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roger1's Replies
Donen lived for another 30+ years after these twin debacles (most of that happily cohabiting with my ideal woman, Elaine May).
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Interestingly, before being with Elaine May, Donen was MARRIED to the much younger and extremely hot Yvette Mimieux (who advertised a TV movie called "Hit Lady" in a bikini around the time of the marriage.) I suppose with Yvette as an ex-wife, Donen saw nothing wrong with Blame it on Rio.
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It's sad in a way that he didn't direct again except a little TV, but I'm pretty sure that most of Donen's biggest fans were glad that there were no more S3s or BIORs.
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Well, that's a corollary to "QT's rule," isn't it? If/when they STOP making movies...no embarrassment. And unlike Hitchcock...who literally worked on a movie until less than a year from his death....both Donen and Billy Wilder lived on and enjoyed life for DECADES after making their final film. I guess each had made enough money to retire comfortably -- and with the lovely Elaine May for Donen?(I did not KNOW that - he must have had his charms.)
BTW, three years after the big success of Charade, Donen made ANOTHER "pseudo Hitchocck' movie" -- Arabesque. Like Charade , it had a great Henry Mancini thriller score(with a BETTER credit overture) and it also had two big stars -- Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren -- ALMOST in the Grant/Hepburn tradition. But the supporting cast wasn't as good as in Charade and the 1966 release "went psychedlic" and is hence more dated today. Still' Arabesque is a lot better than Lucky Lady, Saturn 3, or Blame it On Rio.
There's some undeniably luscious teen nudity
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Yes, pretty much exclusively (less some Rio beach extras) by the woman -- Michelle was her name -- cast to play the teen seductress.
Folks may forget that playing CAINE's daughter was -- young Demi Moore. But she wore her long tresses strategically over her breasts. It was the OTHER gal who went all the way.
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but it all leaves you feeling pretty icky (and it makes the genuine teen sex-comedies that were around at the time seem pretty innocent by comparison).
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That's the real issue, isn't it? This was a remake of a French film, I think and arguments could be made "When the French do it, its sophisticated and adult..when an American studio tries to do it with mainstream stars...its dirty."
---And if you're there for Donen and Caine you can't help thinking something along the lines of 'What are we doing here?' and 'Thank god I didn't pay real money for this'.
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I watched it- on cable -- indeed because of Caine and Donen -- two favorites over the years. And I certainly thought it was better than Saturn 3. And personally, I just LOVE bossa nova music(hello, Sergio Mendes) and I found the movie quite colorful to look at, with its beautiful beach locations. And hell, Valerie Harper ("Rhoda") showed up. She wouldn't be in a dirty movie, would she?
But damn, it sure instilled then, and instills NOW, some serious unwanted guilt over the nature of the plot. I mean, as the kids say, that young woman was HOT. (Plus, if memory serves, Caine and the 'adult teen" only did it ONCE...he kept fending her off of the rest of the movie.)
Was this Donen's last film? If so, at least he went out with something more adult and sophisticated than Lucky Lady or Saturn 3.
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swanstep wrote:
While BIOR was more enjoyable and certainly more technically competent than Saturn 3
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Yes to both...including that "more enjoyable" part. That's what makes BIOR kind of dangerous. Caine IS a great farceur and so was the comic actor playing his more macho friend , Joe Bologna(who was vetoed as Spielberg's first choice for the Roy Scheider role in Jaws.)
The "joke" of Caine having a sexual affair with his best friend's Bologna's daughter and trying to hide it WAS funny, 'cmon...it was. But of course, the age thing created issues.
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it was evidently trying to be a kind of late-addition to the wave of middle-aged guy sex-comedies that began with '10' only with a downshift of lust to high-school age/daughters.
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Note in passing: just as George Segal walked off Lucky Lady forcing Gene Hackman into his part, Segal ALSO walked off 10,..forcing Dudley Moore into his part and making Moore a star for awhile.
Those "walk offs," plus a drug problem, ended Segal's movie star career. as a leading man.
