Lemmon and Dennis: An Unlikely Screen Dream Team

When I think of iconic screen couples, so many come to mind. Gable and Harlow. Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Tracy and Hepburn. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (now that was chemistry!).

Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis are not among them. (Lemmon and Matthau, yes.) But maybe they should be. 

I tend to think of Lemmon chiefly as a light comedic actor in films like Bell, Book and Candle, Some Like It Hot and The Fortune Cookie. (Though, on the other hand, he did break my heart in Days of Wine and Roses.) Dennis brings to mind heavy drama, stürm and drang, with the anxious, neurotic and damaged characters she created for movies like The Fox, Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and of course, her Oscar-winning turn as that very high-strung young housewife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Jack Lemmon as George Kellerman

Sandy Dennis as Gwen Kellerman

In Neil Simon’s The Out-of-Towners (1970), both play against type to enact the misadventures of George and Gwen Kellerman, a pair of hapless and harried travelers from Twin Oaks, Ohio, on an unfortunate trip the New York City. Here, Lemmon is intense and complicated as the uptight, controlling (and occasionally explosively angry) husband, while Dennis ironically gives one of her most engaging performances as his dutiful, ‘go with the flow’ spouse who wants nothing more than to make her husband happy and support his choices. (Though she loses her cool once or twice as well!)

A New York story that depicts The Big Apple as sprawling, tough and hard-as-nails, The Out-of-Towners lampoons every negative stereotype about the city that never sleeps, and about the rigors of travel in general. (Writer Neil Simon was, of course, a lifelong New Yorker himself.)

The film’s other main character: “Is that a beautiful city?” “That is a beautiful city.”

Famous for his witty, lightning-fast dialogue that’s funny and human and honest and relatable all at the same time, Simon treads into more serious territory here than many of the comedic plays that made him famous. This is an edgier, darker story than the feather-light Come Blow Your Horn or Barefoot in the Park, or even his hilarious mismatched buddy comedy The Odd Couple.

Here, Simon crafts a hilarious and often terrifying comedy of errors, using Murphy’s law to plot an unbelievably bad trip for the Kellermans. Anything that can go wrong, does. First there’s a delay in landing the plane, then the flight is diverted to Boston due to bad weather. A crowded claustrophobic train from Boston to New York becomes a cattle car. When they arrive in the city there’s a garbage strike, a transit strike, a heavy rainstorm; the hotel did not hold their reservation. Gwen steps on a bottle and breaks the heel of her shoe; the couple is robbed at gunpoint. And so on.

Comedy is not the wheelhouse of Method actress Sandy Dennis, but as Gwen Kellerman she has impeccable instinctive timing, and many moments, mostly priceless reaction shots, that make you laugh out loud. Harvard-educated Lemmon, who won his first Oscar as the insecure but lovable Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts, depicts what is his darkest character to date in George Kellerman, a seemingly mild-mannered salesman who is triggered by circumstances into rage and utter despair. (Later, Lemmon will a second Academy Award playing an even darker character in Save the Tiger.) Interestingly, both Dennis and Jack Lemmon studied under Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen (Respect for Acting) at the HB Studio in New York and even appeared together in an Off-Broadway play years before teaming for this film.

“Two wet, insignificant out-of-town travelers.”

“Oh my God, I think I lost an eyelash.”

“George?? Can you hear me?”

“We could ask Traveler’s Aid...”

“I think I broke a tooth. Yep, there goes my smile.”

At first, it seems that the couple are mismatched to their environment—a classic fish-out-of-water theme, two Midwesterners vs. the Big City. But the travails of George and Gwen point out their mismatched personalities in the way that they deal with the vicissitudes that await them around every corner. Here, Lemmon overplays and Dennis underplays; he rages like King Lear while she assumes inscrutable blank expressions that try to hide her feelings. Their interplay is a joy to watch, though; together, they create a real chemistry and are totally believable as a married couple from Ohio.

