The Fighter: All in the Family

Boxing films have had a long history of success at the Academy Awards—from Wallace Beery winning an Oscar for his performance in The Champ (1931) to the mother of all boxing films, Rocky, which took home the Best Picture trophy in 1976. Boxing films have also been showcases for some incredible acting, with Robert DeNiro winning Best Actor as the incendiary Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) and Hilary Swank winning Best Actress as the doomed Maggie Fitzgerald in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004—that film also won Best Picture). The Fighter continues the tradition of boxing films garnering Academy acclaim.

Mighty performances carry this film to greatness. Three actors in the film received Supporting Acting nominations. First is the magnetic Christian Bale as Dicky Ward—“The Pride of Lowell”—a broken down boxer turned junkie who is living off the long extinguished glory of knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard in a bout televised on HBO. Next is character actress Melissa Leo (those who loved the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street know just how good Leo can be) as his mother, Alice Ward, terrifyingly strong under an updo and sunglasses. Alice manages the career of her son “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg, who also produced the film) while Dicky is the trainer. Rivaling the Wards for Micky’s affections is Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams—in a nice change of pace from her good-girl roles)—the final nominated role. Charlene sees through Dicky’s schemes and won’t be intimidated by Alice or the seven Ward sisters—harridans each—as she forges a relationship with Micky.

Tempestuous relationships between these characters make up the soul of The Fighter. Director David O. Russell, who has made some very idiosyncratic films such as Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees (the last two were made with Wahlberg, who hand-picked Russell to direct The Fighter) invests more soul into the behind the scenes drama with the Ward family than be does with Micky’s rise through the welterweight ranks. Essentially, the film has three distinct acts: chronicling Dicky’s crack cocaine addiction and how it disrupts Micky’s career, Micky and Charlene’s relationship and how the Wards react to it, and lastly, Micky’s eventual rise to capture the welterweight championship. Russell makes the first two parts of the film fresh and unique; the rise to the championship story is the same underdog story that has long since been made cliché.

Dicky’s story is fascinating because Russell stages it as a film within the film. In reality, Dicky was a subject of an HBO documentary—High On Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell—and the early part of The Fighter is filmed in a cinema verité style that mirrors the documentary footage. The extent of Dicky’s addiction is made clear to the audience because unbeknownst to Dicky, he thinks the documentarians are chronicling his comeback story instead of highlighting his addiction. Bale totally disappears into the role of Dicky as we see him lie, wheedle, jump out of second story windows, and yet still carry an undeniable charisma associated with addicts. Bale is known for his Method approach, and his commitment to the character—Bale also lost a significant amount of weight for the role, and stayed in character between takes—makes the actor indistinguishable from the part. Like eyes being drawn to a trainwreck, Bale makes it impossible for the audience to remove their gaze whenever Dicky is on screen.

As the film progresses, the audience sees that Alice is just as large of a liability to Micky’s career as Dicky’s crack addiction. She manages the careers of both her sons, although it is clear that the rest of the boxing community regards her as a joke, and she is only able to draw matches for Micky where he has to fight boxers far out of his weight class. Consequently, as Alice and Dicky force Micky to accept those fights for the purse, Micky suffers grievous injury.
While rehabbing, Micky meets Charlene, a tough broad working as a bartender. Herself a former athlete (a high jumper), Charlene sees that Micky has more potential as a fighter than he realizes, and that his loyalty to his mother and brother is what is keeping him from realizing his potential. Thus a conflict is staged between Alice and Charlene for the heart of Micky.

Leo and Adams play magnificently off one another. Leo makes Alice into a very complicated villainous figure. She very clearly loves her sons, but she is in total denial about Dicky’s addictions—so much so that she enables his behavior—and she is immovably stubborn about how Micky’s career should be managed. In her eyes, Micky wouldn’t even have any sort of success without her guidance and Dicky’s training. Alice is also the unquestioned matriarch of the clan. Raising nine children has given Alice a sense of earned superiority. Unfortunately, as a consequence of her self-inflated sense of power, she has browbeaten her husband into submission, and her seven daughters—all of whom appear to still live at home—are commanded like minions whenever Alice needs dirty work to be done. When Micky brings Charlene to meet the family, the sisters take their cues from Alice in disparaging Charlene, and the bilious accusations of “slut” and “whore” that spew sevenfold forth from their pie-holes lead to an all-out, seven-on-one girlfight. The brawl spills out of the Ward living room onto the street, and serves as both a dramatic and comedic highpoint of the film.

The sisters have a combined sloth and ugliness—it’s hard to imagine these women as ever being attractive, and the actresses playing them do so without an ounce of vanity—that the comparison between them and Charlene is lopsided to the point where it really isn’t fair. It is to Adams’ credit that she makes Charlene not a caricature, not simply “the good girl”. You know that she sees potential in Micky because she one had that potential too. She herself is a fighter, possessing many of the same strengths that Alice does—tenacity, willpower, business sense—but using them in such a way that Micky can blossom. Charlene becomes a representative for the audience, for she knows that the only way Micky can succeed is to break himself from the toxic hold of his mother and sister. Adams makes Charlene a strong character that is easy to fall in love with.

Anchoring the film is Wahlberg, who is very solid as “Irish” Micky Ward. Wahlberg is completely believable in the physical aspects of the role, and he knows how to lay down a solid foundation as a straight man for the supporting cast with their over-the-top performances. I have heard criticisms to the effect that Wahlberg is overshadowed by his supporting cast but really, the character of Micky is written as passive and stoic. Micky is a man who is divided in his loyalties. He does have a desire to become champion, and knows shedding Dicky and Alice is the first step on that journey, yet cannot reconcile the feeling in his heart that to achieve success he must betray his family. Micky is a man who has had decisions made for him his entire life; no wonder he can barely articulate his frustrations. Micky is also just as dependent on his family as Dicky is to his crack addiction. Wahlberg understands how the two brothers are connected by each of their own addictions, and he also knows that what Micky is also equally fighting for is his own sense of independence. For me, Wahlberg made Micky’s internal struggles crystal clear. It’s the kind of performance that is easily overshadowed—especially when actors the caliber of Bale, Leo and Adams round out the supporting cast—yet takes tremendous skill as an actor to make believable.

It’s a bit of a shame then that the story neatly wraps up its conflicts by the time the third act kicks into gear and the plot focuses on Micky as the underdog fighter working his way up to a title bout. If you’ve seen any of the Rocky sequels, you know how this is going to play out. I know The Fighter is a fact based drama, but many of the threads are wrapped up too neatly. Dicky’s addiction, for one, is resolved by a prison sentence and the fact that Micky remembers his advice in order to win a challenging match. It’s as if Russell decided, “Okay, we need to have a big boxing match for the finale” when really, the struggle of the film is with Micky overcoming his dependency on his family and learning to succeed on his own. The third act tries to have it both ways unsuccessfully. However, I will admit the fights are thrilling and certainly had me shadowboxing in the theater and cheering on Micky as he vanquished the limey bastard holding the title. Those scenes feel like they belong to a different film though.

Ultimately, if The Fighter wins Best Picture, credit must go to Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg is also a credited producer on the film. His relationship with David O. Russell secured a director for the film (after, interestingly enough, Darren Aronofsky was slated to direct the film). A Massachusetts representative, Wahlberg knew of and was passionate about Micky Ward’s story. It is Wahlberg who insisted on filming in Lowell, Massachusetts, often at the locations where the Wards trained. In a further bit of added realism, Wahlberg suggested that Mickey O’Keefe, one of Micky’s trainers, play himself in the film. Wahlberg was insistent that the fights remain grounded and not over-the-top. Wahlberg insisted on authenticity in The Fighter, and along with the tremendous performances from the cast, authenticity is the strength of the film.

I think that The Fighter will certainly walk away with an acting Oscar or two. Bale and Leo are the prohibitive favorites in their categories, and the only changes I’d make to the nominations are that Wahlberg should have received a Best Actor nomination while the screenwriters are undeserving of one. No matter what happens on February 27th, The Fighter continues the tradition of boxing themed pictures representing well at the Oscars. The sport, and the drama behind it, continues to inspire filmmakers to greatness.

DETAILS:

The Fighter (2010)

Director: David O. Russell

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo

Studio: Paramount Pictures

Total Oscar Nominations: 7 (Best Picture—David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman, Ryan Kavanaugh, Mark Wahlberg; Best Director—David O. Russell; Best Supporting Actor—Christian Bale; Best Supporting Actress—Amy Adams; Best Supporting Actress—Melissa Leo; Best Original Screenplay—Scott Silver & Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson & Keith Dorrington; Best Editing—Pamela Martin)

NEXT BLOG: Inception

Black Swan: The $100 Million Dollar Ballet Blockbuster

If someone were to tell me about this time last year that a film about ballet would gross almost $100 million dollars and garner five Academy Award nominations—including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress—I guarantee I would have rolled my eyes at you. I wouldn’t doubt that from a critical standpoint, a film about ballet would represent well at the Oscars. After all, in 1951, An American In Paris took home the Best Picture Oscar largely on the strength of its dazzling 18-minute ballet-inspired finale. Also, these types of pictures generally clean house when it comes to the technical categories like Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup, etc.

Not so long ago though, $100 million dollars was considered the threshold for a film to be called a blockbuster. By that reckoning, Black Swan is certainly one of the strangest and most polarizing films to attract both award attention and mass audiences. For how unlikely a blockbuster the film seems, upon closer examination Black Swan has many elements that have combined to give it mass appeal.

Darren Aronofsky, the film’s director, has to be a big consideration. While Aronofsky has never really made films that have the reputation for being money makers, he does have the reputation of being a master craftsman who has translated difficult subject matter to the screen. Of the four Aronofsky films preceding Black Swan, two have become certifiable classics. In 2000, he adapted Hubert Selby’s novel about drug addiction, Requiem for a Dream, into an unflinching and powerful film. Requiem for a Dream is notable for several outstanding performances, a hyper-kinetic editing style, and contains several scenes of utter depravity that have gone further down the drug addiction spiral than any film before it or any film since. Nearly everyone who has seen the film truly admires it, yet also feels that it is a cinematic experience that once seen, is to unbearable to be watched again.

Aronofsky’s other classic is 2008’s The Wrestler. The Wrestler is very much like Black Swan, in that the main characters are athletic performers in often misunderstood forms of entertainment who sacrifice their bodies to an extreme limit because of dedication to their craft. Randy the Ram—the protagonist played by Mickey Rourke in his big comeback role—has punished his body for professional wrestling, and both films examine how sacrificing one’s body toward art changes the psyche of the athlete who offers their body to their craft. While The Wrestler was not the runaway success Black Swan has been at the box office, the $26 million dollars it made certainly exceeded any expectations box office prognosticators had for a film about professional wrestling with a burned out star in the lead. In fact, had Sean Penn not played Harvey Milk that year, Mickey Rourke would have certainly won the Oscar for Best Actor (Rourke did win the Golden Globe).

