Musicals at Shaw and Stratford: Funny Girl and Guys and Dolls

Sara Farb as Fanny Brice (understudied by Jade Repetta at the performance our critic attended) in Funny Girl. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Since Funny Girl made Barbra Streisand a Broadway star and the 1968 William Wyler movie version enshrined what may be the greatest musical-comedy performance ever recorded, it took more than half a century for the show to generate a major revival. The one-two punch of Streisand’s stage and film triumphs created the impression that the musical was mostly a decorative shell constructed around her, despite the superb score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill and what the threadbare musical bios of the last couple of decades – Jersey Boys, Beautiful and many others – now reveal by contrast to be a creditable book by Isobel Lennart. Funny Girl was finally revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2015 with Sheridan Smith in the role of the Ziegfeld Follies singer-comic Fanny Brice; Smith was marvelous, but when the show transferred to the West End, her health problems delayed her appearance, and for the first half of the run she was replaced by her understudy, Natasha Barnes, who received reviews that can only be called generous. (I saw both actresses; Smith’s performance was filmed in 2018 and can be seen on BroadwayHD.) And Smith was the only reason to see it: Michael Mayer’s production, with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, was clumsy and looked seedy. Those qualities were very much in evidence when the revival opened on Broadway four years ago, with an apparently disastrous leading performance by Beanie Feldstein, who left the run early and was replaced by Lea Michele. (It was Michele I reviewed.)

Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford and The Way We Were

I opted to listen to Barbra Streisand’s 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra, rather than reading it in hard copy so that I could hear her inimitable phrasing – the quality that made me a diehard fan of her albums when I started collecting them in 1964, at the age of thirteen. (The first one I owned, a gift from my aunt and uncle, was the original cast album of Funny Girl, which had recently opened on Broadway; I played “Don’t Rain on My Parade” through so many times that it’s a miracle I didn’t wear down the vinyl.) I was lucky: Streisand’s movie career began the week I started university, when she opened in the film version of Funny Girl, and I saw each of those great early performances – in Hello, Dolly!, The Owl and the Pussycat, Up the Sandbox and The Way We Were – as they came out, on the big screen. What I mostly desired from the memoir was information about, and her personal response to, her early triumphs on stage (her scene-stealing supporting performance in I Can Get It for You Wholesale led to Funny Girl), television (where she, Joe Layton and Dwight Hemion reconceived the variety special with the explosively inventive My Name Is Barbra in 1965), LP and film. My usual experience with the memoirs of performers I love is that they’re fun as long as they chronicle the origins of a career but run out of steam once the writer has made the leap into stardom. And this one comes in at a shade under a thousand pages! Plus I haven’t cared much for Streisand’s pop albums and found only a few of her later pictures interesting – though, notably, I’ve never missed one. (Her film career had pretty much faded by the early nineties.)

Some Like It Hot Refurbished, and a Brief Word of Farewell

Christian Borle & J. Harrison Ghee in Some Like It Hot. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin)

The best romantic comedy released in the early fifties, William Wyler’s Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, was about the impossible romance of a princess and a reporter; it was a cross between a genteel version It Happened One Night and a reverse Cinderella story. But then Hollywood romantic comedy degenerated into sex cartoons with Jayne Mansfield at one end of the spectrum and mechanical farces at the other. One might have feared that the form was dead, until Billy Wilder’s divine Some Like It Hot came to the rescue at the end of the decade. It wasn’t remotely like any previous movie in this genre. (But then, Wilder’s The Lost Weekend hadn’t been like any other social problem picture or Sunset Boulevard like any other film noir.) Wilder and his co-writer I.A.L. Diamond took a page from Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies and then doubled it. When two jazz musicians witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre they run like hell, straight into drag. They figure their only retreat from the gangsters on their tail is to vanish into dresses and wigs and join an all-girls’ band. Tony Curtis’s Joe, a.k.a. Josephine, falls for the lead singer, Sugar (Marilyn Monroe at her most sublime), and chooses a second disguise – a millionaire named Shell Oil Jr. who entertains her on a borrowed yacht, where Curtis draws her in with a dead-on Cary Grant imitation. Jack Lemmon’s frantic Jerry/Daphne finds himself the object of the yacht’s actual owner, Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) – a courtship that Wilder and Diamond leave up in the air when the rest of the plot is resolved. The final line – spoken by Brown – when Jerry reveals his true gender to Osgood is one of the two best curtain lines in American romantic comedy. (The other concludes Charade, with Hepburn and Cary Grant, which followed Some Like It Hot four years later.)

Newfangled, Old-Fashioned: Hamilton and Funny Girl, Streaming

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Philippa Sooi n Hamilton.

Like at least half of my friends, I bought a subscription to Disney+ so I could watch Hamilton. Thomas Kail, who staged it on Broadway (and, in its earlier incarnation, downtown at the Public Theatre), filmed it in 2016, and the original plan was to release it to theatres. When Covid put paid to those plans, Disney picked it up, and though one misses the effect of the big screen – and though the handful of fucks are muted – it seems like a reasonable trade-off. I caught Hamilton with the London cast two years ago, and they were admirable. But, captured just before they dispersed, the original ensemble, headed by book writer-composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton and Leslie Odom, Jr. as Aaron Burr, is so electric that I actually found the show even more exciting and affecting on my home screen.

Elegant 1940s Thrillers: The Spiral Staircase and Laura

Dorothy McGuire in The Spiral Staircase (1946).

Two of the most enjoyable and elegantly appointed thrillers of the Hollywood big-studio era came out two years apart – Laura in 1944 and The Spiral Staircase in 1946. Actually they belong to different genres. Laura is a murder mystery; The Spiral Staircase is a psycho-killer movie, one of the few classic examples from that period that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t direct. (Hitch turned out Shadow of a Doubt in 1943 with Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley, the “Merry Widow murderer” who provokes the fall from innocence of his small-town niece, played by Teresa Wright, who shares his name; and Strangers on a Train in 1951, wherein Robert Walker tries to crisscross murders with a handsome tennis champ played by Farley Granger.)

Light and Sound: Image Makers and The Magic Flute

William H. Daniels, with Greta Garbo, on the set of Romance (1930).

The best time I’ve had at the movies so far this year was watching Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers, which TCM ran over the weekend. It’s catnip for film buffs. Written by film critic Michael Sragow and directed and edited by Daniel Raim, Image Makers zeroes in on seven groundbreaking artists – Billy Bitzer, Rollie Totheroh, Charles Rosher, William Daniels, Karl Struss, Gregg Toland and James Wong Howe. It combines historical and biographical material; precise, razor-sharp film analysis; interviews with a crew of extraordinarily knowledgeable scholars, a few contemporary DPs and a couple of relations; invaluable voice interviews conducted at the American Society of Cinematographers while Rosher and Daniels were still alive; brightly-colored comic-strip frames (by Patrick Mate) to illustrate some of the stories; and, naturally, clips from these men’s movies and in some cases the ones that influenced them.

Musical Evenings: I Married an Angel, Choir Boy, Spamilton

Sara Mearns and Mark Evans in I Married an Angel. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

I Married an Angel is the sixth musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart to be revived by Encores! The original production opened on Broadway in 1938 at the midpoint of an amazing string of hit R&H shows between 1935 and 1942 that came on the heels of their half-decade at M-G-M: Jumbo, On Your Toes, Babes in Arms and I’d Rather Be Right preceded it and The Boys from Syracuse, Too Many Girls, Pal Joey and By Jupiter followed it. (Only Higher and Higher, in 1940, was a disappointment at the box office.) I Married an Angel had initially been planned for M-G-M, an adaptation of a Janos Vaszary farce about the union of a man and a (literal) angel. (This was the era when Hungarian plays found a home in Hollywood, and some of them, like William Wyler’s The Good Fairy and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, were wonderful.) Jeanette MacDonald, who had just had a success with Love Me Tonight , with its ebullient R&H score, was set to play the earthbound angel. But the project was abandoned, and by the time they resurrected it for Broadway they had taken on a new collaborator, George Balanchine, who’d staged the dances – and ballets – for both On Your Toes and Babes in Arms. So the role of Angel was reconceived for a dancer, Vera Zorina, whom Balanchine himself married during the New Year’s Eve performance.

Fanny Brice: Brains and Talent

Fanny Brice, born Fania Borach, pictured in 1928. (Photo: Getty Archives)

In William Wyler’s 1968 Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand gives one of the two or three greatest musical-comedy performances ever put on film as Fanny Brice, the Brooklyn burlesque comic who became a Broadway star when Florenz Ziegfeld tapped her to appear in his Follies in 1910. But Streisand’s is a reimagined Brice – more crafted, funny in a more modern mode, and more of a camera creation (even though Streisand had originated the role on stage and this was only her first picture). The real Fanny Brice, who can be glimpsed in only a handful of movies – Hollywood didn’t seem to know what to do with her, so when she retired from the stage in the 1930s she wound up on radio, where she played Baby Snooks for years – and heard in a couple of dozen recordings. (Jasmine Records has collected them all, including a couple of Baby Snooks routines, on Fanny Brice: The Rose of Washington Square. The song “Rose of Washington Square,” which she performed in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic in 1920, is not, alas, among them.)

