1980s films | Cary Grant Won't Eat You

Say Anything Fan? Holiday (1938) Is the Classic Film for You

09/06/2014 by leah@carygrantwonteatyou.com 2 Comments

A hero who reveals his vulnerability, yet retains his pride; the kind of man devoted enough to lift a jukebox above his head blaring Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” to woo the girl who dumped him, yet still grounded enough to enjoy relaxing with his friends; a boy with few prospects who is seeking a “dare-to-be-great” situation.

There’s a reason Say Anything (1989) and its hero, Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), were nearly universally worshipped by every middle and high school girl I knew. Cusack quickly became the heartthrob of my generation, just as Cary Grant was to his. In Holiday, Grant played a role much like Cusack’s in Say Anything. That’s why if you’re a diehard lover of Lloyd Dobler, I think you should check out this 1938 film and see for yourself the many similarities:

Lightheartedness
Those accustomed to seeing Grant’s suave persona on display in clips and photos might not realize how fun it is to witness him being the opposite—silly, playful, with that same uneasily expressed, coltish confidence in himself that makes Lloyd Dobler so appealing. In Holiday, Johnny (Grant) likes to do flips to cheer himself out of tough times or worries, just as Lloyd chides his sister for not being able to pull out of hers.

Romancing the Daddy’s Girl—and Daddy Ain’t So Great
Both films feature heroines who are too close to fathers who don’t deserve such adulation. In Say Anything, Diane’s dad (John Mahoney) winds up being a crook; in Holiday, Julia’s (Henry Kolker) is so obsessed with money and status that he verges on caricature.

Johnny’s fiancée and her father

Much of Holiday focuses on Johnny’s discovery that Julia (Doris Nolan) is much closer to her father’s character than he realized, just as Say Anything shows Diane (Ione Skye) slowly recognizing that her father is not the moral center of her universe. Luckily, we have both of Julia’s siblings, Linda (Katharine Hepburn) and Ned (Lew Ayres), mocking their dad the whole time in Holiday, which is way funnier than the whole Diane-Dad snooze fest.

Unconventional Ambitions
Both heroes have unpopular dreams. Lloyd’s is beautifully expressed when Diane’s dad opens the door and he tries to sell himself as a trustworthy date: “I’m an athlete, so I rarely drink. You heard of kickboxing, sport of the future?”*

Lloyd responds to a question about his career plans with “Spend as much time as possible with Diane before she leaves” and proceeds to give an amusing description of his hopes: “Considering what’s waiting out there for me, I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career….So what I’ve been doing lately is kickboxing….”

Grant’s plan, captured in the film’s title, is to take a vacation from employment. He’s worked since the age of ten, and isn’t sure what he’s doing it for: “I want to know how I stand, where I fit in the picture, what it’s all gonna mean to me. I can’t find that out sitting behind some desk in an office, so as soon as I get enough money together, I’m going to knock off for a while….I want to save part of my life for myself….You know, retire young, work old, come back and work when I know what I’m working for, does that make sense to you?”

Johnny, like Lloyd, makes fun of the idea of needing familial or professional connections: “When I find myself in a position like this, I ask myself what would General Motors do? And then I do the opposite.”

And like Lloyd, Johnny thinks his love should be enough for Julia’s father: After offering a character reference, he adds, “I’m quite decent and fairly civilized. I love your daughter very much, which isn’t a bit hard. She seems to like me a lot too. And uh, well, that’s about all that can be said for me, except that I think we have a grand chance of being awfully happy.”

A Marvelous Support Network
Both men are backed by funny friends who provide much of the comic relief of their films. Edward Everett Horton plays a professor and Jean Dixon his wife, Susan; they are friends of Johnny’s who gravitate toward Linda rather than Johnny’s fiancée. When they arrive at the fussy engagement party for the couple, Susan says, “Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve got a run in my stocking.” “Good heavens, we’re ruined,” answers her husband. “Not a word of this to a soul,” he warns the butler.

Among Lloyd’s many entertaining friends, Corey (Lili Taylor) is the obvious standout, with her 63 songs about her ex and classic line in response to Lloyd’s “…I’m a guy. I have pride”: “You’re not a guy…The world is full of guys. Be a man.”

In Johnny’s case, Julia proves to be remarkably dull, and soon is outshone by her supportive sister, Linda (Hepburn). Linda can be quite amusing, though at times she’s a bit melodramatic about the family woes.

