Today, the great film director Franco Zeffirelli is 92 years old. He has created a lot of great films. He is probably best known for making Shakespeare work on the screen better than anyone before him. And it is one of films that I want to focus on: his 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet. It is not a play that I’m particularly fond of. But when I was very young, my older sister would take care of me. It worked like this: my parents would have my sister babysit me, and my sister would drop me off at a movie while she went off to hang out with her friends. Usually, the film would be something appropriate like Escape to Witch Mountain. But one night, the only choice was Romeo and Juliet.

I saw the film at least two times — that was the drill. And I didn’t hate it. I think at that age, most things didn’t make much sense to me, so the awkward dialog didn’t stand out. And I knew that it was something I shouldn’t be watching, because I got to see Leonard Whiting’s bare butt and Olivia Hussey’s breasts ever so briefly. I dare say the film scarred me, however. It gave me a very skewed view of what love was all about. How could it be otherwise:

Of course they are both so very silly. But how was I to know at eight or ten (clearly, I did not see it when it was first released). It was very powerful. It isn’t the way that I think women ought to act, but rather the way that men should. And Romeo — long before he meets Juliet — is a very bad role model. So I blame Zeffirelli (and my sister and my parents) for my troublesome love life. But it could have been worse. I could have watched Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry repeatedly. Oh, wait — I did!

Happy birthday Franco Zeffirelli!

The great cinematographer Haskell Wexler is 93 years old today. He got his start in documentaries and that is what I love about him. I have a great love of beautiful lighting, but Wexler did something else. He brought the documentarian’s eye to the narrative film. He provides a cinéma vérité style even to work that doesn’t especially call for it. It is very much apparent in two of the bigger films that he shot: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Wexler is the cinematographer that John Sayles has used the most. It was a good match. They both are interested in social issues, even though Wexler is, at base, a spoiled rich boy. They worked together on a really great film that I discussed before in, John Sayles and Matewan. And they also made the brilliant Bush take-down, Silver City. Here is the trailer for Matewan, which provides a very good idea of Wexler’s style:

Wexler is probably best known for Medium Cool, which he also wrote and directed. Unfortunately, I have never seen it. But I’ve requested it, so when I see it, I’m sure I’ll write about it.

Happy birthday Haskell Wexler!

The great actor Jennifer Jason Leigh is 53 years old today. How great is she? Is she even great? I don’t know. I’ve had a crush on her for decades. But there are three films that she stars in that I think are really good: The Hudsucker Proxy, Dolores Claiborne, and eXistenZ.

It isn’t surprising that she really came to my attention in The Hudsucker Proxy. In it, she does her own — over the top — version of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday — one of my all time favorite films that I still watch regularly. Tim Robbins actually kind of annoys me in The Hudsucker Proxy, but Leigh more than makes up for that. But it remains a lesser Coen Brothers outing. Here’s the “I’ll stake my Pulitzer on it!” scene:

Dolores Claiborne is a really fine film, although deeply disturbing even as it also contains great humanity. Leigh again plays a journalist, but this time a deeply screwed up one. It’s an interesting film in that her character is actually what the story is about. Check it out if you get a chance. Here is a representative scene:

eXistenZ is a great film. And almost no one has seen it. I’ve been an evangelist for the film. But I get very few takers. I’ve given it out many times. I’ve purchased it at least five times. What do I have to do? It should at least be a cult classic, but it has managed to avoid even that. (Note: the following scene only has about 4,000 views, even though it was released over three years ago by a huge YouTube channel.) Regardless, Leigh is great in it:

Happy birthday Jennifer Jason Leigh!

The great comedian Terry Jones is 73 today. He is, of course, one of the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I tend to think that he doesn’t get enough credit in the group. I suspect that this is more because he has the least distinctive face of the group. But that is a big part of what he adds to the group. He is the only one other than Michael Palin who gets lost in roles. Everyone else is pretty much John Cleese doing whatever part, and so on. Jones is especially great playing an older woman, as he does especially brilliantly in Life of Brian.

The critical dynamic in Monty Python was between Jones and Cleese. The consensus seems to be that Cleese was the brains of the outfit and Jones was the heart. Without those two, the show would have been at best just mediocre sketch comedy. Cleese is a comedic genius. But it was Jones that pushed the comedy outside the confines of the studio. It’s funny that many people think of the parrot sketch as a classic Python bit. But it is entirely typical of other sketch comedy of that time. What actually makes the show Pythonesque is stuff like the Michael Palin openings of the old man running toward the camera and saying, “It’s…” Of course, without Cleese, I believe the show would have been just too bizarre to have ever taken off.

One thing that wasn’t highlighted nearly enough was Jones’ physical comedy. He was the best of the bunch. Here is a good example of it. It also shows another aspect of him, which is that he has absolutely no shame:

Another aspect of Jones is that he is a rather good director. To begin with, I assume that the other members are just about impossible to direct. But more than that, all three of the main films — Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and Meaning of Life — look great given their budgets. But directors never get much credit for doing comedies, even though they are clearly the hardest kinds of films to make work. And after about two decades, Jones is coming out with a new comedy, Absolutely Anything — co-written with Gavin Scott and starring Simon Pegg and Kate Beckinsale.

And finally, he’s done some rather good and thought provoking documentary series like Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives and Terry Jones’ Barbarians. You can usually find them online.

Happy birthday Terry Jones!

On this day in 1923, the great screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky was born. I know him primarily from three films: Marty, The Hospital, and Network. I’ll admit, I’ve never really understood Marty. Mostly it is just that no one could ever think that Betsy Blair wasn’t pretty enough for Ernest Borgnine. But the screenplay is quite good. It is a very sweet film — the kind that would likely be panned if it were released today.

But it is Chayefsky’s sharp satire in The Hospital and Network that he is most known for. I think they hold up quite well. But that may not speak so much of the films as it does to the fact that the world hasn’t much changed. The Howard Beale Show and The Mao Tse-Tung Hour in Network are only different from modern reality television in that these fictional shows actually showed so creativity. All that Chayefsky missed about the future was that the people who would bring it to us would be so unrelentingly boring — and that the nation would be just fine with that.

Most people remember the admittedly great “I’m mad as hell!” speech. But it isn’t really what Network is all about. It’s sad that people don’t remember the one scene that is really important. It’s a speech that tells humans that they are meaningless. It is the speech that eventually causes Howard Beale to be assassinated. But it isn’t Beale’s speech. It is the head of CCA, Arthur Jensen, who gives the important speech. It isn’t important because we should believe it. It is important because it completely summarizes what the Jensens of the world think about the rest of us. And if we don’t stand up to those people, we will continue to live in their worlds. “There are no peoples… There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.”

Just five years after the success of Network, Chayefsky died of cancer at 58 years old. It’s sad because he was on a roll. It would have been interesting to see what he went on to do.

Happy birthday Paddy Chayefsky!

On this day in 1910, the fine character actor John Banner was born. And 63 years later — to the day — he died. He had gone back to visit his home town. So apparently, you can go home — but it will kill you.

Banner is known for one thing: he played Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes. As you may know, I was crazy about the show when I was a kid. And I’ve never really abandoned that, although my interest has become much more about what the show said about American attitudes about its place in the world. There was the bumbling, by-the-book British Colonel Crittendon. There was the mysterious and never quite trustworthy Russian spy Marya. But most of all, there was Sergeant Schultz: the good German who is just caught in the middle of a bad situation.

In one episode where Hogan manages to convince the Nazis that the war is over, we learn that Schultz was the owner of Germany’s largest toy maker before the government took it over to convert it to military uses. He’s probably a social democrat. He doesn’t like the Nazis. But mostly, he just doesn’t like conflict, “When it comes to war, I don’t like to take sides.” But there are times when the plot is used to turn Schultz into a real Nazi as when he takes over as commandant and when he is put in charge of making a movie. As I wrote before, “Schultz was the heart of the show.”

A lot of people seem to have the idea that Banner died during the series run. This is not true. He went on to star in another situation comedy, The Chicago Teddy Bears. I don’t know much about it except that it took place in Chicago during Prohibition. Banner starred with Dean Jones (who by federal law had to star in every Disney movie from 1965 to 1980) as partners in a speakeasy. It sounds like a decent show, but few watched it and it was canceled after 13 episodes. The only thing I’ve found is this terrible copy of the opening credits:

Happy birthday John Banner!