A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Cliff Robertson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cliff Robertson. Show all posts

Thursday, August 7, 2025

Gidget (Paul Wendkos, 1959)

Sandra Dee and Cliff Robertson in Gidget
Cast: Sandra Dee, James Darren, Cliff Robertson, Arthur O'Connell, The Four Preps, Mary LaRoche, Joby Baker, Tom Laughlin, Sue George, Robert Ellis, Joe Morrow, Yvonne Craig, Patti Kane, Doug McClure, Burt Metcalfe. Screenplay: Gabrielle Upton, based on a novel by Frederick Kohner. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Film editing: William A. Lyon. Music: Arthur Morton.

Deconstructing Gidget is an amusing pastime. This is a movie made four years after the publication of Lolita, in which Burt Vail, aka Kahuna (Cliff Robertson), a 36-year-old man, almost seduces Francie Lawrence, aka Gidget (Sandra Dee), a 17-year-old girl. (For another perspective, try to imagine Gidget being screened at the Jeffrey Epstein mansion.) Of course, the unmarried Kahuna also hangs around with a bunch of half-naked college boys. And Gidget has an androgynous friend called B.L. (Sue George) who claims to have a boyfriend we never meet. Eventually, to be sure, tomboy Gidget, who claims to be repulsed by the physical advances of boys, will succeed in the "man hunt" initiated by her other, more nubile girlfriends and land the handsome, hunky Jeffrey Matthews, aka Moondoggie (James Darren), one of Kahuna's male followers. It's a movie that launched sequels, a TV series, and a whole subgenre of beach party movies. But were we ever so naive as to take Gidget as just wholesome entertainment? 

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Obsession (Brian De Palma, 1976)




Cast: Cliff Robertson, Geneviève Bujold, John Lithgow, Sylvia Kuumba Williams, Wanda Blackman, J. Patrick McNamara, Stanley J. Reyes, Nick Krieger, Stocker Fonelieu. Screenplay: Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Art direction: Jack Senter. Film editing: Paul Hirsch. Music: Bernard Herrmann. 

Monday, May 20, 2024

The Honey Pot (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1967)

Rex Harrison in The Honey Pot
Susan Hayward in The Honey Pot
Cliff Robertson and Edie Adams in The Honey Pot

Capucine in The Honey Pot

Cliff Robertson and Maggie Smith in The Honey Pot

Rex Harrison in The Honey Pot
Cast: Rex Harrison, Cliff Robertson, Susan Hayward, Capucine, Edie Adams, Maggie Smith, Adolfo Celi. Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on a play by Frederick Knott, a novel by Thomas Sterling, and a play by Ben Jonson. Cinematography: Gianni D. Venanzo. Production design: John DeCuir. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: John Addison.    

Friday, July 7, 2017

Autumn Leaves (Robert Aldrich, 1956)

Lorne Greene and Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves
Millicent Wetherby: Joan Crawford
Burt Hanson: Cliff Robertson
Virginia Hanson: Vera Miles
Mr. Hanson: Lorne Greene
Liz Eckhart: Ruth Donnelly
Dr. Malcolm Couzzens: Shepperd Strudwick

Director: Robert Aldrich
Screenplay: Jean Rouverol*, Hugo Butler*, Lewis Meltzer, Robert Blees
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Music: Hans J. Salter
Costume design: Jean Louis

Six years before What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Robert Aldrich directed Joan Crawford in Autumn Leaves. I mention this because the image many people now have of Aldrich comes from Alfred Molina's portrayal of him in the TV series Feud that this year concentrated on the shenanigans of Crawford and Bette Davis on the set of Baby Jane. Molina's Aldrich is a punching bag for Jessica Lange's Crawford and Susan Sarandon's Davis, and a studio hack under the thumb of Stanley Tucci's snaky Jack Warner. In fact, Aldrich was a gifted director with some strong credits, including the noir version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and the action epic The Dirty Dozen (1967). Autumn Leaves shows off his strengths, especially in keeping a florid melodrama about Hollywood's idea of mental illness just this side of plausibility. He makes the most of the film's major set, Millicent Wetherby's bungalow, collaborating with cinematographer Charles Lang to keep an ordinary dwelling shadowy, confining, and off-kilter. Aldrich is particularly good at working with significant objects, and not only the typewriter that Burt Hanson so memorably hurls at Millicent. After a tense confrontation between Millicent and the increasingly unstable Burt, she goes from one room to another and there, front and center, Aldrich has placed precisely what we want to see: the telephone she should use to call for help. You sometimes sense that Aldrich is having a little fun with the film, too: He stages a beach makeout scene with Millicent and Burt kissing in the incoming tide that's an allusion to the celebrated scene with Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). Aldrich is surely aware that Crawford was offered Kerr's role but turned it down. Crawford had just turned 50 and her face was beginning to harden into the familiar mask of her later years, but she's still plausibly a good five to 10 years younger as the tense, wary, but near-fatally susceptible Millicent. Cliff Robertson, especially in his early scenes, keeps us wondering whether Burt is more than just a creep who likes to hit on older women. Unfortunately, the portrayal of mental illness is the usual Hollywood hackwork: Millicent is in denial about Burt's psychosis because she is starved for love, having sacrificed herself in her youth so she could tend to her father, an invalid. Burt's compulsive lying is the result of a trauma suffered when he discovered that his wife was having an affair with his father. And of course, a montage of medication and shock therapy is all that's needed to persuade us that Burt has been rehabbed and is ready to resume something like a normal relationship with a wife old enough to be his mother. If I were Millicent, I'd keep the typewriter locked up when not in use.

*Jean Rouverol and Hugo Butler were blacklisted. The screen credit went to their "front," Jack Jevne.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies