Monthly Archives: December 2025

  • Blue Moon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Linklater (2025)

    Robert Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles, published in 2003, became a Richard Linklater film five years later.  Kaplow didn’t do the screenplay, but he has written this new Linklater picture.  Blue Moon, after a short, scene-setting prologue, comprises the events of a single night – 31 March 1943.  Like Me and Orson Welles, the piece derives from a particular matter of fact that Kaplow uses as the basis for larger dramatic invention.  His novel was inspired by a photograph in a 1937 issue of Theatre Arts Monthly of Orson Welles and an unknown young man:  Kaplow turned the latter into a stagestruck teenager who manages to get a small part in the Mercury Theatre’s Broadway production of Julius Caesar, which really happened that same year.  Blue Moon‘s starting point is that the last day of March in 1943 saw the Broadway opening night of Oklahoma!, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s first collaboration.  Kaplow’s main character is Rodgers’ former creative partner, Lorenz (Larry) Hart, who escapes from the theatre as soon as the curtain calls and audience applause for the new show begin.  He takes refuge in the saloon bar of Sardi’s restaurant, even though he knows an after-show party for Oklahoma! will soon be happening at the same venue.

    Before it does, Larry (Ethan Hawke) talks with, though chiefly at, Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), who knows him well, and the bar’s piano player Morty (Jonah Lees), who doesn’t.  Larry, whose alcoholism helped scupper his partnership with Rodgers, has been on the wagon recently, but he’ll fall off it before the evening’s out.  Early on, he flirts with a young man who delivers flowers to the bar, but those flowers are a gift for the young woman Larry’s due to see later.  Elizabeth Weiland is a Yale student eager to get into theatre production design; Larry, a self-described ‘omnisexual’, is infatuated with her, regardless of the age difference between them (he’s forty-seven and she’s twenty).  Their relationship has been conducted largely by correspondence, but Larry hopes against hope that tonight will be the night they make love for the first time – something that didn’t happen during a recent weekend they spent together.  Before his date with Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), Larry wants, however, to talk show business with Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), pitching an idea for reviving their musical alliance.

    Blue Moon is very agreeable to watch.  It’s consistently well-acted.  Its one hundred minutes pass quickly.  There are plenty of witty and some very funny lines (which there need to be, considering the total number of lines in Kaplow’s script).  But you’re starved of non-verbal action.  Except for the prologue (which will also be the epilogue) and the brief sequence in the St James Theatre for the Oklahoma! finale, Richard Linklater’s camera stays inside Sardi’s throughout.  I often moan that film versions of stage successes are wrong to lack confidence in their source material by opening things up – that when a filmmaker does that, it tends to dilute the original’s dramatic power – and Blue Moon looks every inch a theatre work put on screen.  It’s not, though:  Kaplow’s screenplay is based on letters exchanged by Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland, and the unity of time, place and action here is a self-imposed limitation.  The film is structured so as to enable a series of key conversations between the protagonist and another character, never mind that it’s unconvincing that these conversations take place as they do.  It might be possible to accept such unrealism in a single-set play in the theatre, where the characters have literally nowhere else to go.  In the naturally mobile medium of cinema, it’s another matter.

    Linklater has described what happens in the film as an ‘imagined’ evening.  Kaplow has said he doesn’t know that the after-show party for Oklahoma! was even held at Sardi’s and thinks it unlikely that, though Lorenz Hart may well have attended the show’s opening night, he put in an appearance at any such party.  This isn’t what’s implausible about the Blue Moon set-up, though:  it’s believable that Hart, as Kaplow and Ethan Hawke portray him, is masochist enough to undergo the Oklahoma! celebrations.  What’s incredible are dialogues between him and Rodgers, well written and played as these are.  It’s Rodgers who, spotting Larry in Sardi’s, first asks for ‘a couple of minutes’; the lengthy exchange that follows, and which isn’t the last of its kind, undermines the script’s conception of Rodgers.  He’s too coolly businesslike to devote so long, on this of all evenings, to someone whose increasingly unreliable timekeeping, the mornings after nights of heavy drinking, was a nail in the coffin of their musical collaborations.  By the same token, Elizabeth, supposedly eager for Larry to introduce her to Rodgers, shows no sign of impatience for this to happen:  Larry and she take just as long as the filmmakers need to make clear that, despite her affection for him, her suitor’s love is unrequited.  Once that’s done, of course, the introduction can go ahead, self-serving Rodgers can take an instant shine to Elizabeth’s beauty, and Larry can suffer the double whammy, as they head off for another party, of losing the pair of them together[1].

