MICHAEL ANDERSON: ANONYMOUS AUTEUR Part One

CHASE A CROOKED SHADOW (1958: Dir. Michael Anderson)

Many years ago I hit upon the idea of interviewing a prominent film director whose work I admired and who was conveniently living in the Toronto area. The name I came up with was Logan's Run director Michael Anderson and after convincing his agent that I was a true student of his oeuvre, I was granted an afternoon's audience with the then 74 year-old active filmmaker. Making the trip to his house in north Toronto was a relatively easy affair as I had grown up with friends who lived in the neighbourhood, however the thought of meeting Mr. Anderson was a daunting prospect and I was more than a little anxious as I rang the doorbell to his large suburban house. Immediately I was welcomed in by his lovely wife and shown into a well-appointed sitting room, where I waited patiently until a few minutes later when the man himself arrived. As he greeted me warmly I was struck by his slim frame and aquiline features, denoting a refinement atypical of his profession. Almost immediately he began to regale me with beguiling tales of his star-strewn life, featuring numerous legendary figures from his years in Britain and Hollywood. Noel Coward, David Lean, Michael Redgrave, Gary Cooper, Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood, David Niven, Sophia Loren, Lawrence Olivier, Richard Harris, Charlton Heston, James Cagney and many others rolled off his tongue as I prompted his memory with film titles, some nearly 50 years old. I still treasure the time I spent with this gracious and gregarious man.

Michael Anderson was born in London in 1920 to an acting family, and began his years in the film business as teenage assistant to seminal British directors Anthony Asquith and David Lean. In 1949 he made his first film, Private Angelo, co-directed with an old army chum Peter Ustinov, eventually leading to a series low of budget of directing assignments, and culminating in 1953 with the stylishly popular thriller House of the Arrow based on the novel by A.E.W. Mason (The Four Feathers). Its success led to Anderson being hired as director of the prestigious war film The Dam Busters (1954). Finally granted a substantial production budget, he was at last able to demonstrate his burgeoning directorial skills, as well as his superb eye for casting such young new discoveries as Robert Shaw and Patrick McGoohan. These talents, coupled with the crisp black and white cinematography of  Erwin Hillier, and Eric Coates' memorable main title march made the film an instant classic, catching the attention of flamboyant Hollywood producer Michael Todd, who lured him to America where he made the the Academy Award winner for Best Picture of 1956, Around The World In Eighty Days, a gargantuan production filmed in eight countries featuring over 40 star cameos. With a big international hit behind him, Anderson's future in Hollywood seemed secured but instead he chose to return to Britain for the. war film Yangtse Incident (1957), before embarking on his boldest project yet. Chase a Crooked Shadow, a U.K./American co-production, would signal the beginning of Anderson's mature period of film-making, balancing intimate dramas and thrillers with the large cast spectacles and action films that had made him famous. Here, he would start to fully explore the film medium, collaborating with his loyal German born cinematographer Hillier, whose early training at Berlin's UFA Studios working for auteurs F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, helped him to develop a palette of deep focus chiaroscuro photography accentuated by expressionistic camera angles and striking spacial compositions. It was a visual design perfectly suited to this dark psychological film, successfully representing the inner turmoil experienced by Anne Baxter as a woman being driven insane when a stranger (Richard Todd) arrives at her Spanish villa claiming to be her dead brother. This would be Todd's third and last starring role for Anderson following The Dam Busters and Yangste Incident, bringing his stalwart British intensity to the role of brooding mystery man. Baxter, whose career was fading fast after her Oscar-nominated performance in All About Eve (1951), uses all her talent to deliver a subtle study in madness, avoiding any grotesque histrionics that could undermine the dramatic tension of her seemingly untenable predicament. Often compared to the work of fellow Brit Alfred Hitchcock, particularly as Baxter and Todd had co-starred together in Hitchcock's Stage Fright  (1951), Chase A Crooked Shadow is a moodier though no less suspenseful work. Its atmosphere best represented by the plaintive yet ominous Spanish guitar solos performed on the soundtrack by classical virtuoso Julian Bream. Sadly, the film was unavailable in Canada when I interviewed Mr. Anderson, but having seen it several times since I continue to appreciate its artistry, and now count it among the top three films of his career. DVD REGION 2

LEE MARVIN'S GANGSTER QUARTET Part Four

CANICULE a.k.a. DOG DAY (1984: Dir. Yves Boisset)