Romantic Comedy at the End of the Millennium: The Last, Brief Golden Age

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).  

Why is it so difficult for Hollywood to make decent romantic comedies in the twenty-first century? Every year brings a handful, but by my count there have been only five in the last decade worth looking at: Ghost Town and Vicky Cristina Barcelona in 2008, Letters to Juliet in 2010, Top Five in 2014 and – a special case – Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (with a contemporary setting) in 2013. And you could put David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on that list, too, since it’s a murder mystery that only gets solved (as Kevin Courrier argued convincingly on this website) when the two protagonists, a brilliant journalist with an analog background and an IT whiz, pool their intellectual resources (while becoming lovers). As Whedon’s movie reminds us, Much Ado is the granddaddy of modern American romantic comedy. It pioneered the structure – a hero and heroine begin as adversaries but, by passing a series of tests and proving they’re open to compromise and change, they gradually earn each other’s love – that Hollywood adopted in the 1930s and that proved hardy and resilient through the rest of the twentieth century. It was the ideal solution to the issues posed by Hollywood’s self-censorship code (the Production Code, known popularly as the Hays Code), which bore down on American filmmakers in 1934 and held sway for roughly the next twenty-five years. The romantic-comedy structure enabled writers and directors to make movies that were sexy and witty, even though the narratives were forced to banish actual sex. Audiences loved smart entertainments like It Happened One Night (the first of these), My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Easy Living, The Moon’s Our Home, Bringing Up Baby, The Shop Around the Corner, His Girl Friday and The Lady Eve. And they responded to the form itself, which was a dramatic metaphor for the process of falling in love.

George Bernard Shaw, Lillian Hellman and Paula Vogel: Issues

Andrew Lawrie, Sara Topham and Jim Mezon in the Shaw Festival's production of Saint Joan. (Photo: David Cooper)

This article contains reviews of Saint Joan, The Little Foxes, and Indecent.

George Bernard Shaw lays out the argument of Saint Joan with unerring precision. Joan is a French peasant, a teenager, unwavering in her Catholic devotion yet possessed of a country girl’s common sense; when she hears the voices of saints in the church bells, urging her to lead an army to throw the English out of France, she accepts them without doubt or hesitation and her no-nonsense certainty that she is doing the right thing convinces one man after another, right up to the Dauphin, whom she dreams of helping to crown King Charles VII. But as soon as she wins the war for him she finds herself mired in political turmoil that she doesn’t understand and that will end inevitably with her being burned at the stake. She has run afoul not only of the English (obviously) but of the church, represented by the Archbishop of Rheims and the Inquisition, who find in her intimate relationship with God a threat to the Catholic hierarchy. Even the Dauphin, now the monarch, is put off by her arrogance, which earlier he, like the officers she kicked into battle, found inspiring and sensible. The more she insists on being true to the simple faith that got her there in the first place, the more she damns herself in the eyes of the church, which forms an unholy alliance with its secular arm (and the English) to execute her.

Great Screen Matches: Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart

Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

Of the great Hollywood women of the 1930s, Margaret Sullavan is the forgotten one, though she was a staple in M-G-M pictures of the era. She had a firefly quality – a flickering glimmer – and the salient characteristic of her performances was the courage that kept her going in the face of her own fragility. She was a feast for the camera – her slender frame was ideal for both clinging, satiny gowns and fussy, elaborate get-ups, which she wore with a kind of gallantry. (“Gallantry” was the film critic Pauline Kael’s word for her, and it’s perfect: it expresses the exquisite tension between her tremulous lightness and her resoluteness in launching herself into the scary world.) Her voice was high and cottony, with an accent somewhere between New York and mid-Atlantic – the made-up accent, still taught in some acting schools, that’s supposed to stand for ambiguous cosmopolitanism in American performers – and the words always seemed to be pushing through some kind of obstacle, like honey dripping through the comb. 

