I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955)

The gargantuan success of The Jolson Story in 1946 led to a dozen-year run of showbiz biopics, including such variable films as The Eddie Cantor Story (1953), The Glenn Miller Story (1954) The Buster Keaton Story, and Man of a Thousand Faces (both 1957). These films tended to forsake historical accuracy in favor of broad, shamelessly melodramatic manipulation, though buttressed by generally effective recreations of their subject's performances. The Jolson Story may be obscenely dishonest about the particulars of Al Jolson's life but it captured the essence of his magnetic stage presence and was crammed with his most memorable songs.

Broadway and film star Lillian Roth (1910-1980) is the subject of I'll Cry Tomorrow, a very successful and acclaimed film in its day, though beyond its impressively authentic depiction of alcoholism it has dated badly.

From childhood Roth (played as an adult by Susan Hayward) was a star on Broadway and in early talkies, including The Love Parade and the Marx Bros.'s Animal Crackers. According to the film, Lillian was completely dominated by a (Jewish-coded) stage mother, Katie (Jo Van Fleet, who was less than three years older than Hayward and looks it). This and a series of unhappy relationships with various men (Ray Danton, Don Taylor, Richard Conte) drive her to drink.

Her career continues to soar just as her drinking begins to affect her performances and destroy her reputation. Pretty soon her career is on the skids and her personal life is in ruins. Can she pick herself up from the gutter?

One of the most striking things about I'll Cry Tomorrow is its utter disregard for period authenticity. Biopics of this era were never particularly accurate, but this picture takes historical sloppiness to a new level. The film starts out around 1920, yet all the New York location exteriors make no effort to hide the anachronistic 1950s automobiles clearly visible in the background. Hayward's hair and makeup and wardrobe are similarly locked into the 1950s throughout, as is most of the rest of the cast's. That the orchestrations and Hayward's performances of Roth's hit songs lack period authenticity is more forgivable but the whole film, spanning roughly 1920 to 1955 (ending with Roth's appearance on TV's This is Your Life, with host Ralph Edwards appearing unbilled) seem to all be talking place in the present day. There are no references at all to other historical events, adding to the vacuum-like atmosphere.

Perhaps wisely, 90% of the film focuses on Roth's relationships with her string of lovers, her mother, and the toll her drinking takes on her career and personal life. This comes at the expense of conveying any real sense of Roth's appeal as a performer; instead we get a half-dozen tacked-on songs which make the film play more like a Susan Hayward vehicle than an honest attempt to tell Roth's story. The musical numbers certainly don't add to our understanding or appreciation of Roth as a performer. The film conveniently leaves out or alters other facets of Roth's life: a sister who she teamed with early in her career, a father who's never mentioned once in the film.

On the other hand, Roth's descent into crippling alcoholism is handled well, with the actress-singer steadily slipping deeper and deeper into the bottle to the point where she's virtually homeless and living on Skid Row. Hayward herself reportedly had a drinking problem, as did co-star Don Taylor, lending their scenes an uncanny verisimilitude. I confess to not being much of a fan of Hayward's acting style, which for me on a good day teeters on the brink of high camp, but as Roth's drinking worsens the better Hayward gets. (*** 1/2)

　 A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966)

Adapted from an October 1962 episode of The DuPont Show of the Week, likewise directed by Fielder Cook from a teleplay by Sidney Carroll entitled "Big Deal in Laredo," A Big Hand for the Little Lady is a delightful, utterly unique Western. It's usually described as a comedy though it's not really that. Key to the film's enjoyment is knowing absolutely nothing about it going in; this review isn't going to ruin it with spoilers, but you might want to stop reading now if you haven't yet seen it. Indeed, don't read any other reviews; nearly all reveal way too much! (Hats off to DVD Savant, however. He managed a great review without ruining the film for first-timers.)

The premise is this: the wealthiest men in the territory - grumpy Henry P.G. Drummond (Jason Robards), cantankerous undertaker Benson Tropp (Charles Bickford), suave ladies man Otto Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy), mousy Jesse Buford (John Qualen), and portly Dennis Wilcox (Robert Middleton) - abruptly put their lives on hold to convene for an annual high-stakes poker game in a closed-off dining room at a local hotel/saloon.

