Tag Archives: Michael York

The Three Musketeers (1973, directed by Richard Lester) and The Four Musketeers (1974, directed by Richard Lester)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In 1973, director Richard Lester and producer Ilya Salkind decided to try to get two for the price of one.

Working with a script written by novelist George McDonald Fraser, Lester and Salkind had assembled a once-in-a-lifetime cast to star in an epic film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.  Michael York was cast as d’Artagnan, the youthful swordman who goes from being a country bumpkin to becoming a King’s Musketeer.  His fellow musketeers were played by Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finlay.  Faye Dunaway and Christopher Lee were cast as the villains, Milady and Rochefort.  Charlton Heston played the oily Cardinal Richelieu.  Geraldine Chaplin played Queen Anne while Simon Ward played the Duke of Buckingham.  Comedic relief was supplied by Roy Kinnear as d’Artagnan’s manservant and Raquel Welch as Constance, d’Artagnan’s klutzy love interest.  The film was a expensive, lushly designed epic that mixed Lester’s love of physical comedy with the international intrigue and the adventure of Dumas’s source material.

The only problem is that the completed film was too long.  At least, that’s what Salkind and Lester claimed when they announced that they would be splitting their epic into two films.  The cast and the crew, who had only been paid for one film, were outraged and the subsequent lawsuits led to the SAG ruling that all future actors’ contracts would include what was known as the Salkind clause, which stipulates that a a single production cannot be split into two or more films without prior contractual agreement.

But what about the films themselves?  Both The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are currently available on Tubi.  I watched them over the weekend and, of the many films that have been made out of Dumas’s Musketeer stories, Richard Lester’s films are the best.  Lester captures the swashbuckling spirit of the books while also turning them into two films that are easily identifiable as Lester’s work.  There’s a lot physical humor to be found in Lester’s adaptation, especially during the first installment.  d’Artagnan runs through the streets of Paris, convinced that he has been insulted by the haughty Rochefort.  d’Artagnan manages to get challenged to three separate duels, all to take place on the same day.  After his first swordfight as a member of the Musketeers, d’Artagnan tries to tell the men that he wounded about an ointment that will help them with their pain.  Raquel Welch also shows a genuine flair for comedy as Constance, which makes her fate in the second film all the more tragic.

For all the controversy that it caused, splitting the story into two films was actually the right decision.  If The Three Musketeers is an enjoyable adventure film, The Four Musketeers is far more serious.  In The Four Musketeers, Oliver Reed’s melancholic Athos steps into the spotlight and his story of his previous marriage to the villainous Milady casts his character in an entirely new light.  In The Four Musketeers, the combat is much more brutal and the humor considerably darker.  Likable characters die.  The Musketeers themselves commit an act of extrajudicial brutality that, while true to Dumas’s novel, would probably be altered if the film were made today.  From being a naive bumpkin in The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers finds d’Artgnan transformed into a battle weary soldier.

The cast is fabulous.  This is a case of the all-star label living up to the hype.  Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain all seems as if they’ve been riding and fighting together for decades.  Christopher Lee plays Rochefort as being an almost honorable villain while Faye Dunaway is a cunning and sexy Milady.  What truly makes the film work, though, is the direction of Richard Lester.  Lester stay true to the spirit of Dumas while also using the material to comment on the modern world, with the constant threat of war and civil uprising mirroring the era in which the films were made.  Interestingly enough, Richard Lester first became interested in the material when Ilya Salkind reached out to the Beatles to try to convince them to play the Musketeers.  While the Beatles were ultimately more interested in a never-produced adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Richard Lester was happy to bring Dumas’s characters to life.

Both The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are currently on Tubi, for anyone looking for a truly great adventure epic.

Wrongfully Accused (1998, directed by Pat Proft)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Ryan Harrison (Leslie Nielsen) is a world-famous concert violinist who plays his instrument like Jimmy Page plays his guitar.  Harrison is invited to a party but when his host, Hibbing Goodhue (Michael York), is murdered, Harrison is wrongfully accused.  No one believes his story that the murder was committed by a one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged man.  Harrison is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.  Maybe he should have asked for a preemptive pardon but that would probably have been too ludicrous an idea for even a parody film like this one.  An accident on the way to prison allows Harrison to escape.  He must now prove his innocence while being pursued by the determined Fergus Falls (Richard Crenna).

Wrongfully Accused is the only film to be directed by comedy writer Pat Proft and it’s a parody film in the style of Airplane!  There are sight gags, movie references, and a lot of ridiculous dialogue delivered in deadpan fashion by Leslie Nielsen.  Richard Crenna does a decent impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones.  There’s a North By Northwest parody that involves a toy airplane.  It’s not that there weren’t enough funny moments, it’s just that there weren’t enough of them.  Most of the jokes instead felt uninspired, as if Proft just turned on his TV and tossed in a joke about whatever movie he saw being advertised.  It feels like the script was written by using parody movie mad libs.  One reason why Airplane! holds up  so well is because it genuinely loved disaster movies and there was a sense of innocence to even the wildest of the jokes.  Wrongfully Accused has some funny moments but there’s no real affection for the movie being poked fun at.  The Fugitive feels like almost too easy a target.  Leslie Nielsen and Richard Crenna score some laughs but even they sometimes seem to be just going through the motions.

As the old saying goes, dying is easy.  Comedy is hard.

Film Review: Lost Horizon (dir by Charles Jarrott)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Friends forever.  It’s a nice idea.”

With those words, the late Casey Kasem closed out the infamous “Rockumentary” episode of Saved By The Bell.  In this episode, Zack Morris fell asleep in his garage while waiting for his high school friends to arrive for band rehearsal.  While he was asleep, he dreamt about becoming a superstar as the result of Zack Attack’s hit song, Friends Forever.  Later, of course, Zack was led astray by a publicist who tried to sell him as being a “male Madonna.”  Zack didn’t care about the fame.  He was more concerned that the music and the lights at his concert were so excessive that the audience couldn’t even hear his lyrics.  Because, seriously, when you’re coming up with banger lyrics like “We’ll be friends forever/yes we will,” you want to make sure that they can clearly be heard.

It’s easy to make fun of the band and the show but that doesn’t make Casey Kasem’s words any less true.  Friends forever.  It is a nice idea.  It’s also a totally unrealistic and implausible idea.  People grow apart.  People develop new interests.  People move to different towns.  Sometimes, people just decided that they need to take a little break from the same old thing.  Instead of demanding that people remain friends forever, it would perhaps be more realistic to encourage people to enjoy and treasure the time that they have in the present.  But, to be honest, entertainment is not about that type of reality.  No one wants to hear, “Be friends until you get bored.”  Instead, they want to hear “Friends forever!”  It’s a simple idea and the simple ideas are the ones that usually bring us the most comfort.

Take the idea behind Shangri-La, for instance.  Shangri-La was a utopia that was hidden away in the Himalayas.  It was a place where there was no war, no greed, and everyone was in nearly perfect health.  It was a place where it was common for people to live to be well over a hundred years old.  It’s a place where people literally can be friends forever.  And while the place does have one very big drawback — i.e., once you decide to stay there, you can’t return to the outside world for even so much as a brief visit — it’s still easy to see why this idealized existence would appeal to many people.

The lamasery of Shangri-La was first introduced in a 1933 novel called Lost Horizon.  Written by James Hilton, Lost Horizon told the story of a group of westerners who, fleeing from a political uprising in India, find themselves in Shangri-La.  That the novel’s portrayal of a peaceful utopia hidden away from the “modern world” proved to be popular should not come as a surprise.  In 1933, the world was still recovering from the Great War.  Much of Europe was still in ruins, both economically and physically.  The combination of the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic had shaken everyone’s faith in the future.  Even as a group of idealistic activists, industrialists, and politicians tried to make war illegal, Mussolini seized power in Italy.  Spain was on the verge of civil war.  In Germany, a fanatical anti-Semite named Adolf Hitler had managed to move from being a fringe politician to being named chancellor.  The U.S. was suffering from the Great Depression.  Even the UK was so mired in political turmoil that it was no longer a reliable bulwark against chaos.  To the readers who were having to deal with all of that on a daily basis, the idea of Shangri-La was an inviting one.