Meanwhile, yeah, I'm guess it got worse and worse to "downshift"(Hah) from the woman in these middle-aged crazy pictrures from being 20-something into a teenager but..ah...that young woman playing the object of Caine's affection? I mean...va va VOOM. This comedy drove a very hard bargain in its fantasy(for men at least): If Marilyn Monroe was a teenager( and a late-age teenager at that) well...and CAME ON to you like that? Well? I guess I'm saying that the actress was carefully chosen for her "adult sexuality" and the excellent Caine was chosen to "reduce the dirty old man factor" with his Nervous Nellie comedy performance and trademark charm(that Cockney accent allowed Caine to get away with a lot.).
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s a result, I couldn't bring myself to pay money for Donen's final film a few years later, 'Blame it on Rio', notwithstanding that it had one of my fave actors, Michael Caine as lead. I did catch BIOR on vhs a few years later, however, and, my God it was awful.
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Yeah. Michael Caine is one of my favorite actors. He's literally been around in movies for most of my life. I saw Zulu(1964) ON RELEASE. At the drive-in with family. And then we all went to The Ipcress File the next year. I was forbidden to see "Alfie" but my "Caine love" was launched and there he's been across the 60's, the 70's(where he made his great R-rated movie Get Carter), the 80's(where he hung in and won his first Oscasr) the 90s(where he won his second Oscar) the 21st Century (where he got famous as Alfred in Batman movies AND worked with Batman director Chris Nolan all the time in other pictures, as a "lucky charm.".)
Caine is 90 now, yes? He finished one more movie but when he had to back out of Nolan's "Oppenheimer"("Enough's enough," Caine joked to the press) I figured retirement was imminent.
What a career. But it certainly has some bad movies in it. As Caine said at some event "I made all those bad movies for high pay so I could make good movies for free." Jaws 4: The Revenge is the worst I've seen, but I understand Caine also played the bad guy in a Steven Segal movie. That must have been bad.
Which brings us to Blame it On Rio...
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Charade had a great Peter Stone script and some great stars-to-be supporting Grant and Hepburn: Walter Matthau(soon to be a star), James Coburn(soon to be a slightly lesser star than Matthau), George Kennedy(soon to win an Oscar and do Airport movies.) Actually, Matthau, Coburn AND Kennedy all won Supporting Actor Oscars. (And I've moved Mad Mad World -- my favorite movie of all time as a kid -- to the Number One of 1963 slot. An era long gone. Jonathan Winters!)
Anyway, came the 70's, fond memories of Donen's past work indeed started to be betrayed. For a 1975 period action movie called "Lucky Lady," Donen had Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds as "buddy stars" with briefly -hot(at the box office) Liza Minnelli in the female lead. It was a jinxed production. George Segal walked off the picture so Hackman had to be paid BIG bucks to come in quickly. The ending was re-shot(Hackman and Reynolds got killed in the original script and that WAS filmed, but they re-shot and brought the boys back to life..) Spielberg, coming off "Jaws" warned Donen not to make "Lucky Lady" at sea, but...no such luck. And frankly, Ann-Margret should have played Minnelli's sexpot role.
But "Lucky Lady" was Singin in the Rain compared to Saturn 3. Just as I have great memories of the movies I LOVED on first viewing, I have harsh memories of a movie like Saturn 3 that I hated on first sight. I recall that aging macho man Kirk Douglas looked too emaciated and saggy(including a naked butt scene) to be bedding sexy co-star Farrah Fawcett(Majors?) I remember an incoherent SciFi plot and terrible production values(I DON"T remember Harvey Keitel in it, but I guess he was.)
And I remember this specific disappointment: The title "Saturn 3" was meant by the studio to suggest a sequel of sorts to the surprise hit "Capricorn One" of 1978. I LOVED Capricorn One for what it was: a non-violent throwback thriller in the North by Northwest tradition, a lot of exciting fun. Saturn 3 brought NONE of that back.
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My biggest experience of this kind (and from the same period that seems to have burned QT) was with Stanley Donen. As a budding film buff I worshipped Donen but then I got to see my first hot-off-the presses Donen film: Saturn 3 (an ugly, plodding, embarassment). I vividly remember the feeling of a kind of hour-long, full-body-cringe in the cinema. You don't forget that sort of experience.
