Cartoonist and illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé was born on this day in 1932. In his native France he's best known for illustrating a series of children's books written by RenéGoscinny (best known for the comic strip Astérix) collectively called Le Petit Nicolas (in English Little Nicholas.) Here in the United States Sempé is far better known for the many covers he's done for The New Yorker. Take a look (in some cases, a very close look):
Knowing that Sempé is from France makes me think all the above scenes must take place in France. However, The New Yorker is an American magazine, and there's no reason these scenes can't take place in America. The United States obviously has airports and swimming pools and downtowns with lots of traffic. The United States even has classical musicians, a favorite theme of Sempé's. In fact, there are whole orchestras with such musicians. I live in Cleveland, and I'm told we have a very good orchestra, have had a very good orchestra for quite a while, that it was once led by a man named Szell who in his day was as well-known as Dennis Kucinich. Currently, it's led by Franz Welser-Möst (like most Rust Belt cities, we have a lot of ethnic groups.) Cleveland rocks listens politely and then claps. But getting back to Sempé, whatever their country of origin, most of his characters seem engulfed by their surroundings. They don't seem to know or care that they're engulfed. On the other hand, we know they're engulfed, because we're afforded a bird's-eye view, and we have to care enough to squint to find them. But the squinting's usually worth it. Maybe that's what makes Sempé's work so universal, and particularly appealing for Americans. If there's one thing we have in this country, it's engulfing surroundings.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some squinting to do.
I'd rather leave directing to the directors. I'd find it distracting to be directed by a Paul Newman. Costarring with him is fine. But I like my directors to be father figures. If Paul directed me, I'd be committing mental incest.
Kicked out of the house by her strict stepfather for appearing in high school plays (and here I bet you thought that kind of thing only happened to teenage boys), young Olivia de Havilland nevertheless saw teaching English as her calling, and was in fact offered a scholarship to do just that. Which didn't mean she couldn't still act for fun at the community theater in her more-or-less hometown of Saratoga, California (the daughter of British expatriates, she had spent her first few years in Japan.) The play was Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream, and Olivia set the whole plot in motion as a mischievous pixie named Puck. Now it just so happened that the highly acclaimed Austrian stage director Max Reinhardt was in California scouring the state for actors to appear in the same play at the Hollywood Bowl. One of Reinhardt's assistants caught Olivia on stage and asked that she be second understudy for not Puck, slated to played by a young Mickey Rooney (it's obviously a role subject to interpretation) but the leading female part of Hermia. Leading female part or not, there was little chance as second understudy that Olivia would find herself actually performing in front of that Hollywood audience. But little chance is not the same as no chance (or else you wouldn't even need a second understudy, would you?), and for whatever reasons the two actresses ahead of her bailed out of the production two weeks before the premiere. Olivia must have proved a very able substitute, for when Warner Brothers asked Reinhardt to directed the movie version, he then asked her if she would appear in it. She at first hesitated--she after all had just got a scholarship--but eventually relented and signed a five-year contract with Warner's.
Though it's highly regarded today, A Midsummer's Night Dream upon its initial release got mixed reviews and tanked at the box office, but nobody blamed de Havilland for that. She was cast as the love interest in a few comedies, then Warner's decided to take a chance on a genre the studio hadn't really been known for up to that point: the costume drama. Since it was a swashbuckler, the studio had hoped to secure the services of British actor Robert Donat, who a year earlier had wielded a sword in The Count of Monte Cristo, a box office hit. But Donat suffered from asthma, and feared another swashbuckler would kill him. Warner's then took another chance. A screentest with an unknown Australian actor the studio had under contract had proven quite favorable, and so Errol Flynn was cast as the indentured physician-turned-buccaneer title character in 1935's Captain Blood, directed by Michael Curtiz. de Havilland is the plantation owner's niece who buys Dr. Blood at an auction, decides at first she doesn't like him, but finds she just can't resist his roguish charm and falls madly in love with him. Captain Blood was a box office hit, in no small part due to the onscreen chemistry between the film's attractive leads. Flynn and de Havilland would go on to make seven more movies together.
Their third collaboration, 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, again directed by Curtiz, wound up being their biggest hit as a duo, and eventually considered a Hollywood classic, one of the greatest adventure films ever made, that even today can hold its own against the latest Avengers offering. de Havilland plays the legendary Maid Marian, referred here as Lady Marian and a member of King Richard the Lionheart's court. She initially spurns the advances of Flynn's Robin (here a slumming aristocrat whose robbing of the rich and giving to the poor is part of a larger agenda having to do with Norman/Saxon factional politics) but finds she just can't resist his roguish charm and falls madly in love with him (as you may have ascertained, in costume dramas it helps to have roguish charm when looking to score with chicks.) They take turns rescuing each other from prison, help restore Richard to his rightful place on the throne, get engaged, and have so much cash on hand at film's end that Robin may have to rob himself if he wants to keep giving to the poor.
Instead of a swashbuckler, Flynn's and de Havilland's fifth movie together was a Western, 1938's Dodge City. Olivia is a young pioneer woman who this time has a very good reason for spurning trailblazer Flynn's advances: he killed her brother. However, it was in self-defense, and, as you might expect, roguish charm works as well in the bar-brawling Old West as it does in those parts of the world where people brandish swords instead of six-shooters, and so the two fall in love. Flynn also becomes the sheriff of Dodge, an odd job to give to somebody with roguish charm, but as James Arness was still in high school when this picture was made, there may have been no other takers. Flynn cleans up this particular part of the West and he and de Havilland move on to Virginia City, which, in the absence of Lorne Greene (still in Canada doing radio), was in complete disarray. de Havilland was beginning to feel like a bit of disarray herself. She enjoyed working with Flynn, but felt she was too good an actress always simply just to stand on the sidelines and look on admiringly while he proved that Roguish Charm always triumphs over Evil.
