Thurday Minute
No. 232 | April 7, 2011

Run for Your Life

Our theme this week
Films about runners and running

Featured this week
Tuesday         —   Chariots of Fire

Without Limits

In Chariots of Fire, Harold Abrahams and Eric Littell are runners who race for God and country.  In Without Limits, Steve Prefontaine runs for no one but himself.  Though we’re not supposed to admit it in polite society, Pre, as he’s known, runs for a more noble cause.  As I see it, running has nothing to do with politics or religion, and filmmakers are wiser to keep them apart.  Prefontaine makes a better subject for a movie, and though I wouldn’t claim Without Limits is Best Picture material, in countless ways it’s superior to the British Oscar winner. 

The film came out in 1998 and did nothing at the box office, just as Prefontaine, another film about the Oregon track star, starring Jared Leto, did the year before.  The story, and the films, deserved better.

Without Limits, the better version, in my opinion, was brought to the screen by Robert Towne, one of Hollywood’s great screenwriters (Chinatown) and occasional director.  (His first directing job was another track story, Personal Best, with Mariel Hemingway.) 

Billy Crudup plays the lead, doing first-rate work to capture the spirit, charisma, and headstrong personality that made Steve Prefontaine a key figure in the running world during the 1970s.  Prefontaine is a front-runner, taking the lead early and often winning without a contest.  When his considerable talent doesn’t blow away the field, he has another edge—guts.  He’s cocky and uncoachable, but his faith in himself is admirable.  He knows better than anyone else what he needs to do to win.

Pre’s coach is Bill Bowerman, a legendary figure at the University of Oregon and later co-founder of Nike, portrayed by Donald Sutherland in an award-worthy performance, one of the finest of his career.  Playing Mary Marckx, Pre’s girlfriend, is Monica Potter (inspiration for the Counting Crows song “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby”). 

Well-written, well-directed, and well-acted, Without Limits is small gem, one of those movies you want to seek out, especially if you missed it the first time around.  Though never an Olympic champion, Steve Prefontaine, in his short life, was one of the shining stars of American track, and a figure well worth spending some time with onscreen.

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Without Limits (1998)
Robert Towne, director
Robert Towne, Kenny Moore, writers
Billy Crudup, Donald Sutherland, Monica Potter

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Quote of note
“Running, one might say, is basically an absurd pastime upon which to be exhausting ourselves.  But if you can find meaning in the kind of running you have to do to stay on this team, chances are you will be able to find meaning in another absurd pastime—life.”
—Bill Bowerman (Donald Sutherland), Without Limits (1998)

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
No. 225 | March 17, 2011

Black-and-White Box Sets, Ten Letters

Our theme this week
Movies about crossword puzzles

Featured this week
Tuesday         —   Crossword Craze Cartoons

UPDATE (3/20):
The 34th annual ACPT is in the books, and you’ll find a recap here.

Wordplay (2006)

 

As I was saying Tuesday, crosswords have a long history, going back nearly a hundred years.  Generations have picked up the habit and passed it on, and today millions of people solve puzzles daily—in newspapers, in books, and increasingly, online.  For decades, the premier venue for American crosswords has been the New York Times.  Will Shortz, the clever and much-admired editor at the Times since 1993, is the prime focus of director Patrick Creadon’s 2006 documentary, Wordplay, though the film is very much an ensemble affair.  Some famous names are profiled, including Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton, who enjoy their daily battle of wits with Shortz and puzzlemakers.  Merl Reagle, one of the tops in the business, gives a behind-the-scenes look at crossword construction.  Five lightning-fast solvers are featured—Tyler Hinman, Al Sanders, Ellen Ripstein, Jon Delfin, and Trip Payne—who train for the big event of the year, the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.  The action culminates onstage at the finals, with an unbelievably thrilling finish.

Wordplay is the essential film about crosswords.  It’s a well-done, entertaining movie, and a very enjoyable look inside a community that deserves the rare attention it gets here.  It has a colorful cast of characters, with plenty of heart and plenty of smarts.  The film is hardly just for the converted.  It’s a treat for puzzle fans and non-fans alike.

American Crossword Puzzle Tournament
March 18-20, 2011
Brooklyn Bridge Marriott, Brooklyn, NY

Will Shortz founded the ACPT in 1978, when 149 solvers competed.  The tournament has grown since then, helped, in part, by the popularity of Wordplay, with nearly 700 attending in recent years.  Most participants go for the fun, not for the prizes, and white-knuckle finishes seem to be routine for the competition—I’ll never forget the finals in 2009, the year I attended.  The 34th annual tourney kicks off Friday night and runs through the weekend.  It’s not too late to join in on the festivities.  You can find all the details at the ACPT website.

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Wordplay (2006)
Patrick Creadon, director
Patrick Creadon, Christine O’Malley, writers
Will Shortz, Merl Reagle, Tyler Hinman, Al Sanders, Ellen Ripstein, Jon Delfin, Trip Payne
Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Mike Mussina, Daniel Okrent, the Indigo Girls, Bill Clinton
Trailer

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Wordplay (2006)
Meet Ellen Ripstein 

More about Ellen (WSJ, 3/13/2001)

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Quote of note
Admiral Brindsen:  I suppose you’re one of those fellows who does the Times crossword puzzle in ten minutes.
Ffolkes:  I have never taken ten minutes.
—Admiral Brindsen (James Mason), Ffolkes (Roger Moore), Ffolkes (North Sea Hijack) (1979)

…58…59…60.

Tuesday Minute
No. 224 | March 15, 2011

Black-and-White Box Sets, Ten Letters

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As you may have gleaned from looking around the site, I’m a puzzle guy.  I solve ‘em and I make ‘em, and so for a couple of days this week I get to indulge by combining two of my passions—movies and crossword puzzles.

This is my regularly scheduled “light” week (and I’m particularly busy anyway), so I will (try to) be brief.  First, a few announcements:

 

The 34th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is happening this coming weekend, the 18th through 20th.  The fun and games take place at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott.  It’s not too late to take part in the country’s oldest and largest crossword competition (as it says at the link, where you’ll find puzzles and plenty of info about the tournament).  If you’re a crossword fan and anywhere within shootin’ range of Brooklyn, go.  (I’m not able to make it this time but had a great experience a couple of years ago and hope to make it back again before long.)

The tournament founder and director is Will Shortz, editor at the New York Times, home to many of the greatest crossword puzzles you’ll find anywhere.  Case in point:  the puzzle in today’s morning paper.  I absolutely adore this crossword and highly recommend you get to it.  You can pick up the Times, of course, at any Starbucks, or if you’re an online subscriber, get the puzzle here.  Kudos to constructor Jeremy Newton for a clever idea and great execution.  It’s everything a crossword puzzle should be!  (After you’ve finished—no spoilers here—you can find this apt movie clip from this post a year ago.)

I’ve been making puzzles for several years, with a few dozen that have run in the major venues, mostly in the Times.  My latest endeavor has been making a monthly pair of mini-crosswords called Gram Crackers.  You can find them, as always, at the MAD Puzzles page.  Next month’s will be going up a few days early, on April Fools’ Day.  Consider yourself warned.

Our theme this week
Movies about crossword puzzles

Crossword Craze Cartoons

The man credited with the first crossword puzzle in this country is Arthur Wynne, who created something he called a “word-cross” that ran in the New York World on December 21, 1913.  That’s a picture of his work above, back when puzzles were at “square one,” so to speak, with FUN already there to give solvers a head start.  Crosswords have changed a lot in their century-long history.  You could say they have a checkered past.  One notable time in crossword lore was the 1920s, when among other crazes—flagpole sitting, marathon dancing—the country fell hard for the crossword puzzle.  Puzzle books flew off shelves, contests tested the wits of solvers, and somebody in Hollywood had picked up the habit too.

Today we have a couple of animated short films, a form not much older than crosswords themselves.  Both feature popular characters who starred in dozens of cartoons.  One was Felix the Cat, in his first incarnation, who debuted in 1919 and appeared in today’s short, Felix All Puzzled, at the height of the crossoword craze, in 1924.  The other is Alice, a young girl played by Margie Gay, about five years old, starring with a cast of make-believe characters in Alice Solves the Puzzle, in 1925.  The Alice comedies are notable for the man behind the series, Walt Disney, who was still a few years away from creating the toon that changed it all, Mickey Mouse.

Like puzzles, cartoons have changed a lot too.  These shorts are a long way from Pixar, but as Arthur Wynne might have said, you gotta start somewhere. 

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Felix All Puzzled (1924)
Otto Messmer, director
Felix created by Pat Sullivan, Otto Messmer
Silent Cartoon / Felix the Cat

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Alice Solves the Puzzle (1925)
Walt Disney, director
Introducing Pete
Margie Gay as Alice

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The Adventures of “Pongo the Pup” (1923)
Pongo Catches the Crossword Craze

The Brits caught the craze too.

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Quote of note
Myrtle Sousé (solving a crossword):  What’s a six-letter word meaning “embezzlement”?
Mrs. Hermisillo Brunch:  Prison.
—Myrtle Sousé (Una Merkel), Mrs. Hermisillo Brunch (Jessie Ralph), The Bank Dick (1940)

…58…59…60.

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)

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
Entr’acte | March 3, 2011

Alfred Hitchcock, Never Best Director

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The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder!, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca*, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat*, Spellbound*, Notorious, The Paradine Case, Rope, Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window*, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho*, The Birds, Marnie, Frenzy, Family Plot.

* Hitchcock’s five Oscar nominations for Best Director.  The respective winners:  John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath (1940); Leo McCarey, Going My Way (1944); Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend (1945); Elia Kazan, On the Waterfront (1954); Billy Wilder, The Apartment (1960).

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Interview with Alfred Hitchcock
“Monitor,” BBC Television
Huw Wheldon, interviewer
Broadcast:  May 5, 1964
Part 1

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Interview with Alfred Hitchcock
“Monitor,” BBC Television
Huw Wheldon, interviewer
Broadcast:  May 5, 1964
Part 2

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…58…59…60.