Monthly Archives: May 2022

  • Tootsie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sydney Pollack (1982)

    The big winner at the 1983 Academy Awards was Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, which landed eight Oscars from eleven nominations, including Best Picture.  Not for the first or last time, the Academy was rewarding worthy subject matter rather than film-making quality and flair, and did so chiefly at the expense of examples of Hollywood at its entertaining best.  Attenborough, named Best Director, acknowledged retrospectively, and decently, that ‘I was certain that not only would ET win, but that it should win.  It was inventive, powerful [and] wonderful.  I make more mundane movies’.  What is still Spielberg’s finest film won only four Oscars from nine nominations but still did better than the other most-nominated picture of the year:  Tootsie took home a single statuette from ten nominations.  Sydney Pollack’s singular romantic comedy, which is also a satire and celebration of acting, shares two of the three main qualities Richard Attenborough ascribed to ET.  Tootsie wasn’t exactly ‘powerful’ but, forty years on and seen through the lens of a much changed understanding of sexual and gender politics, it stands up impressively well.  And the film remains, as Pauline Kael described it in December 1982, ‘marvellous fun’.

    Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is a New York City actor whose intransigent perfectionism has made him unemployable.  He earns a crust waiting tables and teaching acting classes but is desperate for performing work and the funds to produce and star in a play written by his flatmate, Jeff Slater (Bill Murray).  When Sandy Lester (Teri Garr), Michael’s student and girlfriend, goes for the role of new hospital administrator Emily Kimberly on popular daytime soap ‘Southwest General’ and gets turned down, Michael drags up to audition for the role, calling himself Dorothy Michaels, and lands it.  Portraying Emily as a feisty feminist, Michael/Dorothy repeatedly goes off script, primarily in order to fend off the pawing attentions of John van Horn (George Gaynes), the soap veteran and inveterate skirt-chaser who plays senior medic Dr Brewster.  The show’s director Ron Carlisle (Dabney Coleman), a fellow sexist, doesn’t like Dorothy’s approach but Rita Marshall (Doris Belack), the canny producer, wants to see how it plays with audiences.  Emily Kimberly is a popular sensation.  Michael succeeds in holding down an acting job.

    The transvestite enterprise also generates more and more complicated personal relationships.  Michael falls for his soap co-star Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange):  on set, she’s a nurse, outside work, a single mother in a toxic relationship with Ron Carlisle.  Michael, as Michael, approaches Julie at a party and gets wine thrown in his face.  On another occasion, he can’t, even as Dorothy, quite control his feelings, startling Julie, who has come to value Dorothy as a friend and source of motherly advice.  On the point of breaking up with Ron, Julie invites Dorothy for a weekend at the home of Julie’s widowed father, Les (Charles Durning), who’s charmed by his daughter’s mature companion.  Soon after, he invites Dorothy to dinner in a New York restaurant and proposes marriage.  Dorothy pleads for time to think the offer over and dashes home, only to find she’s been followed there by John van Horn.  He tells Dorothy he’s crazy for her, then discovers, when Jeff appears on the scene, that she’s evidently spoken for.  The exhaustingly insecure Sandy hasn’t been sure about Michael since she caught him trying on her clothes.  No sooner has van Horn left the apartment than Sandy is banging on the door.  Jeff lets her in and keeps her talking while Michael gets out of his Dorothy kit and back into his own.  When Sandy confronts him, he admits that he’s in love with another woman – without mentioning the other men in love with the woman he’s pretending to be.

    Larry Gelbart, Murray Schisgal and Don McGuire shared the screenplay credit though at least two other well-known names, Barry Levinson and Elaine May, also had a hand in the writing.  All the prime movers on Tootsie, behind and in front of the camera, were steeped in the worlds of Broadway, Off Broadway, Hollywood and American television.  It really shows.  Sydney Pollack is also on screen, as George Fields, Michael’s agent.  George is a coiled spring, trying and usually failing to keep calm when he’s talking to the exasperating Michael.  Pollack the director transmits nervous energy to the narrative.  The film, especially in its early stages, moves at a terrific pace – the opening summary of Michael’s travails in New York theatre is elating – but is never out of control.  As the plot thickens, the tempo becomes increasingly varied.