    There’s still plenty to admire in Blue Moon – the trompe l’oeil, for a start.  Lorenz Hart was 5’ 1”, Ethan Hawke is nine inches taller but he, Linklater and their colleagues manage the same trick that Philip Seymour Hoffman et al pulled off in Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005) – thanks to forced perspective, clever camera angles, the actor’s costuming and posture, and so on.  Hawke’s portrait of Hart never feels phony although it always seems quite gentle – this man is ruefully exasperated rather than bitterly resentful – and that may well reflect Linklater’s view of his subject.  Hawke handles his many lines dexterously; even so, it’s a wonder that those forced to listen to Larry in Sardi’s don’t tell him to shut up the odd time.  Perhaps that’s why a little scene in the gents’ makes the poignant impact that it does.  Larry and pianist Morty are in there at the same time.  Larry, talking non-stop, explains that bladder issues mean that peeing is for him nowadays ‘a two-act play’.  During the second act, he continues chattering at the urinal, his back to Morty.  It’s a few moments before Larry turns to see that his audience has left the stage.

    It’s quite a subtle touch too that, as the first-night press reviews for Oklahoma! roll in and Rodgers, Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) and their entourage have increasing reason to celebrate, Larry is de trop but not ignored at the party.  Kaplow supplies Hart with some good lines on the lyricist’s craft – observations that make it credible, as well as amusing, that he deplores not only the title song in Oklahoma! but also the title song of Linklater’s film (‘Worst thing I ever wrote,’ he says of the words to ‘Blue Moon’).  At the same time, when he goes on to deride Hammerstein’s lyrics for ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’, you may feel (I did anyway) that pedantic infuriation has got the better of Larry.  An elephant’s eye in an Oklahoma cornfield, he insists, is plain ridiculous; yes, of course, yet it’s the randomness of that hyperbolic simile which makes it funny and charming.

    The film’s view of Richard Rodgers turns playing him into a rather thankless task, but it’s one that Andrew Scott executes acutely and discreetly.  It’s hard to steer clear of damning with faint praise most of the supporting cast since nearly all their characters are designed as feeds for the leading man.  That’s particularly true of barman Eddie, though Bobby Cannavale gives him real warmth.  As Elizabeth, Margaret Qualley does all that’s expected of her – it’s not Qualley’s fault that her role is thin.  Patrick Kennedy makes a nicely judged contribution as E B White, unaccompanied in the bar where he sits quietly, sipping his drink and jotting things down.  It may have helped Kennedy that White, unlike others, isn’t reduced to a device for Larry’s benefit – almost the reverse, in fact.  Larry tells him about the mouse he sees each morning in his apartment and White asks if the mouse has a name.  Larry gives the name; White, notebook and pen at the ready, asks if that’s ‘with a ‘u’ or a ‘w’’, and we realise this conversation is how Stuart Little began.  No doubt a purely fictitious conversation, but it makes for a refreshing moment in the story.

