Joe's View

Producer Jerry Wald was not only a creator of glorious 20th Century Fox kitsch in the 1950s and 1960s, he played a significant role in the publishing world of that era as well.

It was Wald who commissioned editor Rona Jaffe to write her career-girl classic, “The Best of Everything,” locking up the rights to the subsequent 1959 movie version long before the novel was published.

The producer had scored one of the biggest hits of the decade with the 1957 movie version of the 1956 Grace Metalious blockbuster book “Peyton Place.”

Wald became so determined to make a sequel that he convinced the author to write “Return to Peyton Place” for publication in 1959 despite the trouble the original book had caused her in New Hampshire, where residents were furious about the way small-town life there had been portrayed.

The scale of the success of the first Metalious novel is still staggering. “Peyton Place” sold 20 million copies in hardcover and another 12 million in paperback and stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 59 weeks.

What makes the 1961 sequel so much fun is that it is a semi-autobiographical account of the trouble Metalious faced when her book came out. The premise is that the sweet Allison MacKenzie character from the original “Peyton Place” went on to write a thinly fictionalized account of the steamy events in her beautiful little hamlet.

Carol Lynley stars as Allison, but it is the veteran actress Mary Astor (below) who steals the show as a powerful old woman who is so appalled by the young woman’s novel that she pushes the school board to ban it from the library and to oust Allison’s stepfather (Robert Sterling) from his job as principal.

Before the book-banning scenes, the widowed Astor character already feels the assault of “modern times” when her beloved only son (Brett Halsey) returns from law school in Boston with a new wife — a “foreign” model (played by the luscious Lucianna Paluzzi, who would turn up a few years later as the female villain in “Thunderball”).

You can see that Astor had a blast playing the old biddy who says over breakfast to her new daughter-in-law, “Can’t you think of anything but sex?,” or when asked by her son what is so wrong with his new bride, replies in a fake-sympathetic tone, “Maybe it’s just the way she dresses.”

There’s an added kick to the Astor performance for those who are familiar with her own history at the center of one of Hollywood’s biggest scandals — a few decades earlier — when her sexual escapade diary was leaked to the press by her husband in the middle of a very messy divorce.

The scandal hurt Astor’s career as a leading lady, but didn’t stop her from becoming one of the best character actresses in Hollywood.

“Return to Peyton Place” was plagued by many delays and last minute cast changes, but one of the late additions — Tuesday Weld (below) as the “fallen woman” Selena Cross — almost matches Astor in the scenery-chewing department (their moments together are fantastic).

“Return to Peyton Place” is dated and full of ridiculous euphemisms for the sex that everyone is so stirred up about, but the wonderful cast and the prudes vs. libertines storyline is still irresistibly entertaining.

When a young film buff friend told me there was an iPhone app designed to let you know when it was safe to take a bathroom break during a movie, I scoffed.

But, sure enough, “RunPee” is now in the third year of its existence with nearly 75,000 customers drawn in by the slogan “Because movie theaters don’t have pause buttons.”

The app is designed to let you know the safest points at which you can rush to the rest room without missing anything major.

I don’t remember ever taking a bathroom break in the middle of a picture during a pretty long lifetime of moviegoing. (I don’t like to miss anything.) But then again, I never buy those half-gallons of soda that now constitute a standard soft-drink size at a movie refreshment stand.

You might think that RunPee would be most popular with bladder-challenged older moviegoers but a glance at the top ten movies visited on the RunPee app during 2011 suggests a much younger demographic:

1. “Harry Potter: Deathly Hallows-2”
2. “Twilight: Breaking Dawn-Part 1”
3. “Captain America: The First Avenger”
4. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
5. “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows”
6. “The Help”
7. “The Muppets”
8. “Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol”
9. “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”
10. “Cowboys & Aliens”

After installing the app on my iPhone I had fun scanning some of the listings, but quickly learned that the RunPee folks have no interest in off-beat fare such as “Shame” or “Melancholia” — neither flick is in the data base — but if you’re heading out to “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” “War Horse” or “Young Adult” this weekend, you’re in luck.

For “War Horse,” the RunPee listing includes three good times to go — a three-minute break 53 minutes into the movie (“When you see ‘France, 1914’ on the screen”), a four-minute rest stop at the one-hour-and-16-minute point (“When Emily says to her grandfather ‘Well, I won’t have long to wait”) and then at 1 hour, 57 minutes (“Cue: the German soldier and English soldier flip a coin to see who gets to keep Joey”).

RunPee also provides a synposis of the first five minutes of every film just in case you have to stop off on your way into the theater.

So far, the app is free and carries no advertising.

It’s a question that older moviegoers ask all the time: why do actresses over the age of 40 thrive in Europe while their American counterparts (with a few exceptions like the one and only Meryl Streep) are tossed on the scrap heap?

Overseas, performers as diverse as Helen Mirren and Isabelle Huppert came into their movie acting prime in their 40s and 50s and continue to find good leading roles on screen.

In this country, the female movie stars of 25 years ago — Jessica Lange, Diane Keaton, Sigourney Weaver, Sissy Spacek, Kathleen Turner, and many others — are now lucky to land mediocre small roles in films. Two-time Oscar winner Lange has only stayed in the game by taking on supporting roles on television, such as her recent appearance on the F/X shocker, “American Horror Story.”

Part of the problem is the difference between the budgets for Hollywood films and what it costs to produce a film in France or the United Kingdom.

The studios here would rather spend more than $100 million on one big male-dominated action movie than finance a half-dozen smaller films with female protagonists of any age.

The youth obsession of the United States is also a major factor, of course. Our movies now reflect a culture in which being thin and youthful-looking are two of the most valuable commodities. The older men who run corporations and star in movies seem to believe they can deny their own aging process by hooking up with women 20 or 30 years younger than themselves.

The issues of age and beauty in movies were put into stark relief for me Wednesday night at the Avon Theatre in Stamford where I hosted a screening of a fascinating 2010 documentary, “The Look” about the unorthodox but enduring career of British actress Charlotte Rampling.

Now 65, Rampling was launched in movies 46 years ago as Lynn Redgrave’s bitchy roommate in “Georgy Girl,” but began taking on more daunting roles right away in dark pictures such as Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” where she was, at first, scared to play a woman ten years older than herself.

Rampling’s nerves were steadied by co-star Dirk Bogarde who just a few years earlier had turned his back on a lucrative career as a matinee idol in cinematic bon bons in favor of much more challenging roles in off-beat pictures like “The Servant” and “Accident.”

The actress has had her ups and downs since then, but gained character and insight by working on a rich off-screen life (in “The Look” we see her with such friends as the Brooklyn novelist Paul Auster and the wildly eccentric German photographer Juergen Teller — below).

Rampling has never tried to avoid looking her age and over the past decade that has brought her wonderful mature roles in films like “Swimming Pool.”

The actress appears to have wasted little time on the PR activities that eat up so much of the lives of her counterparts on this side of the Atlantic. And the quality of the films she works on seems to matter more than the scale of the production (hence her small but juicy role in the recent Lars Von Trier film, “Melancholia”).

In “The Look” we see that Rampling’s charisma is more about intelligence and curiosity than rigid standards of screen “beauty.” The things she talks about and asks the (non-show biz) people she encounters in the course of the 90-minute film are as interesting as the way she looks.

Sadly, the documentary was only at the Avon for one showing, but you should keep an eye out for the DVD release in a few months.

We get so used to small-scale, traditional storytelling in the theater that it can be hard to adjust to something surreal and non-linear like “Hypnotik: The Seer Will Doctor You Know” which opened at the Theater for the New City last weekend.

Conceived and directed by Ildiko Nemeth for The New Stage Theatre Company, the 70-minute piece follows a psychic/hypnotist (Peter B. Schmitz) whose entertainment at “the infamous Palace Theatre” is to help volunteers to get to the root of their emotional problems through the use of his supernatural gifts.

The show starts with a bit of Bob Fosse-style razzmatazz as three showgirls (below) fill us in on what we are about to see in a song-and-dance number:

“The doctor will see you now,
And slaughter your sacred cow,
heal all of you invalids,
end all of your clawing needs,
he comes to humiliate…
to re-habilitate,
he wants you to deviate
so he can alleviate
He is a healer, he is a healer, his eyes are blades!”

One by one, the volunteer characters step on to a slightly raised circular platform where the doctor shows us what is going on under their highly controlled surfaces.

We see a soldier reduced to childlike behavior, a pregnant actress reveal her infant-killing tendencies, and an arrogant Hollywood producer become even more of an egomaniac.

The two most together-looking volunteers who stay on the sidelines for the first part of the play judging the action — played by the most compelling actors in the piece, Sarah Lemp (above) and Chris Tanner — end up losing their cool, just like their predecessors, when the doctor mesmerizes them.

In the final scene, the tables appear to be turned, with a man we assumed was a minor character on the fringes of the action, suddenly dominating the doctor in a way that makes us wonder if we are inside the seer’s head, sharing one of his nightmares.

“Hypnotik” blends dance, drama, and beautiful stage-picture-making for an evening that seems meant to suggest ambiguous ideas about the mysteries of human personality — what really makes us tick.

Nemeth has a great eye and her vision is beautifully realized with the aid of choreographer Julie Atlast Muz, costume designer Jessica Sofia Mitrani (her work is outstanding), and lighting designer Federico Restrepo. Nemeth herself designed the easily transformed set.

“Hypnotik” is trippy and surreal in a slyly comic manner that reminded me of some of the later Bunuel films (especially “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”). Nemeth gives us the pieces of a gorgeous and fascinating puzzle, but leaves it up to the audience to put them together. The result is a very intriguing night of theater for those who are looking for something challenging and offbeat.

(“Hypnotik” is playing through Jan. 15 at Theater for the New City, 151 First Ave. For more information visit www.theaterforthenewcity.net)

The new Steve (“Hunger”) McQueen-directed film, “Shame,” opened to mostly strong reviews last month — after stirring a lot of talk in Europe and on the U.S. festival circuit earlier in 2011 — but it appears to have stalled in the marketplace.

After early grosses in limited released proved to be strong, the film’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, bragged that “Shame” was going to end the stigma attached to the adults-only NC-17 rating which is almost always a commercial liability.

The picture appears to be fading fast, however, with declining business in sophisticated urban areas and a real national release now appearing to be dependent upon Michael Fassbender getting an Oscar nomination for his phenomenal work in the leading role.

You know you’re in commercial trouble with a film when it does less business in its third weekend on 51 screens than it did in its first weekend at 10 theaters.

The Motion Picture Association of America created the NC-17 rating in 1990 to replace the X because that tag had become synonymous with porn and several of the nation’s theater chains refused to book any X film (no matter how seriously intended it might be).

The NC-17 hasn’t proven to be much better for legitimate filmmakers who are interested in pushing the boundaries of sex content in mainstream films.
Americans have a vast appetite for pornography, but they don’t seem to like encountering explicit sexual content in “regular” movies.

“Shame” is a very tough film with lots of graphic sexual content, but it is also refreshing to see a drama in which sex is addressed directly, without euphemisms, and without the visual prurience of most R-rated treatments of similar material.

McQueen and Fassbender study a successful and attractive New York businessman named Brandon Sullivan who gets plenty of sex, but who doesn’t seem to be able to connect it with a real relationship.

For Brandon, sex has gone from pleasure to a form of compulsive behavior that is spiraling out of control when we meet him — the behavior is beginning to move into his work life in a way that might threaten his career (i.e. the meltdown of his office computer from a porn overload is luckily blamed on an intern).

Any semblance of order in Brandon’s life vanishes when his troubled younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) crashes at his small apartment while doing a cabaret gig in Manhattan. Her search for “love” is almost as compulsive as Brandon’s sexual hook-ups — they both quickly realize that blood is not thicker than water in their case, as they offer little warmth or affection to each other.

“Shame” is a disturbing movie and McQueen presents characters and situations that many people quite understandably do not want to encounter in their search for movie “entertainment.” But I think that Brandon’s condition is relevant to a huge swath of the male population in this post-pornography, post-sexual revoltuion era in which real life connections don’t seem to promise the same instant excitement that is available on a computer screen 24/7.

Fassbender gets one virtuoso scene after another, especially a long dinner date with a very attractive co-worker in which we see him trying but failing to connect on anything other than a sexual level. This scene has a devastating pay-off in which Brandon disastrously attempts to bridge his sexual and emotional interest in this smart and vibrant woman.

After 2010’s high-voltage, Lee Child-style thriller “On the Line,” the terrific crime novelist S.J. Rozan slows her pace just a bit in “Ghost Hero” (Minotaur Books/St. Martin’s Press), the 11th book in the author’s series about the New York City private investigators Bill Smith and Lydia Chin.

