Book review - "Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story of Their Intimate Friendship" by Charles Cassilio

 Montgomery Clift comes out of this badly - bitchy, self pitying, smart, whining about his loss of beauty, a junkie, a pain. People loved him though. And even people he annoyed worked with him again. Liz Taylor comes out of this wonderfully. Brave, funny, loyal, smart.

Gossipy but done with scholarship. And you know something? The small size of Clift's manhood is not insignificant. 

Each film the two made together were iconic in their way - Place in the Sun, Raintree County, Suddenly Last Summer and (in planning) Reflections in a Golden Eye.  But sorry Clift was a bit of a loser.

Play review - "After the Fall" (1964) by Arthur Miller

 A recording of the 1964 New York production from Elia Kazan, who directed a character based on him played by Ralph Meeker. It's got Jason Robards and Barbara Loden and Faye Dunaway. Fascinating.

Kazan only liked the Marilyn Monroe stuff. He was right. It's the strongest. The informing friend could have worked - needed to connect him with the Marilyn part, made it a love triangle. The first wife - dull, cheated on - is dull. Ditto the third wife - concentration camp and all. it's wife two, Marilyn, that makes this worth watching.

The making of this play would be a great movie/play. 

Movie review - "Let's Make Love" (1960) **

 The dud credit for Marilyn Monroe among her latter movies - this actually had some decent people on it, like Norman Krasna and George Cukor, not to mention marilyn, but it's a vehicle for Yves Montand, who struggles with English.

I don't like this movie. Don't believe Yves Montand as a millionaire, don't enjoy him, or his deception - a Frenchman in America is fish out of water enough. In Norman Krasna's defence he said he wrote the script for someone like Charlton Heston or Gregory Peck. There's no sense of Montand's world - Wilfrid Hyde White and Tony Randall don't feel like they come from it.

It's not a bad idea but there's not much development. No sense of why doing this deception will help make him a better person. Or why he likes Marilyn. Montand doesn't deserve his money.

I remember the awkwardness of scenes like a gag writer attacking Montand. 

It has studio production values, and Marilyn, who clearly doesn't want to be there but it the best thing about it. There's novelty of an off Broadway musical but too much Frankie Vaughan.  

The film is packed with people having an off day - Montand, Monroe, Krasna, Cukor. 

Maybe it would've worked had Montand be surrounded by French and it had been about the French falling in love with America. That would've worked. 

Movie review - "Frankie Vaughan The Heart of a Man" (2008) ***

 Not the feature with that name starring Vaughan but a documentary about the singer-actor. I mostly know him from Let's Make Love where he has a weird grin and creepy vibe; he made a few more films in England, mostly with Anna Neagle, and had.a lot of hits. 

It's a very positive depiction - I assume it's true. Loving husband and family man, gave a lot of money to charity, easy to work with, turned down a chance to shag Marilyn Monroe, tried to stop knife fighting in Scotland. 

Talking heads include Tim Rice, Val Doonican and Vera Lynn. 

Play review - "After the Fall" by Arthur Miller

 Controversial play - thought to be mean about Marilyn Monroe. Maybe it is a little, or too soft on the Miller character, but there is a lot of compassion and the character is terrific - messed up, insecure, confused. Not entirely smoothly shapen by constantly interesting.

Play review - "The Price" by Arthur Miller

 Listened to LATW version with Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving. The play was profiled in William Goldman's The Season. Two brothers sort through their dead father's furniture - one kind of wasted his life being a cop out of security and has an unhappy wife the other became a successful doctor but cracked up. The themes spoke to me - bout wondering whether you made a right choice, decisions missed, lack of money, finding purpose. It doesn't really build like other Miller classics - I think because it doesn't naturally go to someone's death. It was his last hit play - the Jewish audience especially responded to it.

Movie review - "The Misfits" (1961) ***1/2

Legendary assembling of, well, legends - John Huston, Arthur Miller, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift... even Eli Wallach and Thelma Ritter in their own more sensible way. Imagine the talk around that commissary.

Miller writes it like a play - there's entrances and exits - but it is carried off well, long dialogue scenes, much talk about people we don't see. It still works, because Huston has cast such superb actors.

Marilyn is heartbreakingly good - a superb part, she's smart, beaten down by life, warm.  Gable is terrific too as the uncomplicated but melancholic cowboy who has done a lot of living. Clift rounds out the trifecta. Of course Wallach and Ritter are fine.

I didn't realise that Wallach's part was so big - he's a love rival for Monroe. Maybe his part could've been blended with Clift's.

It's moving seeing these people who are about to die soon pal around. It's a hang out movie - like The Sun Also Rises should have been. 

I will admit I felt it went too long. It needed maybe a half hour cut out or something.

Movie review - "My Week with Marilyn" (2011) ***1/2

The Prince and the Showgirl isn't a particularly memorable film but the circumstances of it's production were: the world's greatest sex symbol working with the world's greatest actor, both of whom also had legendary spouses. It wasn't a disaster or even that drama packed (compared to say Raintree County) but the personalities were so strong: Arthur Miller, Vivien Leigh, Terrence Rattigan, Paula Strasberg, etc.

Film buffs in particular will derive a lot of enjoyment from this - references to getting the rewrites from Terry (Rattigan doesn't appear), a cameo from Jack Cardiff complete with his cap, roles to Arthur Jacobs and Milton Greene. The work is sympathetic to Monroe: lots of men warn Eddie Redmayne not to fall for her because she'll destroy him, and that she's not as naive as she appears - but we never see that. Everything we are shown is her being a little lost and insecure, and Laurence Olivier not being very nice for scolding her (presumably through to jealousy). 

 

Surprisingly it was very sympathetic to Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond, believable) - no glimpse of the notorious nutter and cheater here, just a woman afraid of getting old and losing her husband, and being nice to Marilyn. It's also very nice to Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench, excellent) who is shown to be loving and supportive- there's a wonderful actor moment where Marilyn keeps fluffing her lines and she asks Marilyn if she wouldn't mind going over lines to help her.

Not all the female characters are sympathetic - Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker, terrific) is depicted as a bit of a freeloader, continually boosting Marilyn's ego and perhaps not with her best interests at heart. Milton Greene doesn't come across very well.

Colin Clarke is dead now so the filmmakers had a free hand with the characterisation. It's a half success - Eddie Redmayne is at least a different sort of male lead, not a conventional pretty boy; at times I found him irritating, other times winning. The real Clarke seems to have been one of those British upper class types who benefit from family connections: Dad an art historian, family friend of Vivien Leigh, related to people who work at Windsor Castle, he went on to have a not-much career making documentaries for British TV, which is an extension of the private school system anyway.

I got the feeling at times the film had been cut for pacing - scenes such as the opening ones involving Clarke's family feel abrupt, Emily Watson comes and goes, Judi Dench disappears for long slabs. And the low budget hurts at times - the crowd and filming scenes feel like they could have done with more extras. But the acting is strong, the production design a delight and Michelle Williams does excellently in an impossible role. She's not Monroe but who is, and she comes as close as anyone I can remember.

Radio review - Lux - “All My Sons” (1950) ***1/2

Not an adaptation of Arthur Miller's excellent play but an adaptation of the film version of the play which means it's been watered down a bit. Burt Lancaster's character, the surviving son, in particular feels as though he's been cleaned up (NB this may not be true, it's been a while since I read the play, it just feels like that). Nonetheless the piece still retains a fair amount of power, particularly the bit where they read the letter from the dead son at the end. Edward Arnold steps in to Edward G Robinson's role as a very sympathetic "villain", a forerunner to Willy Loman's distraught businessman. The radio version keeps the film change in that we get to meet and listen to Joe Keller's gaoled partner.

Book review - "A Homage to Daniel Shays: Essays 1956-72" by Gore Vidal

Vidal is a good novelist, screenwriter and playwright, but is an essayist of genius. This is a top notch collection of pieces, helped by the fact he wasn't quite as angry in the early years so didn't crap on about FDR forcing us into WW2 or oil juntas as much. 

There are pieces on commercial theatre (he defends Williams but gets stuck into Arthur Miller, which is a little unfair), novels, writing for television (a genre at which he was one of the top stars along with Serling and Chayefsky). He is particularly brilliant on novels, with some great pieces on Norman Mailer and John Dos Passos, novelists as "recorders"rather than people who actually imagine things, the fact Americans prefer their novelists to be doomed (very true). 

Marvellous demolition of literary critics, especially some poor soul called Richard Gilman and a very funny review of a book on himself (he refers to himself as"Subject"). He is a bit wonkier on sex - a funny review of Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) he pokes fun of Doc Ruebens making sweeping unsupported statements (to which he says any decent professor would write in the margins "prove"), then goes on to make some himself (and in the copy of the book from the University of Qld library I have read someone wrote in the margins "prove" - very clever); you can't help thinking at times when he's going "hey we're all bisexual and you can be a man and muck around with another man and still get married" he's trying to increase his own constituency. 

He also starts to froth a bit at the mouth when talking about his idea for an Authority to regulate the environment and dispense birth control - years before Gattaca (in which Vidal had a small role - I'd love to hear his thoughts on that film). But generally this is consistently brilliant -surely the best book reviewer ever?