On the Big Screen: COOL HAND LUKE (1967)

That's right: the big screen for Paul Newman's iconic performance in Stuart Rosenberg's film of Donn Pearce's novel. The occasion was the grand re-opening weekend for the Madison Theater in Albany NY. Located near the College of St. Rose campus, the Madison is a neighborhood movie house dating back to 1929. It was a single-screen theater as late as the early 1990s before the original space was split into two screens. Four more smaller theaters were added later. Under new management, the two primary screens now serve as Albany's first full-time repertory movie house, while the remainder are converted into a live performance space. The revamped Madison emphasizes classic Hollywood, broadly defined, programming films according to a different theme each week. Prices for films and concessions alike are reasonable ($5 for the movie) and I intend to be as much of a regular there as the films justify. Anyone who really loves movies in the Albany area should support a theater that shows old films the way they were meant to be seen -- bigger than life.

For whatever reason the new management at the Madison opened with a four-film Paul Newman festival, also showing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Slap Shot this opening week. Perhaps predictably, I chose the oldest film of the four. Cool Hand Luke is celebrated as a celebration of rebellion, but a closer examination reveals greater ambivalence about the hero's rebellion. In his southern prison, Luke is a reluctant Christ figure in a world without God, or at least a Christ figure who doesn't believe in God. Rosenberg acknowledges the absurdity of the concept, posing Newman in his most Christ-like attitude just after Luke has eaten 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour on a bet. Later, the idolization of Luke by his erstwhile enemy Dragline (George Kennedy in his Oscar-winning role) adds a tragicomic note to the allegory. Luke seems capable of miracles, not just in his capacity for eggs but in his inspiration of the work gang to finish a road job in record time, earning them precious extra hours of leisure. Late, he has a Gethsemane moment in an empty church, asking a God whose existence he doubts whether He has any plan or purpose for Luke, finally interpreting an unpromising omen as a cue to give up his life. Luke himself is as uncomfortable with his eventual role as hero of the work camp as he is with any role life tries to force on him. Rebel he may be, and rebel he may against real oppressors, but Luke's rebellion is no more principled or conscientious than Marlon Brando's in The Wild One. Brando's biker, asked what he rebelled against, answered, "Whaddaya got?" Luke might well answer, as in a moment of fatigue, "I dunno, boss." The movie never tries to explain his rebelliousness apart from noting a broken home -- abandoned by his father, raised by an aunt. He has no theory of rebellion beyond, "just because it's the law don't make it right." For this film's purposes, that's enough.

Luke doesn't rebel for a living. He may well have settled into a stint as idol of the cons had the bosses not insulted and provoked him, sending him to "the Box" on no more pretext than a fear (having seen White Heat?) that his mother's death might drive him to attempt escape. Their own actions provoke the response they feared as Luke makes three breaks for freedom. After the second, his acolytes appear to desert him after he seems to break under physical and mental torture from the bulls, but Dragline's faith is restored when a seemingly tamed Luke seizes a truck and drives off. Dragline needs to believe that Luke had faked being broken, that even as he was clinging to a guard's foot he was planning the third escape. He seems undissuaded when Luke assures him that he was broken and had not planned the truckjacking in advance -- "I never planned anything in my life," Luke insists. Kennedy takes Dragline in an odd direction in these last scenes, turning him from the bully of the early scenes into a Lenny to Luke's George -- a Lenny for whom, in a way, George will sacrifice himself. Yet if Dragline has become as a child in Luke's presence, even as Luke tries to blow him off once and for all, there's a hint at the end that Luke has actually enlightened Dragline in some way. Before Luke, Dragline himself had seemed content to be the king of the cons, but Luke taught him to recognize his chains. That Dragline ends the film shackled actually seems like a sign of progress, proof that he's now travelling Luke's path, for whatever good it will do him. Because Luke himself remains an enigma, Dragline's relationship with him becomes the real story of the film -- which is, I suppose, how Kennedy earned that Oscar.

Stuart Rosenberg wasn't really a great director. He too often calls attention to his and cinematographer Conrad Hall's gimmickry, particularly the mirrorshades of "the man without eyes," and makes some odd pictorial choices like a huge closeup of a singer's mouth during a hymn. But he tells the story smoothly, though Lalo Schifrin's score threatens at times to overwhelm the images, and lets his vast ensemble of character actors do their things. Seeing the picture on a big screen made it more atmospheric, more sensual in a grubby, sweaty sense. It reminds you how a star on the big screen commands not just the screen but the whole theater. Seeing it whole for the first time in a long time also reminded me of how much Cool Hand Luke has influenced the Coen brothers, from their recreation of the mirrorshade man in O Brother Where Art Thou to the echo of Clifton James's orientation speech in The Hudsucker Proxy. It's odd because the Coens have never done anything in spirit like Luke, but it gives you an idea of the impression Rosenberg makes visually, despite what I said above. The film may have a mixed message, but there's definitely no failure to communicate here.

DVR Diary: HEMINGWAY'S ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN (1962)

 

A. E. Hotchner's efforts to film Ernest Hemingway's short stories about Nick Adams were cursed from the start. His initial effort, an October 1955 TV adaptation of "The Battler," was to have starred James Dean as the title character, a punchy boxer living in the woods.  Dean's death compelled Paul Newman, who was to have played Adams alongside Dean, to play the boxer's part, just as he would take the role of Rocky Graziano, intended for Dean, in his star-making picture Somebody Up There Likes Me. Maybe Newman alone felt Hotchner's project a lucky one. When Hotchner got the green light from Twentieth Century-Fox and producer Jerry Wald to write a feature film adapting several Adams stories into a single narrative, Newman signed on to re-create his role as "Battler" Ad Francis. But before the cameras rolled Hemingway, normally deeply skeptical of film adaptations of his work yet impressed by Hotchner's TV plays, killed himself. Bad news for Hotchner, maybe good for the studio. It gave Fox an exploitation hook, especially given the tendency to see the Adams stories as a clef tales of Hemingway's own youth. Tentatively titled "Young Man," the film was burdened with the author's name; perhaps coincidentally, the change also catered to Newman's supposed superstition in favor of films staring with the letter H. By the time the film premiered in July 1962, producer Wald was dead. The film bombed. It failed so badly that it was virtually a career killer for star Richard Beymer, who had just starred in West Side Story and was cast in the expectation that the musical would make him bankable. Martin Ritt directed and the film was handsomely shot on locations in America and Italy by cinematographer Lee Garmes. It looks great but the story is hopeless. Beymer is trapped by the bildungsroman format; whatever you think of him as an actor, the script compels him to be callow so experience can mature him -- though many questioned whether Nick had truly matured by the end of the picture.

Hemingway himself never answered, nor even raised the question, and to ask it -- to think of the Adams stories as pieces of a larger narrative puzzle that requires assembly -- is to miss the point of Hemingway's literary project. His early short stories are experiments in form. Their point is to tell what there is to tell inferentially or indirectly, without old-fashioned exposition. His object was to capture the way people actually spoke or acted without resorting to artificial dramatics, yet allow the discerning reader to fill in why the characters say and do what they do by recognizing the emotional truth in his prose. To elaborate on what Hemingway had written as if that was necessary to clarify what he was writing about is to defeat his purpose. From what I've read about the film project, Hemingway was under the impression that Hotchner would film the stories as a sequence of stand-alone vignettes, as they exist in print. Adventures of a Young Man does more than that, importing elements from the non-Nick novel A Farewell to Arms and some stuff made up by Hotchner to give us an Adams toughened by hard work, war and loss to the point when he can finally cut the apron strings and leave home for good. None of this is necessarily inconsistent with what Hemingway actually wrote about Adams, but filling in the blanks is inconsistent with why Hemingway wrote about the boy.

