Joe's View

Movie studios have utilized the compact size of the DVD format for all sorts of interesting multi-disc packages, but it’s hard to make much sense out of the Columbia Pictures “Martini Movies” series.

When I first heard about the new Columbia line, I assumed the movies would be kitschy, retro flicks from the late 1950s/early 1960s “Mad Men” era of guilt-free drinking, smoking and messing around.

The 1957 rag trade expose, “The Garment Jungle,” fits into the well-dressed, heavy-drinking Manhattan world we have all come to love on the hit AMC series, but what are “Dollars” (1971) and “The New Centurions” (1972) doing with “Martini Movies” tags on them?

“Dollars” is a forgettable Warren Beatty-Goldie Hawn heist comedy — set in wintry Germany and padded to 120 minutes — and “The New Centurions” is a rather grim Los Angeles police drama, starring George C. Scott, about the personal toll of law enforcement work.

The only common ground I could find in the series was the fact that the movies were all rather obscure Columbia Pictures releases that had not yet appeared on DVD.

Another picture in the set, “Affair in Trinidad,” has the campy elements that “Dollars” and “The New Centurions” are lacking, but is a pretty standard Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford melodrama from 1952.

Hayworth was never a great actress, but if you watch “Trinidad” you can see why she was such a big star. She’s luscious but likeable, taking the darker elements out of the bad girl roles she played so often.

In “Trinidad” Hayworth plays a nightclub singer-dancer whose husband appears to commit suicide in the opening scene.

We quickly learn the couple was estranged and that Hayworth’s hubby might have known too much about a spy ring on the island. Glenn Ford arrives in the role of Hayworth’s grieving brother-in-law, but it doesn’t take long for things to heat up between these two mourners.

The picture often plays like a bargain-basement “Casablanca” but the stars are fun to watch. Hayworth does two numbers in the movie — dubbed by another singer as was the case in most of her films — and oozes sex appeal.

The spy plot turns out to be more topical than you might expect — the bad guys are terrorist-gangsters with plans to build a missile launcher in Trinidad that could hit targets in the U.S.

The best of the “Martini Movies” bunch is “The Garment Jungle” which I had never seen before. Although the picture was made at a time when studios often faked New York City on Hollywood backlots, the drama has extensive location work that adds tremendous color to this tale of corruption in the garment business.

Lee J. Cobb stars as a business owner who has been paying a shady character played by Richard Boone to keep the union out of his shop. Cobb’s straight arrow son (Kerwin Matthews) comes home from his stint in the service, eager to go to work for dad.

Soon, the young man is embroiled in a labor-management dispute that escalates into extortion and murder. “The Garment Jungle” has a tough film noir feel — and some surprisingly shocking violence for the late 1950s — and is packed with wonderful character actors such as Robert Loggia and Joseph Wiseman.

Progressive journalist Robert Greenwald has produced strong documentaries about everything from big box stores (“Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”) to the excesses of Fox News (“Outfoxed”).

Through his Brave New Productions company, Greenwald has created a new template for up-to-the-minute, ever-evolving non-fiction filmmaking that combines traditional edited material on DVD with links to brand new interviews on his website and Facebook.

Greenwald’s latest project, “Rethink Afghanistan,” is a sobering and timely look at the chaos in that country just as President Obama has committed tens of thousands of troops for what he says will be a strictly limited military action.

The documentary deals both with the continuing breakdown of order in Afghanistan and the fact that Obama may be setting the stage for his own political demise in a quagmire strikingly similar to the one in Vietnam that ended Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

The U.S. populace is so caught up in its own economic chaos that it is has given Obama a pass on Afghanistan for the time being, the film asserts. When the huge financial and physical cost of the war begins to be felt, the public could turn on the president as quickly as it did on Johnson.

Progressives are so thrilled by Obama’s sophistication and intelligence that they seem to be looking the other way when it comes to Afghanistan. There is pretty strong evidence that things have gotten worse in the country with American involvement — suicide bombings were unknown before we arrived and they are now escalating.

Greenwald shows how U.S. policy in Afghanistan may be as misguided as our terrible venture in Iraq. Support for Muslim extremism is increasing around the world as a result of our military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the latter country we seem to be lumping the Taliban (above) and al Qaeda together (even though they have little use for each other).

