Howard who stories peapo.., p.20
The Best Film You've Never Seen, page 20
And there’s a line in Hot Fuzz where our desk sergeant says, “When did you start?” And he says, “Tomorrow.” And that comes straight from The Super Cops. That line is totally from The Super Cops. So thank you, Mr. Lorenzo Semple Jr.
Let’s put this in its proper context. This was Gordon Parks’s fourth feature-length film, his last film before Leadbelly, which flopped and drove him into television work. He directed The Super Cops directly after Shaft and Shaft’s Big Score!, and it’s an anomaly in his canon, because most of his films dealt with strong, usually African American characters. Did that seem unusual to you at any point when you were watching it?
WRIGHT: I hadn’t really thought about it in that context. I have to admit that the only other film I’ve ever seen of Gordon Parks’s is Shaft.
It’s really pretty ahead of its time. It took a real-life case and was funny in very serious circumstances. I imagine if the film was made today from real-life cases—especially a controversial case like Greenberg and Hantz—it would be completely ripped apart in terms of its accuracy and the tone.
The thing that’s incredible is, at the beginning, you have the MGM logo, and then you have news footage of the real Greenberg and Hantz being awarded a medal of honor by the district attorney. And then you see Greenberg and Hantz holding a press conference and talking publicly, and the real Greenberg is wearing a Batman T-shirt on TV whilst getting a medal. The real Greenberg actually looks like Russell Crowe in American Gangster. He’s kind of beefy and manly, and he’s wearing that T-shirt on TV whilst being decorated.
Later in the film, they show the dramatized version of the opening scene. The press conference is a brilliant narrative trick where immediately before you see them getting decorated, you see the DA, played by Pat Hingle, screaming at them about how much he hates them and then cutting to the same press conference where they’re being decorated.
I thought that’s an amazing thing to do with a film—to start your film with real-life footage and basically building up to the message of: “Oh, see the start? Yeah, that was complete bullshit. Everybody hates them.” These two are loose cannons breaking all the rules and getting into hot water.
I just thought it’s something that you probably wouldn’t be able to get away with in this day and age. It’s funny how a controversial subject matter is dealt with so lightly, and it’s got really funny texture. It is going for that same Marx Brothers irreverence and devil-may-care attitude toward authority, like taking Duck Soup and actually applying it to a real case.
Let’s talk about the performances.
WRIGHT: No disrespect to David Selby, but Ron Leibman is the entire show in The Super Cops.
The thing that I really love, love, love about the film—aside from their exploits as Batman and Robin—is Ron Leibman’s performance. After having rewatched this, I’ve become slightly obsessed and been in an ongoing Leibman festival.
He hasn’t made that many films and apparently for good reason, as I discovered a bit more about him. Apparently he’s very principled and very argumentative and famous for either being fired or walking off films. And then there’s a line in a story I read which I found absolutely fascinating. I found out that Leibman was the model for Michael Dorsey, Dustin Hoffman’s role, in Tootsie.
Really?
WRIGHT: That’s what they said, that they had based the character on him. He was infamous for walking off films, getting his name taken off films, being fired from things—and Ron Leibman is an incredible actor.
It’s amazing, this Tony Award-winning [for Angels in America] actor turns up in a lot of things now. Weirdly, when I showed the film to Simon Pegg, he said, “It’s Rachel’s dad!” He recognized Ron Leibman as Jennifer Aniston’s dad from Friends. And then it became the cop film starring Rachel’s dad.
But I went on a little mini Rob Leibman crusade, watching The Hot Rock, Slaughterhouse-Five, Where’s Poppa? I looked at Ron Leibman’s IMDb page and then tried to find every Ron Leibman film. He’s also in Garden State, briefly. But what an amazing performance! He’s sort of like the missing link between Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman. He’s just the most unlikely looking badass in the cop genre.
He doesn’t have that same tough-guy thing, yet I believe him more as an undercover policeman than I believe some of those other actors. He careens through the film with this absolutely unwavering confidence. It’s like watching a film with Groucho Marx as the cop lead. He just made me totally fall in love with it.
Let’s talk about Gordon Parks himself, who had an interesting career. He was better known as a photographer. In fact, most of his obituaries mention his photographic work for the Farm Security Administration, and he did a very famous photo titled American Gothic. He was Life magazine’s first black photographer. What are his strengths as a director?
WRIGHT: Some of the location work is really good in this, and there are really fun, really breezy episodes. I like the bit where Greenberg and Hantz are in action—they’ve got white sneakers on, and they’re scampering about on rooftops.
There are obviously scenes shot on the stage, but what’s shot on location is gritty and kind of madcap at the same time. That definitely really resonated with me.
I wouldn’t say there’s anything visually that I took to Hot Fuzz. It was all really about the tone—the tone of the performances and pacing, which is not something to be underestimated. A lot of ’70s films have a different pace to them. Even Dirty Harry has a deliberate kind of pace.
The Super Cops feels more like a sort of modern TV show. It’s very snappy, and a lot of the gags come from the transitions.
Another shot that really sticks in my mind is when they beat up an undercover officer—not realizing he’s an undercover officer. Out of nowhere, Leibman’s character drop-kicks this guy and puts a garbage can over his head. And there’s one shot where Leibman appears into frame doing this kind of flying karate kick.
What’s really interesting to read about is Greenberg and Hantz’s exploits afterwards. [Hantz resigned in 1975 after being caught with marijuana on vacation. That same year, Greenberg released a sequel to their story in his book Play It to a Bust: The Super Cops. Greenberg was eventually elected to the New York State Assembly but was sentenced to four years in prison in 1990 for insurance fraud. —ed.]
How have people reacted to your recommendation of this film?
WRIGHT: When I was on the Hot Fuzz press tour, I did these little festivals of cop films, and I got to show The Super Cops to an audience. It played really great! That felt very good to get a good audience reaction from that film. There are very few people who have seen it. It was a very difficult film to see, and so I feel very protective of it.
I’m going to put it in my top ten of classic cop films. It’s very memorable, and it deserves to be seen. It’s got a great script, the central performance is fantastic, and it really deserves to be celebrated a lot more. No, wait, let’s put it in my top five. It keeps going up. I won’t be shy about singing its praises.
26
Bill Condon
Sweet Charity
Musicals have long been an interest and a refuge for director Bill Condon, perhaps none more so than Bob Fosse’s directorial debut, his flawed but beloved adaptation of Sweet Charity. Speaking about the impact the film had on him, Condon says, “Maybe it’s being gay, but I think it’s the way Star Wars was, believe it or not, for kids ten years or eight years later.”
The following interview makes a nice companion to Richard Linklater’s chapter on Some Came Running, in which he also praises Sweet Charity and the powerhouse performance by Shirley MacLaine.
Bill Condon, selected filmography:
Gods and Monsters (1998)
Kinsey (2004)
Dreamgirls (2006)
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011)
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012)
Sweet Charity
1969
Directed by Bob Fosse
Starring Shirley MacLaine and John McMartin
How would you describe Sweet Charity to someone who’s never seen it?
CONDON: Sweet Charity is the first movie Bob Fosse made. It’s an adaptation of a Broadway musical about Charity (Shirley MacLaine), a dancer who has several romantic misadventures in her quest to find somebody who’s going to love her.
Tell me about the first time you saw it.
CONDON: Sweet Charity was a communal experience. I was thirteen, in an all-boys high school, and gravitating toward other people who had similar interests. We got ourselves tickets for a matinee of Sweet Charity. It was a 70mm film played with surround sound—that whole notion was new that year. Absolutely every seat filled, and your specific seat was ushered. The lights would go down, and then there was a three-minute overture. Then the curtain rose, and the movie went on.
There was intermission and then the second act. They did it like going to the theater. It was a contemporary New York movie, and that was part of what made it accessible. It was something that was so artificial, this musical-comedy form with people breaking into song and dance in a very familiar place. It started me on a lifelong interest in “orphan movies,” movies that are unsuccessful or reviled in their time.
I think we had gotten these tickets in the third week of its run; the reviews had come out and they’d been pretty bad across the board. It was thrown on the same junk heap by critics as these sort of overblown, out-of-touch studio musicals like Star!, Finian’s Rainbow, and Camelot, and later that year, Hello, Dolly!, Paint Your Wagon, and Goodbye Mr. Chips. None of them made money; a lot of them really just died. In an era of revolution, they were emblematic of a studio system that was basically going to collapse. Sweet Charity is fascinating because it really does have one foot in both worlds. Here it is: a G-rated musical about a prostitute.
Why, specifically, did Sweet Charity hook you the way it did?
CONDON: There are a lot of things just as it’s starting: the bigness, the excitement, the color of it. Again, you can’t explain this, because maybe it’s being gay, but I think it’s the way Star Wars was, believe it or not, for kids ten years or eight years later.
Are you telling me Sweet Charity is the gay Star Wars?
CONDON: I have to say I’m surprised by how many people I meet for whom it means something, this movie. But it was a great big, exciting, sensual experience. You know, it was the red of her hair. It was that intense color scheme that was part of the appeal of it. So, there were lots of little things.
About ten minutes into the movie comes the “Big Spender” number, which I think still holds up as one of the best musical numbers in movies. It’s women in this dance hall. That number is part of the coded thing that makes movies of another era so interesting. These are whores, and they’re funny too. You want to have fun, and then they stamp their feet at you like they are completely terrifying dominatrixes or something. It’s really witty.
Just that line, “Fun, laughs, good time!”—try to get that out of your head after you’ve seen it.
CONDON: The cuts on those words, the incredible dissolves—they all seem like one organism, one big sexual being. It’s incredible. Right when the number builds, the camera just pulls them toward you.
Also, the stylization of it; Fosse didn’t embrace the realism of movies entirely, and that’s what made it such a thrilling movie compared to these other adaptations. Basically, they’re on a stage, and he has you believing that there is a sophisticated lighting technician who is changing lighting cues throughout this whole performance. But it doesn’t matter.
He’s throwing realism away, and thank God for it. It was a number that was included in Fosse, which was then taped for television and shot the same way. He found the perfect way to shoot that number, and that doesn’t happen that much with film.
Also, Chicago is very much built on the Sweet Charity model. Chicago, the play, and the movie in many ways, too. Roxie is the Charity figure, and after an overture, she has one number, solo, and then the first big step we have is without her, without the star, and it’s a big dance number. In that case, it was “Big Spender,” and in Chicago’s case it was “Cell Block Tango.” “Cell Block Tango” works in a very, very similar way to “Big Spender.” There’s no question that was a viscerally exciting number that really kind of cemented my feelings for that film.
Bob Fosse’s wife Gwen Verdon originally starred as Charity, but what is your assessment of MacLaine as a singer?
CONDON: About as good as Gwen Verdon, frankly. Gwen Verdon didn’t have a strong voice. That’s not what she was known for. I didn’t see Gwen Verdon; I was too young for that. I had seen her do little numbers and snippets on Ed Sullivan shows, and there is no doubt that she was a better dancer.
And it’s interesting, because it’s the exact same steps. Sweet Charity is a very good record of that show, because Fosse didn’t reconceive it, and he made MacLaine do the steps that had been built for Verdon. Her voice is limited and thin, as is MacLaine’s.
MacLaine’s voice is sweeter, probably. I don’t think that Verdon’s extremely broad Chaplin-esque performance would have translated on film as well. There are scenes in which MacLaine reaches levels that resonate with other roles in her career, certainly Some Came Running. It’s an incredible bookend to Some Came Running.
Did you see the recut version in the theater?
CONDON: A number of times. You know, they say for a great performance, you need a great telephone scene. That scene when John McMartin can’t go through with the wedding, and she’s forced to call her girlfriends and pretend that he’s in the bathroom shaving, is a really heartbreaking scene. When Sweet Charity flopped, it flopped big. It was cut and reissued [with several scenes removed, including the telephone scene], so it was a scene that I saw three times and then never saw again. It took on extra resonance for me because it had been lost. Again, it was at a time when you never expected to see that scene again, ever—before cassettes and any sense of movies as something that might be preserved or restored.
Those scenes were so powerful, especially this telephone scene. You needed some cleverness to figure out how to get her out of this, and just the power of love wasn’t enough. But I have to say that [the alternate, “happy” ending], the scene in McMartin’s apartment that leads up to him finding her in the park, seemed really, really cheesy to me. Universal had a certain look in the ’60s: the bad sets with the blond wood, that kitchen set and that theatrical monologue that he had. It sort of makes it hard to embrace it at all. You like them winding up together, but it didn’t solve anything.
You talked about how the film didn’t have a chance because of reviews. Did these lower expectations play into your love for the film?
CONDON: It could have been, absolutely, and also the fact that the two friends that I was with didn’t like the film.
What’s interesting about that is it truly was a hopeless cause. You’d never meet anyone who felt this way. It’s been fascinating to watch. I think there’s a moment when the star count in Leonard Maltin went up one year, and suddenly the verdict had changed. You know, there was a real sense around ten years ago that people were taking it more seriously.
It’s not quite Gigli, but it’s not far from the way that Ben Affleck was thought of right after that film.
Fosse said, “When I finished it, I thought it was very, very good,” but responding to the criticisms of it, he said, “I guess I had too many cinematic tricks in it. I was trying to be kind of flashy.”
CONDON: It’s a movie that is almost impossible to watch without wanting to get in there and just edit it. Just when you think he’s about to pull off a number, there comes that zoom right when you don’t want it. It’s the most zoom-happy movie I think was ever made. There was also this technique of taking stills. This use of stills montages with underscore was very pretty but stopped the movie cold.
It was always a little part of Fosse, a little desperation to appear to be with it when he was always a little out of it because he was a Broadway theater person. That’s always true of those theater people. You know they are always just a little behind. So, even as you hear that overture and the curtain came up, they had pit girls singing “Ba-dop-bop ba-dop-ba,” which Burt Bacharach had introduced into the vocabulary, but by 1969, that already seemed dated.
That’s how quickly things were changing. When you are young, you are so sensitive to that. I remember watching it the first time with my friends who didn’t like it, and agreeing on the horror of Sammy Davis Jr. [who plays a hippie guru] and his monologue, because he was just so deeply wrong and a cultural joke.
We talked about other misfires, but what does Sweet Charity do really well? When is it spot-on?
CONDON: When it’s good, the staging and filming of the musical numbers is among the best that we’ve had in movies, and that’s what endures about it.
Also, Shirley MacLaine’s performance. I think there are a lot of good people in the movie, but it is a vehicle for her, and she pulls it off. Those two things are the major achievements of that film. But to talk about the first one, I think there are six or seven great numbers that are very well filmed, if you could cut out those zoom shots.
Other than “Big Spender,” what numbers stand out in your mind?
CONDON: “Rich Man’s Frug” is a brilliantly filmed number.
And all those Edith Head costumes as well.
CONDON: Again, a sharp Broadway satirical number of 1966 gets right to the heart of a certain kind of East Side club restaurant and the kind of posturing that would go on in places like that. That, in the three-year interim, had become completely irrelevant.
It seemed like they might as well have been on Mars. It didn’t connect to anything, which made it a chore to sit through, but in later viewings, there’s something very pure about the dance and the way it’s presented that is thrilling. Movies are such an ephemeral thing, and in this case, this movie got swept aside in the cultural sea change that happened between 1966 and 1969 when it opened.
