MADness—the Blog

Sad news today, and little time to say more than this:  she was one of the biggest stars in the history of movies.  Elizabeth Taylor died this morning, and she leaves behind many great moments, the best of which will outlive us all.

For more on her death, and her life:  her obituary, and A.O. Scott’s remembrance.

(For other clips and comments, you could run a search on the MAD About Movie front page, like this.)

A Place in the Sun (1951)
George Stevens, director
Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift

Maria Schneider died on Thursday after a battle with cancer, at 58.  The French actress was best known for the role of Jeanne, opposite Marlon Brando, in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris.  She was 19 at the time.

Bernardo Bertolucci would like to extend a belated apology:

Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci said Thursday he wished he could have apologised to the late Maria Schneider for putting her through graphic sex scenes in his classic 1972 film “Last Tango in Paris”.

“Her death has come too early, before I could give her a tender embrace and tell her that I was as tied to her as I was at the start and apologise to her at least once,” Bertolucci was quoted by the ANSA news agency as saying.

“The strong and creative relationship that we had during the filming of ‘Last Tango’ became poisoned with the passing of time,” he said.

“Maria accused me of having robbed her of her youth and only today am I wondering whether there wasn’t some truth to that,” he added.

David Thomson ponders if the film ruined her life:

It’s hard now to think the essential purpose of Last Tango in Paris wasn’t to take advantage of Maria Schneider to get our dollars. I don’t mean to say the film lacks anguish, or that Brando isn’t riveting in it. But I’m not sure it was worth doing if it ruined a life. You can argue that actresses know what to expect. Haven’t they heard about show business? Maybe. But some actresses are desperate to believe in what they are doing. Just like actors. Just like us. Let’s tip our hats to Maria Schneider.

Google’s Ngram Viewer made news this week.  You may have heard about it, or perhaps even played around at the site.  As noted elsewhere, it’s not only fun, it can be addictive.

I did a few queries to see how some big names in movies have fared over the years*.  Some of the results are in the charts below.  The first two compare actors and actresses who all began their careers before 1940.  The third compares some Best Picture winners from different decades, starting in the ’30s.

I can’t say there were big surprises—I expected John Wayne and Bette Davis to top the charts, so to speak—but the fascinating thing is to see how the names compare in ways that weren’t available before.

A couple of items caught my eye.  One is the surge for many of the names beginning in the 1960s.  I’d attribute that to a rise in interest in film across the culture more than to the individual stars.  You also see a more gradual, across-the-board dropoff during the past decade.  I’m not sure if there’s a single reason that accounts for that.  In part, the generation that knew the old names best is not here to buy books as they did before.  The internet, no doubt, has had an effect, with more writing online leading to perhaps less in print.  Another thing, it seems we had a spate of movie retrospectives around the centennial of film in 1995, and at the end of the century a few years later, and we may be witnessing a natural ebb of that kind of interest.

THE ACTORS
10 stars, all of whom started before 1940
Charlie Chaplin is the earliest and most enduring name.  Wayne remains the biggest name, though he appears to have peaked about a dozen years ago.  Jimmy Stewart seems to have the latest gain in fame (though it may be that we know him more as Jimmy now and he was more often James back then).

THE ACTRESSES
10 stars, all of whom started before 1940
You can see the huge interest in the early days for Greta Garbo and Shirley Temple, and it’s a tribute to them that they remain big names many decades after their short careers.  But Bette Davis, with a much longer career, is the big name among this group.  She ranks higher than all the men except for Wayne and Chaplin.  But if you add Marilyn Monroe to the query, you see who’s the biggest actress of them all.

THE BEST PICTURE WINNERS
8 Oscar-winning films, one from each decade since the 1930s
The films here are Oscar favorites but not necessarily the most popular ones.  The database doesn’t give good results for some Best Picture winners.  Casablanca and Chicago happen to be names of cities, too.  Who knew?  Hamlet is more than what’s dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.  Lawrence of Arabia is not just a movie about a man, but a man, and the name begins its spike 40 years before the film was made.  That said, for several of the films the chart shows a consistent pattern:  a sudden rise, a dip, a leveling-off.  Not the case, though, for the latest two films.  Schindler’s List hardly gets out of the starting gate, for reasons I can’t explain.  Million Dollar Baby (also a film title from 1941, and a song title, or partial title, for hits from Bing Crosby to Lil Wayne) is still on the rise.  In any case, the top film among this group is On the Waterfront.  It coulda been just a contender—but it’s the champ!