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Stanley Donen is a great example of QT's theory WORKING. I suppose it is a hit or miss theory -- and having just seen some passionate verbiage AGAINST QT's theory, I won't wallow in the "I told you so" rightness of Donen's career PROVING QT's theory. Perhaps the issue is: "sometimes directors can keep going strong to all ages -- sometimes they cannot."
I think the hidden reason taht modernly directors CAN go on longer -- other than my health rationale -- is they are surrounded by professionals who can make movies LOOK and SOUND great, by CGI that can do anything...its as if a modern movie is a perfectly made contraption which can make ANY director, ANY age, look at least competant.
Stanley Donen was famous for musicals -- co-directed on key occasions. Singin' in the Rain is the big one (with Gene Kelly as co-director and star.) Damn Yankees -- my favorite of 1958 --(with George Abbott) is another. (I'll concede Rain as the much more important classic than Damn Yankees but my Number One for 1952 is High Noon; Singin' in the Rain's probably Number Two that year.)
My favorite Donen movie -- which I have downgraded from Number One to Number Two for 1963 -- is Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in "the greatest Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made" -- Charade. (To which Donen angrily replied in the press: "Who says only Alfred Hitchcock can make a mystery-suspense picture?" )In the same interview, Donen noted that he liked North by Northwest ONLY as far as the auction scene. He felt all the Rushmore business went on too long. Nah.
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I think, yet again, that QT seems to have "locked in" on a handful of American directors who sort of ran out of gas in the 60s and 70s
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I suspect that that's what happened too, and, to be fair to QT, if you're a big fan of some director (or other artist) to see them suddenly producing genuinely inferior work is shocking, galling, gutting, traumatizing, a betrayal, pick your epithet.
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Take Howard Hawks. His Rio Bravo of 1959 is truly classic in a great way: a laid back, very warm, very upbeat "hang out movie" that takes time to take its Western plot seriously, but plays perhaps better as a buddy comedy(with a buddy woman, Angie Dickinson.) 8 years later, Hawks pretty famously reworked El Dorado into Rio Bravo remake. John Wayne with Robert Mitchum instead of Dean Martin. James Caan instead of Ricky Nelson. Arthur Hunnicutt instead of Walter Brennan -- and it worked AGAIN (but a little more soundstagey, a little less "big.")
Then 3 years later -- Rio Lobo. Wayne again, but the studio wouldn't pay for another star this time. Weirdly, they cast a Mexican actor as a "former Rebel" after the Civil War, and it just didn't work, and the movie seemed(to me at the time I saw it in 1970) terribly basic and derivative. Third time WASN'T a charm. That was Hawks final movie. 1970. Two years before Hitchcock did Frenzy -- with Family Plot 6 years away, too.
One thing I read: Working on Rio Lobo, the aged Hawks lost track of the days (as we all do sometimes) and thought it was Saturday so went to hang out by his pool. But it was really a WEEK DAY ,and the entire cast and crew of Rio Lobo was waiting for Hawks to show.
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Dern's in his 80's now and highly respected. He was great -- and Oscar nominatd -- in Alexander Payne's "Nebraska." And QT used him to fine effect in "The Hateful Eight" and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." I hope he's got one a few more performances left.
And there is this irony: Dern's daughter with Diane Ladd -- LAURA Dern -- would seem to be the most famous and highly paid of the Dern/Ladd acting family now. Jurassic Park helped put her on the map. And she has won an Oscar. Just like Jamie Lee Curtis has. It is the "Hitchcock star babies" who have succeeded after their parents paved the way.
BTW, I think it sounds like a good monologue gag for Dern to have him effectively chastise the audience for not going to see his good, serious films where he's often a good guy. It's funny to think of films as well-thought-of now as Silent Running and Kings of Marvin Garden not being seen by many people on release.
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Yes. I think whoever wrote that for Bruce Dern "got him." He worked hard to position himself for some solid dramas(The King of Marvin Gardens) and he played genuinely nice guys in Smile and MIddle Aged Crazy(where he was given Ann-Margret as his wife! That's coming up in the world.) He's argumentative with girlfriend Barbara Harris in Family Plot, but in key scenes he shows love for her and he rescues her in the end.