But if Hotchner, Ritt or the studio betrayed Hemingway, did they still make a good movie? Not quite. Beymer can't help being overshadowed by his guest stars, not just the showboating Newman, who plays the Battler as if he'd taken real blows over multiple takes of the Graziano picture, and for years since then, but also a bombastic Dan Dailey as an alcoholic, addicted advertising man. Newman's screen time is disproportionate to the length of "The Battler" (he and Hotchner were longtime pals and business partners) and its place in the Adams canon -- he also gets to speak a famous line from To Have and Have Not, "a man alone ain't got no damn chance," --  and his and Dailey's performances give an inaccurate impression of the Adams stories as a parade of passing eccentrics. Even if his co-stars had toned down the character acting, Beymer would probably be outmatched, but he makes more of an effort than is usually recognized. Again, the script sabotages him, so that Nick seems to grow more petulant rather than more mature. The war stuff and the Farewell to Arms do-over, with Susan Strasberg as the doomed nurse, are fatal to the picture because of their misplaced familiarity. The whole thing feels padded due to Hotchner's obligation to touch a certain number of Hemingway bases along with the extra material. That is, the excesses that hurt the film as a Hemingway adaptation cripple it as a conventional movie. In any event, time had passed Hemingway by. 1962 was a year when the most bankable literary name on a marquee was Tennessee Williams. It wasn't Hemingway's world anymore and hadn't been for about a decade. He'd known that and raged against it because he couldn't keep up and the whole period look of this movie only proved the point, I suspect. If Adventures of a Young Man was meant as a cinematic monument to Hemingway, it did succeed somewhat, because it sometimes feels like you've entered a house of the dead.

If anything, the trailer makes the film look duller than it actually is. SarBear4Ryan uploaded this copy to YouTube.

WUSA (1970)

From forty years ago -- forty-one this November -- comes a film that seems more prophetic than historic. Producer Paul Newman brings his Cool Hand Luke director Stuart Rosenberg to helm novelist Robert Stone's adaptation of his A Hall of Mirrors -- I haven't read that novel but what I have read of Stone I've liked a lot. Newman plays a drifter named Reinhardt who drifts into New Orleans, drops into a storefront mission and hears a sermon from Laurence Harvey, who owes him money. Harvey is a doubly evocative presence in the picture, inspiring subtle memories first of Walk on the Wild Side, and later of The Manchurian Candidate. After getting some but not all of what Harvey owes him, Reinhardt crosses paths with Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), an erstwhile ex-prostitute with a scar across one cheek as a stigmatic badge of independence. I'd just seen a precocious Woodward eat poor Van Heflin alive with an over-the-top tomboy performance in George Sherman's Count Three and Pray so I was worried when she started working an accent, but she was better behaved overall. The husband may have been a positive influence. Anyway, Reinhardt takes Geraldine in and finds work as an announcer at the title radio station, where he auditions for Robert (Count Yorga) Quarry. It was gratifying to see Quarry in a civilian role, small though it proved, and to see him craft a completely different personality, neurotic and eventually somewhat paranoid, from his masterful swinging vampire. WUSA is a conservative station -- it services "America's America" -- but it seems to restrict its messages to the breaks between songs and commercials. Reinhardt doesn't believe a word of what he reads over the air but it's a living. His rise is intercut with the descent of well-intentioned social worker Rainey (Anthony Perkins), who grows suspicious that the survey he's working on isn't telling the real story of black poverty, and that the local boss Clotho (Moses Gunn) who facilitates the work is keeping something from him. Rainey and Reinhardt live in the same apartment building along with some hippies in a band, and when Rainey learns that Clotho is conspiring with political candidate Minter (Wayne Rogers), a WUSA personality, to paint a fraudulent portrait of "welfare chiseling" in order to create a campaign issue, he tries to pump Reinhardt for inside dirt on the agenda of station owner Bingamon (Pat Hingle). Reinhardt couldn't care less about the political agenda, but saves his rage for Rainey, whom he calls a "cornpone Christ" and regards as a contemptible idealist and, worse, a whiner. "I hate whiners!" Reinhardt declares, setting the tone for generations of lower-class right-wingers whose only way to salvage self-esteem is to embrace the values of their masters and despise all who protest rather than simply look out for number one.

