Week that Was

A Film for the Brave

In New York City, Mark Robson's politically nuanced war film Home of the Brave had its premiere, with much of the city's left wing social set in attendance. Playwright Arthur Laurents (who went on to write the screenplay for Hitchcock's Rope), was still in the army writing radio dramas for servicemen when he got the idea for Home of the Brave, a psycho-drama about a Jewish soldier who suffers a mental breakdown after being tormented by anti-Semitic comrades. A hit on Broadway in 1945, the play was snatched up by Stanley Kramer for a film adaptation, but with a difference. Laurents remembered, "Kramer certainly was in a great hurry to sign the contracts. It was because they kept secret that it was now about Negroes…The movie version could never have happened — you could never have had a Negro in a white unit at that time." Kramer, a young producer who was interested in dealing with, as it was then called, "the Negro problem," worked with his producing partner Carl Foreman to switch minority status in the screenplay, making the protagonist Peter Moss an African-American soldier who becomes paralyzed after a traumatic battle scene. Surprising even the studio, the film became a critical and commercial success, ushering in a series of other issue films. Of additional interest are the complex other identity issues brewing just beneath the surface. Arthur Larents' own sense of discrimination was formed by being a closeted gay man in 1945, and the Jewish-born Foreman would later be blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities just two years after Home of the Brave.

Werewolves Welcome

Moviegoers were introduced to a creature on May 13, 1935 that would become a favorite nightmare — the werewolf. Through the early 30s, Universal Studios had a string of horror hits, mostly based on classic literary texts —Dracula, Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Invisible Man. But for the Werewolf of London, writer-producer Robert Harris turned to the deep well of pulp fiction, mythology and folk tales for his story idea. Perhaps no creature had so thoroughly saturated the public imagination as the werewolf, dating as far back as Gilgamesh and being picked up by such unusual writers as Longfellow: "The brutes that wear our form and face, / The werewolves of the human race." In Werewolf of London, Botanist Dr Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) is attacked on in the Himalayas during his quest to find the Mariphasa, a rare species that flowers only during a full moon. Of course, back in London, that bite turns him into a real brute. Unlike the more famous 1941 Wolf Man, in which Lon Chaney Jr. becomes the creature that most people remember, Hull's performance is more subdued. He refused the extensive, hairy make up created by Jack P. Pierece — make up he'd reuse later for The Wolf Man. Reminding many of Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Werewolf of London proved to be much less a box office success than its 1941 successor. But the werewolf of London continues to stay with us in spirit, from John Landis tongue-in-foaming-cheek An American Werewolf in London to Warren Zevon's anthem to the beast in all of us, "Werewolves of London."

Barbarian at the Gate

Before The Terminator, Kindergarten Cop, Maria Shriver and the state of California, there was, for Arnold Schwarzenegger, his first starring role, Conan the Barbarian, which opened on May 14, 1982. Directed by John Milius, the film was adapted from the classic "swords and sorcery" tales of Robert E. Howard, the Texas-born author whose work was a staple of the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1930s. Inspired by the legends of Celtic warriors, Conan was a classic anti-hero, a warrior and thief who, in Howard's stories, ascends to the throne of the fictional kingdom of Aquilonia. For Conan the Barbarian, Milius, along with co-screenwriter Oliver Stone (whose draft placed Conan in a post-holocaust future), jettisoned the animalistic warrior of Howard's stories and instead created a sword-mastering superman. (Indeed, the film opens with a quote from Nietzsche, and Kurosawa's samurai films were a major influence.) The film traded off of Schwarzenegger's previous rep as the "World's Strongest Man," and the actor's own hyper-focus and will-to-succeed fused with the character, launching the stardom of one of Hollywood's most fascinating figures.

Anything Hughes Can Do…

On May 15, 1948, Howard Hughes, the legendary aviator, entrepreneur and international playboy, bought himself a new toy — RKO Pictures. Hughes had acted as an independent film producer since 1926 and had success with films like the aerial extravaganza Hell's Angels (1930) and the film that launched his great discovery, Jane Russell, The Outlaw (1943) — both of which, coincidentally, he also directed — but was also seen by the major studios as an erratic maverick rather than a threat to their domination of the market. However, they were undoubtedly unnerved when Hughes bought RKO, one of the "Big Five" studios. They shouldn't have been. Hollywood was anyway entering a transition period as it faced increasing competition from television and the anti-trust suit against the studios, the Paramount Case, brought an end to Hollywood's infrastructure, but Hughes hastened along the demise of RKO with his mismanagement. Girls he saw in magazines and liked the look of would be put on contract, though they seldom ever made it onscreen. Hughes' transparent motives for hiring them led to RKO being called his personal bordello. He had sustained partial brain damage from several plane crashes and struggled with his hearing: legend has it that Hughes accidentally greenlit the Biblical epic Pilate's Wife believing it was a movie about an airman's better half. Hughes' bizarre behavior and his very public anti-Communist stance during the McCarthy witch hunts resulted in talent leaving RKO and the company going into serious decline. In 1955, after seven years at the helm, Hughes rid himself of the studio, complaining that it was only 15% of his business holdings but took up 85% of his time. Hughes sold RKO to the General Tire and Rubber Company who were solely interested in the studio's library and, two years later, sold the lot to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's television production company, Desilu Production, signaling a shift of power towards the small screen.

This Gun for Hire

Navy recruitment surged and Ray-Ban sunglasses flew off the shelves following the May 16, 1986 premiere of Top Gun, Tony Scott's fighter pilot fantasy starring Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer and Kelly McGillis. In the picture, Cruise's character, Maverick, a Navy F-14 Tomcat pilot, survives a tough rivalry with another pilot, Iceman (Kilmer); a distracting romance with a beautiful contractor (McGillis); training missions gone wrong; and a final showdown over hostile waters. In the process, he finds himself while healing old family wounds. The film, produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer with the full cooperation of the Navy, which ordered modifications to the script, opened the week after the Reagan administration bombed Libya, and its testosterone-fueled mixture of MTV and patriotic militarism (critic David Denby called it "a brazenly eroticized recruiting poster" while Pauline Kael dubbed it a "shiny homoerotic commercial") caught the mood of the country. It grossed almost $177 million and matched that number overseas. There was no formal sequel, although Scott, Cruise, Simpson and Bruckheimer reunited a few years later for a similar racing-car drama, Days of Thunder. And, then, of course, there is what may be the film's lasting legacy: its evocation by Karl Rove in the Bush Administration's ill-fated "Mission Accomplished" press event. Critics of another sort derisively dubbed George W. Bush's theatrical, flight-suited landing on an aircraft carrier just 30 yards from shore as his own "Top Gun moment," a piece of stagecraft designed to demonstrate the president's masculinity and the administration's technologically-backed competence.

The Festival That Never Was

The protests of French students and workers in Paris (now generally referred to as "May 68") spilled over into the sunny, sophisticated seaside town of Cannes 40 years ago this week. May, of course, is when the movie world descends on the French Riviera town for the Cannes Film Festival, and this year the film community were particularly politicized as a result of the recent sacking of the head of the Cinématheque Française, Henri Langlois (which we wrote about a few weeks ago). As the festival progressed, filmmakers became disturbed that the focus was on cinema when they felt the events in Paris were so much more significant. At a screening of Carlos Saura's Peppermint Frappé on May 18, French director Louis Malle — with fellow directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch, Claude Berri, Roman Polanski, and actor Jean-Pierre Léaud stormed the stage at the Palais and demanded proceedings be halted. They were joined in the belief that life was more important than film: Saura, Alain Resnais and Milos Forman withdrew their films in solidarity, and jury members Malle, Polanski and Monica Vitti resigned their positions. The following day, the festival was prematurely ended and — at least to those who assign numbers to film festivals — the 1968 Cannes Film Festival was deemed not to have taken place. As a direct result of the events of that year's (non-) festival, the Film Directors' Society (SRF) was founded and the following year organized the Director's Fortnight, a non-competitive Cannes sidebar with films selected from around the world which, according to its official website, refuses "all forms of censorship and diplomatic considerations, serving as a showcase for all international film industries. All films are born free and equal: we must help them to remain so."