For Boomers, Alice in Wonderland became associated with Christmas through the good offices of Walt Disney. Even before his animated movie version was completed, he showed a scene from it as part of his Christmas television special in 1950, co-hosted by the young Kathyrn Beaumont, who provided Alice's voice in the film. When his Disneyland show became a weekly series, he featured an hour version of the movie as his Christmas shows in 1954 and again in 1964.
All this is revealed on the two disk DVD of the Disney movie, still the best known dramatization of Alice. Moreover, the digitized DVD version reveals its breathtaking use of color, and of course the kind of sumptuous and witty animation that just isn't done anymore. (The people who made Yellow Submarine must have watched it many times.)
Since then, Alice's adventures have been dramatized many times in the movies and on TV. The usual practice was to fill the numerous but relatively small roles with the name actors and comics of the day. A surprising number of these Alices are available on DVD. For instance:
Jonathan Miller did a 1966 television version with Peter Sellers, John Gielgud and music by Ravi Shankar. Ralph Richardson and Michael Crawford were in a 1972 film, with Alice played by the future "Bond girl," Fiona Fullerton.
There was a 1985 version, scripted by Paul Zindel and with music by Steve Allen, that featured Donald O'Connor, Martha Raye, Telly Savalas, Shelley Winters, Sid Caesar and Ringo Starr. Kate Burton was a charming Alice in her first credited role in 1983, co-starring with her father, Richard Burton, as well as Nathan Lane and Maureen Stapleton.
And a 1999 TV movie featured Martin Short, Robbie Coltrane, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lloyd and Miranda Richardson with Jim Henson's puppets.
By now, Alice is seen on stage (in ballets, musicals and stage plays) around the country at Christmastime. But for my money, that Disney DVD is still the best.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Monday, December 24, 2007
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
R.I.P. Elders
The deaths of two classic film directors were announced
within days of each other this week: Ingmar Bergman,
whose movies deeply influenced the Boomer generation
of filmmakers as well as filmgoers (see more on Bergman
here). He died at age 89.
Michelangelo Antonioni died at age 94. His films influenced
many filmmakers and cinema buffs of the Boomer film
generation, but he also made several films that directly
reflected on the 1960s, such as Zabriskie Point and his
most famous film, Blow-Up, with Vanessa Redgrave
(pictured here) in an early screen appearance.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Movies: To Kill A Mockingbird
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch with Mary Badham
as his daughter, Scout, in To Kill A Mockingbird.
Movies
To Kill A Mockingbird
Released in 1962 and starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch , To Kill A Mockingbird was an immediate hit. Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and only Lawrence of Arabia could deny this movie the honor of Best Picture. More than 40 years later, it is still among the most popular and acclaimed movies of all time. Recently the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch as the greatest film hero in the history of movies.
The movie was based on the novel by Harper Lee, also both an immediate and lasting success. She wedded childhood memories with a courtroom drama that struck a chord as the Civil Rights era was reaching its fruition. For example:
In the town of Monroeville, Alabama, a rich man’s son was caught joyriding in a stolen car. His father persuaded the sheriff not to arrest the boy, but to leave the punishment up to him. He imposed three years of house arrest, but it turned into a life sentence when even after that time the young man found he could no longer face leaving the confines of his house, except at night. He became an object of mystery and fear in the neighborhood. Or so the local story goes.
This was Nelle Harper Lee’s hometown in the 1930s. She left it for college, then law school in her father’s footsteps, though she stopped just shy of completing her degree. Instead she went to New York, where she worked as an airline reservations clerk and accompanied her childhood friend, Truman Capote, as he researched his book about two murderers in Kansas, In Cold Blood. (Catherine Keener plays her in the film Capote, and looks very much like her 1960s photos.)
[text continues after photos]
Released in 1962 and starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch , To Kill A Mockingbird was an immediate hit. Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and only Lawrence of Arabia could deny this movie the honor of Best Picture. More than 40 years later, it is still among the most popular and acclaimed movies of all time. Recently the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch as the greatest film hero in the history of movies.
