In The Company Of Glenn

Ollie Johnston, 1912-2008 (Updated)

The New York Times' obituary of Ollie Johnston today has a helpful explanation of why a group of young animators got tagged with the collective nickname "Nine Old Men." The phrase came from F.D.R.'s characterization of the Supreme Court and was applied jokingly to the nonet of animators—then all in their 20s—at Disney's studio. Ollie Johnson in fact did live to a ripe old age—he was 95 when he passed yesterday.

He was the supervising animator on the oft-outrageous "Pastoral Symphony" segment of 1940's Fantasia, pictured above. He was also the animator in charge of the mischievous, winsome Thumper in Bambi. And of course he did quite a bit more...

Disney characters such as Thumper got a lot of lampooning from the boys of Warner's Termite Terrace. Tex Avery's Screwball Squirrel, created for MGM after Avery left the Warner's lot, began his cartoon career by braining a cute bunny. A healthy disrespect for convention is all well and good. But here's the thing. You look at Thumper, the actual Thumper, and not the dozens of cheap knockoffs of Thumper that came in his wake and now languish in the more obscure corners of cartoon history, and you get a sense of humanity that's so disarming it's uncanny. What Johnston and his fellows took the most pride in was embuing their anthropomorphized animals with palpable human emotion. Nobody did it better before, or has done it better since.

UPDATE: My dear friend Joseph Failla, a very talented artist and a far more profound student of animation than I've ever been, e-mails me some very apropos thoughts:

As an animation student myself, who had a particular reverence for the superlative Disney approach, I looked up to these fellows much the same way a confirmed baseball fan does to the hallowed members of that sport's Hall of Fame.

I was lucky enough to have met Ollie Johnston with his longtime friend and working partner Frank Thomas (who passed in 2004 at age 92) at a book signing held for their book Disney Animations: The Illusion of Life (a definitive examination of character animation by way of Disney studios) in the mid 80's. Although the meeting was brief, they were both kind, and, for the moment, lived up to everything I believed they were; two grand old men who epitomized the top of their game and craft. The event had a good turnout from enthusiastic animation fans, but I couldn't help thinking about the irony of the situation; if we weren't dealing with animation and could see these two men for the great performers they really were, we would have understood that they deserved the kind of attention accorded to actors like Olivier! That's how important their contributions have been to our lives. Even though most folks can identify the films, characters, or sequences they love so much...unfortunately, they've never heard of the men behind them. Besides the books they created together, a good way to get acquainted with the work of Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas is the documentary Frank and Ollie, which covers their career and personal lives.

Some nice tributes come from director Brad Bird, who characterized Frank and Ollie with animated cameos in The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, for which the two old friends provided their own voices. So it's fitting and very comforting to know the qualities Ollie and Frank put across in each of their films is not lost on Bird, who'll continue to strive for that same excellence in his own projects.

Amen, brother. Amen.

Charlton Heston

Despite my enjoyment of much of Tim Burton's 1994 fantastic biopic Ed Wood, I've never been able to forgive the cinematic libel it commits near the end. My general principle concerning fictions about real people is that anything goes that plays, so I must consider my response here as completely emotional. It's in that scene near the end when Johnny Depp's Wood rushes into Musso and Frank's for a composing drink and happens upon his idol, Orson Welles (played by Vincent D'Onofrio). After an awkward introduction they take to trading war stories, or, more to the point, complaints. Wood moans about producers who put their buddies in his films, even "when they're not right for the part."

"Tell me about it," D'Onofrio's Welles replies. "I'm supposed to do a thriller at Universal...but they wanted Charlton Heston to play a Mexican!"

It's a cheap laugh line, and a not a particularly effective one, either, and I remember my back going up the very first time I saw Burton's film.

Because for one thing, any self-respecting cinephile knows that it was only through Charlton Heston's intervention that Welles directed Touch of Evil in the first place. Welles had only been contracted to co-star in the picture as corrupt bordertown cop Hank Quinlan. When the producers contacted Heston for the lead role of Mexican narc "Mike" Vargas, they told him, "We've got Welles," to which Heston replied, "Any picture Welles directs, I'll make." Which sent producers scurrying back to Welles, who rewrote and directed the picture for no extra fee.

