favorite movie #95 - election edition: the candidate

Favorite movies that have had an impact on me - #95 - The Candidate (1972) - Robert Redford plays idealistic Bill McKay, who is pulled into a race by Peter Boyle  — as he gets deeper and deeper into the campaign he finds his ideals compromised and the end goal more confusing.

favorite movie #19: three days of the condor

Favorite movies that have had an impact on me - #19 - Three Days of the Condor (1975) - In honor of Robert Redford’s birthday on August 18, I’d like to share another one of my favorites of his films. This movie seems a companion piece to All the President’s Men, with its paranoia level ratcheted up a few more notches. As a CIA book analyst who comes back from fetching lunch for his colleagues to find them all “eliminated,” Redford is immediately put on his guard and on the run for the rest of the film. Along the he way he encounters Faye Dunaway, who he at first forces to help him, but who soon becomes a willing accomplice. Max Von Sydow and Cliff Robertson are both after him, but who poses the bigger threat? It also helps that Redford has never looked more handsome than in this film.

favorite movie #2: all the president’s men

Favorite movies that have had an impact on me - #2 - All the President’s Men (1976): This movie, even when you know the outcome, either from history or previous viewing, is still a tension-packed, at times nail-biting mystery. I’ve always loved Robert Redford, and he works well here with Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, etc. This film should be required (re)viewing, as its depiction of large and small crimes perpetrated by members of our government sounds eerily familiar. “These are not very bright guys” and “Follow the money.”

the great gatsby: redford vs. dicaprio smackdown

Baz Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby is brash and loud and colorful, compared to the pastel-hued tones of Jack Clayton's 1974 version. But is it a better film? Yes and no. The real take-away as the credits began to roll was that F. Scott Fitzgerald's timeless tale had proved, once again, to be, while not exactly un-filmable, at least as elusive to capture as Gatsby's dream of a future life with Daisy proved to be.

Leonardo DiCaprio was effective and impressive as Jay Gatsby, the self-made (and re-made) man, a dreamer who wants to go back in time with the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan. DiCaprio was able to convey how much he cared for Daisy, and how deeply his small-town origins still hung about him, no matter how hard he tried to escape them. In 1974 Robert Redford captured the Gatsby facade, and wore the clothes (designer Theoni V. Aldredge won the Best Costume Oscar, but Ralph Lauren did the men's suits) with more ease and authority. Redford even made the phrase "old sport" sound almost natural and seemed more convincingly menacing as a man who may have been hiding some dark secrets. But DiCaprio was able to take the character to a more emotional place.

He wore it well: Robert Redford in one of Ralph Lauren's linen suits

Gatsby, looking good poolside

What really rankled in the 2013 version was how the women in the story all seemed to be relegated to the background. Daisy may have been Gatsby's focus and the impetus for all of his character's actions, but as played by Carey Mulligan she was just a bland, soft-voiced, Southern-drawling cipher. Luhrmann didn't even acknowledge Daisy's lack of mothering skills — until the last few moments of the film the audience, unless they were acquainted with the book or earlier film version, would hardly know she even has a child. As miscast as Mia Farrow might have been in the 1974 version, she at least was front and center throughout the story. Her Daisy was flighty and selfish and rather unlikable. Probably a litte too unlikable. But Daisy Buchanan, as Fitzgerald wrote her, is not, ultimately, a great person. Luhrmann tried to soft-pedal some of his heroine's faults at the end, which should annoy fans of the novel. Daisy also was dressed in impractical, busy summer frocks, designed by Catherine Martin (who is married to Luhrmann), and an unattractive bleach blond bob.

We have come to expect the character of Daisy to be un-castable, but there is no excuse for how poorly Jordan Baker and Myrtle Wilson were represented in this latest film version. Elizabeth Debicki started off promisingly as Jordan Baker, Daisy's professional golfer best friend, but then practically disappeared from the action, as Luhrmann chose to focus on narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) and Gatsby and Daisy. What happened to Nick and Jordan's romance, or Jordan's witty, wicked sense of humor? What happened to Fitzgerald's interesting, multifacted female characters? Gone.