    Tootsie has a top-class cast to match its script:  impeccably orchestrated, they make the abundant dialogue sing.  Michael/Dorothy is a double act tailor-made for Dustin Hoffman.  Michael’s egocentric quest for perfection chimes with the reputation of the man playing him.  Dorothy is a showcase for Hoffman’s theatrical appetite and aplomb.  He makes the one desperately maddening, the other likeable and both of them a pleasure to watch.  It adds up to the performance(s) of Hoffman’s career.  Jessica Lange (the film’s lone Oscar winner) completely embodies the dream girl that Julie is to Michael but Lange’s lovely naturalistic acting creates a real person to go with the ideal image.  Teri Garr’s vivid hysteria is a reminder of the star she might have been in the golden age of Hollywood screwball comedy.

    The male supporting roles include three splendidly different contributions.  Charles Durning is very witty and even more touching, Bill Murray’s deadpan delivery an invaluable complement to the prevailing emotional mayhem.  (It peaks in Jeff’s mock-appalled response to Dorothy’s unlooked for romantic involvements – ‘You … slut’).  Best of all is the director himself.  Sydney Pollack hadn’t acted for years; it was Hoffman who persuaded him to play George Fields.  The first exchange between them – culminating in a litany of Michael’s infuriating demands, whatever acting job he’s on – is an all-time favourite of mine:

    Michael:   Are you saying that nobody in New York will work with me?

    George:    No, no – that’s too limiting.  Nobody in Hollywood wants to work with you either.   I can’t even send you up for a commercial.  You played a tomato for 30 seconds and they went a half-day over schedule because you wouldn’t sit down-

    Michael:  Yes – it wasn’t logical.

    George:   You were a tomato!  A tomato doesn’t have logic – a tomato can’t move!

    Michael:  That’s what I said – so if it can’t move, how’s it going to sit down?

    Dabney Coleman, originally cast as George, has had a variously successful television career:  in the cinema, he’s unfortunately best known for two egregious sexist roles but he’s much better in Tootsie than in Nine to Five (1980).  George Gaynes is excellent, both as the increasingly bewildered John van Horn, and as Dr Brewster:  he delivers the latter’s lines (whenever he can manage to read the autocue) in orotund tones that anticipate Duncan Preston’s magnificent parody of soap actorly delivery in ‘Acorn Antiques’.  Native New Yorker Doris Belack is spot on as the TV producer who has seen it all, at least until Dorothy Michaels appears on camera.  Geena Davis dazzles in her screen debut, the small part of actress April Page, who plays another of Southwest General’s nubile nurses, and has learned how to steer clear of the show’s resident lechers.

    I feared that Tootsie revisited might now be uncomfortable to watch.  In fact, it seems almost politically prescient.  The clue is in the title.  ‘Tootsie’ is one of the dubious terms of endearment which Ron Carlisle addresses to Dorothy on set and to which she responds: ‘My name is Dorothy. Not “Tootsie,” not “Toots,” not “Honey,” not “Sweetie,” not “Doll.”’  Roger Ebert praised the film for making ‘some light-hearted but well-aimed observations about sexism’.  For plenty of viewers today, the light-heartedness alone will be enough to condemn Tootsie without qualification, male sexual entitlement being, by definition, not a laughing matter.  But for those of us still willing to accept as a major function of comedy the skewering of all manner of undesirable attitudes and behaviour, the film is a highly effective example of treating a serious subject within a comedic frame.  Even better (though this too might damn the film from a narrowly PC point of view), the protagonist’s discovery of what it’s like to be a woman is always anchored in Michael’s character.  Pauline Kael again:  ‘… Michael finds himself when he’s Dorothy … because when he’s Dorothy he’s acting.  He’s such a dedicated, fanatical actor that he comes fully alive only when he’s playing a role …’