At the same time, milquetoast easterner Meredith (Henry Fonda) and devoted wife Mary (Joanne Woodwood), along with their scrawny, wide-eyed son Jackie (Jean-Michel Michenaud) check into the hotel. While Mary goes off to see the local blacksmith about having their wagon repaired Meredith, a chronic gambler, is slowly, painfully drawn into the game. The others quickly recognize Meredith's gambling addiction, pegging the tenderfoot as hopelessly naive to boot. Meredith quickly drops $1,000, and as Jackie looks on helplessly, his father runs back to his hotel room to stake another three grand in the game - the family's life savings.

And then...well, see the film. A Big Hand for the Little Lady is available separately on DVD, a relief as it doesn't really fit with the other films and Western fans will want it without having to buy the more women-centric titles included in this set. Second-billed Woodward's character becomes a prominent character in the last-third of the picture, but it's not really a vehicle for her, great actress though she is. And though she's just fine, it's Fonda's superb performance as an incorrigible gambler inexorably drawn back into his addiction that's most memorable about the film and which holds it all together.

The film's single flaw is the obvious padding throughout. At 95 minutes it's overlong; the film is more like a great short story and would have played better at, say, 80 minutes. The film's coda goes on far longer than it should, and earlier are some nice character vignettes that nonetheless really add nothing to story except detract from the wonderfully claustrophobic atmosphere of the game. Other than that, however, it's practically perfect.

Beyond the unusual story, director Cook does a fine job in other ways. More than most Westerns, there's a strong sense of western town community; the acting, writing, and direction really convince us that these characters, even minor ones, have known one another for years. The film boasts a marvelous cast of character players, but the filmmakers and cast avoid standard Western genre types: Bickford's undertaker wears a gun belt and travels the countryside in an elaborate hearse, for example. McCarthy's gentleman gambler is a subtly smooth performance, while Burgess Meredith's eccentric town doctor is another delight.

Best of all, for first-time viewers, the film just grabs your complete attention from its opening scenes and you sit transfixed by its beguiling, unpredictable unfolding. (**** 1/2)

Up The Down Staircase (1967)

Every dozen years or so there seems to be a flurry of films about dedicated schoolteachers trying to win over and inspire unruly, sometimes violent inner-city teenagers that "the system" has long since given up on. Blackboard Jungle genuinely shocked audiences in 1955 (while simultaneously introducing rock'n'roll to moviegoers); in 1967 To Sir, with Love and Up The Down Staircase told practically the same story even though they were set on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Sandy Dennis stars as Sylvia Barrett, a new teacher fresh out of graduate school thrust into the utter pandemonium of a rotting New York City public school, Calvin Coolidge High. If the name doesn't tip you off to what kind of film this is going to be, take note of Dennis's salmon-like swim "up the 'down' staircase" against an onslaught of students and uncaring teachers. The picture is rife with such obvious symbolism. As is the standard for such movies, Sylvia's first day of class is a total disaster; the students ignore her instructions and ridicule her attempts to connect with them.

The school's so poor she ends up buying her own chalk and winds up cleaning the broken glass from a shattered window after the janitorial staff refuses to take care of the dangerous mess. She observes with quiet disapproval how the other teachers cope with their students: failed novelist Paul Barringer (Patrick Bedford) basks in a minor sort of glory as a popular, sardonically witty teacher some of the schoolgirls (and staff) find handsome and sophisticated; Henrietta Pastorfield (Eileen Heckart) tries to be "one of them," turning lessons into a game.

Eventually, a few of Sylvia's students begin to respond to her exceedingly patient, nurturing style, but she's also up against a system drowning in paperwork and apathy, teacher union regulations and Supreme Court restrictions (where, for instance, the school nurse is not allowed to do any actual nursing), racism and poverty.

Produced on the heels of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Dennis' brief flirtation with leading ladydom was short-lived but during those 4-5 years she gave several exceptional performances. She's well-cast here, looking like a lamb on its way to the slaughterhouse. Her lily-white features and uniquely neurotic persona - even when gives a great big, toothy smile she seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown - yet she doesn't resort to the kind of showy, give-me-an-Oscar pandering found in the worst of these types of films (Dead Poet's Society, Dangerous Minds, etc.).

Most of the other authority characters are, however, broad stereotypes, most painfully the fussy librarian played by Frances Sternhagen, and an all-kids-are-punks type played by 1776's Roy Poole. One of the better characterizations is Florence Stanley's (Barney Miller) guidance counselor, who proudly shows off her efficient tracking system that insists on boiling each student's progress down to two or three words. In an extremely well-acted scene, she thinks Sylvia is complementing her on her dedication when in fact she's appalled at the poor woman's wasted efforts. The students come off better and more authentically, but their problems are the usual stuff for this kind of film.

