Six 1960s films

Select Boomers shall be delighted. But it's difficult not to read Hollywood films of the 1960s through a countercultural lens, even those released at the opposite end of the decade. So in the final scene of The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960), Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran (Shirley MacLaine) drop out of not quite society but rather, the corporate nine-to-five grind and leave Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) to his Don Draperesque lechery. As proto-hippies, they may go on to lose each other at Woodstock or, more likely, in the halls of MOMA, given Baxter's penchant for festooning his apartment with replicas of Picasso and Mondrian. But as the decade progresses, the tenor of the dropping out becomes more strident and intense, at least as it's played out in the films below.

There aren't many obvious connections between Baxter and Paul Newman as the title character in Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963). Lemmon feels of an older generation even though Newman is thirteen days his senior [sic]. But given the considerable swagger Hud exhibits in every scene, one might surmise that Baxter realizes his Hudness at the end of The Apartment when he finally gathers up enough fortitude to forsake an executive position in the hopes of saving his soul. 

What exactly Hud is swaggering over is open to interpretation, though. He rails against big government prompting Pauline Kael to conclude that for her, "Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater" (18).* But I took him for another proto-hippie because he rails against everything, a cousin to Marlon Brando's Johnny spouting "Whaddaya got?" in The Wild One a decade prior. On the precipice of dropping out, he could just as soon vote for no one as for LBJ or Goldwater. And to the extent that Ritt and screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. (adapting Larry McMurty's 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By) intended audiences to hiss at Hud as a materialistic brute and instead revere his morally upright father Homer (Melvyn Douglas), the film must be counted as largely a failure. As Kael notes, "it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy...Hud, the 'villain' of the piece, is less phony than Homer" (ibid.). But that doesn't mean the good liberals in the audience can't claim Hud as their own. This is what happens when filmmakers play with ideological fire - you showcase Oz at the risk of audiences wanting to remain there instead of returning to the sepia drabness of Kansas. James Wong Howe's unshowy, even skeletal photography assists in this endeavor, staying out of the way as we project whatever ideology onto Hud's attractive frame.

The most remarkable aspect of the lesser-known All Fall Down (John Frankenheimer, 1962) is that it's a dry run for Hud and all the more attractive for it. It's the far quirkier film with Brandon deWilde preprising [sic] his role as Lonnie, the nephew who looks up to but eventually rejects his uncle Hud. The Hud here is played by Warren Beatty as a young stud named Berry-Berry who escorts and discards a string a middle-aged women. His younger brother Clinton (deWilde) adores him. But Eva Marie Saint arrives on the scene and Clinton becomes repulsed at Berry-Berry's sadistic treatment of her. As with Patricia Neal's Oscar-winning role in Hud, Saint exists solely to enact a Freudian battle of wills and libidos between two male relatives. Still, Frankenheimer makes the thing digestible in the end by bedecking the Oedipal drama with odd trills and featuring a powerhouse performance by Angela Lansbury as a matriarch even more incestuous than the one she played for Frankenheimer in The Manchurian Candidate released the same year. 

Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965) is the most rebellious film here in terms of form. Beatty as the title character spouts such Hudisms as "I gotta live the only way I'm at least free" and, indeed, he seems in perpetual search of something. But to give you an idea of the chaotic nature of the film, we never learn the character's real name. In flight from the Mafia which may or may not be after him, he gains a social security card stolen from a man named Miklos Wunejeva and he gets rechristened Mickey One. The film is all flight comprised of evanescent vignettes and confounding detours. Scenes of religious fervor, intense melodrama, and comedy both good and bad seem to drop in from other movies. They hook viewers in for two or three minutes and then baffle us by neglecting to connect to the subsequent scene. Written by Alan Surgal and edited by Aram Avakian (who would go on to direct his own chaos theorem with 1970's End of the Road), Mickey One reportedly baffled even Beatty himself who kept losing his footing with the project. In this, he's a stand in for the viewers themselves who wind up either exhilarated or annoyed by the tsunami Penn and company make of the narrative. Classical Hollywood types Franchot Tone and Hurd Hatfield are on board and they seem more game than Beatty with the swirl of emotional registers and story fragments, perhaps because they portray the purveyors of the paranoia that keeps Mickey in flop sweat and bandages. In the same year, Bob Dylan sang on "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Something is happening here/ But you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?" and that same omen infuses Mickey One with an agitated energy that feels indelibly rock 'n' roll (jazz being a foregone conclusion given that Stan Getz scored much of the soundtrack).