In Say Anything, we’re stuck with Ione Skye as the romantic interest the whole film, with that terrible acting doing nothing for any of us. When Diane dumps Cusack, all the viewers may protest, but it was a relief not to hear Skye talk for a bit and listen to Lloyd’s friends instead.

Rising Above…
Both Johnny and Lloyd display a remarkable level of emotional maturity—Lloyd, in his continued efforts to unite Diane and her father once they become estranged in spite of the latter’s hostility toward him.

And Johnny, in his attention to his fiancée’s needs and sensitivity to her family despite her father’s rudeness toward him.

After asking many not-so-subtle questions about Johnny’s connections, Julia’s father expresses zero interest in her suitor’s obvious resourcefulness, the loss of his mother, and his pride in who he is. Johnny freely discusses his background: his dad’s grocery ownership and debts, an alcoholic uncle, and his own work as a steel mill worker, garbage truck driver, and laundry worker while earning his degree at Harvard. While he isn’t exactly trying to provoke the father’s snobbery, he clearly is amused by it.

“Admirable,” the father says after hearing Johnny’s answers about his life, with no sincerity whatsoever.

“Anything else, sir?” Johnny finally asks.

“I beg your pardon?” the father replies.

“I should think you would,” snaps Linda.

Luckily, fun-loving Linda is the one Johnny will eventually be falling for. If my description doesn’t win you, hopefully this image of the former acrobat (Grant) in action will.

*When I mentioned this quote on kickboxing, my husband pointed out that Lloyd was one prescient guy given the success of UFC….

The Moment I Fell for Robin Williams

08/20/2014 by leah@carygrantwonteatyou.com 4 Comments

Last week, while I was seeking Lauren Bacall tributes online, I avoided my TV because I didn’t want to see any Robin Williams ones. The loss was simply too raw, too big for me to watch some summary of a man who slipped through any easy definitions. After all, it was this breathtaking versatility; best demonstrated in Good Morning, Vietnam; that I couldn’t face losing.

While I’m usually quick to attack the Academy for their humorlessness, I agreed with them that dramas displayed Williams’s most remarkable work. Who else could be so manic in humor, and then so quiet in pathos? So riveting in his energy, and even more so (perhaps because of it) in his stillness?

The actor’s sad scenes were the more so because you could feel the good humor bubbling beneath, the fact that this man was capable of very great joy. The first word that comes to mind with Williams is not funny, but empathetic. This man understood human nature like no comic I’ve ever witnessed, and any humor writer will tell you that truth is at the root of all good comedy.

The surprise of finally seeing the actor win an Oscar for Good Will Hunting was not at the Academy having snored through Good Morning, Vietnam (how else to explain Michael Douglas winning instead for his one-dimensional performance in Wall Street?). The shock was in recognizing that this guy should have been playing therapists all along.

My favorite Williams performance was probably in Awakenings. But I fell for him much, much earlier. It wasn’t in Mork & Mindy, in which his fevered acting was exhausting to watch, even for a little kid. I couldn’t take the show very often, even though I always did laugh. No. I fell for Williams in Popeye, the first film he starred in.

Now hear me out. I am not going to argue that this flop is a good film, that it’s under-appreciated or even tolerable. Oh no. It’s so much worse than you remember.

Paul L. Smith as villain Bluto

Williams is not very good in it either. But I fell hard for him for agreeing to take the role at all, and for having so much fun with it once he did. This spinach-eating cartoon character was always my favorite, and though I’ll admit to a vague horror on first hearing a human would be playing it, and in a musical, I was impressed with how completely Williams embraced the role. Such an unsuccessful campy movie I could easily dismiss, but for Williams as Popeye, even in a shaky performance, I felt a kind of awe.

Olive Oyl (Shelley Duvall) with Popeye

One could argue that the actor was just beginning, that this was a role he could get. But that wouldn’t explain all of Williams’s baffling choices over the years, that sense that he sometimes took parts simply to avoid taking his career, or himself, too seriously. How else can anyone explain Hook? And as I mourn Williams, I don’t want to see his best work; it’s too easy to imagine in his depiction of every emotion the darkness that would take him from us. So instead, I’m gonna stick with his silliness for a while. I’ll rewatch The World according to Garp, perhaps The Birdcage, maybe even the batshit-crazy Shakes the Clown. And yes, I’m going to spend some time with the ever-mumbling, ever-smiling, greens-loving sailor man.