But the REST of the time: bad guys. psychos. Certain sneering personality traits that fought against his stardom chances.
I recall reading of estalbished star Kirk Douglas directing Dern in a Western called "Posse." Kirk had the lead AND directed. Dern emerged from a building to walk out onto a street and Douglas yelled "Cut!" and then said, "Bruce, you're a leading man now. You need to walk out that door onto the street with your head held high! Project your authority!"
Who knows? Sounds like effective direction to make someone a star. Douglas had shot down Bruce Dern in a walk on(for Dern) in The War Wagon (with John Wayne) back in 1967. Dern's star had risen on a long hard climb.
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Oh, yeah, wait:
Hitchcock wasn't all that famous for encouraging other people to direct, like, say Spielberg or Scorsese later on.
But he should have been.
That TV show was the training ground(along with other shows) for William Friedkin(The Exorcist), Robert Altman(MASH, Nashville), Sydney Pollack, and James Bridges (The Paper Chase, Urban Cowboy.) Plus for any number of young working directors who stuck to TV.
And Hitchcock seems to have had to meet and interview and oversee them all. He chided Friedkin for not wearing a necktie. Sounds like Inspector Oxford.
And years later when he was super successful, Friedkin saw Hitchcock at a black tie event -- Freidkin was wearing one -- snapped the tie and said "how do you like the tie?"
One last thing on Hitchcock directing his hour episode "I Saw the Whole Thing." One scene is set at "the malt shop" and has some overaged teens(or "young people?") all dancing the Twist to the usual "fake canned rock and roll" of series TV.
Its kind of "Hitchcock does Dick Clark" and there's nothing "Hitchcock" about the camera angles or moves. One pictures Hitchcock sighing and saying "Oh, alright, I'm going to try to get this rock and roll scene filmed" and then telling the young actors to start dancing and then just pointing the camera and DOING it.
He had saved his "big Hitchcock techniques" for things like the Vertigo dizzying stairwell effect, or the crop duster chasing Cary Grant, or the camera following Anthony Perkins up the stairs. This "little TV hour" would get none of his creative focus in a scene about teens dancing the twist.
But its a very, very strange "Hitchcock scene" nonetheless. One expects the Fonz to walk into it...
I watched the final episode of the Hitchcock Hour -- "Off Season," with John Gavin co-starring one more time with "the original Bates Motel" -- dressed up and made fancier than it had been in 1960. This final episode of the Hitchcock Hour ran in the spring of 1965, and ended a ten-year run(mainly of half hours) of an incredibly successfully series that spawned well over 300 episodes. I"ve always found it interesting that the next movie after the TV show went
"Off Season" was directed by William Friedkin ...en route to his 70s triumphs(The French Connection, The Exorcist), Friedkin had to start SOMEWHERE. And John Gavin had to approve him to direct. They had lunch, Gavin approved him -- and Friedkin and Gavin remained lifelong friends. Gavin died first.
"Off Season" is certainly an interesting way for Hitchocck's series to bow out -- with a star of Psycho and the star motel FROM Psycho(the even more famous Psycho house appeared in the truly scary "An Unlocked Window" in that same final hour season.
Though set in a wooded mountain community, Off Season conjures up Psycho not only in the presence of Gavin and the motel, but in the Universal backlot "small town sets" that rather remind one of Fairvale. And here's the REAL twist: in this one, the psycho is..John Gavin. He's a trigger happy cop who has been fired from a big city job for shooting a wino and who runs on a short fuse in his new "backwater job." As was often allowed on the Hitchcock Hour, a cheating spouse is part of the story, too. And Friedkin shows off a few "Hitchcock tricks' of his own.
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But OTHERS in "I Saw the Whole Thing" were interesting. Its about Forsythe defending himself in court against hit and run charges(the victim was a motorcycle cop and he died.) The opening is a "mini-Hitchcock tour de force" as each of five witnesses at a city intersection see the off-screen crash and Hitch "zooms and freeze frames" on each witness turning to look.