Independent producer David O. Selznick saw something more in de Havilland. Having secured the film rights to Margaret Mitchell's massive Civil War novel Gone with the Wind soon after it was published, and then see it become a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, he set about selecting a cast to bring the book's characters to life. This resulted in the famous nationwide search for the right actress to play main character Scarlett O'Hara, and that had every starlet in Hollywood lobbying for the part. In fact the whole search was a publicity stunt and delaying tactic, as Selznick himself had to lobby his father-in-law, MGM head Louis B. Mayer, to loan out Clark Gable to play the equally important role of Rhett Butler, which led to a distribution deal with the studio that took some time to come to fruition. Eventually, a British actress not all that well-known on this side of the pond, Vivien Leigh, got the part of Mitchell's Southern belle. As for Olivia De Havilland, she may have been the one female star in Hollywood who didn't try out for Scarlett. She had read Mitchell's novel, and had taken an interest in a another character, Melanie Wilkes, Scarlett's bookish sister-in-law, friend, and (though Melanie doesn't consider herself as such) romantic rival. Jack L. Warner agreed to loan de Havilland out, and Selznick, perhaps surprised that a glamorous movie star would even want to play such a non-glamorous character, happily welcomed her aboard.
But what was this thing she was boarding? Nine years ago on this blog I wrote a critique of Mitchell's novel, in which I said the author (the Irish-American 1920s flapper daughter of a Southern suffragette) offered some real insight into human behavior that to me almost made her work profound, but that profundity was undercut by a simplistic view of African-Americans that a reasonable person may interpret as "racist". Well, that more or less describes the movie, too, and as with Confederate flags and confederate statues, there's recently been renewed calls to remove the film from public view. That may very well happen, but before it does I should remind you that whatever its racial politics, both the novel and movie mostly concerns itself with the interpersonal relations of four Caucasians during a rather trying time in history, and may be summed up this way: Rhett loves Scarlett, Scarlett loves Ashley, Ashley loves...well, who does Ashley love? As portrayed by Leslie Howard, the Southern Gentleman has his head so far up his ass (per Mitchell's novel) that it hard to tell if he prefers Scarlett or the woman he ends up marrying, Melanie, and that what makes de Havilland's performance important to the film's (um...nonracially) artistic success.
The very first sentence of the novel states that Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, so of course when it came time to make the movie David O. Selznick goes out and hires a beautiful actress to play her. Well, that's really no biggie. The novel further states that what Scarlett lacks in looks she easily makes up for in flirtatious charm, so guys just end up thinking she's beautiful. But what of nerdish Melanie, who never attracts the menfolk, and whom Scarlett hardly considers (at least not initially) serious competition? Selznick then goes out and hires another beautiful actress. Well, that's Hollywood, folks. If the Scarlett of the novel fakes beauty, then Olivia de Havilland's challenge is to fake plainness. To that end, she wears very little makeup, dresses somewhat dowdily, has a kind but nonsexual smile, and never, unless she's giving birth or otherwise wracked with illness, lets her hair down. Does it work? When I was in high school I took an elective course called The Novel, and the very first one we read was Gone with the Wind, and got to watch the movie as well. A subsequent classroom discussion turned toward Melanie's/de Havilland's looks, and the consensus among both the guys and the girls was that "she's all right." Had they seen any of the movies de Havilland made prior to GWTW, or the many glamorous Warner's publicity photos of her, my classmates might have rated her a couple notches above "all right". But even such a top-down approach goes to Mitchell's central point that on an equal playing field (or with equal attention paid to from the wardrobe and makeup departments), there's no particular reason to believe Scarlett is prettier than Melanie.
Why does any of this matter? Because film is a visual art form, and, among other things, the actress has to look the part, even if the part is a bit ambiguous. The Scarlett/Melanie rivalry (one-sided as it is) and eventual friendship (I love the way they bond over a dead Yankee deserter) is one of the most important elements in Gone with the Wind, at least as important as the movie poster-erotic Scarlett/Rhett relationship (not that that's not interesting, too.) But where the book can go inside a person's head, the movie can't. Her character's high self-regard has Vivien Leigh smirking quite a bit throughout the film, unnecessary in the book where we can just read her thoughts. As for Melanie, she's seen mostly through Scarlett's eyes in the novel, whereas in the movie we get to see her through our eyes. We don't necessarily have to dismiss Melanie as a wimp when she first shows up, but we also can't be surprised when Scarlett does so. That not only calls for more acting on Vivien Leigh's part, but also on de Havilland's. In fact, it becomes kind of tricky for the latter. The first impression she makes has to be convincingly cloying for both Scarlett and the audience, while knowing that the second, third, and forth impression will demand reinterpretation, but at the same time she has to stay in character, or at least not wander too outside of it. Drab Melanie would seem to be totally clueless as to what a girl has to due to secure a fellow. Except she secures the fellow anyway, and it's up to actress de Havilland to exhibit some wider appeal beyond the drab cluelessness. Because Scarlett flouts Old South conventions to such an extent that she eventually becomes a successful Reconstruction businesswoman, she's often seen as a protofeminist. It's the proto that can be excruciating. Lacking a certain self-awareness that manifests itself as a highly selective form of procrastination ("I'll think about it tomorrow"), all of Scarlett's emancipatory behavior threatens to become merely a means to a retrograde end, that she'll someday again be that Southern belle surrounded by admiring beaux, chief among them Ashley. Melanie may not seem like much of a feminist, but she cares far less than Scarlett about being the object of male desire, and it galls the latter that she gets the guy anyway. After her first husband (whom she married just to spite Ashley) dies of war-related measles, Scarlett moves to Atlanta and, at her invitation, in with sister-in-law Melanie. It's reasonable to believe that Scarlett has an ulterior motive, so that she can steal Ashley back, but to do that, she first has to figure out, what does he see in Melanie? Well, the marriage is to some extent arranged (it's downplayed in the movie, but Ashley and illness-prone Melanie are first cousins, and come from a long line of wedded first cousins, the multi-ethnic Mitchell's jab at Southern homogeneity.) It would be great if that's all it was, but it's not. When Scarlett joins Melanie as a volunteer nurse at the local army hospital where amputations are not an uncommon occurrence, she sees her Pollyannaish sister-in-law has her own reservoir of strength. And Melanie may be a goody-two shoes, but as Scarlett discovers, she can decide for herself what constitutes good than have society decide it for her, such as when she accepts a charitable donation from the town hooker. The two women end up depending on each other quite a bit throughout this saga.. Scarlett gets Melanie through some dire straits--there's few straits more dire than going into labor as a city burns around you, and Melanie repays Scarlett by bailing her out from one social faux pas after another (including one involving her own husband Ashely!) Melanie can be too good to be true at times, the fate of a secondary character who primarily exists to provide a springboard for the main character's personal growth, though Mitchell does make a late-in-the-novel stab at making her more relatable. I don't have the novel in front of me, but I believe the only time the book goes outside of Scarlett's head, it is when it goes inside of Melanie's. After Scarlett has her miscarriage, Rhett breaks down crying in front of Melanie, who for once is dumbfounded, though in the end she comforts him. The film skips the dumbfounded part and goes straight to the comforting (perhaps because Clark Gable didn't relish crying on camera, wasn't particularly convincing at it, and everyone concerned just needed to get through that scene as quickly as possible.) But Olivia de Havilland gets another chance at humanizing Melanie, and here she scores. Scarlett's and Rhett's daughter Bonnie Blue is killed in an accident involving an underachieving Shetland pony, Mammy relates to Melanie the turmoil in the Butler household of the past few days. Here Melanie really does seem overwhelmed by a tearful Mammy's story of an out-of-control Rhett, and for a moment denies there anything she can do to help. For such a sainted character as Melanie that moment is significant, though Mammy convinces her that she can help, and in fact she does help (though God-knows-how since it's played off-screen.) Finally, de Havilland gets her own deathbed scene, through there it's Vivien Leigh's character who is humanized. These two actresses knew how to play off each other.
For her work on Gone with the Wind, Olivia de Havilland was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to a woman who had played Mammy in the same film, Hattie McDaniel. There's no record of any resentment on de Havilland's part, no should there be. After spending an entire movie cleaning up after a bunch of dysfunctional white folk, McDaniel deserved some kind of compensation.
After Gone with the Wind, de Havilland was back at Warner Brothers, where the studio brass didn't particularly care that she just had a major role in what was already one of the most famous motion pictures of all time. She was again cast in a movie with Errol Flynn, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, but she didn't get to play Queen Elizabeth, Essex/Flynn's true love interest. That went to Bette Davis. Instead she played the fictional Lady Penelope Gray, and got third billing behinds Flynn and Davis. Several more so-so film roles followed, then some so-so roles that failed to follow because De Havilland refused to do them, resulting in a studio suspension. After the suspension was lifted, there was another movie with Flynn, a Civil War-themed Western titled Santa Fe Trail (which, if anything, presents an even more backwards take on slavery than GWTW.) An attack of appendicitis gave de Havilland an excuse to turn down a few more pictures, which gave an unsympathetic Jack L. Warner an excuse to put her back on suspension. After that she did get a meaty role in Hold Back the Dawn, as a small town teacher who finds herself in a romance with a scheming, but in the end redemptive, Charles Boyer. it led to another Academy Award nomination, but no win. There was one final movie with Errol Flynn. In Santa Fe Trail, Flynn had played future Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart, who competes with George Armstrong Custer, played by Ronald Reagan in his salad days, for the affections of de Havilland (guess who comes out on top there.) Well, in They Died with Their Boots On, Flynn himself gets to play Custer. Whether that's a step up or a step down I'm not sure, but it's nice to see him and de Havilland together one last time.
The seven-year contract de Havilland had signed with Warner's was set to expire in 1943, except the studio added another six months to make up for the two suspensions. Feeling that was akin to slavery, de Havilland filed suit. The California Superior Court ruled that the California Labor Code forbid a employer from enforcing a contract for long than seven years, and, a year later, the California Court of Appeal for the Second District (where I guess Hollywood must be located) agreed. Olivia de Havilland was a free woman. Unfortunately, her hard-won freedom didn't sit well with any of the other movie studios in Tinseltown, which not surprisingly had sided with Warner's, and it was almost two years before she worked again. Meanwhile, World War II was still going strong, and de Havilland made good use of her free time by joining a USO tour of military hospitals in the South Pacific (due to a bout of viral pneumonia, she spent time in an island hospital herself.)
