Elmore Leonard (1925-2013)

We here at the Monkey sadly note the passing of a great American author, Elmore Leonard. If you haven't read his novels (and you should have), you've probably at least heard of some of the movies based on them: 3:10 to Yuma, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown (based on Rum Punch), and television's Justified, among others.

Born in New Orleans, Leonard grew up in Detroit, and after serving in the Navy during World War II, graduated from the University in Detroit where he majored in English and philosophy. He sold his first short story, "Trail of the Apaches," in 1951 and spent the rest of the decade specializing in Westerns, including The Tall T and 3:10 To Yuma, both of which were made into movies, the former starring Randolph Scott, the latter, Glenn Ford and Van Heflin (remade in 2007 with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe).

Eventually, he switched to gritty crime dramas that featured witty dialogue and the sorts of miscreants one is more apt to meet in real life than in the usual fiction, which is say habitual criminals only half as smart as they think they are.

Nineteen of his novels or short stories were adapted into movies, and another seven as television series.

Leonard's best tip for aspiring writers: "Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."

Leonard died this morning after suffering a stroke late last month.

ClassicFlix Gig (Beta Testing)

ClassicFlix.com, the Monkey's other gig, is in Beta testing. Click here for a link to my latest post, about D.W. Griffith (you can also click here to read a post about Georges Méliès, among others, adapted from a post that appeared here at the Monkey a couple of years ago.)

Happy Birthday, Brudder

The Monkey's older brother is celebrating a birthday today. That's him on the left. Good times.

In his honor, here's a video his children made for Kraft. Dave worked on such movies as We Are Marshall and Zombieland and the television show The Walking Dead, and now runs his own production company making commercial ads in Atlanta. Stephanie is better known as Plain Chicken and writes for the Birmingham News.

Kraft Recipe Makers from Plain Chicken on Vimeo.

Happy Birthday, Julie Newmar

It's Julie Newmar's birthday. We won't mention her age except to say it's one of those milestone birthdays that ends in a zero. We don't care. We here at the Monkey dig Julie Newmar.

Cecil B. DeMille's Birthday: If He Were Alive Today, He'd Be Very, Very Old

I've written at length about director/producer Cecil B. DeMille (here, for example), one of the best and most influential of the silent era directors.

If you know him only from his bloated Bible epics of the 1950s, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about. But the fact is, beginning in 1918 with Old Wives For New, DeMille reeled off a series of "nervously brilliant, intimate melodramas" and "sly marital comedies" (Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams) centering on the notion that grown ups engage in sexual relations and are glad that they do.

Ah, sophisticated sex comedies—God bless 'em. Here are three by DeMille to bring you up to speed:

Old Wives for New (1918)—In the first of his sex comedies, DeMille dispense with karma and moral judgment, and puts the fun back into sex, sin and every kind of bad behavior. People drink, lie, carouse and generally defy social mores, and not only suffer no consequences, they prosper. Murder goes unpunished, adultery is rewarded and divorce is presented as a sane and sophisticated solution to an unhappy marriage. Starring Elliott Dexter, Florence Vidor and Theodore Roberts.

Male and Female (1919)—DeMille added a young Gloria Swanson to the mix and both of their careers really took off. Basically, the cast of Downton Abbey gets shipwrecked on a desert island, with Swanson as a upper crust nitwit and Thomas Meighan as her butler. Of course, only the servants possess any useful survival skills. Upstairs is down, downstairs is up, in this sophisticated satire of the British class system. Also featuring Theodore Roberts and Bebe Daniels.

The Affairs of Anatol (1921)—Maybe the most famous of DeMille's comedies. Here, a bored husband (All-American heartthrob Wallace Reid) looks to spice up his love life with a series of what turn out to be disastrous affairs. By the time he returns to his senses, his wife (Swanson again) has embarked on an affair of her own. With Bebe Daniels (as Satan Synne!), Elliott Dexter and Theodore Roberts.

Have fun!

Ramon Novarro In A Nutshell

A few facts about silent film star Ramon Novarro:

● He was born José Ramón Gil Samaniego in Durango, Mexico, in 1899. At age fourteen, he moved with his family to Los Angeles to escape the Mexican Revolution.

● Novarro made his acting debut with an uncredited part as a starving peasant in Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 costume epic, Joan the Woman.

● After ten more small, usually uncredited bit roles between 1917 and 1921, Novarro scored his breakout role as Rupert of Hentzau in the 1922 version of The Prisoner of Zenda.

● Novarro's biggest role was the title character in Fred Niblo's silent classic, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Among his silent works, I can also highly recommend Scaramouche and Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg.

● As was the case with many actors of the time, his career suffered with the advent of the talkies. He made his talkie debut in 1929, and of these early efforts, I'd point you to 1931's Mati Hari in which he co-starred with an especially luminous Greta Garbo. MGM dropped his contract in 1935.

● Novarro was a devout Roman Catholic; he was also gay, and was tormented by the conflict between his sexuality and his religious beliefs. Nevertheless, he refused to enter into a sham marriage to satisfy the gossip columnists or his boss, Louis B. Mayer.

● Of his later movies, I am a big fan of his work in the 1949 comic noir The Big Steal, starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. There he is a Mexican police inspector who plays cat-and-mouse with a thief and his pursuers. He also appeared in an episode of The Wild Wild West, a childhood favorite of mine.

● Novarro was brutally murdered in his home in 1968 by two male prostitutes who mistakenly believed Novarro had a large cache of money hidden in his home. They eventually made off with $20, were captured, convicted and served less than ten years each for their crimes.

● And while we're here, how about a few more photos of Ramon Novarro:

with Ernst Lubitsch:

with Joan Crawford:

with Norma Shearer:

More Support For Radical Causes

You probably saw it already, but the decision to put Jane Austen on the ten pound note in England has inspired a vicious backlash that has included tweeted rape threats aimed at those women who campaigned for the decision.

Good grief.

As former residents of the United Kingdom and long-time fans of Jane Austen, we here at the Monkey heartily endorse putting her picture on whatever the British feel like putting it on.

I'd tell you to now tweet your worst, but I don't know how to read Twitter. If you want to threaten me, you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, with a handwritten note mailed to me in care of my publisher. (Actually, I don't have a publisher—send it to the local police station instead.)

Have at it.

P.S. As suggested by bellotoot's comment:

The Great Silent Recasting Blogathon, November 1-4, 2013

I've missed a lot of blogathons recently, for which I humbly apologize, but here's one I simply can't miss.

Carole & Co., the great site devoted to all things Carole Lombard, is hosting The Great Silent Recasting Blogathon on November 1st through the 4th. The rules are simple enough (in fact, they are a variation on the Great Recasting Blogathon from last summer):

[S]elect a film from 1965 onward ... then re-imagine it with silent-era actors and a director, as well as a studio and year of release. ... If an actor or actress appeared in a silent, even in bit parts, he or she is eligible as long as the fictional fllm is made at a time when he or she was actually working.

Count me in! In fact, in honor of Carole & Co., here's one starring Carole Lombard (who did indeed get her start during the silent era), Buster Keaton's never-happened follow-up to The General. It's a part she was born to play, I think.

As always, click on the picture to see full-sized.

The Three Musketeers (1921): Douglas Fairbanks And His Mighty Sword

The Monkey has spent most of the summer reading the collected works of Alexandre Dumas—or, more accurately, The Three Musketeers which is long enough to feel like the collected works of Alexandre Dumas. It's a sprawling epic, crammed to the gills with plots and subplots enough for a dozen novels.

Even if you haven't read it, you probably have some sense of the story: a young Frenchman named d'Artagnan pals around with three of the king's elite guardsmen—the musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis—wielding swords, battling bad guys, and getting into all sorts of scrapes. It's two tons of fun, with memorable heroes and villains, lots of action and pretty girls, and very little angst to slow you down.

No wonder movie makers have been so fascinated with it.

The first film version of the novel (a short fencing scene) appeared in 1898 and people have been retelling the story ever since. At 700+ pages, there's enough here to make any kind of movie you want—a historical romance, a swashbuckler, a buddy comedy, a political thriller, even a sex farce—and there are versions in French, English, Russian, Latvian and Dutch, feature-length versions, musical versions, television versions, and even one version starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy—and that's just in the last ten years!

As a silent film fan, I'm most interested in the one starring the legendary Douglas Fairbanks. Released in 1921, this version of The Three Musketeers opts to emphasize the palace intrigue, specifically focusing on an episode from the first half of the book where Cardinal Richelieu—the real power behind Louis XIII of France—hopes to catch the queen in an affair with England's Duke of Buckingham, thus discrediting her and removing her as a counterweight to his influence on the king.

Riding to the rescue are d'Artagnan and the three musketeers.

Fairbanks had already established the conventions of the movie action hero with The Mark of Zorro in 1920, and after one last foray (The Nut, 1921) into the kind of modern comedy that had previously defined his career, Fairbanks spent the rest of the silent era making the lavish historical action-adventures he's now known for, beginning with The Three Musketeers.

It wouldn't take Fairbanks long to perfect the formula—The Thief of Bagdad, The Black Pirate and The Iron Mask are among the era's best films—but here, he was still figuring out the proper balance between swashbuckling and plot, in this case erring on the side of the latter. The long set-up introducing all the scheming court figures will serve only to tax the patience of some viewers without making what follows any clearer. The movie also tries to squeeze in as many incidents from the book as possible without necessarily investing any emotion in them or tying them together, dissipating the narrative momentum and proving once again that it's possible for a book adaptation to be too faithful.

At those moments, though, when it turns its attentions to d'Artagnan, the film takes off. A young rube from the country, he initially alienates Athos, Porthos and Aramis, but quickly wins them over with his bravery, ingenuity and superior swordsmanship. He falls in love with his landlord's niece who, as it turns out, is moonlighting as the queen's go-between to Buckingham, thus drawing d'Artagnan—and the three musketeers—into the royal intrigue.

When the time comes to act, all the bad guys in Paris can't stop him from succeeding.

Fairbanks, as usual, was in fine fettle. At thirty-eight, he was too old to play the twenty-one year old d'Artagnan, but once the swordplay begins, you don't care. With grace and gusto, he fends off a dozen men, scales walls, leaps through windows, and saves enough energy to woo the girl and outsmart the Cardinal. And his one-handed handspring to stab a man and save his friends ranks with his best stunts and is worthy of a man half his age.

Admittedly, he was not a subtle actor, but then he rarely played subtle characters, and d'Artagnan is no exception. While modern audiences may find Fairbanks's style amusingly outdated, the d'Artagnan he plays is an impetuous, inexperienced youth, untrained in the manners of an urban gentleman, unable to harness his raw emotions, and always looking in his youthful insecurity to pick a fight with anyone he thinks has looked at him wrong. A more subdued, modern style would only wind up highlighting the silliness of the storyline without adding to the fun.

As for the other actors, Adolphe Menjou is well-cast as the ineffectual Louis, and Nigel de Brulier is so good as Richelieu that he played him three more times, in 1929, 1935 and 1939. A long list of nobody-much plays the various female roles, including Mary MacLaren as Anne of Austria, Marguerite De La Motte as Constance Bonacieux and Barbara La Marr as Milady de Winter. The three musketeers wind up being minor characters in a film bearing their name, with Leon Barry playing Athos, George Siegmann as Porthos, and Eugene Pallette (yeah, the frog-voiced tub who played the father in My Man Godfrey and Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood) as Aramis.

Director Fred Niblo (best known for the 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur) and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (All Quiet on the Western Front and Casablanca) made a good team, allowing us to easily follow the swordplay as well as using visuals rather than intertitles to reveal the character of Richelieu—showing, for example, his lurking shadow in the background as the king unwittingly sets the trap designed to ensnare the queen. (Richelieu sometimes also strokes a cat while devising his plans, decades before Ernst Blofeld, Don Corleone and Dr. Evil made it the signature move of the truly wicked.)

Edward M. Langley designed the sets; and Paul Burns and Edward Knoblock were responsible for the costumes.

The film was released in August 1921 to good reviews and a solid box office. Its $1.5 million gross placed it among the top earning films of the year, finishing behind only Rudolph Valentino's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Charlie Chaplin's The Kid.

Overall, this is not top shelf Fairbanks, but it's pretty good, and once you've seen The Mark of Zorro, The Thief of Bagdad and The Black Pirate, I can recommend this one as a worthwhile follow-up.

P.S. Fairbanks returned to the character of d'Artagnan in 1929 with his last silent film, The Iron Mask. Based on a pair of sequels to The Three Musketeers penned by Dumas himself, the second go-around is even better than the first and it proved to be the perfect cap to Fairbanks's swashbuckling career. You don't have to see The Three Musketeers before you see The Iron Mask, but doing so will add to the fun—and poignancy—of the latter.

Book Review: My Lunches With Orson—Highly Recommended

Upon reflection, the next time someone launches another of those internet memes asking who from Hollywood history, living or dead, you'd like to have lunch with, I'm going to answer "Orson Welles." Because if there are two things Orson Welles did better than anyone, aside from making such classic films as Citizen Kane and The Lady From Shanghai, it was (1) eating and (2) talking. I imagine the food would be good, the conversation (on Welles's end, at least) even better, and if in the process, you gained a little insight into one of film history's most mercurial figures, well then the hefty bill at the end would be well worth paying.

Back in the early-1980s, director Henry Jaglom sat down to just such a series of lunches, recorded them, then after letting the tapes gather dust in a shoe box for three decades, allowed Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, to transcribe and edit them for public consumption.

The resulting book, My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, available from Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, is just as lively and insightful as, and a great deal funnier than, any lunch I ever imagined having with Welles—or any other celebrity for that matter.

The relationship between Jaglom and Welles was one between friends and equals—Jaglom had somehow persuaded Welles to star in his directorial effort, then became Welles's trusted go-between with the various moneyed interests who dangled promises of funding for the aging director's film projects—and for years they lunched weekly at Ma Maison, Wolfgang Puck's hideaway restaurant in West Hollywood. The recordings were Welles's idea, inspired by similar conversations Jaglom had taped with his own father, and with no plans for their future use, and thus no sense of history's judgment hanging over his head, Welles is as close to unguarded as he ever was.

Neither adversarial, as between a journalist and his quarry, or worshipful, as between an acolyte and his idol, the conversations are freewheeling and completely unvarnished. Political correctness ("Sardinians have stubby little fingers") is set aside, civility ("I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, 'Go f#ck yourself.'") is forgotten, and good taste ("Buchwald drove it up Ronnie's ass and broke it off") isn't even honored in the breach.

Jaglom was the perfect lunch companion for Welles. Welles was a raconteur, a provocateur, a poseur and sometimes an out-and-out liar, and it would have necessarily taken a man with a quick mind, opinions of his own, unafraid to say, "Orson, that's ridiculous," when he was indeed being ridiculous (which was often), and able to draw out the great man on a broad range of topics, to serve as the host of these repasts at Ma Maison.

The lunches are delicious, lively and hilarious, what I would imagine the Algonquin roundtable was like, with Welles simultaneously playing the parts of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George Kaufmann, tossing out one liners like hand grenades while eating food enough for six. It's wonderful stuff. I wound up neglecting everything—the dog, dinner, this blog—just to read another chapter.

Indeed, if I wrote as quickly as I read, you'd have had this review the day after the book arrived in the mail.

These lunches are also filling, as good lunches should be, featuring lengthy discussions of Irving Thalberg ("Satan"), Erich von Stroheim ("genius"), David O. Selznick ("pious old fart"), Carole Lombard ("very bright"), Rita Hayworth ("magnificent"), Joan Fontaine ("a plain old bad actor"), Laurence Olivier ("very—I mean, seriously—stupid"), Charles Chaplin ("wonderful—but not funny"), and many others.

The greatest insights, though, are into Welles himself, although certainly not the ones he intended. Throughout the book, he and Jaglom are in discussions with the French to finance Dreamers, discussions with the Italians to finance Cradle Will Rock, discussions with Hollywood A-listers to star in The Big Brass Ring, and discussions with everybody to finance King Lear, ultimately with no success on any front. Welles complains frequently about his reputation for being difficult, insisting it's the propaganda of enemies with an axe to grind, and that, really, he was just trying to help those poor slobs sell their terrible wine when he insisted on rewriting their ad copy, and who doesn't hate the tedium of editing film, and yes, he was eating four steaks and seven baked potatoes for dinner at Cannes, but he only sniffed the pork tenderloin.

When over one of these lunches Welles pitches a project to Susan Smith of HBO, it becomes obvious why his career went to hell in a handbasket—he may have been a genius, but he was also ill-tempered, insecure, and surprisingly bashful to boot. One imagined look on her part and a single wrong word and he winds up chasing her out of the restaurant even as she's begging him to do a deal for the cable network.

It's no wonder that when Welles died, he left nineteen unfinished projects, and hadn't completed a feature-length film in twelve years.

The question you always have to ask yourself when reading anything Welles ever said is how much of it is real and how much of it is a put-on (to shock, delight or deflect his questioner). In the end, I'm not sure it matters because to a great degree, the pose was the man. But if anyone ever got close to revealing in a series of conversations the flighty bundle of brilliant insecurities that were apparently dancing around inside Welles's over-sized carcass, it was Jaglom.

At one point, Welles discusses the concert pianist, Arthur Rubenstein, and his description could serve as his own epitaph: "He was the greatest cocksman of the ... twentieth century. The greatest charmer, linguist, socialite, raconteur. ... 'I am too lazy to practice ... I play clinkers all the time [but] I play it better with the clinkers.' [He] walked through life as though it was one big party."

One big party, or a series of very funny lunches.

P.S. Don't know your Orson Welles movies as well as you'd like? Click here for some suggestions from the Monkey.