Thursday Minute
Entr’acte | March 31, 2011

Elizabeth Taylor, R.I.P.

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“I have never felt more alive than when I watched my children delight in something, never more alive than when I have watched a great artist perform and never richer than when I have scored a big check to fight AIDS.  Follow your passion, follow your heart, and the things you need will come.”
—Elizabeth Taylor, her final interview, Harper’s Bazaar, February 2011

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Tribute to Elizabeth Taylor
Turner Classic Movies
Paul Newman, narrator

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Tuesday Minute
Entr’acte | March 29, 2011

Elizabeth Taylor, R.I.P.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“Miss Taylor… is terrific as a panting, impatient wife, wanting the love of her husband as sincerely as she wants an inheritance.”
—Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, 1958

Not everything as Tennessee Williams intended it to be, but the film still packs a powerful punch.  During production, Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband, Mike Todd, died in a plane crash.  It was the only one of her marriages not to end in divorce.

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
Richard Brooks, director
Tennessee Williams (play); Richard Brooks, James Poe (screenplay); writers
Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman

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Wednesday Minute
No. 228 | March 23, 2011

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2011

Our theme this week
Performers inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011

Featured this week
(See Monday post for theme introduction and program note)
Monday         —   Alice Cooper
Tuesday         —   Dr. John

Darlene Love

It took a long time for women get proper respect in the world of rock.  The girl groups of the 1950s and ’60s didn’t get the star treatment of Madonna or Lady Gaga, but hey, they could sing.  And nobody had a voice like Darlene Love’s.  She started as a backup vocalist working with Phil Spector and was the lead singer for several groups.  Her hits make for a good soundtrack of the era:  “He’s a Rebel” (a #1 single of 1962, her biggest hit), ”He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry,” “Wait ‘Til My Bobby Gets Home,” and “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Hearts?”  Love has continued working through the years, and frequently on Broadway.  In the 1980s, she starred in Leader of the Pack, later on, in Grease and Carrie, and just a few years ago, in Hairspray.  Her best-known role in movies was as Danny Glover’s wife in the Lethal Weapon franchise.

Love on film
Basketball Jones (1974)
Lethal Weapon (1987)
Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
Lethal Weapon 3 (1992)
Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

Contributed songs to soundtracks of many films.

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Father of the Bride (1992)
Chris Shyer, director
Steve Martin, Kimberly Williams-Paisley
“(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Going to Marry”
Darlene Love / Soundtrack

 

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Bachelor Party (1984)
“Alley Oop”
Darlene Love / Soundtrack
Cover of hit song of the Hollywood Argyles
Dallas Frazier, songwriter

 

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Quote of note
Trish:  Is this your pen?
Martin:  Thanks, I keep losing it.
Trish:  Something’s wrong.
Martin:  No, not really, just another goddamn pen.
Trish:  You were saying about the pen.
Martin:  Oh, it just reminds me of something, that’s all.
Trish:  Reminds you of what?
Martin:  Ah, reminds me of the night Vicki was killed.
Trish:  I didn’t mean to push.
Martin:  Hang on that, okay?  We never talked about this, did we?
—Trish Murtaugh (Darlene Love), Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

…58…59…60.

Friday Minute
No. 223 | March 11, 2011

Rotary Club

Our theme this week
Mayhem, murder, and a telephone in the title

Featured this week
(See Monday post for theme introduction)
Monday         —   Dial M for Murder (1954)
Wednesday    —   Call Northside 777 (1948)

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

A telephone is never just a telephone.  It’s a device serving different roles in this week’s featured films.  In Dial M for Murder, it’s a trigger for a carefully devised murder plot.  In Call Northside 777, it’s a means to answer a desperate plea for help.  In Sorry, Wrong Number, it’s a lifeline to the outside world for a wealthy, spoiled invalid—and then a source of terror as the lines are crossed and she overhears two men plan a murder to be carried out that night.

Barbara Stanwyck is Leona Stevenson, the bed-ridden wife, in a role played previously on radio by Agnes Moorehead.  Adapting the 22-minute drama for the big screen gave the filmmakers more time to tell the tale.  One addition was the backstory of Leona and her husband, Henry (Burt Lancaster), shown in flashback.  She’s the daughter of a millionaire (Ed Begley) and hardly a likeable character.  She meets and falls for Henry, young, uneducated, and far outside her social sphere.  Leona typically gets what she wants, and despite the objections of her father, she gets and marries her man.  Henry, though, is wrapped up with the wrong crowd, and a crooked character named Morano (William Conrad) blackmails him into plotting her death so he can inherit her estate.

In the bedroom, where the film begins, ends, and returns several times, Leona makes phone calls to piece together the mystery.  She finally discovers the intended victim of the murder plot—herself.  Henry, in a change of heart, telephones her with a warning, and as the police approach his phone booth, he hears her screams over the line.

The ending, and the famous last line, earned legendary status in Hollywood, and the film—a bit of noir, a bit of hokum—is a classic of its kind.  Stanwyck earned her fourth and final Best Actress nomination for her performance.  It was hardly subtle, and actually rather hysterical in bits, and perhaps an inspiration to later generations of scream queens.

One of the great actresses of the golden age, Stanwyck worked another four decades.  As her co-star, six years her junior, Lancaster was just starting out.  He went on to get four Oscar nominations himself, winning in 1960 for Elmer Gantry.

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Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)
Anatole Litvak, director
Lucille Fletcher (radioplay and screenplay), writer
Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards, Ed Begley
Trailer

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Quote of note
“In the tangled networks of a great city, the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives … it is the servant of our common needs — the confidante of our inmost secrets … life and happiness wait upon its ring … and horror … and loneliness … and … death!!!”
—Prologue, Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

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Monday Minute
No. 221 | March 7, 2011

Rotary Club

Social media is quite the thing.  It’s how we make friends these days, and so I hear, how revolutions are made in the Middle East.  If you believe what they tell you on TV, you’d wonder if people had any way to communicate before Facebook and Twitter.  Well, I have it on good authority that there was in fact a social network before The Social Network.  They called it the telephone.

In the post-war years, the country had a new numbering plan.  People moving to the suburbs needed a new way to stay in touch.  Use of phones grew, and Hollywood took notice.

Onscreen, the ubiquitous telephone was hardly an innocent device.  It was often a signal there’d be mayhem and murder afoot.  This week, a threesome of films from mid-century with the telephone getting the most prominent and ominous billing—in the title.

Our theme this week
Mayhem, murder, and a telephone in the title

Dial M for Murder (1954)

Dial M for Murder is a movie set in London made by Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood.  Actors Ray Milland and John Williams lend their British accents to the production, starring with Americans Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings.

Milland plays onetime tennis pro Tony Wendice, a husband with murder on his mind.  He’s married to Margot, his would-be victim, the wealthy and unfaithful wife played by Kelly, in her first of three roles for Hitchcock.  Cummings is the paramour, a fellow named Mark Halliday.  Williams is the veddy British police inspector who unravels what turns out to be a less-than-perfect crime.

Wendice plans the murder with great attention to detail, blackmailing an old school acquaintance (Anthony Dawson) to carry it out while Wendice himself is safely away from home at a stag party.  Hitchcock pays great attention to detail too, and his execution proves more successful than Wendice’s, making for an especially memorable murder scene.  Watch Kelly in her beautiful white negligee (Hitchcock at first planned for a robe but took Kelly’s advice), and watch out for those scissors.

Wendice gets to hear it all over the telephone, but he does not become a suspect until after the wrong person is convicted of murder.  His ultimate undoing comes after much business about a latchkey.  It’s always something.

Though not as accomplished as the best of Hitchcock (a high standard indeed), the movie does have some great moments.  The director had a long fascination with blackmail and murder—and blondes—and it’s all on display here.  Adapted from a play by Frederick Knott, the film feels somewhat stagebound, in part because of the limits of 3-D filmmaking.  In a post-Avatar world, it’s hard to see the appeal of 3-D for this story (1 more D than neeeded), but Hitchcock loved to experiment.

Another odd aspect (from our vantage) comes less than an hour into the film, which clocks in at a brisk one-hour-forty-five minutes:  an intermission.  And they say we have short attention spans.

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Dial M for Murder (1954)
Alfred Hitchcock, director
Frederick Knott (play and screenplay), writer
Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, John Williams
Trailer

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Quote of note
Wendice:  At exactly three minutes to eleven, you’ll enter the house through the street door.  You’ll find the key to this door under the stair carpet here.
Swann:  The fifth step?
Wendice:  That’s the one.  Go straight to the window, and hide behind the curtains.  At exactly eleven o’clock, I shall go to the telephone in the hotel to call my boss.  I shall dial the wrong number.  This number.  That’s all I shall do.
—Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), C.A. Swann (Anthony Dawson), Dial M for Murder (1954)

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