(One of those readers was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who named his presidential retreat Shangri-La.  Years later, Dwight Eisenhower would rename Shangri-La after his son and it’s remained Camp David ever since.)

Not surprisingly, the book’s success led to it being adapted for the movies.  Frank Capra took the first crack at it, release his film version in 1937.  At the time, Capra’s adaptation was the most expensive film to have ever come out of Hollywood.  (It cost $1.6 million dollars!)  It also underperformed at the box office, nearly bankrupting Colombia Pictures.  Even though the film itself was nominated for Best Picture of the year, it still took five years for the film to earn back its cost.  Because Colombia edited the film to shorten its lengthy running time, Capra sued the studio and the end result was that everyone involved lost a good deal of money.  Considering all of the bad luck that befell the first production, one might wonder why Hollywood would even risk making a second version of the film.  And indeed, it would be several decades before any major studio attempted to bring Hilton’s novel back to the screen, despite the fact that the idea behind Shangri-La was probably looking more attractive with each crisis-filled day.

Ross Hunter

In 1973, producer Ross Hunter was sleeping on a mountain of cash.  Well, perhaps he wasn’t but a look at some of the films that he had produced would definitely suggest that he could have if he had so chosen.  Hunter started his career producing melodramas that starred Rock Hudson and were often directed by Douglas Sirk.  He was the type of producer who understood that importance of glitz and glamour, especially with the film industry facing a new competitor named television.  In the 60s, he made films that were totally out-of-touch with the turmoil of the decade but which still appealed to middle-aged viewers who wanted an escape from the hippies and the assassins.  In 1970, he scored his biggest hit of all time when he produced Airport.  As dull as that film seems to us today, it was the biggest hit of 1970 and it also gave birth to the disaster genre.  (It was also the only Ross Hunter production to be nominated for Best Picture.)

It was after the success of Airport that Ross Hunter decided to produce a remake of Lost Horizon.  Following the approach that he used in Airport he gathered an all-star cast.  In fact, George Kennedy appeared in both Airport and Lost Horizon!  Joining Kennedy were Oscar nominees Sally Kellerman, John Gielgud, Charles Boyer, Peter Finch, and Liv Ullmann.  Michael York, fresh off of Cabaret, and Olivia Hussey, who was best-known for playing Juliet in the wildly successful 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet, were cast as rebellious lovers who tried to escape the paradise of Shangri-La.  Larry Kramer, the future playwright and political activist, was hired to write the script.  Charles Jarrott, who specialized in big, glossy films and who had been nominated for Best Director for his work on Anne of a Thousand Days, was brought in to direct.  And Burt Bacharach was enlisted to write the song because, on top of being a literary adaptation with an all-star cast, Lost Horizon was also going to be a musical.

What could go wrong?

What indeed.

The 1973 version of Lost Horizon opens with an endless aerial view of the Himalayas.  In the background, singers sing about peace and love.  “There’s a lost horizon/waiting to be found/where the sound of guns/don’t pound in your ears/anymore,” the singers repeat several times, as if to hammer home the fact that the audience is not about to get Burt Bacharach at his best.

When the opening credits finally end, we find ourselves at an airport.  A very non-musical protest has broken out.  The characters in the film describe it as a revolution but instead, it just looks like a bunch of confused extras standing on a landing strip.  When it comes to an epic film like this, it’s always a good idea to see what the extras are doing.  In a good film, the extras will actually be a part of the world onscreen and you won’t even think of them as being a crowd of paid performers.  In a bad film, like this one, they’ll all stand around in a perfectly organized group and they’ll all do the exact the same thing at the same time, like shaking their fists at a plane.

Despite all of the “drama” at the airport, one airplane does manage to take off.  On the plane are the Conways, diplomat Richard (Peter Finch) and his younger brother, George (Michael York, whose blond prettiness suggests that there’s not a chance he could share any DNA with the much more rough-hewn Peter Finch).  There’s also a Newsweek photographer named Sally Hughes (Sally Kellerman), who pops pills and who suffers from a pronounced case of ennui.  She describes her job as “taking pictures of the headless so that people with heads can look at them in magazines while getting their hair done.”  (Damn, Newsweek apparently used to be  really messed up publication!)  Sam Cornelius (George Kennedy) is an engineer and an embezzler.  And finally, there’s Harry Lovett (Bobby Van), who introduces himself to everyone as being “Harry Lovett, the comedian.”  Harry was playing an USO show when the revolution broke out and apparently, he was abandoned in the country because his act was so bad.  Is the film suggesting that, in 1973, the United States would actually abandon a citizen in a dangerous, war-torn country?  I hope someone impeaches that President Nixon!

