Monday Minute
No. 152 | September 6, 2010

Once Is Enough

ONCE, adv.  Enough.

That’s Ambrose Bierce, not a man to waste words, in The Devil’s Dictionary.  Seems that more than a few actors-turned-directors have read the book.

Acting and directing are different professions offering different rewards.  Actors get the limelight, directors the clout, and that may be why they often trade places.  Who can blame them for wanting both?

The list of actor-directors goes on and on—Chaplin, Welles, Cassavetes, Allen, Eastwood, and many dozens more.  This week we feature a small subset from that roster:  actors who took the reins to direct a film once, but never again.

Note, a couple of this week’s filmmakers are still alive and may not be done yet—we’ll see—but I will skip the one-timers who either have second efforts on the way (e.g., Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp), have also directed television (e.g., Tommy Lee Jones, Zach Braff), or seem a good bet to get behind the camera again (e.g., Drew Barrymore, Edward Norton).

Our theme this week
Actors who have directed one film only

Marlon Brando:  One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

Marlon Brando’s production company owned the rights to a Charles Neider novel, a western based loosely on the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  Brando hired and fired several writers (Rod Serling, Sam Peckinpaugh, and Calder Willingham) and the intended director (Stanley Kubrick) before getting Guy Trosper to work on the script and hiring himself for his first and only credit as director.

Brando teamed with Karl Malden, his costar in a couple of landmark films a decade earlier, A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, both directed by Elia Kazan.  Brando plays Rio and Malden, Dad Longworth, as bank robbers in an ill-fated heist in Sonora, Mexico.  The third partner, Doc, is killed, and as the two try to escape, Dad betrays his friend, adandoning him on a hilltop where Rio is surrounded by Mexican Rurales.  Rio serves five years in prison, then after his release tracks down Dad in Monterey, California, where he is now sheriff.  Rio plots revenge but falls in love with Dad’s stepdaughter, Louisa (Pina Pellicer, in the best known of the few film roles in her too-brief career).  Rio’s presence is more than Dad can bear, and the sheriff is merciless in inflicting justice on Rio, who is beaten and later jailed on false charges.  After Rio escapes, the two men have their final showdown.

One-Eyed Jacks is a revisionist western, and you can understand what attracted Brando to the material.  The good guys and bad guys are not easy to discern.   Who’s wearing the badge doesn’t tell you much.  In fact, as the title implies (in a deck of cards, one-eyed jacks are pictured in profile), the lead characters are two-faced, one side public and the other hidden.  (Think the Harvey Dent character in The Dark Knight.)  The film is not a simple morality tale.  It’s a swipe at the conventions of westerns, which by the sixties had nearly run their course.  Instead of mesas or Monument Valley, most of One-Eyed Jacks is set at the beach, as west as the West can go, along the white sands of Monterey.  Charles Lamb beautifully captured the scenes, earning an Oscar nomination for cinematography.  It was the last Paramount film to be shot in widescreen VistaVision.

The film runs nearly two-and-a-half hours.  It meanders, more interested in contemplating character than tightly plotted action.  But Brando’s version was much longer—four to five hours, apparently—and the studio cut it in half before releasing the film.  That experience may explain why Brando didn’t direct again, and why no one would hire him.

Opinion on the film is divided.  Some say it’s a classic, some say a mess.  I’d say it’s neither, but it is a well-done, involving tale, with plenty of good reasons to see it even if it weren’t the only movie that Brando ever directed.

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One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Marlon Brando, director
Guy Trosper, Calder Willingham (screenplay), Charles Neider (novel), writers
Trailer

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Quote of note
“You might be a one-eyed jack around here, Dad, but I’ve seen the other side of your face.”
—Rio (Marlon Brando), One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

…58…59…60.

Friday Minute
No. 46 | March 5, 2010

Oscar Déjà Vu

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
Film titles with two Oscar nominations for Best Picture

Featured this week
Monday         —   Moulin Rouge (1952, 2001)
Tuesday         —   Cleopatra (1934, 1963)
Wednesday    —   Heaven Can Wait (1943, 1978)
Thursday        —   Romeo and Juliet (1936, 1968)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, 1962)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Director:  Frank Lloyd
Writers:  Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, Carey Wilson; based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall
Cast:  Charles Laughton (William Bligh), Clark Gable (Fletcher Christian), Franchot Tone (Roger Byam), Movita (Tehani), Mamo Clark (Maimiti)
Oscar Summary:  8 nominations, including Picture, Director, Actor (Laughton, Gable, Tone), Adapted Screenplay; 1 win (Picture)

The essentials
The math says 1962 is much closer to 1935 (27 years) than to 2010 (48 years), but the look of the later production feels closer to something from our era of moviemaking than it does to the earlier film.  In part that’s a result of the widescreen color photography, the spare-no-expense budget, and the three-hour length.  But the performances also make a difference, with a cast led by Marlon Brando offering a more naturalistic, less hammy, rendering of the story.  That’s not to say the newer version is a better film; I rather enjoyed 1935 film.  (These days, we’re not likely to see another Mutiny on the Bounty made.  Now, they’d change the ship to a spaceship and those nature-loving Tahitians to the Na’vi; they wouldn’t film it in Panavision, but 3-D, and they’d shorten the title too.  Avatar fans may want to note, for the record, the ship sent a year later to search for the missing Bounty was the HMS Pandora.) 

The 1962 film took more liberties with the truth, though both films were based on the 1932 book Mutiny on the Bounty, which itself is a historical novel, not a history, of the real-life mutiny that took place in 1789.  William Bligh was the commanding officer of the Bounty during its fateful voyage of the South Pacific.  After a stop in Tahiti, a group led by Fletcher Christian took command in a bloodless mutiny, sending Bligh out to sea in a small boat with a few of his loyalists.  Bligh lived to return to England.  The mutineers settled in Tahiti and Pitcairn Island, where some of their descendents live today.  The mutiny, and the cruelty of Bligh toward his crew that led to it, is the stuff of legend.  The tale’s been told in poetry and prose (among the storytellers:  Lord Byron, Mark Twain, and Jules Verne), and at least half a dozen films. 

Beyond the final credits
Of the ten Best Picture nominees featured this week, the 1935 release of Mutiny of the Bounty was the only one to win the prize.  The film was the first ever to have three acting nominations, and the only one to have three nominations for Best Actor—Laughton, a great actor here chewing the scenery, Gable, minus his mustache, and Tone, as the true hero of the story.

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Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Frank Lloyd, director
Trailer

 

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Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
Lewis Milestone, director
Trailer

 

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Quote of Note
Greenwald:  And now we come to the man who should have stood trial.  The Caine’s favorite author.  The Shakespeare whose testimony nearly sunk us all.  Tell ‘em, Keefer.
Keefer:  No, you go ahead.  You’re telling it better.
Greenwald:  You ought to read his testimony.  He never even heard of Captain Queeg!
Maryk:  Let’s forget it, Barney.
Greenwald:  Queeg was sick, he couldn’t help himself.  But you, you’re real healthy.  Only you didn’t have one-tenth the guts that he had.
Keefer:  Except I never fooled myself, Mr. Greenwald.
Greenwald:  I wanna drink a toast to you, Mr. Keefer.  From the beginning you hated the Navy.  And then you thought up this whole idea and you managed to keep your skirts nice and starched and clean, even in the court martial.  Steve Maryk will always be remembered as a mutineer.  But you, you’ll publish your novel, you’ll make a million bucks, you’ll marry a big movie star, and for the rest of your life you’ll live with your conscience, if you have any.  Here’s to the real author of the Caine mutiny.  Here’s to you, Mr. Keefer.  [Greenwald throws wine in Keefer's face]  If you wanna do anything about it, I’ll be outside.  I’m a lot drunker than you are—so it’ll be a fair fight.”
—Lt. Barney Greenwald (José Ferrer), Lt. Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray), Lt. Steve Maryk (Van Johnson), The Caine Mutiny (1954)

…58…59…60.