(In the opening sequence, one of the teachers seems to be played by an uncredited Esther Rolle. She has no lines and isn't credited in the IMDb, but I'll bet that's her.)

It's not a bad film and Dennis is excellent but this same story has been told in so many films that its lack of originality - authentic atmosphere and good performances aside - result in a picture that's involving but unmemorable. (***)

Rich and Famous (1981)

The only real dog in this pack is this misbegotten would-be sophisticated feminist melodrama, about a contentious friendship spanning four decades between two women who become successful novelists. The film was George Cukor's last (and, as it turned out, Meg Ryan's first), a remake of Old Acquaintance (1943), a film that might have been directed by Cukor had it not been assigned to another old hand in such pictures, Vincent Sherman.

After college, best friends Liz Hamilton (Jacqueline Bisset) and Merry Noel Blake (Candice Bergen) embark on radically different lives. Liz writes an acclaimed first novel but struggles for years trying to write a second one. Meanwhile, Merry Noel marries her college sweetheart (David Selby), they move to a beachfront home in Malibu (next door, perhaps, to Dr. Mark Sloan?) and he becomes an alcoholic pining away for Liz. Later, Merry Noel with Liz's help herself becomes a best-selling novelist, albeit of trashy Jacqueline Susann-type claptrap.

The movie chiefly follows their unhappy love lives and resentment toward the other's perceived idyllic lives, unaware of just how unhappy each really is.

The picture is a starkly clashing mesh of '40s-style women's melodrama with pretentious aspirations to be oh-so-sophisticated, most gratingly in the way it name-drops everyone from Proust to T.S. Eliot while featuring blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos by the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Ray Bradbury, Roger Vadim, Marsha Hunt, and Nina Foch, in such glamorous surroundings as the Algonquin Hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria and other hang-outs of the rich and famous.

There's an admirable, serious attempt to explore female sexuality, relationships, and the creative process, but the end results are quite ridiculous, partly because of the campy dialogue (by Gerald Ayres) and that Candice Bergen's southern accent is so alarmingly, outrageously inauthentic (Sissy Spacek would have been a better choice for several reasons), but also because the film gradually descends into a weird realm of female melodrama-as-proxy-homoeroticism.

Cukor's homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood, but unlike his other films (including such excellent examples as The Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib, and A Star is Born), Rich and Famous is like watching a surrogate gay film. Critic Pauline Kael said as much in her 1981 review, sparking a lot of controversy when Cukor and others accused her of being homophobic. Vito Russo, in The Celluloid Closet, later wrote that the picture "had a promiscuous heroine and got attacked for it, notably by Pauline Kael, who attributed the promiscuity of a heterosexual character, a woman, to a homosexual sensibility, as though straight women have never been promiscuous or been given the permission to be promiscuous. So when George Cukor created one for the first time, Kael said they shouldn't be like that; it's homosexual; they're the ones who are promiscuous."

Cukor and Russo missed the point. It's not that Bisset's character is promiscuous; rather Cukor's direction of her intimate scenes with men doesn't resemble anything like heterosexual lovemaking; rather, they play almost like a soft-core gay porn film. Moreover, the male actors (Hart Bochner, Matt Lattanzi), in their performances, hairstyles, and (especially) the way they strip and make love to Bisset don't act like or resemble sensitive straight men at all: they act like sensitive gay men. The fact that Bergen's character is costumed like a female impersonator (complete with gargantuan false eyelashes) only adds to the film's weird ambiance.

The larger problem is that Rich and Famous simply doesn't work on any level. Not as a study in life-long friendship, male-female sexual relationships, trash vs. art, New Yorkers vs. Angelinos. It's supposed to be a comedy-drama, but the writing of the dramatic scenes is so laughably poor that it's hard to tell where the often unfunny comedy ends and the campy would-be drama begins. It's a sincere effort, handsomely made, and Bisset isn't bad even in the more awkwardly-written and directed moments, but it's nearly a total failure. (**)

Shoot the Moon (1982)

Somewhat better is Shoot the Moon, a Bergman-esque, humorless drama about the disintegration of a marriage. George (Albert Finney) and Faith (Diane Keaton) have been at each other's throats for years. The film opens with successful writer George honored at an (improbably televised) writing awards ceremony. It's a hollow victory for the couple however, for despite having seemingly everything - adoring kids, impossibly picturesque house in Marin County, California, etc. - he's wants out and she's got his bags all packed and ready to go.

But life apart isn't any happier than when they were together, despite his relationship with an attractive, younger woman (Raiders of the Lost Ark's Karen Allen) and her burgeoning romance with a tennis court builder (Peter Weller).

Though overly precious at times, one of the film's strengths is the authenticity of their children's distressed and varied reactions to their parents' separation. The oldest (Dana Hill) resents her father's selfishness; the younger ones are suspicious of his new girlfriend and unsubtly voice their disapproval while outwardly going along for the ride.

The performances are excellent all around. Finney is one of the finest actors of his generation, superb in almost anything, while Keaton can be very good when given the right part and material, as she is here. This is one of those films dripping with long passages watching characters silently contemplating their lives: Keaton soaking in the bathtub, smoking a joint, for instance. In such scenes the two leads convey a lot of authentic emotion with a minimum of dialogue, while their scenes together are painfully engrossing, with performances on a level with Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson in Scenes from a Marriage. Alan Parker's direction is intelligent in the way he directs the viewer's attentions to little telling details of the awkwardness and melancholia of its characters, while writer Bo Goldman's dialogue is emotionally honest if unrelentingly grim.

The film is flawed in other, sometimes odd ways, however. Some of the writing is clumsy and obvious. In an early scene George goes ballistic when he can't find any sharpened pencils then later, after the breakup, he sits alone at his typewriter with a case of writer's block - and a huge cup of pencils he neatly sharpens over and over again. I don't quite understand the appeal of affluent, highly successful writers as subjects for such films; don't working- and middle-class families have these problems, too? The one-finger piano score by Michael Seresin (Midnight Express) underlines the picture as Serious Drama a bit too emphatically, while the film's product-placement (a plug for the MGM-Grand is heard over the radio, clips from The Wizard of Oz are inserted to zero effect) and references to other films (the kids sing the "Theme from Fame") are annoying. It's not a great film, but the truthful performances offset its weaknesses. (*** 1/2)

Video & Audio

All five titles get 16:9 enhanced transfers. I'll Cry Tomorrow, in black and white, was probably originally released to theaters at 1.75:1, so this 1.78:1 presentation looks just about perfectly framed. The image is good though no more than that. The late director Daniel Mann and cinematographer Arthur E. Arling shoot the film in a flat, semi-documentary style which contrasts the almost non-existent period authenticity, though the use of real Skid Row streets is effective. The English mono track is fine; the optional subtitles extend to the musical numbers. The other films are all standard 1.85:1 monophonic releases. Up The Down Staircase shows signs of damage with some blotching in the middle of the frame for at least one entire reel that Warners seems to have tried to minimize with some digital clean-up. The latter two films were made at the tail end of MGM's long run yet the film elements look just okay. All five film offer optional English and French subtitles for the feature presentations only. Rich and Famous also includes Portuguese subs.

Extra Features

The supplements are a mixed bag, with several obvious omissions. I'll Cry Tomorrow comes off best; it includes an illustrative Lillian Roth musical short, Story Conference, along with newsreel excerpts of the film's premiere and three MGM Parade excerpts. (It's too bad Warners didn't bother to license Roth's This is Your Life appearance, however.) Rich and Famous comes with an okay vintage featurette with short interviews with Bisset and Bergen though not Cukor, although the director is seen on location in New York. Shoot the Moon comes with an audio commentary track with Alan Parker and Bo Goldman. All but A Big Hand for the Little Lady come with trailers, the new films presented in full-frame standard format.

It's too bad some obvious supplements aren't included. A Big Hand for the Little Lady cries out for a Joanne Woodward commentary while director Robert Mulligan and some of the teen talent would have been an obvious choice for an Up The Down Staircase track. Though previously released to DVD Old Acquaintance should have been paired with Rich and Famous (which Warners also owns), which also cries out for a commentary track by a Cukor biographer; it would have been fascinating to hear about Cukor's last years.

Parting Thoughts

Leading Ladies - Vol. 2 is a decidedly mixed bag. The variety of films, spanning four decades, is interesting but there's no common thread holding them together, and the movies themselves vary from very good to nearly terrible. If you're interested in most of them than you'll want to get the entire set; others are advised to pick and choose. Recommended.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel.