Film review: The Wrong Box (1966)

This is an odd film.  I was led to it by researching Wilfrid Lawson, the actor who played the Doolittle Sr. in Pygmalion, and it was reported that he was a scene stealer in this film.  Not having heard of it, I was immediately impressed with its cast list (Michael Caine, Ralph Richardson, John Mills, (pauses for breath) Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers AND Tony Hancock!)  Well, let's just say it doesn't quite live up to that (or the myriad other British character actors, like Leonard Rossiter, who have blink-and-you'll-miss-them roles), although it has its charms.  It was directed by Bryan Forbes, and so also features his wife Nanette Newman in the major female role.  Basically, the premise (apparently from a book co-written by Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson (!)) is that the only two survivors of a tontine are the Finsbury brothers played by Ralph Richardson (as an incredibly boring fact-collector) and John Mills (permanently peevish, and bed-and-debt-ridden), who live next-but-one to each other in London.  Mills is grandfather to the Michael Caine character (curiously milksop-ish, given his snake-eyes that make him look like he's perpetually contemplating murdering someone) who is a medical student, and boss to Lawson's butler, Peacock.  Richardson is "uncle" to brothers Cooke and Moore (the former, a scheming egg-collector called Maurice, is clearly the brains, while the latter is just a skirt-chaser) who are desperate to get the money, and unrelated orphan Julia, played by Newman.  Notable episodes in the film include a head-on crash between two steam trains (that results in the death of the Bournemouth Strangler, who is (don't ask) dressed in Richardson's coat, so that Cook and Moore think their uncle has died and they've lost the tontine, so they ship the corpse home.  At the same time, somebody is returning a statue to the Mills/Caine household (they stay afloat by selling off their house's contents) and the crates are delivered to the wrong houses.  Caine opens The Wrong Box and is also convinced that his uncle has been killed.  It all gets very complicated.  Peter Sellers is a dotty (corrupt, abortion-performing) doctor, who lives with hundreds of cats, and Hancock shows up practically at the end of the film as a police detective.  I wouldn't recommend anyone seeking it out, although I did laugh at a couple of lines, including when Caine is asked if he's part of the ruling class and says no but that he's studying to be a doctor because his grandfather said that if he can't join the ruling class, the next best thing is to deplete its numbers.  You can read the script here, if you like.

Film review: The Fortune Cookie (1966)

This one should be a winner: it's Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in their first pairing!  In a film by Billy Wilder!  And it's a cynical comedy!  And it certainly had its moments, but somehow it didn't really do it for me.  Perhaps part of the problem is that it's squarely a sixties movie and I just think Wilder's sensibility works better in the 40s and 50s.  Or perhaps it's because I didn't really know who to root for - let me explain.  The film begins at a Cleveland Browns home game.  (Surprisingly huge stadium!  If you think about how many fewer people there were back then, it seems like the entire population of Cleveland is crammed into that stadium.  I guess there weren't that many entertainment options back then.)  A running back gets the ball and sprints up the field.  Jack Lemmon (Harry Hinkle) is a cameraman filming the action on the sideline.  Suddenly the running back gets forced off the field and clobbers Hinkle who does an impressive backflip over a rolled-up tarpaulin behind him.  He's out cold and an ambulance comes and stretchers him off.  This clearly upsets the running back (Luther "Boom Boom" Jackson) who can't seem to pay attention in the huddle as he's worrying about Hinkle.  Cut to the hospital, where Hinkle's sister, mother, brother-in-law and niece and nephew are waiting (the latter two are skateboarding around - which was jarring, as I thought skateboards were invented in the 70s).  The distraught mother (re-)tells the story of how the sister persuaded Harry to jump off the roof when they were kids and this caused Harry to have a "compressed vertebra".  At this, the brother in law (who is, of course, Walter Matthau, playing ambulance-chasing lawyer Willie Gingrich (clearly a cursed name))'s ears to prick up, and he goes to a pay phone (which he pays for by retrieving a dime his kids have just placed in a collection box for "unwed mothers" (it's a Catholic hospital)) and announces that Harry Hinkle is suing the Browns and CBS for a million dollars.  He has realized that the vertebra will (a) show up on an X-ray, and (b) it won't be obvious that he's had it since childhood.  He briefs Harry on the plot and Harry is initially dead-set against it (saying he feels fine) until his ex-wife calls to check up on him.  He bad-mouths her to Willie, who immediately sees that Harry is still carrying a torch for her and persuades him that his scheme is the way to win her back.  Almost immediately "Boom Boom" shows up, with flowers for Harry, clearly still feeling very guilty... and there you have the outlines of the plot.  Matthau's Gingrich has his eyes on the prize, but it requires shepherding Lemmon along against his better judgment.  The insurance company hires a hot-shot three-lawyer team (who have palatial offices in the same building as Gingrich's squalid, cramped office, yet are clearly no match for his cunning and legal knowledge) who in turn hire a private investigator to watch Hinkle like a hawk for signs of fakery.  So Hinkle has to go around in wheelchair (a fancy electric one paid for by Boom Boom, Lemmon's mastery of which provides several very funny visual moments) with a neck-and-back brace.  His wife (who is a trampy singer in a band, the leader of which she ran off from Hinkle to be with) shows up and is instantly wise to Gingrich's scheme and just wants in on it to jump start her stalled career, but convinces Hinkle that she's reformed and loves him and wants to get back together.  She displaces Boom Boom, who has become Hinkle's mother hen, even cooking for him and acting as his physical therapist, and whose focus (and sobriety) has gone to pot.  And therein lies my problem: Hinkle clearly feels bad about how his faking is affecting the good-hearted football player, so it's hard not to want the truth to come out, but at the same time we're rooting for Matthau's scheming Gingrich to win one over the pompous lawyers upstairs from him.  This is all in keeping with Wilder's cynical world view (and a reminder of the excellent Carole Lombard film Nothing Sacred) but somehow it just makes me anxious.  Lemmon and Matthau are excellent, of course (although Lemmon isn't given as much to do as you'd like - although the scene when he finally gives up the pretense is pretty epic) but they're not helped that much by the supporting cast (except maybe the lumbering private investigator, who finally gets Hinkle to crack by the rather jarring tactic of using racist insults about Boom Boom), none of whom went on to much.  All in all, some great moments, but decidedly a second-tier Wilder film.

Films review: My Fair Lady (1964) and Pygmalion (1938)

Backstory: Frederick now likes movie musicals.  Blame Wall-E, which, as those who've seen it (which should be all of you - it's the best postapocalyptic dystopian science fiction film for kids ever) will know features several snippets from a musical, specifically Hello Dolly (the 1969 version starring Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau and pre-Frank-Spencer Michael Crawford).  Intrigued, I ordered the blu-ray of it and it quickly became one of F's favorite films (it has just occurred to me that it is probably not coincidental that "Dolly" rhymes with "Wall-E").  Casting around for similar experiences, I next ordered Oliver! and (perhaps you saw this coming) My Fair Lady.  Let me just say this: musicals are long.  They all seem to have actual intermissions built in to the disks (you'd think this wouldn't be necessary when you can pause the thing at any point).  Anyway, My Fair Lady.  Practically a Christmas Classic in my childhood (that and The Sound of Music - also BLOODY long) and I realized that I hadn't actually seen it since then.  I had very fond recollections of it, largely Audrey Hepburn related, and the musical numbers remain toe-tapping (and Jeremy Brett - you know, Sherlock Holmes! - is in it as Freddy, the young suitor), but we decided to watch Pygmalion (the 1938 film version of the Shaw play starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller) after Frederick went to bed and to my surprise it was superior in just about every measure (despite the fact that the dialog of MFL is almost word-for-word the same for the most part).  (We had Pygmalion as part of our "50 Years of Janus Films" set that we'll finish working through by about 2050.)  The main problem with MFL is that the central relationship between Rex Harrison (excellent) and Audrey Hepburn (woefully miscast, I now realize - still, we'll always have Roman Holiday) just doesn't work.  And with the gorgeous young Jeremy Brett right there as an alternative, the idea of Eliza going back to Higgins at the end (after the way he's treated her!) is positively icky.  Harrison is wonderful, but he's too old (and a little too brutal) for Eliza.  Whereas Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller just seem much more compatible (and the Freddy in Pygmalion is a comically inept Hooray Henry and thus no real alternative).  I get Leslie Howard mixed up with Trevor Howard, so I was expecting to see the actor I just watched being terribly brave in Brief Encounter, but this Howard is a much more nimble comic actor, and, while I love Rex Harrison's reading of the lines, he just isn't very likeable, whereas Howard manages to be in spite of himself.  And Wendy Hiller, while her cockney accent is almost as bad as Hepburn's (Hepburn was Dutch, Hiller was from Cheshire), is a revelation.  She's not what you'd call conventionally attractive, but she's so lively and believable that her Eliza seems so much more real, and her breakdown after the "triumph" of the ball where her performance fools Higgins' Hungarian protege, is accordingly much more affecting.  Oh, and while Stanley Holloway is great in MFL, the actor who plays Eliza's father in Pygmalion, is, as his imdb profile says, a scene-stealer indeed (and actually born ten years AFTER Holloway, who was 74 in MFL - was everyone in that film too old?).  The ending of Pygmalion is identical to MFL, which is sub-optimal, as it's a betrayal of Eliza (and apparently Shaw hated it), but, as I said, Hiller and Howard have such chemistry that you almost forgive it.  (She went on to have a very long career, mostly on the stage, where she was to Shaw what Billie Whitelaw was to Beckett, but he, sadly, was shot down by the Germans in 1943.) So, long story short: if you like the musical, watch Pygmalion anyway and just buy the soundtrack album.
(Minor differences between the two: the "it's my belief they done the old girl in" scene is at Higgins' mother's house in Pygmalion rather than Ascot, so no "move your blooming arse" line, but instead Eliza says "bloody", which (Jami informs me) was the first utterance of said expletive committed to celluloid.  Also, instead of Eliza bumping into her father in his wedding finery in Covent Garden, he shows up to Mother Higgins' house and everybody agrees to go to the wedding.  Also the opening scene of the film lays things out a bit better than MFL does, and has Higgins meeting Colonel Pickering at the same time he meets Eliza, and it introduces Freddy at the same time so that he doesn't just appear out of nowhere midway through the film as he does in MFL.)

RIP Pretzel, best of ducks

Pretzel was with us from one day old until today.  When his (her-)life-partner Zachary had to be put down, the vet told Jami that she was an OLD duck.  Well, Pretzel must have been triple digits in duck years by that measure.  First we thought he would never recover from her loss, then we thought he would never be nice to the youngsters we got to replace her, and then we thought they'd never be able to manage without him.  Well, now they have to.  Over the past few weeks his legs started to fail him, and this week they gave out entirely, so that we had to lift him in and out of his house in the mornings and evenings and he would just drag himself around from food bowl to pond.  He was a mere shadow of the duck that used to nip a person's achilles tendon demanding to be thrown high into the air (always managing to land in the pond).  Godspeed, fair fowl.

Why can't I have something nice? (part II)

Seems like yesterday that this happened.  Well, on Thursday IT HAPPENED AGAIN, only this time they weren't nice enough to admit it with a note.  In fact, I didn't notice at all until Jami said "what happened to your car?"  I guess I should stop parking in the student lot next to the Rec Center...

Thomas graduates!

Evening

Art Institute

Chicago!