Sullavan was brilliant opposite Herbert Marshall in The Good Fairy (directed by William Wyler, whom she later married) and opposite Henry Fonda (to whom she had been married) in The Moon’s Our Home, a marvelous romantic comedy partly written by the on-again, off-again couple Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell that cast Sullavan as a movie star and Fonda as a famous writer who meet and fall in love without knowing each other’s identity. It’s an inspired idea for a screwball comedy, since the premise of those pictures, borrowed from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, is the tension between the sexual and emotional attraction of the hero and heroine and their adversarial relationship. In The Moon’s Our Home, Fonda and Sullavan are biased against each other on principle – the pompous, posturing celebrity writer, the frivolous, narcissistic Hollywood baby – and can only see what’s beneath the surface if they can’t see the surface. But terrific as Fonda and Marshall were at partnering Sullavan, she was best with Jimmy Stewart, with whom she made four films between 1936 and 1940. 

Podcast: Interview with Harold Russell (1981)

Harold Russell and Marlene Aames in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

It's Remembrance Day today and Critics at Large has decided to pay tribute by posting a special interview as a podcast. When Canadian-born Harold Russell appeared in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a powerful and moving drama about servicemen returning home from World War II, he was an army instructor who had training with the U.S. 13th Airbourne Division in North Carolina. Russell, who became an American after moving to Massachusetts with his family in 1921, lost both his hands when trying to detonate an explosive he was handling while making a training film. Given two hooks to replace them, Russell went on to attend Boston University as a full-time student and, a non-actor, was later featured in an Army film titled Diary of a Sergeant about rehabilitating war veterans. When Wyler saw the film, he immediately cast Russell in the moving role of Homer Parrish, a Navy sailor who lost both his hands during the war. For his role, Russell won an unprecedented two Academy Awards, one for Best Supporting Actor and a special award created by the Board of Governors who wanted to salute him for his wartime sacrifice. Russell authored two books, Victory in My Hands (1949) and The Best Years of My Life (1981). After the release of the latter, Russell came to Toronto, where I had a chance to talk on CJRT-FM's On the Arts about his work on Wyler's seminal film. Harold Russell passed away in 2002, at the age of 88.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Harold Russell as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1981.

Musical Revivals in London's West End

Emmanuel Kojo (centre) and members of the cast of Show Boat at London's New London Theatre. (Photo: Johan Persson)

There are three major American musicals in which the main male characters are gamblers, and by chance all three have been revived in London’s West End this season. So audiences who check out Show Boat at the New London and see Gaylord Ravenal (Chris Peluso) toss his winnings in the air as he shares his good luck with his wife Magnolia (Gina Beck) may feel a weird déjà vu sensation if they’ve already seen Nick Arnstein (Darius Campbell) perform the same action with Fanny Brice (Natasha J. Barnes) in Funny Girl, which moved to the Savoy from its original venue, the Meunier Chocolate Factory. No such scene appears in Guys and Dolls at the Phoenix, but nonetheless it is the quintessential gambling musical.

Carol: Women Under Glass

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in Carol, directed by Todd Haynes.

For the first half of Carol it seems as if the director, Todd Haynes, is going to make it work. Haynes stepped into movies with one of the most startling curiosities of the eighties, a short called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story populated by Barbie and Ken dolls, but at feature length his movies always seem theoretical – and rigged – like a doctoral dissertation you can’t get behind because it scrambles any instinctual reading of the material. That’s especially true of the project he returns to every two or three pictures, where he tries to replicate glossy Hollywood melodramas of the forties and fifties but moves into the foreground the subversive qualities that (some say) directors like Douglas Sirk slipped into the margins of their movies. Since I can’t take Sirk’s movies seriously, Haynes’ takes on them probably wouldn’t interest me much anyway. But he was certainly an entertainer, and though he asked his audience to accept some stupefying plot points, God knows he didn’t try to pass theory off as drama. Haynes’ most highly regarded film, Far from Heaven (2002), defied common sense at every narrative turn. His plan was to set the movie in the suburban 1950s with a Jane Wyman-type heroine (played by Julianne Moore, whose performance is the movie’s only saving grace) and give her a husband who’s a closeted homosexual and a lover who’s an African-American gardener. It might have been an interesting proposition, but not if the gardener (Dennis Haysbert) talked like he’d just time-traveled back from the twenty-first century and certainly not with Dennis Quaid as the husband. Haynes needed an actor who read as straight but who could be convincing as a gay man, like Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye. (Or Taylor Kitsch in the second season of True Detective, who seemed to have based the early scenes in his performance on Brando in Huston’s movie.) Quaid is preposterously miscast – like, say, Michael Douglas as  Liberace in the TV movie Behind the Candelabra – so all you get is the idea of a straight man who’s secretly gay. And when Haynes throws in a butch little girl and an effeminate little boy as Moore and Quaid’s kids, the obvious reversal of sexual expectations becomes dopey and childish. It’s the by now familiar problem of drama that goes straight to the symbolic level before it’s been worked through on the narrative level. Far from Heaven flattered viewers by making them feel smart for getting what he was up to without engaging them in the storytelling.