The storylines converge at a political rally with Reinhardt as MC, Harvey's huckster missionary giving the benediction, "White Power" signs in the audience, a black mob growing restless outside, and Rainey lurking on the catwalk with a gun. Everything ends in disaster: Rainey's shot goes wide and takes out a more-or-less innocent man; Reinhardt tries to calm the crowd but can't stop himself from giving an absurdly contemptuous and career-killing speech ("In the heart of every bomb is a fat old lady going to the fair" or something along those lines); Reinhardt's hippie band pals, whom he'd brainlessly brought along to perform to a hostile audience, panic and plant their stash of pot on Geraldine, who's caught with the stuff and told to expect 15 years in jail given her record, though a one-way escape route lays open for her. Reinhardt and his fellow hustler, the preacher, escape more or less unscathed, the preacher to leave town immediately, Reinhardt to learn from a crippled neighbor (Cloris Leachman) of Geraldine's fate, which inspires perhaps a moment of reflection and a reprise of Neil Diamond's original song for the picture before the drifter goes back to drifting.

WUSA boasts a strong ensemble, weakened but slightly by Perkins's stock twitchy turn, and capped by the liberal entrepreneur Newman's apparently knowing portrait of the enemy mindset. If the movie seems ahead of its time now it may be because we see more Reinhardts than ever around us -- people who are not fanatics but are incapable of solidarity because of their overwhelming contempt for their fellow humans, and perhaps for themselves. I make no pictorial judgments on direction or cinematography because the Flix channel broadcast was pan-and-scan except for the credits, but the location shoot is nevertheless a snapshot of a time and place where history took a wrong turn. It's a film worth watching for both its cinematic and historical interest, and it definitely gets me wanting to read A Hall of Mirrors. In many ways Rosenberg's film, which seems to have flopped in 1970, is an instant period piece, but it's not hard to see today in it, in a chilling way.

THE SILVER CHALICE (1954)

At Easter time I always like to look at "bible" movies. It's good to define the term loosely, since many such films aren't adapted directly from the Old or New Testament. Once upon a time novels set during the time of scripture made up a popular genre of fiction, with Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur setting the template and Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe probably being the twentieth-century champion. I see at the library that such books are still written, but you don't see them on the best seller lists as often as you used to. When The Robe was used to roll out Cinemascope and became a sort of Avatar of its time in 1953, Hollywood started grabbing other bible novels to make into widescreen showcases. Warner Bros. snapped up Thomas B. Costain's 1952 best seller about the making of the Holy Grail and set it up to launch Paul Newman as a new star. It was a famous flop that nearly killed Newman's career in the cradle, but it fascinated me when I saw bits of it as a kid. It looked profoundly different from the other epics I enjoyed, and as far as I was concerned Jack Palance was the star. He played Simon the Magician (aka Simon Magus), the nearest thing I could see to a villain of the piece, but in such a soft-spoken, almost reasonable way that he was easily the most interesting thing on screen.

Above, the first shot of Paul Newman's movie career. Below, Jack Palance performs on what is, believe it or not, a major studio set.

This weekend I decided to give The Silver Chalice a fresh look. It's a gravely problematic movie visually, actually quite ambitious in its own way. It was such a way, however, that made it look unambitious to many contemporary observers. Producer-director Victor Saville (who also held the rights to Mike Hammer and produced Kiss Me Deadly the following year) and his design team decided against building big free-standing sets and against realism of any kind as a rule. They opted for a sometimes minimalist, sometimes abstract production design that emphasized clean lines and open spaces when it wasn't obviously self-indulgent or utterly incompetent. To call the results hit-or-miss is to understate the extremes. Sometimes they succeed brilliantly and manage stunning images. Sometimes they look like amateurs. It's the inconsistency rather than the experiment itself that handicaps this film.

