Category Archives: Film, TV, and Theatre

Film, TV, and Theatre

Fry and Laurie’s “John and Peter” sketch (1990)

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Many a comedy double act or group cut its teeth as members of the Cambridge Footlights, the amateur theatrical club run by students of Cambridge University (and which has been going since 1883) – Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, the Goodies, and a surprising number of media personalities active on our television screens today. One pair of former Footlighters pursue their careers individually these days but for a long time throughout the 1980s and 90s their obvious comedic chemistry was exploited to great effect as a double act. I’m talking about Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who collaborated in such programmes as the Black Adder series, Jeeves and Wooster, and four series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

A Bit of Fry and Laurie was a sketch show cast for a post-Alternative comedy audience, in which elaborate wordplay and innuendo were staples of its material. Both performers brought great characterisation to the sketches, and were equally funny, though Fry’s well-known intellectual heft was clearly present throughout the series.

My favourites of the series’ characters were John (Fry) and Peter (Laurie), who are high-powered, hard-drinking business execs, engaged in backs-to-the-wall, boardroom hard talk, the joke being that their location, unlike London or New York, is completely nondescript (Uttoxeter) and their business distinctly underwhelming (a health club). The characters are of course a parody of hard-driving businessmen of the time, drawing inspiration from such boardroom soap operas as Man at the Top and Howards’ Way, in which characters’ bombast is delivered with such complete seriousness, and as if the fate of the free world depended on it, about matters that the viewers know are of no real consequence.

John and Peter’s loud catchphrase was “Damn!” and several increasingly ridiculous variations on this theme (“Three pints of Damn and a chaser of Hell-blast!”), as they uncover some new business-critical twist or plot engineered by arch-rival Marjorie, John’s ex-wife. This marvellous premise is summed up thus:

“Dammit John, I’m talking about the big idea. The dream that you and I shared. The dream of a health club that would put Uttoxeter on the goddamned map once and for all”

Incidentally, Uttoxeter is in Staffordshire…

Film, TV, and Theatre

Reza Badiya’s Title Visualisation for Hawaii Five-0 (1968)

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When I was growing up in the seventies, after a decade of mainly black and white television, there was a plethora of new, colourful, exciting TV dramas: Mission: Impossible, The Six Million Dollar Man, Starsky and Hutch, The Champions, The Persuaders, Kojak…the list goes on.

Most of these of course were American-produced and the industry churned them out to a public hungry for entertainment. A little-known name outside of the TV industry is Iranian director Reza Badiyi, but he deserves recognition from those of us who devoured hours of the aforementioned shows, for Badiyi helmed literally hundreds of hours of episodic TV. He directed more than 430 episodes of television, including multiple episodes of Mission: Impossible, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Rockford Files, Hawaii Five-O, The Incredible Hulk, T.J. Hooker, and Cagney and Lacey.

Badiyi began his American career as a cinematographer, having moved from Iran in 1955 and graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in film-making. He worked with directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman before moving increasingly into television. No-one would claim Badiyi’s work in the seventies as great works of art but, with their breakthrough visual effects, they were certainly culturally significant for young viewers like myself.

To represent Badiyi’s oeuvre I have chosen the title visualisation (i.e. the opening and closing credits) for Hawaii Five-0. If you were alive in the seventies, there’s a very high probability these images will be very familiar to you. Backed by an irresistible score by Richard Shores, Badiyi used dynamic, zooming photography, copious imagery from Hawaii (the 50th State – Five-0 – get it?), with cool quick-cuts and freeze-frames to set the viewer up nicely for the upcoming crime-defeating drama. Who can forget the fast zoom-in to the top balcony of the Ilikai Hotel, with Jack Lord’s Steve McGarrett turning to face the camera?

For the closing credits, Badiyi chose to use these iconic outrigger canoeists battling the surf (anyone remember sitting in a line of like-minded plonkers on a dance floor, paddling like crazy and singing duh-duh-duh-duh duhhhh duhhhh…?)

