Happy Trails to Sam Shepard

In my other life, I am a cowboy. Well, OK, I am a contributing editor for Cowboys & Indians magazine. Over on the magazine's website, I have paid tribute to the prodigiously talented Sam Shepard. And yes, my obit contains respectful mention of Wim Wenders' criminally under-rated Don't Come Knocking, a film that showcases one Shepard's all-time finest performances.

Au revoir, Jeanne Moreau

As a tribute to the great Jeanne Moreau, who passed away Monday in Paris at age 89, I offer this profile I wrote on the occasion of her appearance at the 1989 French Film Festival.

Speak her name, Jeanne Moreau, and the film buffs in your circle will recall the movies, the moments, the magic that made her the thinking man’s sex symbol of ‘60s French cinema.

Those lips: full, sensuous, ripe with provocative challenge, curving into a smile that lets you know she sees through all your clever poses. Those eyes: bright, knowing, focusing into a piercing stare that swerves like a gun turret, finds you, grabs you and won't let you go.

She conveys a promise — and a threat. If you're man enough.

And if you're a woman, you can only marvel at how, in an era before feminism was cool, she was always very liberated.

In Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958), Jeanne Moreau is a bored, provincial housewife who abandons her husband and child for her new lover.

In Roger Vadim’s modern-dress version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1960), she is a master of erotic gamesmanship, bemused by the blandishments of spurned lovers, absolutely certain of her hold on her equally sportive husband. (When he slips away, to fall in love with another woman, her fury is quick, and her sting is deep.)

In Francois Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968), she is a relentless avenging angel, systematically seducing and killing the men who accidentally murdered her husband on their wedding day.

And in Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962) — arguably her greatest, certainly her most famous film — she is Catherine, the enigmatic beauty who demands life and love on her own terms, who rebels against bourgeois convention, who ends a long-running ménage a trois by killing herself and her lover.

During the past four decades, Moreau has made more than 80 films, working with such esteemed directors as Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elia Kazan and Joseph Losey. Now, at age 61, she remains very much in demand, for starring and supporting roles, on the French stage as well as in international screen.

Still, for cineastes of a certain age, she will always be associated, almost to the exclusion of her other credits, with her work for the bold French directors of the nouvelle vague (new wave), film critics who began to create their own cinema in the late 1950s.

It was only appropriate, therefore, that Moreau was honored last month with a lifetime achievement award at the first French Film Festival in Sarasota, Fla. “She, more than any of the others, was the single star of the nouvelle vague,” said critic Molly Haskell, the festival’s artistic director.

To celebrate Moreau's career, the festival presented a newly restored print of Jules and Jim. On the afternoon before the screening, however, Moreau conceded she was reluctant to attend: Truffaut, who died five years ago, was a close friend, and the movie remains one of her favorites. “I'm torn between seeing the film,” she said, “and being ashamed of crying, or being a coward, and not seeing it.”

Jeanne Moreau is not a coward. Even though the movie brought back bittersweet memories — and, indeed, even though her mother passed away a few days before the Florida festival — she attended the screening. And if she had tears to shed, she waited until she was away from the prying eyes of hundreds of admiring moviegoers. For the audience, and for interviewers, Moreau had only smiles.

She almost laughed out loud when reminded that, not so very long ago, she was dubbed “the new Bette Davis” by an awestruck film critic.

“To tell the truth,” Moreau said in her familiar, gravelly purr, “when I began, I was told that I was ‘a new Bette Davis,’ and that got on my nerves. I mean, really.

“But many years later, through a common friend in LA, I was told, ‘Well, Bette Davis would like to know you at last. After all these years, she heard that there’s a new Bette Davis, and it's getting on her nerves.’ So he arranged a lunch that we had, at the Brown Derby, the two of us, and I loved being with her. That was about 15 years ago. And after that, each time she came to Paris, or each time I was in New York or LA and she was free, we would meet. I admire her very, very much. And she's so American, and I'm so French — that was so funny.”

Moreau smiled when I told her of a close friend who has long identified with Catherine, her character in Jules and Jim. She inquired, mischievously: “But she never killed herself with a lover, eh?” Well, no, not really. Not yet, at least. “Well,” she replied. “That's a good thing.”

