That’s a beautiful melody titled “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” and it was written for the movie Shane by one of Hollywood’s premier musical talents, the composer Victor Young. He was, in the words of his colleague and best friend, the equally great composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Searchers), “a very, very talented composer, excellent orchestrator, and wonderful violinist” whose seemingly endlessly inventive stream of lush melodies during a two-decade career as head of Paramount Pictures’ music department came to define Hollywood film scoring.

Born the poor son of a Chicago opera singer in 1900, a chance encounter with an old violin at the age of five (and his mother’s fateful decision to have the instrument re-stringed for him to play with) turned him into a child prodigy. When his mother died a few years later, both Victor and his sister were sent to live with their grandparents in Poland, where they attended the Imperial Conservatory in Warsaw. Both graduated with honors and played in orchestras all across Europe, but came back to America in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and postwar economic strife in Eastern Europe (at one point a starving Victor, impounded in a German prison, played a three-hour concert for the guards on his violin in exchange for a simple bowl of soup).

Back in Chicago, highly skilled but poor, Young began playing in orchestras, then leading the orchestras of silent movie houses, then recording for radio and records. In the Thirties he migrated to Hollywood and started his own successful orchestra for a few years before giving it up in exchange for film scoring at Paramount Pictures, where for the rest of his life he would be the head of the music department. He also scored for lesser studios like Republic on the side, a workload that thankfully married Young’s skills to several of John Wayne’s best films (Sands of Iwo Jima, Rio Grande, and especially The Quiet Man among them).

At Paramount, Young became legendary for his unparalleled ability to invent memorable melodies with seeming ease. “The perfect score for a dramatic picture,” he would say, “is one which the fans do not think they’re hearing but they leave the theater whistling the theme.” For Shane, he eschewed the avant-garde styles growing popular during that era in favor of tried-and-true sentimentalism and classicism.

If you’ve got an ear for old folk tunes and ballads, you’ll hear many sprinkled between Young’s distinct themes for Shane, the Starrett family, the sodbusters, and the villains. Torrey, the doomed settler played by Elisha Cook Jr., gets “Dixie” as his theme (with the local harmonica player often teasing him with quick segues into “Marching Through Georgia” for laughs). “The Quilting Party” is sung by Marian in the beginning of the movie while she’s in the cabin as Shane approaches. Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” appears on a quiet harmonica when Marian and Joey watch Shane standing in the rain. “Good-bye Old Paint” fuels Shane and Marian’s square dancing.

All of these combine with Young’s original music — “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” Marian’s lovely submotif, the triumphant tree-stump conquering music (a style echoed again when Shane and Joe conquer the equally recalcitrant Ryker gang in Shane’s epic bar fight) — to produce one of the all-time great scores. It’s criminal that there is no complete recording available on CD.

Young and several other composers — Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin — would regularly get together after work to unwind. “He loved to play cards,” Max Steiner later wrote in his (alas, still unpublished) autobiography. “and he never let his work interfere with this.” One night, soon after Steiner had proudly told his buddies about a great new theme he had just written for the picture Johnny Belinda, Young nonchalantly told his wife to turn on the radio. Steiner’s theme blared over the speaker, lavishly played by a full orchestra.

“I wrote that piece,” Young said when challenged. “Where do you come off to say that this is your tune?” Thinking he must have somehow unwittingly plagiarized one of Young’s own melodies, Steiner was horrified and thinking his entire score would have to be hastily rewritten until everyone burst out laughing and let him in on the joke: Young had heard Steiner playing it on a piano a few days earlier, surreptitiously copied it down, then made a grand recording of it. “It must have cost Victor $200 to $300,” Steiner recalled fondly, “but the gag was worth it to him. He thought the whole thing was hilarious.”

By all rights Victor Young should have spent several decades after Shane continuing to entertain audiences with his memorable scores, but it was not to be. Young was known as one of Hollywood’s most notorious workaholics. “He could record from nine in the morning until eight at night,” wrote Steiner, “have a bite to eat when he got home and then call the boys and ask them to come over and play cards. They would play until four in the morning, then get up at 7:30, go to the studio and start recording. This was Victor’s routine almost every day.” Not even his first heart attack slowed him down, and he kept up his blistering work pace until finally felled by a second heart attack at the age of fifty-six. An Oscar for the 1956 Best Picture winner Around the World in Eighty Days was awarded posthumously, his first win after twenty-two nominations.

“I gave up cards,” wrote Max Steiner later, “and have never touched them since. Victor passed on quite a few years ago, but without him, it just doesn’t seem right to play anymore. However, I have made my dear wife, my little mama, promise me that when they bury me in Old Forester Lawn, she would put a couple of packs of Pinochle cards, two Gin Rummy decks, two bottles of Bourbon and a box of cigars in my coffin in case I meet Victor where I’m going.”

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Ken Curtis sings “The Call of the Faraway Hills.” Curtis, longtime member of the John Ford Stock Company and the popular musical group The Sons of the Pioneers, sings the lyrics written to accompany the main theme for Shane.

Victor Young Collection at Brandeis University. Upon his death, Young’s wife donated his effects to Brandeis, located in Massachusetts. They have a huge collection of his records, many of them private recordings of his and others music, and it’s a shame that these haven’t been transcribed to digital media, re-mastered, and released.

Interview with Victor Young’s niece, Ms. Bobbie Fromberg. Young’s sole surviving relative tells a bit more about his personal life and legacy.

And do browse around YouTube and Amazon for Victor Young’s music, only a fraction of which is currently available.

I’ll end this week on a pair of obscure scholarly notes: The exact year of Young’s birth is open to conjecture. His entry at the IMDb says 1899. His grave states 1901. Wikipedia says 1899 in the opening paragraph of its entry on Young, then promptly contradicts itself by listing 1900 on the sidebar. My call of 1900 follows the lead of newspaper obits published at the time of his death, Paramount press releases, and this 1920 newspaper article, which describes the return of “Albert Young” from Europe (why the name change while overseas, I don’t know) and seems to insinuate he was nineteen years old as of February 18, 1920. In addition to being the most widely cited year, 1900 splits the difference between the other two possibilities, so that’s what I’m sticking with until a birth certificate appears to settle the matter once and for all.

