, Loves of a Blonde is divided into three swiftly-paced yet immaculately-detailed sequences. In the first, Andula (Brejchova), a teenage factory worker, and her two friends attend a dance where they are awkwardly pursued by a trio of middle-aged soldiers. In the next, she is lured to the room of scrawny, caddish piano player Milda (Vladimir Pucholt), who teaches Andula how to defend herself against unwanted advances while seducing her with the same techniques. In the last, Andula pays a surprise visit to Milda's home in Prague, leading to a disastrous evening with his parents (the hilarious Josef Sebanek and Milada Jezkova). This impulsive move is uncharacteristic of Andula, who is the last girl who would press a guy against a wall -- not that it matters for Milda's mother, unhappy to play host (it's implied, yet again) for her twit of a son's latest conquest.

Seeing one of Forman's first movies near the end of his career is an odd experience, especially since it's better directed than many of the films that made him famous. Amadeus still holds up as a joyous, mournful masterwork; but One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has aged poorly, looking like a schematic play hustled to the screen. Hair is an ambitious, tin-eared mess; Man on the Moon strains to make a martyr out of a molehill; and even the engrossing, politically-charged The People vs. Larry Flynt is far better performed than staged. (In his review, Charles Taylor declared "there may be no major director with less visual sense" than Forman; adding, "I've seen enough movies shot by Philippe Rousselot to make a pretty fair guess that it's not his fault this one looks like dirty dishwater.")

So it's something of a shock to see how crisp Loves of a Blonde looks, with Forman filling each frame with funny, telling images. A factory manager persuades a military commander to lend his troops a stopover in Zruc because, he explains, the women in town vastly outnumber the men -- a biting social commentary staged before an oversized David Leanish map. At the horrible dance, the ogling soldiers order a bottle of booze to impress Andula and her friends, only to have a waiter serve it to the wrong girls. One of the soldiers, who is married, fumbles with his wedding ring only to chase it across the floor. Andula's visit to Prague climaxes with a drunken Milda forced to share his parents' bed, an Oedipal nightmare as uproarious slapstick. Yet beneath the wit and energy is a layer of melancholy. Oft-accused of misogyny later in his career (so many Nurse Ratcheds appearing as antagonists), Forman exudes nothing but empathy for his main character's lack of options. Which is why Forman's monologue in Norton's movie was a reassuring confirmation that whatever his failings, he took memories of actual Andulas with him.

Sizzle & Fizzle (Broken Embraces and Brothers)

With the declining box-office returns of every new Tom Cruise movie and the preprogrammed success of Pixar's animation empire (We make great movies...because we say so!) a license for every Arts & Leisure columnist to bemoan "The End of Movie Stars," it's worth checking out Broken Embraces, the latest by Pedro Almodovar, as a reminder of the essence of what Hollywood has either abandoned or forgotten. Stardom is the film's very subject: a former director of Spanish cinema (Lluis Homar), now a blind screenwriter going by the Graham Greene-ish name of Harry Caine, receives an unexpected visitor from the past with a link to the love of Harry's life, a fledgling actress named Lena (Penelope Cruz). What unfolds is a pair of related storylines: one in the present, where Harry investigates his suspicions of the stranger, who calls himself "Ray X" (Ruben Ochindiano); the other set fourteen years earlier, where we learn how Harry's relationship with Lena caused him to lose his sight.

There is much more to Broken Embraces than even that -- jealous husbands, drug overdoses, illegitimate children -- but the movie is a lot more complicated to explain than it is to watch. Almodovar relishes twisting his plot into knots (one critic accurately described it as Hitchcock-meets-Sirk) and providing nearly every major character with at least one pseudonym. Yet you always know where you are, who you're looking at, what they're feeling and why.

I'm a relative newbie to Almodovar, having seen four out of his last five movies but unacquainted with his earlier work. Some critics who are seem less impressed with Broken Embraces: the gist of many reviews is along the lines of: "Ho-hum! Another good movie." For me, though, the depth of emotion beneath the splashy colors and soap-opera antics is compelling to watch. It's also terrific fun. And Penelope Cruz, dismissed as a Hooked-On-Phonics joke in her American films prior to Vicky Cristina Barcelona (counting myself among her detractors), comes into full-bloom before Almodovar's gaze. Through Harry's eyes -- and, later, his memories -- we see how her Lena simultaneously destroys and fulfills him. It's quite a risk to draw visual allusions between your leading lady and the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, yet Broken Embraces proves that in the black hole of modern cinema, Cruz burns brightly.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S. of A., we have Brothers, a wartime melodrama that's like a Tennessee Williams heavy-breather performed by the St. Mary's High School Players. For the movie to work, we need to believe that Tobey Maguire is a hard-bitten Marine commander stationed in Afghanistan, and that Natalie Portman, as his wife back home, is a harried mother of two precocious daughters in small-town Red State America. It's not their youthful looks that ring false; it's their Hollywood smoothness that dooms the film from the start.