And unless the viewer is paying strict attention, it is possible that Tom Buchanan's (Joel Edgerton) lover, Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher) might be completely missed. With Luhrmann's frenetic pacing of certain scenes it's altogether likely that not only would one not catch Myrtle's name, but also not realize at first that she was the person who tried to flag down Gatsby's yellow car as it whizzed by in a penultimate scene of the movie.

Daisy's husband Tom is a jerk and a racist and a bigot, but he actually does care for Myrtle. Their relationship in both the book and the 1974 filmed version is portrayed as something far beyond casual. Joel Edgerton tried hard to fill in the blanks left in Luhrmann's script. Bruce Dern may have been a strange casting choice as the rich, Old Money, hunky, athletic Tom in 1974, but he very ably portrayed the boor's love of both of his women, Daisy and Myrtle.

That's a lot of lace and flounces for a summer frock

Leo, as Gatsby, raises his glass in a welcoming toast

Quick takes, 1974:

The screenplay/adaptation was by Francis Ford Coppola (!)

The scene where Nick has dinner with Daisy and Tom and Jordan: we see Daisy get jealous of Tom taking Myrtle's phone call — she is definitely hurt, and we feel that she really loves him.

The close-up camerawork was a little disconcerting.

Extra scenes showing Gatsby and Daisy's affair once they become reacquainted make us believe that their love may have a chance.

The scene with Gatsby showing his shirts to impress Daisy really works, as does the scene featuring Gatsby's final swim in his pool.

Quick takes, 2013:

A real stand-out scene is the final confrontation at the Plaza Hotel, where DiCaprio lets Gatsby (finally) lose his cool.

The tea that Gatsby arranges at Nick's to (re)meet Daisy, with Gatsby over-filling his small cottage with flowers and cakes, his nervous anticipation and awe at seeing the love of his life after five years, is both funny and poignant to watch.

The first over-the-top party that Nick attends at Gatsby's is everything Luhrmann is known for — visual opulence, hip music, frenetic camerawork — and it's great fun to watch. Unfortunately the rest of the film can't quite keep up the pace.

Tobey Maguire's Nick Carraway was even more removed and diffident than Fitzgerald's. Not many could attend a drug and alcohol-fueled orgy and still remain uninvolved, but somehow he pulled it off. Luhrmann's framing device of having an alcoholic Carraway narrate the film from a sanitarium as he writes the story didn't quite work, either.

The hip-hop music used to "update" this Gatsby actually worked quite well, but like many of the other design elements, seemed to lessen or disappear as the film progressed. Why not truly update the story to modern times instead of keeping it in the '20s? That may have held this film back from being a truly modern version.

Mia Farrow and Robert Redford as Daisy and Gatsby

L-R: Nick, Gatsby, Daisy and Tom (Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton)

As much as this latest version of The Great Gatsby didn't quite live up to my expectations — its vaunted excess actually seemed to peter out about halfway through the film into straight melodrama — it's hard not to admire both Luhrmann's ambition and aspiration to film such a complex literary classic. When most multiplex movie fare involves superheroes who battle endless CGI explosions, or the latest entry in a franchise that features cars driving really, really fast, a film that ends with some of the most evocative words in American literature is something to applaud:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Related articles

• the great gatsby
• xoxoxoe's #CBR5 Review #5: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

sympathy for the devil

When I was just a kid the United States went through its biggest political scandal, Watergate. As Sam Rockwell's James Reston, Jr. reminds the audience at the end of the film Frost/Nixon, the -gate suffix has been added to every scandal since.

My dad, who at the time was the political reporter/Trenton correspondent for the south Jersey newspaper The Daily Observer, was glued to the television throughout the Watergate Hearings, taking copious notes. It was summertime, when my brother and I and even my mom would spend most of our waking hours running around outside, but I remember each of us coming in periodically to check on him, to see if anything had "happened" on T.V. His obsession, the country's obsession, became the whole family's.



As I watched Frost/Nixon the other night I was amazed by Frank Langella's performance. The play and the players are so great that it is hard to judge it critically as a film. I'm usually not a huge fan of Ron Howard's work, but I was riveted. Rockwell seemed at first a bit too cardboard in his one-note outrage. A lot of his early dialogue was expository. But someone had to be the one to provide context, to express the anger and despair at the time of the tarnishing of the Oval Office. We take politics and dirty tricks to be such par for the course these days that it's hard to imagine what it must have felt like at the time to be shocked that a presidential campaign would resort to payoffs and crooked measures to secure an election.

But in the 1970s everyone was shocked. Or, if not completely surprised, at least extremely upset at the illegal lengths an incumbent president might go to win the Presidency. While my dad took notes from the television, my mom, an artist, sketched the trial participants. Her doodles became political cartoons. My dad, although absorbed in the hearings, was not completely oblivious to what was happening around him. When he saw my mother's cartoons he showed them to his boss at the Observer, which led to her doing a few cartoons for the paper, and also doing a caricature portrait of my dad, which would run from that point on with his column.

I didn't understand everything that was going on at the time. I didn't even realize at first that Watergate was a place. But the message was clear. The President of the United States was involved in a crime. With burglars. It was like some distortion of the villains found in the cartoons my brother and I would watch on Saturday mornings. Also clear was that Nixon probably wouldn't be the President much longer. That was really hard for a kid to understand, to accept. Although I expect the grown-ups were having trouble with it, too. Neither my mom nor my dad were Republicans, but they had voted for Nixon in 1972. Maybe the fact that they had crossed party lines made the betrayal a bit more intense for them.




In Frost/Nixon Frank Langella was beyond convincing as Nixon. If I looked away from the screen or closed my eyes, I heard the former president's voice. It was uncanny, and brought me right back to our living room—with a big box-shaped television, gold pile wall-to-wall carpet, and all the windows and doors open on a hot August day while a single oscillating fan tried and failed to cool the room. Langella also lived through that time, which may have aided his effortlessly capturing Nixon and the era. The timbre of his voice was even a bit like my dad's. Did men enunciate more clearly in the seventies and have gravely, baritone voices? Maybe it was all the cigarettes. Most of all, Langella made me feel sympathetic for a man that was a distant figurehead, an unreal wax figure, and made him real. I can't condone what Nixon did, but I can pity Langella's portrayal of Nixon's desperation that led him to make his fatal choices. I don't feel that way for people like Rumsfeld or Cheney. Somehow the crimes of the "father" seem much less today than those of his disciples.

What happened in the Watergate on June 17, 1972 changed the country. Would such a crime have even been noticed today, with all of the other competing worldwide scandals? Would the public have cared as much? Everywhere you look on the internet you see coverage of Wikileaks, which is sort of today's anti-Watergate. But is anyone really reading all the stories? Or about the scandals attached to Julian Assange? The world has changed so much since 1972.

One of my all-time favorite movies is All the President's Men. It's impossible not to get caught up in its dramatic force and its mystery, sometimes forgetting that what you are watching unfold is based on real events. It is a great film—a history, a thriller, an in-depth depiction of the hard work that went into tracking down a newspaper story. In this case, the biggest scoop of all time. Possibly the last one. Watching Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein is nostalgic and a little bit tragic. The two reporters are relentless and rigorous in their pursuit of the facts. They understand the impossibility of what they are up against, a powerful administration that is willing to go far—but they aren't sure how far—to preserve its power base. There may still be journalists who put the facts above everything else, who risk their lives to get a story, but the state of journalism and print is ... well there really is not much of a state. Print is practically dead, and fact-checking, hell, spell-checking seems to be a thing of the past. My father would be appalled at what passes for political journalism today. I would never want to go backwards, but it is a simple fact that if there was another Watergate tomorrow, there is simply not another Woodward and Bernstein around to track it down, much less a Redford and Hoffman to play them in the movie.




All the President's Men has the outrage, the moral indignation of Rockwell's introductory rant in Frost/Nixon. The president is just a shadow figure in the 70s conspiracy drama. We are only shown him briefly, in television news bits. Howard's film and the years have mellowed how I think about Richard Nixon. It's hard to picture him as Tricky Dick, after seeing him envy David Frost for his ease of talking to people at parties. Langella shows us Nixon's fragile side. He makes me have sympathy for the devil.

a funny thing ...

My mom's memory continues to slip, tiny bit by bit, but with no discernible pattern. Some days it feels like there is only the worst to look forward to. Some days seem fine. One saving grace, at least for the present, is that no matter how hard it can be for her to communicate at times—the right word seems harder and harder to come by—she still enjoys reading and watching movies. And of course watching her adorable granddaughter.

I come from a family of movie buffs. My mom and dad had special nicknames for favorite actors. They always talked about movies particularly—how a certain movie at a certain time in their lives meant something. My brother and I would watch movies with them, mostly on television. From a young age we would also get to go out to the movies on rare occasions, to see something special.




Some of the movies we all trooped together to see made a lasting impression. Young Frankenstein is still my favorite Mel Brooks film, even though I was too young to get the dirty joke/punchline. I think I could probably quote it from beginning to end. 2001: A Space Odyssey bored the whole family to tears, and we are all sci-fi geeks. But shared misery can be a bonding experience. Star Wars thrilled us all and was the first movie we all saw together more than once. Life of Brian was controversial at the time it was released (sacreligious!), but my newspaperman dad wasn't going to let anyone censor his family seeing Monty Python or anything, for that matter. The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid we saw in the space of one week, while they were playing at the local drive-in. Robert Redford was probably the first movie actor I fell in love with that was in a current movie, and not someone from one of the old B&W ones my mom loved that we would see on television, like Tyrone Power or Robert Taylor. Another of my first loves was Frank Langella. We all went to see him in Dracula, as we liked scary movies as much as sci-fi—Langella was very sexy—sort of weird to see with mom and dad. Dad bought me the Bram Stoker novel with Langella on the cover, maybe to get me to read it, or get back to to the source. I was just thrilled at first to get to relive some of the movie's scenes, but then got caught up in the late 19th century epistolary writing style, so maybe dad was onto something. I think I may still have it somewhere ...





I remember when my mom and dad both got so excited about The Godfather coming out. They had both read the book from the library, taking turns, while trying to keep it away from us, from the racy and violent parts. When the movie came out my brother and I had to stay with our grandma while mom and dad drove to NY to see it on a big screen. Maybe my dad had some sort of press pass. Or maybe they just wanted a big night out in the city. My brother and I were so jealous, but we got from them that movies can be special.

I grew up with a B&W television until I was in my teens. One of my fondest childhood memories was when the Wizard of Oz was playing at the local movie theater and my mom insisted on us going to see it. My brother and I had already seen it on television, so we didn't know what the big deal was. We walked downtown with mom who made sure we got good seats. It was fun seeing Dorothy on such a huge screen, and I always liked going to the movies, but I didn't get it until ... She opened the door to technicolor Munchkinland. My brother and I both screamed. I looked at my mom and she just smiled. She had saved that surprise, that bit of movie magic, for us all those years.

So it is extremely gratifying to me that we can sit together in the evening on occasion and still watch movies together. I can see with some of the more recent films that she is losing the plot a bit. But if I put on an old movie, it's like magic. She's much more into the story and excited at seeing the old familiar faces of actors and actresses. I might have to supply the names, but she knows exactly who they all are, sometimes much better than I do. That happened the other night when I was flipping past channels and found Zero Mostel singing the opening number, "Comedy Tonight" in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I had seen the movie years ago, actually probably late one night on television with my dad. I didn't really remember it much, so it was fun to rediscover it with her.

The same thing happened again on a recent Sunday afternoon when we all watched The Pirate. My mom thought she hadn't seen it before (who knows?), but no matter. She loves Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, the kid got to dance along to Dorothy and that guy who tap dances on roller skates, and I got to see Gene Kelly dance in shorts, so it was a win-win-win.

I've always liked old movies, but I think I am going to like them even more now.