The Ed Wood libel also rankled because Heston is so good in Evil. He is simultaneously limber (as when he beats the rattling elevator up a few flights of stairs to his hotel room for a meeting with some law enforcement bigwigs) and stiff, unbending—his sense of propriety is such that it makes him a rather awkward match for his lush, eager new wife (Janet Leigh). And his self-righteousness is such that it makes him, eventually, the least sympathetic figure in Welles' perverse morality play. It's only when he loses that self-righteousness, that control, and snarls "I'm no cop now!" and smashes up a bar in rage, that he brings us back to his side. Throughout this film's journey, Heston gets all the notes right.

Jules Dassin, 1911-2008

Sarris put him in the "Strained Seriousness" category in The American Cinema, calling him a "lively director in a minor key" while bemoaning his "softheaded social consciousness." The social consciousness no longer seems to function overmuch when screening his pictures today...and years and years of unimaginative ripoffs of Rififi have shown us it's not wise to undervalue such originals. Dassin's run of pictures between 1947 and 1955—Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves Highway, Night and the City and Rififi—was about as inspired as any director ever pulls off, and Dassin didn't break his stride of inspiration even as he was going into exile. The cinematic vision of hell in Night and the City is no less unforgettable for being set in London as opposed to New York, where the conventional wisdom would deem the story better-suited.

Dassin had not directed a film since 1980, but he remained active and, it appears, pretty feisty until the end of his life, which came less than a week after the death of his City star Richard Widmark. He gave some very lively interviews to The Criterion Collection for the DVDs of the five films listed above; those movies, and the reminiscences Dassin contributes to their video editions, are as good a way to get to know him as any.

Widmark, for real.

One of the great cross-cultural misunderstandings of our time...well, of my time, although I wasn't there...occurred at the 19823 Telluride Film Festival, where one night a dyspeptic Andrei Tarkovsky was honored. Via his de facto translator, the Polish director Krystof Zanussi, Tarkovsky denounced the cinema as a whore. "When she learns to give it away, she will be free."

The next night's honoree was Richard Widmark, then in his mid-sixties. "I want to name you some pimps," he said in the drollest tone he could muster, which Widmark fans know was very droll. "Hitchcock...Fellini...Bergman...Orson Welles..." (Here's Roger Ebert's account, from which I crib.)

Tarkovsky was a genius who was capable of being a real, well, jerk; Widmark was a largely more gracious and relaxed fellow. They ought not have been at odds. After all, hadn't Tarkovsky's first film, as a student, been a tentative adaptation of Hemingway's short story The Killers, in which Tarkovsky himself appeared, as an assassin, whistling the tune "Lullaby of Birdland"? That's a part that would have been just up Widmark's alley back in the day. And didn't Widmark have the kind of face, the kind of classically sculpted, stoic face, that could weather it through any and every thing a Tarkovsky vision could throw at it? Think of Tarkovsky's greatest leading men: Anatoli Solonitsyn, Aleksandr Kajdanovsky, Erland Josephson. Great, great actors all. But they have not got anything that Richard Widmark did not. Tarkovsky and Widmark should have been allies. They really did stand for the same thing, finally.

Oh, well. A commenter below believes Widmark's portrayal of the Dauphin in Preminger's Saint Joan is homophobic. I never saw it that way. The Dauphin is silly, frivolous, uninformed; he has an epicene quality. Widmark's performance and Preminger's camera take his ignorance for what it is; what torments him in later life is his coming to terms with that ignorance.

Oh well, again. What we have to look back on is his lifetime of wonderful performances, and that unforgettable visage...a one-man rejoinder to Norma Desmond's line about having faces then...

As the desperate Harry Fabian, coming to the end of the line in Jules Dassin's 1950 Night and the City...

As slick pickpocket Skip McCoy, dipping into Jean Peters' purse in Samuel Fuller's 1953 Pickup on South Street...

Finally, breaking his back chasing the goddamn hood who took off with his gun, in Don Siegel's 1968 Madigan...

Each of these pictures is well worth seeking out and watching. Tonight. Don't even get me started. And if you can find Hell and High Water or Warlock, so much the better for you. Widmark never gave a false performance. Not even in The Swarm. Not that I'm recommending you watch that.

Paul Scofield, 1922-2008

The paradigm-shifting Shakespearean, last seen on film on these shores in 1995's The Crucible, had been suffering from leukemia. He was 86.

Ron Rosenbaum on Scofield's Lear: "...[I]n the early sixties [Peter] Brooks with Paul Scofield playing the King (first on stage and then on screen) found some fusion of bleakness and dread that left audiences devastated and cathartically exhilarated and marked the moment when Lear displaced Hamlet in the minds of many as the more profound Shakespearean experience."

Here's Scofield in Brooks' 1971 film version, which has a visual austerity one might describe as Scandanavian...

Scofield's performance is so acute as to be deeply troubling. Alas, as of now the film is only available on VHS and foreign region DVD. More easily accessible, and recommended, are A Delicate Balance, Bartleby, and Quiz Show. And, of course, A Man For All Seasons.

He was truly a sui generis actor. Have you ever heard anyone say of another performer, "He reminds me of Paul Scofield?"

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

Well, there's a damn good ripe old age to go out on. The science-fiction author would have been 91 in December. And he had set up shop in Sri Lanka, not exactly the most cozy outpost for a British-born writer, as of the early '50s.

It also speaks well of him that he was so selective about his film projects. He took his money and stepped aside as Hollywood roundly failed to adapt Childhood's End, proudly collaborated with Kubrick on the (pace Mick LaSalle) epochal 2001: A Space Odyssey, and offered a rejoinder to his own vision with 2010: The Year We Make Contact, on which he had a more prosaic directorial collaborator. (Peter Hyams actually said, on The Tonight Show, that he was AM to Kubrick's FM.)

It's not quite accurate to say he'll be missed; in fact, his influence will no doubt continue to be felt. But the way his influence has already been felt is less, shall we say, intelligent than what he himself propogated—as it happens, I was watching the Blu-Ray of Independence Day when I took a break and got the news, and that film is, while in itself a brilliant construction, a perfect example of a Clarke corruption (although maybe just as much a Heinlein corruption, and maybe that's the point).

2001's peculiar perfection is, I think the cinematic thing for which he should be remembered. And no small thing it is. I'm watching it now, and, like, whoa. And when I say, "like, whoa," I mean, some enterprising blogger should find and post the instructions for the zero-gravity toilet pronto.

UPDATE: And here they are. Kubrick and Clarke wrote them up as a goof—this is precisely the kind of elaborate extrapolation guys like Kubrick and Clarke would consider a goof—while sticking to scientific guns. I particularly enjoy the coinage "uroliminator."

Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008

It is a shock to read of the death, at only 54, of director Anthony Minghella. He apparently had a brain hemorrhage after undergoing a "routine" operation. This is awful. I'm sure all of us have known someone who suddenly passed after an unforseen complication encroached on a putatively "routine" procedure—you never get over the shock of it, or the anger at such an arbitrary, needless seeming whim of fate.

It is a rather gruesome irony that one of Minghella's best films, his debut, Truly, Madly, Deeply, is about a couple whose love manages to endure after one of them dies in a needless medical mishap. Beyond that, I don't think at the moment it's appropriate to do much more than send out condolences and prayers to Minghella's family and colleagues. I commend you, though, to Jeff Wells' personal reminiscences of Minghella, here. They make me wish I had met the man as well.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1922-2008

From La Belle Captive, 1983

The man who dreamed up the above image (which was shot by the great Henri Alekan) died early today, aged 85, after being hospitalized for a heart ailment. His greatest fame was as a novelist, maybe not even as a novelist but as the putative inventor of the "new novel" (nouvelle roman), which putatively jettisoned plot, character, psychology, all that sort of thing, and replaced them with precise, objective, painstaking description. (Vladimir Nabokov, while a great admirer of Robbe-Grillet's fictions, thought the notion that they were non-and/or-anti-psychological to be ludicrous.) Robbe-Grillet took his work as a filmmaker just as seriously. This work began with his scenario for L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad, which was directed by Alain Resnais in 1962. Robbe-Grillet began directing shortly thereafter, with L'Immortelle in 1962 and Trans-Europ-Express in 1963. Both his novels and his films got, for lack of a better word, kinkier over the years, with plenty of bondage and fluids involved; the hideous sex murders-as-peep-shows in his novel Project for a Revolution in New York do play as violent pornography—exquisitely written violent pornography. Were Robbe-Grillet's convoluted narrative strategies merely subterfuges to excuse what the literary critic Roger Sale called (when writing of another controversial novelist, John Hawkes) a "vile imagination"?