    Despite Tootsie‘s extraordinary momentum, you’re always wondering how and when Michael is going to come clean.  It eventually happens when, with the show’s producers keen to extend Dorothy’s contract for another year, a technical problem forces ‘Southwest General’ to be aired live, and Michael seizes his chance to improvise.  Dorothy removes her spectacles and false eyelashes, tears off her wig, drops her accent and vocal register, and declares her/himself to be not Emily but Edward Kimberly, the avenging twin brother of the late Anthea Kimberly (it’s a long story), ‘proud enough to be the woman who was the best part of my manhood, the best part of myself’.  Pollack cuts to reactions in the studio and of armchair viewers beyond it.  Sandy screams.  A cameraman faints.  Les drops most of his sandwich, bites grimly on the bit remaining.  Jeff observes, ‘That is one nutty hospital …’  Ron Carlisle declares, ‘I knew there was a reason she didn’t like me!’  It’s a hard coup de théâtre to follow but Pollack does so nicely.  Wandering unhappily through Central Park, Michael approaches a mime in whiteface, thinks about dropping money in his hat but decides to push him over instead.

    There’s barely a weak moment in most of Tootsie’s 116 minutes.  A photo-shoot montage, summarising Dorothy’s meteoric rise to cover-girl celebrity, is a delight but it detracts from Michael’s subsequent argy-bargy with George Fields about the gender-discriminatory pay increase offered Dorothy:  she has become too big a star to earn less than even an ill-fated male patient on ‘Southwest General’.  It may have been self-effacement on Pollack’s part that led him to omit George’s reaction to Michael’s big reveal; whatever the reason, you feel the lack.  The film’s two original songs – the title track and ‘It Might Be You’ (both with music by Dave Grusin, lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman) – aren’t up to much.  Only in the closing stages, though, does Tootsie start to struggle, as it’s bound to do.  It’s not only Michael who has to extricate himself from a knotty situation:  so does the script.

    Outside ‘The Syracuse Playhouse’ a poster advertises ‘Return to the Love Canal’ – Jeff’s play, starring Michael Dorsey and Sandy Lester.  Next door is Injun Joe’s bar, which we know from earlier dialogue is one of Les Nichols’s favourite haunts.  Michael goes in to face the music.  The exchange between Charles Durning and Dustin Hoffman is beautifully played but their reconciliation is too easily achieved.  This applies even more to the closing sequence, in which Michael approaches Julie outside the television studios.  When he removed his disguise, Michael looked not into camera but at Julie to address the words ‘the woman who was the best part of my manhood’.  He now expands on this idea, telling Julie:

    ‘I was a better man with you, as a woman, with you, than I ever was as a man, with a woman. … I learned a few things about myself being Dorothy.  I just have to learn to do it without the dress.’

    What makes Julie’s, and her father’s, attachments to Dorothy special is that, as well as being funny, they feel truthful:  this is a different order of comedy from Some Like It Hot (1959).  Julie is processing the loss of her friend Dorothy, as well as Michael’s deception.  She couldn’t do either quickly – and even this formidable team of acting, writing and directing talents can’t bring off the instant happy ending.  But the exhilarating journey to that destination makes Tootsie one of the 1980s’ most richly entertaining films.

    21 April 2022

  • I Confess

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1953)

    Late one night, in the confessional of a Catholic church in Quebec, a priest hears the church caretaker admit to killing a man whose nearby house he was attempting to rob.  Father Michael Logan, devout and conscientious, is bound by the seal of confession not to disclose what he hears from the other side of the grille. Otto Keller, the killer, is unscrupulous in trying to implicate Logan.  The priest, suffering in necessary silence, goes on trial for murder.  Alfred Hitchcock and Montgomery Clift, the star of I Confess, got on badly.  The tensions between their very different creative approaches, in combination with Hitchcock’s Catholicism, make for an uneven but a fascinating drama.

