If life seems jolly rotten
There’s something you’ve forgotten
And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing
When you’re feeling in the dumps
Don’t be silly, chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle – that’s the thing
Waves of interest wash over the shores of Henry VIII and his bairns from time to time. It’s been mostly grrrl power entertainments lately, especially in the Elizabethan line. They’re a hard pass from me. Hell, Kenneth Branagh, who should know better, made Lizzy’s favorite playwright Shakespeare a drama queen literally, instead of just figuratively, in All Is True, the most obversely named movie I’ve ever encountered. Oh, yes, and it’s Shakespeare’s daughter who has all the talent. Ho hum.
But Henry Tudor the serial marrier is a fascinating topic, and moviemakers and teevee drones circle back to him like dogs to their recycled breakfasts. I think I’ve seen most all of them at one time or another, including old warhorses like The Private Lives of Henry VIII and Young Bess, with Charles Laughton nibbling ably at the Hampton Court scenery.
The latest (for me) assault on the topic was Wolf Hall, a decidedly uneven affair. Hack writer Hilary Mantel uses the same sort of approach to making a well-worn topic fresh that All Is True employs: it’s hard to write well, so I’ll write the polar opposite of well to get attention. I’m sort of staggered by the attempt in Wolf Hall to make Thomas Cromwell the saintly hero of the piece, and a sex machine to boot, and Thomas More the villain among a gaggle of villains. That’s quite a hill to die on after Robert Bolt has been on the case.
You can tell it’s a female take on the subject, because Tommy Cromwell is simply pursuing the deaths of umpteen men and women in a fit of pique over an oblique insult. Mark Rylance brings something fresh to the proceedings, and his subdued, nearly catatonic delivery suits the position of a court drone, scribbling away furiously and courting favor to make his way into the world of the beautiful people. He’s supposed to be smarter than all of them, of course. But then again, the captain of the football team never cares much if you got an A in algebra. He might eventually hire you to do algebra things he can’t be bothered with, but you’re never going to be on the team.
But it’s the portrayal of Hank in Wolf Hall that really bugs me. A skinny, slopeshouldered mopey Henry, alternatingly whispering and mumbling, goes beyond the beyonds in dramaturgy about a real person we know something about. One who looks like he’s still yelling in oil paintings of him.
So, who did it better? Who made Harry into the force onscreen that he was in real life? Let’s count down the top three, shall we?
3. Richard Burton in Anne of a Thousand Days
It was 1969, and if you needed someone to roar onscreen, Burton was your man. Peter O’Toole could yell with the best of them, but Burton could outsnarl anybody. Henry, the eighth of that name, was reportedly a charismatic dude, in addition to reminding people who was in charge by shortening them a bit when they blotted their copybooks. Burton showed an excellent hail fellow well met side to his Henry with his entourage, backslapping and joshing with everybody, but he’d turn on a dime if you crossed him.
Anne the three-year wonder has many of the usual suspects in the cast. Anthony Quayle is miscast as Wolseley, but does his best. Michael Hordern, as daddy Boleyn, steals a few scenes while selling his daughters down the Thames River. Genevieve Bujold, as Anne, gives as good as she gets, and holds her own while locked in the Panavision tiger cage with Burton, which isn’t easy. John Colicos, who was both a Klingon and a Cylon butt-buddy at one time or another, plays about the creepiest Thomas Cromwell ever.
2. Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons
A Man for All Seasons was a big hit in 1966. It won six Oscars, including Best Picture, screenplay, Best Actor for Paul Scofield, and it made fifteen times its production cost. The cast was uniformly excellent, and Wendy Hiller as Alice More and Robert Shaw as Hal were nominated for two more Oscars, but I guess they got tired of handing statues to good British actors and gave one to Walter Matthau, of all people, instead.
Shaw would seem to be an odd choice to play Henry, but it paid off. He showed the mercurial nature of Henry to a tee, playing the clown, the friend, the statesman, and the bully, sometimes all in the same breath. You can see Scofield’s More trying to say as little as possible, because he knew to slip up meant a hatchet haircut. It’s funny, but the clip shows Shaw raging a bit, and then calming down, trying to find the right key to More’s lock. Right after the byplay shown in the clip, Henry loses his shit completely, and they hear him two zip codes over. Scofield either acts stunned, or maybe was actually stunned, by Shaw’s outburst. That’s a Henry we can get behind. Mostly because it’s not safe to be in front of him.
1. Keith Michell in the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth
Keith Michell played young Henry, middle aged Henry, and old Henry in this six-part TV series, and was completely believable as all of them. The series is somewhat uneven, since each episode was written by a different playwright. But the unevenness only spans from good to great.It’s basically a stage play, but then again, so was A Man for All Seasons. The TV budget sets and costumes don’t distract you from the action, which is mostly of the two heads talking variety.
Michell was an unusual choice to play Henry. He styled himself a song and dance man, and there are excruciating videos of him singing things like Mack the Knife with Julie Andrews extant on the internet. He does the bowler hat and cane thing and lumbers about like Herman Munster. Who knew his potential to appear larger than life? Someone did, and he delivered the Henry all others should be measured by.
You can vote for your favorite Henry in the comments, but please, no wagering.
My son likes Wes Anderson movies, so we got Asteroid City, and looked at it. I can’t testify that we watched it, only that we looked at it. Watching something has a specific meaning.
Watch
intransitive verb
To look or observe attentively or carefully; be closely observant.
“watching for trail markers.”
To look and wait expectantly or in anticipation.
“watch for an opportunity.”
To act as a spectator; look on.
“stood by the road and watched.”
The thing being watched requires a certain amount of interest to merit watching, and Asteroid City was a solar system removed from that level of interest.
Of course ol’ Wes has always wanted his audience to look at his movies. He makes them bizarre and otherworldly for just that reason. He favors two-dimensional scenes, with exaggerated colors, anachronistic clothing and props, and weird, static poses for his actors. He’s the filmic equivalent of walking along a wall in Tutankhamen’s tomb, and wondering what everything means and why everyone has two left hands.
Believe me when I tell you that the trailer has a more coherent storyline than the movie.
But Wes didn’t always produce such directionless kitsch as Asteroid City. The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel had a more subdued version of the same sort of visual style, but they also had a story of some sort to knit it all together. It’s always a loopy and somewhat misanthropic story, but it gets you to watch. Asteroid City isn’t even a disconnected series of tableaus or vignettes. It literally starts noplace, goes nowhere, and ends in midair. I can’t give it a bad review, because it’s not coherent enough to merit one. It’s simply a self-indulgent mess.
Call me crazy, but my mind started to wander pretty far afield about ten minutes in to Asteroid City, and as it dragged along, it struck me that I’d seen this movie before, only not so sucky. An excuse to put a bunch of recognizable, but mostly second-string actors in a movie for no apparent reason, strictly so the audience can sort of collect them as the movie bumps along, like the baseball cards of a team in last place. I couldn’t stop thinking about It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World:
Mad World is from 1963, but it’s a 50s movie all the way. The cast was mostly 50s retreads, like Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, with some up and comers like Jonathan Winters and Dick Shawn sprinkled in. The director was Stanley Kramer, famous for ponderous dramas, but Mad World is anything but.
It’s funny, but Kramer captured the stark high desert vibe with oversaturated sunshine much better than Anderson did. And unlike Asteroid City, the movie was a genuine attempt to entertain the audience. There is nothing as funny as Jonathan Winters wrecking a gas station in Asteroid City, and there are ten things as funny as it elsewhere in IAMMMMW.
Like Asteroid City, IAMMMMW is a single joke told over and over more than a plot, with a sprawling cast and disconnected actions. Unlike Asteroid City, each scene is at least amusing, and the actors are all used to good effect. There are many uber-short cameos by people who just want to be included in the movie, very much like actors lining up to work for cheap money in a Wes Anderson flick. The difference is Stanley Kramer gave them all something to do, and knitted all their zany efforts into a bag at the end at the foot of the big W.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, actors, writers and producers rebelled against a studio system that they felt stifled their creativity, and put a brake on their off-camera behavior. IAMMMMW is a product of the studio system, the result of a committee of people who were honestly trying to make entertaining movies. The writers, Bill and Tania Rose, the directors, the studio, the actors, everybody was constrained by their roles, but worked as hard as they could in their orbit to make the best movie they possibly could. It was a trifle, but it was a stone cold groove. And it made plenty of money, too.
So the studio system is so dead and buried that it’s out of memory now. Wes Anderson doesn’t have to listen to anyone, and he doesn’t. He writes it and produces it and directs it, and if Asteroid City is any indication, he figures he’s the only person that needs to be entertained by it, too. He’s trying too hard to be Wes Anderson at this point.
Sometimes, trying too hard is the same as not trying at all.
Let’s examine two sides of the same coin. In 1967, Warren Beatty produced and starred in Bonnie and Clyde. In 2019, Netflix produced The Highwaymen with Kevin Costner as the lead.
Here’s a trailer for Bonnie and Clyde:
Bonnie and Clyde is famous for a lot of things, mostly the wrong things. The American Film Institute ranks it 42nd on their list of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time, which it decidedly and manifestly is not. It wasn’t much like other movies when it got made, which was its appeal I guess. The actors wore packets of Karo syrup, tinted with red pigment, which are detonated to appear like bullets striking people with a spray of blood. That was a novelty, of a sort. Sam Peckinpah and lots of other bad directors took notes, I gather. Even Monty Python noticed the cheap new frisson of gore gone wild on the screen:
People like to point to the birth of splatter as the reason why Beatty got to be a sort of demigod in Hollywood, but that’s not it. No one would produce Bonnie and Clyde. The studios thought the idea reeked of George Raft and James Cagney and was twenty years too late. It was originally pitched as a kind of comic spoof, almost slapstick. With no interest, Beatty could buy the rights to the movie and became the producer. They made a mess of a movie on a a $2.5 million dollar budget. It made $70 million dollars for reasons that really can’t be explained by watching it. Beatty’s cut was 60 percent. That, and only that, is how you get to be a big deal in Hollywood. Moolah.
American filmmakers were warming up fast to the idea of the anti-hero at the time, and Beatty was out in front by a nose.
I’m not denigrating the entire idea of antiheroes. Outsiders who act as the hero if you squint hard enough have an important literary and societal purpose. You don’t have to squint all that hard at Clint Eastwood, for instance, he’ll do all the squinting for you. Let’s also remind ourselves that everyone from Don Quixote to Huckleberry Finn could be called an antihero.
Well, the real Clyde Barrow was certainly unheroic, mercenary, cowardly, and criminal. He was also a pervert, which wasn’t often included in a dramatic antihero’s curriculum vitae. Bonnie wasn’t any better. But they’re not really qualified to be antiheroes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Bonnie and Clyde were just plain assholes. They were unadulterated by any redeeming qualities whatsoever. They were made into heroes in the first place by newspapers, investing them with anti-establishment credibility out of whole cloth. The papers have always been covens of arseholes as far as I can tell. Then Warren and Faye made them into antiheroes all over again with Bonnie and Clyde.
In a weird way, Kevin Costner kind of reminds me of Warren Beatty. They’re both sleeping on mattresses stuffed with $100 bills, so I expect they’ll be immune to any criticism from me. But they were both himbos who went their own way in Hollywood, and picked up dumptrucks of money, random gold statues, and girls along the way. Neither one can act, as far as I can tell. In the opening of The Highwaymen, I turned to my wife and opined, “Kevin Costner can’t even act like he’s doing nothing.” In every movie I’ve ever seen him in, he sounds like he’s reading a phone book. Warren was great in Shampoo, but that’s because he’s just playing himself, a ridiculous lothario bouncing around Los Angeles. He got Robert Towne to put some interesting words in his mouth in between boinking sessions, and he allowed Jack Warden to steal the show. He made another bazillion producing that one.
I’ll lay the success or failure of The Highwaymen at Costner’s door, if you don’t mind, because the project is his, no matter who the director or writer was. Woody Harrelson plays his sidekick, but at our house, he’s had a dry spell since tending bar in Boston. He’s playing an annoying, slightly humorous fellow in the picture, so I guess he fits the part.
Like Bonnie and Clyde, no one wanted to make The Highwaymen. The script idea from John Fusco had been kicking around Hollywood so long that the original leads were supposed to be Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Fusco objected to the way Frank Hamer, a real, commendable person, had been defamed in Bonnie and Clyde, and wanted to portray him properly. The Highwaymen does.
In the same way Clint Eastwood was born to play William Munny, and everything before was warming up, and everything after a coda, Costner was born to play Hamer. Hamer was as rigidly upright and subdued as Calvin Coolidge on Seconal, and Costner’s range extends to mumbling and grunting. He’s also got the perfect Texas sunblasted skin for the job.
Right at the getgo, a pack of hyenas newspaper reporters accost Texas governor Ma Ferguson and try to fill their paper with their desired slant. She ain’t havin’ it:
“Some folks are saying that Parker and Barrow are heroes, calling them Robin Hoods. Are they Robin Hoods, Ma?”
“Did Robin Hood ever shoot a gas station attendant point-blank in the head for four dollars and a tank of gas?”
Ah yes, the old somepeoplesay gambit. It never gets tired, does it?
So John Fusco, the screenwriter, and John Lee Hancock the director, and Kathy Bates, and Kevin Costner, and oh hell, Woody too, succeed in turning the tables around and making Frank Hamer the hero, or more accurately, the antihero of the story, if there is one, and push Bonnie and Clyde back into the rancid petri dish Warren Beatty pulled them out of. Hard thing to do. Needs doing more often.
Manos arribas.
Before CGI, filmmakers found people who could actually do stuff, and pointed cameras at them. In the flawed masterpiece, The Big Country, Chuck Connors and a few stuntmen showed Gregory Peck and Carroll Baker how to ride horses:
There’s a great mix of humor in this drama. The cowboy who can’t get his boot on at the beginning of the chase, and then can’t get on his horse, is a nice touch.
The director of the first 3/4 of this movie was William Wyler. Wyler was something of a legend in Hollywood by the time he made The Big Country in 1958. He ended up with three best director Oscars, and had thirteen nominations total (tied for the most). He drove actors up the wall, making them do forty takes, but they all wanted to work with him anyway. Henry Fonda wondered why Wyler wanted another take. “It stinks.” Charlton Heston asked for direction. “Be better.” Gotta love that kind of management.
Wyler made all kinds of movies well. Hell, he made 32 silent movies just to warm up. He did westerns and dramas and comedies and sword and sandal epics and musicals and they’re all still pretty entertaining to watch. The Big Country was a big hit, although the critics mostly thought it was pretty meh. Eisenhower was still president then, and loved it, and had the movie screened four straight nights in the White House.
If you’re in the know about cinematography, you probably know about this movie. Wyler and Gregg Toland developed and perfected what’s called deep-focus cinematography. The lenses they used could keep everything in the frame in focus, no matter what the depth of field was. Nothing on the screen was blurry, no matter where it was.
Lots of directors hated widescreen. There was too much area to cover, and it was easy for the actors to look lost. But movies like The Big Country embraced all that screen square footage. The scenes of the actors pounding across the measureless prairie are amazing. I don’t think you would have Lawrence of Arabia four years later if David Lean hadn’t seen how Wyler used the landscape in The Big Country.
Wyler used the landscape as a metaphor. The fight scene in the same movie is unexcelled, because of the moonlight mood and the tiny men struggling to settle a meaningless score in a gigantic void of featureless grass:
They gave Burl Ives an Oscar for this movie, but I don’t know why. He’s sorta eating the scenery through most of it. But the real problem with the movie is Wyler was incredibly in demand for his work, and he had to ditch The Big Country to go to Italy to make Ben Hur. The movie was finished by a different director, and squanders the vibe that built up throughout the first part of the film. It just sort of fizzles out at the end.
It matters who directs a film. People used to know how to do things, but not everyone knew how to do it like William Wyler.
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