Roy Scheider: not a man to try to put one over on.

One of the most enjoyable-to-watch weapons in Roy Scheider's considerable performance arsenal was what I'll call, for lack of a more delicate term, his "are you shitting me?" look, with which whatever character he was playing hoped to squelch any dissembling or whatnot on the part of whatever character he was playing against. It's a look that worked particularly well when augmented by a cigarette dangling from the lips, as we see in this image from 1976's Marathon Man.

The actor on the receiving end of the look here is William Devane, at his oiliest, playing a prick C.I.A. colleague of Scheider's who does, soon after this scene, get the better of Roy, alas. Scheider was about 44 when this picture was released, a year after his lead turn in Jaws. It was performances like his in Marathon that led to critics of the time calling him a latter-day Bogart—what with his snappy dialogue delivery, convincingly cool cynicism, and more. But they weren't necessarily making movies for latter-day Bogarts then, so the number of great Scheider lead performances we have isn't necessarily what it could have been. Jaws, of course, is a must, but the relatively uncomplicated hero of that picture clearly doesn't challenge him all that much; better you should check him out in Fosse's All That Jazz, pretty much the greatest, most balls-out portrayal of a can't-help-it heel/genius you're gonna get in late-20th-century cinema. He's great in Sorcerer as well...and a bunch of other things.

The correlative to his "are you shitting me?" look was his fake sincere/reassuring look, seen here in his portrayal of Dr. Benway in Cronenberg's underappreciated Naked Lunch.

The two looks quite possibly came in handy in the real life of the Orange, New Jersey born actor, who died yesterday at age 75 after a two-year fight with multiple myeloma. A genuine presence, he was.

G-d damn, do I miss Sonny Sharrock...

My bubbies at the Downtown Music Gallery just this week released a stellar reissue of Headfirst Into The Flames, a remarkable document of the extremely combustible free ensemble Last Exit, which consisted of beat super-mathematician and blues moaner Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, conceptualist/bassist Bill Laswell, underrated-by-Diamanda-Galas-at-the-very-least reed exorcist Peter Brotzmann, and the guitarist known to some as "Sweet Butterfingers," but known to me and a bunch of my fellow fans as the baddest motherfucker to ever get a specific (LOUD and SOUL-SHREDDING) tone and volume out of any Marshall amp setup lucky enough to have him pumping his Les Paul through it, that is, Mr. Sonny Sharrock. One of the more memorable pieces on Headfirst, the compositions of which were given titles from the writings of Kenneth Patchen (I infer that Brotzmann, who was in charge of the album's artwork, made these choices), is one called "So Small, So Weak, This Bloody Sweat Of Love," a blistering anti-virtuosic guitar solo by Sharrock that is joined by the ensemble about two-thirds of the way through...but they only chime in to lift him up and push him on. He ends alone, the gain and volume on his amp conspiring with his frantic fingerwork to create a galvanic analog to the "sheets of sound" he so loved in Coltrane, but which he could not emulate on the sax because of an asthmatic condition.

What Sonny created out of a lack of breath was something entirely different and entirely exhilarating. It was a sound I could never get enough of. Sonny had a softer side—he covered Kate Bush, memorably and righteously—and it led him up some blind alleys, at least as far as some of us fans of his more extreme work were concerned. (What was the deal with that electric piano player he brought down with him from upstate?, many of us wondered.) But when Sonny passed unexpectedly in May of '94, right after scoring a big record deal and an unusual gig doing music for The Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast, fans like me...who never stopped coming to see him, blind alleys or not...were left severely bereft. And we still are.