Our heroes may think that they’re escaping to freedom but it turns out that the plane is actually being hijacked!  One thing leads to another and eventually, as happens in all good musicals, the plane cashes in a remote area of the Himalayas.  At first, it seems like our heroes are done for but, fortunately, they’re discovered by Chang (the very British John Gielgud) and a group of Shangri-La monks.  Chang leads the party through the snowy mountains and eventually, they arrive at what appears to be a Disney resort but what we’re told is actually Shangri-La, a tropical paradise that sits in the middle of one of the most dangerous places on Earth!

Shangri-La has something for everyone:

Sally gets off drugs and discovers a library that, oddly enough, has every book ever written even though no one knows where Shangri-La is, none of the inhabitants can leave the area without running the risk of rapidly again, and Amazon wasn’t a thing in 1973.

Sam discovers a gold mine but, realizing that money doesn’t matter, he instead uses his engineering skills to help out the farmers of Shangri-La.  It really didn’t appear that the farmers of Shangri-La needed any help but whatever, I guess.  As long as Sam is happy.

Harry Lovett becomes a big star as the children of Shangri-La love his comedy.  Children are well-known for their lack of taste when it comes to comedy.

Richard not only falls in love with the local teacher (Ingmar Bergman’s muse, Liv Ullman) but he also meets the High Lama (the very French Charles Boyer).  It turns out that the High Lama is finally going to die and that he’s determined that Richard is the man who is destined to take over Shangri-Law, despite the fact that Richard has only recently arrived and isn’t even a Buddhist.

In fact, almost everyone is so happy that they start to sing and dance!  It takes 50 minutes for the film to reach its first big musical number.  Unfortunately, there’s a reason why most successful film musicals open with a big number instead of holding off on it.  It’s important to, early on, get the audience used to the idea that they’re watching a film set in a world where it’s perfectly common for people to break out into song.  From West Side Story to La La Land, good musicals have understood the importance of bringing the audience in early.  Lost Horizon waits until everyone has gotten used to the film being a somewhat rudimentary adventure/disaster film before suddenly springing the singing and the dancing on everyone.  It’s a bit jarring.  It wouldn’t matter, of course, if the songs were any good but again, this was not Burt Bacharach’s finest moment.

Unfortunately, one member of the group doesn’t want to stay in Shangri-La and dance and sing.  George Conway does not want to be friends forever.  Instead, he’s fallen in love with the local librarian, Maria (Olivia Hussey).  Maria dreams of seeing New York and London.  George is determined to grant her wish, despite being told that Maria is nearly as old as John Gielgud and will start to age as soon as she leaves Shangri-La.  Richard feels an obligation to accompany his brother.  Needless to say, things don’t go well.  (As Michael York would later put it himself, “There is noooo sanctuary….”)  Will Richard be able to find his way back to Shangri-La?

“Let’s not go to Camelot, ’tis a silly place,” King Arthur famously declared in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Lost Horizon suffers the opposite problem.  While Lost Horizon’s Shangri-La is occasionally a silly place, it’s usually just an incredibly boring place.  One can’t help but feel that Maria has a point, regardless how much time Sally spends singing about her hatred of the New York night life.  The film’s downfall is that it argues for Shangri-La being viewed an ideal without making Shangri-La into any place that you would want to visit.  Add in the anemic songs and the confused performances and Charles Jarrot’s inability to maintain any sort of compelling pace and you have a film that’s too dull to really even qualify as a fun bad film.  It’s just bad.

That said, much like friends forever, Shangri-La is a nice idea.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, directed by Don Taylor)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After the ship that he’s working on sinks, engineer Andrew Braddock (Michael York) washes up on an uncharted island. It’s a beautiful island but it quickly proves dangerous as another survivor of the sinking is killed by wild animals. The injured Braddock passes out and when he wakes up, he’s being cared for by a mysterious scientist named Moreau (Burt Lancaster).

Braddock discovers that the island is populated by creatures that are half-human and half-animal. Led by the Sayer of the Law (Richard Basehart), these creatures are the results of experiments conducted by Moreau and his assistant, Montgomery (Nigel Davenport).  Moreau’s experiments are expected to obey Moreau’s laws.  Should they fail, they will be taken to the House of Pain and punished.  When Baddock objects to Moreau playing God, Moreau plots to reverse the experiment on Braddock and turn him into an animal. Even as he falls in love with a former cheetah (played by Barbara Carrera), Braddock realizes that he must escape the Island of Dr. Moeau.

This is the forgotten adaptation of H.G. Wells’s classic novel, as well as being the most faithful. The Island of Lost Souls, from 1932, is considered to be a classic. The third version, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, is a legendary disaster. This version, though, is usually overlooked. It’s also my favorite of the three but that might be because it was the first version that I ever saw. It’s a straight-forward version of H.G. Wells’s story of science gone mad with director Don Taylor not wasting any time getting the action started. Michael York, always an underrated actor, convincingly portrays Braddock’s outrage and his struggle to maintain his humanity after Moreau starts to experiment on him while Carrera is beautiful and mysterious as Maria. Probably the film’s biggest surprise is Burt Lancaster, who turns out to be ideally cast as Moreau. More subdued than either Charles Laughton or Marlon Brando, Lancaster plays Moreau as a brilliant but callous man who is too arrogant to realize that he’s become as much of an animal as those he claims to be perfecting.  What makes Lancaster’s Moreau so disturbing is that he doesn’t have the excuse of being insane.  Instead, he’s just too stubborn to admit that he’s potentially made a huge mistake.

It may be forgotten but this still the version of The Island of Dr, Moreau that I would recommend.

(Trailer courtesy of Classic Movie Reviews)

Film Review: Murder on the Orient Express (dir by Sidney Lumet)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s been a murder on the Orient Express!

In the middle of the night, a shady American businessman (Richard Widmark) was stabbed to death.  Now, with the train momentarily stalled due to a blizzard, its up to the world’s greatest detective, Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), to solve the crime.  With only hours to go before the snow is cleared off the tracks and the case is handed over to the local authorities, Hercule must work with Bianchi (Martin Balsam) and Dr. Constantine (George Coulouris) to figure out who among the all-star cast is a murderer.

Is it the neurotic missionary played by Ingrid Bergman?  Is it the diplomat played by Michael York or his wife, played by Jacqueline Bisset?  Is it the military man played by Sean Connery?  How about Anthony Perkins or John Gielgud?  Maybe it’s Lauren Bacall or could it be Wendy Hiller or Rachel Roberts or even Vanessa Redgrave?  Who could it be and how are they linked to a previous kidnapping, one that led to the murder of an infant and the subsequent death of everyone else in the household?

Well, the obvious answer, of course, is that it had to be Sean Connery, right?  I mean, we’ve all seen From Russia With Love.  We know what that man is capable of doing on a train.  Or what about Dr. No?  Connery shot a man in cold blood in that one and then he smirked about it.  Now, obviously, Connery was playing James Bond in those films but still, from the minute we see him in Murder on the Orient Express, we know that he’s a potential killer.  At the height of his career, Connery had the look of a killer.  A sexy killer, but a killer nonetheless….

Actually, the solution to the mystery is a bit more complicated but you already knew that.  One of the more challenging things about watching the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express is that, in all probability, the viewer will already know how the victim came to be dead.  As convoluted as the plot may be, the solution is also famous enough that even those who haven’t seen the 1974 film, the remake, or read Agatha Christie’s original novel will probably already know what Poirot is going to discover.

That was something that director Sidney Lumet obviously understood.  Hence, instead of focusing on the mystery, he focuses on the performers.  His version of Murder on the Orient Express is full of character actors who, along with being talented, were also theatrical in the best possible way.  The film is essentially a series of monologues, with each actor getting a few minutes to show off before Poirot stepped up to explain what had happened.  None of the performances are exactly subtle but it doesn’t matter because everyone appears to be having a good time.  (Finney, in particular, seems to fall in love with his occasionally indecipherable accent.)  Any film that has Anthony Perkins, John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Albert Finney all acting up a storm is going to be entertaining to watch.

