The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 1969)

Maggie Smith and Pamela Franklin in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Cast: Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Pamela Franklin, Gordon Jackson, Celia Johnson, Diane Grayson, Jane Carr, Shirley Steedman. Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen, based on her play and a novel by Muriel Spark. Cinematography: Ted Moore. Production design: John Howell. Film editing: Norman Savage. Music: Rod McKuen. 

My problem with the title character of the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is that she seems to have sprung full-blown -- mannerisms, catchphrases ("I am in my prime"), ideology and all -- from the imaginations of the people who created her, screenwriter Jay Presson Allen and actress Maggie Smith. I'm no more able to envision a backstory, a childhood, or an inner life for her than I am for a Dickens character like Mr. Micawber. At least in Muriel Spark's novel there are hints of something more, but they haven't translated well to the screen. Which is not to say that Smith didn't deserve her Oscar for playing the role; it's a fascinating, nuanced performance, from Jean Brodie's initial dominance to her comeuppance to her final defiance. If we don't know how Jean came to imagine herself an Übermensch, that's our problem, the film eventually suggests. Better to sit back and watch some fine performances: Robert Stephens as the randy art teacher, the always wonderful and welcome Celia Johnson as the headmistress, and 19-year-old Pamela Franklin convincingly transforming the 12-year-old into the post-pubescent student whom Jean underestimates. But anathema upon the producer or whoever decided to commission Rod McKuen to write a goopy song that unaccountably was nominated for an Oscar. At least it plays only over the end credits when you can easily escape it.

 

Travels With My Aunt (George Cukor, 1972)

Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen in Travels With My Aunt

Cast: Maggie Smith, Alec McCowen, Louis Gossett Jr., Robert Stephens, Cindy Williams, Robert Flemyng, José Luis López Vázquez, Raymond Gérôme. Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen, Hugh Wheeler, based on a novel by Graham Greene. Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe. Production design: John Box. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Tony Hatch.

Graham Greene's novel Travels With My Aunt is a contribution to the "wacky aunt" genre whose most popular constituents include Arsenic and Old Lace and Auntie Mame. Greene, a more substantial writer than the authors of either of those works, added his usual layers of international intrigue and espionage to the story of a mild-mannered bank clerk dragooned into risky business by his elderly aunt -- who may in fact be his mother. The film version jettisons most of Greene's subtext and a good deal of his plot, especially toward the end of the film. The project began with director George Cukor's interest in the book and his hope that he could persuade Katharine Hepburn to play Aunt Augusta. For a time Hepburn was interested even to the point of helping write a screenplay, but the original deal fell through. It was revived for Maggie Smith, playing to her strength as a specialist in eccentric and imperious women, which helped her win an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 1969). But Smith was in her late 30s, much too young for the film's Aunt Augusta, so she is heavily made up and affects a drawn-down mouth and a fluty treble for much of the role. (She was not too young for the flashbacks that show Augusta in her earlier years -- scenes that may have would have been impossible for Hepburn.) Smith was also nine years younger than the actor playing her putative nephew, Alec McCowen, who seems a little ill at ease in some of the film and never quite makes Henry's transition from mouse to lion convincing. The best performances in the film, surprisingly, are given by the American actors, Louis Gossett Jr. as Augusta's lover Wordsworth and Cindy Williams as the hippie known as Tooley. Though Travels With My Aunt fails to capture the spirit and depth of Greene's novel, suffers from miscasting, and ends weakly, it has some amusing moments and some opulent views of Paris locations. 

Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)

Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Marnie

Marnie Edgar: Tippi Hedren
Mark Rutland: Sean Connery
Sidney Strutt: Martin Gabel
Bernice Edgar: Louise Latham
Lil Mainwaring: Diane Baker
Mr. Rutland: Alan Napier
Susan Clabon: Mariette Hartley
Sailor: Bruce Dern

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Marnie, once dismissed as just a stew of melodrama and pop psychology, has undergone a wholesale re-evaluation in recent years, much of it spurred by revelations about Alfred Hitchcock's sexual harassment of Tippi Hedren. Now it's often seen as not only one of his most revealing films about his personal obsessions -- second perhaps only to Vertigo (1958), which it much resembles -- but also one of his greatest. Its champions include the New Yorker's Richard Brody and filmmaker Alexandre Philippe. In the introduction to a recent showing of Marnie on Turner Classic Movies, Philippe even compared Hedren's performance to that of Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001). I wouldn't go that far. In fact, the most I'm willing to say is that Marnie is a very odd duck of a movie, one that just thinking about for a while can give me the creeps, especially in these times when each day seems to bring a new revelation about powerful men and their treatment of vulnerable women (and men). That's why the key to Marnie seems to me not so much Marnie herself but Mark Rutland. Hedren is very good in her role, fully playing up her character's ever-present self-consciousness, born of being the constant object of the male gaze. But the film turns on an actor's ability to make Mark's obsession with Marnie, his persistence in trying to treat her disorder, and the breakdown of his endurance when he rapes her into something both credible and meaningful. I doubt that even Hitchcock's most gifted leading men, i.e., Cary Grant and James Stewart, could have brought off the role with much success. Sean Connery brings his Bondian smirk to the part, which heightens our sense of Marnie's fear of men, but also undercuts what should be at least a plausible interest on his part of treating her illness. There's no gentleness in Connery's performance, so that even Mark's attempts to win her over -- buying her beloved horse, for example -- look like power plays. But Marnie's response to Mark is equally perverse: After the rape, she tries to drown herself in the ship's swimming pool, and when he asks why she didn't just jump overboard, she replies, "The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish." Not only is the reply nonsensical but it also underscores the truth: The idea was obviously to let herself be found, either to be rescued or by her death to score another point against men. So it's clear that Marnie is the kind of film that invites exhaustive comment, which is not exactly the same thing as saying it's a great film, or even a good one. To my mind, it's a showcase of Hitchcockian technique without heart or wit. It has some fine touches, such as the scene in which Marnie goes to rob the Rutland safe and we watch as she goes about it on one side of the screen while on the other a cleaning woman comes closer and closer to discovering her. Once again, Hitchcock makes us root for someone who's doing something we should disapprove of, but there's also something overfamiliar about it: We saw something like it in Psycho (1960), when Norman tries and almost fails to sink the Ford containing Marion's body in the swamp. But there it was an important alienating moment; here it just seems like a trick to build suspense in a film that doesn't particularly need it. It's style for style's sake, the essence of decadence, and Marnie may be Hitchcock's most decadent film.

Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)

I've been reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which a young German engineer, recuperating in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, decides to read up on physiology. He concludes that life itself is a kind of disease, "a fever of matter." In Cabaret, Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) proclaims that "life is a cabaret, old chum." Yet given that the cabaret presided over by the Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) in the film is a febrile sort of place, there's a coherence between the two views. Director Bob Fosse would himself go on to posit a relationship between illness and creativity in All That Jazz (1979). And Sally Bowles's favorite phrase, the seeming oxymoron "divine decadence," suggests that out of decay comes something higher. What would be the opposite, after all: satanic order? In perhaps the movie's most chilling moment, Fosse gives us a closeup of a cherubic, well-scrubbed young face, the very opposite of the Master of Ceremonies's rouged and lipsticked face that  has dominated the film from the very beginning. The boy then begins to sing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," and as the camera pulls back we see that he is wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth. As the crowd at the open-air beer garden, which has to this point seemed an idyllic setting, joins in and begins to raise their arms in the Nazi salute, we view the very definition of satanic order. But enough German dialectics here; just let me say that Cabaret is one of my favorite movie musicals. As I have said before in this blog, I prefer musicals created originally for the movies, like the Warner Bros. films with the kaleidoscopic routines of Busby Berkeley, the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, or the sublime Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952), and not the musicals like West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961) or My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), that were translated to film from the stage. My admiration for Cabaret would seem to be an exception to that rule, except that when Fosse became director, he jettisoned the book that had been written by Joe Masteroff for the 1966 Broadway musical and went back to the source, Christopher Isherwood's 1939 The Berlin Stories. Jay Presson Allen had been commissioned to write the screenplay, but Hugh Wheeler (credited as "research consultant") heavily revised what she had written. Fosse also dropped many of the songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, though he added new ones by them: "Money, Money" and "Mein Herr," along with one of their older songs not from the Broadway version, "Maybe This Time." And he made the significant decision to keep the musical numbers confined to the Kit Kat Klub stage -- a touch of cinematic realism that seems essential to a story set in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. The result is a musical essentially created (or at least re-created) for the movies. It received 10 Oscar nominations and won eight of them, including awards for Minnelli, Grey, and Fosse, as well as for Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography. The only categories in which it lost were best picture and best adapted screenplay, which went to The Godfather and its screenwriters, Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola.