PRINCE POPPYCOCK

Just yesterday, before either one of us had heard of 84-year-old Patricia Neal's death in Martha's Vineyard, the Siren was having an email exchange with a friend about Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the new book about it by Sam Wasson. And the Siren mentioned that one of her several problems with the film is the treatment of Neal's character, a rich woman paying George Peppard's every bill while he works, theoretically, on a novel. She's given a nickname that shows what she means to him--an apartment number, 2E--and we're meant to see Neal as an obstacle to his destiny as an artist, not as someone trying to make things easier for a lover and getting barely concealed contempt in return. She leaves him money, the harpy! How's he supposed to write if she's doing things like that?

But, as always with Neal, there are more things in that face and that voice than the lines or blocking are meant to suggest--a pained vulnerability, the idea that she feels Peppard's shameless use of her as a wound she covers with brittle chatter and a sophisticated attitude.

In her films, as well as in her life, Patricia Neal always seemed to be giving more than she got.

In Bright Leaf, the 1950 Michael Curtiz epic about tobacco farming, Neal is the one character simmering with emotion, attracted to Gary Cooper but determined to destroy him. The scene where she turns on Cooper is the most dramatic in the movie, their sexual chemistry roiling even as she confesses how much she has hated him. When he rides out alone in the end, it seems wholly fitting, not just because he couldn't keep faith with truehearted Lauren Bacall, but also because he wasn't man enough to do anything with the passion that had been flying off Neal the entire time. He didn't deserve either one of them.

She made one earlier film with Cooper, The Fountainhead. The Siren feels obligated to mention that one, but much as she loves Neal, in truth the Siren cannot bear that movie, King Vidor or no King Vidor. Ayn Rand's fans sometimes complain the film strays too far from her novel; the Siren thinks it's a visual match for Rand's writing style, and that is no compliment. Even so, the Siren still sees Neal's warmth and intelligence glimmering behind her risible lines and motivations.

During the filming of The Fountainhead, and continuing through and after Bright Leaf, Neal had an affair with Cooper that brought her agony, as Cooper's Catholic wife refused a divorce. Cooper was Catholic too, but not so much so that he didn't urge Neal to have an abortion when she became pregnant, a decision Neal grieved over for the rest of her life. Her later marriage to Roald Dahl was marked by a horrifying taxi accident involving her four-month-old son. Theo survived, but Neal's seven-year-old daughter Olivia later died of complications from measles. In 1965, as she was in the early stages of shooting John Ford's Seven Women (a part that might have been perfect for her), she suffered a catastrophic series of strokes while she was pregnant with daughter Lucy. The effects on her speech, her body and her memory were devastating, but Dahl, with savage dedication, nursed her back to life and to acting.

Less than twenty years later, they divorced when Neal discovered Dahl's longstanding affair with her best friend. Betrayal haunted Patricia Neal off-screen as much as it did on.

Her misfortunes, her philanthropy and her courage became perhaps even more famous than her work, and tinge the perception of something like The Subject Was Roses, her first major role after the strokes and a beautiful performance. But simple nobility is almost never enough on screen. Neal always showed you the struggle, how damn hard everything was--but in a way that told you pity would be an insult to such a woman. It's evident even in an earlier role, such as her magnificent work in A Face in the Crowd, where you feel her revenge on Lonesome Rhodes as a blow for every woman who ever wasted time, intelligence and love on a worthless egomaniac.

She was one of those actresses whose beauty became softer and more inviting, not less, with age. In Hud, her housekeeper character Alma fends off Paul Newman's advances with the torment of loving him emphasizing every line on her face, and yet it only adds to her magnetism. Later parts became more like Alma, such as warm, gentle Olivia Walton in The Homecoming.

Always there was that voice, its timbre joining the Tennessee accent to create a sound you anticipate the way you might yearn for a close-up of another actor. The Siren has spent this morning collecting the adjectives. Corncrake, said David Shipman (a bird, evidently--the Siren had to look that one up). Molasses, says the Times. Throaty, husky, sandpaper. And the Siren can hear all that even just reading a printed interview with Neal, like the one where she explained the fears of a young contract player at the old Warner Brothers: "Bette Davis was queen of the studio, and you couldn't just go up to her and ask her to solve your problems.

"They were real stars in those days, babe."

(Postscript: You will most definitely want to read Sheila O'Malley's tribute.)

A fellow blogger recently requested that the Siren send a link to her favorite post. After three years, there was still no question--this is it. She reposts it now, and wishes her readers a happy Father's Day.

My father was a constant reader, a wicked prankster and something of a film buff. His film tastes were pretty eclectic--we went together to see The Pope of Greenwich Village, for example--but his real reverence was for the classics. I remember his description of a scene in The Gold Rush, to give his small daughter a flavor of it in those pre-VCR days when anything silent was hard to come by: "...and then he looks up at the clock, and he realizes, she's not coming. And just like that, you go from slapstick to sad..."

For Dad one filmmaker towered above all others, however, and that was John Ford.

One spring Saturday when I was in my early teens, Dad spoke to his adult nephews on the phone. A film recommendation from him was something to be taken seriously, and that Sunday morning the Superstation's Academy Award Theater was showing How Green Was My Valley. Our main phone line was in the kitchen and I could hear Dad's end of the conversation. "You should see this one...John Ford, Wales...Maureen O'Hara too...gorgeous...You'll get a kick out of it." The conversation ended and I caught Dad's eye over whatever he was reading at the kitchen table.

"Get a kick out of it?" I repeated, incredulous.

"Sure," said Dad, affably. "Good movie, isn't it?" As he went back to his book, I swear I heard him chuckle.

Sometime after noon on Sunday our phone rang. It was Cousin R., and he sounded like he was coming down with a cold. "Put that father of yours on the phone," he snapped. I handed the phone to Dad, he put down the New York Times crossword puzzle, and as I leaned across the kitchen table my cousin's voice rose to a volume that carried it well beyond the receiver, especially when my father pulled the phone away from his ear to avoid hearing damage.

"...coal miners...strike...and they go to America...falls in the water...gets sick...accident...the other two leave...won't marry her...ANOTHER accident...goddamnit, I'm gonna get you for this one."

"But it was a good movie, right?" said my father, looking pleased with himself.

"...GREAT movie...I'm going to GET DRUNK."

The conversation ended. Dad returned to his crossword puzzle. "Where's he gonna get a drink?" asked my sister, who had heard the whole thing too. A shrug from Dad.

"He's in a dry county," I reminded Dad.

"It's SUNDAY," added my sister.

The phone rang again. It was another, older cousin, the football coach, who seemed to have caught his brother's cold. "Tell your father we're sending him the liquor tab," he barked.

I hung up and looked at Dad. "You totally tricked them into seeing that movie," I said.

His eyes didn't move from the crossword. "They'll thank me for it later."

Funny that this memory of my father should concern How Green Was My Valley, which has Donald Crisp, 180 degrees from his terrifying drunk in Broken Blossoms, playing one of the most lovable fathers in screen history. Not until Gregory Peck tucked Mary Badham into bed in To Kill a Mockingbird would there be an equally noble, and touching, portrait of fatherhood.

How Green Was My Valley ends with Crisp's death at the bottom of a mine shaft. Ford's camera focuses on the lift bringing other miners to safety. One platform of exhausted men passes us by, and then we see the one we are waiting for, Donald Crisp's head barely at the edge of the frame, cradled by his youngest son. That son, Roddy McDowall, stares past the camera, his beautiful face a bleak mask that reflects every child who ever faced a future without a parent. I've been facing that myself since 1991. Perhaps that's why I haven't watched the movie since.

But Ford wasn't by nature a pessimist, and How Green Was My Valley doesn't end on that shot. Its final montage includes McDowall and Crisp, going for another walk together. Memory isn't enough, but memory has its comforts, even if they are as simple as remembering how your father once lured an audience for one of his favorite films.

Dennis is a demonic artist, like Rimbaud. -Brooke Hayward

In the Siren's head, there is a triangle of aristocratic mid-century actresses, one that goes Europe-America-Britain--Hepburn, Kelly, Simmons. Jean Simmons, who has died in California, age 80, is the apex. Alas for the Hollywood in my head, Simmons isn't a household name like the other two. But her filmography is packed with layered and intelligent performances as well as darkly ambiguous characters the likes of which the other two ladies, great as they were, never dared.


Simmons began as a child actress, an excellent one. The Siren hasn't seen much of her juvenile work but like everyone else she's seen Great Expectations, and Simmons was fine as the young Estella, wounding and luring young Pip. In Black Narcissus her body makeup was the one false note in the masterpiece, but as the sensual, predatory serving girl Simmons put it all into her movements and snake-charmer eyes. In Hamlet, James Agee said she was "the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life." She earned an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress and Hollywood was interested, but she was still under contract in Britain and continued to make films there.

She made the 1949 version of The Blue Lagoon and if the Siren's memory is to be trusted, that one was no less silly than the remake, although Simmons worked valiantly. Much better was the beloved So Long at the Fair, a mystery-romance centered on the old legend of a disappearance at the Paris Exposition of 1889. There are many reasons to cherish this atmospheric, dreamy movie; for one thing, the sinister Parisians who take turns gaslighting poor Vicky (Simmons) fit neatly with the perception one can get of customer service in that city. But more credit goes to Simmons, who displayed her signature ability to yank a damsel-in-distress role out of mothballs and make the girl seem courageous, intelligent and worth saving.

Simmons had her own distress in the early years of adult success. There was her romance with Stewart Granger, who left his wife for her in 1950, causing some anxiety for Simmons and her employers in those sterner times. She weathered the Granger publicity, then endured a long series of contract disputes that held up her career and occasionally forced her into parts she didn't want. Rank, the studio that had Simmons under contract, put on dark glasses to avoid seeing Hollywood beckon as they cast her in pictures that did well at the box office, if not always with critics. (There are a number from this era that the Siren would like to see, including Uncle Silas, The Clouded Yellow and Cage of Gold.) Finally, as Granger prepared to go to MGM, Simmons was permitted to go with him as Rank loaned her to RKO for Androcles and the Lion.

The Siren thinks she's charming as Lavinia, but the movie must have been a bad memory for Simmons. The filming dragged on and on, she couldn't take any of the offers pouring in, and then Rank sold her contract to RKO with just six months left to go. RKO, then being run into the ground by Howard Hughes, claimed she made an oral agreement to stay on. Simmons said she did no such thing, and indeed it seems unlikely as Hughes made his sexual interest in the newlywed vulgarly obvious. She was so miserable that Granger claimed in his memoirs that the couple discussed the advisability of pushing Hughes off the cliff near their home. Instead, she agreed to do three more films and in a fortunate move for everyone, not least Simmons' fans, she made Angel Face.



Robert Mitchum biographer Lee Server says Hughes hired Otto Preminger to direct the movie in hopes of making the leading lady's life as difficult as possible: "I'm going to get even with that little bitch," quoth the ever-gallant Hughes. Preminger was often brutal to his actors for the sheer hell of it. Given explicit encouragement by a studio boss he "absolutely, totally destroyed me," Simmons said later. But she was no fragile Jean Seberg, thank goodness; when Hughes made one too many demands about her hairstyle she cut it all off and was made to wear a wig during filming. A scene where Mitchum slapped Simmons resulted in the legendary moment when, after Preminger had done take after take, Simmons bearing each blow until her eyes watered from the pain, Mitchum turned around and slapped the director instead. But oh, the film they made. Simmons is magnificent, an evil, father-obsessed, psychopathic beauty to place beside and even eclipse Gene Tierney's similar turn in Leave Her to Heaven. Simmons, so often cast as a schoolteacher or a missionary, takes her Black Narcissus sexiness and turns it full force on Mitchum's chauffeur. Their erotic chemistry is as potent as any in film noir.

Hughes continued to be a putz, refusing to loan Simmons out for Roman Holiday. The RKO dispute landed in court and Simmons eventually won a qualified victory and the ability to work at other studios. At MGM she made Young Bess, a movie notable mostly for Charles Laughton's return to his Henry VIII role (his scene with Simmons is the best in the movie) and her fiery, wilful Elizabeth, a girl you can easily see growing up to defeat an Armada. She made another film at RKO and then it was back to MGM to play The Actress, a role intended for Debbie Reynolds, who would have been pleasant, I suppose. Under George Cukor's direction, Simmons turned it into the definitive portrait of stagestruck youth. Part of Simmons' talent is that she never tries to signal the audience that she sees a character's flaws--she plays foolishness straight up. She takes the girl beyond the acting bug into a place for all adolescent dreaming. It is one of Cukor's best films and the Siren's favorite Simmons role. But the movie did poorly and David Shipman notes the irony, in a verdict the Siren agrees with; "she was wan as the heroine of The Robe with Richard Burton, a tremendous success...[but] a rotten version of a rotten novel by Lloyd C. Douglas."

The 50s were Simmons' years at the top, as she was cast in big-budget fare like Desiree and The Egyptian. Neither was very good, though the Siren gets plenty of pleasure from both. The Siren has little use for what Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph Mankiewicz did to Guys and Dolls, but no less an authority than Steven Sondheim called Jean's joyous dance in Havana "a high point of the picture." (In the 1970s, Simmons toured as Desiree in A Little Night Music and originated the role in London; she's said to have been terrific.) The Siren does think Simmons is swell in a somewhat anemic, but enjoyable women's picture, Until They Sail, about sisters in New Zealand experiencing World War II chiefly as man trouble.



Just after that, Simmons made The Big Country with William Wyler, who thought highly of her talent although he annoyed her as much as he did any other actor. The Siren cares not what others say of this movie, when she hears that music she sits and watches it all over again, yep, all three hours. Simmons, as she often did, had the hardest character of the lot, a well-bred orphan meant to serve as a battleground as vital as the movie's Big Muddy watering hole. Instead she breathes such intelligence that certain less-plausible ideas, like courtly treatment from Burl Ives' otherwise ruthless rancher, cause nary a flicker of disbelief. Of course he would defend this woman. Such is her radiant dignity, he might even lumber off his horse and bow. (He doesn't, but he could have.)



The marriage with Stewart Granger began to fail, as marriage with Stewart Granger must, and Simmons made Elmer Gantry with Richard Brooks, who became her second husband. It was one of the finest roles of her career, an evangelist doomed by belief in her own cant. Simmons is remarkably free of any condescension to Sister Sharon, her conflicts or her beliefs. There haven't been many performances like it since, as we live now in an age where we see a preacher address thousands and just assume there must be a Jim Bakker backstory somewhere. Incredibly, Simmons did not get an Oscar nomination though her work was as great as that of Burt Lancaster, who won.

She was professional as always in Spartacus, but while the movie is good and has acquired a devoted following, the Siren thinks Simmons' part isn't particularly interesting. She gets a couple of chances to shine near the end, however. Her kiss for Laughton is so loving you feel his reaction may not be acting at all, and the moment where she sees Spartacus dying, and the camera stays and stays on her face, is the most heartbreaking in the movie.

Shipman says that around this time, "to protect this marriage and to bring up her children," (she had one from each marriage) "she began to refuse work." Simmons is darling in The Grass Is Greener, her giddy Mitford-esque flirt out-shining onetime Granger love Deborah Kerr. She was great again as the mother in All the Way Home, a beautiful movie based on Agee's A Death in the Family that also had an equally fine Robert Preston. But the downbeat story was a flop.

As the 60s hurtled on, Simmons found her offers getting fewer and less interesting, as they do for most actresses with the nerve to get older. Her beauty was striking right up to the end, but what does that ever matter in Hollywood? The Siren hasn't seen much of her work past about 1967, including her Oscar-nominated role in Brooks' The Happy Ending. The Siren did see her in The Thorn Birds; she was lovely. Simmons was always lovely, even in silly fare like North and South where her presence was like using a Stradivarius to play "Oops, I Did It Again."


Joseph Mankiewicz called her "a fantastically talented and enormously underestimated girl. In terms of talent she is so many head and shoulders above most of her contemporaries, one wonders why she didn't become the great star she could have been." He went on to theorize, "it doesn't matter to her much." The Siren isn't so sure; stardom means good parts, and those mattered a great deal to Simmons, enough to keep her working nearly her entire life. "Maybe it doesn't help to have been so good so young," said Shipman. Well, Simmons deserved better from the movie business, as did so many actresses. But the Siren, as a Jean Simmons admirer now and always, got much indeed from the lady's acting.

(Please note: the beautiful picture at the bottom is copyright-held by the gentleman we know as Yojimboen. He took it himself, the lucky devil.)

It is a recurrent irony of certain film artists' lives that upon their death, no matter what other accomplishments may have been theirs, if they won an Oscar the headline will read "Academy Award Winner Dies." It hurts the Siren to see this headline for Jennifer Jones, because The Song of Bernadette is not a film she ever took to her heart (to put it mildly). Consciously or subconsciously, the movie undermines the whole notion of religious fulfillment because it makes Bernadette's life seem so awful. The Sirens adds, though, that the movie has its admirers; for an eloquent appreciation of Bernadette, please see Marilyn Ferdinand here.

The movie uppermost in the Siren's thoughts isn't that hagiography, but rather Portrait of Jennie, in which Jones' superb talent for creating odd and bewitching women reached its apogee. William Dieterle's ghost story was the perfect vehicle for Jones, whose spiritual quality always had a note of restless passion. When you meet her she is attired in her best fur-trimmed coat and muff, appearing among the ice skaters at Central Park as though she sprang complete from one of the glittering snow banks. Jones was a great child impersonator, as she had shown in Bernadette despite that movie's flaws, and yet there is something womanly in the way she makes eye contact with Joseph Cotten. Not sensuality yet, but its promise. It is a strange film, sweepingly romantic in that way that has vanished from American movies, the scenes moving through different tones as Jennie herself moves in and out of worlds. The Siren wasn't surprised to hear, from Dan Callahan, that Luis Bunuel loved Portrait of Jennie. What might Bunuel have done with a chance to direct its star?

An eeriness clings to Jones and every attempt to discuss her. You reach for the same adjectives: febrile, intense, jittery, instinctual. When she arrived in Hollywood she was married to the gifted but self-destructive Robert Walker, with whom she had two sons. In addition to having a bad drinking problem, it was Walker's profound misfortune to have David O. Selznick fall in love with his wife. The question that overhangs Jennifer Jones is whether Selznick's love was ultimately her misfortune, too. He is generally supposed to have slowly smothered her talent, rendering her less natural and more stilted the longer she remained under his influence. (Miriam Bale alludes to this in her excellent piece that accompanied last year's Jennifer Jones retrospective at Lincoln Center. Also, please check out Miriam's detailed response under M.B. in comments, in which she explains her view that it was not the liaison, but rather marriage to Selznick that seemed to douse some of Jones' light.)



This theory isn't so tidy, however. It's true that several of her best movies, including the Lubitsch masterpiece Cluny Brown and Michael Powell's Gone to Earth (which the Siren, alas, has yet to see) were made outside of Selznick's meddling. Cluny Brown shows a flair for comedy that Jones never got a chance to exploit, unless you count Beat the Devil, which the Siren doesn't find very funny. Cluny, we are told repeatedly, doesn't know her place, but of course she does. Her place is with Charles Boyer's Adam Belinski, the intellectual who alone appreciates her. "You must never become a victim of my circumstances, and, if you should ever seem romantic to me, don't hesitate. Just kick me," Cluny tells her true love (who responds, "Yes, let's kick each other"). The Siren is convinced that no one but Jennifer Jones could have brought the right combination of physical enthusiasm and ardent innocence to an explanation of how to solve blocked-up pipes: "I would bang, bang, bang, all night long."



But Jones is good or excellent in other movies where Selznick either produced or hovered a great deal at the margins. There's Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun, of course, a valiant attempt to show carnality unmarked by civilization, with some intermittently good scenes from the actress. Jones is a better creature of the body in King Vidor's Ruby Gentry. But there is also her young girl in Since You Went Away, an underrated portrait of innocence yearning to grow up. The overall film is heavy-handed, it is true, but Jones isn't, and the Siren loves both her bright eagerness at the dance in the massive hangar, and the farewell scene at the train. She did a fine job with Madame Bovary's dual nature in Minnelli's film, especially in the ballroom scene, where Emma's sexual and class longings become too much for the room, or indeed the film, to contain. And the Siren is fond of Jones in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, even if few others are. This invalid Elizabeth still has a simmering physicality and some common sense; compare Jones' realization of the incestuous nature of her father's interest with the prim horror displayed by Norma Shearer, and see if you don't take the Siren's point. And although it is Laurence Olivier's movie, the Siren admires Jones in Carrie, where she makes the title character more interesting than she was in Dreiser's novel. Olivier admired Jones as well, later in life comparing her to Meryl Streep.

There certainly are films, however, where Selznick's influence can't be described as anything other than unfortunate--certain ludicrous passages in Duel in the Sun; the overcooked, overtinkered A Farewell to Arms; or the producer's butchering of de Sica's Terminal Station, complete with the most shudder-inducing re-titling ever, Indiscretion of an American Wife.

But if Selznick's obsession with Jones was in some ways detrimental to her career (and her mental stability) it didn't do much for Selznick, either, who did better work when still married to the shrewd and decidedly earthbound Irene Mayer. In Irene's autobiography, she tells a revealing story about the aftermath of the Selznicks' breakup. Jones pretended to be Dorothy Paley to get Irene on the phone, then waited outside a theatre for hours to confront the ex-wife. Irene had her driver take them on circle after circle of Central Park as Jones became hysterical, saying David didn't want her, he wanted Irene and his life was ruined unless he could have her back. Jones also tried to throw herself out of the car. "She talked as if I were responsible," Selznick said.

Selznick's relationship with Jones is a particulary sad story of Hollywood folie à deux, and Walker's horrible death and the eventual suicide of Selznick's daughter with Jones turns it to tragedy. Jennifer Jones is rather like Marion Davies, in that we will always wonder what her career would have been like without Svengali. And we will never have a completely satisfying answer to whether Selznick's influence was imposed from without, or whether Jones was drawing it to herself. That ambiguity turns up in all of Jones' screen roles--is she being manipulated, or is she using her "weakness," whether social, mental or sexual, to manipulate?



It is comforting to note that Jones went on, after her own fight against mental illness and all that trauma during and after her years of stardom, to forge some apparent stability and contentment. Sometime around the late 70s-early 80s my father was at the front desk of a hotel (the St. Regis?) when he heard a voice at his elbow that sounded familiar, asking the clerk for something. He turned to see Jennifer Jones, still clearly recognizable after all those years. As Dad gaped the clerk asked her name (ah, how fame fades) and she said, "Mrs. Norton Simon."

A Star Is Born, played for a clueless clerk and an astonished audience of one.

Movies are a visual medium, we repeat in unison, yet when old-movie buffs get together to discuss the objects of their affection what they do, as often as not, is quote dialogue. When the Siren sees a recent movie, what she often misses is the verve and crackle of glorious midcentury American speech.

When it came to using that speech for film, Budd Schulberg, who died this week age 95, was one of the best. In On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd, his characters speak in a way that is always recognizably and believably American, yet what power of observation and expression he gives them.

Their dialogue is heavily peppered with slang, they describe themselves as bums or indeed, they really are bums. But even the most hateful or least educated characters in a Schulberg screenplay have an uncommon ability to speak their minds. From On the Waterfront we remember tender, heroic Terry Malloy and Father Barry, but Lee J. Cobb as Johnny Friendly, as unregenerate a villain as 1950s cinema gave us, has his reasons:

When I was sixteen, I had to beg for work in the hold. I didn't work my way up out of there for nuthin'. You know, takin' over this local took a little doin'. There's some pretty rough fellas in the way. They gave me this [he displays an ugly scar on his neck] to remember them by. I got two thousand dues-payin' members in this local. That's $72,000 a year legitimate and when each one of 'em puts in a couple of bucks a day just to make sure they work steady--well, you figure it out. And that's just for openers. We got the fattest piers in the fattest harbor in the world. Everything moves in and out. We take our cut. You don't suppose I can afford to be boxed out of a deal like this, do ya? A deal I sweated and bled for, on account of one lousy little cheese-eater, that Doyle bum, who thinks he can go squealin' to the Crime Commission? Do ya? [pause] Well, DO YA?

Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers, everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be Fighters for Fuller. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president--and you'll be the power behind me!

All you gotta do to that story is give it the switcheroo. Instead of the minister you got a young dame missionary, see, Dorothy Lamour. Her old man kicked off with tropical fever and she's carrying on the good work. You know, a Nice Girl. Then instead of Sadie Thompson you got a louse racketeer who comes to the Island to hide out. Dorothy Lamour and George Raft in Monsoon! Does that sound terrific? So, Dotty goes out to save George's soul and he starts feeding her the old oil. Of course, all he's out for is a good lay, but before long he finds himself watching the sun rise without even thinking of making a pass at her. The soul crap is beginning to get to him, see? He tells her she's the first dame he ever met he didnt' think about that way. Now give me a second to dope this out...

Jack Cardiff, the supreme genius of Technicolor, has died in Kent, England, age 94. Cardiff said that if he hadn't become a filmmaker, he would have been a painter. With him dies another link to a film process that gave us images like this.



The people at Technicolor, wrote Michael Powell, had usually encountered filmmakers accustomed to black-and-white, people who listened while the Kalmus crew told them what Technicolor could and could not do. The Technicolor folks had a surprise in store from Cardiff, who had worked in the laboratory for years and was "able to tell Technicolor where they could get off."

"Now," said Powell, "they were dealing with painters, which was a very different thing."

For his inventions, imagination and sheer audacity, there has never been another colour cameraman like Jack Cardiff. Georges Perinal was the best camaerman I have ever worked with, both in black and white and in colour, but Jack was something apart. The skin textures in the close-ups of Colonel Blimp would have delighted Fragonard, but Jack's lighting and composition in Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes would have infuriated Delacroix, because he couldn't have done any better himself, in imagination or in chiaroscuro.
--Michael Powell, A Life in Movies

The problems of being beautiful are something the Siren does not generally worry her little head about, such difficulties ranking in her mind with whether it is hard to maintain a large house in Manhattan and what on earth will become of Dirk Kempthorne on January 20, 2009. But in the case of Paul Newman, one of the great male beauties of the American screen, it's an underlying critical theme. How much of his appeal was based on his amazing looks?

David Thomson declared himself "suspicious of such blue-eyed likability," but he was only the most forthright of critics. As you go back through reviews of Newman's work, and even now as you read the obituaries with a heavy heart, here come the references to his charm, his charisma, his alleged "cool." The subtext, frequently, is that this was somehow all natural, that Newman was gifted from birth with certain genetic qualities that were fated to pop up on screen. He came from a well-to-do Cleveland family and grew into a beautiful man whom the camera was bound to love. Even his admirable charity work fits into the myth, in that it's taken for granted that his tremendous good luck made him want to give something back. (Phooey. There are others far luckier who never give back a thing--what has Pia Zadora done for us lately? Giving away $200 million is a far deeper statement about character that merely wanting to share the wealth.)

But the Siren is here to talk about Newman's acting, and to remind us that charm does not follow naturally from being handsome, nor does possessing that quality in life mean you can bring it to the screen. Consider Alain Delon, an excellent actor with looks so perfect they seem a cosmic joke, but resolutely uncharming in role after role. Think of George Brent, a well-loved man in Hollywood but often a limp screen figure. Look at Peter Sellers and Rex Harrison, despised by colleagues but the picture of charm in so many movies. Charm is a learned technique for an actor. Either you choose not to use it, as the Siren presumes Delon has chosen, or you can only bring it out when the stars align, like Brent, or you learn to project it despite your real personality. Newman seems to have been a wonderful man in real life, but that's irrelevant to his talent. The things he was able to bring to the screen came from his dedication to acting, not the Good Fairy Merryweather hovering over his cradle.

For further evidence, you don't have to sit in a dark room with Newman's entire filmography on disc. All you have to do is watch The Silver Chalice, his first movie, from 1954. It is neither, as Newman variously described it, the worst movie ever made, nor the worst movie made in the 1950s. It is bad, however. And Newman, as he would tell every interviewer for the rest of his life, is terrible. As the Bible Films blog points out, The Silver Chalice hits every cliche: "a young man becoming a Christian as a result of his pursuit of an early Christian relic...pagan-finds-faith falling for beautiful-Christian-girl." The movie couldn't even capitalize on the genre's mystifying popularity in the 50s, and it lost a fortune. What astonishes a latter-day viewer isn't the ridiculous sets, or the disorganized screenplay that veers from a search for the Last Supper cup to a search for a witness to Newman's adoption and then back again, nor is it even Jack Palance bringing his modern gait and All-American vowels to the role of a Roman-era magician. No, what leaps out at you is this: Newman isn't charming. I mean, look at him in that still above. He is anticharm, in the sense of antimatter. When Pier Angeli looks at him, it isn't with love, but with wonderment that this gorgeous man has the personality of a just-caught red snapper, with lifeless eyes (can you believe it?) and ungraceful movements.

Well, that was his first role. He was never that bad again. Two years later he took the part intended for James Dean in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Boxer Rocky Graziano was a well-loved figure, but many's the character beloved in real life who comes across far differently in a biopic. This is, after all, the story of a guy who starts out more familiar with jails and reformatories than schools, a member of the Greatest Generation who declines to contribute to the struggle, instead repeatedly going AWOL from the Army and eventually earning a dishonorable discharge for striking an officer. That this selfish, immature delinquent becomes quite lovable is due in part to a screenplay that takes care to show the roots of Graziano's behavior, but even more credit is due to Paul Newman. Some will take this as heresy, but the Siren doubts very much that the intense, fiery Dean would have been as sweetly tentative in the love scenes (again with Pier Angeli, looking as though she can't believe her costar's improvement) or as sympathetically big-lunkish when behaving badly.

What was he doing for the two years between roles? Some television, some theater, classes at the Actor's Studio. What flicked the switch? Hard work, definitely. Accretion of experience, I suppose, and perhaps the knowledge that the movie was a do-or-die second chance. Not to mention the fact that Graziano, a street tough who was about as close to the real-life Newman as Rosalynn Carter is to Sandra Bernard, was nevertheless a part far more suited to the actor's ineffably modern sensibility than some silly Greek slave. Somebody Up There Likes Me was the first inkling of Newman's unique talent for playing antiheros, an ability to burrow down into the lives of the small-time and hard-luck cases and find what could bring the audience to the character's side.

The Siren finds his next part, as a soldier who cracked under torture in The Rack, fascinating both for the subject matter and for the place it occupies in Newman's development as an actor. While the screenplay offers him some backhanded compassion, Newman's character is ultimately condemned as a vague example of some kind of weakness in the younger generation. Here again, however, you see that Newman reserved charisma for the parts that demanded it, and the tormented officer he plays gives off no glow. It's an interesting forerunner to another self-hating man Newman would play to far greater effect many years later in The Verdict.


Newman's roles up to the early 1960s are often seen as a sort of romantic-lead holding pattern for the actor, until he could reach his destiny in brilliant turns as The Hustler, Hud and Cool-Hand Luke. These early films have their rewards, though. The drifter in The Long, Hot Summer in some ways is a dry run for the venal but mesmerizing Hud, and his chemistry with Joanne Woodward is delicious. Glenn Kenny pointed out to the Siren that Martin Scorsese mentioned From the Terrace in his tribute to Newman, right alongside Butch Cassidy. Walter Chaw may call it a film "only a dinosaur Republican could love," but the Siren sees it of a piece with Newman's later work. It is, after all, the story of a man materially gifted from birth who still has a reverse Midas touch in his personal life, a type of role that emerged with a slightly different spin the year before as he climbed the ladder in The Young Philadelphians. Moral choices dog early Newman characters. He was usually asked to come down on the side of the Establishment, but you believe him more as he mocks the system, describing his Wall Street office in From the Terrace as an "aging fortress of banking integrity" and sparring bitterly with his father and wife, not when he cleans up in the last act. These are men whose appeal burns fitfully, usually in the love or flirtation scenes. The confrontations and ethical dilemmas are played straight and truthful.

Moral choices dog Newman, too, in the two Tennessee Williams plays he filmed, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, alas, is a hot mess, but it isn't Newman's fault, although he might have tried to make Brick less petulant. The main problem is that there is no way in hell you can make a heterosexual man's refusal to sleep with the 1958-vintage Elizabeth Taylor believable. Even being gay wouldn't completely explain it but at least that's a start. Newman seems to know this, and if you ask the Siren, he's pretty much punting his scenes with Taylor in favor of the scenes with Burl Ives as Big Daddy, which are quite touching in spots. Newman's expression as he watches his father grapple with imminent death makes you forgive Brick, momentarily, for being such a putz in the rest of the movie. While Sweet Bird is flawed, Newman is quite convincing as a would-be actor and pseudo-gigolo in the second film, his follow-up to The Hustler and Paris Blues. Plus the Siren confesses eternal love for the scene where a shirtless Newman does slant-board sit-ups. I deeply admire his acting, I think he was so much more than a pin-up, but still, I could watch that thing on a loop for as long the film held out.

Anyway, what you have, up to the watershed of The Hustler in 1961, is an actor already working at a high level and, for the most part, attacking roles with great fervor and seriousness. The only movie from this period in which the Siren really sees Newman on autopilot is Exodus, and she can't say she blames him for that one. Otherwise, in his early films he isn't relying on his looks and his charisma comes out sparingly. Maybe that's why his 1960s work, which brought him a number of roles that required allure in spades, was and remains such a thunderclap.



With 1963's Hud, Newman would eventually express dismay that the amoral, ruthless title character was taken for his charm and not the viciousness underneath. That audience reaction was the result, however, of perfect playing. Orson Welles's depiction of Harry Lime had the same fate. How else would these men do their dirty work, if they could not make a surface so dazzling it blinded people? In Cool Hand Luke, allegory goes down so easily at least in part because Newman takes Luke and gives him more allure than any straight-up movie Jesus ever had. The Siren likes to think it was maybe a bit of payback for that earlier exercise in Christian mythology.

In later years Newman contributed to the "blue-eyed likability" meme by describing acting as unfit work for a grown-up and pouring his efforts into other interests, like auto-racing, politics and his charitable endeavors. It may well be that at some point the parts he was being offered began to bore him--another irresistible devil, ho-hum. Well, talent Newman had in abundance, but technique and ability must be kept in shape, something Newman acknowledged when he retired a couple of years ago. The Siren does not for one minute believe that he truly despised acting. He stayed too good for too long, his performance in 1994's Nobody's Fool as fresh and true as any he gave in the first golden years of superstardom. His Absence of Malice costar, Sally Field, remarked that "He's so easy you keep thinking he's not doing anything. You know, 'When is he going to act?'" The secret to Paul Newman, and what has the Siren missing him so badly this morning, is that he wasn't just lucky. He was working for the audience all along.

Hollywood history records a lot of ways women have dealt with possessing world-class looks. There are those who find it a cross from the beginning, test people constantly to make sure it isn't affecting every interaction, and wilt when they find it usually is. Others profess great disregard for their beauty but use the hell out of it all the same. Then there are the women who never bother to conceal how much they love being stunning, and flaunt it like a gambler's winnings. So firmly did the ravishing Anita Page belong to that last group that even after time had done its damage, she scarcely seemed to notice, retaining the ways and prerogatives of a beauty even as she approached the century mark.

She would receive guests and tell them about, for example, Mussolini's attempted wooing with an air that suggested her heyday was last week, not more than 70 years ago. And why not? All stars are accompanied by their celluloid ghosts. As a reporter sat with latter-day Anita he sat also with her companion, the face on film that led Clark Gable to say that when he met Grace Kelly in the 1950s, he immediately thought of Anita Page. She died Saturday in her sleep, age 98, and like Amy-Jeanne the Siren feels cheated, having always assumed the unsinkable Anita would make 100 with time to spare.



Her career began with bit roles in silents and lasted until 1936. After that came marriages, a role in 1963 and a handful of horror roles in the last decade. The Siren has seen only two movies that starred Anita, The Broadway Melody and Our Dancing Daughters. In neither did she leave an impression of shimmering talent. But like Ava Gardner, another woman who savored her beauty to the dregs, just to look at Anita gives so much pleasure you feel churlish mentioning something like technique. Which is not to say Anita was bad; she wasn't. But the contrast provided by Joan Crawford, her ambition burning through every frame of Our Dancing Daughters, gives a more plausible explanation of Page's relatively short time at the peak than any stories about Irving Thalberg as an unlikely Casting Couch Creep.

In later years Anita was known for surrounding herself with adoring gay men, which in the Siren's eyes just shows fundamental common sense. As life winds down, who among us wouldn't be content with friendship, laughter and daily affirmations of fabulousness? Aside from food, shelter and family, there isn't much else the Siren sees herself wanting if she makes it past 90.

Mr. C likes to tell people about an interview he saw with France's oldest living woman, then well north of 100. She had buried something like four of her doctors and at least one man who had foolishly taken a type of viatical settlement on her when she was a spring chicken of 80. Asked about the downside to such advanced age, the Frenchwoman said wistfully that it got a bit lonely, outliving everyone. As we lose the last threads that connect us to the old days of greatness, the Siren feels more and more lonely herself.