Though it’s been a bit overshadowed by the Kenneth Branagh version, the original Murder on the Orient Express holds up well.  I have to admit that Sidney Lumet always seems like he would have been a bit of an odd choice to direct this film.  I mean, just consider that he made this film in-between directing Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon.  However, Lumet pulls it off, largely by staying out of the way of his amazing cast and letting them act up a storm.  It looks like it was a fun movie to shoot.  It’s certainly a fun movie to watch, even if we do already know the solution.

Love On The Shattered Lens: Romeo and Juliet (dir by Franco Zeffirelli)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Now that the Oscars and the Sundance Film Festival are over with, it’s time to start a new series of reviews here on the Shattered Lens.  For the rest of February, I will be looking at some films that deal with the universal topic of love.  Some of these films will be romantic.  Some of them will be sad.  Some of them might be happy.  Some of them might be scary.  Some of them might be good.  And some of them might be bad.  In fact, to be honest, I haven’t really sat down and made out a definite list of which films I’ll be reviewing for Love On The Shattered Lens.  Instead, I figure I’ll just pick whatever appeals to me at the moment and we’ll see what happens!

Let’s start things off with the 1968 film version of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

“Oh my God!  Romeo and Juliet are hippies!”

Well, that’s not quite true.  I mean, it is true that Romeo (played by Leonard Whitting) and Juliet (Olivia Hussey) are played by actual teenagers in this version of the classic play.  It’s also true that, even though the film is set in a painstakingly recreated version of 15th century Verona, almost all of the actors have what would have then been contemporary haircuts.  Romeo, Benvolio (Bruce Robinson), and Mercutio (John McEnery) all have longish hair, dress colorfully, and look like they could all be in the same band, covering the Beatles and writing songs about dodging the draft.  Even Tybalt (Michael York) seems a bit counter-cultural in this version.

As played by Olivia Hussey, Juliet comes across as being far more rebellious in this version of Romeo and Juliet than in some of the others.  It’s hard to imagine that Olivia Hussey’s Juliet would have much patience with Juliets played by Norma Shearer, Claire Danes, Hailee Steinfeld, or even the version of the character that Natalie Wood played in West Side Story.  Olivia Hussey’s Juliet is always one step away from running away from home and hitch-hiking to the free Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway.  Like the audience that the film was intended for, Romeo and Juliet both know that their parents are out-of-touch and that their friends are only temporary.  Embracing love and pursuing all that life has to offer is what matters.

Was this the first film version of Romeo and Juliet to make explicit that the two characters had consummated their marriage?  I imagine it was since it was apparently also the first version of Romeo and Juliet to feature on-screen nudity.  That’s quite a contrast to the largely chaste 1936 version, in which Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard both seemed determined to keep a respectable distance from each other.  Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey have an amazing chemistry together.  They’re the two prettiest people in Verona and they just look like they belong together.  From the minute they meet, you believe not only that they would be attracted to each other but that they’re also meant to be lovers.

Of course, we all know the story.  The Capulets and the Montagues are rival families.  Juliet is a Capulet.  Romeo is a Montague.  Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, kills Romeo’s friend Mercutio.  Romeo kills Tybalt.  Juliet fakes her death.  Romeo commits suicide.  Juliet wakes up and does the same.  The Prince shows up and yells at everyone.  This film version moves around some of the events and it leaves out a few scenes but it actually improves on the play.  For instance, poor Paris (Roberto Bissaco) doesn’t die in this version.  Seriously, I always feel bad for Paris.

Throughout it all, director Franco Zeffirelli emphasizes the youth of the characters.  It’s not just Romeo and Juliet who are presented as young.  The entire Montague and Capulet feud is largely portrayed as being just a silly turf war between two competing high school cliques.  When Tybalt and Mercutio have their fateful duel, it starts out largely as a joke and, when Tybalt kills Mercutio, it comes across as if it was an accident on Tybalt’s part.  Tybalt appears to be just as shocked as anyone, like a scared kid holding a smoking gun and trying to explain that he didn’t know it was loaded when he pulled the trigger.  When Mercutio curses both the Capulets and the Montagues, it’s all the more powerful because Mercutio is undoubtedly wondering how the duel could have so quickly gone from playful taunting to a fatal stabbing.  The entire conflict between the Montague and the Capulets is a war that makes no sense, one in which the young are sacrificed while the old retreat to the safety of their homes.