Apparently, our Iraq fatigue and euphoria over the end of the Bush II era have set the stage for another military/political disaster.

In “Rethink Afghanistan” Greenwald (below right with journalist Anand Gopal) has assembled an impressive array of intelligence experts, journalists and people in Afghanistan who point out that U.S. military occupation is destined to make things worse in an intensely nationalistic culture (one politician asks what we would do if a foreign army was stationed in the U.S. to “restore order”).

(Much of “Rethink Afghanistan” is available online at www.rethinkafghanistan.com)

Equal parts funny and appalling, the new Robert Sellers book “Hellraisers” (St. Martin’s Press) takes us back to the glory days of stage and screen stars Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed.

The men represent an earlier era of British theater and film when stars bragged about their drinking and womanizing exploits.

The four men profiled by Sellers agreed later in life that they probably wasted a lot of time and energy in their offstage adventures — and, sadly, forgot big chunks of their own personal histories in a boozy fog — but they were products of a macho show biz culture in which Errol Flynn and John Barrymore had set a high bar for carousing.

Sellers is perhaps a bit too light-hearted in recalling some truly appalling behavior by the four men, but he makes it clear that what they did was not that unsual in “The Plastered Fifties” and “The Soused Sixties” — two of the chapter titles in the book.

“Hellraisers” shows how the actors got themselves into a vicious cycle in which their often dismal films pushed them to drink more which made them unreliable and often unemployable for long stretches of time.

Burton told an interviewer that his early theater days of nightly shows with drinks and dinner afterwards put in motion an alcohol habit that only got bigger with the passage of time.

“Burton’s intake was prodigious,” Sellers writes. “At the height of his boozing in the mid-70s he was knocking back three to four bottles of hard liquor in a day.”

The actor claimed he couldn’t remember making “The Klansman” (1974) — a mercy considering the film is often cited as one of the worst studio pictures of the 1970s.

When they were young, the drinking and carousing seemed to be part and parcel with their brilliant and daring work — O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), Harris in “This Sporting Life” (1963), Reed in “Women in Love” (1969) and Burton in a number of great stage and film roles in the early 1960s.

Harris called the lifestyle “a fine madness, a lyrical madness…we lived our life with that madness and it was transmitted into our work…We weren’t afraid to be different. So we were always dangerous. Dangerous to meet in the street, in a restaurant, and dangerous to see on stage or in a film.”

O’Toole and Harris were lucky enough to clean up their acts and go on to fine work in their 60s and 70s (indeed, Harris made a fortune later in his life by purchasing the stage rights to “Camelot” and earning millions on a multi-year tour).

Burton was only 58 when he died and who knows what he might have done with another 10 or 20 years or work. Maybe win the Oscar that always eluded him?  

Reed’s story is the saddest of the four, dying at 61, with his few memorable film roles — “Oliver!” in 1968, “Women in Love” the following year — long behind him.

There is lots of Oscar buzz swirling around Jeff Bridges for his performance in the new indie film, “Crazy Heart.”

An Academy Award for Bridges is long overdue. He has been delivering fine screen work for almost 40 years, and has never strayed too far from edgy offbeat filmmaking.

One of my favorite Bridges movies is the 1981 thriller “Cutter’s Way” based on Newton Thornburg’s strangely unheralded 1976 crime novel “Cutter and Bone.”

“Cutter’s Way” was one of the first Hollywood pictures to be released by an art house subsidiary of a major studio — United Artists Classics — and the success of the specialized distribution paved the way to Fox Searchlight, Miramax and all of the other companies of the 1980s and 1990s that brought foreign and indie films to a greatly expanded number of theaters in this country.

After the break-up of United Artists, the founders of the classics division moved on to another troubled company, Orion, before eventually finding a permanent home under the Sony banner as Sony Pictures Classics.
But, enough business talk.

“Cutter’s Way” is one of my favorite movies from the 1980s because of the way it blends classic elements of 1940s film noir thrillers with the cynical countercultural tone of the late 1970s — when the baby boom radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s knew their day was coming to an end and the “Reagan revolution” was about to begin.