Also, regarding Shane, there is one crucial cue in the film that wasn’t written by Young at all. Towards the end, when Shane is riding through the night into town to face Ryker and Wilson, the ominous music was taken from an old Franz Waxman score to another film. It’s effective, but if you listen carefully it’s not at all like the music heard throughout the rest of the movie, and none of the other Shane themes can be heard within it.

Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), The Sound of Music (1965), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Ten Commandments (1956), Titanic (1997), Jaws (1975), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Exorcist (1973), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1939), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Ben-Hur (1959), Avatar (2009), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Sting (1973), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), The Graduate (1967), Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), Fantasia (1941), The Godfather (1972), Forrest Gump (1994), Mary Poppins (1964), The Lion King (1994)

If you said they all made scads of money, bravo — they are the top twenty-five domestic box-office champions of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course).

But consider another similarity: surprisingly few of them relied on established A-list movie stars — the most famous, the highest paid — for their moneymaking prospects. Gone with the Wind had Gable, yes. The Sting had Newman and Redford. The Godfather, Brando.

As for most of the rest, they either featured no A-listers at all, or used them before they became bonafide movie stars. In fact, many of those pictures can take credit for sending now-famous actors into the celestial Hollywood firmament in the first place. Gone with the Wind made Vivian Leigh known to the world. The Ten Commandments did it for Charlton Heston. The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman. The Godfather, Al Pacino. Star Wars, Harrison Ford. Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews.

Meanwhile, I note that Will Smith, the current top A-lister, is nowhere to be found on this rarefied roll call. Nor is Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Jim Carrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Julia Roberts, or many others whose compensation has, at various times, made gasp-worthy headlines. Of the modern crop of top-salaried men, only Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, and wee Leonardo DiCaprio are up there, and only for movies where it can be argued that genuinely astonishing special effects and epic spectacle, brought to life by proven audience-pleasing directors, served as the real stars.

(It’s telling that four of those behind-the-scenes men — Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, and Walt Disney — are responsible for over half of the list all by themselves.)

Is this being too dismissive of the contributions of highly-paid thespians to a movie’s bottom line? I don’t think so. Do you honestly think that Jurassic Park suffered at the box office because Harrison Ford turned it down and was replaced by Sam Neill? Or let’s go straight to the very heights of heresy: if you took Gable’s indelible, iconic performance out of Gone with the Wind, or Brando’s out of The Godfather, and replaced them with other well-regarded actors, would the movies still have made that Top 25 list? If the presence of these vaunted personalities is so magical in and of itself, how does one explain all the flops starring these very same actors?

There are other considerations that trump the movie-star effect in terms of improved profits. Consider that eight of the top twenty-five films were rated G, and eleven PG (four others had a PG-13 rating, and a paltry two were rated R). It’s clear common sense: make a movie suitable for the whole family, and you’ve just doubled or tripled your ticket tally, not to mention all the extra popcorn, soda, and candy getting sluiced through the digestive tracts of America’s moppets in direct violation of nanny-state health doctrine. That’s not to say that there’s no place for R-movies, just that a film’s potential for profit should always remain a healthy multiple of its budget.

Given all this, it’s high time that the stumpy tail of A-list Hollywood stops wagging the studio dog. Ten or twenty million guaranteed, up-front dollars to an actor for any movie (much less an R-rated one) is fiscal insanity. It’s the quality and appeal of the movie as a whole that counts. Once one comes to grips with this, paying a huge salary to a well-known celebrity begins to seem like a far poorer use of a studio’s money than spending the same amount of dough on better special effects, larger advertising buys, a great script, and/or a quality crew of cinematographers, editors, sound designers, and musicians.

Patrick Goldstein, who gets a lot of criticism round these parts, wrote an excellent article last year about the trend towards reduced star salaries. Music to my ears. Movie stars will always be with us, and at their best they add a great deal to a film’s artistry. But perhaps they will once again assume their proper economic place in the hierarchy of moviemaking (less money, less creative control), allowing Hollywood’s much maligned product to get better as a result.

Touches and things. As we learned last week, Vidor equated silent films to ballet: operatic makeup, overwrought facial expressions, stylized movements, and the action punctuated by an enormous symphonic orchestra that — because the players and their instruments were live in the theater — sounded as amazing as today’s very best surround-sound systems. With the advent of synchronous dialogue, all of this vanished — people now wanted to hear actors talk, of all things! Now, rather than mounting a sort of grand operatic ballet, Vidor found himself helming something more akin to a stage play, and the change was jarring and disheartening. How could a director recapture the emotional magic of old, using mere dialogue?

The freedom accorded to Vidor by Marion’s script gave him time to think through these challenges, and ultimately work out an entirely new way of expressing himself on celluloid. For every silent-film technique he was forced to abandon, or that he preserved to his detriment (I’m thinking of his under-cranking the camera for The Champ’s final fight to artificially speed up the action, a trick that today looks horribly dated and silly), Vidor discovered another made possible because of sound. For instance, “When we were running the silent films,” Vidor explains, “faces were always in profile. We called these ‘fifty-fifty shots.’ In this film, you began to see people’s backs.” Such a tiny thing, filming the actors from behind — but think of the freedom this gave the director to attempt shots impossible in silent films:

Then there was the rebirth of camera movement. In the silent era cameras were gloriously mobile, but now they were imprisoned in large, soundproofed housings. (Thankfully, sound also ended the reign of hand-cranked cameras, which so often resulted in herky-jerky action, and ushered in pilot-toned and ultimately crystal-synched cameras that captured movement at exactly 24 frames per second). By the time of The Champ, the old silent-era directors were itching to recapture the sense of motion that propelled their earlier films, so they started experimenting. “Sometimes you had to do a retake because of camera noise,” Vidor remembered. “However, we were able to put the camera tripod on a dolly, and then move the whole thing around the floor. This was what we called a perambulating shot. I liked to move the camera around, and I used a lot of this in The Champ.”

