Tag: Herb Edelman

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Front Page

Written by Richard T. Jameson October 19, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 36, October 1974]

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Avanti! bombed. The Front Page may well make lots of dollars. I like to see Billy Wilder on top, but Sherlock Holmes and Avanti! will live through the ages whereas The Front Page, a calculated catch at prepackaged commercial success, is as mummified as the makeup-encased actors inhabiting it. It’s among the several worst films Wilder has ever made.

I must say the idea bothered me from the first. The director appeared to have come to terms with so many of his demons in those recent, mellow, glowingly personal pictures. The Front Page seemed a clear reversion to professional-wiseass territory—a country Wilder occasionally made his own, but the spoils of conquest only made him more bitter, so that he descended to the arid, tortured, unilluminating likes of Kiss Me, Stupid and The Fortune Cookie (better films than they were credited for at the time, but thrashing, ugly experiences all the same). The juicy cynicism of the Hecht-MacArthur property looked too readymade. And so, I fear, it’s proved to be, although one of the most serious faults of Wilder (and I.A.L. Diamond)’s version of the play is that it ignores so many of the gemlike facets of the play’s cynicism.

Review: The Yakuza

Written by Richard T. Jameson March 9, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]

First things first: The way they say it in the movie is yaw-ku-zah and, as a headnote explains, the Yakuza were roughly parallel to the western’s good badmen—gamblers, con men, drifters with short swords and no samurai code of bushido to sustain them, sometime Robin Hood figures who stood between the defenseless and the marauders who would prey upon them. Yakuza stories within a modern gangster framework are immensely popular in the Japanese cinema, and Paul Schrader, former editor of the American film magazine Cinema, wrote a comprehensive survey of the genre for a Film Comment of about a year ago. Remarking therein that anyone who’d seen a few examples of this relentlessly formalized genre could write one himself, Schrader spoke from experience: his own The Yakuza, touched up a smidge by Robert Towne and formally permissive enough to incorporate some double-dealing American gangsters along with its Japanese pro- and antagonists, looked a likely enough successor to the kung-fu cycle in popularity that Warner Brothers paid a hefty price for the screenplay ($300,000, according to Newsweek).

Hearts of the West

Written by Richard T. Jameson November 3, 2011

Hearts of the West will be shown on Turner Classic Movies this coming Friday, Nov. 4, at 9 a.m. West Coast time, 12 noon Eastern. Here’s the program note from the “Marvelous Modern Scripts” screening. —RTJ

There isn’t really a whole lot that needs to be teased out of Hearts of the West. It’s a pleasant film—from its opening 1.33:1 masking of the old monochrome MGM logo, a movie full of affection for the absurdities, inanities, and tacky pleasures of El Cheapo filmmaking and fictionmaking. Its gentle teasing of would-be writers steeped in formulae and short on living experience is readily apparent. Offsetting this is our pleasurable awareness that “The Kid” Lewis Tater writes about and the enthusiastic “kid” that he is probably both reflect aspects of the local kid—Rob Thompson of Bothell—whose first script this was. He took it to Hollywood and a couple of days later he had sold it to producer Tony Bill, who happened to be having an afternoon drink in the same bar where Thompson and a mutual friend were sitting. The rest is history, of a sort: Hearts of the West got made to the satisfaction of those involved, critics and film festival audiences warmed to it, MGM gave it the wrong ad campaign, and mostly people didn’t go to see it. A lost masterpiece it’s not; a nice movie to make the acquaintance of, it remains.