Still, Maguire and Portman try hard to make it work, as does Jake Gyllenhaal, more persuasive as the Marine's jailbird younger brother. When Sam (Maguire's character) is taken prisoner by Afghani soldiers and presumed dead, brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal) becomes deeply involved with Grace (Portman) and his nieces. I've found Gyllenhaal woefully out of his depth in Zodiac and other recent films (my dad once remarked, "He always looks like he's about to cry"), but he creates a fully lived-in character here. Sam is a screw-up who rises to the occasion when others need him, and Gyllenhaal renders authentic his feelings for Grace and Tommy even as Portman and Maguire fail to offer a reason why.

Brothers was directed by Jim Sheridan, possibly described best as a distant Irish cousin to the acclaimed American-Emo filmmaker James Gray (whose movies I loathe). Like Gray, Sheridan is praised for his sensitivity and overt embrace of emotion. Unlike Gray, he has a sense of humor and pacing and how to shape a scene: one such latter instance -- a tense birthday gathering where an unhinged Sam (newly returned from Afghanistan) confronts a resentful daughter, with a party balloon employed like a ticking time-bomb -- is staged masterfully. The director also tries some things with his young cast that work better than expected (Maguire, believe it or not, comes to bear a startling resemblance to Travis Bickle), and sets up a potentially tiresome character (Sam and Tommy's ultraconservative father, played by Sam Shepard) only to draw some surprising contours. However, as in his last film, In America -- which combined the stark realism of an Irish immigrant family's struggle to survive in New York with the fable of a black man dying so that they may live -- Sheridan can't distinguish his good ideas from his bad. Yet I suspect even he knows that his cast isn't up to snuff: in the Golden Age of Hollywood, they'd be caddies to the stars.

Spirit of '67: Pictures at a Revolution (Part V)

In his review of Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune, Charles Taylor conveys a description of the difference between racism in the North and racism in the South: "In the South...white people don't care how close black people get as long as they don't get too high; in the North it's just the opposite." This was still the case in the late-90s, at the time Altman's film was released. And it was certainly true in 1967, as Pictures at a Revolution makes clear, when a movie depicting a black detective from Philadelphia investigating a murder in Mississippi hit the sweet spot between popular success and Oscar contender.

In the Heat of the Night

• Even in 1965, John Ball's mystery novel, In the Heat of the Night, didn't add anything revolutionary to what Mark Harris calls the subgenre of African-American mystery fiction. Authors like Donald McNutt Douglass, Ed Lacy, and Chester Himes had written award-winning novels featuring black detectives and police officers for years, yet "what made (their) novels strong on the page -- the specificity and 'blackness' of their worldview -- is exactly what kept filmmakers away." Nowadays, for all of Walter Mosley's success in the same genre (and Carl Franklin's superb adaptation of Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington, which sadly bombed at the box-office), it's apparent little has changed.
• Ball's novel, however, was more accessible to Hollywood. The author, who was white, wrote in a sparse prose that didn't editorialize the relationship between the black detective and the white Southern sheriff who are forced to work together to solve a homicide; it merely presented events in the narrative as they unfolded.
• Sidney Poitier, whose frustration at "becoming complicit in a fantasy designed to explain to white America that racism was wrong because it meant mistreating someone as free of human flaws and foibles" as he himself was purported to be was reaching a breaking point (cf. Tiger Woods), is surprisingly given little voice as to what he thought about playing Virgil Tibbs, the blank slate African-American policeman from the novel, other than Harris implies he signed on right away. Perhaps, having evaded disaster by being written out of Doctor Dolittle as Rex Harrison's native African sidekick, Poitier counted his blessings for becoming the first black actor to headline a detective movie. The search for a counterpart to play Chief Gillespie, the sheriff of the Mississippi town, would continue.
• I've seen In the Heat of the Night maybe four or five times. It's a good movie, certainly not a great one; far more accurate than Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in its depiction of race relations, not a cinematic watershed the way Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were in the same year. Yet I wonder if it wasn't a trailblazer, in its own understated way, as an interracial buddy movie and a fish-out-of-water film?
• If so, much of the credit goes to screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, who fleshed out both Tibbs and Gillespie on the page. In the novel, Tibbs was from Pasadena; in Silliphant's original treatment, he was from Harlem; eventually, the compromise became Philly. Silliphant also made Tibbs more angry than he was in the book, and made the prejudices aimed at him -- toward his social standing --a more pervasive threat.
• Virgil Tibbs became an interesting character for Poitier: in the wheelhouse of his previous cool-headed roles (like the line in Singin' in the Rain: "Dignity...always dignity"), yet with more rage coiled beneath the surface. As a related aside, it's amusing to see how the marketing of the character --