Paramount Pictures eventually signed de Havilland to a two-picture deal. The first of these pictures was the 1946 child-born-out-of-wedlock drama To Each His Own. Charles Brackett's witty (if not entirely credible) script had de Havilland as the unwed mother who gives up her son to avoid scandal, and then is surprised to learn that she can't easily adopt him back, not even when she becomes quite wealthy running the London branch of a major cosmetics company. The real treat in this film is watching de Havilland convincingly age some thirty years from World War I to World War II. Actually, since the story is told in flashbacks, the aging is kind of in reverse. She starts out in her fifties, then film-dissolves into her 20s, with the incremental disappearance of youth in-between. It's no much that de Havilland looks older--you may as well credit the makeup artist who adds all the lines to her face--but she gets the voice right, which gets deeper as she gets older and develops a more regal bearing. Olivia was again nominated and this time won her first Best Actress Oscar.
Olivia's greatest performance, in my opinion, came in 1948 when she played mental patient Virginia Cunningham in The Snake Pit. Like a lot of well-meaning "problem pictures" of the 1940s, this film can seem somewhat exploitative by our standards, as if it were an R-rated women-in-prison film with the swear words and lesbian scenes cut out. Except it's not a prison but a state mental institution. And the screenplay by Frank Partos, Millen Brand, and an uncredited Arthur Laurents isn't afraid to inject moments of comedy bordering on satire into the lurid proceedings. More important, actress de Havilland isn't afraid to inject humanity into a portrait of derangement. Actually, it's an open question as to just how deranged Virginia really is. Certainly, her problems are real enough, but the film seems to make the case that in a mental institution, mental illness itself may be relative. I say that because there really is no other character in the film for the audience to identify with as Virginia comes across as, if not saner, than at least more sympathetic (and more good-humored) than not merely the other inmates but most of the nurses and doctors as well. I mean, how sane is it to wave a cigar in a mental patient's face, as one jackass shrink does? The psychiatrist who treats Virginia, played by Leo Genn, is rational enough, but even that doctor-patient relationship is threatened by a jealous bitch of a nurse played by Helen Craig. Then there's the famous scene where Virginia finds herself in the worst part of the asylum, where the patients everyone has given up on are housed, the snake pit of the title, and has de Havilland philosophically narrating her hallucinatory response to roomful of women in a hallucinatory state. Like I said, relative. A film made in the 1950s, Home Before Dark starring Jean Simmons, is probably a more realistic, more saner version of mental illness, and Simmons is very good in it. But whatever the excesses of The Snake Pit, de Havilland's canny performance offers an existential aspect to madness that Simmons and every other thespian who's ever played a mentally ill person lacks, and that I for one find hard to resist. She once again was nominated for an Oscar, but sadly (well, I consider it sad) did not win.
Olivia did win another Oscar for 1949's The Heiress. Based on a play that was in turn based on Henry James 1880 novel Washington Square, it's the story of an unattractive rich girl whose widowed father has never shown her any affection and so becomes the willing recipient of the affection shown to her by a handsome young man played by Montgomery Clift, though he may just be a cad out for her money. To play the unattractive rich girl, de Havilland wears no makeup (or only enough so her face can be seen on camera underneath all the lights), her hair up like a melted skull-fitting manhole cover, and has downcast eyes and a frown that threaten to crash into the Earth's surface. She's actually prettier wearing a straitjacket in The Snake Pit. As for Clift, in order to play a handsome young man he merely had to make sure he had a designated driver. Clift does turn out to be a cad, as her father warned, and de Havilland, who looks improve as she grows increasingly bitter, she manages to get back at the both of them. In this film, Olivia is Scarlett and Melanie rolled into one, with a touch of that bitch nurse played by Helen Craig. And here you never wanted to read James because you thought he was too stuffy.
Olivia's film appearances became more sporadic throughout the 1950s as she resumed her stage career to a degree, and, upon meeting a Frenchman, moved to Paris. One of her more interesting later movies is 1962's Light in the Piazza. She was about 45 when she made it, and still fairly attractive, though I imagine most straight males in the audience were paying more attention to Yvette Mimieux, who played de Havilland's beautiful brain-damaged daughter. Olivia and Yvette are both on vacation in Italy, when the latter captures the eye of a handsome, suntanned young Italian played by George Hamilton. Though actor Hamilton grew up in Arkansas, he does a credible job portraying a Florentine whose grasp of English is so poor he never realizes the girl of his dreams has the mind of a child and instead dismisses such acts as eating rice thrown at a wedding as an American eccentricity. It all seems to work out in the end, possibly because he never learns the truth, thanks to de Havilland's character, who sees this as her daughter's best chance at happiness. One wonders if there's also another chance awaiting the mother, whose marriage is strained (thanks to Yvette's problems), as she finds herself in a flirting relationship with Rossano Brazzi, who plays Hamilton's dad.
In 1964, de Havilland starred in a couple of psychological thrillers. In Lady in a Cage, she's a rich woman with a broken hip whose private elevator breaks down with her inside it. This leads to a home invasion (one of the intruders is a young James Caan), and quite a bit of violence. It's a nasty film, but that doesn't necessarily mean I wouldn't recommend it. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte was director Robert Aldrich's follow-up to his surprise hit of a year earlier, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Again it was supposed to star Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but the latter had to leave the project due to illness (given how the two stars reportedly felt about each other, maybe Crawford was sick of Davis), and so de Havilland stepped in. Davis is a wealthy Southern spinster slowly losing her mind while trying to hang on to her mansion, which stands in the way of a proposed highway. Olivia is her conniving cousin out for her money in a plot that involves murders both past and present. Another nasty film that I wouldn't necessarily not recommend.
Olivia de Havilland's final movie appearance was a cameo in 1979's The Fifth Musketeer. (I haven't seen this film or even heard of it until now, but my curiosity is piqued as I see Alan Hale Jr, the Skipper on Gilligan's Island, plays one of the Three Musketeers. I reminded that Hale's lookalike father, Alan Hale Sr, appeared in even more Errol Flynn pictures than did de Havilland!) She did a lot of television in the 1970s and 80s, including the miniseries Roots: the Next Generation, and a TV version of Anastasia, in which she played the Dowager Empress, and won a Golden Globe for her efforts. De Havilland retired from acting in 1989. She made news a few years ago when she filed a defamation suit against the FX network and the producers of the miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan in which she was played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. It bounced around this California court and that California court, the final judgement being that she was a public figure and that the producers had a First Amendment right to portray her as long as there was no slander involve. Many outside observers were amused that a 100-year-old woman should care about such a thing, while others cheered her on because she was 100.
Well, that's about all you need to know about Olivia de Havilland. Lessee, did I forget anything? Oh, yeah, that's right.
Olivia had a sister. But to explain that relationship would take another eighteen paragraphs, and I've used up enough of your time already.
See that man in the overcoat in the lower right of the above picture? He's clearly run afoul of the law, and is now about to receive his punishment in the form of an Alabama State Trooper's billy club. Well, you know what they say, crime does not pay. Except...exactly what was his crime? Did he try to rob that Haisten's in the background, the only company I know of that specializes in both mattresses AND awnings? No, that wasn't his crime. Maybe he tried to mug that man in the middle of the picture, that big dude carrying what looks like a bag (I've blown up the picture to size of the computer screen and still can't tell you what it is.) But no, that's not his crime either. Maybe he tried to rape that kneeling woman in the lower left of the picture. Except then why isn't any of those cops helping her back up on her feet? Blow up the picture, and she looks a little afraid to get up, and it ain't the guy in the lower right of the picture nor that big dude with the bag that she's afraid of. I think we can rule out rape. Lessee, what other crimes are there? Did he rob a bank, steal a car, kick a dog, spit on the sidewalk, or remove a tag from a pillow? No, none of those things. His only crime was exercising a First Amendment right, as he and others had peaceably assembled on a bridge to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. At least it was peaceable until the cops showed up, thus greatly increasing the grievances that needed redressing.
Now, this wasn't the man in the overcoat's first run-in with the law, and maybe not even the first time he got his skull cracked. When he was still in high school he had closely followed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and made it a point to meet both Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, which he did before he had even reached the age of 20. When he was in college, he became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders, seven whites and six blacks who rode several buses from Washington D.C. to New Orleans as a way of testing a Supreme Court ruling that proclaimed segregated interstate bus travel to be unconstitutional. At a stop in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the young man walked into a whites-only waiting room and got kicked in the ribs by a couple of those whites. Nevertheless, he continued with that Freedom Ride and several others throughout the early 1960s, one of which got him a 40-day stay in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. All this might seem a difficult way to spend one's young adulthood, but he had now earned the respect of many of his peers, and was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In that role he became one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington, where he made a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial--at 23 he was the youngest speaker that day--and, along with a bunch of other Civil Rights leaders, got invited to the White House (that's him in the above photo, fourth from the left, and to the immediate right of the aforementioned King.) All well and good. Then, two years later, came that Bloody Sunday in Selma, but even that didn't stop him. By the late 1970s, he had become a member of the Carter Administration. In 1981, he ran for and won a seat on the Atlanta City Council. In 1986 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving Georgia's 5th congressional district for 17 consecutive terms, right up until the day he died. Before that day arrived, however, he had lived long enough to see a black man elected President. He also lived long enough to see that black man succeeded in the same office by a racist, and witness yet another round of racial violence. Live long enough and you get to see the good and the bad, played out in what seems like an endless loop.
In the July 20 issue of The New Yorker, the always-readable academic Jill Lepore has an article about the history of policing titled "The Long Blue Line". Y'all should check it out.
As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
That's film composer Ennio Morricone four years ago when he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He deserved it though I should point out that he was never a permanent resident of Hollywood, nor Los Angeles, nor Los Angeles County, nor California, nor the United States, nor even the North American continent. He lived his entire life in Italy, though I'm sure he left it occasionally to do things like go to Oscar ceremonies, and, well, see his star unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now, I said he composed films, as in feature films, movies. And we here in the U.S. tend to equate movies with Hollywood, but Morricone's most well-known film score was for a picture made in his native Italy, and directed by a fellow Italian, though it did star three Americans who had done their fair share of work in Hollywood: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach. Moreover, it was a movie that took place in America, in the Old West, a period of history that seems to interest Europeans as much as it once did Americans themselves. And it interested an old schoolmate of Morricone's, that Italian director I mentioned, Sergio Leone. The versatile Morricone, at home with both classical and jazz, was already an up-and-coming composer, of movies but also radio, TV, and music performed by Italian pop stars of the day, when in 1964 Leone hired him to write the score for a Western starring the aforementioned Eastwood titled A Fistful of Dollars. The next year there was a sequel (unless Eastwood was just playing a different but very similar character with a very similar fashion sense--no one's ever known for sure) called For a Few Dollars More. A year after that a third movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, turned the whole thing into a trilogy. All three films were released in the USA in 1967, giving rise to the USA-coined term "Spaghetti Western". Such Westerns--Leone's anyway--were violent, darkly humorous, and morally ambiguous (I suspect that's because Europeans tend to see the United States as a whole as violent, darkly humorous, and morally ambiguous, but let's not go there.) And Morricone's moodily evocative melodies provided the perfect background music for a gunslinger wandering the desert looking for that special somebody to kill. Leone was about to quit directing Westerns altogether when Paramount Pictures of Hollywood, USA, threw a bunch of money at him to come up with another one. The result was 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West starring Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, Claudia Cardinale, and an uncharacteristically homicidal Henry Fonda. From my point of view it wasn't all that different from the earlier films, but whether because Eastwood, now a big star who no longer needed a Spaghetti Western to boost his profile, had begged off this one, or that nobody could appreciate the novelty of Fonda blowing away an Opie Taylor lookalike, it flopped at the US box office (but did quite all right elsewhere.) No one blamed Ennio Morricone for any loss of film revenue, as he had produced another classic score, and he in fact now was greatly in demand, particularly in Hollywood.
Morricone did several more Westerns (including Duck, You Sucker, again for Leone) and then took a 42 year hiatus from the genre. In the meantime other esteemed Italian directors kept him busy, including Bernardo Bertolucci (1900), and Guiseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso.) And when it wasn't the Italians, it was the French (Édouard Molinaro, La Cage aux Folles) and the British (Roland Joffé, The Mission.) But the biggest calls for Morricone's services outside of Italy came from Hollywood directors. There were three films for Brian de Palma (including The Untouchables), and two for Barry Levinson (one of which was Bugsy.) Other Hollywood directors he worked with include Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven), John Carpenter (The Thing, 1982 version), Mike Nichols (Wolf), Oliver Stone (U-Turn), Warren Beatty (Bullworth), John Boorman (British but working within the Hollywood system--The Exorcist II: The Heretic), Wolfgang Peterson (German but working within the Hollywood system--In the Line of Fire), Roman Polanski (Polish, as well as a fugitive from U.S. justice, but somehow still working within the Hollywood system--Frantic), Franco Zeffirelli (Italian but working within the Hollywood system--Hamlet, 1990 version), and one other Italian who ended up working within the Hollywood system, the aforementioned Sergio Leone, who finished his career with Once Upon a Time in America, a movie about Jewish gangsters (perhaps Leone saw it as a blow against the ethnic stereotyping of organized crime figures.)
Then there's the American-born director with the Italian-sounding last name, Quentin Tarantino. A longtime fan, Tarantino has often referenced the films of Sergio Leone in his own movies, even when the movies themselves were of an entirely different genre (thus Inglorious Basterds, a Spaghetti Western version of World War II.) Now, Tarantino had long resisted the traditional single-composer-doing-the-whole-score in his films, preferring the alternative method, a soundtrack made up of a bunch of different songs by a bunch of different artists. Yet when it came time for Tarantino to make a Western that actually took place in the Old West, 2015's The Hateful Eight, he asked the 87-year-old Morricone to do the score, which ended up being nominated for an Academy Award. Morricone had been nominated several times before, but, for as in demand as he was as a composer, he had always lost out to someone else. However, now he was back in his old stomping ground (in terms of public recognition) the Western, and finally took home an Oscar. Call it frontier justice.
Unlike so many comedy icons who rose to prominence in the mid-20th century, particularly those born to Jewish immigrants and raised somewhere in New York City, Carl Reiner never played the Catskills. In fact, he was never really a stand-up comedian at all except when maybe after he already had become famous he was asked to emcee various show biz functions. The facts are murky, but Reiner seems to have started out as a straight actor. Somewhere along the way a now-forgotten Broadway casting director thought he might make a good straight actor in comedies--that is, a straight man, the guy who feeds the lines to some clownish character who then turns the whole thing into a joke. The more successful of these comedies were "revues", collections of skits and musical numbers, including Call Me Mister, which dealt with returning World War II vets (Reiner himself happened to be one in real life.) Television came along about this time, and the revue format made the transition to the new medium, where it soon became known as the "variety show". Texaco Star Theater, starring Milton Berle, was one early example. Another was Your Show of Shows.
Your Show of Shows had evolved out of the Admiral Broadway Revue (and later evolved into Caesar's Hour.) Ninety minutes long, it featured elaborate musical numbers, and, what it soon became best known for, comedy sketches. These sketches were enacted by host Sid Caesar, and costars Imogene Coca, Howard Morris, and Carl Reiner. Caesar, Coca, and Morris were three classic rubber-faced comedians who could changes their voices, talk with exaggerated foreign accents, and basically disappear into extreme comic characterizations. Mildly handsome back in the day, Reiner was anything but rubber-faced. Nevertheless, given half the chance, he could change his voice, exaggerate a foreign accent, and disappear into an extreme comic characterization with the best of them. But more often he maintained a normal, vaguely mock-dramatic presence that the other three could play of of. In particular as a reporter in an overcoat and fedora interviewing, and feeding lines to, Caesar's flaky German professor (Reiner:Professor, what keeps birds in the air? Caesar:Courage!) But if feeding lines was considered Reiner's chief asset onscreen, offscreen he soon proved to have a knack for inventing lines.
Sid Caesar wasn't just content to act in these sketches but also wanted some say in how they came to be written. And he thought, or hoped, his costars might want some say also. To that end the entire cast had an open invitation to the writer's room. Reiner took this invitation very seriously, so much so that, long before this week's obits appeared, he was regularly described as having been a member of the Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour's writing staffs, alongside such future comedy legends as Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. Yet he never received any onscreen credit. His contribution would have been hard to pin down anyway. Caesar's sketches were room written. A single person may have come up with a central concept (often Caesar himself), but then a dozen or so writers added jokes. That is, if they could be heard above the din as this highly competitive bunch weren't known to politely take turns (a young, introverted Woody Allen, who worked on specials Caesar did toward the end of the 1950s, hated the atmosphere, preferring to write a ton of jokes at home and then see if he could fit them in somewhere.) Watching the old kinescopes on YouTube, it's fun to speculate that "This joke could only have come from Brooks" or "That gag has Simon written all over it" but they were just as likely to have been written by Head Writer Mel Tolkin, well-respected in his field though never a household name. And even once the sketch was put down on paper, Caesar wasn't above ad libbing. Getting back to Reiner, since he wasn't listed in the credits, and there were enough writers already, could his be contribution have been exaggerated? I would say yes if it weren't for the fact that onscreen proof of his writing talents in a non-Caesar project was right around the corner.
Ironically, Reiner the non-writer writer was the first of Caesar's crew to write a book, an autobiographical novel titled Enter Laughing, which fellow Your Show of Shows writer (and future Fiddler on the Roof librettist) Joseph Stein turned into a hit Broadway play that Reiner himself adapted for the big screen. But Reiner hadn't yet given up playing straight man. In fact, he was primed to play straight man in one of the most celebrated, if intermittent, comedy teams of the postwar era.
One of the many friends the likable Reiner had made in Caesar's writing room was the aforementioned Mel Brooks. The two had cooked up a parody of TV news shows that had some eyewitness to history as an interview subject, which in the 1950s could have been a far back as the Spanish-American War. Reiner and Brooks wanted to go back further, all the way to ancient Mesopotamia if necessary. For whatever reason, such a sketch never made it onto Your Show of Shows or Caesar's Hour. But Reiner and Brooks kept the idea alive as a comedy routine they performed in front of friends at social gatherings (it certainly beats watching someone dance with a lampshade on their head.) Another TV comedy star of the day, Steve Allen, thought they should put the act down on record and even provided them the studio to do so, resulting in the comedy album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. The 2000 year old man was just one character among many Brooks played, which included a Yiddish-accented astronaut and a Yiddish-accented rock and roll teen idol (!), but the twenty-centuries old Yiddish-accented geezer is what caught on, getting the two of them on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Hollywood Palace, and other variety shows. The success of the album raised Brooks profile considerably, as he was until then unknown outside of comedy writing circles. Reiner was again the straight man but as the act seems to have been a combination of previously-agreed upon exchanges and improvisation, he would often challenge Brooks one-liners, forcing the latter to come up with even funnier one-liners. While both men would soon (very soon, in the case of Reiner) move on to separate projects, they would revive the bit whenever asked to do so, even doing an animated version in the 1970s.
In fact, Carl Reiner had a much more ambitious project in mind. He would write, produce (along with former tough guy actor Sheldon Leonard) and star in a situation comedy called Head of the Family. Reiner played a New York-based TV comedy writer named Rob Petrie, who had young, pretty wife named Laura, a young son named Richie, and two co-workers named Buddy and Sally. If you recognized all those just named, then you know that no such TV series with Carl Reiner in the lead ever aired with any regularity. Ah, but the pilot does exist today on YouTube, where comparisons can be made with a later, more famous version. Head of the Family is funny enough, and Reiner is funny enough in it, so why didn't CBS purchase the pilot? Reiner's Rob Petrie had a certain brashness about him, as well as a slight New York accent, which could be interpreted as "Jewish". At least, that is the prevailing theory. Now, it's not like a brash New York City Jew couldn't star in his own sitcom--Phil Silvers is a famous example--but as a suburban father? Not in that WASPish era. Reiner believed in the possibilities of his proposed sitcom more than he did in the possibilities of his own stardom, and so swallowed some pride and set about finding himself a new Rob Petrie.
He found one in the Midwestern born-and-raised, John Alden-descended, Tony Award-winning star of the hit Broadway show Bye, Bye, Birdie: Dick Van Dyke. The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered on October 3, 1961, and ran for five years, only leaving the airways when Reiner decided it should go out on top. It very nearly went out on bottom, as CBS decided to cancel it after the first season. The network only changed its mind after sponsor Proctor & Gamble, which obviously believed in the show, threatened to pull all its afternoon soap operas, unless the sitcom was allowed to find an audience. Ironically, it found its audience when it was rescheduled right after the highly-rated The Beverly Hillbillies. I say ironically because TDVDS is often held up as the most sophisticated television that the 1960s has to offer, whereas the country bumpkins-turned-oil barons sitcom is seen (perhaps unfairly)as among the least sophisticated. To that end I wonder if there was some strategic decision behind Van Dyke tripping over the ottoman at the beginning of the second season (the first season's opening credits just showed photographs of the stars), a way of assuring the yahoos watching Hillbillies that nothing too hifalutin was about to follow. Actually, compared to later sitcoms such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, MASH, Cheers, and Seinfeld, The Dick Van DykeShow may not seem as sophisticated as it once did. But it remains quite funny, a mélange of workplace comedy, domestic comedy, physical comedy, and musical comedy, along with being a show biz satire (but then satire is merely a hifalutin form of comedy, isn't it?) In this revamped version of Reiner's original concept, Van Dyke's Rob Petrie is a smart, decent, but accident-prone family man whom, it's suggested, derives comic inspiration from his own klutziness. In fact, I sometimes think the slapstick may have been the most truly sophisticated aspect of the series, a reminder that no matter how good a joke a Rob Petrie can come up with on a typewriter, God, Fate, or Chance will come up with an even better one, that you can sidestep the ottoman, but stumble on the carpet anyway (as happens in later seasons.) Van Dyke was assisted by a terrific acting ensemble (none of whom were in the Head of theFamily pilot.) The aforementioned Mary Tyler Moore as the pretty, now downright sexy capris pants-clad wife, Borsht Belt comic Morey Amsterdam as Borsht Belt comedy writer Buddy Sorrell (reportedly based on Mel Brooks), gravel-voiced Rose-Marie as the wise-cracking comedy writer Sally Rogers (reportedly based on Selma Diamond, who wrote for Caesar), Richard Deacon as the stuffy, sycophantic producer Mel Cooley (reportedly based on Mitch McConnell--no, just joking, that would be impossible), Ann Guilbert as the excitable next-door-neighbor Millie Helper, Jerry Paris as Jerry Helper, Millie's more laid-back husband (he has to be, he's a dentist), and Larry Mathews as Rob and Laura's son, who showed up every now and then to remind everyone that Rob was indeed a family man. Carl Reiner wrote over 50 episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, including such classics as "Never Bathe on Saturday" (in which Laura gets stuck in a bathtub--you had to be there), and "It May Look Like a Walnut" (an Invasion of the Body Snatchers parody in which a zombified Buddy Sorrell asks "Did you hear the one about the nearsighted turtle who fell in live with an army helmet?") Eventually, Reiner handed over the writing to others, including writing teams Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson (who later co-created the 1970s TV version of The Odd Couple, and, separately, the former created Happy Days and the latter wrote the screenplay for the 1970s feature film Smile, a beauty pageant satire), and Bill Persky and Sam Denoff (who later co-created That Girl.) Reiner stayed on as a producer. And made one other, in my opinion, huge contribution to the series.
There's a character I haven't told you about yet, the guy Rob, Buddy, and Sally works for. Technically, I suppose that would be producer Mel Cooley, except Cooley has no real power over that bunch and is in fact regularly insulted by Buddy--who shows no fear of getting fired--whenever he enters the room. Besides, Mel himself takes his orders from the star of the fictional variety/sketch comedy show, Alan Brady. I'm going by memory as the Internet is no help whatsoever here, but I don't believe we see Alan at all during the first season of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Even in an episode ("The Sick Boy and the Sitter") that takes place in Alan's home, we don't see him. And he never visits the writers room. This, of course, isn't the way Sid Caesar did things (but it may be the way another 1950s TV comedy legend, Jackie Gleason, did things. According to Mel Brooks, Gleason had his writers slip his scripts under his dressing room door.) I'm not absolutely certain of this, but I think Alan Brady makes his first appearance in a second-season episode titled "When a Bowling Pin Talks, Listen", but only the back of head. Now, it's easy to imagine what the front of his head looks like, because Alan Brady was played by none other than Carl Reiner. So why the modesty? Knowing that he had been only a "second banana" on Sid Caesar's various shows, and that CBS didn't think he should star in a sitcom based on his own life, Reiner felt nobody would accept him as a longtime TV comedy star (according to one 1961 episode, The Alan Brady Show already had been on the air about ten years.) And so for the next two seasons, when we saw Alan Brady at all, it was just the back of his bald or toupee'd head. Then, in season 4, in an episode titled "Three Letters from One Wife" Reiner was finally prevailed upon to show his face, and from that point on, he never looked back. Vain, egotistical, self-involved, insensitive, and motor-mouthed, Alan Brady is a bull in a china shop, with Rob, Laura, Buddy, Sally, Mel, and, in one story ("A Day in the Life of Alan Brady"), even Millie and Jerry, as the plates, cups, and saucers. Brady is the focal point of several episodes in the last two seasons, and in these episodes, The Dick Van Dyke Show becomes a wickedly funny satire of television and show biz, which it hadn't quite been up to then. And if the situation comedy itself had proven Reiner's skill as a writer, then the Alan Brady-centered episodes showed just what a great comedian he could be, his talents as a comic performer most likely wasted in his years as a second banana or straight man. In fact, in the scenes they appear in together, it's Van Dyke who comes off as the straight man!
After The Dick Van Dyke Show went off the air in 1966, there were a few more stabs at producing and writing for TV, most notably The New Dick Van Dyke Show, which ran for three years in the early 1970s. As far as acting goes, Reiner got to star in what turned out to be a box office hit, the Cold War satire, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966). But mostly, Reiner settled into a long, relatively successful career as a feature film director. In 1977, he had a huge hit with Oh, God! starring George Burns and John Denver, with a screenplay by old Caesar's Hour cohort Larry Gelbart. He then gave Steve Martin a big boost by directing him in three films in which they both worked on the screenplays, The Jerk (1979), the film nor parody Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), and my personal favorite, the mad scientist spoof The Man with Two Brains (1983). There was a fourth film that Reiner directed and Martin starred but which neither one wrote the screenplay, All of Me (1984), that has the latter possessed by a prim and proper Lily Tomlin. Reiner's final film was 1997's That Old Feeling with Bette Midler. I have a vague memory of once seeing an ad for it, and that's all. After the filmmaking career ended, he did many, many, many guest appearances on TV shows, and maintained his comic timing right up to the end.
