Reading Peter Biskind’s Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America was, for me, a largely enervating experience. Yes, I know; the book is reputed to be a feast of dish, full of jaw-dropping revelations about the putatively irresistible actor/writer/producer/director whose footprint on the culture (“the” meaning “the American,” just so we’re clear) is arguably more impressive/noteworthy than his footprint on film history per se (but we’ll get to that). And it certainly does, you could say, deliver in that particular department.
The problem is in exactly how it delivers. Most of the biographies of great or even good moviemakers that I’ve read have, among other things, filled me with a fever to revisit their works. Upon putting down Star I felt a serious compulsion not only to never look at a Warren Beatty picture again, but to never lay eyes on the guys face for as long as I live. What I felt was not a moral revulsion. There are worse guys in the world than Warren Beatty. There are worse and more talented guys in the world than Warren Beatty. Hell, I heard a story—apocryphal, I should make clear in no uncertain terms—about a writer, no saint himself by his own admission and writings, who wrote a biography of a certain hell-raising musician…and the story goes that in the researching of said biography this writer uncovered material so appalling that the writer was compelled to make a bonfire, eventually, of a lot of very valuable memorabilia relating to this musician, on account of that’s just how appalled he was. I don’t suspect Peter Biskind of being capable of making this kind of ultimately self-defeating sacrifice; I imagine Biskind would regard it, for one thing, as too showy, even if perpetrated in complete private. And yet Biskind sacrifices something real with this book, a book which is more often than not little else but a robotically relentless chronicle of (mostly) pretty people doing and saying very ugly things, with a transparently self-loathing narrator lording it over all of them.
There is no one in this quasi-epic tale whom Biskind will not take down a peg, regardless of how sympathetically he has painted that person up to a certain point or, more troublingly, how much genuine sympathy the reader may have come to believe Biskind actually had for that person up to that point. Repeating a second-hand rumor that Beatty paid for Julie Christie to have breast-enhancement surgery at some unspecified time in the early ’70s, Biskind sneers, “So much for the anti-establishment hippie.” After page after page after page of quoting the frank, erudite, refined, and witty Buck Henry as a primary source, Biskind speculates on a kind word Henry drops for Beatty thusly: “but, having mellowed (or needing work), he also said,” …and so on. Beatty, of course, is depicted in indulging in all sorts of unconscionable, indecisive, credit-hogging, celluloid-and-budget gobbling behavior (that’s not even getting into his personal life), which Biskind rationalizes by way of a spit-balled-together argument that Beatty is in fact something like a great filmmaker.
Biskind announces his, and the book’s, problem in his very first line: “Finishing this book was like recovering from a lingering illness, although admittedly one that I had brought on myself.” That’s something you might expect to read from a biographer of Joseph Stalin or maybe Jeffrey Dahmer; for a biographer of Beatty, it seems a little overwrought. Unless you understand what exactly is, and has been, at stake for Biskind throughout his bookwriting career. And here I realize I’m stepping into a river that I might not even want to get toe-deep into, so let me withdraw a bit and slog through Biskind’s coyly-titled intro “Warrenology,” a bit more.
“Why Warren Beatty?” he asks a bit further on…and not rhetorically. Instead of offering a direct answer, the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures (and the somewhat less well-known essay collections Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying And Love the Fifties and Gods and Monsters: Movers, Shakers and Other Casualties of the Hollywood Machine) gives us a little self-pitying o tempora, o mores action: “It’s distressing to have to make a case for his importance because no one under forty (maybe fifty?) knows who he is.” This is complete bullshit, at least in my experience. Now I’m not braggin’ on myself, as Lou Rawls might put it, but it so happens that I am married to a woman in her very early thirties, and she, and pretty much all her friends know exactly who Warren Beatty is. Yes, this is what you’d call anecdotal evidence, but I don’t think Biskind can beat it. To continue: “If you go to the blogs, you’ll find they’re merciless, nasty and mean, for no better reason than that [Beatty’s] getting old.” If you go to the blogs, you’ll find that few, if any, of them have had jack shit to say about Beatty up until the point this book came out. “Ours is an unforgiving culture.” Cry me a river, and we’ll get back to that later.