-- has been altered in keeping with the times:

• Norman Jewison, known at the time for directing The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen and the out-of-nowhere Cold War comedy hit The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming with Alan Arkin, chose In the Heat of the Night as his next project (against the advice of his agent, who warned it was a small film). Jewison was, then and now, an intelligent and extremely affable filmmaker (see his engaging interview with Robert Osborne on TCM), not groundbreaking in terms of vision or technique, but unlike Stanley Kramer skilled enough to incorporate social issues at the service of a story.
• For all his even temperament, Jewison also possessed reserves of steel and daring. He encouraged DP Haskell Wexler, fresh off his heated battles with Mike Nichols on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to shoot In the Heat of the Night in color, then an unconventional choice for a "serious movie." Jewison also bucked the establishment by casting the blacklisted actress Lee Grant in a small but crucial part as the wife of the murder victim.
• Jewison's most important collaborator on In the Heat of the Night was none other than Hal Ashby, credited as the editor of the film (as well as Cincinnati Kid and The Russians Are Coming) yet highly active in all facets of production. I enjoyed Harris's description of Ashby as "a rarity in mid-1960s Hollywood: a day-in, day-out pothead who was also a workaholic"...and "whose commitment to recreational drugs didn't seem to impede his skill as a superb detail man, to take care of every loose end.
• Ashby, of course, would go on to direct a remarkable string of essential American films in the 1970s (The Landlord, Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, Being There) and whose body of work is enjoying a renaissance today.
• Rod Steiger, who was enjoying an amazing run of his own as an untamable, chamelon-like Method actor (a Holocaust survivor in The Pawnbroker, a gay mortician in The Loved One, a Russian aristocrat in Dr. Zhivago), signed on to play Chief Gillespie after George C. Scott turned it down. Steiger, who would emerge late in life as a relatively more stable version of his On the Waterfront costar Marlon Brando, has a lively interview of his own that pops up from time to time on TCM, where he discusses his preparation for the role.
• According to Steiger, he had trouble relating to the racist Gillespie and needed something physical as a gate of entry. After dismissing Jewison's suggestion that he smoke a cigar, he took the director's idea that he instead chew gum and ran with it.
• Steiger is a lot of fun to watch in the movie: the way he slows down or accelerates the gum-chewing to convey Gillespie's thought processes; his growing frustration at how every well-meaning overture toward Tibbs gets interpreted (correctly) as bigotry.
• Poitier "was unprepared for the Method-driven intensity that Steiger was bringing" to the movie -- remaining in character off-camera as well as on- -- and rose to the challenge by pushing himself farther than he had ever gone as an actor. Harris cites the key moment as the excellent scene where Gillespie and Tibbs appear on the verge of bonding over a drink, only to have Gillespie abruptly rebuff Tibbs' empathy.
• In the Heat of the Night was shot almost entirely in Sparta, Illinois, to meet Poitier's understandable condition that the production stay above the Mason-Dixon line. Nevertheless, Jewison did manage to persuade him to film the pivotal sequence where Tibbs squares off with a plantation owner in rural Tennessee. For two sleepless nights, Poitier holed up in his hotel room with a gun under his pillow. Jewison worked fast during the day and got Poitier back to Illinois as soon as possible.
• Although the above scene, with its famous exchange of slaps between the plantation owner and Tibbs, is still compelling to watch, it caused audible gasps among both white and black moviegoers back then. Initially Jewison was disturbed that their sneak-preview audience in San Francisco laughed throughout the film, but the tuned-in hippie Ashby explained that they were just grooving on the subject of "a smart black cop waiting with ever-decreasing patience for a backward southern sheriff to drag his carcass into the modern world." He assured Jewison, "'They were enjoying the film. They were into it. They get it.'"
• In the Heat of the Night received generally positive reviews, yet many critics "treated the movie as if it had been hatched overnight" in response to the ugly racial clashes of the previous summer. Pauline Kael seemed to understand the movie best, blasting her colleagues for praising it "'as if it had been exactly the kind of picture that the audience was so relieved to discover it wasn't.'"
• Yet In the Heat of the Night was exactly the kind of picture that often finds favor with Academy Awards voters: a box-office success, but not too successful; an espouser of socially liberal values without scaring the hell out of everyone. It tied The Graduate with seven nominations and won a surprising five, including Best Picture. Additionally, Steiger won Best Actor, Ashby for Best Editing, Silliphant for Adapted Screenplay, and Best Sound.
• Naturally, Haskell Wexler's groundbreaking cinematography was ignored by the voters. Wexler, however, would win in 1976 for Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory. Lee Grant, whose bit part helped to revive her career, went on to win Best Supporting Actress in 1975 for Ashby's Shampoo.
• Norman Jewison also enjoyed a productive career, possibly best known for directing the original '68 Thomas Crown Affair starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway and the sparkling 1987 comedy Moonstruck.
• Yet Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier, two of the most wildly successful actors of the 60s, would both flame out after In the Heat of the Night. Bizarrely, Steiger never gained traction after his Oscar win. After turning down Patton (which was then offered, appropriately, to George C. Scott), he spent years in the Hollywood wilderness before enjoying a mild Hollywood comeback as a supporting player late in his career.
• Poitier's career downturn was due to more complex circumstances. The trap Hollywood and American culture had put him in as a faultless, sexless, raceless icon finally closed in; he made two failed attempts to reprise his most famous character (They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! and The Organization), turned to directing for a spell, then vanished as an actor for over a decade before a welcome if all-too-brief reappearance in the late-80s and 90s. I'm partial to Poitier's supporting performance in the lighthearted heist comedy Sneakers, the most at ease he's ever been onscreen.
• Fittingly, Harris ends Pictures at a Revolution with Poitier's words: "'I guess I was born out of joint with the times. I have not made my peace with the times -- they are still out of kilter. But I have made my peace with myself.'"

