Hey, Is Tora! Tora! Tora! a Good Movie? Beats Me

Tora! Tora! Tora! is a pain in the ass to type. I’m not one of those eleventy!1111!1!11!1 guys from the internet from ten years ago. I like to think I’m a competent male writer, so exclamation points are rarer than honest congressmen in my text. I have to go looking for the exclamation point, and hunting for it three times in a row makes me peevish. It also makes me peevish to be unable to tell you if, you know, the movie is any good. If I was getting paid, I could write either side of the equation for you. But I’m doing this for free, so all I can rely on is my opinion. I’m not sure I have one.

Let’s go to the trailer, shall we, while I try to make up my mind one more time:

Of course trailers like these were designed to get you to drag your carcass to the theater or drive-in the next time you had five bucks burning a hole in your pocket. You couldn’t tell if a movie from the 1970s was going to be good by relying on the trailer. You had to go see it to figure it out. The TV, VCR, and the internet took all the mystery out of movies. You could just flip the channel or pop in another tape or whatever, or fold your laundry while Freebie and the Bean plays unwatched in the background.

Well, I saw, you know, this movie in the theater when I was a little kid. It used to be on TV a lot. You could rent it ten ways from Sunday after a while. Hell, at this point, you can watch the whole thing, or download it, straight from the Internet Archive.

I watch this movie every once in a while. I have no idea why. I think it’s sorta like the reason people eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It’s no good, but they like it anyway. I have a hunch that the movie isn’t any good, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I wouldn’t swear at it, either, so maybe it’s not that bad. The movie didn’t make any money back in the day, and the critics weren’t kind to it. But here we are, talking about it, and maybe watching it once a year. I’m really not sure why.

The internet will tell you that Richard Fleischer and Akira Kurosawa directed this movie. Akira was hired to do it, but he bugged out before it started. But the internet loves Kurosawa for more or less the same reason it likes Mac and Cheese, so he gets mentioned when the movie gets mentioned at all. At any rate, Fleischer, and some guys with unpronounceable names made of little pictures made the thing back in 1970. Richard Fleischer’s whole career was Mac and Cheese, now that I think of it. He directed plenty of profitable pictures, but you mostly watch them ironically, or not at all. Stuff like Fantastic Voyage or The Vikings. Why do I watch them, too? I don’t know, but I do.

When you get right down to it, Tora… you know, the movie is dry as dust. In a way, it’s duller than a documentary would be. The events plod along and you get the impression that someone had a clipboard with a long list of things that had to be included, and checked them off one by one. It has an enormous cast of That Guys on the American side, and a bunch of Some Japanese Guys playing the villains.

Except they aren’t, really. Its funny, but the Japanese characters are portrayed as either fairly noble or completely clueless. If it wasn’t for Tojo, you wouldn’t find anyone to dislike enough to call a villain. And the Americans are so clueless in their own right, finding heroes is harder than you’d think. But then again, the American soldier’s vibe in World War II was mostly just farmboys and guys from Brooklyn who shrug and spit on their hands and get on with it. Americans are not a traditionally warlike people, I don’t think. We don’t have a bushido class that I’ve seen, anyway, or a Prussian officer class. Even the uniforms are drab.

Maybe the most interesting part of the movie was all the model ships they constructed to film it. Those were great. I’m sure it’s evident without me even mentioning it, but I sniffed a lot of model airplane glue as a kid. It was a big thing back in the 60s and 70s, and we built plastic battleships in between P-51 Mustangs and funny cars. Check out these from the movie:

That’s from the Model Ships in the Cinema website. It’s one of those wonderful websites that used to be common on the intertunnel but is very rare these days. People used to post things on the internet simply for the love of it. The movie spent a lot of time, money, and effort into building an American and a Japanese fleet. And these things aren’t tiny things floating in a glorified bathtub. Some were forty feet long, and were powered by golf cart motors. They were big enough to climb on:

So, you can watch Tor… you know, the movie. I have, and will again. If you can determine if it’s any good at all, I wish you wouldn’t tell me. I’m not sure if I’d like it less if you told me it was terrific, or it stunk, but either way, I’d rather just enjoy it in peace. If enjoyment is the correct word. Beats me.

Elaine May Isn’t Funny

I was treated to The Heartbreak Kid (1972) last night. “Treated” may be the wrong word here. I’ve lost my thesaurus, so I’ll have to wing it. Subjected to? Mistakenly viewed? Doggedly watched all the way through? Suffered from a full-blown bout of Elaine May?

Well, I guess it’s not that important to characterize the experience in depth. I’ll bet the signs posted outside a leper colony have far fewer words on them than the warning label on Wegovy.  If you’re doing a lot of explaining about danger, people will ignore what they hear. Post a sign that simply says: Leper Colony, and people stay out. I wish I’d read the sign that said: Elaine May Is the Director outside the leper colony of entertainment that The Heartbreak Kid encloses. I would have heeded it. A picture of Charles Grodin would have done the trick too. A hard pass on him never disappoints.

I was cozened into watching the thing because Neil Simon wrote it. I like Neil Simon less than I like Neil Hefti, but he’s alright. His hyper-Levantine microscope doesn’t resonate with me, but it holds no terrors, either. The Odd Couple has lots of good jokes in it. I thought there might be at least one in The Heartbreak Kid. I thought wrong.

I admit I’m defective. I can no longer enjoy entertainment simply on its own merits. I get to wondering about things outside the frame. Since it’s not possible for anyone who hasn’t been thrown clear of an automobile recently to enjoy The Heartbreak Kid, I started thinking outside the frame almost immediately. I could be certain that Elaine May wasn’t going to amuse me, so I knew I had to amuse myself. My mind wandered, and I wondered through the whole shebang whether I was supposed to like the main character, or dislike him, or laugh at what anyone said, or be outraged, or any other normal human emotion that it failed to engender. That goes for any of the other characters, or anything they said, or did, or wore, or drove, or ate, or talked about. There simply was no there, there for me to hang my hat, or my head on. But that’s Elaine May’s career in a nutshell.

Nichols and May are from before my time, but I have a library card. They were famous for stretching 15 seconds of material over 15 minutes of occasional nervous laughter from what I gather was some kind of prison audience. They say people always clap. Some because they like it. Some because it’s over. I know which way to bet on anything from Nichols and May.

Nichols and May are often exalted as comic’s comics.

Woody Allen declared, “the two of them came along and elevated comedy to a brand-new level”.

They did indeed elevate comedy to a brand new level, a subterranean one, which is no mean feat. Before them, comedians never realized you could be a comedian without ever saying anything funny, or even interesting, and still get paid. Woody took a page out their playbook, but chickened out and sprinkled his movies with Borscht Belt jokes between the scenes of people behaving badly towards one another in rent-controlled apartments. This rendered the tedious behaviors of the revolting characters watchable.

If you look up The Heartbreak Kid, they refer to it as a “black comedy.” This term has been twisted from its original meaning to cover stuff that’s painfully unfunny, instead of stuff that’s darkly amusing. The Coen Brothers do black comedy. Elaine May farts, sticks out her hand, and says, TaDa!. When no one laughs, she says she meant to do that. You know, black comedy!

I have no notions that the entertainment world is a meritocracy. People willing to get Weinsteined know how to climb the greasy pole, so wondering how talentless people thrive in it is a fool’s errand. But analysis visits you unwonted sometimes. I started to analyze The Heartbreak Kid, and where it came from.

A cursory glance at Elaine May’s filmography reveals that the high point was writing and directing Ishtar. Now there’s a clue. Ishtar is Hollywood shorthand for a thoroughgoing, money-desolating Armageddon-level flop.

Ishtar was nominated for three Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay, with May winning Worst Director, tied with Norman Mailer for Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Ishtar also was nominated for Worst Picture at the 1987 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. When the Stinkers unveiled their “100 Years, 100 Stinkers” list to present the 100 worst movies of the 20th century, Ishtar made the list and ranked at No. 20 in the listed bottom 20.

So Nichols and May had parted brass rags by 1961. Nichols went on to become one of only 21 persons to achieve an EGOT (An Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award). Elaine May… didn’t. Nichols was the most successful stage director anywhere for a good long while, and then became a wildly successful movie director. His films were nominated for 43 Academy awards, and won 7 of one kind or another. And the most successful of all of them was The Graduate. It cost $3 million to make, and earned $105 million at the box office. That’s $857 million in 2024 bucks.

So I started to do a compare and contrast between The Heartbreak Kid and The Graduate, and for good reason. The Heartbreak Kid is a wan attempt to accomplish the same story, one done by someone who really knew what they were doing, by someone who never did. The Heartbreak Kid is so badly done that no one noticed the similarity, but it’s there.

In The Heartbreak Kid, the protagonist (Lenny) is a creepy nebbish played by Charles Grodin. He literally has no redeeming qualities, and is uninteresting in every way. He decides to dump his wife on his honeymoon because WASPy Cybill Shepherd winks at him. In The Graduate, the protagonist (Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock) is a uninteresting loafer with no redeeming qualities. He wants to marry a girl way out of his league after sleeping with her mother. Both characters turn their lives (and everyone else’s) upside down to convince their respective inamoratas to marry them. These women are supposed to be attracted to them for reasons that would escape any normal person’s thinker-upper.

Lenny goes through his banal machinations to marry his manic pixie-shiksa dreamgirl, and ends up at his wedding reception reciting the same humdrum bromides about life he used to win fair maid to everyone there, ending up on the couch with two children listening to him. He’s already bored with the whole idea. That’s the point, I guess. You have to guess. It’s a May black comedy, remember?

Now, many people think Romeo and Juliet is a love story, instead of a cautionary tale about teen infatuation that ends up with everyone dead. These same people also think The Graduate is a sweet love story, and that it has a happy ending. Not hardly, if you’re paying attention. Here’s the final scene of the movie:

In the back of the bus, it finally dawns on Benjamin Braddock that he has no idea why he was trying to woo fair maid. It was forbidden, so he wanted it. He’s already ambivalent about her. She looks at him and maybe wonders what she saw in him in the first place. It’s a subtle punch line delivered with panache at the end of a rollicking sendup of late sixties suburban ennui and misbehavior. The Heartbreak Kid is just an unfunny attempt to find some ore in the same, played out mine.

All in all, I wished I’d watched Ishtar instead. At least I could have made fun of it.  Making sport of dreck is a form of entertainment, I think. It’s the only form of amusement you’ll find if Elaine May is involved.

Is Niagara (1953) a Good Movie? Beats Me

We have a very large collection of movies, many of them old. The movie business isn’t ancient. It’s possible to be fairly conversant with its entire history if you have a big enough hard drive, and skip Fletch movies and similar shallow puddles of pixels. I used to think that the average person must have seen every movie and TV show ever made, simply based on the amount of time they spent going to the movies, watching television, cable TV, VHS, DVDs, and then streaming stuff. But I learned later that most people just watch the same things over and over again. We’re just as likely to re-watch things as the next person, I guess. We just re-watch different things, and fewer. Our relatives have a tradition to watch Christmas Vacation every year, ye gods. We watch It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that for many people, anything older than about 1990 might as well be silent movies.

But we like the older stuff. It’s not vegetables we choke down because they’re healthy. They’re entertaining, and often illuminating. They understood the concept of spectacle better than the CGI mavens do now. Part of the appeal of old movies is survivor bias. We have lots of good movies from the 1950s, but I’m sure there were just as many bad ones made as good back then. It’s just that no one bothered to put the dreck out on VHS or DVD or load it up for streaming. Stuff disappears. Nothing you see on Tubi will still be around 50 years from now.

An exception is when dreck becomes exalted simply because it’s widely available. Do I really like the Three Stooges, or do I like them because they were the only thing on TV when I got home from grammar school? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. I think way too many people who are in charge of making entertainment these days watched Kimba the White Lion instead of Moe, Larry, and Curly while eating their Handi-Snacks. They could use a few  good blows to the head.

Many movies are interesting enough to watch multiple times, with an appropriate interregnum. I’ve noticed that anything that has Netflix, or Apple, or the Amazon logo in the opening credits is never worth a second look. Most don’t deserve even a first look. Their descriptions alone are generally enough to elicit a hard pass. What, exactly, qualifies a streaming service, or company that buys telephones from the Chinese, or an online dollar store, to make movies? It’s especially silly for streaming services. In 1950, Louis B. Mayer didn’t hire projectionists and ticket booth girls to direct movies, and for good reason.

In the re-run department, we’ve watched Niagara (1953) multiple times over the years. I’m not sure why, exactly, but we have.

It’s a straight noir plot, if a little muddled. Scheming temptress wants to throw over her slightly shellshocked hubby for a hubba-hubba guy with two-tone shoes. Everything except hilarity ensues. It breaks the cardinal rule of noir without losing anything in the bargain. It’s in Technicolor. I don’t know why more directors didn’t try to adapt noir plots to Technicolor. The three-strip process had a way of making colors look way more lurid than any black and white movie ever accomplished in the yeah, see genre. And there can’t possibly be anything more lurid than a closeup of Marilyn Monroe in Technicolor after Ben Nye got done with his brush and roller work.

Niagara was the first movie that gave Monroe top billing, and from watching the trailer, you can tell the producers figured Marilyn’s butt on the screen would put butts in the seats. They weren’t wrong. Niagara was a money-maker when it was released, even though reviews of the film were somewhat mixed. Jean Peters, who was once Miss Ohio, and married to Howard Hughes, was cast as the plain Jane wife of about the goofiest character ever set to celluloid, played by Max Showalter. Max exuded tons of sexuality, don’t get me wrong, but not the kind of sexuality that was going to do Jean Peters any good. So how do you make Jean Peters look average-y? You slam the battleship Monroe into her side.

I gather that the generations that followed my parents and mine don’t “get” Marilyn Monroe in quite the same way. She entered the pantheon of weird notoriety that Fat Elvis and Michael Jackson and Santa Claus reside in. Andy Warhol’s paean to her cemented that status way back in 1962, with the Marilyn Diptych:

It’s not an accident that Warhol’s literally reverential treatment of Monroe was cribbed from a publicity still from Niagara:

That look, there. Sleepy eyes, a smile that could mean anything. She perfected it. Her face is a circus poster pasted on a brick wall. God only knows what goes on in the building itself. But it’s a brick shithouse, that’s for sure.

It’s beyond my ability to explain the appeal of Marilyn Monroe. Whatever recipe she’s using was more closely held than Colonel Sanders ever managed. I think Lawrence Oliver, who hired her to star in The Prince and the Showgirl, and maybe wished he hadn’t, is the only person who truly understood what was going on. And even he, completely aware of how acting works, how actors behave, how notoriety works, and constantly surrounded by the most attractive female humans in the world, admits he was flummoxed by her.

Some movies like Niagara make excellent cultural artifacts. By watching them, and trying to immerse yourself in the time and place they sprang from, you can understand the vibe that produced them. Niagara is modestly entertaining as a story. It’s got Niagara Falls for a backdrop, which is monumental. It’s fun to watch. And Marilyn Monroe is in it. I have no idea why that matters. But it does.