I was less than 10 years old but I can still remember my father's expression when one morning he told me he was going to watch Brigadoon. "Who's in it?" I asked. "Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse." "Cyd Charisse? Who's he?"

With great emphasis: "SHE."

"A lady named Cyd?"

"YES, honey."

"So she was pretty?"

If all goes well with childrearing there aren't many moments where a parent says to himself "what the hell have I produced here?" but this was one for my father, I have no doubt. His face was beyond pained as he said, "All right. We'll watch this movie and then you tell me."

For many fans of Cyd Charisse, Brigadoon probably ranks somewhere between Meet Me in Las Vegas and that bit in The Harvey Girls where she sings (via dubbing) about being from Providence, Rhode Island. But as a child I thought it was swell and I still do. Why does everybody single out Brigadoon for being shot on the back lot? Does Seven Brides for Seven Brothers look like it was shot in Oregon? Does Easter Parade scream "sidewalks of New York" to you? Brigadoon is a fantasy, for crying out loud. Of course it doesn't look like Scotland. That is because Scotland has no magical disappearing 18th-century villages. In the Siren's view, Vincente Minnelli struggling with Cinemascope, which he disliked, had more to do with some of the movie's awkwardness than the obvious sets.

But there is still a lot to love. Minnelli lit the interiors to resemble Flemish paintings. The scene in the crowded Manhattan bar is brilliant. Van Johnson proved he could really act, and the Lerner and Loewe score is fabulously beautiful.

Most of all, "The Heather on the Hill" is sublime, with that sexual longing that's in all Charisse's dancing, married to a spiritual feeling in keeping with the film's mysticism.

So the Siren has a special place in her heart for Brigadoon for a number of reasons, but the greatest of these is undoubtedly that the movie was the first time she saw Cyd Charisse, the matchless dancer who died yesterday at age 86.

I think the next time I saw Charisse was in Singin' in the Rain. I like to think this was probably my father's introduction to her, as he was in the Army around this time, and could easily have been in an audience reacting exactly the way David Shipman describes here:

If you were in an air-force cinema, circa 1952, you'll never forget the sound which greeted the appearance of Cyd Charisse halfway through the climactic ballet in Singin' in the Rain. The audience to a man greeted the sinuous leggy beauty with a loud and prolonged 'Ooooaah!' As she slithered round an understandably bewildered Gene Kelly, there was uproar in the cinema. Cyd Charisse didn't do more than dance in Singin' in the Rain and people remember her in it.

It was her run of musicals at MGM in the 1950s that guaranteed her immortality, including Singin' in the Rain and another masterpiece that followed it, The Band Wagon. Fred Astaire called "The Girl Hunt Ballet" his favorite dance. Charisse, who had been in a couple of noirs without making much of an impression, took a Mickey Spillane spoof and danced a femme fatale for the ages: "She was bad...she was dangerous. I wouldn't trust any further than I can throw her. But she was my kind of woman."

As in The Band Wagon, Charisse's greatest moments usually cast her as a woman whose jazzed-up dancing is seen as slumming somehow. In that sense she was perfectly of the 1950s, her sensuality boiling along under the surface as she gives her frequently wooden line readings. Then the music starts, she begins to dance and all hell breaks loose. You realize that here is the real Cyd, a dose of sex so strong that at some point in the dance her partner, even a great like Astaire or Kelly, seems bowled over by it.

So in The Band Wagon, she's a ballerina with a bad attitude about musicals, until she and Astaire go "Dancing in the Dark." In Meet Me in Las Vegas, she's a ballerina again, horrified by her contract to perform in Vegas, giving a nice-but-no-more bit from Swan Lake--and then all but igniting the film stock with "Frankie and Johnny."

She gave her best all-around performance in It's Always Fair Weather as a woman who harbors a brain under the bombshell exterior, sporting some dangerously feminist ideas in a cab scene with Gene Kelly, then raising the gym roof with a chorus of punch-drunk boxers in "Baby, You Knock Me Out." Her final musical at MGM had her taking the old Garbo role as a defrosted Soviet in the Ninotchka remake, Silk Stockings, discovering the power of her own beauty in a number partnered only by some lingerie and the items of the title. Her last great dancing part, in Nicholas Ray's Party Girl, brought the two-sided Cyd to some sort of apotheosis, as she tries to set Robert Taylor straight while performing two dances that would turn any good man bad.

For years now the Siren had occasionally searched around for current pictures of Charisse, and she always looked radiantly happy and beautiful. It was a great life, but it's still a sad day for us. The Siren leaves the final word to Astaire: "That Cyd! When you've danced with her, you stay danced with."

He isn't often mentioned in the same breath with great male heartthrobs such as Gary Cooper or his contemporaries Marlon Brando and Gregory Peck, but Charlton Heston was one of the most breathtakingly handsome men in the annals of American cinema. To get his first major role in a big-budget movie, all he had to do was walk across the Paramount lot--Cecil B. DeMille spotted him and presto, Heston was the lead in The Greatest Show on Earth. Heston's was a beauty uniquely suited to epics, so striking, symmetrical and sculpted that no matter how wide you made the screen, how much period paraphernalia you hung around the set or how many good-looking extras you had milling around, he held the gaze.

But if general gorgeousness were all it took to make a memorable performance in an epic, Jeffrey Hunter would have hit King of Kings out of the park. Heston could take a character like Judah Ben-Hur, almost literally a plaster saint, and give him life. Not real life, mind you, but if you wanted reality you didn't seek it at a roadshow engagement. What Heston gave his historical characters was the power of his own belief in them, no matter how improbable the setting. His finely detailed memoirs reveal a man who never wanted for self-respect, and it translated into a screen persona that absolutely demanded your credulity. Heston believed he was Moses, El Cid, a heterosexual Michelangelo, believed it with such burning intensity he swept the audience along. You may question the setting, the special effects, the dialogue, the dialect, the leading lady's eyeliner, but never Heston's absolute conviction in his character.

Several Heston performances outshine the movie itself, such as his George "Chinese" Gordon in Khartoum--a shaky accent but an enjoyable performance that got better notices at the time than did costar Laurence Olivier. He's also the Siren's favorite thing in The Big Country, a movie she loves and has seen many times. Heston's character, the unfortunately named Steve Leech, is often described as a heavy but he's no such thing, just a strong silent type eaten up with love for Carroll Baker and determined not to lose her. Heston often had a lack of chemistry with his leading ladies, perhaps because the diva-esque prerogatives of stars like Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner drove the punctual, meticulous Heston round the bend. But in The Big Country his scenes with Baker smolder, and his longing for her is so nakedly sexual and apparent that you sympathize with Leech long before the character starts to do anything sympathetic.

In his science fiction movies, particularly Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green, Heston's presence gives the viewer something to hang onto amid the dystopia. The world has gone to hell, we're overrun with ragged, starving masses or damned dirty apes, but you pin your hopes on his sheer Charlton Heston-ness. Those shoulders won't bow down no matter how bad things get.

Heston's best work, however, came in his smaller-scale roles. In Will Penny, he reins in all the bigness and toughness and gives a gentle, nuanced portrayal of a hard-up cowhand, falling slowly and fearfully in love with Joan Hackett. When they finally kiss, the Siren's heart turns over. Heston always cited it as his favorite role.

Give Heston credit for something else: the man knew talent when he saw it, and had the courage to back new or underrated directors, as with Will Penny's Tom Gries. Another instance produced another one of his best films, Major Dundee. It's usually described as an interesting failure but the Siren likes this movie a lot, and likes Heston in it, too. When Sam Peckinpah ran into trouble with Columbia, Heston personally intervened, as David Shipman relates, "even offering to return his salary in an attempt to get things right (the studio, to his chagrin, accepted)." Heston was fine indeed as the Major whose harsh drive remains a mystery, unable to enjoy victory or accept defeat, slogging through fight after brutal, senseless fight.



If Charlton Heston had done nothing more in his professional life than to use his influence with Universal to help get Orson Welles the directing job on Touch of Evil, any cinephile worthy of the name would have reason to remember him fondly. The movie is without a doubt the best that Heston ever made, and the Siren wishes people would lay off his accent in it. No, it doesn't sound authentic , but what is important to the film is the way Heston's Mexican police officer counterbalances Welles' corrupt captain in every way. His character is courageous and virtuous, but Heston also plays Mike Vargas as stiff-necked, pompous and a trifle obtuse, the kind of man who would vibrate with righteous indignation if overcharged for the starch in his shirts. Vargas loves his wife and is fighting the good fight against racism and corruption. Yet Heston's performance, with its hint of priggishness, gives us room to see Hank Quinlan as human, with a touch of evil that makes him ultimately more sympathetic.

This week will undoubtedly witness a great deal of back and forth and back again about Heston's politics, given that most people last saw him not in character but at the podium of NRA rallies. But during his career Heston was an actor who approached each role with deep seriousness, repeatedly returning to the stage in between films until the lines would no longer stay in his memory. As the right- and left-wing comments sections runneth over, the Siren recuses herself. Whether you find his late-period activism admirable or appalling, what does it matter what you say about people? He was some kind of a man, but it's the work that endures.

(Cross-posted at Newcritics.)

The Siren has a friend who is a film editor, and over the years this gentleman has corrected her more than once when she pronounced Dassin "Das-SAHN," in the French way. "He's American," the editor would say. "Don't forget." Dassin would have approved. "I'm American, and that I will stay," he said, in this excellent interview over at the WGA site.

The Siren has been thinking about her editor friend's reminder this morning. Because along with the Sunrise jokester from the Oscars, here's another writer the Siren would like to nominate for permanent hiatus: whoever wrote Jules Dassin's obituary for the Associated Press.

Dassin, a leftist activist whose more than 20 films also included "Topkapi," abandoned Hollywood in 1950 during the Communist blacklisting era.

[snip]

Dassin, who was active in leftist political causes, was denounced by Hollywood contemporaries as being a Communist enough to be placed on the era's infamous blacklists.

He moved to London in 1950 to shoot his next film, "Night and the City." Dassin then lived in Italy and France before returning to the cinema with "Rififi."

He could not find work in Europe for five years, as producers felt American distributors would automatically ban any film with his signature. When Rififi opened, critics wrote about Dassin as if he were European. The New York Herald Tribune reported in 1961, 'At one ceremony, when the award to Rififi was announced, [Dassin] was called to the dais, and a French flag was raised above him: "It should have been a moment of triumph but I felt awful. They were honoring my work and I'm an American. It should have been the American flag raised in honor."'

Rehearsals of Marathon Man in New York. Dustin Hoffman and Roy Scheider are about to rehearse their first scene together. Hoffman has the vehicle role and is the more important of the two, but Scheider, coming off the lead in Jaws, is not chopped liver.

In the story, they play brothers. Hoffman is a graduate student. Scheider, whom he adores and thinks is in the oil business, actually works for the government as a killer and a spy.

Hoffman has just been brutally mugged in the park. He has written this to Scheider. Scheider suspects it was not an accident--bad guys are trying to get at him by threatening his kid brother. So he comes down from Washington to visit.

It's night, and Hoffman is asleep. Suddenly, he realizes he's not alone in his apartment, so he grabs a flashlight from his bed table and points it around the room, trying to catch the intruder. As he does this, he has a line of dialog:

Hoffman:

(very James Cagney)

I got a gun, you make a move, I'll blow your ass to Shanghai.

Okay, rehearsal. A mock set is prepared. Hoffman lies down, closes his eyes. Scheider mimes opening a door, bangs his foot down to indicate the closing of the door, and Hoffman springs awake, mimes getting the flashlight, and says his Shanghai line.

Then rehearsals stop.

Hoffman says to hold it and he turns to the director, John Schlesinger, and tells him that he thinks it is wrong for his character to have a flashlight in his bed table.

Schlesinger tells him we'll get to it later, let's continue rehearsing the scene, please.

Hoffman shakes his head...

A lot of people have flashlights by their bed tables, Schlesinger tries.

Hoffman isn't playing a lot of people, he is playing Babe and Babe wouldn't have a flashlight by his bed table.

Schlesinger makes another attempt: You've just been mugged, you're upset, you're taking precautions.

No sale...

Through all this, silent and waiting, stands Scheider.

And that is probably my strongest memory of the situation--it took an hour, by the way--Scheider, waiting quietly, a perfect gentleman through it all.

--William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade