From KTTV, Los Angeles:

Funeral services were pending today for actor Jackie Cooper, who starred in “Our Gang” shorts as a child and was nominated for an Oscar at age 9, but was known to later fans as Daily Planet editor Perry White in the “Superman” films of the 1970s and 80s.

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When the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, announced that they were going to remake True Grit, it sparked all of the usual arguments about the merits and demerits of such undertakings.

The first film, released in 1969, sits in the mid-upper tier of movies made by its star, John Wayne (as well as winning him his only Oscar), and as such has achieved a kind of classic status among both Wayne fans and lovers of good westerns. There is a brand of theatergoer who maintains that there is no need to craft fresh takes on successful pictures, any more than we need new painters to dutifully re-imagine a masterwork like Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

On the other side of the debate are those who see good reasons for taking another swing at this piñata. Ever since the appearance of Wayne’s Grit, many fans of the novel — which first appeared forty-two years ago as a Saturday Evening Post serial written by Charles Portis (1933–) — have been keen to see a cinematic version that hews far closer to the plot of the book. Others see remakes as akin to a contemporary orchestra re-recording — and in the process re-interpreting — a famous piece of classical music, imbuing it with their own particular sonic signature. Seen in this light, the announcement of a new True Grit was a welcome one.

So now that the movie is out, who is right? Is the remake ill-advised, or a welcome addition to the western canon? Does the 2010 version have what it takes to make it a classic in its own right, or is it destined to be forever overshadowed by the 1969 original? (more…)

The Cameraman marks an exact crossroads in the career of Buster Keaton. It was his last genuine silent film, made after his previous three pictures (all now hailed as classics) had underperformed at the box office. Coming at the very pinnacle of his career, it represents the last chapter of his prime “Golden Age” years, and the final opportunity to see him at the very top of his game, expertly doing what he did best.

At the same time, it was his first picture made with mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who in 1928 had lured him out of the independent wilderness with a lucrative contract and promises of big budgets for production, advertising, and distribution. The Hollywood studio with “more stars than there are in heaven” sought to add a genius comedian to that celestial firmament, and who better to fill that role than the guy whom critic James Agee would later credit with bringing “pure physical comedy to its greatest heights”?

Keaton initially thought that his new deal, the richest in M-G-M history up to that time, would ensure his stardom for many years to come. “This was still before the stock market crash,” he said years later in an interview. “There was money everywhere. . . I was successful, I was famous, I was free. Hell, I was sitting pretty and didn’t have enough sense to know it.” (more…)

When King Vidor first stepped onto the set of The Champ, he was filled with a rare sense of freedom. Frances Marion’s script was unusually simple, focused squarely on a pair of immensely sympathetic protagonists and their relationship. All the key moments, plot twists and emotional climaxes were spelled out on the page, with no false conflicts or manufactured drama to complicate the works. Vidor realized that having such a tight screenplay “would relieve me as a director — now I didn’t have to worry about the story, worry about how I will wrap this up and keep it all together. I could concentrate on little details, touches and things.”

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?

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Toward the end of the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the picture’s director, Victor Fleming, was suddenly called away to salvage another production that was careening off-track at the studio, Gone with the Wind. The “Oz” portions of the movie, filmed in spectacular Technicolor, were already finished. But the “Kansas” sequences bookending the picture — including the all-important scene showing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on her Depression-era farm — had yet to be shot.

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.

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If you’ve seen Superman: The Movie (1978), you surely remember the character of Perry White, the tough-as-nails editor of The Daily Planet. Played pitch-perfect by actor Jackie Cooper, he’s one of the comedic highlights of the picture. “I want the name of this flying whatchamacallit to go with the Daily Planet like bacon and eggs! Franks and beans! Death and taxes! Politics and corruption!”

Cooper delivers his one-liners in a Preston Sturges staccato that helps give the 1970s film a pleasant 1930s gloss, bridging the gap between comic book and movie. But if, like me, you were just a kid when you saw Superman, you may not have known that here was an actor who, fifty years earlier, was one of the most popular and recognizable in the world, courtesy of a little picture called The Champ. (more…)

The Champ marks the third time in a row — after John Wayne and Burt Reynolds — that I’ve chosen a movie starring an actor many deride as a “natural,” a “ham,” someone who gained stardom not by skill but mere charisma. The sort of rough-hewn appeal epitomized by Wallace Beery (1885–1949) isn’t something that can be taught by Stanislavski or faked with The Method. It comes from within, and evokes American qualities and ideals that have never gone out of style.

Beery was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest son of three. He dropped out of school in fourth grade (“I was too dumb to get any farther”) and ran away for a few months, bumming around the Midwest, spurred onward not by a hatred of family but by a sense of pure adventure. At sixteen he lied his way into a job as an elephant handler with a circus, spending the next three years traveling across the country, and even crediting himself with being the first to train elephants to use their trunks to grab the tails of the elephants in front of them in order to keep them all in line. But eventually he realized that, where bull handling was concerned, “my ambition had been no ambition at all, that I was just drifting.” When Beery heard that his older brother Noah was working on Broadway in New York, he hurried there to try his hand at the acting game. (more…)

Our newest film in this series, 1931’s The Champ, marks the first time we begin our study not with a director but with a writer. Not to say that the director didn’t have a great deal to do with the success of the film — he most certainly did, and (as the title of this post hints) we will review that contribution in good time. But in the case of The Champ, it was the writer who was primarily responsible for the rich familial tone and heart-rending melodrama for which this touching little film (only 86 minutes) is best known and remembered.

The Champ is that rare film that features a pair of strong male leads doing masculine things in a masculine universe, but with nuanced and delicate characterizations that delve far deeper than the usual sports movie, tearing at the raw edges of what it means to be a parent in an imperfect world, to live through the tragedy of a broken family, and to suffer the premature loss of childhood innocence. On the surface, these subjects would seem ill at home in one of the most famous boxing movies of all time. But The Champ is not based on a true story, or cribbed from a famous novel — it was wholly conceived in the mind of the screenwriter. And not just any screenwriter, but the most prolific (and arguably one of the greatest) in Hollywood history. Who was he, you ask?

Well, first of all, he was a she. (more…)