Bringing the Kellermans’ urban nightmare to vivid life are a bevy of consummate character actors to lend support and expertly spout Simon’s acerbic dialogue at a rapid-fire pace. Most portray service people trying in vain to calm irate customers; all give unforgettable cameo performances: Ann Prentiss (sister of Paula) as a deadpan stewardess; Billy Dee Williams (Lady Sings the Blues)  from the airline Lost & Found; Johnny Brown as the smiling dining car waiter with nothing but bad news for the hungry travelers; Anthony Holland at the Waldorf Astoria front desk;  Ron Carey (High Anxiety) as a Boston cab driver; Graham Jarvis as a Good Samaritan with an ulterior motive; Anne Meara (mom of Ben Stiller) as a nonplussed purse-snatching victim.

Anne Meara: “You carry a pocketbook in this city, you’re a marked woman.”

Billy Dee Williams as Clifford: “I see no reason to assume it won’t show up.”

Graham Jarvis: “Just tell them that Murray sent you.”

Dolph Sweet, Johnny Brown, Anthony Holland and Ron Carey

Director Arthur Hiller paces the film as a frantic run that keeps you on the edge of your seat and as breathless as our protagonists. (Hiller’s masterful direction provided the engine that also made Silver Streak and The In-Laws such memorably fast-moving comedic sprints.) With his bold and original scoring, Quincy Jones skillfully underlines the urban tension and frantic urgency, and displays a sense of humor, too, adding comic musical counterpoint to the proceedings.

But it’s the Sandy Dennis and Jack Lemmon who hold the entire film together with their outstanding performances and palpable screen chemistry, a seemingly mismatched couple but actually a Classic Movie Dream Team. They are the reason I return to this movie again and again.

 (The less said about the execrable 1990s remake, the better, despite the presence of Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin, whom I love in other films.)

This is an entry in the Mismatched Couples Blogathon hosted by Realweegiemidget Reviews and Cinematic Catharsis. What fun we’ll all have this weekend!

Who's Afraid of Liz and Dick?

They’re movie legends who have appeared in dozens of classic films, both separately and together as a screen team. But arguably, the crowning cinematic achievement in the careers of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton is the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) directed by newcomer Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Postcards from the Edge).

For two larger than life personalities considered more to be “movie stars” than serious actors, the casting of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as George and Martha in the film adaptation of Edward Albee’s searing play was a creative risk. 

Even Burton, who once was poised to inherit the mantle of “world’s greatest actor” from his rival Sir Laurence Olivier, was taken less seriously as an artist due to his preoccupations with partying, publicity and purchasing large diamonds for his movie star wife. The poor Welsh boy’s desire for commercial success often superseded artistic fulfillment. 

Burton’s life and career had changed irrevocably his first day on the set of a fabled big budget sword-and-sandals epic. Immediately he found himself with more fame and notoriety than he had ever imagined when he left his wife Sybil to pluck costar Elizabeth Taylor away from her new husband Eddie Fisher during the filming of Cleopatra in Rome in 1962. 

For her part, Elizabeth Taylor had already been branded a man-trap and an erotic vagrant by the press. Fisher had recently left Debbie Reynolds and his family and destroyed his own reputation to be with Taylor after the death of his best friend, Taylor’s third husband Mike Todd. Now Burton was added to the cast of the ongoing Elizabeth Taylor saga that would play out in the tabloids for decades to come, until the actress’s death in 2011. This chapter of the Liz soap opera would now be dubbed Le Scandale by the Roman tabloids. 

Richard Burton as George

Still, with his deep and resonant voice and studied artistry, Richard Burton reminded the world he was a classical actor with his acclaimed performance in Shakespeare’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1964, just before his marriage to Taylor in Montreal. Burton became Taylor’s fifth husband, and probably her most compatible playmate, on screen and off.

After Cleopatra, the couple appeared together in entertaining cinematic puff pieces including The VIPs and The Sandpiper, cashing in on their fame and notoriety. Burton had also turned in a powerful performance in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana as a semi-retired Liz joined him on the set in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico. 

But then came a project that both actors could really sink their teeth into. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is the story of a late-night cocktail party gone terribly wrong. This is the turning point in the lives of an alcoholic middle-aged couple, the “stupid, liquor-ridden night” when George and Martha go too far in “walking the wits” of their “vile, crushing marriage” for a young couple they’ve invited over for a nightcap. This is the night when the slender thread between truth and illusion snaps.

Elizabeth Taylor as Martha

The 1962 Broadway production of Virginia Woolf had starred Uta Hagen (The Other, Reversal of Fortune), George Grizzard, Arthur Hill and Melinda Dillon (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and took place in a single claustrophobic living room set. 

Screenwriter and producer Ernest Lehman, who had just brilliantly adapted the Broadway hit The Sound of Music to the silver screen, exercising his flair for transforming stage plays with his cinematic storytelling techniques, took another risk by hiring young stage director Mike Nichols to helm the film upon on Elizabeth Taylor's recommendation. On Broadway, Nichols had just directed the Neil Simon hit Barefoot in the Park after starting his showbiz career as half of a stand up comedy team opposite the brilliant writer Elaine May. 

Cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s crisp black and white photography, which includes a few moody outdoor scenes to “open up” the stage play, and Alex North’s mournful, downbeat classical scoring set the scene for an unforgettably savage all-night bender. 

Edward Albee’s masterfully poetic use of language is unparalleled here—this is probably the playwright’s masterpiece, though A Delicate Balance and Zoo Story do come close to Virginia Woolf’s perfection. Punctuated by very dark humor, peppered with literary allusions and set off by four-letter words and singsongy baby talk, Albee’s dialogue is rich, dense and often brutal. 

It was said that Albee, a homosexual, had used the drunken verbal brawlings of bitter gay men to bring his characters of George and Martha to life, but Albee never dignified those notions with an answer. His poetic, intricate, searing use of language was universal in its ability to connect with the audience. 

George Segal as Nick

Cast opposite the Burtons as the young Midwestern couple who are invited for an after hours nightcap were George Segal and Sandy Dennis. The chemistry among these four fine actors is truly remarkable as they bring four iconic characters to vivid life: The loud and obnoxious Martha, the ineffectual and embittered George, the ambitious and socially correct Nick, and the high-strung and tightly wound Honey. 

George is Richard Burton’s most difficult and rewarding role. The handsome and heroic Burton, who had played King Arthur and Marc Antony, is transformed into a beleaguered, henpecked milquetoast in a frayed sweater, whose sonorous voice quavers at first and then finds strength as he becomes angrier and surlier and more empowered as the evening wears on. Burton is masterful in all his pas de deux with the other actors—he has unforgettable moments with Segal and Dennis as well as Taylor. 

As good-looking, well-built new associate professor Nick, George Segal is less flamboyant than harridan Martha, poetic George and high-strung Honey, but it is his attempt to remain calm in the face of a storm that holds the story together. It is Segal’s most subtle and effective performance. 

Sandy Dennis is a revelation as the young wife who reveals layers of complexity as she becomes more and more soddenly drunk on sip after ladylike sip of brandy, until she’s literally foaming at the mouth and nose. Her skilled performance made Dennis the go-to actor for any female character labeled as “neurotic” in a script. Nobody ever played it better. 

Sandy Dennis as Honey

Elizabeth Taylor was one of Hollywood’s most underrated actresses, uniformly giving wonderful performances in film after classic film, from Father of the Bride to A Place in the Sun to Giant. The Academy finally began to recognize and acknowledge her talents in the late 1950s, when she was nominated as Best Actress four years in a row from 1957-60. Ironically, Taylor had won her first Best Actress Oscar for a role that she felt didn't deserve the honor, as a call girl in the tawdry melodrama Butterfield 8. (Taylor had been near death with pneumonia during the Academy voting process and won the sympathy vote.)

Here, Elizabeth has a field day as the domineering, foul-mouthed Martha. Making the film in 1966, Taylor was only 34 and in lush, full womanhood, still the greatest beauty the silver screen had ever known.  Costume designer Irene Sharaff (who won an Oscar for this film), hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff and makeup wiz Gordon Bau transformed Liz’s look to make her appear 15 years older and 20 pounds heavier with with makeup and padding. (And for the first time, Elizabeth stopped watching her weight and packed on some real pounds as well, the beginning of a lifelong battle of the bulge that would last the rest of her life.)