    Hitchcock’s notorious dictum that ‘actors should be treated like cattle’ (made early in his Hollywood career) was no doubt designed to provoke but a tongue-in-cheek remark often reflects something of the speaker’s underlying view, and this one surely did.  James Mason, who got on well enough with Hitchcock to make three films with him (two more than Montgomery Clift did), felt that he regarded actors as ‘animated props’.  In a 1967 interview with Bryan Forbes at the National Film Theatre (as it then was), Hitchcock recalled the Method actor who told him that ‘We’re taught using improvisation.  We are given an idea and then we are turned loose to develop in any way we want to’.  Hitchcock’s rejoinder was ‘That’s not acting – that’s writing’.  Although that exchange doesn’t refer specifically to Clift and I Confess, Hitchcock’s response to Forbes’s next question does:

    ‘I was doing a film with Montgomery Clift.  He turned up with the scene completely rewritten.  I said to him, “Has it occurred to you that there is another actress in the scene?”  I wouldn’t let him do it.’

    Clift, as well as being the first high-profile Method actor to play a Hitchcock lead, already had form when it came to rewriting dialogue.  It was a habit he kept up throughout his career:  he’d done it on The Search (1948) and would do it for his small but memorable role in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and both films benefited.  Hitchcock’s words imply that Clift was interested in changing only his own lines in I Confess, regardless of Anne Baxter, who played the main female role, though that hadn’t been the case with the dialogue he originated for The Search.  Even so, I Confess wasn’t the best film in which to try to improve the script.  Clift understandably wanted the piece to be a character study but the material, despite the moral dilemma that drives the plot, is a rough-hewn crime melodrama.

    The source material is a 1902 French stage play, Nos deux consciences, by Paul Anthelme (which Hitchcock had seen performed in the 1930s) but George Tabori’s screenplay sets the action in the present day and I Confess, shot in black-and-white by Robert Burks, has a more decidedly noir visual atmosphere than most Hitchcocks.  Otto Keller (O E Hasse) and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas), who is Father Logan’s housekeeper, are German immigrant refugees.  Logan fought in World War II before becoming a priest.  In his pre-War life he had a romance with Ruth (Anne Baxter), whom he’d known since childhood.  After he joined a Canadian infantry regiment, they wrote to each other until Michael stopped returning Ruth’s letters; she married Pierre Grandfort (Roger Dann), a member of the Quebec legislature for whom she’d been working as a secretary.  Ruth and Michael met up as soon as he returned to Quebec but, throughout the twenty-four hours they spent together then, she didn’t tell him she was married.  They were walking near a country estate when a storm broke out and forced them to shelter overnight in a summerhouse in the grounds of the estate.  They were found there next morning by Villette (Ovila Légaré), the owner of the place and the man who, years later, is killed by Otto Keller.  Police investigations, led by Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), reveal that Villette had been blackmailing Ruth, threatening to reveal to her husband what Villette saw and (wrongly) assumes went on in the summerhouse.  After that night, Ruth didn’t see Logan again ‘until the day Michael was ordained’; even then, it seems they had no contact with each other.  That changed, as Larrue discovers, after Ruth, in desperation, phoned Logan to tell him she was being blackmailed, and they met up on the night of Villette’s murder.

    The script repeatedly fails to clarify motive.  Keller, as well as being church caretaker, is Villette’s gardener.  When he kills his employer, Keller is dressed as a priest – whether purely for purposes of disguise or because he’s already intending to frame Logan remains unclear.  If Keller really meant only to steal from Villette and works for him anyway, it’s surprising there weren’t easier ways of carrying out the theft than turning up at his house at dead of night in clerical garb.  Keller is Catholic enough to feel compelled to beg Logan to hear his confession to murder immediately, even though, in the meantime, he has planted a bloodstained cassock among the priest’s belongings.  Why does Michael stop replying to Ruth’s letters while he’s on active service?  And why, since she didn’t tell him she was married, do they break off contact after the summerhouse episode?

    Montgomery Clift could hardly be blamed for trying to probe Father Logan more than the script does and although he hit a brick wall in Hitchcock, he still gives a fine performance:  in Clift’s hands – and face – the pressure of Logan’s tormenting secret is gripping.  What’s more, a dual conflict on Hitchcock’s part makes I Confess genuinely distinctive in his oeuvre.  The first conflict is between his conception of the actor’s function and his appreciation of acting talent.  Clift’s Methodology vexed Hitchcock but you get the sense that he was intrigued by the resulting portrait – not least because he respected the priestly calling and was disinclined to diminish the gravity of Logan’s plight.  There’s also a conflict, though, between Hitchcock’s religious background and his film-making instincts.  Much of the direction of I Confess is, like its protagonist, soberly controlled.  This works well in the trial scenes, where the defendant’s reticence in the witness box is dramatically eloquent.  Thought-provoking, too:  would a priest (as the whole set-up of the story requires) really violate the sacramental seal if he disclosed that, and when, he heard a named individual’s confession – without revealing details of what was confessed?

    In the end, though, Hitchcock the cinematic entertainer can’t keep his impulses in check quite as well as Logan does.  The film might be more powerful if it ended in the courtroom albeit the climax to the trial is pretty bizarre.  In answer to ‘How say you – is Michael William Logan guilty or not guilty of murder?’ the foreman of the jury first explains their verdict:

    ‘While we attach grave suspicion to the accused, we cannot find sufficient evidence to prove that he actually wielded the weapon that killed Monsieur Villette.  Therefore, our verdict is not guilty.’

    Discharging Logan, the judge chips in to record his ‘personal disagreement’ with the verdict.   These damning remarks pave the way for Logan to be mobbed by an angry crowd as he leaves the courthouse; for the distraught Alma Keller, who knows the truth, loudly to protest that the priest is innocent; for Otto Keller, fearing what she’ll say next, to shoot his wife dead; for Larrue suddenly to cotton on; and for a melodramatic chase sequence through Quebec’s historic Château Frontenac hotel, which culminates in a stand-off between Keller and police marksmen.  En route to the (otherwise deserted) ballroom where this takes place, Keller shoots a hotel kitchen employee.  Cornered in the ballroom, he accuses Logan, who tries to reason with him, of breaking the seal of confession and shoots at him too.  As he does so, Keller takes a bullet from a marksman.  He asks for forgiveness as he dies in Logan’s arms.  It’s as if the siren call of Dmitri Tiomkin’s garish, hyper score finally got the better of Hitchcock.  The concluding action comes so thick and fast there’s barely time to register the post-trial shootings as fatal consequences of Logan’s noble silence.

    I Confess also devotes too much time to flashbacks of Logan’s romance with Ruth and their tortured, furtive meetings in the immediate aftermath of the murder.  Anne Baxter’s acting is limited and predictable compared with Clift’s though far preferable to the crude overplaying of the murderer and his victim (especially Ovila Légaré – just as well he’s not on screen for long).  Brian Aherne (as the Crown Prosecutor) and Roger Dann are easier to take.  Karl Malden isn’t at his best but Larrue, to be fair, isn’t much of a role.  Although there’s little coverage of Logan’s relationship with the two other priests with whom he lives, Father Millars (Charles André) and Father Benoît (Gilles Pelletier), the latter’s bicycle is a better running gag than might be expected.  The bike is kept in the house, to Millars’s exasperation; it’s an effective moment when it noisily topples over as the domestic atmosphere reaches a peak of tension through Logan’s predicament.  Another good detail, late on, is the woman eating an apple in the crowd outside the courtroom.  The hint of someone enjoying her day out nicely counterpoints the hyperactive hotel chase to come.

    20 April 2022

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