All in all, a bravura title visualisation by one of the most prolific directors of episodic series television in the history of the medium. Book him, Danno!

Reza Badiyi

Film, TV, and Theatre

The HAL 9000 Scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

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There’s been a lot of talk in the media recently about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Facebook uses it for targeted advertising, photo tagging, and news feeds. Microsoft and Apple use it to power their digital assistants, Cortana and Siri, and Google’s search engine has utilised AI from the beginning. There appears to be something of a chase to create flexible, self-teaching AI that will mirror human learning and apparently transform our lives.

There have been some big-name doom-mongers on this subject, however. Elon Musk thinks AI is probably humanity’s “biggest existential threat”. Stephen Hawking fears that AI may “replace humans altogether”. Bill Gates agrees with both of them. Me, I’m not so sure; surely you can always turn a machine off?…(on the other hand, have you ever tried closing Skype?)

This concept of computers/machines gone bad is a well-worn theme in science fiction, with the Terminator series of films an obvious example, but it was back in 1968, in Stanley Kubrik and Arthur C Clarke’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey, that we were introduced to our first electronic wrong ‘un, HAL 9000. HAL (from Heuristically programmed ALgorithm, apparently, though some have conjectured an easily-decrypted code version of IBM) is a sentient computer controlling the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft on its mission to Jupiter.

HAL is initially regarded as another member of the crew, engaging genially with its human colleagues, playing chess with them and so on. However, he begins to malfunction in subtle ways. As the malfunctioning deteriorates, the crew members discuss the possibility of disconnecting HAL’s cognitive circuits. Unfortunately, HAL can read lips and discerns their plan, and his programmed directives to protect the mission lead him to reason that he must kill the astronauts. In this classic scene, crew member Dave Bowman is outside the main craft in a “pod” and is seeking re-entry, asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. HAL (voiced chillingly by Douglas Rain) isn’t playing ball…

Film, TV, and Theatre

Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

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Writer/director John Hughes had had a series of successful movies in the eighties featuring teenage angst and adventures (Weird Science, Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) when he embarked on this, the more grown-up movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It’s a comedy, and it is indeed packed with comic set pieces, but it’s a lot more than that: it has a genuine pathos and poignancy.

Inspired by an actual hellish trip that Hughes had personally experienced, in which various delays and diversions had kept him from getting home for an entire weekend, Hughes apparently wrote the first sixty pages of the script in just six hours. Steve Martin plays Neal Page, a marketing executive desperate to get back home to Chicago to see his wife and kids for Thanksgiving, and who along the way becomes saddled with shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith (John Candy). Mishaps befall the two throughout their travels, and they endure every indignity that modern travel can inflict on its victims.

The success of the movie is founded on the essential natures of its two principal actors: Steve Martin and John Candy embody themselves, and this is key to why the film is able to reveal so much heart and truth. Neal spends the movie trying to peel off from Del, whilst Del spends the movie having his feelings hurt and then coming through for Neal anyway. It is road trip and buddy movie rolled into one, done to highly comedic effect, and my family returns to it time after time.

The last scenes of the movie deliver the emotional payoff we have been half-expecting all along. Neal undergoes a kind of moral rebirth: we know he has learned a valuable lesson about empathy, and there is true poignancy in the scene where Neal finds Del waiting alone on the L platform. Incidentally, there is a moment just before this scene where Neal, on the train home before he returns to find Del, starts to laugh quietly to himself as he recalls their misadventures. It’s wonderfully natural and it turns out that there was good reason for that: unbeknownst to Steve Martin, Hughes had kept the cameras rolling in between takes on the Chicago train, while Martin was thinking about his next lines, and in so doing captured this unguarded moment. I include it, along with a few of the other great scenes in the two-part montage below.

 

Film, TV, and Theatre

The Sales Speech in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

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David Mamet’s two-act play, Glengarry Glen Ross, was first staged in 1983, and won the Pulitzer Prize, remaining something of a classic of contemporary theatre. It was adapted for film in 1992, by Mamet himself, and it is almost a word-for-word transcription of the play, with the one exception being this: the most famous, most quoted, and most popular scene of the movie, which is the subject of this blog, didn’t exist in the play but was written apparently to bulk out the piece to film length.

In creating the scene, Mamet arguably sets the tone for the entire movie. The movie features the pressured lives of real estate salesmen played by Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris and Alan Arkin, struggling to close deals in this toughest of tough rackets, and about to receive a visit from Blake (Alec Baldwin), the motivational speaker from Hell, who has been sent from “downtown” to read the riot act. It’s excruciating stuff; it takes a while to dawn on the salesmen just how tough this grilling is going to be (“Put that coffee down. Coffee’s for closers only…”) and we grimace at the ritual disembowelling of the poor men (“You call yourself a salesman, you son of a bitch?”).

Edifying it ain’t, but nonetheless it’s an acting masterclass from all concerned: Baldwin dishing out the flak; Lemmon like a rabbit in the headlights; Harris initially derisive and sceptical but then brow-beaten and forced to endure the spiel; Arkin submissive, silent. We can see and hear from the windows that outside is dark and the rain torrential; inside, the office is shabby and bleak and Blake is an unrelenting and pitiless tormentor. Now imagine you’ve just been told that you’re fighting to save your job in this month’s sales contest, in which first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize is “You’re fired”. It’s stark, to say the least. You wouldn’t want to be in this game…

But hey, you’re not in this game – so sit back, relax, and enjoy not being on the receiving end of this verbal maceration and instead observe the equal measures of bravado and human frailty exhibited in this wonderfully uncomfortable performance by some great American actors.

Alec Baldwin

 

 

Film, TV, and Theatre

Julie Walters in Victoria Wood’s sketch, Two Soups (1986)

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Victoria Wood’s collaborations with Julie Walters over the years spawned many a rich reward. Wood’s wit produced great ideas for characters, and Walters’ instinctive comic timing and gift for nuanced physical comedy brilliantly brought those characters to life. The series of sketches around Acorn Antiques, for example, provided the ideal showcase for Walters to ham it up as the glorious character that was Mrs Overall, or more accurately, the gloriously inept actress that played the character in this send-up of low-budget, shoddily performed, daytime soap opera.

The showcase I have selected for this blog, however, is the sketch, Waitress (popularly known as Two Soups), in which Walters plays an elderly, deaf, shaky, and painfully slow waitress, serving a couple who are only too aware one of them has a train to catch and simply want a quick meal. This simple premise, replete with possibilities for that typically British comedy of frustration, is enough for Walters to take the ball and run faster and further with it than probably even Victoria Wood imagined at first.

Witness Walters’ shuffling gait, wobbly head and fixed smile – this is physical comedy of the first order, and we’re laughing before she opens her mouth. With her bad memory and dangerously maladroit handling of the crockery, this unfit-for-purpose waitress should have hung up her apron strings years ago, but for now let’s thank the forbearance of her employer as we enjoy this infuriating but hilarious performance. Needless to say, the couple’s plans for a quick meal are thwarted.

Julie Walters
Film, TV, and Theatre

Jack Nicholson plays Badass Buddusky in The Last Detail (1973)

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Three sailors on a road trip. Two Navy lifers, portrayed by Jack Nicholson and Otis Young, are assigned to escort the hapless 18-year old recruit, Meadows (Randy Quaid), from Norfolk, Virginia, to military prison in New Hampshire, after he was caught stealing from a charity, which unfortunately for him happened to be the favourite charity of the Admiral’s wife. “Badass” Buddusky (Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Young), are given a week to carry out their duty, and initially aim to hustle Meadows to prison while keeping his per diem expenses for themselves, allowing for a bit of holiday drinking and whoring on their way back.

As the disproportionate severity of the eight-year sentence handed down to Meadows dawns upon them, Badass and Mule change their objective; now they want to show Meadows the best time of his life before he is incarcerated. Numerous shenanigans ensue, as the three eat, drink and fight their way across a naturalistic 1970s America.

Nicholson is a marvel to watch. Initially in a sour mood and underwhelmed by this “detail” that has been handed to him out of the blue, eventually the realisation of freedom sinks in and the prospect of fun beckons, at which point Nicholson ignites. His character, Buddusky, soon shows why he got his “Badass” nickname. He lives in the moment, is highly impulsive, and never squanders an opportunity for a good time, like the scene in which he spots some Marines entering the public lavatories at the station. He promptly follows them in to start a ruckus, drawing Mule and Meadows into the caper by dint of military solidarity. After battering the Marines in typically chaotic fashion they charge recklessly and hilariously out of the toilets and the station itself to seek their next adventure.

The film was nominated for three Academy Awards, but it failed to win any, and good critical notices did not translate into box office success. A few months later, Chinatown exploded onto the scene, and The Last Detail was somewhat eclipsed. Nicholson would soon go on to win an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – and quite rightly – but for me, his performance in The Last Detail is as fine an achievement as that role.

Here, we’ll see two representative scenes: first, a simple master class in how to eat and relish a hamburger, Buddusky-style; and second, the infamous bar scene in which Badass completely loses it when the bartender refuses to serve the underage Meadows and contrives to push all the wrong buttons as far as Badass is concerned. The disturbing and highly intimidating over-reaction from Badass toward the bartender is then tempered by a huge release of tension on the sidewalk afterwards as they laugh like drains at their escapade. “I am a bad ass, ain’t I?” says Buddusky. Yes sir, you certainly are.

Jack Nicholson as Badass Buddusky
Film, TV, and Theatre

Laurel & Hardy in Thicker Than Water (1935)

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Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were arguably the most successful comedy team of all time, thriving during the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. Known and loved throughout the world under a large variety of names (among them Dick und Doof
in Germany, Flip i Flap in Poland, and Cric e Croc in Italy), to the English-speaking world they were of course Laurel and Hardy: Stan the loveable simpleton and Olly the ambitious but pompous butt of many a “fine mess”.

The duo, like W C Fields and the Marx Brothers, had deep roots in stage and music
hall before making the successful transition from stage to screen. Stan Laurel began his career, when he was plain Arthur Jefferson, as Charlie Chaplin’s understudy when they were both stablemates of “Fred Karno’s army”, Karno being an influential theatre impresario and pioneer of slapstick comedy. Oliver Hardy, meanwhile, was cutting his teeth performing vaudeville and working for the Lubin motion picture production company, appearing in scores of one-reeler movies, mostly playing the “heavy”. Their paths began to cross when both worked for Hal Roach Studios in the early 1920s, but it was in 1927 that the two shared screen time together in the silent comedy films, Slipping Wives, Duck Soup, and With Love and Hisses. The positive audience reactions to the pairing was noted, and a comedy duo was born, and then cemented as they transferred so perfectly to the advent of the talkies.

Their comedy timing was impeccable, their physical comedy honed to perfection. With a pair of unmistakeable, born-for-comedy faces and physical morphology, just looking at a picture of them is enough to bring a smile to the face. Whilst so much early comedy has become dated, the comedy of Laurel and Hardy remains timeless, a whole eighty-odd years later. Testament to their enduring charm is the large group of modern-day Laurel and Hardy fans known as the “Sons of the Desert” (taken from their 1933 film of the same name) with chapters all over the world. A few years ago I took the family to a screen showing of some Laurel & Hardy reels at Birstall, and was both amused and reassured to see some of the chaps in the audience sporting the trademark Sons of the Desert fez! I was equally delighted to see my young daughters lapping up the physical comedy and giggling at these gags from a distant age.

Here, I have chosen a nice clip of the two getting into typically amusing bother, with Olly, as usual, paying for his imperious and blustering treatment of Stan, by coming off considerably the worst. It’s from the 1935 film, Thicker Than Water.

 

Laurel & Hardy
Film, TV, and Theatre

Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party (1977)

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In 1977, British director, Mike Leigh worked with a small group of actors to develop an idea he had for a play, a comedy of manners, in the form of a suburban situation comedy satirising the aspiring middle class emerging in 1970s Britain. The play was called Abigail’s Party and opened at Hampstead Theatre in April; later that year, in November, a recording was made for the BBC’s Play for Today.

Beverly and Laurence (Alison Steadman and Tim Stern) are holding a drinks party for their new neighbours Angela and Tony (Janine Duvitski and John Salthouse), along with another neighbour, Sue (Harriet Reynolds), whose teenage daughter Abigail (whom we never see) is holding a party next door. Leigh got his actors to build their characters through repeated improvisations and the cast largely constructed their own characters’ back stories themselves. The result is a rich tapestry of characterisation.

Alison Steadman’s aspirational Beverly is the star of the show. She slinks like a cat around her kitsch living room, cigarette and drink in hand, and you just know she’s feeling sophisticated and oh-so-modern. She’s got the latest gadgets in her kitchen but doesn’t know how to use them. She has the rug, the drinks cabinet and built-in record player, the cigarette case on the coffee table, along with a host of other pretensions…in her mind, she has clearly “arrived”, though her Estuary English points perhaps to a different background: a former life as a department store cosmetics demonstrator. She dominates her husband who, though he has clearly made her lifestyle possible by working long hours as an estate agent, is constantly hen-pecked and undermined by Beverly, to the extent that he becomes increasingly neurotic as the play progresses. The cracks in the suburban facade are evident.

The plays is at turns amusing and excruciating, especially to those of us old enough to have had some real-life insight into seventies suburbia. Watch this glorious scene as Beverly, with barely-veiled irritation at her husband’s lack of pliancy, cajoles him to put contemporary crooner Demis Roussos onto the record player (could Mike Leigh have picked a funnier example of an inherently-seventies artiste?).

So please…do you think we can have Demis Roussos on…?

 

The cast of Abigail’s Party
Film, TV, and Theatre

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Amy Archer in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

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The Hudsucker Proxy is a 1994 fantastical comedy film by Ethan and Joel Coen. Sidney J Mussberger (Paul Newman), the new head of the hugely successful corporate monolith, Hudsucker Industries, in Fifties-era New York, comes up with a brilliant plan to make a lot of money: appoint a moron to run the company. When the stock falls low enough, Sidney and his friends can buy it for pennies, then take over and restore it to its former fortunes. They choose Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), who has just started in the mail room, but soon, tough reporter Amy Archer smells a rat and begins an undercover investigation of Hudsucker Industries.

The Coens’ sense of the aesthetic is supreme, their knowing references witty to the extreme, and their style all their own. This movie, despite being a box office flop, is packed with delicious highlights but today’s blog focuses on the brilliant performance by Jason Jennifer Leigh. Leigh plays Amy Archer, the hardnosed reporter willing to do anything to get a good story, even going undercover to gain the trust of the über-naïve Norville. In the newsroom, she’s bold, sassy, and will inform anyone listening about her Pulitzer Prize. In a man’s environment, she’s the most capable of the lot and, as we’ll see, she can simultaneously talk on the phone to the chief, type a story, solve crossword puzzles, and fence fellow reporter Smitty with smart, fifties-hip wordplay.

If the concept of the quick-tongued, ace female reporter feels familiar, it should; in the great tradition of newspaper movies, Leigh is channelling a cross between Jean Arthur in Mr Deeds Goes to Town and Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. In this scene, she has inveigled herself into Norville’s office and contrives to win his trust, playing the vulnerable maiden in distress and pretending to be “a Muncie girl”. Then cut to tough Amy in the newsroom, multi-tasking spectacularly and mocking the patsy, Norville. You can be sure her heart will soften in the end, but for now Leigh nails the stereotype character with aplomb.

Jennifer Jason Leigh as Amy Archer