June 20th 2013. Pick Of The Day.
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Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT, the director's Oscar-winning skewering of corporate ladder-climbing culture in post-WWII America, screens today at 1:30pm as part of MoMA's ongoing Auteurist History of Film series. Still boasts a bite plenty sharp 53 years later, but alas this Jack Lemmon-Shirley MacLaine vehicle took my Pick yesterday, so I gotta focus on another type of status seeker today. Rules is rules.
Film Forum's exhaustive tribute to master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu enters its midpoint today with a 2-fer pairing of THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE TODA FAMILY and WHAT DID THE LADY FORGET? The former concerns a mother and daughter dealing with the pain wrought by their husband/father's death, while the latter involves a modern liberated woman's discombobulating effect on her uncle's serene and organized existence. Both worthy films, but my Pick today goes to a different female and her discombobulation of an entire country. Read on.
MoMA's equally impressive career retrospective dedicated to a different filmmaking pioneer, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, today offers a cementing of genre tropes and an upending of the same. His seminal collaboration with Douglas Fairbanks, 1922's ROBIN HOOD, pretty much set the template for the action/adventure film, while the 1940 Western TRAIL OF THE VIGILANTES warmly sends up the sacred tenets of the horse opera. Another genre, the Hollywod Epic, steals my Pick away today though, as surely as Wales' finest acting export stole Eddie Fisher's wife. You bad boy, you.
Over at the Library for the Performing Arts their summer series dedicated to Robert Altman proceeds with today's screening of SECRET HONOR, which is pretty much recommendable mainly due to Philip Baker's Hall tour de force perf as a drunken, haunted Nixon recounting his sins from deep within his long exile. Love The Bakes, but a different power-grabber, who quite frankly met the end Nixon may have secretely pined for, gets my Pick today. Watergate was a colossal debacle, it's agreed, but Joe L. Mankewicz's 1963 70mm spectacular remains the only flick in cinema history to take top box office honors at year's end and not recoup its budget. Not by a long shot. And it needed to lose way more than 15 minutes.
Producer Walter Wanger had the idea; cast Hollywood's biggest star as one of history's most famous queens, spare no expense on the widescreen Technicolor extravaganza, and wait for the cash and awards to pour in. The original budget was a then fairly high 2 million bucks. Its star's salary alone would ultimately reach 7 mil, the result of an incredibly talent-friendly contract, and the total budget would land somewhere in the region between 44 and 60 mil, due to a series of dilemmas and disasters that sent the production spinning wildly out of control (E. Lacy Rice's brief detailing of the chaos can be found here). In other words this was a film whose failure would have guaranteeed the demise of parent studio 20th Century Fox. And as much as its star's powerful sway and unexpected illnesses caused the film to incur expense like Marlon Brando did bloat, it was also the unexpected affair she began with her co-star that most agree is the reason the film outgrossed all others whence released and ultimately, according to some, made a profit. It was a fabulous scandal that usurped the headlines for the remainder of the filming all the way up to its gala premiere, and at one point the leading man, via the swarming paparrazi, went so far as to dare the Vatican to denounce their adultery. As is often the case, sin equalled ka-CHING in La La Land. The resulting film is of dubious quality to some, movie magic to others. What's undeniable is this; the chemistry betwen the two co-stars, magnetic and tempestuous, as would be the case in their real-life romances, which spawned two marriages, two divorces, and the goddamdest enduring loyalty Hollywood may have ever seen. So tonight let's celebrate this first meeting of two Hollywood titans, the start of cinema's most famous romance, and all the magical anarchy that ensued on and off screen.
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton meet cute in Joseph L. Mankewicz's gorgeous and gargantuan CLEOPATRA, 7pm at the Clearview Chelsea Cinemas. Still sits at #15 on the Most Expensive Film list, adjusted for inflation. Come see what kind of anicient world $44-60 mil bought ya back in 1963.
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Be safe and sound and make sure the next guy/gal is too! Back tomorrow with a new Pick. Til then you feel free to tell me if summer decides to show up. Excelsior, Knuckleheads!
-Joe Walsh