The story follows two lifelong Santa Barbara friends —the scarred Vietnam vet Cutter (John Heard) and the rapidly aging beach boy/gigolo Bone (Jeff Bridges).

Bone has lost his idealistic youthful drive and Cutter is raging over a “system” that left him physically and emotionally maimed.

Late one night, after he has been paid to have sex with a wealthy older woman, Bone’s car breaks down in a rainy alley, and he sees someone dumping something large into a trash can. The something turns out to be a dead girl and soon Cutter and Bone come to believe she was a hitchhiker who was disposed of like a piece of trash by one of the wealthist men in town, J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott).

The two men set off on a dangerous quest to nail the politically connected power broker, but instead get a painful lesson in the way that rich people clean up their messes.

“Cutter’s Way” has a very strong sense of place — you can practically smell the rot just under the beautiful Southern California surfaces — and the performances by Bridges and Heard are spectacular.

The 1980s movie scene came to be dominated by the comic book antics of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but “Cutter’s Way” was part of a wave of less-publicized 1980s films such as “At Close Range,” “To Live and Die in L.A.” and “Mike’s Murder” that demonstrated all was not well in boom time, Reagan era America.

Jesse Green does an excellent joint interview with Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim in the current New York magazine to mark last week’s opening of “A Little Night Music” on Broadway.

The revival of the 1973 hit marks the third time Lansbury has worked on a Sondheim show on Broadway.

The duo met on the now legendary 1964 flop-turned-cult-musical, “Anyone Can Whistle,” which marked Lansbury’s debut as a musical comedy star.

The show about political corruption, madness and miracles was too weird for a year that brought “Funny Girl” and “Hello, Dolly!” to town, but some critics loved it and Columbia Records president Goddard Lieberson decided that the score was so strong that a cast album would be recorded the day after the show closed (it only ran a week).

Thanks to that recording, Lansbury’s terrific debut performance was partially preserved and two years later she would become the toast of the town in her second musical, “Mame.”

Sondheim had a rockier road to success. The failure of “Anyone Can Whistle” put his career as a composer-lyricist on hold. He returned to writing lyrics for other composers, collaborating with Richard Rodgers on “Do I Hear a Waltz?” (a charming song score that Sondheim has dissed for five decades because of his clashes with Rodgers — and, no doubt, his frustration with not being able to compose as well as write lyrics).

Things finally turned around for Sondheim with the opening of the hit “Company” in 1970 and it has been onward and upward ever since.

Lansbury won a Tony for a memorable 1974 revival of “Gypsy” (above) — lyrics by Sondheim, score by Jule Styne — and then won again for “Sweeney Todd,” the 1979 Sondheim show in which the actress gave what might be her greatest stage performance.

The duo went their separate ways for 30 years but finally came together again this season for the new “Night Music” (below) in which the 83-year-old trouper does work opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones that will probably earn the star a sixth Tony.

The New York magazine piece is like a mini-history of modern Broadway and is must reading for theater fans:

 http://nymag.com/arts/theater/features/62635/

I was up late the last two nights reading an advance copy of Variety senior editor Robert Hofler’s juicy biography of film and stage producer Allan Carr — “Party Animals” — which is set for publication by DaCapo Press in March.

Carr has been largely forgotten in the decade since he died, but Hofler reminds us of the man’s fame and clout in Hollywood and New York in the 1970s and 1980s.

The talent manager-turned-producer indulged in all of the excesses of the cocaine/disco era, but he also made his mark by demonstrating a peerless gift for marketing people and movies.

The 1978 film version of “Grease” was Carr’s big money-spinner — it was the top-earning musical in movie history until “Mamma Mia!” outgrossed it last year — but he made himself into a fairly major celebrity through his knack for throwing lavish parties.

In an era when producers and moguls tended to remain behind the scenes, Carr relished getting his own name and face in the papers and magazines for the huge parties he threw for such movies as the 1975 “Tommy” (below) — the event was held in a New York City subway station.

The parties cost small fortunes, but earned Carr’s films reams of newspaper and magazine publicity in the pre-Internet age.  

“Allan was the bridge between new and old Hollywood,” producer Peter Guber tells Hofler. “When I first came to Hollywood, he gave parties on a scale of what you read about in Harold Robbins.”