Thanks for reading!

Spirit of '67: Pictures at a Revolution (Part IV)

"Casting is destiny." -- Warren Beatty

Mark Harris proves Beatty's point over and over again in Pictures at a Revolution, and not just concerning Bonnie and Clyde. "'Casting really controls story. One guy would do a thing, another guy wouldn't,'" Beatty continues. "'And if you're the guy in the close-up, character acting isn't going to help -- you either are that guy, or you aren't.'" Harris adds that if this is the case..."(then) it's hard to find a movie from the mid-1960s in which it is more the case than Guess Who's Coming to Dinner...." Today it is a movie that looks hopelessly quaint; then, however, the film featured a subject so controversial that it would demand perfect casting for the three starring roles to get made. And this was no easy feat: one of the required trio had withdrawn from the limelight; the second was growing weary of playing saints; and the third was dying.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Of the five Best Picture nominees of 1967, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner occupies a curious middle ground. Aesthetically and generationally, the picture is as Old Hollywood as Doctor Dolittle. Yet its topic -- interracial marriage -- was as radical as the antiestablishment antiheroics of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. The contemporary cultural reactionaries of FOX News often miss a point about Hollywood of which Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a valuable reminder: Hollywood is liberal, yes; but it more readily embraces what may be called "soft liberalism" -- the cuddly, feel-good strain that doesn't scare audiences and is more likely to win awards (e.g., Crash, Slumdog Millionaire, Dances with Wolves, Driving Miss Daisy, and countless other examples, including the fifth Best Picture nominee from '67 that ended up beating Dinner and the other nominees). Radicalism scares the studios, because radicalism is a hard sell. To get a place at the table, it needs to be made palatable.

