Sunday, July 09, 2006

Heaven Can Wait (1978)


My stepmom took me to see this movie when it came out, and I'm sure she explained how it was a remake, not of Heaven Can Wait (1943), but of Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

In the years since, I've seen Mr. Jordan, and Heaven a few times, and Mr. Beatty's remake is really well done. He hits all the notes of the original, while fitting the plot neatly into the film world of the then-present. Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin work the adulterous Mrs. Farnsworth and her lover neatly into the murder mystery farces that were then so popular. And should be again.

But anyway, everybody bitches about remakes, but they've been part of the movie picture since the beginning, and this a particularly good one.


And if you haven't seen the original Mr. Jordan, I would highly recommend it. It stars the fabulous Robert Montgomery, the father of the late Miss Elizabeth Montgomery, who we Space Race–Era babies remember as Samantha of Bewitched.

Any devotee of Bewitched or Ms. Montgomery in general can look at that photo on the right and see how much she looked like her daddy. And he was brilliant. It's a crime that he's largely been forgotten.

He started out playing Park Avenue playboys, but he wanted something more, so he took a role in The Big House, as yet another Park Avenue playboy who's been busted big-time, and accepts his fate.

It was his breakout role, and he went on to play an Irish serial killer and a PT boat commander.

He parlayed his stardom and WWII heroism into a chance to direct, and made fucked-up fantastic films like Ride The Pink Horse and Lady In the Lake, the latter innovative for its use of the camera as a substitute for the protagonist.

He was a Republican, but that meant different things back then. He was definitely elitist, if you've read the stories of the formation of the Screen Actors' Guild. But he really had been a PT boat commander, and his post–War work, like that of other pre–War pretty boys like Tyrone Power, belied a new seriousness.

He invented the entire concept of media training for Dwight Eisenhower, and smirked bitterly at the Nixon-Kennedy debate, saying that if Nixon had hired him, he woulda won.

He was probably right. And thank God Nixon didn't hire him.

Montgomery was so much smarter than Karl Rove. Because he loved people.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

God love you, George Sanders

Note: Mr. Sanders's birthday was July 3. This is what I get for dallying.

Mr. George Sanders would have been 100 years old today.

I'm a bit fatutzed with TCM for not acknowledging him.

But I would like to remember Mr. Sanders on his birthday. He rocked the house.

He won an Oscar for his role in All About Eve, and rightly so. Who else could deliver lines like, "She's a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts" with such aplomb?

Mr. Sanders was a White Russian.

His family had to flee St. Petersburg during the revolution. He tells a story in his memoirs about his uncle lying in bed with a pistol and having a manservant smear the ceiling with jam so he could shoot the flies that gathered to lap it up. Mr. Sanders felt the communists robbed him of the chance to emulate such voluptuous indolence, so he was a die-hard anti-Communist all his life.

Mr. Sanders got the idea to dip his toe into the theatre because of this cute, red-headed secretary who turned out to be Greer Garson. But he never did like it. Louis B. Mayer got a look at him early in his career and got it in his head that Mr. Sanders could be developed into a leading man. So he set up a lunch meeting.

On the appointed day, Mr. Sanders got so caught up working on a telescope he was building that he blew off the lunch. In his later years, he was grateful he hadn't made it, as a character actor can keep working when the bloom of youth has faded.

Everybody quotes his famous suicide note about how bored he was, but he left a second note for his little sister, in which he expressed his fear of becoming incapacitated. He'd had a couple of strokes, and had recently seen his mother and his wife die long, agonizing deaths. He wanted to check out while he could still wipe his own ass, so he did.

Wherever you are, Mr. Sanders, God bless you. I run into lots of fans of yours on these here internets. You are still loved.