The fact that Carr was so “flamboyant” — i.e. openly gay — and took lots of drugs and didn’t hide his handsome boy toys caused many Hollywood folk to underestimate his brilliant marketing mind.

It was Carr who repackaged a fading Ann-Margret as a serious actress with “Carnal Knowledge” in 1971 and then scored the actress a second Oscar nomination for “Tommy” four years later. She was his most important client in his management days.

Hofler shows how Carr took the slightly gritty urban 1972 stage musical “Grease” and transformed it in a squeaky clean fantasy of life in 1950s suburbia for the hugely popular film version. The producer wanted it to be more like his own high school days in suburban Chicago.

“Party Animals” contains a valuable reminder of Carr’s work as a behind-the-scenes master of PR. It was his early enthusiasm for “The Deer Hunter” that kept Michael Cimino’s picture in a three-hour form rather than the two-hour version the studio wanted, Hofler points out in a chapter called “Oscar’s First Consultant.”

Carr went on to plan the revolutionary Oscar campaign for the movie in which the film was presented publicly for only a week in New York and Los Angeles in Dec. 1978 — to make it eligible for Oscar consideration — and then withdrawn until the nominations were announced two months later.

Carr made a very difficult film into a much talked-about industry hot ticket and he produced big results — the best picture Oscar for 1978. Many of Carr’s then-unorthodox PR techniques have been used in subsequent years to tout unlikely pictures as major Oscar contenders.  

Sadly, the ’80s were packed with bad choices and bad behavior by Carr. The producer had a big stage success in “La Cage Aux Folles,” but he also produced the legendary disco musical disaster — “Can’t Stop the Music” — which opened in 1980 after the disco fad peaked. The $20 million picture crashed and burned on its opening weekend and was quickly withdrawn. With Bruce Jenner and Steve Guttenberg playing the male leads, it is unlikely the film will ever lose its reputation as the most perversely cast musical in Hollywood history.

When Paramount offered Carr $5 million for a sequel to “Grease” he put together the dismal 1982 flop “Grease 2,” notable solely for giving Michelle Pfeiffer her first starring role (in the photo above she is at the film’s premiere, with Carr and her then-husband Peter Horton).

The killing blow for Carr, however, was his production of the famously awful 1989 Academy Awards TV telecast (the one that opened with Rob Lowe and Snow White – above – singing together). The film “community” hated the show — even though the ratings were higher than the previous year — and they closed ranks against the mortified producer.

A decade later, Carr died in relative obscurity from liver cancer.

Hofler’s book will remind Hollywood that there was a lot more to this over-sized character than met the eye and that he is well worth remembering. The writer was able to talk with a wide array of people who were in Carr’s orbit for a while — from Stockard Channing to Jerry Herman and Ann-Margret to Arthur Laurents — and they have lots of interesting things to say.

Back in Neil Simon’s prime, almost every Broadway season would bring with it a new contemporary comedy in which that hit-maker would invariably make a direct connection with the mainstream audience.

Simon tended to write about rather ordinary middle-class New Yorkers faced with a sudden crisis — things like a marriage in trouble (“Barefoot in the Park”), trying to keep up with the 1960s sexual revolution (“Last of the Red Hot Lovers”), and sudden unemployment (“The Prisoner of Second Avenue”).

Simon’s audience and his subject matter began migrating to television in the 1980s and 1990s, and we stopped seeing many comedies designed to hit fairly ordinary people where they live.

This is where the remarkable French playwright Yasmina Reza comes in.

Although her shows have all begun life in Paris — in French-language productions — the writer’s work is clearly hitting a universal chord with middle-of-the-road audiences.

A decade ago, Reza’s play “Art” proved to be a huge hit in London and on Broadway and then in regional theaters throughout this country.

The Tony Award-winning play poked fun at the contemporary art scene, but was really about the balance of power in the longtime friendship of three middle-aged men.

In the space of 90 minutes, Reza established her characters with speed and precision, and a huge international audience found the play to be true to their experience and very funny.

Reza received a big boost in her English language productions of “Art” from translator-playwright Christopher Hampton who smoothly made it seem as if the plays were designed for London and New York audiences.

Reza had two more trans-Atlantic hits in “Life (x) 3” and “The Unexpected Man” — both of which played off-Broadway in New York — but not on the scale of “Art.”

Earlier this year, Reza and Hampton returned to New York with “God of Carnage” — which again won the Tony for best play — and there is a good chance this comedy-drama will prove to be even more popular than “Art.”

I caught up with the play last week with the new cast — Annie Potts (right), Christine Lahti, Jimmy Smits and Ken Stott — and it’s an even stronger piece of material than “Art,” examining marriage and parent-child relationships rather than friendship.

The show opened last winter with a starrier cast — James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis and Tony winner Marcia Gay Harden — but the new company of actors digs into the play as if it was written for them.

Set in Brooklyn, “God of Carnage” opens with what appears to be a relaxed meeting between two sets of parents about a schoolyard confrontation between their sons. Veronica (Lahti) and Michael (Stott) don’t appear to be too upset by the fact that their son suffered some fairly serious injuries at the hands of the son of Annette (Potts) and Alan (Smits).

Veronica suggests that Annette and Alan bring their son over the following evening to apologize to her boy.

Within a few minutes of this sane and reasonable opening, a double marital meltdown begins on stage. The couples start as two pairs of allies, but that soon breaks down, too, as the spouses turn against each other in the heat of the angry (but hilariously funny) battle over the behavior of two children.

The title comes from one of the husband’s life philosophy which boils down to his belief that all of us live in a dog-eat-dog universe ruled over by a “god of carnage.”

The shifts between comedy and drama are quite amazing and there are only a few points where Reza (and Hampton) push too hard for comic results.

“God of Carnage” has the feel of an instant classic that will be receiving dozens of productions around the country over the next few years, giving many actors four terrific parts to play.

Joan Lindsay’s novel “Picnic at Hanging Rock” was suggested by an actual Australian mystery — the disappearance of three schoolgirls and one of their teachers on a country outing in 1900.

No one ever figured out what happened to those who vanished, but speculation has included everything from murder-suicide to abduction by UFO to passing through a dimensional portal.

A young Australian filmmaker named Peter Weir became determined to make a movie out of the book in the early 1970s. It took him several years to raise the money and to cast the film — he lost his British leading lady Vivien Merchant during the preliminary shooting and had to hastily line up her replacement, Rachel Roberts (below).

Although the finished film was rejected by the 1976 Cannes Film Festival submissions panel, “Picnic” caused an immediate sensation in Australia and then in art-houses around the world. Weir’s ability to present an ambiguous story on screen — and to focus on suggestion rather than narrative certainty — earned him comparisons with Michelangelo Antonioni’s two classic mysteries without solutions, “L’Avventura” (1960) and “Blow-Up” (1966).

The movie established Weir as a director of uncommon technical skill and emotional subtlety and within a decade or so he was a major force in Hollywood, making indelible studio pictures such as “Fearless” (1993).

Tonight at 7 p.m., it will be my pleasure to host a screening of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” at the Fairfield Library, as part of its monthly “Foreign & Fringe” series.

Lindsay’s novel is wonderful, but Weir was able to translate it into one of the most sheerly cinematic movies — the lush visuals and the unusually active soundtrack, combined with the mystery, result in one of the great mood pieces in modern film.

The story is so suggestive — and so unresolved — that it has haunted people for years. Last summer, the brilliant young New York theater composer Daniel Zaitchik unveiled a musical version of “Picnic” in workshop form at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, that demonstrated the durability and the adaptability of the story to different media. It was a terrific show that deserves to be seen in a full production in  New York City.

The late Vincent Canby, who was the film critic for The New York Times when “Hanging Rock” opened, put it well when he wrote, “Though (the film) has immense feeling for an interest in the Australian landscape, it is anything but a picturesque or provincial film. Among other things it knows that there are some romantic longings, especially in the young, that are so overwhelming they simply cannot be contained. The result is a movie that is both spooky and sexy.”

If you don’t have plans for tonight, join me at the Fairfield Library for this provocative modern classic. There should be lots to talk about after the movie.

(The Fairfield Library is at 1080 Old Post Road in Fairfield. For more information, go to http://www.fairfieldpubliclibrary.org.)