Ten years after Prime Cut and a now aged Lee Marvin was still being chased through the wheat, albeit a continent away. Canicule is a rarely-seen French lament to the traditional gangster genre, and Marvin's last top-billed cinematic performance. Turning 60 years old, Marvin knew his career as a star was over, so he wisely accepted the lead role in this adaptation of a novel by Jean Herman, an author and occasional filmmaker whose style could best be described as the French equivalent of Southern Gothic. It had been the dream of director Yves Boisset to make a film based on Herman's unique oeuvre but in order to portray the main character of a fugitive American bank robber in rural France he needed an iconic Hollywood tough guy to provide instant familiarity and gravitas. Once again, and for the final time, Marvin slipped into the tailored suit of a hard-bitten hoodlum, but this time the violence now took on the same haggard desperation that was written over every inch of his deeply lined visage. To escape the helicopters closing in on him he takes refuge in a farm inhabited by a degenerate family whose greed and lasciviousness, make Marvin's baleful brigand look like a clergyman by comparison. They are the Gallic equivalent of Prime Cut's redneck thugs but unlike their American counterparts these French farm folk are maddeningly impulsive, forcing Marvin to question his criminal code of honour in the wake of their shocking unpredictability. It was an appropriate swan song for the well-worn Marvin, playing a man, much like the actor himself, out of fashion with the cynicism of a new generation. DVD REGION 1 & 2

LEE MARVIN'S GANGSTER QUARTET Part Three

PRIME CUT (1972: Dir. Michael Ritchie)

By 1972 Lee Marvin was a bona fide star yet he was still choosing films where he shared equal screen time with mostly younger actors like Clint Eastwood (Paint Your Wagon) and Paul Newman (Pocket Money). Michael Ritchie's Prime Cut would break that cycle with a character tailor-made for Marvin's grey-haired cool. As Irish mob enforcer Nick Devlin, Marvin is the very definition of dressed to kill, with his snazzy ties, white leather shoes, and the burnished submachine gun in an attache case, that he keeps in his limousine. From his first appearance in a crowded bar, the viewer immediately senses that there is no-one who can touch him for style, cunning, and deadly force. His worthy foe is a rebellious Kansas City racketeer played by Gene Hackman in a grinning cornpone performance that masks a frighteningly sadistic meglomania. Theirs is a conflict that represents the historical rivalries of a corrupt America, city vs. rural, homegrown vs. immigrant, and man vs. beast, amusingly staged by Ritchie with tongue firmly in cheek. It culminates in a picturesque parody of Hitchcock's North by Northwest with Marvin, and ingenue Sissy Spacek, fleeing a predatory threshing machine across acres of gleaming Alberta-shot wheat fields, accompanied by Lalo Schifrin's Dirty Harry meets Cool Hand Luke pastiche score. Conceived by director Ritchie and writer Robert Dillon as a coldly ironic black comedy, it was reshaped by its producers with a happier ending that allowed one the rare opportunity to see Lee Marvin in the role of an unabashed knight-in-shining-armor. It is a welcome humanizing touch, that in retrospect, helped to ameliorate some of the film's seedier and disturbing moments. Whether it made any difference in box office revenues is a moot point given its middling grosses, but it certainly didn't undermine the warranted cult interest that Prime Cut enjoys to this day. DVD & BLU-RAY

LEE MARVIN'S GANGSTER QUARTET Part Two

POINT BLANK (1967: Dir. John Boorman)

Rather unexpectedly, Lee Marvin won an Oscar in 1965 for the comedy film Cat Ballou, a genre that was not considered his forte up until then. It was also his first starring role in a theatrical feature, and together with the simultaneously released Ship of Fools, quickly established his credentials as a leading man. Demonstrating a healthy lack of vanity his next two films were ensemble pictures (The Professionals, The Dirty Dozen), and their undisputed box office success cemented Marvin's clout in the industry, guaranteeing him director approval and finally, his name above the title on all prints and advertising. So it was with this new-found independence that Marvin agreed to star in a film by an untested young British filmmaker John Boorman. Sharing some thematic similarities with The Killers, as well as previous co-star Angie Dickinson, Point Blank was the most modern and challenging film of Marvin's career. A near abstract and dreamlike meditation on betrayal and revenge, Boorman utilizes a bold colour palette and an alienating sense of space to foreground Marvin's unstoppable avenger, a thief double-crossed and left for dead by his partner and his wife. The script, based on Donald Westlake's pulp novel The Hunter, was largely re-written without credit by Boorman in consultation with Marvin, forgoing the novel's inviting San Francisco locations for the cold cement of Los Angeles, mercilessly captured by Blake Edwards' veteran cinematographer Philip Lathrop (Peter Gunn, Experiment in Terror). Towering over the kinetic narrative, Marvin imbues his mostly emblematic character with an awesome and terrifying determination, while at the same time conveying the hollow impotence of a man fighting forces beyond his power and comprehension. The film was, for its time, a cinematic achievement that brought fresh energy and a European sensibility to Hollywood. Audiences didn't approve, but Marvin would show his loyalty by collaborating with Boorman the next year on a very personal examination of war and racism, Hell in the Pacific. DVD  & BLU-RAY

LEE MARVIN'S GANGSTER QUARTET Part One

Ernest Hemingway's THE KILLERS (1964: Dir. Don Siegel)

Lee Marvin has a mystique all his own, a cool cat with a threat of menace buried under his sonorous baritone utterances. Marvin had seen combat and the horrors of war haunted his every performance. As if rushing headlong toward a precipice, his most memorable characters were always looking for a way out with booze, money, or women. It was a personality molded during the course of his earlier roles, particularly starring as driven Detective Lt. Frank Ballinger on the TV Series M Squad ( 1957-1960). By the early Sixties Marvin had only achieved co-star status in features and was considered a long shot at leading man. His big break and the beginning of his jump to stardom would be a unique film entitled Ernest Hemingway's The Killers. This was a pet project of Lew Wasserman's, the former uber agent turned head honcho of Universal Pictures. He prophetically envisioned a market for films made directly for television using lesser names and smaller budgets than the studio's theatrical releases. To inaugurate this new small screen genre Wasserman hired journeyman director Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to produce and direct Universal's pioneering first effort, a very loose adaptation of Hemingway's famous short story. Siegel cast Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and his close friend John Cassavetes, while Wasserman called in a favour by asking his old client Ronald Reagan, who was already making the leap into politics, to play the villain. Deserving of its cult reputation, the film was Siegel at his best, delivering a compelling hard-boiled story with grit and verve. Slightly undermined by a limited budget which forced him to sacrifice location work for in-studio process shots, Siegel nonetheless fostered emotionally powerful work from all of his actors, including supporting players Claude Akins, Norman Fell, and youthfully eccentric Universal contract player Clu Gulagher. Not surprisingly it was Marvin who impressed the most. With his steely eyes hidden beneath stylized sunglasses, he effortlessly embodied the cold brutality of Hemingway's hit-man, while at the same time effectively establishing the cornerstones of his future on-screen persona. In tribute to Lee's disturbingly remorseless behaviour, the film was deemed too violent for broadcast, so it was released to cinemas instead, where its dark tone clashed with the depressed mood of a public recently traumatized by the assassination of their President. Denied a starring hit, Marvin had nonetheless delivered the first in his series of legendary juggernaut protagonists. DVD & BLU-RAY

MEL AS MENTOR Part Three

JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY (1984: Dir. Amy Heckerling)

Sometimes you come across a film at a certain time of life that just hits you right in the funny bone. Johnny Dangerously was such a movie, and a hit among my gang at university. It may have been the film's infectiously old fashioned absurdity or its mildly risque humor that made it so endlessly quotable for me and my friends. Eschewing the fashionably R-rated raunchiness of the Eighties, including director Heckerling's own Fast Times at Ridgemount High (1982) Johnny Dangerously delivers its high quota of verbal and visually anachronistic gags with a comedic verve that owes its origins to the Borscht-Belt legacy of Mel Brooks, mentor to the film's producer Michael Hertzberg and co-screenwriter Norman Steinberg. Steinberg was a dissatisfied copyright lawyer when a chance meeting with Mel Brooks led to a writing opportunity on Get Smart, the TV spy spoof co-created by Brooks and Buck Henry. This association led to further collaborations with Mel on Blazing Saddles (1974) and When Things Were Rotten (1975), Brooks' fondly remembered though short-lived Robin Hood sitcom. Hertzberg was Mel's former assistant director on The Producers (1968) who went on to produce three of  Brooks' subsequent films: The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles, and Silent Movie (1976). In paying homage to Mel's style, Johnny Dangerously not only milked Steinberg's comical contributions but producer Hertzberg insured its successful silliness by padding the supporting cast with numerous Brooks veterans including Peter Boyle, Ron Carey, Dom DeLuise and Richard Dimitri. Other notable cameos include Jaws scribe Carl Gottleib, Police Academy creator Neal Israel ( Heckerling's then-husband), and Halloween II director Rick Rosenthal. However it is peppy star Michael Keaton as the titular pretty boy toughie who makes the whole thing work, machine gunning his quips with a Cagney-like energy that really sells this as an affectionate send-up of Thirties Warner Bros. gangster pictures. A significant success at the time of its release, it is now more fondly remembered by its fans as the hoodlum parody that Mel never made. DVD REGION 1 & 2

MEL AS MENTOR Part Two

DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID (1982: Dir. Carl Reiner)

Despite having worked together as writers on Sid Caesar's 1950s variety televison show Your Show of Shows, and later as writer-performers of the famous skit The 2000 Year-Old Man, Carl Reiner never fully embraced the Mel Brooks style of comic parody until he had a few films under his belt as director. Perhaps he came late to the party due to a reluctance to copy his buddy Mel, who was making hits like Blazing Saddles (1974) by doing what they both had done in a short sketch format for Caesar. Reiner instead plowed his own field as an auteur with his autobiographical film Enter Laughing (1967), the profane Jewish mother comedy Where's Poppa? (1970), the George Burns hit Oh God (1977) and Steve Martin's debut classic The Jerk (1979). Having enjoyed a fruitful previous collaboration, Reiner teamed up with Martin again for a follow-up film. In Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid  Steve's deadpan silly-ass persona is seamlessly dropped into a Forties film noir parody where he believably interacts with Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, Ava Gardner et al. via old film clips, ingeniously edited together with new scenes shot in matching black and white. Just as Mel's Young Frankenstein was a tongue-in-cheek love letter to Universal's monster cycle of the Thirties, so this project was Reiner and Martin tipping a daffy hat to Forties detective films like the The Big Sleep (1945). Hilariously absurd, the film was perhaps a bit too clever for its own good, and viewed in hindsight, its failure to connect with audiences seems less an indication of quality and more a sign of the growing cultural divide between a generation raised on noir classics and a younger more impatient demographic obsessed with pacy films full of special effects and technology. Reiner would mine similar territory ten years later with the amusing sex thriller spoof  Fatal Instinct. After an early screening of that movie, Reiner's friend Mel Brooks suggested a far more comically evocative title, one that might have even made it a hit: Frontal Attraction.  DVD REGION 1 & 2

MEL AS MENTOR Part One

THE ADVENTURE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES' SMARTER BROTHER (1975: Dir. Gene Wilder)

Melvin James Kaminsky a.k.a. Mel Brooks has a lot to answer for. Almost single-handedly he changed the face of American comedy with a series of taboo breaking comedies that still have the power to shock with their non-p.c. humour and juvenile vulgarity. His influence would extend to generations of imitators and acolytes, but the first film to really channel Mel's unique brand of tomfoolery, was this hilarious Sherlock Holmes pastiche. By gathering together talent from previous Brooks productions, director-screenwriter Gene Wilder, star of The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein (co-written with Brooks), created an almost perfect copy of a Mel Brooks film without Mel's name appearing anywhere in the credits. From Madeline Kahn doing a Brit music hall version of her Lili Von Schtupp character from Blazing Saddles ( 1974), to Marty Feldman reprising his guileless sidekick from Young Frankenstein (1974), and finally Dom DeLuise hamming it up as a blackmailing Italian opera singer in the same larger-than-life style as his Russian orthodox priest from The Twelve Chairs (1970), Wilder successfully revisited the same style of endearingly zany comedy that had resulted from his unique partnership with Brooks. As a smart screenwriter he also knew how to exploit himself as leading man, particularly in featuring the championship fencing skills this young Anglophile had acquired during his student days at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Casting in a Conan Doyle interpretation is crucial and like other successful parodies, this film contains such a high calibre of British thespians in all of the featured roles that they could well have performed in a dramatic version of  the same story, including Roy Kinnear, Wilder's previous co-star from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), and Douglas Wilmer, nimbly lampooning his BBC TV Sherlock Holmes role from the Sixties. One of a small group of films that never fail to make me laugh out loud, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother  is a worthy successor to the movie madness of Mel Brooks. A goofy, naughty, romantic romp that begins with a profane Queen Victoria and ends with the three stars hopping around like kangaroos in a public park. DVD & BLU-RAY