Week that Was

Here's Jack

Perhaps the iconic American actor — Jack Nicholson — was born on April 22, 1937. He started his life, as he would live it, in show biz and confusion. Born to a showgirl and an undetermined father — it could've been the man who committed bigamy in marrying his mother, or his mother's manager — John Joseph Nicholson was raised by his grandparents, believing through most of his childhood that they were his actually parents. But things got better. A three-time Academy Award winner, Nicholson has captured not just one generational zeitgeist but many. From his early work in Easy Rider to his turn with Morgan Freeman in the recent surprise hit, The Bucket List, Nicholson's appeal has crossed decades and demographics. His sly delivery, arching eyebrows and perfect mixture of acting and attitude have enlivened an almost impossible list of classic movies, among them Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Last Detail, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as it Gets, About Schmidt and The Departed.

The Real Evil

One of the last great film noirs — and one of film restoration's most celebrated objects of scrutiny — was first screened in Los Angeles on April 23, 1958. A feverish tale of crime and police corruption on the U.S.-Mexico border, Touch of Evil was director Orson Welles's return to mainstream moviemaking after more experimental films like Mister Arkadin and theater adaptations like Othello and Macbeth. But after delivering his rough cut to Universal Pictures, the studio re-cut and reshot some of his film and then dumped it to theaters as the second half of a double bill. During post-production, Welles wrote Universal a 58-page memo detailing his recommended edits, but his advice went ignored. Years later, however, after the film (even in its bowdlerized form) received critical acclaim, the studio attempted a restoration. A 108-minute print, 15 minutes longer than the 1958 version, found in the studio vault was released in 1976, but scholars realized that this version didn't represent Welles's vision either. A more complete restoration occurred in 1998, with producer Rick Schmidlin and editor Walter Murch going back to that 58-page memo and coming up with a critically-acclaimed take on the film that adds character development, subtlety and menace.

You Must Remember This

By April 1942, Warner Brothers producer Hal B. Wallis was scrambling to get a small project based on a script called Everybody Comes to Rick's off the ground. The manuscript had arrived at the studio's mailroom the day after Pearl Harbor and everyone felt this could be the right story for the turbulent times. For the lead actress, they had considered Michèle Morgan, the French actress who'd just had a hit with Joan of Paris, but her $55,000 price tag was too much for Wallis. He turned his attention to Ingrid Bergman, who'd showed talent, but had only appeared in a few films since arriving from Sweden. But Bergman would also only cost $25,000. The big problem was that Bergman was under contract to David Selznick. To plead his case, Wallis sent the screenwriters, the brothers Julius and Philip Epstein, to visit Selznick. According to Aljean Harmetz's The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman and World War II, Selznick was slurping soup as Julius Epstein started off: "There are refugees and transit visas and intrigues," and suddenly I realized that I had talked about 20 minutes and Bergman isn't even in the story. So I said, "Oh, it's going to be a lot of shit like Algiers." Selznick, who was actually tried to place Bergman, agreed to loan her out for 8 weeks under the condition that Wallis loaned him Olivia De Havilland for 8 weeks — whom he never actually used. The role would not only make Bergman a star, but would prove to be her most memorable role, even though she never particularly liked the job she did.

Eisenstein's Field of Nightmares

This week in 1937, Sergei Eisenstein publicly distanced himself from Bezhin Meadow, his controversial first foray into talking pictures. The film is now perceived as a "film maudit" (or "cursed film"), because of the troubles it had during its production and beyond. Though the title comes from a story by Turgenev, the plot was based on the folk tale about a 13-year-old boy, Pavlik Morozov, who informed on his father because he had sabotaged the year's harvest, and was then killed by his family. The film had been commissioned by Communist Youth League to honor the martyred boy and highlight their collective farm work, and the direct link between Eisenstein and the Soviet government was problematic. Eisenstein was initially unsure the script was strong enough to be filmed, and production took two years after two lots of rewrites and reshoots were demanded by the studio and then the head of the Principal Directorate for the Cinema. Finally, production was halted by the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party who called the film "inartistic and politically bankrupt" and "confused the class struggle with the struggle between good and evil". After filming stopped, Eisenstein was struck down by small pox and then pneumonia and was unable to move forward on completing the film on his own. Completing a horrible run of ill fortune, the reels of the unfinished film were destroyed during a WW2 bombing raid, however in the 1960s Eisenstein's widow revealed that she had kept some footage from the film. Based on the script and Eisenstein's notes, a 30-minute version of the film was reassembled.

Death of a Beautiful Scoundrel

George Sanders, the actor and raconteur, committed suicide this week in 1972. He was found in a hotel in Spanish coastal town of Castelldefels with five empty bottles of Nembutal besides his bed. Also found was a now-legendary note saying "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck." The note was, in many ways, typical of Sanders as it combined dry, weary and self-deprecating wit with an understated melancholy. Sanders was not a classical actor with tremendous range but rather a compellingly charismatic Englishman with a gift for comic delivery who was perennially in demand for essentially just being himself. His most memorable roles include the aptly named drama critic Addison DeWitt (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor) in All About Eve (1950) and the voice of the sly tiger Shere Khan in Disney's The Jungle Book (1966), but in many ways his most fitting performance came as the title character in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). There was something incredibly Wildean about Sanders that made him born to play the role of the sophisticated, vain and brilliant Gray, and indeed Sanders once described himself as "beastly but never coarse. A high-class sort of heel."

A Classic is Born

In 1937, the ultimate inside-Hollywood story, A Star is Born, was released to near-unanimous praise. Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times wrote: "It is not as dull a Spring as we had thought. Selznick International came to April's defense yesterday with one of the year's best shows, A Star Is Born, which probably will find the Music Hall's treasurer turning cartwheels in the streets this morning." The film was almost skipped, though, because Selznick felt that films about Hollywood were box-office poison. His wife had to convince him otherwise. Cobbled together by a who-who's of Hollywood writers, from the credited William Wellman and Robert Carson to the less (or not) credited Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht and Budd Schulberg, from scraps of gossip about town, A Star is Born follows the rise of a Hollywood ingénue Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) and the fall of her beloved, alcoholic, husband Norman Maine (Fredric March). The film went on to get 7 Oscar nominations, winning for Best Original Story. But more importantly it went on to be re-made twice, once in 1954 with Judy Garland, and then in 1976 with Barbara Streisand — and there has continuously been talk of another, as if each generation must retell this story for themselves.