The biggest impact The Wrestler made was to establish Aronofsky as a reliable auteur filmmaker in the mold of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino or Stanley Kubrick. A film can now be sold based simply on Aronofsky’s name. He is a filmmaker associated with both quality and risk, and his films have a track record of delivering unique experiences. Black Swan reaped the benefits of Aronofsky establishing his credentials through his previous filmography. There was always going to be a percentage of the audience waiting for his next film.

In terms of drawing audiences, Natalie Portman’s popularity cannot be underestimated. She has been in films both epic—the Star Wars prequels—and intimate—Mike Nichols’ Closer, for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Portman has also cultivated a controversy-free, appealing image that balances her Harvard education with her vegetarian activism and her history as a child actress. I can’t think of anyone saying they hate Natalie Portman. She’s a bonafide movie star in the mold of Audrey Hepburn.

That said, her role as Nina Sayers in the film allows Portman to go further than she has ever gone as an actress before. Aronofsky is wise to play off Portman’s good-girl image when he cast her in the role. A key plot point is that the ballet company in the film is staging Swan Lake, and the lead role in the production requires the ballerina to play both the good and evil personas of the Swan Queen. Nina’s perfect, delicate style makes her perhaps overqualified to play the “good” persona, but she seems to lack the passion and the sexuality to render the “evil” persona convincingly. Portman herself has played many goody-goody, sweetheart, and cutie pie roles. Speaking personally, I have always found Portman to never quite live up to her astonishing debut as the vengeful Mathilde in Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional (1994), a role she played at the age of 12. Portman herself said, "I'm trying to find roles that demand more adulthood from me because you can get stuck in a very awful cute cycle as a woman in film, especially being such a small person."

Combine Portman’s ambitions with the demands of the role—the intensive ballet training required for the part, the significant weight loss that goes with it, the intense and insular nature of the character, the explicit sexuality—and the stage is set for a popular, beloved actor to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime performance. I would compare the role favorably to Robert DeNiro’s Oscar winning turn as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, especially in the physical transformations necessary to make the part work.

The other two factors that account for the film’s popularity are the lurid subject matter and the fact that it is a film about ballet. Even before I saw a preview for the film, I knew that it was going to be more of a hallucinatory thriller than a film about the art of ballet. What I didn’t expect is how much melodrama was contained in the film. A key subplot is straight out of All About Eve, in that Nina usurps the part of the Swan Queen from an older ballerina (played by Winona Ryder—and that also is a bit of brilliant casting, as Portman has basically played the sorts of roles in the 2000’s-2010’s that Ryder played in the late 1980’s-1990’s). In turn, Nina is also constantly looking over her shoulder at her looser, more comfortably sexual understudy Lily (Mila Kunis, and who would have ever figured the chick who played Jackie on That ‘70’s Show had a performance like this in her), who seems like a more natural choice to play the evil Swan Queen. There is also tons of sex in the film, as the repressed Nina is basically kept in girlhood by her dominating mother (Barbara Hershey). As frenemy relationship is forged between Nina and Lily, Nina allows herself to open up sexually to Lily, culminating in a full-on lesbian sex scene between the two characters. I’m sure straight males everywhere (and probably many women) forgave their wives and girlfriends for dragging them to see the “ballet flick” after seeing Mila Kunis go down on Natalie Portman. Backstage backbiting, hallucinations, lesbian sex—there is more than enough drama in Black Swan to help audiences overcome the fact that the film is a “ballet movie”.

None of the above should discount the fact that there are many, many people who are going to see Black Swan precisely because it is a ballet movie. How many little girls in this country have taken ballet classes at some point and carried fond memories of those times into adulthood? Ballet has always managed to capture the dreams of women (and let’s face it—probably many men too). It’s fantasy. It’s Natalie Portman as a ballerina. It’s a rare chance to see the art of ballet on the silver screen. Aronofsky certainly makes the dancing the major attraction of the film. His warts-and-all approach to ballet only gives the audience further appreciation of the art. The scene where Nina’s big toe splits open quickly dispels any romantic notions of ballet, and those scenes also greatly appeal to the people in the audience who love body horror—and Black Swan is also most certainly a body horror film.

With such a broad variety of ways Black Swan appeals to moviegoers it is unsurprising that the film is a hit. Which begs the question: is the film worthy of Best Picture? In answering it, some bipolar attitudes about the film are revealed.

I was surprised that Black Swan did not receive any nominations for Art Direction, Costume Design, or Makeup—three categories I thought were absolute locks for the film. (Score was never going to be a factor, since most of the film uses Tchaikovsky, and scores that use an abundance of previously used material are ineligible for Oscar nominations.) Yet it did receive nominations for Cinematography and Editing—which are probably the two most prestige of the technical categories. Aronofsky received his first nomination, and the film’s best chance at receiving Oscar gold is via Natalie Portman for Best Actress, who looks to be a lock. Despite several positive notices neither Mila Kunis (who did receive a Golden Globe nomination) nor Barbara Hershey scored a Supporting Actress nomination.

The most telling thing when you look at Black Swan’s nomination tally is that the film did not receive a nomination for Original Screenplay, and justifiably so. The screenplay is easily the weakest part of the film. For starters, I don’t think the script is the best at balancing the ballet elements with the psychological horror elements of the film. When a key plot point of the film has—SPOILERS AHEAD—Nina literally transforming into a black swan, the screenwriting team of Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin are asking the audience to take a major leap of faith. The ballet portions of the film are so well grounded—and the most interesting—that Nina’s psychoses seem like plot devices instead of organically part of the narrative.

I also think that the characters function more as symbols than real people. Nina’s character is represents virginity, repression and almost a clinical perfection. Lily is earthy, sexual and uninhibited. Both Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey’s characters represent the ballerina gone to pasture, and Hershey has the added bonus of playing a psycho mother. Poor Natalie Portman though, for all the grueling physical preparation and transformation her body endured for the role, plays a character that is largely a cipher. Nina is motivated to be “perfect” but we never see how Nina specifies perfection or the process in which she can achieve it. A huge fuss is made over her character not being passionate enough to play the evil Swan Queen, and we never see the moment when Nina earns the role. We are told she bites the lip of her director (Vincent Cassel, oozing smarm) so hard she draws blood when he tries to kiss her, but the actual bite is never shown. For a film that revels in shots of toenails splitting in two, this is a huge missed opportunity. The way Nina is written I never felt access to her, I never felt like I was being carried along side this girl on her journey. By the time the finale rolls around, I did not have an emotional connection to Nina; I was simply watching to see how the melodrama plays out. When comparing Nina to Randy the Ram in The Wrestler—which was written by a different screenwriter—it’s night and day as to which character seems more like a real person and less like a plot device. It’s a shame, for as much as Portman sacrificed her body for the role; the screenwriters gave her very little material to carve out a character that feels real.

Ultimately, I think Black Swan benefits from the Academy expanding the field of nominees to ten instead of the more traditional five. I think Aronofsky would have secured a nomination anyway—his virtuosity as a director is on constant display—but the film itself is simply too strange to be a film with a solid chance at winning the Oscar. It’s very polarizing—popular consensus shows there are as many people who hate the film as claim to love it—which also probably accounts for its box office popularity. I know I always want to see a polarizing film so I can form my own opinions. Ultimately, I think Black Swan is a technical masterpiece that does not do enough to win the characters over on me. It’s a beautiful, but largely emotionless film. That said there are plenty of elements within the film to satisfy the curiosities of moviegoers, accounting for its surprising box office totals.

DETAILS

Black Swan (2010)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, Vincent Cassel

Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures (20th Century Fox)

Total Oscar Nominations: 5 (Best Picture—Scott Franklin, Mike Medavoy, Arnold Messer, Brian Oliver; Best Director—Darren Aronofsky; Best Actress—Natalie Portman; Best Cinematography—Matthew Libatique; Best Editing—Andrew Weisblum)

NEXT BLOG: The Fighter

West Side Story: I Believe in "America"

This will probably be the most personal of my blog entries. First of all, I’m a sucker for anything Romeo and Juliet related and West Side Story is my favorite Shakespeare film adaptation. West Side Story is also my father’s favorite film; he screened it for me when I was probably ten or eleven. At my wedding, my wife and I used mini-posters—like lobby cards—of Best Picture winners as table identifiers for the reception. My Auntie Lupe (my father’s sister) asked for the West Side Story place setting, saying that it was her favorite movie. My Auntie Lu also told me a bit of family legend: her eldest sister, Amelia, auditioned for a part in the film. The thing is, we aren’t even Puerto Rican; we’re Mexican, but Latinos everywhere claim the film for themselves.

What I also like about the film is that like many great films, my reaction to it has changed over time. Great films aren’t static; as you grow older and develop more life experiences, your perspective on your favorite films should change accordingly. A film that doesn’t offer fresh insight upon repeat viewings can be good—but not great. I remember when I first watched West Side Story; I was a full-on Jets guy.

It’s not hard to see why an eleven year old boy would like the Jets better than the Sharks. Let’s face it, the Jets are cool. They get the fantastic “Jet Song” that opens the film and the cool-as-hell introductory close-up—five tough guys, in close-up, snapping their fingers off the zoom-in from the birds-eye view of New York City. They have the funnier lines. They have the cooler names—Riff, Ice, Action, A-Rab, Tiger, Baby John. Riff, my favorite Jet, was based off my favorite character in Romeo and Juliet—Mercutio. I even recognized some of the actors. I knew that Russ Tamblyn and Richard Beymer—who play Riff and Tony, respectively—were also on a TV show I liked, Twin Peaks, though obviously older and in completely different kinds of roles (this should prove to you how strange I am—I was watching Twin Peaks surreptitiously at eleven).

But deep down—and this is a bit harder to admit than I would like, but completely necessary to say—I probably identified more with the Jets because I identified more with the white half of my ethnicity than the Mexican half. I don’t mean this as a negative thing—it’s simply a statement of fact. I lived in a small town full of mostly white people, went to school with mostly white kids taught by completely white teachers, and was raised by my white mother and white step-father. For all intents and purposes, my Mexican heritage was entirely subverted. I may as well have been 100% white. It was only natural that I identified with the characters that looked like me.

I can’t pinpoint when my allegiances shifted from the Jets to the Sharks, but I guarantee that the more I learned about my Mexican heritage and Latino culture, the more I felt that the Sharks were the true heroes of West Side Story. To be fair—I never disliked the Sharks. I liked George Chakiris and Rita Moreno—Shark leader Bernardo and his girl Anita, respectively—from the get go, and the Oscars they won for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress are completely deserved. They’re easily the best performers in the film. The Jets though, were just that more cooler, and they were cooler for a long time.