Actually, Moreau claimed, most people don’t remember the murder-suicide that ends Jules and Jim. “I think the main idea people have [about the film] is, how can a woman manage to be in love with two men? And very funnily, the idea of the last tragedy, the death, is erased in the memory of people. They don’t talk about the suicide, and this crime — that's gone off. And what’s left is that a woman tried to make it with two men.

“Students who have seen the film, young girls and young boys, are interested in that very special relationship.

“But, you know, women of my age, or younger, never approach me concerning Jules and Jim. When they write to me, or when they speak to me, it’s more in relation to life in general. How do you manage? How did you make it? How is it that you're still there? How is it that you're working and you seem to enjoy it?”

The daughter of a French restaurant manager and his Anglo-Irish wife, Moreau was 15 years old when she saw her first play, Jean Anouilh's Antigone, and immediately informed her parents that she wanted to become an actress. There was something of a theatrical tradition in the family — her mother once danced at the Folies-Bergere. Even so, her father reacted badly to Moreau’s announcement: He slapped her soundly.

Undeterred, Moreau began taking courses at the Conservatoire theater school in Paris. By 20, she was the youngest performing member of the Comedie-Francaise. A few years later, she electrified Parisian theatergoers with her scorching portrayal of Maggie in the first French staging of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Movies, inevitably, followed.

In addition to her work with the nouvelle vague crowd, Moreau has starred in several English-language movies — The Victors, The Yellow Rolls-Royce, Monte Walsh, The Great Catherine — and directed two French film dramas, La Lumiere and The Adolescent. She is extremely proud of working in three different films directed by Orson Welles: The Trial, based on the Franz Kafka novel; Falstaff, a drama drawn from Shakespeare’s plays; and a never-completed version of a novel recently filmed, in Australia, as a thriller titled Dead Calm. “Freedom and tyranny,” she said. “Orson could be very good at both.”

During the past decade, Moreau has been more active on French stage, earning rave reviews as a maid looking back at her eventful life in Le Recit de la Servante, and, more recently, as an elderly and overweight matchmaker in a revival of a 15th-century Spanish play, La Celestine. (Next year, she may direct the French stage translation of Steel Magnolias.) After surviving a brief, stormy marriage to American filmmaker William Friedkin (The French Connection), Moreau lives alone in a Paris apartment, where she reads scripts, entertains offers, and looks forward, never backward, to her life and her work.

The movies continue to attract her interest. After Sarasota, she was off to Moscow to star in Anna Karamazoff, directed by political dissident Rustam Khamdamov. “He’s a young man who had been in hiding. Because of the new politics of Gorbachev, he has been allowed to make his film… And they asked me to do the main part, even though I’m French. Because this man, in hiding, has been dreaming about me. About pictures of me in magazines. And he saw some films. And he’s been dreaming about me doing his film. Isn’t that funny?”

When Anna Karamazoff wraps, Moreau will return to France for La Femme Fardee, based on the novel by Francoise Sagan. Next year, she will travel to Australia for a major role in Until the End of the World, a futuristic love story directed by Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas).

So, tell us, Jeanne Moreau: How is it that you’re still working and you seem to enjoy it?

“Maybe because I didn't think of my life in terms of career. Very early, when I became successful with the New Wave, I’d been making films for 10 years. And I felt the danger, instinctively. I didn’t want to be part of the star system, you know, where they say, ‘Oh, you represent so much, and that means you should get such-and-such amount of money.’ That frightened me, really.

“So I moved away. I said no to lots of things. And I lived very freely. I traveled, I fell in love, I did nothing, I read — surrounded by people who were saying, ‘Oh, you’re destroying your career.’ But I didn’t want any career.

“And now, that's my strength. Because I do not belong to any category. I’m out. So that’s total freedom. And because of that, I don't worry. And not worrying, I’ve kept a very childish attitude toward being an actress: I enjoy it, immensely. And I have a great curiosity. And as soon as something crazy comes my way, like that Soviet director who says, ‘I can't pay you, you have to buy your plane ticket, and you have to come over, the only thing I’m sure of is that you’re going to have food and a good bed’ — well, I go. You see?

“I have learned to look at my life, and see it’s incredible how unexpected things come up. I’m really a lucky person.”

Must-see screenings: Sir Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers and The Lavender Hill Mob at MFAH

This weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the retrospective tribute to Sir Alec Guinness continues apace with screenings of The Ladykillers (7 pm Friday) and The Lavender Hill Mob (7 pm Saturday). Here's what I wrote about films back in 2000 on the occasion of an earlier MFAH tribute to the late, great British actor.

The Ladykillers (1956): Try to imagine a hybrid of Humphrey Bogart and Dr. Caligari, and you're ready for Guinness's weirdly stylish turn as a would-be criminal mastermind in this mischievously sardonic farce. Outfitted with enormous teeth -- even bigger than Matt Dillon's choppers in There's Something About Mary -- Guinness plays Professor Marcus, a vaguely creepy fellow who presents himself as an amateur musician when he rents an upstairs room in the shabbily genteel home of Louisa Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), a seemingly harmless old lady. Marcus hopes to use the room, and the old lady, while conducting a heist with a motley crew of co-conspirators. (Chief among the cohorts: Peter Sellers as a chubby-faced teddy boy and Herbert Lom, who would later play straight man to Sellers's Inspector Clouseau, as an excitable tough guy.) But the tables are turned -- repeatedly, hilariously -- as the improbably resilient Ms. Wilberforce sparks a chain reaction of comic mayhem. The Ladykillers may start out as a conventional comedy about dumb crooks and cute geezers, but the humor turns progressively harsher and darker as the thieves fall out and the body count rises. Trivia note: After directing Guinness in this movie and The Man in the White Suit, Alexander Mackendrick moved to America to make the deliciously cynical Sweet Smell of Success.

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951): A whimsical caper comedy with a touch of magic and a sprinkling of melancholy, The Lavender Hill Mob finds Guinness in one of his very best roles. As Mr. Holland, a mousy, middle-aged Bank of England employee whose innocuous manner is a brilliant disguise for his criminal intent, Guinness eloquently expresses the dreamy daredevil that lurks in the heart of every anonymous wage slave. With the help of a souvenir manufacturer (Stanley Holloway) and a couple of small-time crooks (veteran British character actors Sidney James and Alfie Bass), Holland swipes a gold bullion shipment, then smuggles the booty to France in the form of miniature Eiffel Towers. The humor is mostly low-key and character-driven under Charles Crichton's direction. At the end, though, there's a dandy high-speed car chase that's fresher and funnier than many similar scenes in more recent comedies. Pay close attention during the opening scene -- yes, that really is a young Audrey Hepburn who briefly dallies with Guinness.

Recalling a time when Martin Landau recalled his experiences with Steven Spielberg, Peter Falk, naughty fan mail and, of course, Space: 1999

I had the pleasure of chatting with the late, great Martin Landau on several occasions — including a 1996 TV junket for The Adventures of Pinocchio, a movie he made just two years after his Oscar-winning performance as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. (As I wrote in my Variety review: “Martin Landau plays Geppetto, the aging puppet-maker who becomes a father for the first time after his latest creation magically springs to life. It’s a role that could have been played with broad gestures, cheap sentiment and other easy acting tricks. It is much to Landau’s credit that he takes a more restrained approach, in a largely successful attempt to make the character seem more endearingly poignant than boisterously amusing.”) But when I heard of his passing Saturday at age 89, the encounter I remembered most vividly was a 1980 interview I did with him for The Dallas Morning News, where I was employed at the time, when he came to Big D to promote a movie called The Last Word.

Mind you, there was nothing very memorable about the movie itself. (Truth to tell, I had to double check my files a few minutes ago to ascertain that I had actually seen it.) But I do recall that Landau was engagingly gracious and entertainingly loquacious, and that our free-wheeling tête-à-tête took some interesting detours. Like, when he talked about what he described as several instances of “bad timing” in the years following his departure from the Mission: Impossible TV series.

To quote my Dallas Morning News article:

“‘I made a movie with Peter Falk and Jason Robards called Operation Snafu… I thought it was hilarious when I read [the script]. But it came out the same year as M*A*S*H and Kelly’s Heroes, two other war comedies. I thought we were going to be first, but we wound up third.’

“As a result, Landau noted, the comedy… received a pitifully limited release, and was quickly dropped into the television market.

“Two years later, Landau and [his then-wife Barbara Bain] teamed for Savage, a 90-minute pilot film for a projected series about an investigative reporter.

“’That was before Watergate, before 60 Minutes,’” he said. ‘Nobody wanted a series about an investigative reporter. They were afraid of the show’

Ironically, the failed pilot was an early effort of a director whose time had not yet come — Steven Spielberg.

“’I had to fight to get Spielberg,’ Landau said. ‘At the time, he hadn’t done a whole lot. He was 23 at the time. It was right after he did Duel, but he had a reputation of going over budget.

“‘He did go over budget [on Savage]. But he’s always been talented. 1941 was one of his few less-than-successful ventures.’ Landau smiled wanly and added, ‘Savage was the other.’”

“In 1975, Landau and his wife teamed again for a slightly more successful television venture. Space: 1999, a production of Britain’s flamboyant Sir Lew Grade, featured Landau as the commander of a moon base where nuclear wastes were stored. When the waste material exploded, the moon — and some 300 people stationed on the base — went spinning off into outer space.

“The show, which depicted the misadventures of the people on the prowling planet, attracted a sizable audience in the United States, and an even greater following in Europe. After two years, however, the producer opted to pull the plug on the program when its ratings dipped slightly.

“‘Lew Grade got into motion pictures,’ Landau said. “The $7 million it would have taken to continue our show was what he needed for the advertising budget for Voyage of the Damned, The Eagle Has Landed and The Cassandra Crossing.’

“So Grade decided to end production on Space: 1999 — just a matter of months before Star Wars hit the world’s movie screens and kicked off a brand new science-fiction craze. Had Space: 1999 been able to hold out for a bit longer, it conceivably could have capitalized on the Star Wars mania and vastly improved its ratings.

“Even so, the series has been thriving in reruns. ‘There’s a whole cult around it,’ Landau said. ‘Not as big as the Star Trek cult, but still a cult… I get all kinds of things in the mail. Fan mail. Marriage letters. Divorce letters — things that read, “Divorce that broad and marry me.” Sometimes you even get pictures that are a little indecent — but that’s very rare.’

“‘At science fiction conventions, outtakes from the show, single frames of film, go for $10. I went to a convention in Columbus, Ohio — and 10,000 people showed up. A uniform I wore went there for something like $400. I thought, “My God. I wish I had kept my suits.” But it was too late.’”

Undeterred, Martin Landau pressed on, racking up an astonishing number of TV credits over the next three decades. He earned Academy Award nominations for his pitch-perfect performances in Francis Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) — and finally took home the Best Supporting Actor prize for Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994). 

Obviously, there are other credits on his resume that bespoke of a working actor’s incessant need to pay his rent and maintain his visibility. But consider this: Landau’s resume ran the gamut from Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest to Entourage (both the HBO series and the movie spin-off). He appeared as a regular or guest star on many TV series, and even managed to make a strong impression in something as otherwise unremarkable as The Evidence, a short-lived 2006 police procedural that, I confess, I continued to watch (just to watch Landau) even after ABC consigned it to ignominious burn-off on Saturday nights.

In short, he had a hell of a run, because he was a hell of an actor. And while I can’t claim we were close friends, I strongly suspect, based on my experiences on those occasions when our paths crossed, that he was a hell of a nice guy. Even when his timing may have been off.

My tribute to George Romero and a Night to remember

For a variety of reasons, I have never seen any of the sequels to George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead — well, unless you want to count Dan O’Bannon’s gruesomely amusing The Return of the Living Dead (1985) — perhaps I’ve always considered it a tough act to follow. Or, more likely, because I don’t think any audience response to any sequel (or remake) — at any time, anywhere — could top the one I noted, and shared, when I first saw Romero’s classic 1968 horror opus during my college days.

While I was attending Loyola University in New Orleans back in the 1970s, I attended an evening screening in a large auditorium on campus. The crowd (including me) was impressed and attentive. Indeed, at least one of my fellow students may have been a little too impressed and attentive.

The first time a group of the shambling undead appeared on screen, a shriek rang out from the darkness: “Don’t let them get me! Don’t let them get me!” At first, I figured someone was goofing off, or encouraging some kind of audience participation. (Little did I know that, only a couple years later, such behavior would become commonplace at midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) But then it happened a second time. Louder. And a third time. Louder still. By that point, it was quite obvious that whoever was screaming was totally, unabashedly, nearly-scared-to-death terrified.