Romeo and Juliet was a hit in 1968 and it’s still an achingly romantic film.  Whiting and Hussey generate more chemistry in just the balcony scene than Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes did in the entirety of Baz Luhrmann’s version of the tragic tale.  Along with being a box office hit, it was also a critical hit.  The Academy nominated it for best picture, though it lost to Oliver!

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Cabaret (dir by Bob Fosse)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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The Godfather is such a classic film that it’s always somewhat surprising to be reminded that it wasn’t exactly an Oscar powerhouse.  When the Academy Awards for 1972 were handed out, The Godfather may have won Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Actor but, out of 10 nominations, that’s all it won.  Francis Ford Coppola did not win Best Director, Gordon Willis was not even nominated for Best Cinematography, and neither Al Pacino, James Caan, nor Robert Duvall won Best Supporting Actor.  According to the fascinating book Inside Oscar, Godfather producer Al Ruddy started his acceptance speech by acknowledging that, “We were getting a little nervous there.”

When you look at the 1972 Academy Awards, what quickly becomes obvious is that the year’s big winner was Cabaret.  All of those Oscars that people naturally assume went to The Godfather?  They went to Cabaret.  Out of ten nominations, Cabaret won eight.  It set a record for the most Oscars won by a film that did not win best picture.

If it hadn’t been for The Godfather, Cabaret would have won best picture and it would have totally deserved it.  Oh my God — how I envy all of our readers who were alive in 1972!  How wonderful it must have been to have not one but two legitimately great and groundbreaking films released in the same year!  Five years ago, I was lucky enough to see both The Godfather and Cabaret on the big screen and it was an amazing experience but I can only imagine what it was like to discover these two films for the very first time, with no preconceived notions.

Seriously, I need a time machine and I need it now.

Cabaret takes place in Berlin in 1931.  Germany is still struggling to recover from World War I.  When the reserved English academic Brian (Michael York) first arrives in the city, he barely notices the buffoonish men standing on street corners, handing out anti-Semitic pamphlets.  He’s more interested in earning his doctorate.  When he moves into a boarding house, he meets and cautiously befriends Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), a free-spirited American actress who dances at the Kit Kat Klub.  When Sally tries to seduce Brian, he is curiously passive.  Finally, after she asks him if he doesn’t like girls, Brian tells her that he’s tried to have sex with three separate women and each time, he failed.  However, Sally is not one to give up and eventually she does manage to seduce Brian, telling him that the other women were just the “wrong three girls.”

To make money, Brian gives English lessons.  One of his students is the wealthy and innocent, Natalia (Marisa Berenson).  While Brian teachers her English and Sally gives her advice about sex and love, Natalia finds herself more and more of an outsider in Berlin.  She’s Jewish and as a result, her dog is murdered.  Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper) falls in love with Natalia but marrying her means publicly revealing that he’s Jewish and putting both of their lives in danger.

Sally performs at the Kit Kat Klub, where the Emcee (Joel Grey) gives the wealthy audiences a taste of decadence.  At first, the audience is full of well-dressed and upper class people but, with each performance, we notice that the audience is changing.  More humorless men in uniforms appear at the tables, like constantly multiplying cancer cells.  Outside the Klub, men are attacked in the streets but the show inside continues.  Though they may not know it (and Sally would certainly never admit it), we watch the performances in Kit Kat Klub with the full knowledge of what is going to eventually happen to the majority of the people who we see on stage.  (That the Emcee is played by an actor who is both Jewish and gay only serves to drive the point home.)  As a result, the performances are both entertaining and ominous at the same time.

It’s easy to be critical of Sally.  In fact, I think it’s a little bit too easy for some critics.  Sally may be apathetic and she may be self-centered and apolitical but how different is she from most of us?  With the exception of Natalia, Sally may be the only truly honest character in the film.  She alone understand that life is a nonstop performance and that there’s nothing she can do to change the world in which she’s found herself.  All she can do is look out for herself.

Sally and Brian eventually meet and enter into a brief ménage à trois with Max (Helmut Griem), a wealthy baron.  Sally occasionally allows herself to dream of being a baroness while Brian struggles to deal with the jealousy he feels towards both Max and Sally.

Of the three of them, Brian is the only one to eventually become alarmed by the rise of the National Socialism.  Sally refuses to take consider anything that’s happening outside of her own life and her own dreams.  Meanwhile, Max holds the Nazis in disdain but insists that the aristocracy can control them and that the Nazis are useful for keeping the lower classes in line.

And then this happens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co

This scene is one of the most important in the history of cinema and it’s one that is even more relevant today than ever.  With the U.S. currently in the middle of a bitter and angry election cycle, everyday seems to bring more of the political mob mentality that this scene epitomizes.  In Cabaret, the mob sang in a beer garden.  In the modern world, they hop on twitter and start hashtags.

Whenever I watch Cabaret, I always think about that old man in the beer garden.  He alone sits there and does not sing.  He alone seems to understand.

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Cabaret is a powerful and important film, now more than ever.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #95: 54 (dir by Mark Christopher)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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“A guy named Steve Rubell had a dream: To throw the best damned party the world had ever seen and to make it last forever. He built a world where fantasy was put up as reality and where an 80-year-old disco queen could dance till dawn. Where models mingled with mechanics, plumbers danced with princes. It was a place where all labels were left behind. A place where there were no rules.”

— Shane O’Shea (Ryan Phillippe) in 54 (1998)

So, did you actually read that quote at the beginning of the review?  I don’t blame if you didn’t because not only is it ludicrous overwritten but it just goes on and on.  It’s one of those quotes that you read in a script and you think to yourself, “They better get absolutely the best actor in the world to deliver these lines,” and then you realize Ryan Phillippe has been cast in the role.

Except, of course, I doubt that any of those lines were found in the original script for 54.  54 is one of those films where, as you watch it, you can literally imagine the chaos that must have been going on during the editing process.  Subplots are raised and then dropped and the mysteriously pop up again.  Characters change both their personalities and their motives in between scenes.  Huge dramatic moment happen almost at random but don’t seem to actually have anything to do with anything else happening in the film.

In short, 54 is a mess but it’s a mess that’s held together by incredibly clunky narration.  Shane O’Shea, who spent the waning days of the 1970s working at Studio 54, narrates the film.  And, despite the fact that Shane is presented as being kinda dumb (think of Saturday Night Fever‘s Tony Manero, without the sexy dance moves), his narration is extremely verbose and reflective. It’s almost as if the narration was written at the last-minute by someone desperately trying to save a collapsing film.

I watched 54 on cable because I saw that it was about the 70s and I figured it would feature a lot of outrageous costumes, danceable music, and cocaine-fueled melodrama.  And it turns out that I was right about the cocaine-fueled melodrama but still, 54 is no Boogie Nights.  It’s not even Bright Lights, Big City.

54 does have an interesting cast, which makes it all the more unfortunate that nobody really gets to do anything interesting.  Poor Ryan Phillippe looks totally lost and, in the film’s worst scene, he actually has to stand in the middle of a dance floor and, after the death of elderly Disco Dottie (that’s the character’s name!), yell at all the decadent club goers.  Breckin Meyer is cute as Phillippe’s co-worker and Salma Hayek gets to sing.  Neve Campbell plays a soap opera actress who Phillippe has a crush on and…oh, who cares?  Seriously, writing about this film is almost as annoying as watching it.

Mike Myers — yes, that Mike Myers — plays the owner of the club, Steve Rubell.  The role means that Myers gets to snort cocaine, hit on Breckin Meyer, and vomit on the silk sheets of his bed.  I think that Myers gives a good performance but I’m not really sure.  It could have just been the shock of seeing Mike Myers snorting cocaine, hitting on Breckin Meyer, and vomiting on the silk sheets of his bed.

If you want to enjoy some 70s decadence, avoid 54 and rewatch either Boogie Nights or American Hustle.