Tuesday Minute
No. 168 | September 28, 2010

Late for the Show

Our theme this week
Actors with posthumous nominations for Oscars

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   James Dean (1931-1955):  East of Eden, Giant

Spencer Tracy (1900-1967):  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Monday’s and Tuesday’s actors were in some ways opposites.  James Dean was a method actor.  Spencer Tracy’s key to acting, so he said, was to ”show up on time, know your lines, and don’t bump into the furniture.”  Dean died before his career had barely started.  Spencer Tracy died after a career stretching four decades, with nine Oscar nominations in all (each for a leading role), including two wins (Captains Courageous and Boys Town).

Tracy’s final film was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, his ninth pairing with Katharine Hepburn.  The two play a well-to-do father and mother whose daughter (Katharine Houghton) returns home with a surprise—a fiancé.  He’s a doctor, educated at Yale, and that would all be just swell, except for the “pigmentation problem.”  “It never occurred to me that I would fall in love with a Negro,” the daughter says, “but I have, and nothing’s going to change that.”  It’s not what the good folks had been hoping for, and even though the “Negro,” in the person of Sidney Poitier, is as perfect a specimen as director Stanley Kramer and writer William Rose could conjure, the parents, and the father especially, are not so ready to give their blessing.  (The deck is stacked, though, and we have no doubt where the story is going.)

Kramer was known for tackling the issues of the day, often to deliver a timeless but heavy-handed message.  (“Mr. Kramer, Mr. Goldwyn is waiting on line 1.”)  Few things were as topical in the mid-sixties as the issue of race, yet whatever relevance the film may have had then, it seems rather tame today (and at times, unintentionally funny).  It’s not that we’ve overcome all prejudice, but how we think and talk about race is filtered through a much different prism.  The bigger problem with the film, though, is that Kramer has stripped down his characters to fit his purposes.  They may work for the morality tale he’s constructed it, but they’re easier to recognize as types than as real flesh-and-blood people.

The story, beneath the cloak of social currency, is a rather conventional tale of true love triumphing over whatever obstacles may be in the way.  The film’s pleasures are the performances, especially Tracy and Hepburn, who had a long and complex relationship on and off screen.  The affection they had for one another is palpable, and knowing this was near the end for Tracy, as they surely knew, it’s impossible to watch and not be moved.

Spencer Tracy died of a heart attack seventeen days after filming completed.  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released six months later.  The movie earned ten Academy Award nominations, with four for acting, including one for Hepburn (who won) and one for Tracy.

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Stanley Kramer, director
William Rose,  writer
Sam Leavitt, director of photography
Trailer

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Spencer Tracy sums it all up

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Quote of note
“The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel, for each other.  And if it’s half of what we felt, that’s everything.  As for you two, and the problems you’re going to have, they seem almost unimaginable, but you’ll have no problem with me, and I think when Christina and I and your mother have some time to work on him you’ll have no problem with your father, John.  But you do know, I’m sure you know, what you’re up against.  There’ll be a hundred million people right here in this country who will be shocked and offended and appalled at the two of you.  And the two of you will just have to ride that out, maybe every day for the rest of your lives.  You can try to ignore those people, or you could feel sorry for them and for their prejudice and their bigotry and their blind hatreds and stupid fears, but where necessary, you’ll just have to cling tight to each other and say “screw all those people!”  Anybody could make a case, a hell of a good case, against your getting married.  The arguments are so obvious that nobody has to make them.  But you’re two wonderful people who happened to fall in love and happened to have a pigmentation problem.  And I think that now, no matter what kind of a case some bastard could make against your getting married, there would be only one thing worse, and that would be if—knowing what you two are, knowing what you two have, and knowing what you two feel—you didn’t get married.”
—Matt Drayton (Spencer Tracy), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

…58…59…60.

Monday Minute
No. 62 | March 29, 2010

“City” Flickers

Movies are always about people.  Sometimes they tell you who it’s about right in the title—e.g., Precious, Annie Hall, Forrest Gump.  Sometimes the title is the name of a place—Key Largo, Chinatown, Moon.  In that case, you don’t expect a travelogue but a movie about people who lived there or went there at a certain time.  Usually that’s how it works, though there are exceptions.

This week’s films are movies named for a familiar type of place, a city.  Sometimes the connection between the city and the story is historical, sometimes metaphorical, sometimes something else.  At times that connection is  clear, and at times—when we get to the Coen brothers—not.

MAD About Movies is still suffering jet lag from its recent world tour (see our visits to England and Japan), so this time let’s stick to cities on the U.S. map (sorry, Casablanca fans, some other time).  There is one other distinction that the five movies for this week share.  More about that on Friday; meanwhile you’re welcome to guess what it is.

Our theme this week
Films named for U.S. cities

San Francisco (1936)

The city
Founded:  1776
Named For:  St. Francis of Assisi
Nickname:  The City by the Bay; Baghdad by the Bay (don’t call it “Frisco”)
Population:  809,000

 

The earthquake of 1906

Today

 
The movie
Release Date:  1936
Director:  W.S. Van Dyke
Cast:  Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy
Oscar Summary:  6 nominations, 1 win

 

San Francisco is the earliest and probably the least known of this week’s films.  Stars Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy appeared in many other films we’re more likely to remember.  Jeanette MacDonald is better known for her films with singing partner Nelson Eddy.  (She went on to have an opera career as a soprano; he was a baritone in opera before his film work.)  But San Francisco was a big hit in its day.  It was the top-grossing movie of the year, making millions of dollars for MGM. 

San Francisco is an early disaster flick, set in 1906, that eventful year when the city was devastated by an earthquake.  As Jack London put it:  “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed.  San Francisco is gone.”  The disaster scenes are not as amped-up as in later Hollywood spectaculars, but they are very well done; there’s a reality to the collapsing buildings and frightened crowds that we typically don’t see with movies of today that rely heavily on CGI and other special effects.

Gable stars as Blackie Norton, a roguish Barbary Coast saloonkeeper, who hires, falls for, and fears losing, singer Mary Blake, played by MacDonald.  One highlight is MacDonald’s version of the title song “San Francisco,” which (among other renditions) wins top prize at the Chicken’s Ball, right before the shaking starts.  The song was a hit, popularized later by Judy Garland, and today is an anthem of sorts for San Franciscans.

San Francisco, open your golden gate
You let no stranger wait outside your door.
San Francisco, here is your wanderin’ one
Saying “I’ll wander no more.”

There’s more Hollywood hokum than history in the final scenes, an uplifting ending that appealed to audiences three decades after the real-life disaster.  It makes me wonder how the movies will handle the disasters of the past decade—9/11 and Katrina—after another generation goes by.  It’s hard to imagine they’ll get the same treatment.

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San Francisco 
The Earthquake

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San Francisco 
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

This ending, fading to a long shot of the rebuilt city, was used for the 1948 re-release.  The original 1936 ending had shots of street life and construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.  MGM thought the ’30s version looked dated, so they changed it.

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Quote of Note
“There are eight million stories in the Naked City.  This has been one of them.”
—Narrator (Mark Hellinger, producer), The Naked City (1948)

…58…59…60.