After the third outburst, two people — friends? faculty? security personnel? I never found out — more or less lifted this frightened fellow from his seat and carried him (gently, as far as I could tell) out of the auditorium. But not before the guy had managed to make some of us (again, including me) even more uneasy while watching Romero’s masterwork.

Maybe his fear was a natural reaction, maybe it was, ahem, chemically enhanced. But, either way, that fear obviously was contagious. And how do I know this? Well, here’s the thing: None of the other people in the audience laughed when he screamed the second and third times. Come to think of it, as I recall, no one told him to shut the hell up, either.

George Romero passed away Sunday at age 77. He often is credited with starting the zombie movie genre – even though no one in his Night of the Living Dead ever actually uses the term “zombie” to describe the reanimated corpses that makes such nuisances of themselves. I’ll leave it up to others whether he deserves that acknowledgement. All I can say is, all these years later, I smile whenever I think of the night he enabled me to experience something that was, you know, really scary.

Spider-Fan! Spider-Fan! I'm your friendly neighborhood Spider-Fan!

And that's why my editors at Variety asked me to write this rundown of all six Spider-Man movies, ranking them worst to last. Naturally, the new Spider-Man: Homecoming figures into the mix.

One mo' time: Celebrating Independence Day with Bill Pullman

I am an immigrant's son, and I get paid to go to the movies. Truly, this is the land of opportunity. And so, to celebrate tomorrow's birthday of our great nation, I once again present the ridiculously corny yet tremendously affecting speech given by a beleaguered U.S. President (potently played by Bill Pullman) to rally a final push against invading extraterrestrials in Independence Day. Let freedom ring.

(And yes, I appreciate the fact that this fictional president probably would be more effective than the current Commander in Chief in uniting us against a foreign threat.)

Mom goes time-tripping in Chinese-produced thriller Reset

The Korean filmmaker known as Chang does the time warp again, and again, in the Chinese-produced sci-fi thriller Reset, a film best described as the fair-to-middling realization of a cleverer-than-average high concept. The MacGuffin here is a “data module” that contains info about technology capable of sending people way back into the past — make that back 110 minutes or so — through artificial wormholes leading to parallel universes. But that’s merely the impetus for repeated time-jumps by research physicist Xia Tang (Yang Mi), whose five-year-old son is kidnapped by bad guys demanding ownership of the aforementioned module, and who must go to extremes on two different occasions when her little boy is killed twice.

Reset — which won Best Picture and Best Actress prizes last April at the WordFest/Houston International Film Festival — opened Friday in theatrical and digital release. You can read the rest of my Variety review here.

TCM celebrates July 4 with 1776. And so should you.

Ten years ago this week, I rediscovered 1776 on Turner Classic Movies. At 10:15 pm ET/ 9:15 pm CT Tuesday, July 4, you, too, can re-evaluate (or see for the very first time) on TCM a restored version of the movie -- one of the last Old Hollywood adaptations of a hit Broadway musical. And take it from me: Even if, like me, you were none too impressed by it back in the day, you'll find it was substantially improved by the restoration of scenes and songs that had been deleted by producer  Jack Warner  before its ’72 theatrical release. (No less a notable than then-President Richard Nixon "requested" the deletion of a tune that tweaked conservatives.)

As I noted in 2007: "1776 still is something less than an unadulterated masterwork. (Although director Peter H. Hunt manages some impressive wide-screen compositions, he’s a tad too literal-minded in some aspects of his stage-to-screen translation.) Taken as a whole, however, the movie is wonderfully entertaining – and, better still, undeniably inspiring -- as it offers an intelligently yet playfully romanticized account of events leading to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But wait, there’s more: The cast includes most of the major players from the original 1969 Broadway ensemble – including William Daniels (John Adams), Howard Da Silva (Benjamin Franklin) and Ken Howard (Thomas Jefferson), all at their finest – along with an absolutely luminescent Blythe Danner (who was pregnant with Gwyneth Paltrow during filming) as Martha Jefferson. And the heated debates over individual rights and tyrannical rulers are, alas, every bit as relevant today as in 1776 or 1972." Or 2017.

More pertinent than ever: The reluctant agreement by Adams, Franklin and Jefferson to delete a key paragraph from their original draft of the Declaration.