The movie was based on the novel by Harper Lee, also both an immediate and lasting success. She wedded childhood memories with a courtroom drama that struck a chord as the Civil Rights era was reaching its fruition. For example:
In the town of Monroeville, Alabama, a rich man’s son was caught joyriding in a stolen car. His father persuaded the sheriff not to arrest the boy, but to leave the punishment up to him. He imposed three years of house arrest, but it turned into a life sentence when even after that time the young man found he could no longer face leaving the confines of his house, except at night. He became an object of mystery and fear in the neighborhood. Or so the local story goes.
This was Nelle Harper Lee’s hometown in the 1930s. She left it for college, then law school in her father’s footsteps, though she stopped just shy of completing her degree. Instead she went to New York, where she worked as an airline reservations clerk and accompanied her childhood friend, Truman Capote, as he researched his book about two murderers in Kansas, In Cold Blood. (Catherine Keener plays her in the film Capote, and looks very much like her 1960s photos.)
[text continues after photos]
She began writing in earnest in the mid 50s, returning frequently to Alabama to nurse her ailing father. One Christmas in Manhattan, a songwriter friend and his wife gave her a unique gift—a year’s income, to support her writing. (The songwriter was Michael Brown, who made his reputation and probably his fortune producing industrial musicals for clients like DuPont and Woolworth.)
She used it to write the first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, and remains among the top 10 best selling novels from then until now. It is one of the five most assigned novels in American schools, and American librarians recently voted it the best novel of the twentieth century.
Harper Lee transformed memories of her childhood: her father was the inspiration for Atticus Finch, Truman Capote became Dill, and that ghostly young man was the probable prototype for Boo Radley. (That story is not well known, by the way. I found it in an academic thesis online by the director of a University of Alabama production of the play, who visited Monroeville.)
To refresh your memory of the story: Atticus Finch is the widowed father of the tomboy Scout (Harper Lee’s self-portrait) and Jem (Scout’s older brother). Atticus is a lawyer appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a young black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. This event is based partly on a case of her father’s, and partly on the infamous Scottsboro Trials of young black men falsely convicted of raping a white woman, also in the 1930s, when Harper Lee was about the same age as her fictional stand-in, Jean-Louise, known as Scout.
She used it to write the first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, and remains among the top 10 best selling novels from then until now. It is one of the five most assigned novels in American schools, and American librarians recently voted it the best novel of the twentieth century.
Harper Lee transformed memories of her childhood: her father was the inspiration for Atticus Finch, Truman Capote became Dill, and that ghostly young man was the probable prototype for Boo Radley. (That story is not well known, by the way. I found it in an academic thesis online by the director of a University of Alabama production of the play, who visited Monroeville.)
To refresh your memory of the story: Atticus Finch is the widowed father of the tomboy Scout (Harper Lee’s self-portrait) and Jem (Scout’s older brother). Atticus is a lawyer appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a young black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. This event is based partly on a case of her father’s, and partly on the infamous Scottsboro Trials of young black men falsely convicted of raping a white woman, also in the 1930s, when Harper Lee was about the same age as her fictional stand-in, Jean-Louise, known as Scout.
Lee’s first submitted version of the work was reportedly more of a series of linked stories (ironically, a very hot form in fiction at the present moment.) But her publisher insisted on a more unified novel.
Lee was able to achieve this partly by following in linear time the education of the young girl, Scout and her brother, Jem, and partly by weaving a few important themes throughout the book. The first was about innocence, both of children and of “the mockingbird”—the innocent who only sings and does no one any harm—which applies to both Tom Robinson, the accused black man Atticus defends, and to Boo Radley, the neighbor who lives in darkness, the stranger in their midst who receives their projections of violence, and is therefore a source of fear.
He is different (and a kind of artist, who creates sculptures and leaves them for the children to find, along with talismans of his own “normal” childhood). He is literally unseen, and so represents the aspects of people we are blind to, because of our preconceptions. This obviously applies to race, and there is also a strong theme of class in the novel—which cuts both ways. (It can be argued that Atticus has his own class prejudices.)
The second theme, which follows from the first and is explicitly stated as a lesson to the novel’s children, is that of cultivating empathy and understanding by trying to see the world from the other’s perspective (as Scout does finally when she stands on Boo Radley’s porch at the end), by metaphorically living in someone else’s skin, walking in their shoes. This is a lesson about life and specifically about race. It remains the most crucial lesson in our public as well as private lives, and so this too accounts for this novel’s standing.
It is reinforced in other ways throughout the novel, notably by the brief story of Mrs. Dubose, a surly neighbor who insults everyone, including Scout and Jem, and says harsh things about Atticus. When Jem loses his temper and destroys her garden flowers, Atticus sends him to Mrs. Dubose to apologize and make restitution. Mr. D. requires him to read aloud to her everyday. When she dies, they learn that she was always in pain and addicted to morphine, which accounted for her harsh behavior. She decided she would die free of her addiction, and Jem reading to her was a way for her to bear the pain. It’s another example of assumptions and projections contradicted by understanding, as well as a story of redemption and the power of simple acts to do good.
Lee was able to achieve this partly by following in linear time the education of the young girl, Scout and her brother, Jem, and partly by weaving a few important themes throughout the book. The first was about innocence, both of children and of “the mockingbird”—the innocent who only sings and does no one any harm—which applies to both Tom Robinson, the accused black man Atticus defends, and to Boo Radley, the neighbor who lives in darkness, the stranger in their midst who receives their projections of violence, and is therefore a source of fear.
He is different (and a kind of artist, who creates sculptures and leaves them for the children to find, along with talismans of his own “normal” childhood). He is literally unseen, and so represents the aspects of people we are blind to, because of our preconceptions. This obviously applies to race, and there is also a strong theme of class in the novel—which cuts both ways. (It can be argued that Atticus has his own class prejudices.)
The second theme, which follows from the first and is explicitly stated as a lesson to the novel’s children, is that of cultivating empathy and understanding by trying to see the world from the other’s perspective (as Scout does finally when she stands on Boo Radley’s porch at the end), by metaphorically living in someone else’s skin, walking in their shoes. This is a lesson about life and specifically about race. It remains the most crucial lesson in our public as well as private lives, and so this too accounts for this novel’s standing.
It is reinforced in other ways throughout the novel, notably by the brief story of Mrs. Dubose, a surly neighbor who insults everyone, including Scout and Jem, and says harsh things about Atticus. When Jem loses his temper and destroys her garden flowers, Atticus sends him to Mrs. Dubose to apologize and make restitution. Mr. D. requires him to read aloud to her everyday. When she dies, they learn that she was always in pain and addicted to morphine, which accounted for her harsh behavior. She decided she would die free of her addiction, and Jem reading to her was a way for her to bear the pain. It’s another example of assumptions and projections contradicted by understanding, as well as a story of redemption and the power of simple acts to do good.
As the Civil Rights Movement came to fruition in the early 1960s, the book struck a chord. So did the equally classic 1962 movie version.
The movie has quite a pedigree behind the camera. Alan Pakula produced it (today perhaps even more renowned as a director), Robert Mulligan directed, Elmer Bernstein wrote the musical score, and the screenplay was written by Horton Foote, the Texan playwright, who had written extensively for television drama and later wrote many acclaimed movie scripts, including Tender Mercies for Robert Duvall.
Harper Lee was a consultant on the movie and present for the filming (mostly on a backlot in California.) She and other participants formed lifelong friendships on that set. She and Gregory Peck in particular remained close. As she watched the first scene being shot she was seen to shed a few tears: he reminded her so much of her father.
Young Mary Badham, who played the six year old “Scout,” also kept in touch with Peck for the rest of his life. She felt close to him immediately on the set, and between takes would be seen hanging onto him in his lap. She called him “Atticus” ever after.
The movie has quite a pedigree behind the camera. Alan Pakula produced it (today perhaps even more renowned as a director), Robert Mulligan directed, Elmer Bernstein wrote the musical score, and the screenplay was written by Horton Foote, the Texan playwright, who had written extensively for television drama and later wrote many acclaimed movie scripts, including Tender Mercies for Robert Duvall.
Harper Lee was a consultant on the movie and present for the filming (mostly on a backlot in California.) She and other participants formed lifelong friendships on that set. She and Gregory Peck in particular remained close. As she watched the first scene being shot she was seen to shed a few tears: he reminded her so much of her father.