Neglected Gem #79: Loss of Innocence (1961)

Loss of Innocence is an almost unknown coming-of-age picture made in England in 1961, when American moviegoers were rushing to see the latest British releases because they were starved for intelligent films that didn’t infantilize them. But unlike some of the imports from that period that attracted the attention of critics and art-house audiences, such as Room at the Top and The Entertainer and A Taste of Honey, this one never caught on. The screenwriter was an American, Howard Koch, who was most famous for co-writing Casablanca but who sometimes displayed a surprising European sensibility: he did the adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Letter for William Wyler in 1940, and in 1948 he collaborated with the Austrian émigré Max Ophüls on the delicate high comedy Letter from an Unknown Woman, with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. In Loss of Innocence Koch adapted a novel by Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer (the movie was released in England under that subtler title), about a sixteen-year-old English girl who grows up when she and her three younger siblings travel to the French countryside for a summer vacation with their mother but have to go on to the hotel by themselves after their mother falls seriously ill on the train and is hospitalized.

Get On Up: Shot in the Arm

Get On Up, the James Brown biopic, is full of life, most of it supplied by Chadwick Boseman, the remarkable actor and dancer who gets down Brown’s startlingly kinetic presence. Boseman didn’t make much of an impression as Jackie Robinson in the bland 42, but he’s mesmerizing as the charismatic and tyrannical Godfather of Soul. Brown’s sense of himself as a one-man band whose fellow musicians – and wives - he sees as no more than necessary echoes of his presence alienates everyone around him, even, eventually, his best friend and loyal colleague Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), who sticks around longer than anyone else. But his musical inventiveness is as outsize as his personality. The musical numbers, directed with a great deal of skill by Tate Taylor, do exactly what they need to do: they replicate the excitement of seeing James Brown.

Notes on the Method: Jane Fonda, 1969-1971, Part 2

Jane Fonda as Bree Daniel, in Klute (1971).

In the 1971 Klute, Jane Fonda plays Bree Daniel, a high-class Manhattan hooker who – reluctantly – asks for the protection of a cop named John Klute when she’s stalked by a creep (Charles Cioffi) who turns out to be a killer. Donald Sutherland gives a fine, understated performance as Klute, and the chemistry between him and Fonda (they were an off-screen couple for a few years and made one other picture together, 1973’s Steelyard Blues) is partly what makes the film so memorable, especially once the protagonist and the title character become involved. Klute is far from a romantic comedy, but it has a romantic-comedy set-up: the tensions between the hero and heroine, who come from different worlds – Klute is a small-town Pennsylvania police officer who meets Bree during an investigation into the murder of a friend – and rub each other the wrong way, turn out to be erotic ones. Sutherland’s nerdy looks – the gawky frame, the mongoose neck, the outsize ears – are used here to emphasize his character’s square-shooter persona, the very thing that Bree mocks and tries to undermine, at first reflexively and then as a form of resistance against the danger of losing emotional control. (During this early phase of his career, Sutherland generally played hipsters, most famously “Hawkeye” Pierce in Altman’s M*A*S*H; the fact that his goony appearance didn’t stand in his way is an indication of the way the Vietnam-era made movie stars of actors who would never have landed leading-man roles in any previous period, like Woody Allen and Elliott Gould.)

Orson Welles: Modernist and Elegist

Orson Welles, on the set of Citizen Kane

There has been no one in the entire history of the American theatre quite like Orson Welles. Part prodigy, part carny spieler who rewrote his family history to such an extent over the course of his fabled career that he was largely self-invented, he talked his way onto the stage in his teens and by the mid-1930s had established himself as the most exciting young director in New York. This was at a time when FDR’s Works Progress Association had generated the Federal Theatre Project, the aim of which was to provide work for professional theatre folk and which, due to the convictions of its director, Hattie Flanagan, resided squarely in the left wing. Welles directed an all-black cast in a Haiti-set Macbeth that became popularly known as The Voodoo Macbeth; an up-to-the-minute Fascist Julius Caesar (with himself as Brutus); Marc Blitzstein’s satirical musical The Cradle Will Rock, which, locked out of its playhouse at the last minute, staged an opening night across town – without set, costumes or anything but the most rudimentary, off-the-cuff lighting – that was more dramatic and certainly more memorable than anything in the play itself.