No Oscar Love for Harold Ramis: The Academy, as Humorless as Ever

02/27/2014 by leah@carygrantwonteatyou.com 6 Comments

Harold Ramis, whom President Obama labeled “one of America’s greatest satirists,” died this week shortly before this Sunday’s Oscars. His list of co-writing credits is astonishing: Animal House, Stripes, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day. He also directed the latter, Caddyshack, and Vacation. I’m sure the Academy will clap enthusiastically this weekend when his face appears in the “In Memoriam” tribute, but they won’t express what they should: regret. Ramis never won an Oscar; in fact, he was never even nominated.

Harold Ramis: won A BAFTA, but no Oscar

In the years the Academy snubbed Ramis, comedies did make appearances in the original screenplay category, including Private Benjamin, Splash, Beverly Hills Cop, Sleepless in Seattle, and Dave. But many of the nominations were of grim films you didn’t know then, much less now. The following were the original screenplay winners the years Ramis could have been nominated:

Coming Home (Animal House), Melvin and Howard (Caddyshack), Places in the Heart (Ghostbusters), and The Piano (Groundhog Day).

Most Oscar nominees for original screenplay are not bad movies; the Academy saves their embarrassing choices for the best film category (Crash, anyone?) But have these screenplay winners stood the test of time? Have they influenced you—or anyone you know—in any way?

Here’s a test for you:

Can you quote from it?

Do you adopt cultural affectations from it (perhaps Roman)?
Have you sung along with it?
Does it give you more understanding for the weak kid or the outsider, perhaps make you feel more comfortable challenging authority? (See this great Ramis bio.)

Does it bring back childhood memories that make you grin, maybe your best Halloween costume ever?

Have you lost count of how many times you’ve seen it?
Do you (be honest) feel tempted to dance with a certain character’s nemesis during the closing scene?

Of course, the Academy—and critics in general—have long shown more appreciation for drama than comedy, failing to see in it the far subtler, and often more trenchant and artful cultural critique it can provide. In 1941, Preston Sturges, a writer/director who, like Ramis, was fond of what’s often dismissed as “adolescent” humor, wrote an entire film addressing the greater appreciation given to drama, Sullivan’s Travels. But unlike with the usual Oscar winners, this time, the case for comedies is much more persuasive.

It begins with a scene between a director (Sullivan, played by Joel McCrea) and his bosses (Mr. LeBrand and Mr. Hadrian). Sullivan has decided to write a serious film, which his bosses fear will be less profitable than his usual comedies. Why not do a sequel to your Ants in Your Plants of 1939 instead? they ask him. His movies are inspiring, they tell him. They don’t, as Hadrian puts it, “stink with messages.”

Sullivan (Joel McCrea in the middle) with his bosses

Mr. LeBland, Sullivan (Joel McCrea) and Mr. Hadrian

Sullivan tries to argue them into supporting his new effort, showing them a scene from his O Brother, Where Art Thou? (yes, Coen fans, that’s where they got it)

Sullivan: “You see the symbolism of it?….It teaches a lesson, a moral lesson, it has social significance.”

Hadrian: “Who wants to see that kind of stuff? It gives me the creeps.”

….

Sullivan: “I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions, stark realism, the problems that confront the average man.”

LeBrand: “But with a little sex.”

….

Hadrian: “How about a nice musical?”

Sullivan: “How can you talk about musicals in a time like this, with the world committing suicide, with corpses piling up in the streets?…..”

Hadrian: “Maybe they’d like to forget that.”

After Hadrian convinces Sullivan he’s too inexperienced with suffering to direct movies about it, the latter decides to go on a quest to learn about poverty firsthand. A despondent LeBrand barks at his assistant, “Get me a copy of that O Brother, Where Art Thou? I guess I’ll have to read it now. Make that two copies. Why should I suffer alone?”

By the end of the movie, Sullivan agrees with his bosses that he should keep directing comedies. He discovers that his movies, silly as they may be, have something to offer that dramas never will: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have?”

In fact, Sturges begins the movie with a dedication that could have been written for Ramis: “To the memory of those who made us laugh….in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little….” Not a bad epitaph, from one comedic genius to another.

Incidentally, Sullivan’s Travels (1941) ranked on the AFI’s top 100. But you guessed it: Not a single Oscar nomination.