How did Ernest Lehman get the controversial script past the censors? It was said he substituted phonetic spellings of the swear words (gah-dam or g’dam for goddamn, for example) in the script he submitted for approval, but this film marked the the beginning of a new era in film frankness. Producers and studios basically began to thumb their noses at their own self-imposed censorship and tell adult stories they felt needed to be told. Though Virginia Woolf was not rated at the time of its release, the film was one of the main reasons that the Motion Picture Association of America came up with its (constantly evolving) ratings system that is still used to this day. 

One of the greatest film foursomes ever!

Nominated for 10 Oscars, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf won a total of five. Elizabeth Taylor was pleased to have won her richly deserved second Best Actress Oscar for playing Martha but then cursed the Academy for passing over her husband. Burton did win the BAFTA for his role of George, but lost the Oscar to Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons. Richard Burton was never to win an Academy Award, despite a total of seven nominations, the last two for his roles in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Equus (1977). 

Sandy Dennis (The Out of Towners, Come Back To the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) won for Best Supporting Actress as the high-strung Honey, while Segal (The Owl and the Pussycat, It’s My Party) lost the Best Supporting Actor statuette to Walter Matthau in the Billy Wilder comedy The Fortune Cookie. (Haskell Wexler, Richard Sylbert and Irene Sharaff were the other Oscar winners.)

Together, Taylor and Burton would never experience a critical and artistic triumph on the scale of Virginia Woolf, though they were lauded for their fine performances in Zeffirelli’s production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew a year later. Resounding flops like Boom, Doctor Faustus and Hammersmith Is Out made the screen team box office poison, though they both found some success working separately. All told, Elizabeth and Richard would make a total of 10 films together. But Virginia Woolf was the zenith of their screen partnership.

Both alcoholics themselves, the Burtons’ hard-drinking jetset lifestyle led to constant bickering and battling, and in the end they became very much like the Albee characters they had inhabited so skillfully. The were never quite able to shed those personas, offstage or on.

Did the Burtons use their own volatile relationship as subtext?

In particular, Elizabeth added a new earth mother dimension to her sex goddess image, providing a perfect transition into character roles that ensured her career longevity. Most of Taylor’s more showy roles to come, including Michael Caine’s scorned wife in X, Y and Zee and the gaslighted heiress in the suspenseful horror flick Night Watch, featured shades of Martha. 

Off the screen, Burton and Taylor tired of playing sparring partners and divorced in 1974 after 10 years of marriage, then briefly remarried and quickly divorced again in 1976. As actors they would team up just one more time after their final breakup, for a brief Broadway run of Noel Coward’s Private Lives in 1983. 

In her later years, Taylor rhapsodized about both Burton and Virginia Woolf, calling him the love of her life and this film her all-time favorite acting experience. It is indeed a masterpiece in filmmaking; everyone involved was truly at the top of their game.

This is an entry in RealWeegieMidget’s Regaling About Richard Burton blogathon. I look forward to reading all the entries about one of the silver screen’s greatest leading men!

Many Thanks, Robert Altman, Robert Altman

A crumbling relic of the past, which was never built to be anything but a facade in the first place, is far from a foundation on which to base a life and an identity. That’s the theme of Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, the little-seen 1982 film based on a play by Ed Graczyk and directed by Robert Altman. Currently unavailable through any mainstream DVD-on-demand service, lovers of this film must content themselves with scratchy VHS transfers offered by those lucky enough to buy the film when it was still in circulation more than two decades ago. (And thank goodness for that crumbling relic of a videotape which allowed this film lover to enjoy this remarkable little film once again.)

Black, Bates and Cher—Disciples of James Dean

A quirky piece, even for the king of quirk himself, the great Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, The Player), Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is a forgotten gem of a film, featuring a collection of strong and dimensional women’s roles brought to life by an eclectic group of fine actors. Here is where film fans will find Sandy Dennis in her last great role and superstar Cher in her first, plus startling turns by a young Kathy Bates, Marta Heflin, and a Karen Black as you’ve never seen her before.