• Stanley Kramer was "as enshrined a member of the Hollywood establishment as anyone in the movie business, and there was probably not an active producer or director who would have hated that description more."
• His films were usually message movies with socially conscious topics such as racism (The Defiant Ones), evolution (Inherit the Wind), nuclear war (On the Beach), and the Holocaust (Judgment at Nuremberg). His movies frequently received Oscar attention but often failed to turn a profit and, occasionally, as with The Defiant Ones, wouldn't play in regions like the Deep South.
• Thus Kramer saw himself as an antiestablishment renegade and couldn't understand why some critics like Pauline Kael mocked the plots of his films as "'original sin meets Mr. Fixit.'" After all, he was taking a stand! Perhaps for this reason, Kramer did receive generally positive reviews. Yet Harris astutely notes that when Bosley Crowther praised Judgment at Nuremberg for being "'persuasive,'" that he failed "to explain what exactly he had needed to be persuaded about...."
• The consensus, then and now, was Kramer was a good producer but left something to be desired as a director. Harris observes: "He didn't possess what came naturally to many of the directors he admired -- an unforced sense of pacing or camera placement or a particularly visual imagination -- and the screenplays for his films (which he did not write) often omitted nuance, surprise, and specificity in favor of a stentorian sense of the wrongness of things that all right-thinking people already agreed were wrong...."
• By 1965, Kramer was planning a Civil War drama called Andersonville and, more intriguingly, had bought the rights to a Vietnam War novel titled Seek Out and Destroy, which made him very cinematically forward-looking on that subject.
• Yet the following year, he got sidetracked from those projects due to an original screenplay about interracial marriage by William Rose, whose previous scripts included the popular Ealing Studios black comedy The Ladykillers, Norman Jewison's recent surprise hit The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming, and Kramer's own It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

• As those credits suggest, Rose was a gifted screenwriter with a knack for comic structure. Yet his early drafts for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Harris notes, were a few decades behind the Civil Rights movement: "Rose was so appalled that Cassius Clay had, in 1964, changed his name to Muhammad Ali...that he mentioned it in his treatment."
• Kramer "managed to comb out some, though by no means all, of the screenwriter's condescensions and stereotypes." However, understandably yet perhaps fatally, he insisted that the African-American bridegroom, Dr. John Prentice, be so infallible that only a racist would object to him. "Kramer was sure that if Prentice had any flaws at all, bigots in the audience would seize on them as a reason to disapprove of the marriage," Harris notes, "but in seeking to avoid that trap, he fell right into another one: the return of the exceptional Negro, a character type that had by then become so familiar that even white critics were beginning to react against its persistence."

• Sidney Poitier emerges as a fascinating individual in Pictures at a Revolution, his public persona at odds with a growing private discord about his movie parts and the subject of race in America, which were inexorably linked. Put succinctly: "Hollywood needed an 'Exceptional Negro'...and Poitier was perfect in the role."
• Poitier's screen debut was as a doctor in No Way Out (1950), and he was versatile enough to portray a teenager a few years later in The Blackboard Jungle (1955). In 1959, he became the first African-American to receive a Best Actor nomination, for The Defiant Ones. In 1964, he became the first black actor to win the prize, for Lilies of the Field. Presenting the award to Poitier -- and spontaneously embracing him, in what would prove to be one of the few highlights of a dismal ceremony -- was Anne Bancroft, the previous year's Best Actress winner for The Miracle Worker.
• Unsurprisingly, Sidney Poitier was not perfect. Although married with children, he had had a longtime affair with Diahann Carroll, but his eventual divorce would be carefully suppressed as it was potentially damaging. This is why, "(i)n the press, he walked a fine line almost unerringly: He was humble but never servile, concerned but rarely intemperate, unwillingly to pretend bigotry was anything other than an immense national problem, but optimistic that it would eventually give way." Still, he was frequently goaded by his friend/rival Harry Belafonte, who was much more outspoken on racial issues and incessantly urged Poitier to be the same.
• While Poitier was wrapping up In the Heat of the Night, Stanley Kramer went to work on pulling his dream cast together for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which required "a kind of diplomatic gamesmanship at which Kramer, as a veteran producer, was an expert," Harris writes. "His plan was to convince Poitier that he already had Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn lined up, tell Tracy and Hepburn that Poitier was eager to make a movie with them, inform Columbia Pictures that all three stars were ready to go, and conceal the full extent of the film's potentially controversial subject matter from the press until the contracts were executed and the money was committed."

• Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, of course, were the most famous screen couple in Old Hollywood. Wisely, Harris does not belabor the well-known details of their private relationship, merely stating that Hepburn's public persona as a proto-feminist contrasted with being essentially Tracy's doormat in real life. She had always been his supporter and enabler, and as his health failed in the last years of his life, the more she embraced these roles instead of any onscreen.
• Before signing on, Tracy and Hepburn invited Poitier over for dinner -- "an unofficial dress rehearsal" for the movie. Poitier found them decent, despite having to endure Tracy's interminable stories about the good ol' days, Hepburn's clueless opinions on civil rights, and the former telling the latter repeatedly to shut up. It was the opportunity to work with a pair of Hollywood legends that attracted Poitier far more than the script itself.

• I watched Guess Who's Coming to Dinner for the first time in preparation for this piece, and I agree with Harris that it remains a charming and funny comedy of manners when focused on (in the words of one character) "'a broken-down old phony liberal face-to-face with his principles,'" but totally out of its depth when attempting to address racial issues. (Listen to Isabel Sanford as Matt and Christina Drayton's family maid for numerous cringeworthy examples: "'Civil rights is one thing, but this here's somethin' else!'")
• The author's Old Hollywood vs. New Hollywood theme surfaces in interesting ways with the making of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Spencer Tracy had nothing but contempt for the "unmasculine oversensitivity" of Method acting, and even he had not been seriously ill, he would have balked at a lengthy rehearsal and multiple takes. Katharine Hepburn, meanwhile, aggressively courted the press for her comeback film, offering a range of telling opinions such as dismissing Antonioni's Blow-Up as "a bunch of claptrap."

• While Tracy soldiered through the picture with half-days of work and rarely more than one or two takes per scene, Poitier's difficulties had to do with correctly believing the movie a step backward following his energizing collaboration with Rod Steiger and Norman Jewison on In the Heat of the Night. (More on that film in Part V.) While he enjoyed working with Hepburn and Tracy, Poitier felt that his own character, Dr. Prentice, suffered from an unreconcilable contradiction: that an African-American man would be so progressive as to propose marriage to a Caucasian woman, yet so squarely traditional as to put the fate of the union entirely in the hands of her father. (The schema of Rose's screenplay is if Tracy's Matt Drayton refuses to give them his blessing, then the wedding is off.)
• Another problem was the sketchy writing of the Drayton's daughter, as well as the awkward performance of Katharine Houghton, a novice actress and Hepburn's real-life niece. Her character comes across as naive -- if not downright vacant -- in her obliviousness to the consequences of an interracial marriage in the 1960s, and unlike her famous aunt, Houghton was too unnatural a performer to fill in the blanks herself.
• Spencer Tracy's eight-minute monologue that caps the movie was broken into increments and shot over six days. A year or two ago, James Wolcott mocked Tracy's performance and Hepburn's reaction shots during the scene, but Harris offers a touching counterpoint. He quotes the editor of the film that Tracy revealed "a kind of vulnerability he hadn't had before (in that scene)" and that Hepburn's tears were real.
• Spencer Tracy would die of a heart attack less than a month after wrapping the movie, but not before calling his friends and exclaiming, "I did it! I've finished the picture! And I was betting against myself all the way."

• Reaction to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was mixed, not just among the critical establishment but oftentimes in the same reviews: gushing love for Tracy and Hepburn; utter disdain for Stanley Kramer's paint-by-numbers direction and William Rose's "deck-stacking" screenplay. Commercially, however, it was a huge success, the biggest ever for the studio, the director, and the stars.
• Guess Who's Coming to Dinner tied Bonnie and Clyde with the most Academy Award nominations, ten, and went on to win two biggies: Best Original Screenplay for Rose (over David Newman and Robert Benton for Bonnie and Clyde), and Best Actress for Katharine Hepburn (over Anne Bancroft for The Graduate and Faye Dunaway for Bonnie and Clyde). Hepburn, naturally, was less pleased with her victory and more outraged that Spencer Tracy lost posthumously to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night.
• Nevertheless, the film stopped aging well almost instantaneously. One of the most vivid passages in Harris's book describes Stanley Kramer's disastrous nine-campus tour screening Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? for college audiences. "If the people who were attacking his movie as old-fashioned and cliched knew that he was getting anonymous phone calls from racists, even death threats," Harris writes about Kramer's aims, "surely he would get credit for the bravery and oral courage he felt it had taken to make the movie." Instead, students wanted to talk about Bonnie and Clyde, about Godard, about anything other than "the same hand-wringing, hypocritical take on race relations that they had been hearing from their own parents for years."
• Perhaps it is fitting that the maligned Katharine Houghton is left with the most perceptive take: "'The real event of the film was the relationship between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy -- that was what was going on for audiences. The love affair between the white girl and the black man? That was never given any reality. It was a fable.'"

Next: Poitier's quest to prove himself an actor, Steiger's mad mad mad mad Method, and Jewison's little-movie-that-could becomes an unlikely Oscar winner....