While the movie is pictorially erratic, the story and most of the acting are fatal. We're following the adventures of Basil, a poor boy adopted by an old, wealthy and childless merchant (E.G. Marshall) against the wishes of his brother. When the old man dies, the brother bribes Antioch officials and a witness to the adoption into denouncing Basil as a slave, not the heir to the estate. Basil is promptly sold to a family that puts him to work as a sculptor and silversmith. In servitude he encounters an old friend, Helena (first Natalie Wood, then Virginia Mayo), a slave who ran away from the old merchant's household and is now hanging out with Simon the Magician. Helena will be torn between Basil and Simon for the rest of the picture, while Basil will be torn between her and Deborra (Pier Angeli), the granddaughter of Joseph of Arimathea. Using Luke the Evangelist as his agent, Joseph buys Basil's freedom and brings him to Jerusalem to craft a silver chalice that will house the drinking cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. Helena ends up in the holy city when the Sicarii, a Jewish insurgent group, recruit Simon to be their spokesman and messiah.

The Sicarii are a promising but underutilized element of the story. I don't know if they're meant to represent the People's Front of Judea or the Judean People's Front, but as they're shown in the movie the question is really whether they're stand-ins for fascists or communists. Since the year is 1954, let's opt for commies. They're obsessed with violent revolution, but Simon, a fellow-traveller in the parlance of the time (the 1950s, that is), instructs them in the need to project a benevolent front of freedom and spirituality. This movie really needs a band of black-clad sword-wielding thugs to liven up things, but Saville never thinks to stage any anti-Roman mayhem. This film is hopelessly short on action, though things could be worse. At 135 minutes, Chalice is relatively brief by epic standards.

Pier Angeli is so holy, she sort of has a halo already.

Virginia Mayo has to choose between Newman's youthful ardor and Palance's magic fruit. What would you do?

Anyway, the story loses interest in the Sicarii after a while, and the scene shifts from Jerusalem to Rome. Basil goes there to meet the Apostle Peter (Lorne Greene) and make a study of his face for the Chalice. Simon and Helena head there because the Magician has a grudge against Peter (documented in the Acts of the Apostles and other early Christian sources) and wants to discredit Christianity as an act of spite. He convinces the Sicarii to let him go on the premise that news of Peter's expected humiliation will disabuse Judeans of their silly new religion of peace and love and make them receptive to the Sicarii war cry. Helena steers him toward Rome because she knows that Basil's going there with the Chalice.

Nero's palace is one of the film's more successful sets. Within it, Palance adds snake-handling to his wonder-working repertoire.

Simon wants to destroy the Chalice as part of his revenge on Peter, but he's also starting to believe his own propaganda. Believing himself a true miracle worker as well as a magician, he convinces the Emperor Nero to let him prove his superior spirituality by doing one thing neither Peter nor Jesus ever did: leap off a tall tower and fly.

Close up, Palance's final costume change makes him look like an unmentionably virile superhero. From afar, it's more like an ancient Acme Bat-Man Outfit.

I hope I don't seem to be boasting if I say that my description is more interesting than the film itself. The screenplay by Lesser Samuels is quite literally lesser work. The dialogue is clunky in the bad-epic manner without rising to the memorable word-jazz weirdness of something like The Ten Commandments. Newman is as bad as legend claims, as he often conceded himself. In his defense, Basil is a hopeless part. He has no chemistry at all with Mayo, who seems dreadfully out of place here, but fares better with the younger, more modern looking Angeli. Jack Palance steals the film with ease, coasting along a character arc that takes him from amiable cynicism to rapturous delusions of grandeur. If the visuals don't attract you, he may be the one reason to give this film a look. Seeing him as Simon after so many years vindicates my memory that he was the best thing about the movie. Overall, The Silver Chalice deserves a little extra credit for its pictorial ambition, and it's worth noting that it isn't even the worst religious epic of its release year -- that's The Egyptian by a good margin. If you want real sword-&-sandal entertainment from 1954, go with Delmer Daves's Demetrius and the Gladiators. But if you want a genuinely eccentric effort from Hollywood's epic era, then Chalice is on TCM on Easter afternoon for you to judge for yourselves.