Sudie Bond, Sandy Dennis and Cher

Based on a 1976 play by Ed Graczyk, Jimmy Dean takes place in a dusty and arid one-horse Texas town several hundred miles from Marfa, where scenes from the 1956 George Stevens epic Giant were filmed. It is now two decades since these local Texans experienced their brief brush with Hollywood magic, and the members of a local fan club, the Disciples of James Dean, are scheduled to meet at the local dime store where they originally held their meetings, 20 years after Giant and the young star’s untimely death. All that's left of the past are crumbling bits of the fictional Reata Ranch, which Mona collects during a yearly pilgrimage to the long-abandoned film location.

By the late ‘70s, the “well-made play” as popularized by Ibsen and continued by Tennessee Williams and William Inge had fallen out of favor, and Graczyk’s play was considered old-fashioned and derivative with its rhythmic and formulaic uncovering of secrets and revelations, culminating in a transformational climax, but within this well-worn structure actors are allowed to shine.

Edna Louise (Heflin), Mona (Dennis) and Juanita (Bond)

Mona, Joe (Patton) and Juanita

A tense moment for Mona, Joanne and Sissy

Lacking the operatic and often Shakespearean spectacle of Robert Altman’s most well-known films, this one is a curiousity, with its claustrophobic single setting of a faded drugstore interior sweltering in a Texas heatwave. Altman also uses the stage conventions of lighting and the reflection of a mirror behind the counter to differentiate the 1955 flashback scenes with the present action. But fans of the filmed stage play genre will appreciate Robert Altman’s loving focus on his actors. Having also directed the play on the Broadway stage with the same cast, the director chooses to allow them to tell the story.

Sandy Dennis as the high-strung Mona

As the troubled and dreamy Mona, chosen as an extra for a few of Giant’s large crowd scenes and still starry-eyed from her mythic encounter with James Dean, Sandy Dennis gives one of her most layered and complicated performances. Look up the word neurotic in the dictionary and you’re bound to find a picture of Ms. Dennis in any of her iconic film performances, perhaps in her Oscar-winning turn as Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or as Jack Lemmon’s beleaguered wife in Neil Simon’s The Out-of-Towners. Mona is a crowning achievement for Dennis, who did very few films after this one.

Karen Black reveals an uncomfortable secret as Joanne

The versatile Karen Black, who worked so well with director Altman in the legendary 1975 country music epic Nashville, gives one of the most arresting performances of her career in the difficult role of Joanne, the transsexual visitor who serves as catalyst for the destruction of Mona’s fragile facade of untruth. Joanne’s “Edie Gormé” monologue, delivered while perched against the rusted jukebox, is an iconic moment for Karen Black fans.

Cher's acting debut, as the sassy yet vulnerable Sissy

Jimmy Dean also marks the film acting debut of Cher—no, her appearances with Sonny in specialty movies Good Times and Chastity don’t count! Already a seasoned performer, Cher makes the transition from musical variety to drama seamlessly and skillfully, recreating her stage triumph as the brassy, bawdy and big-bosomed Sissy.

The smaller roles are standouts, too, particularly plaintive-voiced veteran character actress Sudie Bond as Juanita, the hyper-religious proprietress of the drugstore; Altman stalwart Marta Heflin as a shy wallflower, and Kathy Bates as her pushy, loud-mouthed former BFF. The only male role in the story, their gay friend Joe, is played in the flashbacks by Mark Patton. Unseen by the audience is the title character, the supposed offspring of Mona and the movie star, a half-wit who became a cause celebre when used to promote Texas tourism after James Dean’s sudden death.

Watching these wonderful actors work together under the direction of a creative risk-taker like Altman is a joy. Even if this film is ultimately deemed a failure by film historians, it’s an experimental work of of movie art designed for lovers of acting and theatrical storytelling.  

Robert Altman with his stars 

"Sincerely" by the McGuire Sisters