* Caveat querier:  The Google database is big, with more than 500 billion words from 5.2 million books, and it offers one measure of popularity over time.  But like any metric (e.g., box office results), it’s hardly definitive.  For one thing, it’s a work in progress (the database contains 4 percent of the corpus of published books).  And there’s this:  what people talk about is often not the same as what people write about, and what people write about in newspapers, in magazines, and now on the internet, is often not what people write about in books.

UPDATE:
This just in.  Well, from the summer of ’09, actually.  A discussion at the Language Log blog took issue with the accuracy of the Google Books endeavor, and Jon Orwant of Google provided this insight into the project.  Some interesting technical background and another reason to not take results as gospel truth.

UPDATE 2:
The Schindler’s List anomaly is due to punctuation.

The past couple of weeks on the front page, I’ve been featuring actors and actresses who are 90 and over.  The idea was to take a moment to remember some of the stars from yesterday before they are gone.  As I had mentioned in Friday’s post, one of those stars was Barbara Billingsley.

In the news this morning I read that Barbara Billingsley died on Saturday.  For many, she will be remembered as June Cleaver, the archetype of the 1950s mom, on the family comedy Leave It to Beaver.  Before that, Billingsley had appeared in movies, in many small roles, and a few other TV shows.  After Beaver, she’s best known for her cameo as the “jive”-talking passenger in Airplane! (1980).

R.I.P., Barbara Billingsley.  She was 94.

Tony Curtis died last night in Las Vegas at the age of 85.

He was a first-rate actor, both with drama and comedy, and whatever the role, he was a pleasure to watch and easy to identify with.  Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success and Joe/Josephine in Some Like It Hot are two performances among my favorites.  Curtis worked in films across seven decades, and during the 1950s and ’60s he was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.  A few of his films include The Defiant Ones, Spartacus, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Boston Strangler.

Maybe when your birth name is Marion Morrison you have it written into your contract to “just call me John.”

This is from John Wayne’s filmography at IMDb.  Twenty consecutive movies from the mid-1930s.  Notice a pattern?

1 Chris
1 Rod
1 Randy
17 Johns

You got a problem with that, partner?

“We didn’t need dialogue.  We had faces!”

That’s Norma Desmond, of course, the aging and forgotten star of the silent era reflecting back on her glory days and complaining about the wretched state of the movies.  From our vantage, it’s not so easy to imagine that summer of 60 years ago, when Sunset Boulevard was released, as a time of Hollywood’s demise.  We’d say that’s part of the golden age (hey, Norma, you should see some of this summer’s movies). 

It was a very good year, 1950, with several notable films and a couple of classics that rank among my favorites.  Billy Wilder’s film noir was a scathing look at Hollywood.  With All About Eve, Broadway got the treatment.

Both films feature stories about actresses who are aging.  They are old for their profession.  Norma Desmond is all of 50, and Margo Channing is in her 40s.  Not so old, really, we’d like to think.  Age hasn’t slowed down the career of Meryl Streep, for example.  But someone like Streep is an exception, and for too many in the acting profession, age still matters.

Age is just part of the conversation at Slant Magazine, where Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard have a fascinating discussion about those two classic films of 1950.  Bellamy:

That actually segues nicely into another of Sunset Boulevard‘s famous moments: when Norma responds to Joe’s assessment that she “used to be big” by demanding, “I am big! It’s the picturesthat got small!” It’s a magnificent line—truly one of the best in cinema history—and, like the film’s equally famous final shot, it’s tempting to think of that line as nothing more than a sharp dagger to the heart of a misguided Hollywood. I mean, just think of the countless essays you’ve read that use Norma’s quote en route to a proclamation that Hollywood’s best years are behind it. Sure, there are lots of movie lines that are more celebrated or better recognized, but I’d be hard pressed to come up with one that cinephiles, on the whole, find more personally resonant. Because we’ve all been there: staring up at the closing credits of a lackluster movie with that empty feeling that Hollywood used to make ‘em better. Whether that’s true or not is beside the point. When Norma sneers that the pictures have gotten small, cinephiles reflexively nod their heads in agreement. We love her in that moment.

I think it can be fun to compare the two movies, though I’m not sure it’s useful to rank them.  In my world, each is about as good at what it does as can be imagined.  Mankiewicz deserves a little more credit than I think he gets at the Slant conversation.  The All About Eve screenplay is one of the very best in all of cinema, not just because of the wonderful dialogue, but for the intricate and perfectly executed story structure, weaving in points of view and voice-overs from multiple characters.  Yet the voice-over in Sunset Boulevard is a stroke of genius too.  As we learn, it’s from a man floating face-down in a swimming pool.  Neither film is strictly realistic.  All About Eve has an exaggerated theatricality to it, and Sunset Boulevard tends toward the gothic.  I’m partial to the latter, probably because I’m more fascinated by old Hollywood than old Broadway, not because it’s necessarily a better film.  Wilder, I should add, has a slant that is not only a good match for mine, but was influential in forming my own take on things.  Maybe that’s a chicken and egg thing, but he’s always been a favorite.

Yes, I’m still here.  Actually, I haven’t gone anywhere, though activity on the MADness—the Blog side has been quiet lately.  For a while, my routine had been a few blog posts a week (in addition to Movie Minute posts every weekday on the front page), but then nothing.  Somehow, nearly a month has slipped by.  What happened?  I got busy.  Demands on my time seem to be growing by the week, so I’ll be dropping in to say something whenever I can, but the schedule may be sporadic for a while.  I’ll aim to keep the weekday Movie Minutes coming as usual, though I may need to revert to “summer hours” at some point.

So what’s been going on?  Some old news, perhaps, but a few items worth noting:

Remembrances of Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

F.X. Feeney in the L.A. Weekly:

At its depths, behind the camera or in front of it, Hopper’s legacy as a filmmaker is defined by a multitude of excellent performances, each alive with the iconic honesty Dean had pressed him to seek in himself. His particular genius as an artist was that he made himself at home within his own contradictions — and was perpetually eager to invite the rest of the world to join him there, laughing at the darkness.

Edward Copeland:

How many odd turns can one man’s life and career take? There’s probably no limit, but Dennis Hopper, who died at 74 after a long battle with cancer, took a lot of them: From young actor of film and TV in the 1950s to counterculture icon of the 1960s and ’70s (while adding director to his resume and still working with the likes of John Wayne); from nearly unemployable because of drugs to a career comeback in the mid-1980s before frequent returns to TV. On the side, he managed to find time to be a prolific photographer, painter and sculptor. His later years also brought the strangest twist for the hippie hero: he became a Republican. Still, it’s his film and TV work that will be his legacy.

I have a couple of recollections of Hopper, aside from his film work.  One, hearing him talk about working with James Dean, in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant.  He was in awe of Dean, and learned a lot from him.  Mostly, though, I remember Hopper’s fascination with acting.  It was just great to listen to him.  Two, seeing him work, which I had the chance to do on a film called Boiling Point, from 1993.  (If you look real hard, you can see my shoe in one of the scenes, my moment of glory on the big screen.)  Hopper and Wesley Snipes were the co-stars, but Hopper was the guy I wanted to watch.  He seemed to be an accessible, decent guy behind the scenes, and he gave a very good performance too.  I’ll remember Hopper for his films, more than anything, and particularly these:  Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, and Red Rock West.

Cannes

Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the first Thai film to win the top prize.

Recaps and perspectives worth reading:  Roger Ebert on the not-so-hot festival.  Manohla Dargis on the end of film.

The Gulf Oil Tragedy

James Cameron offers to help.  BP says no, thanks.  (I saw an interview with Cameron on TV.  He actually has expertise and access to equipment for deep-sea dives that might be helpful, to the government perhaps if not to BP.)

Program note:  a week of oil at the movies, starting Monday, on the front page.

Movie to See

There’ll be plenty of others this summer, but here’s one that’s got my curiosity:  Double Take. 

Now playing at New York’s Film Forum.  (Only 2,407 miles from here, says Moviefone, but maybe not this weekend for me.)

MAD About Movies Site News

It’s been a while since the last crossword, but another is on its way, soon as I get a chance to clue it.  That probably will not happen this week, unless I surprise myself.  The calendar is a tyrant.

A sincere thanks to those of you who have found the site and stop by to read about movies.  I started in January, not sure what to expect, and (except for a few time crunches along the way) I’m enjoying it.  Traffic is steadily growing every month.  May numbers were about 50% above April, so it’s good to know somebody (that’s you!) is out there.

She was a legend.  Lena Horne was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term Hollywood contract.  Best known as a singer, she starred in just a few movies, and none as memorable as this one:

Stormy Weather (1943)
Lena Horne
“Stormy Weather” (Harold Arlen & Ted Koehler)
 

Lena Horne died Sunday in New York.  She was 92.  You can find her obituary here.

Got a light?