    The film’s prologue seems, by the end of Blue Moon, incongruously grim, as a drunken Larry collapses in a dark alley, the gloomy mood reinforced by the falling rain.  This leads into a radio bulletin, announcing the death of Lorenz Hart, at the age of forty-eight, and helpfully summarising the highlights of his career with Rodgers.  Then it’s a ‘Seven months earlier’ notice on the screen and Larry enters Sardi’s on the evening which will occupy the rest of the film until the reprise of his opening collapse, and text explaining where he died and confirming his immortality as a lyricist.  Hart’s life story is a sad one, yet Richard Linklater’s film has a strong nostalgic flavour.  The tunes played on the Sardi’s saloon bar piano aren’t exclusively Rodgers and Hart classics, but those are more than well represented in Morty’s selection.  Larry complains at one point that Oklahoma! is ‘nostalgic for a time that never existed’.  The years when Lorenz Hart was alive never existed for my generation, but the cultural ambience and references of Blue Moon are real.  This film is far from great cinema but it’s good enough to appreciate a great lyricist and, with regret and gratitude, evoke his world.

    7 December 2025

    [1] Even if that’s not quite what really happened.  Rodgers and Hart did team up again, after Oklahoma! opened, to write new songs for a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, which opened in November 1943.  The new songs included ‘To Keep My Love Alive’, Hart’s final lyric.  (According to Wikipedia, Hart ‘had taken off the night of the mid-November opening and was gone for two days. He was found in a hotel room ill from drink and was taken to Doctors Hospital, Upper East Side, but died within a few days’.)

  • The Night of the Iguana

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Huston (1964)

    With two important exceptions, the chief contributors are miscast, the director included.  John Huston isn’t on Tennessee Williams’ wavelength:  that comes through most clearly at the end of this screen version of The Night of the Iguana – in the adjustments made by Huston and Anthony Veiller (who shares the screenplay credit with him) to Williams’ 1961 play’s conclusion – but it’s a problem throughout the film.  Huston’s sympathy with the characters is very selective.  He likes the randy, alcoholic protagonist, T Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), a former Episcopal priest now reduced to working as a guide for a downmarket tour operator.  Huston despises, and crudely caricatures, Shannon’s current party of tourists, women Baptist schoolteachers on a coach trip in Mexico.  The party’s one incongruous member is teenager Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon), who’s somehow attached to the group and keeps trying to seduce Shannon, in defiance of her hawk-eyed killjoy chaperone, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall).  After a while, the dramatis personae converge on a cheap hotel in the cliffs above Mismaloya Beach, Puerto Vallarta.  The hotel owner – earthy, recently widowed Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner) – is old friends with Shannon, and Huston likes her, too.  Two other significant characters also now enter the picture:  spinster Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr), who scrapes a living as a sketch artist, is companion to her ancient grandfather (Cyril Delevanti), a published poet in the throes of writing what he’s sure will be his final poem.  (He’s known as Nonno, presumably because he’s grandpa rather than because he’s a nonagenarian.)  Huston showcases Tennessee Williams’ collection of misfits; bar Shannon and Maxine, though, he doesn’t show them much fellow feeling.  He leaves doing that to the actors, so it’s unfortunate that he didn’t get the right ones for key roles.

    Much of the time, Richard Burton gives one of his more frustrating performances.  He’s startling in the film’s prologue, as Reverend Shannon delivers his last address from the pulpit and suffers a nervous breakdown in the process of doing so.  (Shannon has scandalised his congregation by having an inappropriate relationship with a ‘very young’ Sunday school teacher.)  Once he’s with the tour party, Burton luxuriates in his character’s jaded outrageousness, relying on the famous voice to surf his lines, of which there are many.  He doesn’t attempt to sound American.  While it’s true that he also used only the lightest of American accents in his great portrait of George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, just two years after The Night of the Iguana, the academic setting and Martha’s view of her husband helped to make sense of that.  Here, Burton’s non-Americanisation seems an expression of indifference.  This screening was part of BFI’s Richard Burton season marking the centenary of his birth.  Judging from their knowing chuckles whenever Shannon reached for the bottle, some in the NFT2 audience thought Burton was right for the part just because of his own alcoholism, which is pretty insulting to his memory.

