Old Yorker

  • The Only Game in Town

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Stevens (1970)

    In 1964, and beyond, Frank D Gilroy’s play The Subject Was Roses was a critical and commercial hit.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, two Tony awards and ran on Broadway for 832 performances.  For the 1968 film of the play Patricia Neal was Oscar-nominated as Best Actress and Jack Albertson won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.  Just before it was released, another Gilroy play had completed its Broadway run:  The Only Game in Town opened on 20 May 1968 and closed on 1 June of the same year, after 16 performances.  By the time this play flopped, though, 20th Century Fox had paid more than half a million dollars for the film rights so they pressed ahead with a screen version written by Gilroy (like the screenplay for The Subject Was Roses).  The two leads were Elizabeth Taylor, a few pictures on from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Warren Beatty, in his first film since Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  Taylor was paid $1,125,000 and Beatty $750,000.  The result was another flop – according to Wikipedia, Fox’s second-worst financial failure behind Cleopatra (1963).  The Only Game in Town was also the last film directed by George Stevens.

    The story is set in contemporary Las Vegas, where Fran Walker (Taylor) is a past-her-prime showgirl and Joe Grady (Beatty) a lounge pianist and compulsive gambler.  He and Fran first meet when she goes for a meal after work to the restaurant-bar where Joe’s playing; they get talking, he comes back to her apartment and stays over.  Fran has been having an affair with rich, San Francisco-based Tom Lockwood, a married man who comes on occasional visits to Vegas:  she’s given him repeated ultimatums about ending his marriage but there’s no sign that Tom will oblige.  Joe plans to make five thousand dollars on the Vegas craps tables before he leaves the city to start a new life as a pianist in New York.  Since he keeps losing more money than he wins, his move east doesn’t seem an imminent prospect either.  What both Joe and Fran expect to be a one-night stand turns into a continuing, no-strings relationship, though it’s rarely a pacific one.  Joe moves into Fran’s apartment until Tom Lockwood (Charles Braswell) turns up there unexpectedly – pretending that Joe has just given her a lift home, Fran sends him on his way.  Even more unexpectedly, Tom arrives armed with decree absolute documents, a ten-carat diamond engagement ring and two plane tickets to take Fran and himself on a European honeymoon.

    Fran is overcome and confused – she confesses to Tom she’s been living with Joe – but he doesn’t mind.  She changes into a wedding outfit before deciding she can’t through with it.  Now it’s Tom who exits and Joe returns but he and Fran instantly fall out.  She wonders if Tom’s the best bet after all, books a plane ticket, leaves Joe a goodbye note but, as she’s about to leave the apartment, turns to see him in the corridor.  He explains how he lost all his money in the casinos and even had to sell his car … before his luck turned in a big way.  Fran is sceptical until Joe produces from his jacket pockets his winnings – twenty-two thousand dollars.  He then proposes to Fran:  marriage is another kind of gamble but, says Joe, it’s ‘the only game in town’.  Fran takes a lot of convincing – she’s scared of things going wrong – but Joe tells her she loves him as much as he loves her, and she eventually admits it.  They’re in each other’s arms on the final fadeout.

    A pair of characters spend most of their time arguing but realise at last that they can’t live without each other.  This kind of romantic comedy two-hander – as The Only Game in Town virtually is, apart from Tom Lockwood’s one scene – can work well on stage.  Another American play of the 1960s, Bill Manhoff’s The Owl and the Pussycat, is a good example.  It depends on rather stereotyped conceptions of its chalk-and-cheese characters – he’s an intellectually snobbish, emotionally fearful would-be writer; she’s a chatterbox prostitute, brassy yet vulnerable – but both roles are securely written and Manhoff’s dialogue is lively and often funny.  The evidence of its short-lived Broadway run, of course, is that The Only Game in Town didn’t work well on stage:  judging from Gilroy’s screenplay, you wonder if a main problem was that his characters aren’t clearly defined.  Neither Fran nor Joe is given much context.  She is glimpsed in a chorus line then a communal dressing room at the start but that’s about all we see of her work, even though it matters to Fran that she can pay her way and isn’t Tom Lockwood’s kept woman.  When Joe quotes lines from Kipling’s ‘If’ and, in the closing scene, The Tempest, it sounds like the screenwriter rather than the character demonstrating his breadth of reading.

    When a theatre piece, perhaps especially one like this, is turned into a film, there’s the perennial dilemma of how much to open it up.  The movie of The Owl and the Pussycat – written by Buck Henry, directed by Herbert Ross and released the same year as The Only Game in Town – invented numerous minor characters, although I still remember only the principals, played by Barbra Streisand and George Segal.  The screen version of The Only Game in Town is much more sparing with a supporting cast but not to its credit since the bits that aren’t Taylor-Beatty numbers are feeble.  Charles Braswell has a thankless task playing Tom Lockwood, who’s merely there to move the plot forward.  Other residents of Fran’s apartment block include a tall man with a tiny dog; their repeated appearances are the closest the film gets to a visual running gag.  There’s also a smallish woman with a big dog.  George Stevens inserts occasional montages of neon-lit venues on the Las Vegas strip but you feel his desperation in doing so.  Maurice Jarre’s music makes matters worse.  If it’s possible to miscast the composer of a film’s music, here’s an instance.  It sounds as if the man who wrote grandiose scores for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Ryan’s Daughter (again in the same year as The Only Game in Town) has listened to the soundtracks of a few other recent rom-coms, mixed in a bit of jazzy stuff that he thinks is vaguely Vegas-y, and hoped for the best.

    Frank D Gilroy’s material is unworthy of the director and his stars yet The Only Game in Town is often fascinating, chiefly for the pairing of Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty – and for what feels wrong and right about that pairing.  Fran and Joe are such thin characters that it’s hard to be sure he’s meant to be older than her although that’s what the original Broadway casting of Barry Nelson and Tammy Grimes suggests:  Nelson (who also directed the play) was fifty and Grimes thirty-four.  That Taylor seems much older than Beatty is partly illusory – there’s only five years between them, and she still wasn’t forty when the film was made.  But because she’d been a big name in Hollywood since the mid-1940s Taylor seems decades senior to Beatty, who made his screen debut in 1961.  He signed up to play Joe Grady when Frank Sinatra had to drop out:  The Only Game in Town was postponed due to Taylor’s ill health and Sinatra was committed elsewhere (Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas!) during the revised shooting schedule.  Although the age difference between Sinatra and Taylor was nearly the same as that between Barry Nelson and Tammy Grimes, Sinatra too began in movies in the 1940s:  he and Taylor seem part of the same generation of Hollywood stars.

    Taylor has a mutton-dressed-as-lamb look here, thanks to the mini-dresses she wears.  The Hollywood royalty treatment she inevitably gets doesn’t help her characterisation either.  The opening credits name two costume designers specifically for Elizabeth Taylor (Mia Fonssagrives and Vicki Tiel); you wonder why, when she’s playing a working woman trying her best to be financially independent.   The hairstyle for ‘Miss Taylor’ was created by Alexandre de Paris.  The art directors have furnished Fran’s apartment to a standard she surely couldn’t afford.  These accoutrements are galling given Taylor’s natural aptitude for coarseness.  In spite of everything, though, her acting gifts, which also include empathy, shine through:  she makes Fran genuinely frustrated and fearful.  Her comic timing is spot on and the connection between Taylor and her co-star (like Sinatra, a notably relaxed performer) is strong – as actors, she and Beatty are on the same wavelength and come across as entirely contemporary.  Because of his enduring public image you tend to forget how convincingly but unsentimentally Beatty could play anxious men, even losers.  Stevens includes too many casino sequences but Beatty plays them well enough to hold your interest:  the level of Joe’s emotional reactions to winning or losing rings true – even in a scene where a gorgon-like rival gambler (Olga Valéry) repeatedly thwarts Joe, cackling vengefully each time she does.

    This was the last of my four visits to BFI’s ‘The Old Man is Still Alive’ season.  Knowing something in advance of the film’s reputation, I worried it was also going to make for the saddest viewing – an ignominious end to George Stevens’ career.  Like William Wyler’s The Liberation of L B Jones, Stevens’ swan song has plenty of regrettable features but – as with Wyler’s Hollywood envoi, too – I worried more than I needed to.  This was the third time that Stevens and Elizabeth Taylor worked together:  on the first two occasions – A Place in the Sun (1951) and Giant (1956) – he won the Academy Award for Best Director.  Warren Beatty has named Stevens (along with Wyler and Elia Kazan) as a particular inspiration in his own career behind the camera.  Stevens’ final film is proof that he always retained one of his outstanding talents.  He was exceptionally skilled in directing and creating synergies between actors, as Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty demonstrate in The Only Game in Town.

    25 April 2025

  • Under the Volcano

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Huston (1984)

    John Huston’s Under the Volcano is a surprising entry in BFI’s ‘The Old Man is Still Alive’ programme.  It didn’t mark Huston’s return to filmmaking after long absence from the Hollywood scene:  a confirmed genre-hopper, he’d directed a big-budget family musical – Annie – only two years previously.  It didn’t go unnoticed on original release, premiering at Cannes and earning two Oscar nominations.  It certainly didn’t mark the end of Huston’s career:  the two films he made subsequently – Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and The Dead (released in late 1987, a few months after his death) – are widely admired.  Besides, this 1984 film is, in conception as well as in effect, a one-man show by the lead actor.  Adapted (by Guy Gallo) from Malcolm Lowry’s celebrated, partly autobiographical novel of the same name, Under the Volcano is remarkable much less for Huston’s signature than for Albert Finney’s performance.