At the same time Welles and his producing partner John Houseman brought live theatre to the air in a series of broadcasts called The Mercury Theatre that included the most famous – and infamous – of all radio programs, the 1938 Halloween dramatization of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. When he moved on to Hollywood, his debut was so eagerly anticipated that RKO Studios invited him to co-write, direct and star in his own project. That was Citizen Kane, released in 1941, when Welles was all of twenty-six years old. His directorial career, which lasted not quite three decades, was blighted by a chronic difficulty to get funding for his ventures – the consequence of a reputation as an unreliable spendthrift that was largely the fabrication of Louella Parsons, the powerful gossip columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper syndicate, whose boss was displeased with the way Kane had portrayed her boss (in a transparent fictional guise). But that career was also marked by some of the most staggering achievements in American cinema. Both as a director and as an actor Welles was a walking legend for the rest of his life, the definition of the theatrical enfant terrible and ego-driven multi-tasker. (The 1953 musical The Band Wagon, written by Comden and Green and directed by Vincente Minnelli, offers a light-hearted send-up of the Orson Welles of the popular imagination in the person of actor-director Jeffrey Cordova, played by Jack Buchanan.)

The virtual creator of conceptual directing, the first director to fit classic texts to modern settings, a conqueror of one twentieth-century technology (film) after another (radio), the first American filmmaker to make significant stylistic strides in the employment of sound (even though Kane came out fourteen years after the official birth of the talkies), one of the two American directors – the other was William Wyler – to import the deep focus lens that enabled the camera to show foreground, middle ground and background with equal clarity in the same frame, Welles was an embodiment of theatrical modernism. But he was a paradox. All of his best movies, beginning with Kane and ending with Chimes at Midnight, his last full-length dramatic feature, in 1967, in some way represent a conflict about the modern age wherein the boundless energy and hurdling drive of the new struggles with a longing for what it’s irrevocably replaced.

Neglected Gem #59: Masquerade (1988)

Rob Lowe and Meg Tilly in Masquerade.

The title of the 1988 film Masquerade suggests an association with the exotic thrillers of the sixties (Charade, Arabesque), and it certainly is stylish. But it’s actually more of a cross between Hitchcock’s Suspicion and The Heiress, William Wyler’s 1949 film of the Henry James novella Washington Square. In the first, Joan Fontaine plays a mousy bride who suspects her husband, Cary Grant, of scheming to eliminate her; in the second, Olivia De Havilland, a homely heiress belittled by an embittered widower father (Ralph Richardson), is wooed by a fortune hunter (Montgomery Clift). In Masquerade, which was written by Dick Wolf and directed by Bob Swaim, Meg Tilly plays Olivia Lawrence, a rich orphan who lives in the Hamptons with her alcoholic, lecherous bully of a stepfather, Tony Gateworth (John Glover). When she meets Tim Whalan (Rob Lowe), a handsome playboy sailor who has been hired to captain a yacht belonging to one of her neighbors – he’s moonlighting as a bedmate to his boss’s attractive wife (Kim Cattrall) – Olivia falls for him, and he rises to the bait of her irresistible fortune. (Masquerade is the name of Olivia’s boat; Obsession is the vehicle Tim works on. Both names acquire a sinister resonance as the story unfolds.) At this point Wolf’s ingenious plot takes the first of several twists, and difficult as it is to discuss the movie without revealing any of them, I don’t want to spoil any of its considerable narrative pleasures. Suffice it to say that there is a death, followed by an investigation, and that the cop on the case is Mike McGill, Olivia’s childhood friend (and one-time suitor), played by Doug Savant.

Five Came Back: How the Second World War Changed Five Directors

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War marks the second time in a row the film critic and historian Mark Harris has got hold of a great book subject. His 2008 volume, Pictures at a Revolution, uses the five movies nominated for the 1967 Best Picture Oscar – Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night – to talk about the death of the old Hollywood, which still believed in the values of the big-studio era of the thirties, forties and fifties, and the shift to the new Hollywood, with its link to counterculture audiences. Harris’s strategy is ingenious, and the book is one of the best historical studies of a movie era ever published. In Five Came Back – another quintet – he turns to the work that John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler and Frank Capra, “the most influential and imaginative American film directors to volunteer for service,” did for the Armed Forces during the Second World War.