Popdose: The Unsung Sidney Lumet

A look at some of the less familiar chapters from a career highlghted for me by 1975's Dog Day Afternoon.

Remembering John Barry

Popdose recollects. I wanted to write something more heartfelt than a couple of comments--he was my favorite living composer, though he had been silent for 10 years--but as you may have guessed something happened in the chasm between posts. And that something is that we welcomed my son, Ryan, on Jan. 15. He's as delightful as his big sister Larissa but integrating another member into the household has been challenging. What this means for the blog (a hair under five years old now) and my writing/reviewing career in general I can't say, though long-time browsers will note the falloff that occurred when I became a first-time parent. With two to corral, well, we'll see...but in any event enjoy the YouTube links I provided. Barry was a legend, and his death leaves me even more reflective as I contemplate my new arrival and all he brings.

Popdose: Remembering Blake Edwards

Days of wine and roses, and glow in the dark condoms, with the director of Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Pink Panther, and Victor Victoria.

Popdose: Remembering Dino De Laurentiis

"No one cry when Jaws die. But when the monkey die, people gonna cry." Rewinding the hits and misses of the legendary producer.

RIP Jill Clayburgh

A consideration of a personal favorite on Popdose.

RIP Tony Curtis

I can only hope that the passing of a genuine star will halt the distressing series of deaths this week. That stardom, and all the notoriety that entailed, tended to eclipse the career, but if we lop off the peripheral final decades (save for scene-stealing parts in 1976's The Last Tycoon, besting an array of old and new Hollywood talent, and Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance in 1985) we find a strong and varied core of work: comedies (Some Like It Hot), hard-hitting dramas (The Defiant Ones, his Oscar nominee), fun popcorn pictures (The Vikings, which my movie group adored when I showed it a few years back), epics (Spartacus), true crime films (The Boston Strangler)...and those are just one of each. A word, too, for his standout performance in the Ira Hayes biopic The Outsider (1960). And no one forgets the relentless Sidney Falco, in Sweet Smell of Success. "Match me, Sidney"...at his best Curtis was matchless.

RIP Arthur Penn

Penn directed four of my favorite films: The Miracle Worker (1962), adapting his Tony-winning direction of the play so sensitively it may be the best stage-to-screen translation ever, the groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the great American story of Little Big Man (1970), and a touchstone film of its decade, Night Moves (1975). Two others, The Chase (1966) and Alice's Restaurant (1969), are as compelling as they are confounding. Cases have been made for other films I find far more problematic, like Mickey One (1965) and The Missouri Breaks (1976). He should have received an honorary Oscar. Oh, and I laughed all the way through the Broadway show Fortune's Fool (2002), an unlikely adaptation of Turgenev adaptation, with its crackerjack, Tony- and Drama Desk-winning performances by Alan Bates and Frank Langella. A keen loss for stage, screen, and television.

RIP Gloria Stuart

I saluted her 100th birthday on July 4. The inevitable followup posting has come quicker than I would have liked, but the star of The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man in the 30s and Titanic in 1997 lived what was by all accounts (including her own 1999 memoir) a full and contented life, and I salute her once more on her passing. Fun fact: She was so spry at age 86 it took an hour-and-a-half per day to transform her into her 101-year-old Titanic self (pictured).

RIP Kevin McCarthy

One of those days, sadly...the actor would have had a perfectly respectable career, including an Oscar nomination (for the 1951 film of Death of a Salesman; he appeared onstage in its original London production), Broadway credits from the 30s to the 80s, lots of TV, and movies that included The Misfits, The Best Man, and A Big Hand for the Little Lady. But starring in Don Siegel's 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers gave him iconic status--he's ideally cast as a workaday exemplar of the human race--and filmmakers who grew up on it gave him a continual lease on creative life, notably Joe Dante, who featured him in Piranha, The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie, where he was funny and disturbing in equal measure, and Innerspace, among others. (He was also in the 1978 Body Snatchers remake, and his presence in the two since might have helped.) McCarthy, who died at age 96, worked right up until the end.

RIP Claude Chabrol

Marketed as "the French Hitchcock," his films must have disappointed anyone looking for action, thrills, setpieces. But the best were supremely intelligent, a mixture of classical elegance and surprising bluntness, dead-centered on the hypocrises of the bourgeois. My film group watched Le Boucher (1969) in 2006, and were held by it (so was Hitchcock, who wished he had made it, but perhaps not in the same way). I've written about Chabrol before; adhering to a Woody Allen-like film-a-year schedule for decades, often working with family members, he always gave you something to write about, unlike his contemporaries in the French New Wave, as they branched into non-commercial filmmaking or fell away.

But for all I've seen I don't feel I've seen enough, and I can't quite come to grips with it. You can do a "Chabrol/Isabelle Huppert" retrospective, which is a fantastic idea, spotlighting his excellent collaborations with the actress...but you can also do a double feature of his two late 80s duds with the unlikely Andrew McCarthy, not that anyone would show up to see how Chabrol and the international market never quite came to terms. Better too much than too little, however, and there is a place in my dark heart for La Ceremonie, Violette, This Man Must Die, Les Biches, and The Cousins. A final film, and his first with Gerard Depardieu, Bellamy, awaits.

RIP Patricia Neal

For my masters in journalism, which seemed so useful back in 1988, we had to come up with a saleable magazine concept. We found one, alas an unglamorous concept, caregiving. The good news was that our cover subject was the great actress and fellow Northwestern alum Patricia Neal, who with her then-husband Roald Dahl by her side battled back from debilitating strokes in the mid-60s, regaining her life and career. I didn't interview her, but the word was that she was as kind and generous as she was always said to be.

Also, in her professional life, a good judge of scripts--so flinty yet so touching in her Oscar winner, 1963's Hud. Caught up in the craziness of The Fountainhead (1949) with her lover, Gary Cooper, as Hollywood beckoned following a Tony award for Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest. Anchoring The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) with her good common sense. Managing Andy Griffith to shallow stardom in A Face in the Crowd (1957). Stylish and controlling in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). Wistful and unfulfilled in The Subject Was Roses, for which she received a second Oscar nomination as she returned to the screen in 1968.

Others: The fine, Burma-set play adaptation The Hasty Heart (1949), with the late Richard Todd and Ronald Reagan, Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way (1965), a good match for John Wayne; the Dahl-written The Night Digger (1971), no doubt feeling youthful opposite Fred Astaire and John Houseman in 1981's Ghost Story, Cookie in Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune (1999). Glenda Jackson played her in the good 1981 TV movie The Patricia Neal Story, opposite Dirk Bogarde as Dahl, filmed not long before their 30-year marriage dissolved.

I always loved her (that voice!). In that I was hardly alone. A talent and an inspiration.

RIP Ronald Neame

Such a rich 20th century life in the movies, which he was born into and never left. He was there as Alfred Hitchcock and the British film industry entered the sound era, shot, did effects work for, and co-wrote some of David Lean's finest films, for which he received three Oscar nominations, then struck out on his own for a varied directing career. He made the best of the disaster films, 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, then unmade the genre with the disastrous Meteor seven years later. On a more human scale he directed Maggie Smith toward an Oscar in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, helmed the sprightly capers Gambit (1966) and Hopscotch (1980), made two of Alec Guinness' more notable credits, The Horse's Mouth (1958) and Tunes of Gloryy (1960), and gave Judy Garland a best as could be hoped for swan song in 1963's I Could Go on Singing. I have The Chalk Garden (1964) waiting to watch. Now's the time.

RIP William A. Fraker

Six Oscar nominations for the veteran cinematographer...but not for Bullitt? Rosemary's Baby? Did they somehow cancel each other out in 1968? That's Hollywood, which was also disinclined to acknowledge his staggering work on John Boorman's maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic. But he did get two nominations (one for visual effects) for Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979), a movie of dense, smoky textures, notoriously hard to replicate on DVD (the one that's out doesn't even try) but absolutely stunning at the theater so long ago. And he directed one of the great autumnal Westerns, 1970's Monte Walsh, with Lee Marvin and Jack Palance. Played "The Cellist" and photographed the Seventies cult object Dusty and Sweets McGee. He was also a friend and mentor to many, which more than makes up for Oscar's whims.

RIP Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper was a mess. Fights with directors, drugs, booze, insane movies, a stormy personal life that rattled his last days. He was so crazy for a time the country of Australia, historically tolerant of outlaws, more-or-less ejected him for life as the turbulent shoot of 1976's Mad Dog Morgan ended. He was an easy rider who became a conservative convert and appeared with Gary Coleman in the rightie comedy An American Carol.

But he was a glorious, transcendent mess, who lived one of the great soul-seeking lives of the late 20th century, a life that encompassed modern art and photography and much else. He was a cultural omnivore, and he gave back. Not always smartly, and there was collateral damage as that life, and his work, collided with our institutions and mores. A true iconoclast, brilliant and terrible.

This video essay, and this recollection, say more eloquently what I mean to say. Maybe when you have a hard time articulating what you mean to say about someone, that person was indeed a true original, and best to leave it at that. The strange and beautiful menace of the still, from the mold-breaking Blue Velvet (1986), more than stands in for words.

RIP Frank Frazetta

Arbogast on Film said it best. And Ian McDowell at the Mobius forum posted this terrific gallery of images. I still have some of those Creepy and Eerie magazines in my parents' basement; I bought the reprints based on those fantastic covers.

RIP Lena Horne

Some time ago I stopped memorializing artists with whom I had no "personal" connection. Horne is something of an exception to this rule, in that I only recently became acquainted with her work. Growing up she only appeared in one film that I saw (on cable), 1978's The Wiz, where she gives an earnest, gauzy performance as Glinda (it would be her last screen role), appeared on TV, and had a Broadway hit that was before my time as a theatergoer. Not much to go on. Now I realize what a hard climb it was for her, and I can fathom why aspects of her multifaceted career seem unrealized as she went from striver to living legend without sinking in as deeply as other performers. I'm better acquainted with her music, I appreciated her steadying personality in an uneven but interesting Richard Widmark Western, Death of a Gunfighter (1969), and I've seen her two best films, from 1943, Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky. She's incredibly sexy and delightful in each, a major presence...and such was America in the pre-civil rights era that her gifts could not easily be capitalized on. She opened doors that let others through, a huge accomplishment not easily achieved. But I'm not sure we got to know her as well as we might have.

RIP Lynn Redgrave

So sad this morning to read of the passing of the actress, after a valiant fight against breast cancer and atop recent family misfortunes. Despite her fair share of accolades she never quite had the same career as her sister Vanessa, but she was always more likable--and I have to say a better stage actress, much less inclined to dominate or impress. (I enjoyed her Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest at BAM, was delighted by her Drama Desk-winning turn in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, and last saw her Off Broadway in a religious drama, Grace.) That unpretentious quality sustained her through everything from Shakespeare to The Happy Hooker, and she left an indelible mark in Swinging Sixties culture in Georgy Girl. Her other Oscar nomination came for the marvelous Gods and Monsters, as the thickly accented housekeeper (pictured), a figure that bridges the fact and fiction of James Whale's life. (She spent some time bridging the fact and fiction of her family's life, too, enacting episodes from its storied history onstage in several plays, including the Tony-nominated Shakespeare Round My Father.)

'''Vanessa was the one expected to be the great actress,'' Lynn Redgrave told The Associated Press in 1999. ''It was always, 'Corin's the brain, Vanessa the shining star, oh, and then there's Lynn.''' Nice to have known you, Lynn.

RIP Dorothy Provine

The AP, the Times, etc. will file the nuts and bolts but this is a far more satisfying obituary of the charming actress, who pretty much left show business in her 30s. How nice of the community theater players to stop by and cheer her up in her final days. She was so nice (and so sexy) in movies like Good Neighbor Sam and Who's Minding the Mint? you want to know that she passed with a smile on her face. She could be rowdy, though the pose is uncharacteristic of her film work; I'd like to see her pre-Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie Parker, and she's fun vamping it up in a Johnny Mercer/Henry Mancini musical number in The Great Race. But I'm surely not alone in remembering her most vividly as the oasis of calm among the comedians in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, the one who discovers the "Big W," then watches as its riches slip away (and is spared the final slapstick indignities). "It was a nice dream, if only for a couple of minutes," she says wistfully to Spencer Tracy. Lovely moment, lovely performer.

RIP Dede Allen

See a little of what made the film editor great. It's hard to believe she went without an Oscar despite her innovations, but the work, as always endures. Would there have been a golden era in 60s and 70s without her leading the way in the editing room, establishing its particular rhythms and idiosyncrasies? Her influence over her time is the mark of enduring greatness. Coincidentally, I just finished reading Mark Harris' superb "Pictures at a Revolution," which quite thrillingly tells the whole story of how Bonnie and Clyde, her signature credit, came to be. And there was so much else. What a resume--Odds Against Tomorrow. The Hustler (the first time an editor received sole credit for a film). Little Big Man. Serpico. Dog Day Afternoon (Oscar nomination). Night Moves. Slap Shot. Reds (Oscar nomination). The Breakfast Club. Wonder Boys (Oscar nomination). There are other key credits than those; indeed, more facets to her trail-blazing career than that particular skill. But her work on some of my favorite, generation-defining movies is what generations to come will remember.

RIP VCR Plus +

I remember how excited I was when these codes started appearing in the paper and TV Guide about 20 years ago. VCR Plus + was the old media version of the DVR, just pop in the code and be done with all that programming bother. Now TV Guide is dead, newspapers are dying, and the VCR is a relic; I still have a small box of tapes, and a player, neither of which have seen any use in years. The P.C. Richard & Son near me is still selling VCRs, for $40, which seems an unrealistic price point at this late date. But if you're going to buy one now and live off the grid with it I doubt you'll need sissy stuff like programming codes.