    Finney is Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul in Mexico and an alcoholic.  The film’s timeframe is around twenty-four hours – the last day of Geoffrey’s life, which coincides with the Day of the Dead festival in November 1938.  The setting is Cuernavaca, capital of the Mexican state of Morelos.  Under the Volcano was filmed on location there – the volcano of the title is Popocatépetl – and Huston makes the most of it.  The opening title sequence is intriguing:  a succession of death’s-head and other puppets appear on the screen, accompanied by Alex North’s tingly music.  As soon as the film proper gets underway, Huston’s camera is touring the town’s streets and market stalls – dominated by Day of the Dead outfits and artefacts that have less impact because they follow straight on from that title sequence.  While subsequent bits of local colour – street theatre, a bullfight – are visually striking, you almost start to wonder if their purpose in the film is to give Albert Finney, and the audience, occasional breaks from his herculean labours.

    There are two main problems for Finney.  The first is that, although he’s given a great deal to say, his role is underwritten.  Malcolm Lowry regarded intoxication as an often gruelling but a visionary state of being.  In Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, his posthumously-published fictionalised autobiography, Lowry wrote that ‘not an hour, not a moment of my drunkenness, my continual death, was not worth it:  there is no dross of even the worst of those hours, not a drop of mescal that I have not turned into pure gold, not a drink I have not made sing’.  It seems Lowry saw Geoffrey Firmin’s alcoholism in terms similar to his own – but we don’t see or hear what’s going on inside Geoffrey’s head.  We’re merely in the almost constant company of a garrulous drunk.  It goes without saying that he becomes boring company.

    Finney is inventive and funny whenever he has someone with theatrical flair enough to spark with.  That’s clear from his single scenes with Katy Jurado, as Señora Grigorio, a bar owner and fortune-teller; and, especially, James Villiers, as an Englishman who stops his car just in time to avoid driving into Geoffrey, who’s lying face down in the road at the time.  Geoffrey picks himself up, dusts himself down and cheerfully insists that he’s fine.  The other Englishman spouts well-meaning, what-ho inanities even as Geoffrey heads off unsteadily down the road:  in response to these, Finney’s assenting murmurs and gestures are a fine blend of sociability and sarcasm.  Geoffrey has rather more screen time with a local physician, Dr Vigil (Ignacio López Tarso), at least some of which works well.  After Geoffrey laments how much he misses his wife Yvonne, from whom he’s recently divorced, Dr Vigil takes him to a church, urging Geoffrey to pray to a statue of the Virgin Mary for Yvonne to come back.  ‘I can’t,’ protests Geoffrey, with an appalled glance at Mary’s unappealing plaster features, ‘It’s like asking my fairy godmother for three wishes’.

    The following morning, Yvonne returns to Cuernavaca:  ‘A miracle!’, Dr Vigil declares, on being introduced to her.  But Yvonne’s arrival is where the second problem for Albert Finney – the casting of the two key supporting roles – starts to kick in.  Finney expertly suggests that Geoffrey, however boisterous and chatty, isn’t fully present in his interactions with most people – the effects of alcohol somehow close him off.  His now ex-wife, whom Geoffrey still loves, is an exception yet Jacqueline Bisset, who plays her, is impersonal.  This is intriguing for a while; once it emerges that Yvonne is still in love with Geoffrey too, despite his chronic drinking and his impotence, Bisset’s cautious, arm’s-length manner makes less and less sense.  The lack of connection between Finney and her, rather than illustrating the Firmins’ relationship, only exposes Bisset as an underpowered actress.  The fact that Yvonne is also an actress but not a greatly successful one, is hardly an excuse.

    Still, Jacqueline Bisset is considerably better than Anthony Andrews, seen here during his deservedly brief big-time cinema career in the wake of Granada TV’s Brideshead Revisited (1981).  He plays Geoffrey’s  much younger half-brother, Hugh, a journalist just back from the Spanish Civil War.  Hugh seems meant to be restless, impassioned and left-wing – during an outdoor lunch with Geoffrey and Yvonne, he shows how impulsive and hot-blooded he is by jumping into a bull ring and doing muleta business with a bull.  Hugh’s also supposed to have had an affair with Yvonne at some point.  You don’t believe any of these things.  Coiffed (1980s style) and cas in his cowboy jeans and boots, Andrews has two facial expressions:  smugly quizzical and, when Hugh gets serious, petulant.  There’s next to no characterisation.  Trying to play off  Bisset and Andrews, Albert Finney must have decided, reasonably enough, that he needed to do enough acting for three and John Huston lets him.

    Huston has occasional fun joshing supernatural assumptions:  after Geoffrey gets a result from not praying to the Holy Mother for Yvonne’s return comes Señora Gregorio’s prediction that ‘One day she may come back to you’.  Señora Gregorio is so used to the routine of prophecy that she’s oblivious to Geoffrey’s information that Yvonne already has come back – indeed, at that very moment is standing in the street opposite the Señora’s bar.  The film’s climax takes place in and around a bordello, where Geoffrey will meet his violent death and Huston conveys something of his disgusted fascination with the grotesquely aberrant.  His equation of repellent appearance and moral deformity is out of date now, though:  the parade of dwarves, transvestites and overweight, greasy Mexicans in the bordello is less a freak show than a display of political incorrectness.  Otherwise, Huston’s direction is unusually self-effacing.  After that promising start under the titles, Alex North’s score gets more conventional and less individual, too.

    21 April 2025

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