My allegiances shifted when I began to pay more attention to the lyrics and the acting, which is something that comes more naturally as one becomes a more mature appreciator of film. Musicals can be especially challenging films in which to soak in and absorb every strata of detail. Granted, I think many musicals are insipid (and there are two very, very popular musicals that won Best Picture in the 1960’s after West Side Story that fall directly into that category), but when they’re created with obvious layers and deeper meanings, as West Side Story is, they demand multiple viewings over an extended period of time. Having said that, what stood out most to me upon first seeing the film was the story, the catchy and memorable songs and music (the soundtrack, from lyricist Stephen Sondheim and composer Leonard Bernstein, held the record for the bestselling film soundtrack for decades, and I think it is without peer in movie musicals), and of course, how cool the Jets were. Later, I judged the film on its fidelity to its source material (Shakespeare would be proud, says I). It probably wasn’t until I was in college, armed with a better understanding of my Latino heritage, that my perspective on West Side Story truly changed.

Basically, I finally started to pay attention to the lyrics in “America”.

“America” is the Sharks' big number in West Side Story. It comes roughly an hour into the film, toward the beginning of the second act. Until that point, the story is told almost entirely from the Jets’ perspective. The first act of the film closes with the big dance, where Tony meets Maria (Natalie Wood—a fine actress, but miscast as Puerto Rican), and the white guy’s interest in the brown girl (and her mutual interest in him) is used as a reason to escalate, in Anita’s words, “World War Three”. The second act opens with Tony’s song “Maria” (Beymer’s voice is dubbed by Jimmy Bryant, and Wood’s voice is dubbed by voice pro Marni Nixon, who dubbed Deborah Kerr in The King and I and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady). From there the film catches up with the Sharks in their tenement building. (It should be noted that the film changed the order of “America” and “Tonight”, the song which recreates the famous balcony sequence from Romeo and Juliet. In the Broadway show, “Tonight” is first, then “America” and I think it should have stayed that way. “America” was also substantially changed, but for the better, and more on that later.)

Bernardo, overprotective, lectures Maria about the dangers of dating outside her own race. In a timeless example of Latino machismo, Bernardo says, “Someday, when you are an old married woman with five children, then you can tell me what to do! But right now, it is the other way around.” Bernardo commands Maria to bed, and as he and Anita make their way to the techo of their tenement building, they begin the argument that forms the crux of “America”.

ANITA: You know, she has a mother. Also a father…
BERNARDO: They do not know this country any better than she does!
ANITA: And you do not know it at all! Girls here are free to have fun. She-is-in-America now.
BERNARDO: Puerto Rico is in America now!
ANITA: Sometimes I don’t know what is thicker—your skull, or your accent.

Before delving into the song, it is important to note that the rooftop is the one place where we see the Sharks and their girls truly relaxed and not on guard. This is important, because while “America” is a debate, it is a playful one. In minority communities, the most serious of issues are most often discussed in places where the community feels the most at ease and comfortable. For the Puerto Ricans, the techo is that place. The men are off-guard and have toned down the macho posturing they display when with the gang. The women do not have to be the silent dressmaker’s assistants. On the techo, they are free to speak their minds. While the gender inequality is still heavily tilted toward the men (Bernardo’s attitude toward his sister completely spells out which gender has the ultimate decision making power), the women speak as equally, as frequently, and as passionately as the men. In terms of contributing to the discussion, the sexes are equal. Most importantly, everyone is honest.

Anita continues the argument about Maria at the dance—“She was only dancing.” Bernardo retorts, displaying his own prejudices—“With an American. Who is really a Polack.” (More on the ethnicities of the Jets at the end.) Anita’s comeback: “Says the spic.” This leads into a conversation about the jobs the Shark boys hold down. The girls are impressed that Tony has a job. Chino (Jose DeVega) says he has a job, too—an assistant—and Bernardo complains that Chino “makes half of what the Polack makes.” There are some lighthearted jests at Bernardo’s observation—his friends have heard it many times before—but the issue eats at his own self-worth and impression of what America would be like for him. “Well, it is true! When I thought of how it would be for us here…We came like children, believing, trusting…” For Bernardo, there has been a serious breach of trust between him and his adopted home.
As the conversation continues, Bernardo’s complaint is sort of brushed aside—remember, everyone has heard it all before from him—his Shark buddies dream of what America will bring them, and what they will return to Puerto Rico with. “I’m going back with a Cadillac!” “Air-conditioned!” “Built-in-bar!” “Telephone!” “Television!” “Compatible color!” One of the girls points out, “If you had all that, why would you want to go back to Puerto Rico?” Anita replies, getting to the heart of her position: “Even if you didn’t have all that, why would you want to go back to Puerto Rico?” Bernardo: “It’s so good here?” Anita: “It’s so good there? We had nothing.” Bernardo again, with the upper hand: “Ah, we still have nothing—only more expensive.”

This leads to flirting between Bernardo and Anita (say it with me and Bernardo—“Anita Josefina Teresita Beatriz del Carmen Margarita—etcetera, etcetera…”), who have really been playfully teasing one another the whole time. Bernardo takes it a step too far when he accuses Anita of no longer being loyal to her home country. “And now she is queer for Uncle Sam.” This leads to the song (and I am going to copy the entire lyrics with speakers below).

“America”
ANITA: Puerto Rico, my heart’s devotion—
Let it sink back in the ocean.
Always the hurricanes blowing,
Always the population growing,
And the money owing,
And the sunlight streaming,
And the natives steaming.
I like the island Manhattan,
Smoke on your pipe and put that in.
GIRLS (chorus): I like to be in America,
Okay by me in America,
Everything free in America—
BERNARDO: For a small fee in America.
ANITA: Buying on credit is so nice.
BERNARDO: One look at us and they charge twice.
ROSALIA: I’ll have my own washing machine.
INDIO: What will you have though, to keep clean?
ANITA: Skyscrapers bloom in America.
ROSALIA: Cadillacs zoom in America.
ANOTHER GIRL: Industry boom in America.
SHARKS: Twelve in a room in America.
ANITA: Lots of new housing with more space.
BERNARDO: Lots of doors slamming in our face.
ANITA: I’ll get a terrace apartment.
BERNARDO: Better get rid of your accent.
ANITA and THREE GIRLS: Life can be bright in America.
BERNARDO: If you can fight in America.
ALL GIRLS: Life is all right in America.
SHARKS: If you’re all white in America.
(There is an interlude of whistling and back and forth dancing)
ANITA and CONSUELO: Here you are free and you have pride.
BERNARDO: Long as you stay on your own side.
ANITA: Free to be anything you choose.
SHARKS: Free to wait tables and shine shoes.
BERNARDO: Everywhere grime in America,
Organized crime in America,
Terrible time in America.
ANITA: You forget I’m in America.
(Another interlude with more dancing)
BERNARDO: I think I go back to San Juan
ANITA: I know what boat you can get on.
BERNARDO: Everyone there will give big cheer…
ANITA: Everyone there will have move here…
(“America” ends in an exuberant dance number.)

“America” is the immigrant experience in the United States of America. The dream and the promise; the reality and the cruelty. For the Sharks, their fight against the Jets isn’t simply because Bernardo doesn’t approve of Maria dancing with a white boy. They are fighting more a measure of respect and self-worth. For the Anita and the girls, America is a land of promise; Puerto Rico is the land of struggle and conflict. For them, America is the country where they are free and have pride. Both sides are correct, and for me, realizing that “America” illuminates the struggles immigrants face in this country is what made me be a Shark forever. These characters voice a struggle my father, his siblings and my grandparents face. It is a struggle that continues to be fought today. It is an issue I grapple with, that friends of mine grapple with. Having the Sharks and their girls voice this in West Side Story gives immigrants a voice on the silver screen; it gives us heroes that we can identify with.

“America” also represents a conscious choice on the part of the filmmakers to give voice to immigrant issues on screen. In the original Broadway production, “America” was originally a duet between Anita, who defended America, and Rosalia, who took up the cause for Puerto Rico. Some of the lyrics in the original song could also be interpreted as painting a caricature of the island (example: “I’ll drive a Buick through San Juan/ If there’s a road you can drive on”). When adapted for screen, co-director Jerome Robbins made the decision to according to Moreno, “bring the boys in”. The lyrics were also re-worked to eliminate many of the lyrics that could be construed as too offensive. To be fair, the “America” in the film certainly paints the United States as the country of promise and opportunity, while Puerto Rico is home to poverty and suffering, but the song also makes room for some vicious, stinging and absolutely true criticisms about America.

And what an incredible range of issues the song brings up! There is a litany of topics brought up and dispelled, from simply purchasing items in a store (“Buying on credit is so nice/ One look at us and they charge twice”), to housing issues (“Twelve in a room in America”, “I’ll get a terrace apartment/ Better get rid of that accent”), job prospects (“Free to be anything you choose/ Free to wait tables and shine shoes”), to the big issue: facing the reality that the American dream, as advertised, does not apply to minorities because of the color of their skin and their native tongue. What else could possibly be meant when the girls sing “Life is all right in America”, then the boys retort—and this is so bad ass and subversive—“If you’re all-white in America”? All-white in America—that is the burning issue, it’s what eats at Bernardo and the other Sharks, causing them to rise up and take arms.

What is fantastic is that the girls are also right. When Bernardo has his opportunity to present his version of America—“Everywhere grime in America/ Organized crime in America/ Terrible time in America”—Anita hits him right back with a simple truth: “You forget I’m in America.” Anita here isn’t simply Bernardo’s girlfriend; she is his future, the promise of family. And really, isn’t that why immigrants come to America? The promise of a bright future for your family. Puerto Rico is where Anita is from; America is where her family will live. The song ends with the line, “Everyone there will have moved here.” What family will Bernardo have if her were to go back?

Bernardo also forgets that he and the Sharks aren’t the only ones having to deal with racism and social inequity. Anita and the other girls have to deal with all the same shit (a scene toward the end of the film, where Anita goes to the Jets to give a message to Tony, shows how nasty she really has it). What future do they have working in the dress shop? Not much of one. The girls have to hitch their post to a strong man, and hope that he isn’t pigheaded enough to get himself killed. The girls have made their choice—they know that America isn’t the paradise of freedom they dreamed it to be, but they have no other choice but to make the best of a less than ideal situation. The question becomes: How are these men going to deal with it?