“Ghost Hero” takes us into the Manhattan art world as Lydia and Bill are hired by a mysterious client who wants them to investigate a rumor that new works by a great Chinese painter killed at Tiananmen Square are about to go on sale in a Manhattan gallery.

The painter Chau Chun was a political radical hated by the government of the People’s Republic of China but adored by Chinese dissidents for the past two decades. He has become known as “Ghost Hero” and many of his followers believe/hope he was not actually killed and is still secretly producing radical work.

The book delves into the lives of current Chinese artists and dissidents who are not being brutalized ala Tiananmen Square but who are the targets of ongoing government crackdowns. Although the painter activist in “Ghost Hero” is fictional, he has many contemporaries in modern-day China (on her acknowledgements page, Rozan includes “a wish for good fortune” to Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei).

Bronx native Rozan has taken us from one end of New York City to the other in her stories. “Ghost Hero” includes a very detailed tour of the contemporary Manhattan art scene, with a special emphasis on the Chelsea gallery district and the rising value of modern Chinese art.

Since Bill Smith is a gallery hopper and Lydia Chin a neophyte, the art world case produces a lot of good-humored conflict in the PI team — Lydia hates to be put a few steps behind her partner. The sexual tension between the professional duo is ramped up a notch or two when a handsome Chinese-American friend of Bill’s, Jack Lee — who is an art expert as well as a PI — joins the team.

Rozan has kept the series and the characters fresh by alternating the points of view in each story — after a tale with Bill as the protagonist, the next book will be centered on Lydia.

Through this device, we get to see each partner’s private thinking about the other and two different takes on contemporary New York and the clients who keep Bill and Lydia busy.

Rozan does such a good job writing from the two different perspectives that it would be impossible for me to play favorites and to say that I like the Lydia books more than the Bill stories or vice versa.

“Ghost Hero” is a Lydia book that once again features marvelous insights on New York’s Chinatown and Chinese-American culture.

Rozan has created one of the best series in modern crime fiction and if you haven’t read any of these books yet, “Ghost Hero” would be a very good place to start.

Although a blond-haired, green-eyed American suburbanite named Colleen LaRose was arrested in 2010 as part of an alleged international terrorist plot — she called herself “JihadJane” on social networking sites — we live in an age when we have been conditioned to think of terrorists as Middle Easterners with a homicidal grudge.

(LaRose was reportedly recruited precisely because she would not be picked out of a crowd that was being racially profiled for jihadists.)

The German film, “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” takes us back to an era when middle-class kids all over the globe started to have the same violent, revolutionary thoughts as Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers.

The movie is a gripping/disturbing look back at a group of political activists who went over the edge in response to the Vietnam War and the other upheavals of the late 1960s.

The Uli Edel-directed film is an expensive-looking, grand-scale affair that treats the counterculture uprising of the 1960s in the style of a traditional war movie. The approach fits the material because what was going on in cities and college campuses around the world ran parallel to the military action in Southeast Asia (started by the French and inherited by the U.S.)

“Baader Meinhof” shows how a group of college professors and students in Germany became so incensed by the war — and the U.S. military presence in their country — that they tipped over into terrorism.

Opposition to the war became just one of a number of anti-Establishment causes that made a violent push-back seem justified — the authorities made matters worse through the use of indiscriminate police actions against large groups of demonstrators.

Just as the police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 mobilized many appalled American young people, German youth came together in the aftermath of a demonstration against a visit of the Shah of Iran — a gathering that ended with leftist young people being beaten and killed in the streets.

Martina Gedeck — who you might remember as the female lead in “The Lives of Others” — plays Ulrike Meinhof, the academic who went from criticizing the government and the war in Vietnam as a TV talking-head to joining younger radicals willing to kill to make their point.

Moritz Bleibtreu — one of the stars of “Run, Lola, Run” — plays Andreas Baader who is ready for violent resistance before most of his friends.

Watching “The Baader Meinhof Complex” it is impossible not to see the similarities with the Symbionese Liberation Army in this country — both groups robbed banks to raise funds and attracted unlikely recruits from college campuses and the streets.

On the surface level, the politics and lifestyles on view in the film look as archaic as a story set during World War II.

But, a viewer is left wondering if the current financial chaos and the Occupy Wall Street movement might ignite such rebellion from middle-class college students today.