    In contrast, Ava Gardner plays Maxine with likeable enthusiasm, but without the finesse needed to make the most of what she has to say.  Bette Davis, then Shelley Winters, had done the role on the Broadway stage.  Gardner seems to have been cast chiefly to justify Huston’s relatively upbeat ending:  why on earth wouldn’t a man like Shannon decide to make a go of living with this beautiful version of Maxine?  Sue Lyon is a lazy piece of casting – this was her first cinema appearance following Lolita (1962) – yet Lyon isn’t up to her role this time.  She can’t decide whether to play Charlotte as instinctively eager for sex or as a knowing flirt – and Huston gives her no help.  Less well known than her co-stars, Grayson Hall seizes her big-time opportunity in no uncertain terms (her reward was an Oscar nomination), but the effort shows.  Cyril Delevanti (in fact only in his mid-seventies at the time) acts his socks off, too.  Even allowing that Nonno has at least one foot in the next world, though, Delevanti is performing in isolation.

    Far from being miscast, Deborah Kerr is verging on typecast as Hannah Jelkes.  Kerr had appeared as several kinds of middle-aged spinster, in films as different as Separate Tables (1958), The Innocents (1961), The Chalk Garden (also released in 1964, a few months before The Night of the Iguana) and, before any of those, Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957).   Huston may not sympathise with what makes Hannah tick, but he trusts Deborah Kerr to do so, and the trust wasn’t misplaced.  Not too long after Hannah’s arrival in the story, there’s a momentary break in the raging melodrama, as Shannon confides in her about the young Sunday school teacher who ‘declared herself to me, wildly’.  When Hannah replies, ‘A declaration of love?’, Shannon comes back with ‘Don’t make fun of me, Miss Jelkes’, she with ‘I wasn’t’:  the quiet seriousness of the exchange has real impact and is, fortunately, a sign of things to come.  Once the coach party and their driver (Skip Ward) depart, leaving Shannon behind at the hotel in the company of Maxine and Hannah (and Nonno), The Night of the Iguana improves – thanks largely to Deborah Kerr and the effect her acting has on Richard Burton’s.  Like him, Kerr doesn’t bother with an American accent, but this is easier to accept in her case:  at least Hannah is a New Englander (‘Nantucket born and bred’).  Kerr portrays her as both politely no-nonsense and sensitive.  When she has a speech of any length, her readings, as usual, tend to become predictable.  Yet she’s a superb reactor:  her facial expressions and delivery of single lines have terrific emotional precision.  Burton the actor, as well as in the person of Shannon, seems to listen to and respect Kerr/Hannah.  Responding to her, he ups his game.

    There’s no doubt the lizards of the title are well cast, but they have too much screen time.  Even before the principals arrive at Maxine’s place, one of the tourists (Mary Boylan) catches sight of iguanas en route and recoils at the information that the locals eat such ‘disgusting creatures’.  Maxine’s cabana boys (Fidelmar Duran and Roberto Leyva) keep an iguana tied to a rope, until Shannon frees it.  On stage, the iguana may work well enough as a symbol of the human condition (trapped, struggling to be free, at the end of one’s tether, and so on).  Whatever symbolic power they had in the Williams’ original, is diluted by repeated images underlining what the iguanas mean in the film.  Perhaps Huston himself felt trapped by the source material.  His long filmography includes many adaptations of novels and other prose forms (rather few of his movies had original screenplays); but only three Huston features, including this one, were adaptations of theatre works.  (The others were Key Largo (1948) and Annie (1982).)  Every so often, he slips his leash by inserting an ‘action’ sequence, but most of these – for example, when Shannon runs down to the sea to drown himself, pursued and eventually captured by the cabana boys – are rather desperately dynamic (though a later insert, when Maxine goes to the beach with the boys, is more effective).  It’s an irony of Huston’s The Night of the Iguana that its highlights come when just a few characters are in the frame, talking rather than moving.  The film is at its best, in other words, when it’s most like a stage play.

    5 December 2025

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