The answer, of course, is a tragic one. Bernardo ends up unable to look past his anger. He ends up with a knife in his chest. The Jets are scarcely able to look past their own anger, and both the lives of Riff and Tony are claimed by violence. What West Side Story subtly implies is that the Jets are also descendants of immigrants. Tony is Polish, and the auburn-headed Riff is obviously Irish. Action (Tony Mordente) is clearly Italian. (I also love the tomboy Anybodys—played by Sue Oakes—who is unquestionably a lesbian.) Every one of the Jets belongs to a low economic class, a fact they are all aware of and confront with great humor in “Gee, Officer Krupke.” The tragic irony in West Side Story is that there are two sets of immigrants fighting one another. If the Puerto Ricans weren’t in their neighborhood, the European immigrants that make up the Jets would be on the bottom of the scrap heap, the lowest of the low.

What each group doesn’t understand is that the Jets could be singing “America” and the Sharks could be singing “Gee, Officer Krupke” and “Cool” and the words in each song would be true for both of them. When they could be working together collectively to improve the social and economic outlook of their neighborhood—their turf, if you will—they choose to deal with their anger through conflict. The tragic force of that irony comes full circle in the final minutes of the film. Inexorably, bloody consequences await, as Bernardo murders Riff, Tony murders Bernardo, Chino murders Tony, and both Anita and Maria are essentially widowed. Maria grabs Chino’s gun, and asks: “How many bullets are left Chino? Enough for you? And you? All of you? You all killed him! And my brother! And Riff! Not with bullets and knives! With hate! Well I can kill too! Because now I have hate! How many can I kill, Chino? How many—and still have one bullet left for me?” Only after violence has wracked these young people with its terrible consequences can these two groups of immigrants come to any sort of understanding. The Jets and the Sharks come together to carry Tony’s body away, and the audience’s tears are well earned.

West Side Story succeeds where so many musicals fail because it allows for thematic complexity. Musicals, by design, are meant to have simple stories with simple themes. What‘s The Sound of Music really about other than being strict and uptight is no way to raise children? My Fair Lady tells us that love isn’t defined by class. In An American in Paris, art and love are one and the same. The Wizard of Oz tells us there is no place like home (actually, that story is pretty complex, but the simple message is what is most remembered). West Side Story is an adaptation of a story that everyone knows—Romeo and Juliet—and like the play, the simple message of the story is why must tragedy unite warring factions instead of love? Yet where the play is primarily focused on the star-crossed lovers, West Side Story gives equal weight to what motivates the supporting characters.

In many ways, the heart of the film belongs to the Jets and the Sharks. Part of this is by design—Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer neither sing nor dance as Tony and Maria in the film. As mentioned earlier, their voices were dubbed, and the few scenes where pair is required to dance—the gymnasium sequence, “I Feel Pretty”—the choreography is rudimentary. Compare their participation to the majority of the cast filling out the ranks of the Jets and the Sharks and their girls. From the ballet inspired steps of “Jet Song” to the sweat drenched and intense “Cool”, the dancing in the film is a major factor in telling the story. Look at how dance is used in “America”, especially in the caustic responses from the boys (my favorite bit has to be when they act out “Twelve in a room in America”) and how the girls flirt and tease right back. The song could be wordless (and “Cool”, for the most part, is) and the idea of the two different Americas could be read loud and clear.

Jerome Robbins, who co-directed and choreographed West Side Story, was a relentless taskmaster that demanded absolute perfection from his dancers. The cost of perfection made for a busy costuming department, as dancers wore out over 200 pairs of shoes, had over 100 pounds of makeup sweat right off their bodies, and 27 male dancers danced until their pants split open. Not to mention the crushing physical toll taken on their bodies, as the first aid unit dealt with numerous injuries (and according to the making-of article included in the DVD booklet, 18,000 Band-Aids were applied during the production) and dancers literally passing out from exhaustion.

Because of their limitations as dancers, Beymer and Wood were unable to contribute to the film on the same level as their castmates. As such, the love story in the film inevitably carries less weight. I also feel that while most of West Side Story is perfection, it is not a film without flaw. Frankly, the Tony and Maria sections of the film are far less compelling and more than a little saccharine. The flaws in their storyline only serve to make the social conflict in the film even more compelling, and the screenplay is structured so that each story carries equal weight. And I will say that when the finale of the film hits, when the love story and the gang conflict intercede, it is Wood who gives the film its final, haunting power.

Finally, I think the choice to make West Side Story not only a tragic love story, but a social issues picture improves and modernizes the source material. Shakespeare created a masterpiece in Romeo and Juliet, but the Capulets and Montagues are the Hatfields and McCoys of the theater—the feud has been going on for ages, and nobody can recall how it began. The Capulets and Montagues are also two upper class families, and one gets the sense that the feud is really about which family is richer. Only though the character of Prince Escalus—a minor part—does Shakespeare tip his quill as how the blood feud of the two families has affected Verona. In West Side Story, there is no specific reason as to how the rivalry between the gangs was sparked, but the broad reasons are abundantly clear. In “America” the Sharks sing that because their adopted country has shown nothing but racism and hardship toward Puerto Rican immigrants, they must fight to gain respect. For the Jets, it’s a socioeconomic issue. They have to keep the Sharks down because they no longer wish to be the lowest of the low in terms of social class. Both reasons run deeper than mere hatred.

When I examine why my family loves the film so, a big reason is, of course, the film is ridiculously entertaining. As far back as I can remember my father has hummed the tunes and sang the lyrics from songs in West Side Story. Yet without ever directly vocalizing it, my father showed the film to me because there were characters in the film that he identified with, who looked like him, that shared the same struggles. He was telling me—these too, are your people. On a subconscious level, we all identify with characters that look like us. Countless musicals—which in the early 1960’s were basically the equivalent to a 3D special effects blockbuster today, in other words, the bread-and-butter moneymakers for the Hollywood studios—are the near-exclusive domain of characters white as Wonder bread with problems vanilla as a milkshake. (Which is why, as fine of an actress as Natalie Wood was, it’s a bit hard to buy her as Puerto Rican, another flaw with the character of Maria.) Latinos, regardless of country or origin, claim West Side Story as their own because the film chooses to give voice to characters of color. My father knew this, and knew exactly what he was doing when he showed West Side Story to his son. It just took me a bit longer to catch on to the message.

Te adoro, Papa.


DETAILS

West Side Story (1961)

Director: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins

Starring: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris, Russ Tamblyn, Jose DeVega, Sue Oakes, Marni Wood*

Studio: United Artists

Total Oscars: 10* (Best Picture—Robert Wise, Best Director—Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins**, Best Supporting Actor—George Chakiris, Best Supporting Actress—Rita Moreno, Best Art Direction (called at the time, Best Set Decoration, Color), Best Cinematography (Color), Best Costume Design (Color), Best Editing, Best Score, Best Sound) from 11 nominations (Best Adapted Screenplay—Ernest Lehman)

* Jerome Robbins was also awarded a special Oscar for Brilliant Achievements in the Art of Choreography on Film (though it does not toward the official total)
**Wise and Robbins set an Oscar record by becoming the first “established duo” of directors to be nominated for and win the Best Director Oscar. In addition to Wise and Robbins, Warren Beatty and Buck Henry were nominated for 1978’s Heaven Can Wait. Joel and Ethan Coen became the second established duo to win a Best Director Oscar for 2007’s No Country For Old Men.

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The Apartment: Shut Up and Deal

The Apartment is a perfect film to begin a discussion about the Academy Awards in the 1960’s because in many ways it is a film that bridges the 32 years of Best Picture winners that preceded it to the fifty years of Oscar history that would follow. The film’s final line delivered with razor-sharp precision timing by Shirley MacLaine—“Shut up and deal”—is also the perfect angle in which to approach the ten Best Pictures of the decade. In a period of unmatched tumultuous social change, the most enduring films were the ones that chose to shut up and deal with the changes Americans faced.

The Apartment is also the perfect transitory film because it is the last film to win Best Picture to be shot entirely in black and white (Steven Spielberg used black and white film for Schindler’s List in 1993, yet that was a deliberate artistic choice, and the film also has sections where color is used for specific purposes). However, like its recent Best Picture-winning predecessors, the film is gloriously widescreen. It gives Ben-Hur and The Bridge on the River Kwai a run for its money in terms of scope. The look of the film straddles the past and the future. Unlike the chiaroscuro film stock, there is nothing black and white about the themes contained in The Apartment. The story is extraordinarily modern and it perhaps resonates stronger now than when it premiered over fifty years ago (Look at the television show Mad Men, which exists squarely under the shadow of The Apartment).

What makes The Apartment a great film is the way director Billy Wilder pull the audience in alongside his characters. I think Wilder was a great humanist filmmaker. What I mean by humanist is this: Wilder’s films contain characters drawn with such a depth of humanity that it becomes impossible for the audience not to be carried alongside their journeys. These characters are just as human as the viewers watching them. In Double Indemnity, we are seduced along with Walter Neff (played by Fred MacMurray, who also has a key, also similarly against type role as an insurance man in The Apartment) when he meets deadly Phyllis Dietrichson and mistakes murder for honeysuckle. Ray Milland makes Don Birnam’s alcoholism so profound in The Lost Weekend that we can smell the booze sweating out of his pores as he searches for the bottle of hidden whiskey. A funeral for a monkey in Sunset Boulevard makes Norma Desmond’s madness palpable, inspiring both horror and sympathy. The idea of two men being able to find the meaning of true love only after they have disguised themselves as women sounds absolutely absurd, but in Wilder’s hands Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (Lemmon plays the lead role in The Apartment, and in many ways, he was Wilder’s muse) make the absurd logical in Some Like it Hot. Every one of these films is a classic because the characters endure.

Each of the main characters in Wilder’s films share a common trait—loneliness—and in The Apartment, that great existential theme drives the actions of the characters in the film.

The film opens with a brief montage of New York City. Wilder means to convey the metropolis is a bustling epicenter of human life and commerce, but the helicopter shots of towering skyscrapers and office buildings underscore the fact that a single individual could easily find themselves lost among the hubbub. The narration is provided by C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Lemmon), an average, hard working yet powerless white collar worker employed by Consolidated Life of New York. Bud describes New York as if he were reading off the back of a baseball card. “On November 1st, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six and a half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan.” His description of his workplace is just as statistically bent:

“We're one of the top five companies in the country. Our home office has 31,259 employees—which is more than the entire population of Natchez, Mississippi. I work on the 19th floor—Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, desk number 861. My name is C. C. Baxter—C. for Calvin, C. for Clifford, however most people call me Bud. I've been with Consolidated for three years and ten months and my take-home pay is $94.70 a week.”

Wilder then gives us a shot of the interior of Bud’s office on the 19th floor—a literal sea of desks, with one benign occupant after another (the shot is an homage to King Vidor’s 1928 silent film The Crowd). Bud even provides us this detail: “The hours in our department are 8:50 to 5:20—they're staggered by floors, so that sixteen elevators can handle the 31,259 employees without a serious traffic jam.” Bud is just one man in an ocean of desks, in a skyscraper that houses a small city, where elevator rides must be scheduled as to not upend the entire building. In a city where he is surrounded by eight million other people, Bud could not be more alone.

Bud’s narration dives right into the main plot of The Apartment. He often arrives at his desk early and stays late despite the prime location of his apartment in the “West Sixties, just half a block from Central Park”. What could keep a man away from an apartment which is “just right for a bachelor”? Bud has found a way to advance his career, by loaning his apartment out to his superiors so that they can engage in extramarital trysts with the secretaries, telephone operators and other low-level female employees in the firm (it should be noted that all of the female employees at Consolidated Life are low level; this doesn’t make The Apartment a sexist film, merely a historically accurate one). This arrangement is a fruitful way of brown-nosing, and Bud enjoys being called a “bright boy” and hearing promises of a promotion. However, Bud incurs two problems with this arrangement, one he is unaware of, and one that is painfully obvious.

The painfully obvious part of his problem is that his apartment is loaned out so often that he is unable to use it for a social life of his own. The “hospitality” the apartment provides Bud’s bosses extend well after work hours. When Bud does get home, he usually has a TV dinner and a bottle of Coke, a late night movie his only companionship (in one scene, Bud watches the 1932 Best Picture Grand Hotel, another film about lonely people in a busy place). Bud also suffers looks of indignation and scorn from his neighbors, especially Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen and Naomi Stevens). Because Bud’s “guests” fail to ever clean up after themselves, Bud often has to tote bags of empty bottles of alcohol down to the garbage. While there, Dr. Dreyfuss comments, “The way you're beltin' that stuff, you must have a pair of cast-iron kidneys....As a matter of fact, you must be an iron man all around. From what I hear through the walls, you got somethin' goin' for ya every night...Sometimes, there's a twi-night double-header. A nebbish like you!” Bud never bothers to correct the assumption that he is a boozehound, skirt-chaser, and all around lothario. He assumes that if he keeps a low profile and keeps his supervisors happy, the ever-elusive promotion will come his way.

What Bud remains unaware of is that his supervisors regard him as a doormat. The first supervisor who absconds to the apartment in the film, Kirkeby (David Lewis), tells his mistress that the dwelling belongs to “some schnook in the office”. Later, Mr. Dobisch (character actor Ray Walston, and if you’ve seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High you’ll recognize him instantly), another middle manager, wishes to extend his date. He phones Bud at 11 pm, rousing him from his sleep, simply because he wants to screw his date, a “blonde who looks like Marilyn Monroe” (a dig at the actual Monroe, who though irreplaceable, gave Wilder absolute fits when directing her in his previous picture, Some Like It Hot). Bud doesn’t want to give up the only activity he can enjoy in his apartment—sleep—but Dobisch blackmails him, saying "Look Baxter, we're making out the monthly efficiency rating, and I'm putting you in the top ten. Now you don't want to louse yourself up, do you?" Bud meekly acquiesces, spending the night on a hard bench on a cold November night in Central Park. He’s in so deep, that in many ways, he has become a secretary for his own home, keeping each middle manager on a rigid schedule and having to iron out conflicts when two bosses wish to cheat on their wives on the same night. Bud isn’t moving upward, he’s simply becoming a bigger bitch for mid-level management.

Bud does have at least one source of happiness at Consolidated Life—his daily ride on the elevator. It is there that he flirts with the charming and cheerful elevator operator, Fran Kubelik (the incandescent Shirley MacLaine). Miss Kubelik is also clearly likes him (in a friendly way)—she is compassionate toward Bud comes in the elevator sick, she places a carnation in his buttonhole when Bud is nervous upon being summoned for a meeting, and she tells him, crucially, that “something happens to men in elevators. Must be the change in altitude—the blood rushed to their head or something—boy I could tell you stories.” Bud, however, does not rank among these men. He is the only man who removes his hat as a sign of respect when he enters Fran’s elevator; she’s noticed, and she thinks Bud is a nice guy. When Bud tires to find out information about her from Kirkeby—whom Fran has rejected before—he is told that Fran plays hard to get and that she isn’t that special. Bud defends her, calling Fran “a nice, respectable girl.”

In that first act, Wilder and his co-writer I.A.L. Diamond gives the audience everything we need to know about Bud and Fran. He is lonely, angling for a promotion, and at heart a romantic; the removing of his hat in Fran’s elevator and his chivalrous defense of her prove that trait. Fran shows true kindness in addition to being charming and attractive. There is also an undeniable mystery and allure to the girl. Wilder and Diamond provide the set up for the audience to be on the side of these two characters; Lemmon and MacLaine make us want to know them better. What will become of the moral quandary Bud has found himself in? Will we ever know more about this cute, elusive and charming girl who runs the elevator? Luckily, the answer to both questions is yes.

The big twist in the plot occurs when Bud is summoned to the office of the Director of Personnel, Jeff D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, playing a version of his Walter Neff had he survived Double Indemnity and rose up through the ranks from insurance salesman). Bud figures that Sheldrake has discovered that he is letting his superiors use his apartment for their infidelities, and that Sheldrake will fire him on grounds of moral turpitude. Instead, Bud is surprised that Dobisch, Kirkeby and the others have finally recommended him for promotion. There is a catch though, because Sheldrake does know about the apartment—“I know everything that goes on in this building”, Sheldrake intones. It turns out that Sheldrake is just as adulterous as Dobisch, Kirkeby and the rest, and he seeks to gain membership into Bud’s “little club”. At first, Bud can hardly believe he isn’t being fired, but Sheldrake buys him off with a pair of tickets to The Music Man and the promotion. Bud’s rationale: “Four apples, five apples, what’s the difference, percentage-wise” (Wilder and Diamond create an extended gag in the film by tacking “-wise” onto the end of several words in the script; it is even seen in the tagline in the film’s poster).

Bud is so excited with his promotion and now that he has a pair of tickets to the hot Broadway show, he works up the courage to as Fran out on a date. She declines at first, citing a previous commitment to meet another man for a drink, but Fran is unsure of her current relationship, calling it “more or less kaput.” She dismisses dinner with Bud, but agrees to meet him at 8:30 in the lobby of the theater for the start of the show. What Bud does not suspect is that the man Fran is meeting is Sheldrake, and they have had an on-again, off-again affair.

The night of The Music Man Fran and Sheldrake have a conversation in a Chinese restaurant, in the booth nearest to the back, that reveals how Fran is torn about their relationship (in a nice touch, the piano man in the restaurant plays “Jealous Lover” upon Fran’s entrance). It is the first date between Fran and Sheldrake in six weeks. Sheldrake tells her, “It's been hell...You don't know what it's like, standing next to you in that elevator, day after day. Good morning, Miss Kubelik. Good night, Mr. Sheldrake. I'm so crazy about you, Fran...I never said goodbye, Fran.” Wise to Sheldrake’s pleas, Fran retorts, “For a while there, you try kidding yourself that you're going with an unmarried man. Then one day, he keeps looking at his watch, and asks you if there's any lipstick showing, then rushes out to catch the 7:14 to White Plains. So you fix yourself a cup of instant coffee—and you sit there by yourself, and you think—and it all begins to look so ugly…What do you want from me?” Sheldrake tells Fran that he wants her back. He tells her that he is getting a divorce from his wife. Still, Fran is unfazed. “They got it on a long-playing record now. Music to String Her Along By. My wife doesn't understand me. We haven't gotten along for years. You're the best thing that ever happened to me.” Finally, Sheldrake plays his trump card: he will promise to divorce his wife if Fran promises to tell him that she loves him. With resignation, Fran says, “You know I do.” This is a woman trapped between what her heart is telling her and what her conscience knows is right. All the while, Wilder cuts to Bud waiting in the theater lobby for Fran. He has been stood up. As Sheldrake and Fran leave the restaurant, he hails a cab to take the pair to Bud’s apartment.

Six more weeks pass, and Bud and Fran do not talk to one another until the Consolidated Life Christmas party (on Christmas Eve). His anger toward Fran for standing him up has subsided considerably, going so far as forgiving her. Bud tells Fran: “I mean, when you're having a drink with one man, you can't suddenly walk out on him because you're having another date with another man. You did the only decent thing.” Fran tells Bud that she is “no Girl Scout”. Bud will hear nothing of it, saying “as far as I'm concerned, you're tops, I mean, decency-wise, and otherwise-wise.” While Bud forgives Fran, secrets are also spilled under the influence of alcohol. Miss Olsen (Edie Adams), Sheldrake’s secretary, has seen Sheldrake parade his mistresses in front of her desk for the past four years; she was, in fact part of the parade at one time. A conversation is all it takes for Miss Olsen to dispel Fran’s fantasies.

Miss Olsen: Hi. How's the branch manager from Kansas City?
Fran: I beg your pardon?
Miss Olsen: I'm Miss Olsen, Mr. Sheldrake's secretary...You don't have to play innocent with me. He used to tell his wife I was the branch manager from Seattle, four years ago when we were having a little ring-a-ding-ding.
Fran: I'm sorry; I don't know what you're talking about.
Miss Olsen: And before me, there was Miss Rossi in Auditing, and after me there was Miss Koch in Disability, and right before you, there was Miss, uhm, oh What's-Her-Name, on the twenty-fifth floor...You haven't done anything. It's him—oh, what a salesman! Always the last booth in the Chinese restaurant—and the same pitch about divorcing his wife—and in the end, you wind up with egg foo yong on your face.

Fran can no longer take it, and seeks out some comfort from Bud. He proudly shows her his new office, where there is a Christmas card from Sheldrake—pictured with his wife, sons, and dog—open on Bud’s desk. Fran begins to cry. When she goes to reapply her makeup, Bud notices Fran is using a compact—he recognizes a fleur-de-lis pattern—that he returned to Sheldrake after he used the apartment. He pieces together that Sheldrake and Fran have been having an affair. Both Bud and Fran leave the party disillusioned; Bud seeks comfort in booze at a dive bar, Fran leaves with Sheldrake to the apartment.

Back at the apartment, Sheldrake and Fran exchange gifts. She gives him a record. Sheldrake tells Fran that he cannot spend much time with her, that he has to be home because his in-laws are there, and that he is obligated to spend Christmas Eve with his family. Miss Olsen’s words prove prophetic—Sheldrake is the master salesman, and he has been stringing Fran along. He tells her, “When you've been married to a woman for twelve years, you just don't sit down at the breakfast table and say, 'Pass the sugar, I want a divorce.' It's not that easy. Anyway, this is the wrong time. The kids are home from school. My in-laws are visiting for the holidays. I can't bring it up now.” Fran knows now that there will never be a good time for Sheldrake to broach the subject of divorce with his wife. “You'd think I would have learned by now - when you're in love with a married man, you shouldn't wear mascara,” Fran says acknowledging the futility of her relationship. Sheldrake drives the stake Fran’s heart when he gives her his gift—a one hundred dollar bill. “You go and buy yourself something,” Sheldrake tells Fran, proving to her (and the audience) that she is no more than a prostitute in his eyes.