Lighting, too, improved by leaps and bounds in the early silent era, for reasons that may not be immediately apparent to modern audiences. It wasn’t just technology that was advancing, but film grammar. “As we depended on dialogue more and more,” said Vidor, “we could have the faces more in shadows, and we could pay more attention to effect lighting. With sound, you were not completely dependent on facial expressions to tell the story. I realized that I could do a whole scene in the dark if I really wanted to. It freed lighting to help establish more of the mood.”

Then there was the freedom of dialogue to consider. Unlike a stage play on Broadway, where every line has to be projected — almost shouted — to the whole audience, in film an actor could whisper a line, or hem and haw and stutter under his breath, and by so doing broaden the range and depth of a line of dialogue far beyond what was possible before. Acting became more subtle and intimate.

It was inevitable that actors exploring these boundaries would soon discover the joys of improvisation. One of the big complaints against Wallace Beery was his infuriating penchant for changing the script’s dialogue on-the-fly to better match his blue-collar vernacular. “I don’t think he’d ever speak a line exactly as it was written,” Vidor said, “unless it was right in line with his character. He wanted to be crude and mumbling a bit. He was not thinking in the exact words the character was supposed to be speaking with.” Imagine a director doing Shakespeare and having Beery changing lines pell-mell!

But King Vidor — ever on the lookout for new ways to improve his films — saw improv not as an annoyance but as a boon. He quickly recognized in Beery a budding expert in the skill, correctly divining that the hulking lug’s natural style fit perfectly with his character in The Champ. “As far as I was concerned,” Vidor said, “I didn’t care if he spoke the exact words, as long as he put across the feeling of the scene. I like an actor to adapt things to his own character and way of speaking.” Thus Vidor encouraged the habit that so many other directors despised. “Quite a few lines were all off-the-cuff. It seemed to work pretty well.”

It wasn’t only the actors that were improvising — Vidor found himself doing a lot of things “off-the-cuff” as well. “I don’t know whether you remember Jackie Cooper walking up on a roof of a house and singing a song and sticking cigarettes in his pocket — well, this was Marion Davies’ dressing room on the M-G-M lot, but it was ad-lib, off-the-cuff, because I was in the mood.”

During these moments, Vidor began to appreciate his luck in having two naturalistic actors like Beery and Cooper to work with, instead of the more stolid and classically trained thespians that littered M-G-M’s roster. “When you put Wallace Beery in a film,” Vidor said, “you had something to work with. You had interest immediately, in every shot. And Jackie Cooper at the that time was the same type of small boy. So you had a live couple of actors in there, interesting actors.”

Interesting as they were, they were still actors, and Vidor sometimes had to use guile to evoke the performances he needed. The very end of The Champ was the key to the whole picture: we see Jackie Cooper’s character, so old beyond his years, regress back to a child. “When we got down to the end of the picture,” Vidor said, “he had to have this very hysterical sobbing scene. I wanted to achieve something a little beyond fake acting. I wanted to really feel it.” For Cooper’s role in the hit film Skippy his director/uncle had, among other things, threatened to shoot his dog to get him to cry. Vidor wasn’t that mean, but at one point he told Cooper he had fired assistant director Red Golden (who Cooper was apparently quite fond of, despite his later protestations in his autobiography), and even lied that Cooper’s mother had been brought to the hospital. “I’m sure he didn’t believe these stories,” Vidor said later, “but he was enough of an actor to understand what we were doing, and he went along with it. Pretty soon he swung into it and became hysterical, and started to throw a tantrum. The result was great. He was a very good actor, and a joy to work with.”

With Beery, getting a professional performance wasn’t the problem, but there were other issues. When first offered the role, Beery had told Vidor, “If I have to do any fighting, I can’t do it.” His reluctance wasn’t merely movie-star pique. A few years earlier, during a training flight for the Navy, Beery had suffered a mild stroke, forcing the trainee he was teaching to bring the plane down in an emergency landing. Now he was afraid of putting too much strain on himself, and the final fight in The Champ sounded like a bridge too far.

“All right,” Vidor assured him. “We’ll get doubles. I’d like to have you do the film.” But Vidor wasn’t about to let one of the picture’s important scenes suffer so easily:

One day at lunch when we were getting to do the prizefight scene, I noticed [Beery] with a couple of pretty girls, extra girls, having lunch, and I was having lunch with the assistant director and I said, “Go over and get the girls’ names — I have an idea.”

We took them off the set where they were working, put them in the front row of the prizefight audience, and then when I called for the doubles to do the fighting, Wally said, “What do you mean, doubles?” So he got up in the ring and did some tough fighting because those two pretty girls he’d had lunch with were sitting there.

He was a wonderful character.

All of these things — script, camera movement, lighting, improv  — helped make The Champ one of the monster hits of 1931-32. Audiences lined up for the chance to delight in the byplay between a washed-out father and his adoring son. Handkerchiefs were a necessity. Thinking about the film’s success fifty years later, Vidor would conclude that, “It was simply the fact that everybody could go and have a good cry that marked the success of The Champ.” People had wept at films before, of course, but a tender relationship between father and son had never been rendered so delicately and humorously on screen.

When first taking on the job, Vidor had considered it little more than hackwork, a studio gig endured so that he could get permission to make the less bankable, artistic films he liked best. But by the time the film premiered the nation was deep in the Depression, people were feeling downtrodden and vulnerable, and they reacted strongly to Vidor’s championing of lower-class American exceptionalism. A funny gossip item from The Hollywood Reporter for October 6, 1931 was titled “Two-Time Weeps,” and dutifully reported that M-G-M executives

“Louie” B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Eddie Mannix were among the weepers at the preview of The Champ. While in the theater they wept because of what the picture did to them — and later on the curb, for joy at what the picture would do for them.