In the courtroom, we meet the witnesses: one of them is Phlilp Ober -- the UN victim in NXNW. One of them is mousy milquetoast John Fiedler(the voice of Piglet). One is a drunk. And two are women of note:
Claire Griswold -- quite pretty, on "personal contract" to Hitchcock -- but she would quit show biz to marry director Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don't They and The Way We Were, etc) all the way to his death.
Evans Evans -- THERE's a name. Not quite as pretty as Claire Griswold and in this tale more of a Southern accented comedy relief character. But SHE also married a famous director _- John Frankenheimer(The Manchurian Candidate, Black Sunday). I don't think that marriage lasted, I'm not sure.
Speaking of Sydney Pollack, he STARTED as an actor, and he has the lead in a Hitchcock half hour and...well one can see why he switched to directing. He was thin and wiry but not terribly good looking in youth -- it would take some years to age himself into a handsome and interesting middle aged actor in such movies as Tootsie, Husbands and Wives, and A Civil Action.
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Hitch directed a handful of the half hour shows and only one of the hour shows (after Psycho and then The Birds, he was just too big to do it, I guess.)
From the top of my head, I can only think of Vincent Price as a noteable star(and perhaps more B level) -- who had not already done a Hitchcock movie -- PERSONALLY directed by Hitchcock in a TV episode.
Meanwhile, in his half hours directed by himself personally, Hitchcock used some of his movie people including Vera Miles, Joseph Cotten, Barbara Bel Geddes., Claude Rains...
I just flashed on David Wayne, Keenan Wynn, and Tom Ewell as "non-Hitchocck movie actors" he directed on TV. Big enough, I guess.
About that hour show:
Well, Robert Redford was in the first broadcast hour, so we can add HIM (years later, Hitchcock pitched Family Plot to Redford, I think for the Dern role, but maybe for the Devane villain role?)
I mentioned this in another thread but I was very surprised to see ...JAMES MASON in a lead in one of the Hitchcock hours. I thought he was a MOVIE STAR then -- over the title in NXNW, and that very year in Kubrick's Lolita. I guess the Hitchocck Hour was simply a prestige place to work. (And Angie Dickenson was in this episode.)
As for the one Hitchcock Hour directed by Hitchcock himself, it was from the first season: "I Saw the Whole Thing." The lead actor was reliable John Forsythe -- in some ways "the perfect Hitchcock actor" -- suave, handsome with a great smooth VOICE(remember my comments on The Voices of Hitchcock -- Forsythe had one of the best), but never really a star. Forsythe got the lead in The Trouble With Harry after William Holden turned it down, and though he was the only recognizable American "name" in Topaz...he wasn't much of a name at that time(1969.) Sadly, John Forsythe is often trotted out in the "anti-Hitchcock criticisms" of the kind of low-wattage journeyman actor that Hitchcock used too often.
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This is on topic about Anthony Perkins and Psycho, but a little bit OFF topic about Bruce Dern, Karen Black and Family Plot. Hitchcock players all and -- I believe -- the only three Hitchcock performers to host Saturday Night Live.
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Whether his small part in Psycho (cop at the end) really makes him a Hitchcock player is perhaps doubtful, but Ted Knight (hot off the MTM show) hosted SNL.
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I say...that COUNTS. And Psycho, yet.
I suppose one thing I am trying to express here is how -- even as he got a lot of press in his last years of life and even as the 80s would see "the five Lost Hitchcocks" come back -- Hittchcock's world actually rather FADED AWAY pretty fast came the 70's in a contemporary way. His MOVIE stars were largely "old people" -- Grant, Bergman, Stewart -- who weren't going to be hosting SNL , Grace Kelly was long decamped to Monaco (and shockingly, would die only two years after Hitchcock, in 1982 thanks to a car crash). A new generation of directors and stars were taking over FAST.
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Of course, if you include people who were on AH's tv shows then a whole bunch have hosted: Ed Asner, Angie Dickinson, James Coburn, Burt Reynolds, William Shatner, Harry Dean Stanton, and probably a few more I've missed.