The theme of prostitution, or as is the case with Bud and Fran, of compromising one’s morals to attain a personal goal, runs deep in The Apartment. Bud has prostituted himself by turning his home into a hotel with rates by the hour. He isn’t a second administrative assistant; he is a scheduling manager for a brothel. Fran has it even worse. She has convinced herself that if she loves a married man enough, that he will return that love and marry her. Yet how much does it really weigh on her mind that if she receives a marriage proposal from Sheldrake, she will play a part destroying a family. Never mind that Sheldrake has made a farce of his wedding vows for years, Fran knows she is doing something morally compromising, and chooses to do it anyway. Simply because Sheldrake cheats on his wife does not mean that Fran should allow him to cheat on his wife with her. Bud—a single man with whom she shares a mutual attraction—could be a good man for her, but she deludes herself into thinking that Sheldrake will change. When Sheldrake gives her the $100, all he is doing is exposing Fran for what she has been in his eyes—a whore. What is worse is that Fran, until that moment (and this is true of Miss Olsen and the other women who the bosses cheat with) was lower than a whore. At least a prostitute is paid for her services.

The remainder of The Apartment seeks redemption for both Bud and Fran. In doing so, Wilder and Diamond’s script masterfully changes in tone—a move that would sink less assured screenwriters (and in Wilder’s case, director), but here is where the film truly becomes something memorable.

On the same Christmas Eve, bud returns to his apartment inebriated, with an equally lush date in tow. Upon entering his bedroom, he sees Fran passed out on his bed, having overdosed on a bottle of sleeping pills. At first, Bud is incensed at the sight of Miss Kubelik, but he soon realizes that Fran's health is critical. He dismisses his date (and really, what can the poor guy do to get laid in his own apartment?), and raps on the door of Dr. Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss already has a low opinion of Bud, and when the doctor spots a note lying next to the bed; he assumes that Bud has driven Fran to attempt suicide. Bud pleas with Dreyfuss to revive Fran, and he begrudgingly does so. The resuscitation is staged with such intensity that there is considerable doubt to Fran’s survival; the scene also helps jolt the film from being a lighthearted adultery comedy to a potentially tragic suicide drama.

Finally, Dreyfuss gives Bud a piece of his mind: “As your neighbor, I'd like to kick your keister clear around the block! I don't know what you did to that girl in there, and don't tell me, but it was bound to happen, the way you carry on. Live now, pay later. Diner's Club! Why don't you grow up, Baxter? Be a mensch! You know what that means? A mensch—a human being!” Dreyfuss has been incorrect in assuming Bud is a playboy, yet he rightly points out that Bud’s callous behavior reflects a lack of compassion for humanity. Bud may not have broken Fran’s heart, but he has created the environment for heartbreak. He is indirectly responsible for Fran’s suicide attempt.

Over the next few days, as Fran convalesces, a relationship slowly begins to develop between Bud and Fran. They spend Christmas together. They both speak of their failed romances. They play gin rummy. Fran tells of how she came to live in New York and become an elevator operator. Bud cooks spaghetti for her; the scene where Bud uses a tennis racket to strain the noodles is a great, pure example of a bachelor taking sublime pleasure in cooking a meal for the woman he loves for the first time, and Lemmon plays it perfectly. Bud tells her, “Me, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe, I mean shipwrecked among eight million people. Then, one day I saw a footprint in the sand, and there you were. It's a wonderful thing, dinner for two.” Bud is clearly in love with Fran; she though, remains cool, and says, “Why can't I ever fall in love with somebody nice like you?” Bud’s reply: “That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.”

Meanwhile, back at Consolidated, change is afoot. Winning the Boss-of-the-Year Award, Sheldrake fires Miss Olsen for revealing his adulterous history to Fran. She serves him up with a sharp reply—“You let me go four years ago, Jeff. Only you were cruel enough to make me sit out there and watch the new models pass by."—and as a parting gift, she tells Mrs. Sheldrake about her husband’s infidelities. As a result, Mrs. Sheldrake begins divorce proceedings, and Sheldrake is kicked out of his home, living out of his suitcases at the men-only Athletic Club. Sheldrake—who was too cowardly to ask for the divorce himself—couldn’t be happier, and with the barrier of family no longer in place, he intends to rekindle his relationship with Fran. As a result, Bud is again rewarded with a promotion and the most symbolic gift of all—a key to the executive washroom.

Still, this isn’t a no-strings-attached promotion, and Sheldrake expects to continue to be allowed use of the apartment. Upon hearing this, Bud finally understands what it means to be a mensch. Sheldrake is shocked, telling Bud, “It takes years to work your way up to the 27th floor, but it only takes 30 seconds to be out on the street again.” Bud is no longer threatened. He passes the key to the executive washroom back to Sheldrake (who initially mistakes it for the key to the apartment), saying “I won’t be needing it, because I’m all washed up around here.”

On New Year’s Eve, a furious Sheldrake carries his anger over into a meeting with Fran in the Chinese restaurant. Sheldrake bitterly complains, "Just walked out on me, quit, threw that big fat job right in my face...that little punk, after all I did for him. Said I couldn't bring anybody to the apartment, especially not Miss Kubelik." Finally, this allows Fran to see that Bud is the right man for her. She tells Sheldrake, “I guess that’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.” She leaves a dumbfounded Sheldrake alone as revelers in the restaurant sing Auld Lang Syne.

The final scene is handled with remarkable restraint and perhaps a sly bit of skepticism. Fran, jubilant, runs down the street to Bud’s apartment. She finds him there alone with a bottle of champagne. Bud can hardly believe Fran is at his door. They resolve to move on to "another neighborhood, another town, another job." Regardless of where they end up, they know they will be together. Those who were once alone have found another person to share a meal with. They play another hand of gin rummy, and Bud finally tells Fran, “I love you, Miss Kubelik.” She remains reticent, almost stone faced, and continues to play the game. Bud tells her, “Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.” Her response is a fantastic one liner that closes the film: “Shut up and deal.”

What makes the ending perfect is that Wilder doesn’t immediately give the audience the saccharine conclusion they expect. Bud doesn’t kiss Fran in a moment of passion—in fact, our lovers are never seen kissing in the film—he only tells her he loves her, and she appears to be ignoring him. What Wilder knows is that the corny ending, the saccharine embrace, the give-over to romance is not in character for Bud and Fran. These are two weary souls, recovering from loneliness. Bud has told Fran he loves her; we know Fran loves him, when she surprises him on New Year’s Fran gives Bud all the acknowledgement of love he will ever need. The rummy game is a metaphor, for these two people have literally laid out all of their cards on the table to each other. All that remains is to shut up, and deal with it.

The Apartment signals a trend in film where romance is rejected in favor of realism. Bud and Fran don’t have a “meet cute” scene. They never go on a date. Neither of them makes a grand gesture of love to win the other over; their consciences come to the conclusion that they should be together. What they do understand is that each has made the other a whole human being. They no longer have to be lonely among eight million. The remainder of their lives is what they will have to deal with.

The 1960’s film that most embraces the notion of rejecting romanticism in favor of idealism is The Graduate. Ben whisks Elaine away—on her wedding day—in spectacular fashion. But when the young lovers board that bus together, Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross give the audience some two of the most quizzical and unsettled looks ever seen on film, and the audience isn’t left with happily ever after, instead, the characters seem to be saying, “Did I just really do that?” Wilder doesn’t end The Apartment on anywhere near of ambiguous of a notion, but neither does he give us the happily ever after we expect. He lets Fran do the speaking for him: “Shut up and deal.” He is saying that relationships are not always filled with fun and romance; they’re not an evening frolic in a bachelor’s apartment. In The Apartment, a true relationship is the one where two people grow into being better human beings. Wilder lets us know not to expect happily ever after, and in fact, we may be better off rejecting that notion.

“Shut up and deal” is an excellent way to view the Best Picture winners of the 1960’s. The Oscar winning films of the decade are monstrous and eternally popular and smaller, intimate and character driven. The best films are the ones that deal with the issues the characters—and by extension American society—face. The Apartment is one for the time capsule.

DETAILS

The Apartment (1960)

Director: Billy Wilder

Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Jack Kruschen, Ray Walston, Edie Adams, David Lewis, Naomi Stevens

Studio: United Artists

Total Oscars: 5 (Best Picture—Billy Wilder, Best Director—Wilder, Best Original Screenplay—Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond*, Best Art Direction (called Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black & White at the time), Best Editing) out of 10 nominations (Best Actor—Jack Lemmon, Best Actress—Shirley MacLaine, Best Supporting Actor—Jack Kruschen, Best Cinematography (B&W), Best Sound)

*The acceptance speech given by Wilder and Diamond for winning Best Screenplay proves the axiom; brevity is the soul of wit. Diamond said, “Thank you Billy Wilder.” Wilder said, “Thank you I.A.L. Diamond.”

NEXT BLOG: West Side Story

1950's Decade in Review

The 1950’s were a decade of schizophrenic Best Picture winners. Full confession time—I have finished watching all of the Best Picture winners and did a ranking of all 82 of them. You’ll all have to wait for each of the reviews to come out before I reveal my final rankings (and I will make a mental note that if I want readers to care about such things, three month hiatuses between posts does not help maintain a captive audience), but I can tell you that five films from the 1950’s are in my top twenty Best Picture winners. The other five are in the bottom half of the list, four of which are in the bottom twenty, three of which are in the bottom five, and one film from the 1950’s the hands-down, no competition winner for worst film to ever win the Oscar.

I think the division of quality in the Best Picture winners from this decade reflects two things: a reaction to the political climate of the country—the blacklisting of several filmmakers, screenwriters and actors during this time is most indicative of this—and the advent of television as a major competitor for the entertainment dollar of the American public. The question of “Why should I go to the movies when I can watch TV at home for free?” became a bigger threat to Hollywood than communism. In the journey from All About Eve to Ben-Hur, you can trace the evolution of film from sharply written, character based drama to broadly drawn, massive spectaculars that provided audiences with an entertainment experience unique to the silver screen.
With that said, here is how I am ranking the 1950’s Best Picture winners (and I’ll let you know that deciding between #1 and #2 was very difficult to determine—they’re easily the closest #1 and #2 within a decade for all the Best Pictures. I went simply with the film I thought was overall better):

#1—All About Eve (1950): This Joseph Mankiewicz penned and directed masterpiece about the backbiting that takes place behind the scenes in the world of theater showcases not only a phenomenal script and fine acting (and it is an especially great showcase for actresses) but also one of the finest film to ever deal with the everyday emotions of being human. The final shot of the film has an aspiring actress gazing into a mirror, with her image reflected ad infinitum. The shot is a metaphor for her vanity, but it also serves to reflect the many sides of humanity in the audience watching. Bette Davis as Margo Channing is one of the all-time greatest roles for any actor ever, regardless of gender. A masterpiece.

#2—On the Waterfront (1954): You can choose to see this as Elia Kazan’s apology for naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, but it is better to see the film as a triumph of human goodness and conscience. The ensemble cast—led by Marlon Brando as palooka Terry Malloy—is absolute dynamite, and one of the finest ever assembled for a film. Terry Malloy famously says he could have been a contender; On the Waterfront is an undisputed champion.

#3—Marty (1955): Paddy Chayefsky adapted his one-hour drama into a feature film not much longer. Size matters not here, as 94 minutes are exactly what is needed to prove that love can be found among people who consider themselves unlovable—in this case Ernest Borgnine’s lummox of a butcher and Betsy Blair’s plain, insecure schoolteacher. When Marty dances in the street, knowing he has found true love, you will be moved to dance along with him. And hey, the French loved it.

#4—The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957): Director David Lean knew that you can make the most epic looking film in the world but it the picture would ultimately be hollow unless there were equally compelling ideas at its core. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a film where the scope and ambition of the filmmaking matches the power of the ideas within that have engaged the minds of its viewers.

#5—From Here to Eternity (1953): While the film is responsible for providing one of the most smoldering and iconic loves scenes ever filmed—the Burt Lancaster/Deborah Kerr kiss on the Hawaii surf, as the waves of the beach crash around them—the movie is not the passion-filled romance the image suggests. Director Fred Zinnemann uses the audiences’ foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor for maximum dramatic effect as the stories of the characters within spin inexorably toward tragedy.

#6—Ben-Hur (1959): William Wyler’s biblical and historical epic was at the time, the most expensive and biggest motion picture ever filmed. It not only set a record by winning eleven Oscars, but it also saved MGM from bankruptcy. Ben-Hur re-established Hollywood filmmaking as the dominant producer of spectacular entertainment.

#7—Gigi (1958): This musical is a triumph of production design, and Leslie Caron is very pretty, but there is ultimately not much substance to be found here.

#8—An American in Paris (1951): This Vincente Minnelli directed, Gene Kelly/Leslie Caron starring musical contains some of the most innovative dancing ever seen in film—especially in the incredible ballet and fine art inspired finale. However, the “story” holding the film together completely falls apart at the seams. The film is nothing more than one song and dance sequence after another.

#9—The Greatest Show on Earth (1952): Cecil B. DeMille’s circus spectacular could have been the greatest show on Earth had it focused less on melodrama and more on how the circus survives a multitude of daily calamities. It would have been better as a documentary on the Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey circus.

#10—Around the World in 80 Days (1956): Producer Michael Todd wanted to give audiences a film that contained everything and the kitchen sink. The problem is that the film becomes so overstuffed that it loses all semblance of focus. It ended up being an insipid, unentertaining mess. Around the World in 80 Days is the only Best Picture that I saw that had no redeeming qualities. Easily the worst film to ever win the Oscar.

Actor of the Decade: Marlon Brando. His Terry Malloy was the cherry on top of a fabulous decade for the Method actor. Brando was nominated for Best Actor five times in the 1950’s (consecutively from 1951-1954), and his performances revolutionized screen acting. Easy choice.

Actress of the Decade: Bette Davis. Davis is really a product of the Golden Age of cinema during the 1920’s, ‘30’s and early ‘40’s, and she didn’t actually win an Oscar for her performance as Margo Channing in All About Eve, but two key factors figured into my decision making. First—the 1950’s were not the greatest decade for actresses, and the three most famous actresses from the period—Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe—are better known as icons than actresses (though to be fair, Hepburn and Kelly each won Best Actress during the decade). Second—Davis’ performance set the bar so ridiculously high that only one other performance from an actress during the decade—Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, also from 1950, and also did not win Best Actress—matched it in terms of greatness. Davis deserves recognition, and her Margo Channing will endure for all time.

Director of the Decade: Elia Kazan. Kazan is easily the most controversial figure of the decade, but he also made some unquestionably great films. On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and East of Eden each netted the director Oscar nominations (he won for On the Waterfront). His work with Brando in bringing Lee Strasberg’s Method acting to the screen alone merits a director of the decade nod. Hugely respected by his actors, he led twelve actors (Brando, Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, Kim Hunter, Anthony Quinn, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Jo Van Fleet, James Dean, Carroll Baker, and Mildred Dunnock) to fifteen Oscar acting nominations and seven wins (Leigh, Malden, Hunter, Quinn, Brando, Saint, and Van Fleet). In the decade he had six films receive an overall 38 nominations and fifteen wins. Controversy aside, the numbers favor Kazan.

Studio of the Decade: I’m going to cop out a bit and call it a tie between Columbia Pictures and MGM. MGM had three films outright win the Oscar (An American in Paris, Gigi, and Ben-Hur), and both Marty and Around the World in 80 Days were both United Artists releases. The UA library has since been incorporated into the MGM library (though Around the World in 80 Days is now owned by Warner Brothers). So you can argue that MGM really has five Best Picture winners during the decade. The studio was still the unquestioned popular tastemaker, and the musicals MGM released during the 1950’s were the finest any studio produced. Still, Columbia released three films that also outright won the Oscar—From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai—that represent such a massive uptick in quality over MGM’s slate that they have to be included in the argument. For a schizophrenic decade, it seems right that there are two studios that share the “Best of Decade” title.

NEXT BLOG: The Apartment

Ben-Hur: Bigger Is Better

It has been said that the Academy often awards Best Picture not based exclusively on merit, instead opting to reward the film with the biggest payroll (and in certain regard, it makes sense—a big film is likely to have more Academy members employed on it, and if cast and crew show loyalty to the picture they worked on, then naturally the films with the largest productions would have an advantage in terms of votes). Perhaps no film symbolized the triumph of logistics better than William Wyler’s Ben-Hur.

Even by modern standards, Ben-Hur is a massive picture. The film endured six years of pre-production, and when, in 1956, Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of his biblical epic The Ten Commandments (which DeMille first staged as a silent film in 1925) proved to be a massive hit for Paramount, MGM became serious about bringing Ben-Hur back to the screen. Like The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur was also first successfully staged as a silent film—also released in 1925. MGM, like every studio in Hollywood, was quick to adapt to trends, and they even went so far as to cast Charlton Heston—famous for playing Moses in The Ten Commandments—in the lead role of Judah Ben-Hur.

Ben-Hur was also—at the time—the most expensive film ever made, budgeted at $15 million dollars (which doesn’t even pay for the salaries of some actors today). It was filmed on location in Italy, where massive, life-like sets were erected, to be populated by tens of thousands of extras. The Circus Maximus stadium built on the Cinecitta Studios backlot in Rome for the climactic chariot race spread out over eighteen acres, and the ten-block set used for the re-created Jerusalem was historically accurate. The film used over 1,000,000 props. Over 1,250,000 feet of 65mm film were processed in MGM’s laboratories for Ben-Hur–at the cost of a dollar a foot—and for the chariot race alone, for every foot of film used, 263 feet were trimmed. The marketing of the film was also taken to a ridiculous extreme. Aside from the usual and expected movie tie-ins like the soundtrack and action figures, MGM created Ben-His and Ben-Hers matching bathrobes. In every regard, the picture was massive.

The result—an unprecedented eleven Oscar wins out of twelve nominations. The film also represented an enormous gamble and payoff for MGM. Had the film been a failure, it would have sunk the studio. Instead, Ben-Hur was a massive success and saved MGM from bankruptcy.

In my opinion, time has not been particularly kind to every aspect of Ben-Hur. I will be the first to say that a film this massive and phenomenally popular in its time will always attract favorable audiences, but many elements of the film don’t hold up well under the scrutiny of time. First things first, Ben-Hur is an extremely old-fashioned film. There are many reasons that contribute to this. Part of it is the length of the film itself. Three hours and thirty two minutes is a long time for any audience to invest in a film, particularly one that doesn’t contain very much complexity—either from the actors, characters or the story itself. Another reason is the subject matter of the film. Ben-Hur is subtitled A Tale of the Christ and the film is unquestionably Christian. I have nothing against religiously themed films, but I’ve also found that film is a poor substitute for actually going to church. There is nothing subtle (save one very notable exception, which I will discuss in a bit) about Ben-Hur’s interpretation of Christianity, from the opening credits that unfurl themselves against Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to the Passion play finale. Finally, the script is easily the weakest part of the Ben-Hur, and struggles to contain the massive scope of the film.

Director William Wyler (who was paid the then record setting salary of $1,000,000 to direct Ben-Hur) hated the screenplay from its inception. Upon his first reading of Karl Tunberg’s script, Wyler scribbled the words “awful” and “horrible” in its margins. Almost immediately, Wyler sought out superior screenwriters to polish and in some cases rewrite the screenplay. One of the writers commissioned to do rewrites was Gore Vidal. Vidal also hated the script upon first reading, and wanted nothing to do with the film. However, Vidal was also under contract at the time, and hated being a contract writer as much as he hated the script for Ben-Hur. Wyler offered to get Vidal out of the final two years of his contract if he would contribute to the script rewrites. Vidal’s major contribution to the screenplay was to provide a homosexual subtext to the relationship between Judah Ben-Hur and the primary antagonist of the film, Messala (Stephen Boyd).

The original script simply had the root of the conflict between Ben-Hur and Messala—who were the best of friends in childhood—arise from political differences. Wyler felt political disagreement was not impetus enough for a relationship between two characters who were such close friends as children to devolve into outright hatred. Vidal supplied the subtext that Ben-Hur and Messala were lovers as teenagers, and the resentment and bitterness Messala feels is because Ben-Hur spurned him. Wyler was hesitant to implement this change—and was especially fearful of Heston’s reaction—but agreed to it after no explicit mention of the sexuality of the characters be made in the film (which would have violated production codes at the time) and that Vidal discuss the change with Boyd (who was fine with it) while never mentioning it to Heston. This results in an awkward performance from Heston, who is completely clueless to one of the motivating foundations of his character.

Astute audiences picked up on the subtext, and the sexuality of the two characters remained a mystery for years until in 1995, Vidal publically admitted he wrote the characters as former lovers. Wyler was proven right in wanting to hide Vidal’s changes from Charlton Heston. Heston, upon hearing Vidal’s assertions, immediately denied that Ben-Hur and Messala had a homosexual relationship. He claimed that Vidal never received screen credit for the film (more on that a bit later) because he tried to add gay innuendo to Ben-Hur. As most bigots eventually prove, Heston hypocritically contradicted himself. In his 1978 autobiography, Heston cited that Vidal was ultimately responsible for authoring the majority of the shooting script. After seventeen years, Heston changed his tune.

Wyler then brought in Christopher Fry to author the second major rewrite of the Ben-Hur screenplay. Fry’s contributions included a polish of the dialogue and a rewritten ending. Upon the release of the film, neither Vidal nor Fry received on-screen credit for their extensive contributions to the screenplay of the film. Wyler eventually commissioned 40 scripts for the film (never a good indication of a quality screenplay), and was so incensed of the lack of credit that Vidal and Fry received that he leaked the drama to the press (still considered something of a no-no in Hollywood). To add further insult to injury, Karl Tunberg received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for his “work” on Ben-Hur. It is perhaps a small measure of justice that Adapted Screenplay was the only Oscar Ben-Hur was nominated for that it did not win.

I think one of the major weaknesses of the script is that it doesn’t always reconcile the Ben-Hur part with the A Tale of the Christ part. Mostly, the film is a revenge story. Ben-Hur is framed, his family is imprisoned, he is wrongly enslaved, he becomes a confidante to his Roman captors, then ultimately seeks revenge on Messala, his former friend who imprisoned him. Ben-Hur even swears to Messala, “May God grant me vengeance. I pray that you live until I return.” This is an Old Testament theme in a film supposedly about the other part of the Bible.

Ben-Hur’s story is interwoven with that of Christ’s. The film opens with the traditional nativity story—the three Magi bearing gifts and riding into Bethlehem to witness the birth of Christ. The film ends with Christ’s crucifixion. Throughout the film, Ben-Hur and Christ intersect, most importantly in a scene shortly after Ben-Hur is enslaved and being forced to march through a desert. When they stop at Nazareth, the dehydrated Ben-Hur is at his weakest moment, and he literally cries out for God to help him. Who should be there with a drink of water but Christ himself, and in that moment, Ben-Hur is transfixed by the son of God.

The most effective part of Christ’s depiction in the film is that His face is never seen. In fact, I will go on record as saying that I think this is the most effective interpretation of Jesus I have ever seen on film. Any actor who plays Christ—and there have been several very good ones, notably Willem Dafoe and Jim Caviezel—will inevitably fail to live up to the image of Christ in the minds of the audience. One thing Ben-Hur does do subtly and well is to keep Christ’s face hidden and let our imagination of Him fill in the gaps. He is also referred to obliquely, almost in passing at times (the Romans refer to Jesus as “a King of the Jews who will lead them all into some sort of anti-Roman paradise”, and that Christ is a “young carpenter’s son” who is “different. He teaches that God is near, in every man. It’s quite profound, some of it.”). Later, Ben-Hur meets Balthasar (Finlay Currie), one of the three Magi, who tells a disbelieving Ben-Hur:

"Your whole life is a miracle. Why will you not accept God's judgment? You do not believe in miracles, yet God once spoke to me out of the darkness, and a star led me to a village called Bethlehem where I found a newborn child in a manger. And God lived in this child. By now, He is a grown man, and must be ready to begin His work. And that is why I have returned here, so that I may be at hand when He comes among us. He is near. He saw the sun set this evening as we did. Perhaps He's standing in a doorway somewhere on a hilltop. Perhaps He is a shepherd watching, a fisherman. But He lives in all our lives. From now on we'll carry His mark. There are many paths to God, my son. I hope yours will not be too difficult."

This all serves to make Christ in the film a legendary figure, so that when He does appear in the film the audience is prepared to witness a figure of powerful faith.

Yet Ben-Hur’s conversion from a man filled with a bloodthirsty hatred for Messala and the Romans into a man who follows Christ’s example is less convincing. I never felt that, at least in the way Heston plays it, that Ben-Hur’s spiritual conversion comes from within. Instead, it feels like a plot device. After Christ gives Ben-Hur the drink of water at Nazareth, He disappears from the film for the entire second act—even after the chariot race is finished. Ben-Hur witnesses the Sermon on the Mount, but he is unmoved by Christ’s words. Furthermore, Ben-Hur doesn’t manage to put two and two together in that the man preaching on the hill is the same man who gave him a drink of water when he was thirsty. Balthasar and Esther (Haya Harareet), whom Ben-Hur loves, also witnesses the Sermon on the Mount, and it is she who reminds Ben-Hur of Christ’s teachings.

Ben-Hur is not satisfied that he has defeated Messala in the chariot race; he wants revenge on all of the Romans who have persecuted the Jews. (Important to note here is in Ben-Hur’s absence from Jerusalem, his mother, Miriam (Martha Scott) and sister, Tirzah (Cathy O’Donnell) have contracted leprosy after their own imprisonment in solitary confinement and are condemned to live in the Valley of Lepers.) Esther tells Ben-Hur, “Love your enemy. Do good to those who despitefully use you.” Christ’s words, from the mouth of a supporting character (again also serving to enhance the larger-than-life figure of Christ in the story). Yet Ben-Hur is unmoved, and Esther claims that Ben-Hur has become like the Romans whom he despises.

Finally, although he does not quite believe it, Ben-Hur is persuaded to seek out the Messiah to see if he can perform one of his miracles to cure Miriam and Tirzah of their leprosy. Esther persuades him to act by saying “Life is everlasting. Death is nothing to fear if you have faith.” In Jerusalem, Ben-Hur learns that Christ was put on trial and was sentenced to death by crucifixion. Ben-Hur again passes by Christ carrying the cross on his back as he is on his way to Golgotha. It is here that Ben-Hur finally recognizes Christ as the man who gave him water when he was dying of thirst in Nazareth. When Christ falls, Ben-Hur offers Him a drink of water, and Ben-Hur’s conversion is brought full circle.

Yet do we ever hear Ben-Hur forgive the Romans? Is there ever reconciliation with Messala? I understand that the film asks us to accept that Ben-Hur’s reawakening of faith is another one of Christ’s miracles. I don’t deny the existence of miracles. However, I don’t feel that a miracle alone is reason for spiritual reawakening—the new ideals one has accepted into their heart must be put into practice, and the film never allows us to see the Christian Judah Ben-Hur becomes. Heston does not convincingly sell the conversion of faith. (To be fair, an awakening of faith is one of the most difficult things an actor can portray on screen. We’ve already seen Paul Muni do this effectively in The Life of Emile Zola, and we will see Ben Kingsley do it in Gandhi.) As such, the reaffirmation of faith—and the film wants to be more about spiritual awakening than vengeance—seems more plot driven than coming from within the character of Judah Ben-Hur.

I’ll wrap up my discussion of Ben-Hur on a positive note by backing up a bit and talking about the chariot race—the sequence that the film is most famous for and that most likely secured the Best Picture Oscar for the film. What works best about the chariot race is that nothing is faked. I think one of the things modern audiences struggle the most with when watching older films is that the special effects or the stunt work looks crude and phony. In Ben-Hur certain scenes are guilty of this. The naval battle in which Ben-Hur’s slave galley takes part in is a good example of an action sequence that has not held up well over time. With the chariot race, the reverse is true. Many action sequences today do not have the immediacy, the true sense of peril and overall reality that the chariot race has. William Wyler knew that the only way the scene would be effective was to actually film a chariot race.

The sequence took five weeks to complete filming. As mentioned earlier, the Circus Maximus was recreated on an eighteen-acre set—the largest ever built—on the backlot of Cinecitta Studios in Rome with a high degree of historical accuracy. 15,000 extras populated the sequence. Eighteen chariots were built for the sequence. Heston and Stephen Boyd learned chariot driving, and the actors serve as their own charioteer in all but two of the most dangerous stunts. One is where Ben-Hur is flung backward off his chariot, and the other is where Messala is trampled by his own horses (a scene which is still shocking, even today).

Of course, there have been several urban legends associated with the scene. It was claimed that a stuntman died during the trampling sequence, and the footage was used in the final film. However, Wyler, and his second unit director Andrew Marton, who actually filmed the chariot race, denied this claim, and it was backed up in Heston’s autobiography when Heston claimed the worst injuries anyone—actor, crew member or stuntman—obtained while filming the chariot race was minor scrapes and bruises. Other outlandish urban legends since debunked are that a Ferrari can be seen in the background and that Heston is wearing a wristwatch. No matter what tall tales are concocted about its filming, the chariot race will always remain a classic cinematic sequence, and it is a testament to the mastery of the actors, filmmakers, craftsmen, and stuntmen (stunt director Yakima Canutt and his son Joe, who was involved in a memorable stunt as the driver of a chariot who is flipped when Ben-Hur’s chariot jumps his deserve special mention) responsible for its creation.

I think the best form of praise the sequence can receive is in its many homages. Most famously, George Lucas homaged the chariot race in 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The pod race in that movie follows the chariot race in Ben-Hur on an almost shot-for shot basis. Yet the sequence does not contain the immediacy or sense of danger as the original sequence filmed forty years earlier. Lucas had vastly more sophisticated filmmaking techniques at his disposal, yet created a scene that while thrilling, plays more like a video game than the life-or-death encounter between good and evil that the chariot race in Ben-Hur actually is. All Lucas did was prove the might of the original sequence.

Ben-Hur fittingly closes the 1950’s as a decade where films grew more fantastic and opulent by giving audiences an epic of historical and religious spectacle. In this decade where films most directly and fiercely had to compete with television for audience supremacy, Ben-Hur throws down the gauntlet and unquestionably proves that movies are the exclusive domain of spectacular entertainment. That Ben-Hur was a massive global success that not only resonated with popular and critical audiences, but also quite literally saved its studio, MGM, is proof that bigger really is better. How could the Academy not make Ben-Hur the most honored ever in terms of Oscars won (a record the film still shares with 1997’s Titanic and 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)?


DETAILS

Ben-Hur (1959)

Director: William Wyler

Starring: Charlton Heston, Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Martha Scott, Cathy O’Donnell, Finlay Currie*, Claude Heater**

Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Total Oscars: 11(Best Picture—Sam Zimbalist, Best Director—William Wyler, Best Actor—Charlton Heston***, Best Supporting Actor—Hugh Griffith***, Best Art Direction (called at the time Best Set Decoration, Color), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Score—Miklós Rózsa (called at the time Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture), Best Sound, Best Visual Effects (called at the time Best Special Effects)) out of 12 nominations (Best Adapted Screenplay—Karl Tunberg)

*Finlay Currie played both the Magi Balthasar and narrated the film.
**Claude Heater, an opera baritone, was the stand-in for Christ in Ben-Hur. He was uncredited, and it was his only film appearance. The roles of Mary and Joseph were also played by uncredited actors.
***When Heston and Griffith won for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively (Griffith plays the sheik who sponsors Ben-Hur’s entry into the chariot race), it would be the last time a pair of actors won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for the same film until 44 years later, when Sean Penn and Tim Robbins accomplished the same feat for Mystic River.

NEXT BLOG: Ranking the 1950's Best Picture winners, then into the 1960's with The Apartment