If so far these reviews exemplify the proclivity of critics for making connections between any two disparate films, then Youngblood Hawke (Delmer Daves, 1964) shall be the fly in that particular ointment. It shares a vague sense of disaffection and soul desertion with the other films. James Franciscus plays the title hunk who moves from Kentucky to Manhattan and becomes a best-selling author. But soon, under the influence of various big-city sybarites, he compromises his integrity and must return to Kentucky to finds his true self. Overall, though, it shares little with the angsty titles here except insofar as it serves as their negative snapshot. The frequent book porn points to a majority far more silent than Hud (at least for now), the audiences who purchased the chunky tomes that would be adapted into the highest grossing films of the decade: Spartacus, Exodus, The Longest Day, The Carpetbaggers, Doctor Zhivago, and onward to Hawaii, The Sand Pebbles, Valley of the Dolls, etc., a list Herman Wouk hoped to join with his 783-page Youngbloood Hawke (1962). 

It would be simple to claim that these were the people who were repulsed by Hud or Berry-Berry, maybe even Baxter and the men Lonnie and Clinton became, and afraid of encountering them in the big bad recently deserted cities or, worse, fearful that they'd infiltrate the well-tended suburbs. Peter Bogdanovich was not one of those people. But with his 1968 directorial debut Targets, he adds fuel to the suspicion that Hud and his ilk wind up like the Charles Whitman stand-in Bobby Thompson (Tom O'Kelly, chilling in his blasé malevolence). There's an icy fatalism to this film that would have impressed Fritz Lang if not made him shudder. But no title of the 1960s did more to presage the resignation that permeated the New Hollywood (The Godfather, Chinatown, etc.) if not Boomer ideology overall, the sense that violent fragmentation, maybe even history itself, was a fait accompli and there's nothing we can do about it. Bogdanovich essentially plays himself in the film, shushing Boris Karloff, essentially playing himself in the film, while he watches Karloff on TV in The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931) while intoning "All the good movies have been made." One must wonder how Bogdanovich managed to go on having a career in directing after such a doomy pronouncement (at the very least, he could've spared us 1975's At Long Last Love). But in this conception, cinema is not just dead but deadly. In the most brilliant moment of rhetoric in this term paper of a film, the movie screen literally becomes murderous - Bobby has positioned himself behind a drive-in screen and shoots through it with his rifle at the moviegoers in their cars and environs. 80-year-old Karloff manages to stop him with his cane and slaps him across the face as if Bobby were a mere petulant child. "Is that what I was afraid of?" asks after 90 minutes of mourning over how the world had become more violent and scary than any of his films. It seems like a message made for the Silent Majority who voted Nixon as their president that same year. But they didn't know the film existed. They were busy seeing Funny Girl and The Love Bug.

The Apartment: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

Hud: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

All Fall Down: A-minus

Mickey One: A

Youngblood Hawke: C+ (docked a notch so I'm not tempted to watch it a third time)

Targets: A-minus (B+ when I'm angry at Boomers)

* Pauline Kael; "Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood." Film Quarterly 1 July 1964; 17 (4): 15–23.

 

Howard the Duck (Willard Huyck, 1986)

I had high hopes for this. I'm a huge fan of Messiah of Evil, the 1973 horror film Willard Huyck co-wrote and directed with his wife Gloria Katz. My favorite genre is the film maudit. And, in general, I exhibit deep affection for broken, unloved films such as, to choose one example utterly at random, Some Call It Loving. But sometimes bad movies are just bad and Howard the Duck falls dead from the sky.

If that last phrase made you wince, then you now have a taste of how every single comedic line in the film, without fail, earns my all-time favorite adjective - arch, "marked by a deliberate and often forced playfulness, irony, or impudence." After one of the many travails he has to endure after crashing on Earth, Howard wisecracks nudge-nudge one-liners like or "Talk about bad breath" or "I need this like I need another tail." Did anyone on the planet ever laugh at such sub-Groucho Marxisms, "jokes" that would've tanked in the Borscht Belt of the 1950s? The only laughter I experienced was an occasional seconds-delayed guffaw over how such godawful writing made it to the screen.

Even worse, the imperative of having to adapt a Marvel comic book for a major studio drained the film of all the quirk and personality so evident in Messiah of Evil. Film maudit fans might appreciate John Barry's incongruous score (ILX user Old Lunch describes the music, in a line funnier than any of the film, as akin to "watching some heartwarming '80s family movie about two lovable scamps learning the true meaning of Arbor Day") and the inconsistent reactions to a talking duck in Cleveland. But with those potential quirks out of the way by the first quarter, Huyck and co-writer Katz proceed with a crushing anonymity through overlong chase and destruction scenes. 

So it's bad but exactly how bad? The failure is too fascinating to merit an F and it didn't enrage me like Unsane. The title song, written by Thomas Dolby and George Clinton and sung by Lea Thompson (a terrible performance but an understandable one given what she had to work with), is catchy albeit baffling: "We call him Howard the Duck/Ain't no way to conceal it...If it ain't funk, you don't feel it." Jeffrey Jones deserved the biggest check for the "Dark Overlord of the Universe" makeup he had to endure. Tim Robbins is tall and strong. And the best performance is a cameo by Jorli McLain as the waitress Crystal. Her brief moment is so raw and natural that she could've stepped off of Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. And she utters the one remotely witty line in the entire film: "You know, hostility is, like, a psychic boomerang." McLain has only two more credits to her name but went on to invent, with her former partner Wendy Robbins, the Tingler head massager. Sadly, she died in 2010 at 49.

In short, SpaceCamp, another 1986 entry starring Lea Thompson, now feels like Citizen Kane. 

Grade: D

 

Caprice (Frank Tashlin, 1967)

Doris Day nominated Caprice as one of her worst films. Leonard Maltin agreed, awarding it a BOMB: "Terrible vehicle for Doris as industrial spy plunged into international intrigue with fellow agent Harris. Muddled, unfunny, straining to be 'mod.'" And okay, the last third, where the screenwriters try to wrap up the spy nonsense, is indeed muddled. But if "straining to be mod" results in such fabulous costumes, objets (a vase holding hairspray that prevents your locks from ever getting wet), sets (check out the gloriously preposterous interior of a private plane below, almost as silly as the one in Airport '77), kooky opening credits, and a meta moment in which Day goes to see a film called Caprice starring Doris Day, then mod on by! And several set pieces are hilarious and rowdy. This may be Day's most physical role of her career. As per Tashlin's cartoon-reared dictates, Day flops around on the screen like a fashion-plate Daffy Duck, falling from balconies and hanging from porch beams. Funniest scene: when Day foils a surveillance attempt by gnawing on potato chips.

Incidentally, I came across a Rate Your Music entry that lists all of Maltin's BOMBs from his various guides. Quite useful for party planners and film programmers.

Grade: A-minus

Item: Mad Men Series Finale a Disappointment!

To be sure, Mad Men is one of the great experiences in television history - trenchant, consistently surprising, enormously provocative, delivering the narrative goods while bedizening the entire edifice with modernist trills, all that and so much more. Unfortunately, it couldn't escape the attendant disappointments of that most dreaded televisual necessity - the series finale. 

In this, the creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, who wrote and directed the series finale, "Person to Person," is hardly alone. Even an underseen show like Rectify (Ray McKinnon, 2013 - 2016, SundanceTV), which matches Mad Men in subtlety and overall brilliance, junked its hard-won delicacy with a trite, utilitarian ending. Such is the fate of most serial narratives; by their very nature, they are bound to disappoint. They borrow the structure of soap operas but unlike soap operas, they must end at some point. We then mourn the loss of the interplay between episodic verticality and serial horizontality that gripped us over several seasons and years. The series finale of Six Feet Under circumvented this problem since the show concerned death, the most final ending of all. And The Sopranos ignored the problem altogether by stopping, not ending. But, in general, from what I've heard about shows I haven't seen (Game of Thrones, Lost) to shows I've completed (Breaking Bad, Succession, Ozark), serial television will one day let us down. 

To start with the godawful, Weiner brings Peggy Olson's (Elisabeth Moss) story to a close with...wait for it...the formation of a heterosexual couple, the most rote method of ending any narrative. Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson) professes his love for Peggy and Peggy professes back. "I want to be with you. I'm in love with you...I love you, Peggy." "I can't believe it. I think I'm in love with you too. I really do." What, is this the Friends finale? It's not as if the coupling was an unforeseen development; certainly, one could glean some sexual tension between the two throughout the series. But apart from the fact that this ending apes the ending of literally hundreds of thousands of other narratives, the device comes off as cheap and mechanical for two reasons.

First, the formation comes not just in the last episode but almost at the very end of the final episode, with barely ten minutes to spare. Apart from a brief peck between the two before the final scene, this is the last we see of them. The eleventh-hour nature of the device registers a panic over Weiner's apparent need to get the formation in under the wire. Like the ending of an Harlequin romance novel, it arrives as an unexamined imperative rather than a reasoned dénouement. In fact, it's actually worse than a Harlequin because at the very least, we can pick up another Harlequin novel and get back to the tensions we so desperately loved, forgetting the clockwork coupling that occurred on the last page. Here, we enjoy no such luxury since there are no episodes left. Weiner strands us with the most cliché method of tying up loose ends imaginable. 

Second, the formation fails to preserve any of the ambiguity that made Mad Men such a compelling watch to begin with. As Sean O'Sullivan writes, "the synthetic unity of a show...depends fully on...the specific ways in which the variances and interruptions force us to navigate seriality’s inevitable lacunae of space and time – the negotiation among different physical environments, and the temporal omissions within and between episodes, and within and between seasons." (120)* The keyword here is "force" because Mad Men required the viewer to do more narrative bookkeeping than most series - filling in gaps, making connections, gaining one's bearings, determining time and even space, etc. With Stan and Peggy expressing their love for one another (finally!), Weiner shuts the door on this story thread. There's nothing left to negotiate. 

This may seem a preposterous thing to say about a series finale. But negotiation need not cease with the literal end of an episode or series. Indeed, one measure of a great TV show is its ability to keep us negotiating with it long after we've taken it all in. Compare how Weiner afford us a last glimpse of Betty Draper (January Jones). We know she will soon die of cancer. But instead of a Terms of Endearment-caliber death in a hospital, Weiner shows her smoking at the kitchen table while her daughter Sally  (Kiernan Shipka) does the dishes. No dialogue. Sally's future is unknown and thus the moment vibrates with possibility instead of clicking into a preordained narrative position. Even Roger Sterling's (John Slattery) coupling with Marie (Julia Ormond) has a breezy, almost matter-of-fact aura to it that lies in marked distinction to the doctrinaire formation of the Peggy and Stan couple. In Broadway terms, Roger and Marie sing a fine number that only Great American Songbook scholars recall whereas Peggy and Stan blast out the 11 o'clock number or the bombastic Act One showstopper. 

As for other preordained narrative developments, it seemed inevitable that the series would have to end in the west and not just the west but California. And not just California but the very edge of the continental United States. With America fully colonized by 1970, the only frontier left for Don Draper (Jon Hamm) to conquer is the one within. So he must perform yoga on a rocky precipice, the Pacific Ocean raging behind him. Weiner then cuts to the infamous Coca-Cola ad repurposing the New Seekers' "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)." Robert Christgau deemed the song the worst single of 1972 presumably in disgust over how easily Madison Ave. was able to commodify the 1960s counterculture. And indeed, that's how it sits at the very end of the series. 

Most critics and viewers (and Hamm too) assume that Draper goes back to McCann Erickson to create the ad (indeed, McCann Erickson is the agency that did actually create the ad) and co-opt the inner light for the soda-swilling masses. I find the maneuver too conceptual for such a tight connection. And pinning its effect to a Draper cause drains the device of its ambiguity. Given the gargantuan disappointment of the Stan/Peggy thread, I'm inclined to ignore the final moments and even main characters and flash back over the ambiguities and expansions I loved so dearly. 

For instance, Bob Benson (James Wolk) was a far more compelling creation than Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt). If a character is known to be gay, then you can punish that character, a fate that befell Salvatore and, of course, Batt who was out of a job once Salvatore was axed. But Benson never showed his cards and was thus fascinating from the jump. With his fixed smile and potentially evil machinations, he was queer not gay, unable to be categorized or commodified. And the secretaries served as an unexpected Greek chorus to let some air out of the main stories. Ida Blankenship (Randee Heller) and Caroline (Beth Hall) were desexualized workers who could get away with not being unduly preoccupied with the allure of Don and Roger. Shirley points to a world outside when she exits the series by telling Roger "advertising is not a very comfortable place for everyone." And while Meredith (Stephanie Drake) initially came off as a ditz, she revealed more layers as the series progressed. In the final episode, she echoes Shirley when she tells Roger that “there are a lot of better places than here [i.e., advertising].”

As for Joan (Christina Hendricks), probably my favorite main character, I wanted more of and for her. She always deserved far more than she got but Weiner used her as a measure of the two-steps-forward/six-steps-back nature of women in the workplace. Still, I hope what I'm detecting is happiness in her final moment as she runs her own business out of the apartment she never moved from despite financial windfalls below her station. 

Once more - one of the greatest television series of all time. Now to check out The Sopranos again to see if it's still toppermost in my eyes. 

* Sean O'Sullivan, “Space Ships and Time Machines: Mad Men and the Serial Condition,” in Mad Men: Dream Come True TV. Gary R. Edgerton, ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

Gunn (Blake Edwards, 1967)

Known at least on the poster as Gunn...Number One! in the hopes of kicking off a franchise that never happened, this feature-length update of Blake Edwards' Peter Gunn television show feels at times like Edwards' attempt to keep up with avant-garde cinema. Before even a minute has passed, we're treated to a spatially, visually, and narratively incoherent image - a shiny half circle into which a distorted pair of eyes enters. Later, Edwards will introduce a scene with a zoom in to a red line painted on the far end of the room. What, was Paul Sharits making him jealous? 

MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD!

The stylistic perversity threatens to overwhelm the story (apparently a rehash of the first Peter Gunn episode) but unfortunately, the story wins especially at the climax when Gunn (Craig Stevens) rehashes the entire crime scheme to the secret villain Daisy Jane (Marion Marshall). Marshall gets a special credit billed as M.T. Marshall presumably because Daisy Jane turns out to be a man in river gambler madam drag. Gunn rips off her wig and Daisy engages him in a death battle, taking her place among the dozens of murderous drag queens in Hollywood history. It's remarkable Vito Russo missed an opportunity to dump on this aspect of the film in his essential The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981) even though 2023 viewers might approach the scene with more nuance (or more vitriol). 

Still, it's a visual treat throughout and Edwards puts Gunn through a series of odd paces - pelted with racquetballs or ensconced in a photo booth while receiving some key information from an informant. And there's plenty of star wattage to help the 94-minute episode go down. Opera diva Helen Traubel plays a saucy proprietor of a nightclub. Laura Devon sings a few torchy numbers. Ed Asner plays Ed Asner. Screenplay co-written by William Peter Blatty. Music by Henry Mancini and, to represent those kooky kids of the day, the Gordian Knot. Good show.

Note: No, of course I didn't see a pristine print of the thing. But I doubt any print would place it above Edwards' next film, The Party (1968). 

Grade: A-minus