Vidor in turn was touched by the reaction of his countrymen, and he found himself going out of his way to enjoy their emoting first-hand. “Those were the days when I was seeing a lot of [Charlie] Chaplin,” Vidor remembered. “We usually had dinner at Musso and Frank’s and then we would walk the length of Hollywood Boulevard. I always timed it so that we would be walking past the theater when The Champ was getting out. I would watch the people come out with their handkerchiefs in their hands, wiping their eyes. This was a great joy to me.”

When asked in the 1960s why movies had dropped so much in popularity, the now-retired Vidor acidly quipped, “The sight of a couple having sexual intercourse is not a good enough reason for people to spend money on babysitters.” He correctly perceived that the duty of the Hollywood entertainer wasn’t to mirror the state of the lowest elements of the culture or put filth on a pedestal in the name of realism and artistic authenticity. “The movie director has a voice, a powerful and articulate voice,” he said, “and he should use it well. People in India, China, South Africa, Uruguay have been affected by the fashions and customs set forth in American motion pictures. . . I had always felt the impulse to use the motion-picture screen as an expression of hope and faith — to make films presenting positive ideas and ideals rather than negative themes. When I have occasionally strayed from this early resolve, I have accomplished nothing but regret.”

Whether filming the trials of a soldier (The Big Parade), or a man and his family struggling in the big city (The Crowd), or an over-the-hill prize fighter and his boy (The Champ), or a little girl dreaming on a Depression-era farm (The Wizard of Oz), Vidor’s America possesses a God-graced moral center. The Champ’s Andy Purcell is a divorced drunk and a gambler, someone whose loss of fame has turned him into a sot and a loser. But he is never beyond hope. There’s a classically American optimism that courses through him and the story, and I credit that to the soul and sensibility of King Vidor. “I affirm that ours is a grave responsibility,” Vidor said about his profession as a Hollywood entertainer.

Man, whether he is conscious of it or not, knows deep inside that he has a definite upward mission to perform during the time of his life span. He knows that the purpose of his life cannot be stated in terms of ultimate oblivion. That is why the Bible has always been at the top of the bestseller list and why the assertion “In God We Trust” is a national motto, minted on our coins. So an explanation of this heroic struggle that we are living — a film story giving humanity reassurance that the good fight is not in vain, and showing the individual that he is not alone in his quest for the good life — would be received by receptive hearts everywhere. I think that multitudes would leave their warm firesides and doubtful television programs, call in babysitters and stand in line to see such a film.

After a long life as a film director, King Vidor died hopeful that Hollywood would one day redeem itself, just like The Champ’s flawed protagonist, and that through the efforts of good filmmakers it would once again man its post on the ramparts of American culture. “The only barrier between the public and the filmmaker lies in the mind of the latter,” he vowed. “When the makers of films are as unafraid of good films as the public, we shall really have a renaissance.”

This concludes our five-part look at Frances Marion’s and King Vidor’s The Champ. Come back next Saturday as For Conservative Movie Lovers turns to an all-new film from an all-new-year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

OK, time for you to hunt down a copy of The Champ. You can find a good-looking print on DVD for as low as $14.05 (the audio, being from the dawn of sound in 1931, hasn’t held up nearly as well, but played through a good sound system it’s plenty serviceable). Alas, no Blu-ray yet.

You can also pop The Champ into your Netflix queue, (avoid the 1979 remake, which features the Mighty John Voight but is a pale shadow of the original).

And if the Beery-Cooper combo delights you as much as I think it will, you can also use Netflix to watch their final team-up in the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Treasure Island (1934), directed by Victor Fleming (who would go on to make both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz).

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”?  If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

And yet Vidor (you pronounce it “VEE-door,” not “VEYE-door”) was no foreigner at all. Texas born and bred, he was a champion of the little guy, the average Joe. His Christianity (he was raised a Christian Scientist), optimism, and Americanism infuse all his work. A craftsman, an innovator, an auteur, he had one of the longest careers of any director. If you have always treasured those sepia-toned Wizard of Oz sequences, and would like to find more stuff like it, do yourself a favor and hunt down Vidor’s The Champ (1931), a film that shares many of the same qualities with his later work on Oz.

Growing up as a middle-class kid in Galveston, Texas, King Vidor (1894-1982) didn’t fall in love with cinema right away. He was born just at the time that movies began being projected for audiences, and as a kid he would occasionally frequent the local Nickelodeons (so named because they cost a nickel to get in) and see the very first silent films. He was far from impressed. “When I was a young kid in Texas at the beginning of the century, I used to hate movies,” he explained decades later. “I hated their phoniness, their fakeness, the makeup which used to mask the actor’s expressions, their dreadful unreal acting with overdone pantomime gestures. People find them laughable today. I found them laughable then.”

All of that changed when, as a teenager, he became a ticket taker and backup projectionist at one of the theaters in Galveston. With nothing else to do, he found himself watching the films over and over. “I saw that two-reel Ben-Hur (1907), made in Italy [sic], twenty-one times each day or one hundred and forty-seven times in its week’s run. The men who made it never sat through it as often.” Studying the pantomime, the acting, the lighting, the camerawork, Vidor began to see the possibilities and power of this nascent art form. One thing he noticed right away: “The better the technique of the director, the fewer the subtitles.”

When a neighborhood kid hatched a plan to build a functional movie camera out of “an old projection machine and cigar boxes,” Vidor jumped at the chance to join in the experiment. They worked like kiddie mad scientists on their project, then bought a hundred feet of unexposed negative and used it to capture the spectacular destruction of a bathhouse near the Galveston seawall during a raging storm. With the help of some adults they sold the film as a newsreel to a distributor, and it got a lot of play around Southern Texas. “The day that hurricane struck,” Vidor said, “the course of my future was settled.”

He continued making newsreels throughout high school and selling them to distributors, ever trying to expand his prospects and break into a real job as a director of honest-to-God movies. It seemed that every day came further confirmation that cinema was growing into a great art form with a power to be reckoned with. Once, while watching a Western in a North Texas theater, Vidor watched in shock as a cowboy in the audience suddenly drew his pistol and began shooting at the screen! “He had come to town for a Saturday night’s spree,” Vidor recalled, “but when he saw the hero was about to be hung unjustly for cattle rustling, he couldn’t sit there with his six-shooter without doing something. The film did not stop, nor did they arrest the shooting cowboy. I suppose the three bullet holes were later patched, the manager having decided the less said about the incident the safer.” Movies, Vidor believed, were quickly becoming, “as vital to everyone’s life as milk and bread. You grew up with it. It affected your character, your dress, your lovemaking, your courage.” It was an industry of dreams and illusion and humanity that he wanted to be a part of.

Newly married, Vidor rode out to California at nineteen and ended up in San Francisco with twenty cents left in his pocket. They survived with typical Vidor-ian ingenuity, by taking empty, discarded boxes from grocery stores and scraping out the crumbs of oatmeal, Shredded wheat, and corn meal found within until they had enough for a meal. Eventually they scrounged together enough money to take a steamship to Los Angeles, where they did their best to weasel their way into the budding Hollywood film industry.

Vidor’s pretty wife became a $10 a week actress, while Vidor himself wrote dozens of scripts, photographed newsreels and travelogues, and worked any odd studio jobs that presented themselves. His breakthrough came with The Turn in the Road (1919), a film he financed from money begged from a consortium of dentists. Shot for $9,000, he found a distributor to take a chance on it, and it made $365,000 in its run. With that notch in his belt he could finally get studio jobs, and at twenty-three he was a young up-and-coming director. (his wife, Florence Vidor, became a famous silent screen actress, and they would eventually divorce for all of the usual Hollywood reasons).

Always pushing the envelope and remembering the unrealistic movies of his youth, Vidor experimented and innovated in his films. He used bright lights to smooth out the wrinkles on actresses faces, and got them laughing off-camera before a scene to capture a bit of that authentic glow of humor on film. He began timing shots to classical music, building up the editing of scenes into what felt like a musical crescendo, calling his technique “silent music.” He would sometimes even make his actors march or walk to the pace of a metronome, and the effect was almost subliminal, but haunting.

At a time when most films were suffused with fantasy and spectacle, Vidor grew to appreciate human stories that carried with them what might be called American realism. There were seldom villains in his movies — he relied instead on the trials and tribulations of real life for his drama. “War, wheat, and steel,” was his way of summarizing his interests, meaning life on the streets of middle-to-lower class America.

The Big Parade (1925), a World War I film presenting for the first time the perspective of mud-soaked grunts and GIs, became the most profitable silent film ever made (had there been any Academy Awards back then, it would have won a pile of them). Another Vidor film, The Crowd (1928), was an experimental masterpiece about ordinary people making their way through the small triumphs and tragedies of American big-city life, and garnered nominations for Best Picture and Best Director at the very first Academy Awards.

With the coming of sound, Vidor didn’t suffer the career setbacks that actors like Wallace Beery did, but he did discover that he needed to make some serious adjustments to his filmmaking style, not all of them welcome:

Silent pictures were treasured as an art form, and when talking pictures came in, most of the silent film directors regretted the change, the transition, because there was a certain technique that was very much akin to music. A silent film was never seen without music, without an orchestra. . . .We believed in the articulate powers of pantomime; we felt the things we were doing were bigger than words.

[In talking films] words reduced the actions, the emotions, the story we were trying to tell. It was like using words at the ballet. It made specific what we wanted to keep general. We could no longer appeal simultaneously to all audiences, the various levels of age and intelligence and sophistication. People were no longer free to fill in their own words. . .

It was a time of quiet despair to those of us brought up to love the lucidity of silence.

He also bemoaned the fact that all of the wonderful (and today still very modern-looking and influential) camera movements for silent pictures like The Big Parade and The Crowd were now all but impossible in the sound era, as the cameras now had to be housed in soundproofed rooms or covered with bulky soundproofed housings.

These were the problems facing him as an artist when, in 1931, he got the chance to direct The Champ.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at The Champ with some stories about how Vidor worked behind-the-scenes with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, along with a look at the movie’s appeal both in 1931 and in 2010.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Watch eighty-five-year-old King Vidor receive his honorary Oscar at the 51st Academy Awards on April 9, 1979.

The Big Parade (1925), directed by King Vidor: You can watch this silent film triumph in its entirety on YouTube. Part One starts here.

Hollywood Series — A Celebration of American Silent Film: King Vidor is a featured interviewee in this wonderful series by film historian Ken Brownlow. Many of the episodes are on YouTube, and I specifically recommend the first part of “The Pioneers” for an education about the true power and popularity of silent films in that era, how they were every bit as impressive to them as Star Wars and Avatar are to us.

And so Smokey and the Bandit was made fast and loose, outside, on a low budget. In Reynolds’ words, they worked “lightning quick,” with first-time director Needham “reigning over crew and camera with instincts that made him, in my humble opinion, the best action director in the business.” The entire film was shot on location in the South. “We moved all over Georgia. . . It was a screwy chase picture, but Hal’s fun, outlaw, hell-bent-sensibility made it sparkle.”

Needham’s blistering pace also served to instill a certain freedom in his actors, of a kind seldom enjoyed by the more paint-by-numbers Hollywood productions. Critical darlings like Mike Leigh — Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004) et al. — are often praised to the high heavens for having actors invent a script during rehearsals. Although Needham doesn’t get anywhere near the same respect for it, he is also an expert practitioner of improvisation. Lots of his footage ends up on the cutting room floor, or in the blooper reels that often run under the credits of his movies (alas, he didn’t start that gimmick until after Smokey). Peeking at those muffed shots gives an idea of what it’s like to film a Needham script: lots of experimentation, lots of laughter.

This brand of seat-of-your-pants filmmaking requires the right talent, and — just like with the other aspects of a Needham production — pretentious people need not apply. Enter Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, a bunch of game amateurs and character actors, and a hound dog.

Field was the good-natured, saccharine star of television shows such as Gidget (1965-66) and The Flying Nun (1967-70), and by 1976 was firmly typecast as, in her estimation, “the All-American syrupy meaningless girl-next-door with no belly button. Just about as bland as you can get.” She took the Smokey role in an attempt to shatter that impression, scarcely aware of what she had gotten herself into. Flipping through her script on the first day, she innocently asked Reynolds why Big and Little Enos, the jolly pseudo-villains of the piece, shared such a strange name. “Because it rhymes with penis!” Reynolds happily replied (and if you think about it, that is exactly why the name is inherently funny). Her acting in Bandit would be nominated for a Golden Globe.

Jerry Reed (1937-2008) was a country music star and a friend of Reynolds and Needham, who had already acted for them in several earlier redneck movies. Originally slated to play the Bandit, he gamely allowed himself to be demoted to the role of Snowman when Reynolds entered the picture. In hindsight, it was a great move — Snowman was the role he was born to play. He also wrote and sang the iconic songs for the film. “Eastbound and Down” took Reed all of an hour to dream up, and looking back it was one of those tunes that perfectly encapsulates a movie and a genre. The fact that it wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award while the likes of Melissa Etheridge and Eminem have won Oscars tells you everything you need to know about how irrelevant the Best Song category has become in the modern age.

To find a suitable Chewbacca for Reed’s truckin’ Han Solo, Needham held a “canine beauty pageant” down in Atlanta, won by a dog named Happy (who is called Fred in the movie). Many of the sweetest laughs in the film concern the Snowman worrying and fussing over his dog, who Needham carefully includes in the corner of many widescreen compositions, panting contentedly as they motor down the highway. It’s a rare chase movie that makes time for things such as Snowman’s request that the Bandit get Fred a hamburger at the local “choke-n-puke,” or Reed pursuing a playful Fred into a nearby lake. Heck, the damn dog got laughs just from the Bandit and Snowman lugging it across the yard and into the truck. Another movie might have had the heroes leave Fred behind as an impediment to winning the bet on time. Not Bandit. And audiences didn’t need to be told why Snowman brought him along without a second thought, nor why the Bandit doesn’t raise the slightest objection. It’s his dog, man.

If there was one figure who held these disparate elements, characters, and improvisations together, it was Burt Reynolds. His energy and good humor fuels the picture and paces the action. “When I go on the set at the start of a picture,” Reynolds says

I make a nest for myself. I make jokes and try to get comfortable. When I’m doing comedy, I like to get into a rhythm. I begin working in that same rhythm with the crew first. Once I get them laughing, I know it’s working because they’re a very tough audience. Sometimes people on the outside who don’t know my way of doing things criticize me for wasting time or screwing around, not doing my lines. But I am actually preparing for what’s coming up in a scene.

Like John Wayne a generation before him, Reynolds worked damn hard to create the charisma he projected on the screen. It takes a certain courage and talent for an actor to just be, and to make “just being” something that possesses its own depth and meaning. “What is it about acting that grabs hold of us and won’t let go?” Reynolds once asked. “Acting! Why, it’s nothing but make believe. . . pretending to be something you’re not. Or is it a chance to be something you really are? A chance to transfer an emotion, like joy, to someone?”

That transference explains perfectly the appeal of guys like Reynolds and Wayne, and it serves as a rebuttal to the method excesses of all the De Niros and Streeps and Penns out there with their tiresome array of tics and quirks. The “charismatic hero” school of acting is designed to appear effortless, but in fact it takes a lot of work and concentration. “You’ve got to like the people in the picture for it to be successful,” Reynolds maintains.

Smokey and The Longest Yard, I think, were terrific films, better than most critics gave them credit for. When the gross is over 100 million dollars, a lot of people must like them. And in both of them, I was making a really conscious effort to have the time of my life in front of the camera. I think that’s what came through. . . the fun we had on the film was, I think, infectious to the American people who saw it.

Creating that sense of fun was easier said than done, given Reynolds’ precarious physical condition. He was then suffering from years of undiagnosed hyperglycemia, so bad that he would often faint dead away for no discernible reason. One of the reasons he looks so thin in Bandit is because he had lost a lot of weight. “It got to the point where they would just prop me up and put on more makeup because I’d turned white. I’d think, ‘We’ll, this is a good time to die. I have number-three Desert Tan on, and I’m nice and thin’.” If the role hadn’t allowed him to spend most scenes sitting in the Trans Am, he might not have finished the picture at all.

But it’s often the case that physical illness brings out the best in actors. Think of Gene Kelly doing his famous Singin’ in the Rain dance while running a temperature of 103, or Harrison Ford chasing Nazis and Arabs through the streets of Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark while racked with dysentery. And so it was with Reynolds — his sickness kept any pesky “Look at me — I’m a big star!” temptations in check, and gave him a down-to-earth, sympathetic streak that winningly offset his brash cockiness. Reynolds usually projects an anger simmering under the surface of his characters, but that quality is nowhere to be found in Smokey, leaving the Bandit far more endearing than he might have otherwise been.

Like Reynolds creating his “nest” and getting into a comedic rhythm, Needham also saw value in having a certain vibe course throughout his set. “Dailies were a big thing with me and my company,” he says today. “I would set up a bar and have some finger food, sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres and things, big table of it. I’d pay for it, not the company. I invited everybody on the crew. If we were on location, they could bring their wife and kids, I didn’t care.” Guys like Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron shroud their sets in secrecy, but Needham’s viewings of the previous day’s work were family affairs. “Everybody’d get a drink,” Needham explains. “We’d put a reel on. That reel would go off, everybody’d get another drink. Hell, about five reels into it, we thought it was funny as hell whether it was or not.”

Perhaps it was this family-skewed audience that reminded him to keep the film relentlessly joyous and light on its feet. Like most other filmmakers in the 1970s, Needham easily could have added a bit of “the old ultra-violence” to Bandit, shocking the audience but ruining the movie’s charm. But like his mentor John Wayne, he would have none of it. “I think there’s a big difference between violence and action,” he says emphatically. “In any movie I ever directed, you’ll never see violence. You’ll see action but never violence. Never in all my movies was anybody ever killed. And I did a war film, for Christ’s sake. But that was my theory and my thinking, and I chose to do it that way.” Throughout Smokey and the Bandit, every time a stunt results in a crashed car or motorcycle, Needham is careful to include a shot of the occupants getting out of the wreck without any injuries. Little touches like that frequently escape the attention of Hollywood executives, but audiences notice and appreciate them.

All of this — the energy, humor, pace, improvisation, charisma, and action — paid off in spades. Smokey and the Bandit was first released in New York to terrible reviews and lukewarm box office. Needham told Universal that they were doing it all wrong — they needed to debut this picture among the people it was made for. So Universal changed tactics, opened the movie down South, and it took off like a rocket. Once the word spread, the movie was re-released in the cities and caught on there as well. It ended up being one of the biggest grossing movies of all time, an amazing feat given that it didn’t have any expensive special effects to buoy its must-see factor. What it had was humor, inventive stunts, a dash of romance, and a deep love of the South. And that was enough.

In between the critics panning the movie as crude, lowbrow, and racist/sexist/homophobic, a few managed to take the film’s proper measure. Writing in the Washington Post on July 29, 1977, critic Gary Arnold made an early case for Needham as a cultural throwback to a more optimistic era in our popular culture:

Needham seems to possess a comic outlook and timing extending beyond his erstwhile specialty. The prevailing mood of the film is cheerful and witty. Every element seems to be in balance, from the flirtatious exchange of Reynolds and Field, who make an endearing romantic comedy team, to throwaway bits of business, like the moment when Field begins practicing a dance step on the inside of the Trans Am windshield.

Needham also demonstrates a form of comic-poetry rabble-rousing talent that reminds one of Frank Capra at his most affectionate and, thankfully, least mawkish.

Affectionate. That is an adjective seldom attributed to Smokey and the Bandit, yet it gets much closer to the truth of what the movie was really all about than all the scathing reviews combined.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Smokey and the Bandit by addressing the movie’s cultural impact and its recapitulation of oft-derided American values.

Previous posts in the series “Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds and Smokey and the Bandit”:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

ANOTHER LOOK AT SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT: Here’s a very nice look back at Smokey from John Pearley Huffman at the Edmunds Inside Line website. Lots of clips, quotes from Needham and other principals, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Definitely worth a read.

THE COOLEST SMOKEY REVIEW EVER: Check out this hilarious appreciation of Smokey and the Bandit by a clever Austrian dude.

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We’ve heard a lot in the last few years about how American films now need to appeal to a broad international audience, and so they must tone down their American patriotism and values. The Austrian guy narrating the above video is a walking advertisement for the other point of view: that an America secure in its image is far more attractive to international audiences than the reverse.

The video is around ten minutes long, the narrator has all kinds of appreciation for and understanding of American culture, and it’s well worth watching until the end. Lots of laughs, and light-years better than what passes for film criticism on domestic TV these days. I especially enjoyed his takedown of those silly American Film Institute lists that come out each year.

BURT BUILDS A BANDIT: Netflix subscribers can rent a DVD containing a five-part miniseries from the cable reality show Celebrity Rides, wherein Burt Reynolds watches a modern car shop give his old Smokey and the Bandit SE Trans Am a hot update for the new millennium. Along the way he tells lots of fun, behind-the-scenes stories, such as learning that Alfred Hitchcock adored Smokey and the Bandit — his daughter told Reynolds that toward the end of his life he would watch it again and again and mutter “How did they do those things!”

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history.

His first triumph, made on a shoestring budget and a scant few weeks of shooting time, was a little picture called Rocky (1976). He had no money, no stars, no amazing effects, and yet Avildsen used camera, music, and editing to craft scenes of immense power and impact. Has there ever been a film, before or since, that ends on a more rousing wave of uplift? That takes such pains to create identification and empathy with its wide array of characters? That more patiently or expertly builds up to its cataclysmic swell of emotion? That has the guts and sense of timing to fade to black at the exact peak, frustrating our desire to know what happens next even as it leaves us too blissful to care?

Rocky did all of that and much more, and despite its fight scenes now looking like slow-mo hokum compared to the MMA-style mayhem that now rules on TV, it remains the most memorable and effective boxing film ever made. That’s really saying something, given the immense amount of solid competition the genre boasts.

But as other directors began ineptly looting and mimicking Avildsen’s style and innovations, it looked as if everything that made Rocky great would quickly become so cliché as to make a repeat impossible. We all know that sinking feeling when we begin perceiving the clunky wheels of the typical “Hollywood sports plot” turning — that excruciatingly slow crawl towards the utterly predictable final showdown, where the very last seconds of a contest are shamelessly milked until the hero finally hits the last shot/punch/goal/basket. Even the Rocky sequels couldn’t escape these pitfalls, and it would be hard to blame an audience for glumly concluding that Avildsen’s 1976 artistic triumph had spoiled the sports movie for all time.

So who would have guessed that, eight years later, Avildsen would essentially pull off the same trick again? How on earth did he once again make a Rocky-style plot arc work, without the end result becoming a pale pastiche?

He achieved this feat in large part by turning everything we remember from Rocky on its head. Ralph Macchio’s Daniel Larusso is played not as a thickheaded lummox, but as a fast-thinking, bone-skinny teen whose nasal Jersey whine sounds more like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer than Sylvester Stallone. He’s neither a down-and-out fighter with his best years behind him, nor is he looking to “go the limit” to prove something profound to himself. He’s just a kid at the very beginning of his adult life, who for most of the film limits his ambition to simply not getting beat up. Similarly, Elizabeth Shue’s Ali Mills is light years away from Talia Shire’s Adrian Pennino: rich instead of poor, charming rather than an ugly duckling, sociable not shy. And Pat Morita’s unforgettable Mr. Miyagi isn’t washed up or pathetically ambitious like Burgess Meredith’s Mickey Goldmill — he’s the very epitome of contentment and balance and wisdom.

Rocky achieved its verisimilitude with generous dollops of grime, rust, blood and profanity, whereas The Karate Kid is notable for its relative wholesomeness (note how Elizabeth Shue even wears a one-piece swimsuit to the beach instead of the obligatory teen-movie bikini). The music marks yet another telling departure. Rocky’s iconic score, by Bill Conti, was a mix of 1970s funk, heroic brass, and a choir acting as a Greek chorus, all combined into a sonic brew that still ranks as one of the most recognizable and rousing in film history. For The Karate Kid, Conti was once again brought in as the composer. But this time, in between pop songs like Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” he chose a light mix of delicate strings, only occasionally allowing them to burst forth into full orchestral splendor. For the training montage, Conti completely eschews Rocky’s reliance on trumpeting brass and instead opts for the lonely skirling of Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute, creating a more spiritual and intimate vibe.

Avildsen’s camera, for its part, is probing and observant, often making excellent use of telephoto lenses to highlight what would otherwise be a missed reaction or expression. He achieves true poetry in the training scenes: on the beach among the circling cranes, on the lake amidst glittering golden waters, and even in the fights and strategies that pulse through the climactic tournament. He also warred with the studio when necessary to protect certain crucial scenes, such as the one where a drunken Miyagi reveals his service in WWII to Daniel. That one adds a whole new layer of depth to what was already a touching and authentic relationship, and yet the studio wanted it cut, deeming it superfluous.

On top of all that, the excellent screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen (who distinguished himself more recently by penning the immensely satisfying kidnap flick Taken) consistently leads Avildsen down novel paths. The teen villains of the story (portrayed by, among others, Steve McQueen’s son Chad and Elizabeth Shue’s brother Andrew) are refreshingly human, at times even gaining our sympathy. Unlike the usual faceless, gormless teens in Hollywood fare, this group is delineated exceedingly well, and remain recognizable as individuals even when hiding behind Ray Harryhausen-esque skeleton makeup in a genuinely chilling night scene. Kamen fleshed out his bad guys so well that the Cobra Kais, led outside the dojo by actor William Zabka’s smirking blond-haired bad boy Johnny Lawrence, now have a sizable fan following among Karate Kid aficionados. One admirer even made a clever YouTube re-edit of the final fight so that Johnny wins:

Meanwhile, a band called No More Kings has made a song about the redemption of Johnny called “Sweep the Leg,” with a fun “Karate Kid continuation” music video written and directed by Zabka himself:

In interviews, Zabka has expressed pleasant surprise that The Karate Kid remains so alive in the popular culture, calling it a “sacred film” and noting that there are even Cobra Kai bowling teams out there. It’s enough to convince me that The Karate Kid II should have been all about Miyagi reforming the Cobra Kais, slowly rehabilitating them into good guys.

In so many ways, Avildsen’s 1984 film is courageous in the way it deviates from the instantly recognizable Rocky formula. How strong must the pressure have been on Avildsen to make the easy, safe choices, mimicking his earlier masterpiece in every detail? His resistance to those impulses does him credit, and hence to dismiss The Karate Kid as a mere Rocky clone is to do it an injustice.

But if there is one overriding secret to the success of The Karate Kid, it is the transcendent performance of Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi. In 1984, most Americans still conceived of the East, at least in cinematic terms, as a mystical wonderland of Kung-Fu magic and swordplay. Hong Kong directors like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam were only beginning to create the explosion of masterful, modernized pictures that would eventually change the entire way the world looked at Asians on film. It’s hard to remember how utterly fresh a character like Mr. Miyagi was to 1984 audiences, completely unexposed as they were to the renaissance happening in Hong Kong. Fully fleshed out, with a compelling backstory and potent motivations, he was written as charmingly colloquial and disheveled, a character who could consistently shatter the stereotype of the “magic Asian” to raucously humorous effect.

Almost always in American cinema — to this day — Asian protagonists are depicted as cardboard caricatures at best and laughingstocks at worst. Avildsen rejected the initial front-runner for the part of Miyagi — the great Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune — and instead bet his entire film on the talents of a thoroughly Americanized stand-up comedian, one who in his salad days used to bill himself in comedy clubs as “the Hip Nip.” Comedians have a strangely robust record of shining in good dramatic roles — think Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, et al. — and they often manage to strike a solid balance between laughs and drama. Morita did exactly that in The Karate Kid: affecting just the right Japanese accent, leavening his character’s power and seriousness with just enough comedy, and always figuring out ways to make you laugh with Miyagi instead of at him.

If you haven’t seen The Karate Kid in awhile, you’re in for a treat — Mr. Miyagi was no fluke, he remains one of the most winning characters in the history of cinema. It was the role of a lifetime for Morita, who garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination (as it happened, he lost that year to Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields, who himself became the first Asian to win an acting Oscar). Any number of others would have played Miyagi as either an embarrassing joke or an irremediably grim Samurai grandmaster. But in his every glare, mannerism, and pose, Morita elevates the character into a veritable Gandalf. Look closely at the scene when he bows gravely to a shocked Daniel (who has just discovered that his hated chores were actually important lessons), or when towards the end he smacks his hands together with such orchestra-enhanced thunder that the audience jumps. In those moments The Karate Kid — so often seen as an also-ran and afterthought to Rocky — breaks away from that film’s orbit and soars free all on its own.

So Avildsen pulled it off not once, but twice — I still can’t believe it. And if he never makes another great movie, he can still sit back and rest easy, secure in the knowledge that two of the very best fight pictures ever made have his name on them. That he did both of them on such low budgets should give hope to conservative filmmakers who assume liberal Hollywood will never give them a chance. There is nothing in The Karate Kid that couldn’t be accomplished on a micro-budget — all you would need is the gumption to dream up the script.

But will anyone take on the challenge, as Avildsen did those many years ago? Only time will tell. Until then: wax on, wax off. . . wax on, wax off. . . .