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One I would add was Walter Matthau, who hosted SNL in 1978 as he was enjoying the final throes of his stardom(The Bad News Bears and House Calls were recent hits.) Matthau did at least two of the Hitchcock half hours.
Which crosses things over:
In the 60s, Hitchcock worked with a FEW new young stars in his movies: Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, Sean Connery.
But a lot MORE soon-to-be stars of the 60s(AND 70s) appeared not in HItchcock's MOVIES, but on his TV show:
I count Steve McQueen(in two half hours), Burt Reynolds, Walter Matthau, Charles Bronson, James Coburn.
And yet: Hitchcock PERSONALLY didn't direct any of those actors in their episodes.
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'"I thought the first half hour was the most boring movie I've ever seen and the rest of it was the sickest movie I've ever seen. And you can't see it until you are 18."
😂
'PS. I finally got to see Psycho way before I was 18.'
Glad about that!
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Ha. Thank you, thank you.
I like to tell that anecdote because well, here was a parent TRYING to hold the line against that "sick" movie and, of course, only whetting my appetite TO see the film.
But there's stronger irony. The Los Angeles showings in TV season 1967-1968 were only a few months apart -- first in November of 1967 and then in February of 1968. November and February were/are "sweeps months" when the biggest events were to be broadcast -- ratings were especially scrutinized in those months.
Well, around the time of the February 1968 LA screening -- I also saw Bonnie and Clyde at the movie theater! THAT one had a very bloodly and violent reputation too but -- thanks to "negotiation" - I got to go see it with my father(the designated "adult movie" person) and I remember bracing for the blood but really just being enthralled by the gunbattles -- with one exception: when the old man bank clerk jumped on the getaway car and got shot through the face(an Arbogast moment, yes?) THAT shocked me... but the rest of the movie...I took fine. So somehow my mother felt Bonnie and Clyde was fine, but Psycho was not.
And less than two years later, I "negotiated" to see The Wild Bunch with my father and...again..FAR more violent than Psycho, but I was allowed to see it. And I was REALLY enthralled by that one: final gunbattle was probably the most exciting thing I'd ever seen to that date, even as it seemed adult and disturbing.
Meanwhile, this was "the olden days" when you couldn't just rent a movie, soI had to wait a couple of years for Psycho to get a TV broadcast again -- but I watched it, and it was not terribly scary at all. And I was much younger than 18. Psycho did ALL of its scaring of me BEFORE I saw it!
'Anyway, here's Hitchcock with "an eye out" to cast Perkins and along comes the 1959 novel Psycho -- with a "fat and forty and bespetacled Norman Bates" and -- Hitch made the switch. "Tony, you ARE this movie" Hitchcock told Perkins.'
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Genius move, no doubt about it.
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I always wince a bit when I type the phrase "fat and forty" -- but the alliteration DOES serve the less-than-romantic characterization of Norman in the book. Screenwriter Joe Stefano many times told the tale of how disappointed he was in reading Psycho the novel at trying to dramatize such an unappetizing central figure -- UNTIL Hitchcock told him "how about we convert the character into Anthony Perkins?" "Now you're talking!" said Stefano to Hitch.
Convincing Perkins to take the role was hard work on Hitchocck's plart, but Hitch was at his peak of power in Hollywood(the hit TV show, North by Northwest as a big hit movie) and Perkins just couldn't say no. Evidently Perkins had turned down the Jack Lemmon role in Some Like It Hot over the cross-dressing...and he wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.
12 years later, Hitchcock did simliar things in making the good but not quite classic Frenzy, and this time one of the results was different.
First of all, he converted the loser-ish anti-hero of the novel -- a middle-aged WWII veteran -- into a much younger man(British unknown Jon Finch was cast in the part) , which was sort of like turning fat-and-forty Norman into Tony Perkins(except Finch was -- kinda/sorta -- the hero here.)
In casting the Cockney villain, Hitchocck wanted to again "go against type" by casting the heroic Michael Caine as the sexual psycho in Frenzy. Unlike as witih Psycho, Hitchcock was NOT at the peak of his powers when he pitched Frenzy(his last three films had been failures) and Caine said no.
Still.one can see Hitchcock continually making changes to the source material and attempting certain casting coups well up to the end of his career.
And then, just in time for the 50s/60s cusp , Capra made his final two films: A Hole in the Head in 1959(with big star Sinatra and the Oscar winning song High Hopes) and Pocketful of Miracles(a remake of his own 30s movie, "Lady for a Day.") This final film -- in Technicolor and Panavision, was a wonderful throwback to a sweeter time at the movies -- Capra's contribution to keeplng the 50s/60s cusp a bit nostalgic even as Hitchcock and Wilder and Preminger were getting more adult.
Speaking of Preminger, HIS cusp movies were Anatomy of a Murder(James Stewart anchoring a coutroom drama of rape and murder with graphic testimony), Exodus(Paul Newman anchoring a "birth of Israel" epic; Advise and Consent(a movie about DC politics that takes it wonderfully seriously -- an antidote to today's circus) and The Cardinal(about the Catholic church.)
What a time at the movies.
Weirdly, and even though his films got Oscar noms and wins(Maxmilian Schell for Oscar's 1961 Best Actor for Nuremberg), these Kramer movies seemed to get lightly mocked and dismissed as "too didactic and square" and not good enough for their topics. I dunno, I moved Judgment at Nuremberg to my personal favorite of 1961 (over The Guns of Navarone, West Side Story, and childhood fave 101 Dalamations) so I know I like what Kramer could do with his all-star casts and Big Topics.
None of those movies made much money at the box office, BTW. Stars or no stars people evidently didn't want to go to movies about the nucelar End of the World, or attacking religion, or reminding us of the horrors of the Holocaust.
So Kramer turned to his famous comedy epic "Its a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World" which he originally wanted to title "Something a Little Less Serious." Ha. But even THAT "light chase comedy" had at its core a rather sad take on how greed can turn "regular folks" into animals in competition.
A nice digression: we can supermipose OVER Hitchcock's cusp movies(Vertigo, NXNW, Psycho....The Birds at the end) Wilder's cusp movies(Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, One Two Three, Irma La Douce)...KRAMER's cusp movies(The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg...Mad Mad World.)
And Tony Perkins landed in two of them. Good for his legacy.
I'll add one more I just recalled the other day: Frank Capra.
Capra's biggest years of success were in the 30s(It Happened One Night, You Can't Take it With You, Mr. Smith, Lost Horizon) and the forties(Meet John Doe, Arsenic and Old Lace, Its a Wonderful Life).
But he took almost the ENTIRE fifties off, less a couple of movies in the early fifties. He made some short educational science films!
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'They are waiting for news from ashore in California that someone has been found alive. But a morse code tells them that what was found "alive" in California was a Coke bottle tapping on the morse code machine(what are those things called?) endlessly because of being caught on a curtain cord.
The three men SHOULD be devastated -- nobody is alive outside of Australia, after all. But instead, the men chuckle and laugh -- its all a big joke.'
What an ending!
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Yes, I don't think I quite articulated it well enough, but the idea is that this "morse code beeping" has been heard on Australian equipment and submarine commander Peck takes Perkins(an Australian naval officer) and Astaire(a nuclear scientist) and his crew on this long journey to the coast off San Diego, California to "track down who is tapping the Morse code signal." Another actor -- a bit player of sorts -- dons an anti-radioactivity suit and tracks the signal down to that Coke bottle in the curtain cord. This actor then taps out his own message to Peck's submarine and...
...we get that impressive shot of Peck, Perkins, and Astaire slowly breaking into grins and chuckles. Its emotional in a funny but sad way: All hope is now gone and...what to do but laugh.
"On the Beach" is from that 50s/60s cusp period I so favor. It was from producer-director Stanley Kramer, who made several "big message" movies in a row on that cusp: The Defiant Ones(Poitier and Curtis chained together on the run) On the Beach(the nuclear End of the World -- played without any bomb scenes -- just people desperately trying to hang on to life a little longer), Inherit the Wind (in the Psycho year of 1960 -- the Scopes trial dramatized so Kramer's issue was religion versus evolution) and Judgment at Nuremberg(Nazi war crime trials and the Holocaust.)
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