Soon enough, Biskind’s cleared his throat sufficiently to actually try to make his case, and it is…unpersuasive. He evokes what he calls “the old parlor game.” “How many defining motion pictures does a filmmaker have to make to be considered great?” Avowing that, like the guy with the editorial on the penultimate page of any given pennysaver in any given burough, it’s just his opinion, Biskind asks, “Orson Welles? One, maybe two: Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil? Jean Renoir? Does anyone know titles other than Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion?” Yeah, I’ll stop, because I don’t want you to projectile vomit. Biskind’s point is that, as a producer at least, Beatty’s got five: Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Bugsy! As a director, three: Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Bulworth! As an actor…yes, yes, yes, you’re not hallucinating, Biskind did say Heaven Can Wait. Twice.
And hey, you know who can name more great Jean Renoir films besides Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion? Peter Biskind can. And he knows it. And it’s ceased to matter to him. And that’s part of why this book has such a tired, nasty feel to it.
Even a delighted reviewer such as Lawrence Levi, writing about the book in The Los Angeles Times, caught this: “Biskind tosses off the occasional groan-worthy phrase and leaden simile. He has the jarring habit of quoting dead people in the present tense…His chapter titles…are cheesy. This hardly matters.” Janet Maslin, writing of the book in The New York Times, thinks it does matter, and zeroes in on Biskind’s habit of quoting production designer Richard/Dick Sylbert in the present tense, despite Sylbert’s having passed away in 2002. I noticed that too, but for a little while I was slightly touched, rather than annoyed by it. One needn’t have been particularly close to Biskind to know that Sylbert was, in a way, the writer’s Hollywood Passepartout, not only a frequently cited source on Biskind’s galvanic Easy Riders, Raging Bulls but a powerful backstage force, a Deep Throat, a trusted provider who could put the touch on a reluctant source and say, hey, this guy’s okay. And someone who stood by Biskind every time out, despite how many bridges Biskind might have thought (or knew) he was burning with this revelation or that. A real friend, then; they genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. So why get on Biskind’s case for all the “Sylbert says” quotes. all the way up to the postmortem on Beatty’s film career (which should give you some idea of just how long it’s been dead)? But I’m a sentimental fool for thinking that, because earlier in the book, in the section about the making of Bonnie and Clyde, there is a group of similarly first-person quotes from that film’s co-screenwriter David Newman, who died in 2003, and with whom Biskind did not, as far as I know, share a similarly warm relationship with. Oh well.
Maslin seems to have endured longheurs similar to my own when reading the book, and she’s unnervingly astute about the quality that makes it come to appalling life: “malice,” she calls it. Maslin is most astute when she notes that this quality is at its most pronounced, and unappealing, when it’s applied to the film critic Pauline Kael. And it really is kind of unbelievable. Discussing Kael’s negative review of Reds, Biskind quotes Sylbert’s twin brother Paul thusly: “She was a woman who was small and not particularly attractive.” Look at the titles of her books, Sylbert says: “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I Lost It At The Movies. That’s the reason she turned against these people. It was like a bad fuck.” A few lines down, Biskind quotes Beatty exclaiming of Kael, “That vituperative bitch!” And about a half page later, Biskind shrugs, “Problematic as Kael’s review was, she did zero in on some of the picture’s weaknesses…” The spectacle of three grown men—who were never in fact materially harmed by Kael (her notice hadn’t a thing to do with Red’s returns, finally)—pissing on her grave is not a particularly edifying one. Ours is an unforgiving culture, indeed.
Then there are Biskind’s entirely arbitrary pop culture references. He compares Beatty’s girlfriend-juggling to Big Love. He says of a promise to behave, extracted out of Elaine May, that it was “like asking Amy Winehouse to go to rehab,” ar ar ar. At a certain point, whatever under-forty reader Biskind’s got will be saying, “No, Grandpa, you get off MY lawn.” And then there are the errors. Shampoo is a “gloss on Steely Dan’s ‘Hollywood Kids,’ ” he notes. This will come as a surprise to Steely Dan, as they’ve never written or recorded such a song. I think he means “Show Biz Kids.” Don’t get me wrong, the previous books had their share of such gaffes—in Dirty Pictures he says that Max von Sydow played Death in The Seventh Seal and mentions a heretofore unknown actress named Julie Delpie—but those errors had the feel of what happens in a stop-the-presses, race-to-put-up-the-next-headline rush. Here they crop up wearing the sagging shoulders of indifference.
I’m glad Biskind’s over his “lingering illness.” Maybe now he can tackle a subject he’ll actually enjoy. I’m not being snarky when I say I look forward to him doing so.
A post worth waiting for. Thanks for reading, so I don’t have to.
Who’s Warren Beatty?
I gave up on the book around the McCabe discussion, which seemed uninformed. Compare it to the passages on McCabe in the Altman oral biography and it’s clear Biskind didn’t dig below the surface. Also, I was offended (and I’m not easily offended) by the passage in the Warrenology section where he says he promised to not discuss anything he heard about Beatty personally after he married Annette Bening, leaving the impression that he did discover something. It’s a cheap shot, and I didn’t trust anything he had to say afterward. For a much better book on Beatty, one that brings his childhood to vivid life, I’d recommend Suzanne Finstad’s highly underrated biography.
I’m not interested in Warren Beatty (for the record I’m 35 and I’ve known who he is pretty much since I was a teenager) so I wasn’t planning on reading the book anyway. Unfortunately I now find myself wondering if I want to read ER,RB now either…
According to Erich von Stroheim, the French have it right: it only takes one movie. I guess my general view of Beatty is higher than yours. I think it’s an impressive career, all told, just very abbreviated, for whatever reason.
Easy Riders was a pleasure, but this one sounds like I should pass. I don’t think I would have made it past the part where he talks about Orson Welles’s claim to greatness and doesn’t mention The Magnificent Ambersons.
Your yeoman’s work is appreciated, sir.
I’ve read exactly one book by Biskind – Down and Dirty Pictures – and I didn’t like it one bit. My experience wasn’t quite as horrid as it sounds like yours was, Glenn, but it was still a bitter slog to the last page (for the record, it was required reading for a film class). Biskind is a creep, a gossip, and a crappy writer, but the self-loathing is what really makes his schtick so miserable.
While I’m as fascinated as the next guy by the seamy underbelly of showbiz glam and glory, and the way it fucks with people’s heads, bodies, spirits – I’d rather experience it à la Lynch, thank you very much. Give me another helping of INLAND EMPIRE any day, and Biskind can go sell his junk to the tabloids.
No, maybe I would have tossed it aside when he was mean to Julie Christie. Excuuuuse her for doing something to make herself more marketable in that cold cruel town.
Funny how Biskind’s piece on Woody Allen in Vanity Fair bent over backwards to excuse Allen’s every foible, and of course Allen’s personal foibles are feeble indeed. Glenn, did you ultimately feel that Biskind was too hard on Beatty, too soft, or just had no real handle on Beatty’s true place in film?
Glenn, it’s hard to feel sympathy for Kael when she rode Beatty’s coattails to some bullshit industry “consulting” position, which was a pretty pathetic move for someone in her position, not to mention a conflict of interest that makes her ridiculous biases even more laughable.
I wonder if you feel as bad about her pissing all over Orson Welles with “Raising Kane” when he was still alive and desperately Raising Financing as you do about Biskind, Beatty and Sylbert “pissing on her grave”. You know, if we’re talking potential damage to reputation.
@ Lazarus: Indeed, I did, and do, feel as bad worse than bad, actually, about “Raising Kane.” Always have. As I’ve mentioned any number of times, I“m not the world’s number one Kael fan. I’m also a firm believer in the adage that two wrongs don’t make a right. Whatever the Kael/Beatty relationship (and it’s certainly true that it crossed any number of lines of which were then known as journalistic ethics), the notion that she somehow owed it to him to give “Reds” a favorable review is not tenable. Also, I watched half of “Reds” the other night, and boy does it not hold up…
@ The Siren: Ultimately I think it comes down to door number three.
Glenn: I haven’t read the book, but many of your criticisms here seem right on the money. I do take issue with this one, though:
“It’s distressing to have to make a case for his importance because no one under forty (maybe fifty?) knows who he is.”
This is complete bullshit, at least in my experience.
Again, I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how Biskind’s statement falls within that context. But within the context of the passages you’ve cited here, I’d say that your “complete bullshit” objection takes Biskind too literally.
It seems to me his point is that the legend of Welles, whose successes came earlier, lives on, while Beatty is out of the conversation (as you said, he wasn’t even being discussed on blogs until the book came out). Does Biskind draw the line properly at under 40? No way. I’m not quite 33, which means that I know that even casual movie fans my age know who Beatty is because of Dick Tracy and his relationship with Madonna, if nothing else. Of course, that’s not the same thing as knowing about Reds, Shampoo, etc., which is kind of Biskind’s point, but it’s at least recognition. That said, I have a brother who is not quite 20, and I’m sure he has no clue whatsoever who Beatty is. And, as a movie fan, do I feel he needs to know Beatty? No. Not yet, with so much else to learn. And that seems to be Biskind’s point, too.
Of course, Biskind’s stance is all dependent upon the premise that Beatty and Welles should be considered in the same regard. I disagree with that, but from Biskind’s point of view I think the “no one knows who he is” line has quite a bit of validity in spirit, if not technically accurate. (And I don’t think he really means “no one” when he says “no one.”)
Just saying.
Suzanne Finstad’s Beatty bio is excellent for showing how complicated and exasperating he is. She strikes a good balance between his personal life and his work and explains how he is the result of having strong women in his life, especially Shirley and their mother and maternal grandmother. He emerges as likable because he takes films seriously and has always tried to do good work.
A highlight of the Altman oral bio is Mrs. Altman’s claim that Beatty shouted at and cursed her at the McCabe première and his response that he’s a good boy who would never do that to a lady. In context, it’s hilarious.
“jaw-dropping revelations”
Very funny.
Oh, Jane…
Curious what you’ve found not holding up, specifically, in “Reds.” Nicholson’s quiet performance is wonderful. And I was actually thinking the other day about the documentary device: what inspired Beatty to do it (what notable examples of it preceded “Reds”); how, among others, Clooney used the idea in “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind;” and how most biopics today could stand an invigorating idea like that.
The fascination with Beatty has always slightly puzzled me. I have nothing particular against the guy – I’ve liked him in some things, found him bland in others, but he is, or was, clearly ambitious, and so on. But if he hadn’t removed himself from the business, would anybody care quite this much? Beatty seems to have developed this mystique, based largely on the fact that he’s taken himself out of the game. If Robert Redford had done the same, would he have the same aura? Redford has, to some degree, stuck with it, with diminishing returns, but people don’t hate his old movies because of that (unless they already hated them). Beatty’s entire reputation as an artist seems to center on four films: REDS, SHAMPOO, MCCABE & MRS. MILLER and BONNIE AND CLYDE. That’s not a hell of a lot, is it (and frankly I prefer DICK TRACY to at least two of those, but that’s beside the point)? And if he’d stuck with it in the same way Redford has, would he still be Warren-Frickin’-Beatty*, or would he just be Robert Redford?
*If he’d done KILL BILL, the odds would be better.
@ Chris O: On reflection, my tossed-off remark about “Reds” not holding up was part piqué. There are a number of really quite spectacular things about it, and as a whole it’s probably a very good (but not great) movie. You’re right, the use of the so-called “witnesses” IS invigorating, and all Beatty’s idea, and Nicholson is fabulous in it, his quiet performance all the more impressive for coming right after his more, shall we say, expansive work in “The Shining.” But I find Keaton’s performance irritating, ticcy, and Beatty never convinces me of Reed’s fervor. So I’m mixed. But it’s hardly a movie to be dismissed. “Heaven Can Wait” is another story.…
Glenn, we seem very simpatico on Reds, which I re-watched after a space of more than 20 years for the Shadows series. I think it’s a beautiful and very well-constructed movie but Keaton’s performance in the first half is, and boy do I hate to use this word, but I must–shrill. But then she seems to gain her footing later, as Bryant gains in confidence and empathy. Beatty and Keaton are both transformed after the Revolution; their performances start to click. I do think Stapleton as Emma Goldman is the conscience of the movie and she’s great too, as good or better than Nicholson.
BULWORTH, anyone? I thought it was a good, ballsy work, although I haven’t seen it since ’98/‘99ish.
I guess HEAVEN CAN WAIT is irrefutably minor, but has some terrific art direction. SHAMPOO has aged better.
@Jaime -
“BULWORTH, anyone? I thought it was a good, ballsy work, although I haven’t seen it since ’98/‘99ish.”
At the time of its release, I would have agreed with you, but more and more the ballsiness seems particularly forced, and the ending is absurd, a by-the-numbers black comedy write-off.
Though I should admit I haven’t seen it in a long time.
I understand why some wouldn’t like Keaton in that first half, Siren. But when she does “gain her footing”, as you say, man does she knock it out of the park. The look in her eyes may be partially due to the exhaustion of dealing with Beatty’s perfectionism, but they speak volumes. And when she does speak, as in that confrontation with Nicholson, she’s no longer shrill but wounded and lacerating.
I also think Beatty should get credit for underplaying (and I mean this from a directing sense) the climactic train station scene. It could have been completely over the top, but he just lets it happen; just a couple lines of dialogue, a few notes on the piano, and it’s one for the ages. It’s also something Minghella appeared to be paying homage to near the end of Cold Mountain (though no one else seems to have noticed).
Bulworth and Dick Tracy are both great in their own way, even if the latter wasn’t really what people wanted from a comic book movie. Bottom line is that with just a handful of films he proved to be a pretty versatile director.
Biskind is slime. Sorry, but it’s true. What I mainly recaLl from EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS is the relish with which Biskind tosses in personal gossip, such as De Niro getting angry in some restaurant. Now that is revealing. I’d feel icky and sick too if I woke up to be Peter Biskind.
Richard Sylbert was a real mensch though, and whenever I chatted with him, he was full of vigor and enthusiasm without a judgemental bone in his body. He loved telling stories about his time in the trenches.
@Bill – What I remember as effective about BULWORTH was, in fact, its strain. I found it a deeply uncomfortable movie, in a way that was constructive as a movie experience. (Constructive, politically, to what extent, that’s another debate.) The discomfort level seemed to go beyond the normal goalposts of movie satire, beyond what Beatty may have planned for. Gave the movie an “everyone’s in over his head” atmosphere that I found exciting, all the more because you didn’t see that stuff every day. You still don’t.
In deciding what to say about this thread, I kept thinking, “Beatty was good in…” and then I would realize I was talking about another actor. ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (a fantastic film that nearly singlehandedly validates the myth of the American cinema’s ’70s peak) occurred to me even after I realized it was Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Am I weird?
Anyway, someone brought up Clooney. I like him a lot as a star, and some colleagues think he’s the best thing we’ve got at the moment. He’s better than Beatty as a director – I feel confident putting my name on that. LEATHERHEADS is a really good, controlled work, a nostalgia piece that doesn’t rest on its concept. (And he gave Peter Gerety an absolutely plum walk-on/steal-movie/walk-off role.)
Jaime, I can see your points about BULWORTH, and they’re good ones. I really should see it again, but it doesn’t seem to really linger with me.
Not to take this too far off topic, but because you brought up LEATHERHEADS: Is it just me, or does that last play, in the last game, make no sense at all?
Zach remarks: “Biskind is a creep, a gossip, and a crappy writer, but the self-loathing is what really makes his schtick so miserable.” Much of that, if not the not-as-apparent self-loathing, is what made Easy Riders such a great read, even if its revelations are mostly of the on-the-QT-&-very-huish-hush variety. Even there, I have a…different appreciation for people like Margot Kidder and other underappreciated figures of the period Who Were There.
I also generally second Siren’s appreciation of the writer/actor/director, if mostly on the basis of Reds and the woefully underrated Bulworth. Reds’ occasional set-ups/payoffs – the hat for the guy on train, bumping his head on the chandelier, “nobody re-writes what I write,” etc. – are as clumsy as Borscht Belt comedy, but the performances are largely grand, inclusive of Nicholson, Stapleton, great unfussy performances by Gene Hackman, Paul Sorvino, &c., as well as those documentary interviews. And maybe I’m too seduced by him, too, but I do consider Beatty to be an interesting Method actor, albeit not a towering one.
As for Mr. Henry, not for nothin’ but what has he done for us lately? I generally bailed on him after The Big Show – husker du? And that was after the not-even remotely erudite, refined, or witty First Family. I don’t believe I’ll be seeing many defenses of that here, will I? Gilda, from beyond the grave, pleads “Say ‘No!’ ”.…
The thing that really caught my eye here is this: “Upon putting down Star I felt a serious compulsion not only to never look at a Warren Beatty picture again, but to never lay eyes on the guys face for as long as I live.” You detail your issues with Biskind’s work ably enough, but don’t seem to address what it was that makes you off your feed where le Warren is concerned – apart from pretty peeps, ugly deeds, which may well be enough. But I feel like you have some other issues with Beatty and his work not completely addressed in your dressing down of Star. Discuss.
Mr. Kenny, did you just slip in a reference to Stanley P. Gershbein of the [your Brooklyn neighborhood here] Courier?
All this time thought I was alone in my secret shameful masochistic obsession with his ‘It’s Only My Opinion’ column.
What’s probably more telling, I think, is what Beatty hasn’t done: what he’s turned down and what he hasn’t yet made. His Howard Hughes script is like Kubrick’s “Napoleon,” the elusive passion project that’ll be talked about years after Beatty’s gone, presuming it never happens. (And anyone remember the rumor he participated in a script reading of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” nearly a decade ago?)
@Glenn & Siren: Ticcy and shrill describes most of Keaton’s performances, but I concur re: Reds somewhat.
@christian: Wanna hear uplifting De Niro gossip? Apparently, he secretly paid for John Cazale’s bond to get him on “The Deer Hunter” after the latter had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
A lot of people went to the mat for Cazale. That’s a very touching bit of film history.
The Parallax View. Let’s not forget that one.
Splendor In The Grass. Let’s not forget that one.
All Fall Down. Let’s not forget that one.
Bugsy. Let’s not forget that one.
Mickey One. Let’s…you get the idea.
Beatty’s resume isn’t as thin as is imagined by Biskind.
And I’ll second Glenn’s point on Heaven Can Wait, but I’ll argue that Beatty’s finest performance on film is in Ishtar. Really.
One can only assume the allusion to the writer/“hell-raising” musician is Nick Tosches/Jerry Lee Lewis. “Hellfire”-“Hell-raising”…this is like gossip blind items for the nerd set.
I really liked ISHTAR! In my rock & roll fantasy, Jerry Lewis and Elaine May are still making pictures, while Rob Cohen and … a lot of other directors have retired.
BUGSY was one of my all-time favorite films when I was fourteen years old. Recently gave it another shot, it’s okay – handsome to say the least – but Levinson is all over the place visually and tonally, and that final scene between Bugsy and Virginia Hill seems like the perfect illustration of “apocryphal bullshit.” Sure, most of the film qualifies, but that scene was just…raw b.s. And it doesn’t seem earned, either, emotionally or in story terms. (She peaced him! Gave him the air! No tearful g’byes! Come on!! Oh, studio mandates…)
@Bill – shamefully, I don’t remember the play that closed LEATHERHEADS. A little help? Mind you, I may never fully understand football. The closest I’ve gotten: Peter Berg’s excellent pilot for FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.
@James – Excellent comment, and I agree on Easy Riders. And you articulated the request for more on Beatty from Glenn much more precisely than I did. I hope to hear more from our host.
@TLRHB – thanks for bringing up those films. I don’t think Beatty’s resume is thin, either. I wish it had more films on it, but that is not the same thing, and hell, I could say that about most of the people I write about. Except maybe Crawford and Davis who went the other way and made a few films too many at the end. I will also add Lilith.
And since I just wrote up Reds on my own site and am feeling the fervor, let me ask (she said, sticking her chin way out) just what is so wrong with a good comedy like Heaven Can Wait? In my book it’s that rare remake that improves on the original. Grodin and Cannon are funnier than Johnson and Emery, for one thing, and though I love Claude Rains, James Mason is the one actor in the world who can match him for angelic vocal beauty. And I think Beatty is hilarious; I like him in the boardroom when he’s using football metaphors to talk to the directors.
@Siren – I’ll grant that HCW probably inspired Eddie Izzard’s character, “James the God Mason,” and that’s all right with me.
Robert Montgomery – what was that story? Quasi-retirement by choice? Bad blood from the HUAC years? Went out of fashion?
Frequent lurker, infrequent poster here who really hates Heaven Can Wait, and is thrilled by the opportunity to explain why.
First off, the one nice thing I’ll say:
Grodin and Cannon are hilarious, and their performances are the only things I really like about the movie.
What I hate:
1.The way it looks – that tissue over the lens look that makes the whole movie appear slightly hungover, to no apparent effect aside from annoying me.
2. The music – the worst kind of cutie-pie, pushy, look-at-me score courtesy of Dave “Smooooth” Grusin.
3. Warren Beatty as a professional football play. Really? Really? Really?
4. The story. Never much cared for Here Comes Mr. Jordon in the first place. Making it more mannered and smug and visually graceless didn’t count as an improvement.
5. Warren Beatty’s jittery performance, centered around principles of comedy no one besides him has ever gotten.
6. I know it’s shallow of me, but: Julie Christie’s haircut.
7. Elaine May’s scripts are always doomed to seem viciously snide on screen and unless she directs them herself, since she’s the only one who gets her own off-kilter tone.
8. I usually like Jack Warden, but he’s too loud here, too allowed to play into everyone’s preconceptions of what a charming “old-fashioned” romantic comedy and its denizens of eccentric characters should play like.
9. I usually love James Mason, and that’s part of the problem – whenever he’s off screen, I’m left to wonder “why?”
I thought “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” stunk. It may have been Charles Taylor who summed up Biskind’s thesis best – the wide-eyed wonderment with which he asked, “How did all these assholes make such great movies?”
Jaime, Montgomery stepped off the merry-go-round to join the Navy just as Here Comes Mr. Jordan was reviving his somewhat stagnant career. He came back after three years to make his best film, They Were Expendable, but at that point he was aging as a leading man and he got more interested in directing, anyway; also did some stage work and TV. I don’t think HUAC had much to do with anything. People testified either from conviction or to keep their careers, not to torpedo them.
Paul, it has been too long since my last viewing of Heaven Can Wait to answer you point for point, but I liked the script and Beatty’s comic timing and Warden, and I thought the look of the movie was supposed to echo the fairy-tale quality of the story, not a hangover.
I completely and totally grant your point on the music, however, and Christie’s perm is so bad I often wonder if it was some sort of revenge from someone.
…the look of the movie was supposed to echo the fairy-tale quality of the story…
Yeah, I got that idea, but in practice I just kept waiting for Lucille Ball to show up.
I polled about a dozen people in their early twenties today, and I’m sad to report that none of them knew who Warren Beatty was. Nor Robert Redford.
As a man in his late twenties who knows who knows who both are, on behalf of my entire generation, I sincerely apologize.
… None of them knew who Robespierre was, either. Sigh.
When I care, which is seldom, what I can’t forgive Beatty for is that he allegedly passed up the chance to play Richard Nixon not once but twice – first for Oliver Stone, then for Opie. It’s the part he was born for, and the great joke is that JFK is said to have wanted him to play the young Jack in PT-109 too. Ah, the 20th century.
On the flip side, I just rewatched Bonnie & Clyde for the hell of it a few days back, and it’s pretty good.
@Paul – “Yeah, I got that idea, but in practice I just kept waiting for Lucille Ball to show up.”
OMG, a “Mame” joke. I love you even if you are dissing HCW.
Beatty has paid his cinema dues with his integrity and MICKEY ONE; BONNIE & CLYDE; SHAMPOO; MCCABE & MRS MILLER; THE PARALLAX VIEW (amazing film);HEAVEN CAN WAIT; REDS, ISHTAR (yep); BULWORTH; parts of TOWN AND COUNTRY (Beatty and Heston together!) and for achieving a comic book look for DICK TRACY. I’m not sure what else he owes. I think his suggesting Carradine replace him in KILL BILL was brilliant. Though I like the gambling scene that would have introduced the Beatty version. But Beatty with a samurai sword? I do wish he would have stuck to WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT? He was also fucking hilarious in his brief cameo on THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW.
And that was a great story about De Niro and Cazale.
And while we’re at it, I guess we shouldn’t forget his role as Madonna’s boyfriend in TRUTH OR DARE.
I think Rosenbaum has Heaven Can Wait just right: “A charming but not very profound comedy … It’s certainly likable enough and was a big hit when it came out, but one could hardly call it an auspicious artistic debut—a crafty commercial entertainment with a certain amount of intelligence is more like it.” Actually, I love Heaven Can Wait – my kind of schmaltz – but I’d grant that it’s not a great movie.
@Asher–With due (meaning great) respect to Rosenbaum, I don’t have to have profound in my comedies. I’m delighted if it shows up, but just getting pleasure is okay too.
“How many defining motion pictures does a filmmaker have to make to be considered great?”
ONE!
Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter”
@ James, Siren, et.al., please excuse my hyperbole. In my more settled moments I freely admit to enjoying Beatty as an actor in pictures such as “Splendor in the Grass,” “All Fall Down,” McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” and more—even Richard Brooks’ “$!” I think “Shampoo” is a masterpiece, “Bulworth” very good and ballsy and unusual, “Bugsy” ditto. “Bonnie and Clyde” is an excellent and significant film that I don’t get a lot of pleasure out of revisiting.“Dick Tracy” shoulda been directed by Alain Resnais. And again, I just have no feeling for “Heaven Can Wait” at all. Hope this clears things up…
I share the love for Parallax, an indelible slice of distinctively 70’s-American, post-Watergate – really, post-Dealey Plaza – dread. Neither Beatty nor AJP ever did better work and it gains the weight of tragedy over the years as you keep hoping with every viewing that Frady will out-manueuver the Illiuminati. Fat chance. Great cameos from so many, but most especially the forever-underappreciated Anthony Zerbe and more-than-forever-underappreciated Paula Prentiss who sets Joe on his path (if & when I start my own blog, I will have a “Neglected Actresses” feature and PP is defnitely gonna be among the first three.).
Surprised to see Parallax missing from your litany above, Mr. K. I have no feeling for Heaven, neither – possibly the finest performance in the film was realized off-screen by Ms. Christie’s hairdresser. Maybe Marguerite Duras should’ve directed it (Robbe-Grillet, maybe?)…
Beatty’s filmography is incredibly thick. Putting his appearance on TV’s “The Man Loves of Dobie Gillis” aside (and Tuesday Weld has been adamantabout him NEVER getting to even first base with her, much less home plate) his career begins at the top in 1961 with “Splendor in the Grass” in whcih he STARS. A mere six years later he not only stars but produces “Bonnie and Clyde” – the seminal film of the 60’s. Any comparasions? Nope.
This was in the cards early on. My favorite Betty story concerns an argument he had with Robert Rossen over a line in “Lilith.” He was suppsoed to say “I’ve read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.” Warren wanted to say “I’ve read Crime and Punishment and HALF of The Brothers Karamazov.”
Nohting Biskind says about Warren and His Mighty Penis beats what Warren said himself in “Shampoo.” His politics is likewise there for the world to see in his two best films “Reds” and “Bulworth.”
At his worst he goes sappy. “Heaven Can Wait” isn’t much and “Love Affair” just sits there.
“Dick Tracy” is worth another look however. “What Can You Lose?” is one of my very favortie Sondheim songs.
“I just kept waiting for Lucille Ball to show up”
Maybe that explains Julie Christie’s perm? It was a homage.
Try watching Reds and Dick Tracy back to back. It’s like dropping acid.
“Try watching Reds and Dick Tracy back to back. It’s like dropping acid.”
Same with Lilith and Mickey One.
Not mentioned above, Kaleidoscope is lots of fun as a minor caper/swinging London venture.
I fall in the middle on Beatty, but he certainly is a fascinating and important figure in Hollywood, and I would love to read a good biography, or critical study, of him. I just think Biskind is incapable of either, if “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down & Dirty Pictures” are any indication. However genuine his love of 70’s movies may be, the former was undercut by his gleeful tone of “hey man, wasn’t it great how all those guys drank and smoke too much and fucked everything that moved?”, while the latter, while scoring points against its two main targets – Redford and Weinstein – decided to take arbitrary potshots at everyone else (remind me what Billy Bob Thornton did to deserve Biskind’s treatment of him?).
SHAMPOO is one of the great American films. So, yeah, I’d say it only takes one.
I’d like to revisit BULWORTH, which I, too, found ballsy and funny at the time, even though I wasn’t thrilled by the “Oh crap, I hired at hitman but changed my mind” plot that seemed to pop up a lot around that time.
I wish he had made more films, but hey, he had things to see and people to do.
Lurker here: Beatty’s contributions to (American) cinema are grand and important, if few. After having been typecast and hired as a pretty boy actor mostly, he decided to take fate into his own hands and venture out into producing, writing and directing. He always stayed true to himself and to his principles, did all the research and footwork for some his best work (Shampoo, Reds, Bulworth) himself.
A consumate perfectionist, hard on himself and even harder on others, but not to be nasty: simply in pursuit of excellence. Yes, it’s debatable and depending on perspective whether or not he achieved excellence in the end. Doesn’t matter. He deserves the respect his peers are not stingy in giving him (Irving Thalberg award, AFI Lifetime Achievement and later this year yet another big award, to name but a few).
Oh, about HCW: Beatty and professional football? Certainly. “Mad Dog Beaty” was such a talented football player that he was offered 10 scholarships. But, like many potentially great roles, he turned them all down.
’ ”Mad Dog Beaty” was such a talented football player that he was offered 10 scholarships.’
Really? Really? Really? ohokayillshutupnow.
Biskind’s EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS is a wonderful read, but doesn’t hold a candle to Mark Harris’ PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION, which just might have been the last decade’s best 1960s book (even slightly better than Rick Perlstein’s utterly brilliant NIXONLAND).
‘Easy Riders’ was certainly fun to read, but Biskind blew it at the end by suggesting that Star Wars was responsible for the death of 70s cinema, instead of the acclaimed auteurs of that decade bringing it down themselves by making crap. I used to really enjoy Biskind’s pieces in Première but his books have left me cold, particularly Down and Dirty Pictures which I found incredibly boring.