Young Mary Badham, who played the six year old “Scout,” also kept in touch with Peck for the rest of his life. She felt close to him immediately on the set, and between takes would be seen hanging onto him in his lap. She called him “Atticus” ever after.
A wide search for children to play Scout and her brother Jem was conducted in various southern cities, but the actors selected, Badham and Philip Alford as Jem, lived within a couple of blocks of each other in Birmingham, though they’d never met.
Mary Badham was herself a “tomboy,” as was her character, and the girl that Scout was based on—Harper Lee. She acted for several more years, and was in one more notable movie (This Property is Condemned, based on a Tennessee Williams play, written by Francis Ford Copolla and starring Robert Redford and Natalie Wood.) She gave up acting by the late 60s but has returned to it in recent years.
While Harper Lee is reclusive, living at least part of the time back in Monroeville, it is Mary Badham who represents this movie when it is honored and shown at festivals.
The movie streamlines the story of the novel by collapsing the events into a single year. It very carefully tells the story from the children’s point of view, even in shot selection. Though the subplot of Mrs. Dubose (played by the accomplished actor, Ruth White) was shot, director Mulligan felt it sidetracked the momentum of the film and most of the scenes were cut. It’s said her performance was brilliant.
There are so many indelible images, performances and moments in this movie. One little noted performance by William Windom for example, as the prosecutor in the courtroom scene. He brought just the right amount of cool contempt for a black defendant, and confidence that he would be able to trip him up. And he was quick to pounce on Robinson's remarks that he felt sorry for the white woman. (Today's audiences may not automatically understand what a violation this is. No matter how far down the class continuum a white person is, it was the iron law of the racist South that the poorest white was still better than any black person. For a black person to "feel sorry" for a white was to assert equality if not superiority, and that was unforgivable.)
Even the way Windom sat during Gregory Peck's summation, with his leg dangling, expressed the Good Old Boy arrogance that assumed the verdict, even when in terms of facts he had no case.
But we return to Mary Badham's remarkable presence and performance, especially in a scene of Peck as Attticus putting Scout to bed and talking of her mother (added to the film and not a scene in the book), and then of course in one of the most moving scenes in any film—when she sees Robert Duvall behind the door, and recognizes him, and with a luminous smile says, “Hey, Boo.” Her face in this film is absolutely unique.
Mary Badham was herself a “tomboy,” as was her character, and the girl that Scout was based on—Harper Lee. She acted for several more years, and was in one more notable movie (This Property is Condemned, based on a Tennessee Williams play, written by Francis Ford Copolla and starring Robert Redford and Natalie Wood.) She gave up acting by the late 60s but has returned to it in recent years.
While Harper Lee is reclusive, living at least part of the time back in Monroeville, it is Mary Badham who represents this movie when it is honored and shown at festivals.
The movie streamlines the story of the novel by collapsing the events into a single year. It very carefully tells the story from the children’s point of view, even in shot selection. Though the subplot of Mrs. Dubose (played by the accomplished actor, Ruth White) was shot, director Mulligan felt it sidetracked the momentum of the film and most of the scenes were cut. It’s said her performance was brilliant.
There are so many indelible images, performances and moments in this movie. One little noted performance by William Windom for example, as the prosecutor in the courtroom scene. He brought just the right amount of cool contempt for a black defendant, and confidence that he would be able to trip him up. And he was quick to pounce on Robinson's remarks that he felt sorry for the white woman. (Today's audiences may not automatically understand what a violation this is. No matter how far down the class continuum a white person is, it was the iron law of the racist South that the poorest white was still better than any black person. For a black person to "feel sorry" for a white was to assert equality if not superiority, and that was unforgivable.)
Even the way Windom sat during Gregory Peck's summation, with his leg dangling, expressed the Good Old Boy arrogance that assumed the verdict, even when in terms of facts he had no case.
But we return to Mary Badham's remarkable presence and performance, especially in a scene of Peck as Attticus putting Scout to bed and talking of her mother (added to the film and not a scene in the book), and then of course in one of the most moving scenes in any film—when she sees Robert Duvall behind the door, and recognizes him, and with a luminous smile says, “Hey, Boo.” Her face in this film is absolutely unique.
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